Preston Pysh (00:02:34):

The stages were massive. I couldn’t get over the size of some of the stages and just the number of people, and I was told-

Eric Weiss (00:02:40):

… and the quality of people.

Preston Pysh (00:02:42):

… and the quality of people, I know.

Eric Weiss (00:02:44):

Heads of states, billionaires, asset manager, I mean, professional athletes, entertainers. It was just extraordinary.

Preston Pysh (00:02:52):

Yeah. It’s truly turning into a cultural movement that is really hard to define. I mean, when you got Aaron Rogers and Serena Williams on stage, and it’s just like, “What in the world is going? This is blowing up.”

Eric Weiss (00:03:05):

Yeah. We talked about that at dinner the other night. I think that irrespective of where you are in life, whether you’re super successful financially, you’re a professional athlete, all these things, people are very concerned about the general direction that the world is going, and Bitcoin, both the asset and the ethos, represents maybe not a full counter culture, but a way to a way to say something to get behind that says, “Hey, the government’s not taking this in the right direction. I’d like to just take a step away from the government.”

Preston Pysh (00:03:42):

If you were going to describe to Eric’s site picture of the macro environment or where we’re at.

Eric Weiss (00:03:49):

Got it.

Preston Pysh (00:03:50):

I mean, feel free to back it up decades if you want. Give us a starting point of how you’ve seen the markets evolved to where we’re literally sitting right now in 2022 as we’re recording this.

Eric Weiss (00:04:04):

I think the easiest way, obviously, there are a lot of factors, right? Countless factors. However, I think it can all be boiled down to oversimplify it to one material change, and that is a couple years ago, our government went crazy and started printing more money than they’d ever printed. So in the last 24 months, money supply in the United States is up 41%. We have printed 41% more dollars in the last 24 months, and that to me is what just broke things open.

Eric Weiss (00:04:43):

That’s why we’re dealing with this ridiculous inflation, can’t put the genie back in the bottle, and there were a whole bunch of issues prior to that, which didn’t get exposed because if you’re printing 6%-7% more a year, it’s not that big a deal. It’s an abuse, but it’s not an egregious abuse, especially when the US dollar is still the best house in a bad neighborhood, right? So we feel it less. You only feel it with the dollar against other truly scarce assets.

Eric Weiss (00:05:12):

So we were able to get away with it, this cheating for a long time. This massive money printing that we did is starting to catch up with us very quickly, took a couple years, but I think it can really all be brought back to that.

Preston Pysh (00:05:28):

Yeah. It’s crazy when you look at the charts and you look at the central bank balance sheets and how they’re blowing out, especially on the M1. I know Lynn and some other macro people who are really astute in some of these areas like to refer to the M2 chart, which is isn’t as drastic, but it’s blowing out as well.

Eric Weiss (00:05:47):

Yeah. I tweeted M3 the other day just to show it. Whether you look at M2 or M3, it’s the same thing. It’s 41%. Not everybody’s an economist, not everybody’s in the weeds with this stuff, and we talk about M1, M2, and you showed charts, and I think we lose a lot of people, but an example I think that really drives it home, I mean, my mom’s in her 70s. This example was effective for my mom, right?

Eric Weiss (00:06:13):

So I’m here in Miami and I said, if you went to sleep, if you put a dome over the city of Miami, nothing in, nothing out, and while everybody was asleep, you doubled the money. So everybody that had a dollar, it was $2 the day. If there was 1,000 bucks in your bank account, it was 2,000. When you went to your favorite store or favorite restaurant or whatever place it was the next day, the price of that thing that you bought for a dollar yesterday before they doubled the money supply would be somewhere between $1 and $2, right? That clicks for people I think when you think about an isolated format like that. You just can’t keep pounding dollars into the system and not expect there to be inflation and blaming it on Putin or supply chains or builtup demand or this other stuff or governor of Texas slowing trucks at the border. It’s just silliness. We did it to ourselves.

Preston Pysh (00:07:12):

Well, so let’s back up. Let’s talk about your career. So I mean, go clear back to you graduate from wherever and then talk to us about how you started off your career in finance.

Eric Weiss (00:07:22):

Okay. I went to undergrad at the University of Maryland College Park, and my first job out of school was in the 2 World Trade Center on the 60th floor, Dean Witter. I would’ve been there on 9/11 had I not gone back to Columbia Business School. So fortuitous.

Preston Pysh (00:07:40):

Wow. Wow.

Eric Weiss (00:07:40):

Yeah. Yeah. I lost a lot of friends that day. I probably knew about 30 people that were there.

Preston Pysh (00:07:45):

Oh, man.

Eric Weiss (00:07:47):

Yeah, it sucked, but I was a bond trader. I traded two years in end of US treasuries and agency bonds and I loved it. It was a great macroeconomic kind of thing. I wasn’t able to be a professional athlete. I didn’t have the skills for that, but it had the same adrenaline rush and the instant feedback of winning and losing and monetary rewards for winning and losing. So that was cool. I loved it, but I looked around the trading floor and there was nobody in their 40s there.

Eric Weiss (00:08:19):

So I was like, “Okay. I better find a new career.” Then trading doesn’t really give you that many transferable skills. So I figured I needed a pivot point. So I went to a business school at Columbia. Then after that got into venture capital and private equity, and I was investing. I went to GE Capital first. At the time, VC wasn’t like it is now. There were only 4,500 people in the United States in venture capital. It was a small cottage industry, and GE Capital at the time was the largest VC investor putting out about a billion dollars a year.

Eric Weiss (00:08:51):

So I joined them. They had a training program, learned a lot, and then I moved on to a couple other VC firms, but I was always investing in companies that were using the internet. So it was internet-based VC. This was ’98-’99 timeframe. So then we invested in a company called the Internet Capital Group, ICG. I joined them and then I helped start a firm in New York called Stripes Group after that.

Eric Weiss (00:09:15):

Then I went to a Bitcoin conference in Miami in 2013 just to see what it was about. I was really blown away. I don’t know that I would’ve articulated it this way at the time, but being an internet VC, you’d got good at seeing what was a good application of the internet and what wasn’t, and what the internet was really good for was sharing information quickly all over the world, not particularly secure.

Eric Weiss (00:09:42):

When I went to this Bitcoin conference, it was the first time that I saw the internet being used to transmit value safely and securely, and more amazing party A didn’t have to know or trust party B, and you didn’t need a third party intermediary. So light bulb went off. I was like, “This is it. This is the thing.” I was like, “I got to do something in this space. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I got to do something.” I was like, “What kind of business can I start here?” That was my first thing. The only business idea that I could come up with was, “I guess I could start a directory of companies that take Bitcoin,” but it still wouldn’t be a good business, right?

Eric Weiss (00:10:17):

So then I thought about it and I said, “Well, if this is going to work out due to the limited supply, the price of Bitcoin is going to have to go up.” So I said, Well, I’ll just buy some Bitcoin and move on to the next thing,” right? So I bought some Bitcoin in 2013 and then it was super volatile. It was a passion buy. There was no reason to believe that Bitcoin would be where it is today. I was up a lot, I was down a lot, and then finally, I just sold it a profit thinking, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Preston Pysh (00:10:48):

I mean, back then, $1,000 price point or $5,000 price point sounds like a million today, right? Back then.

Eric Weiss (00:10:56):

Yeah. Exactly right. Yeah. I think my first trade was in 700 or something, and I think I sold it probably doubled that, but on a risk-adjusted basis, I actually think Bitcoin is a much better investment today than it was then, for sure. Really, it is.

Preston Pysh (00:11:11):

Talk about that. Talk about that idea for people.

Eric Weiss (00:11:14):

In 2013, Bitcoin was a hope and a dream. Who knows if this is going to get any traction? Who knows if it’s going to be regulated away? There are real risks. I mean, it’s just now that we’re finding out that the government’s not so opposed to it, right? Here in the US, and we’ve had other governments outlaw it, all of that was like massive risks. So back then it was like there was not any real know network effect. There wasn’t any traction. There were all these geopolitical risks. It was just-

Preston Pysh (00:11:44):

No immediates. There was no lightning network.

Eric Weiss (00:11:48):

Not even close. There wasn’t even a catalyst to envision of how this would catch fire. So otherwise, people wouldn’t have those stories about buying pizzas or using 1,000 Bitcoin to buy an iPhone. Really, it was just impossible to understand that it could really, not impossible, obviously, white paper everything, people envisioned it, but the pragmatic actual acceptance of it would’ve been hard to envision, at least I wasn’t capable of envisioning it at that time.

Eric Weiss (00:12:16):

Now, I think we’re in a really unique situation. We’re on a risk-adjusted basis. Literally right now as we sit here today, I think this is by far the most attractive Bitcoin that’s ever been. The people who like to say for a long time that it doesn’t matter what the governments do or say, they can’t hurt it, blah, blah, blah, the truth of the matter is if the United States had not taken such an incredibly pragmatic approach to regulating Bitcoin, it would be a very different landscape.

Eric Weiss (00:12:46):

So we’re very fortunate to get the Biden administration. We were fortunate that Gensler, who’s one of the more knowledgeable people on the planet about digital assets, cryptocurrencies, et cetera, is the chairman of the SEC. We’re fortunate that Gensler helped put other people in the Biden administration in place. If you’ve watched the class that Gensler taught for MIT on Bitcoin and crypto, you can’t help but come away with the impression that the guy, I don’t know if he’s a Bitcoin maxi, but he certainly likes Bitcoin. He admires Satoshi. A number of times he said that the contribution of Bitcoin is real, and he’s very positive on Bitcoin.

Preston Pysh (00:13:30):

Yeah. The only spot that he’s not or at least appears that he’s not is on the spot ETF approval, and it seems like that’s more of a CFTC versus SEC battleground and I just can’t wrap my head around because I agree with everything you said. Anything I’ve ever watched, I watched his course at MIT. It was fascinating. The guy is an expert on it, way more of an expert than a lot of influencers in the space.

Eric Weiss (00:13:57):

Oh, my God. Way more.

Preston Pysh (00:13:58):

Way more.

Eric Weiss (00:13:58):

Way more. Yeah. So I think my take on that is his job is very challenging, right? Bitcoin is not a pain point for him. It’s the 15,000 other digital assets that I think he perceives and maybe rightly so securities. He’s got this very unwieldy task of how does he regulate, how does he bring these other things that are securities into compliance, and it’s virtually impossible. They’re having trouble winning their case against ripple, which it seems like they’ve got a pretty good case.

Preston Pysh (00:14:36):

This is slam dunk.

Eric Weiss (00:14:39):

Yeah. So if you can’t slam that one, then how are you going to do all the others? So I think the rationale, if you read the language when they rejected the other Bitcoin ETFs, I think the language suggests that he wants to use this Bitcoin ETF as leverage to go after the exchanges, and the exchanges are a one throat to choke kind of thing for all those other thousands of digital assets.

Eric Weiss (00:15:08):

So if he can rate force the changes to be regulated and compliant, then the exchanges, they’re the ones that’ll have the burden of making the individual assets be compliant before they can trade them. So I think that’s his tact. The SEC gave an excuse when they rejected the ETFs like, “Well, we can’t be sure that the exchanges that the Bitcoin trades on are not compliant and, therefore, we can’t be sure that the price isn’t manipulated, so we can’t approve the spot ETF, but we can approve the other ETF,” which makes no sense.

Eric Weiss (00:15:45):

Anyway, so that’s what I think is behind that, although the Grayscale thing will be interesting because there are other forces that play there, right. If Gensler really is pro-Bitcoin and a Bitcoin maxi, which he may well be, then he might be looking for an opportunity to approve an ETF. In Grayscale’s case with GBTC, you’ve got lots of investors who are suffering because the value is not anywhere near NAV, right? So he could use that protecting those investors as a rationale for granting them a special situation conversion into an ETF. They also, the SEC, solicited comments from shareholders of GBTC and there’s an overwhelming response.

Preston Pysh (00:16:38):

Interesting.

Eric Weiss (00:16:38):

So it could be that those responses are just fodder and support for him saying, “Okay. You get your conversion.”

Preston Pysh (00:16:48):

The thing that’s even crazier about it, so Hester Peirce is his deputy and she is openly public about how she disagrees and thinks that the spot ETF should be approved. It’s the strangest thing that I think I’ve ever seen in government officials having such a 180 view of each other and they literally sit right next to each other working this stuff. It’s fascinating.

Preston Pysh (00:17:14):

I was in a clubhouse chat one time and Hester was in the room and we brought it up. We’re like, “Hey, aren’t you introducing more risk by not approving this and allowing there to be more than one vehicle in which people could invest in? All the funds are flowing in the GBTC. How can’t you see that risk sitting there?” You know what her response was? She says, “Yeah. I agree with that. I think that it’s something that we …” I’m just like, “You’re the deputy of SEC.”

Eric Weiss (00:17:42):

Surreal.

Preston Pysh (00:17:43):

It’s surreal. Yeah. It’s crazy to me. I don’t understand it. It’s very strange.

Eric Weiss (00:17:47):

Well, I mean, we have to remember that the SEC is a government agency, and there are no shortage of counterintuitive and counterproductive measures that governments take. So I think it’s nice that we have someone in the top spot who admires Bitcoin and respects its contribution. I think that we’re in really good position to be viewed as property, which is the most important thing in my opinion. So I think this confluence of people and events and regulatory evolution is better than I would’ve expected, I could have imagined.

Eric Weiss (00:18:30):

That said, it is surprising to me that the price of Bitcoin in US dollars is still as low as it is. If you would’ve told me these events would’ve happened, I would’ve thought the price would be significantly more than it is now.

Preston Pysh (00:18:44):

I’m with you on that, and maybe it’s just that macro backdrop of the cap rates and all the compression that maybe the fixed income market is putting on cap rates because we got the yields blowing out. I don’t know, but I’m with you, and maybe we’re going to see a lot of price action here in the coming year. I don’t know. Hey, you made a comment about you thought it was very important that it’s viewed as property. Talk to us about that idea on that designation.

Eric Weiss (00:19:14):

Sure. So there are a lot of aspects of property that are beneficial to us as Bitcoiners, right? For one thing, a politician can’t advocate for security. So you couldn’t have a Cynthia Lummis in the Senate saying, “Buy Apple stock. Apple stock is good,” but she can advocate for property. That’s important, that from a advocacy political point of view, that Bitcoin be viewed as property.

Eric Weiss (00:19:47):

Then the other thing that’s really important about property is property rights globally are pretty well-established. You know nation states can violate them and they have eminent domain other stuff, but generally speaking, property rights are about the most well-established rights out there. So getting a designation of property is quite a comfort.

Eric Weiss (00:20:05):

Then there’s also close ties to property rights and taxation. There’s a lot of history and it’s tough to, for example, we’re not taxing New York City real estate on an unrealized capital gain basis, right? It’s property. So a designation of property might be very useful if the government starts to get stared that Bitcoin’s growing too big and they wanted to institute it unrealized capital gain tax lines like, “Wait a minute. We’re property here.”

Preston Pysh (00:20:38):

Very interesting. Very interesting. Yeah. We got to keep that one. Let’s not talk about that one anymore.

Eric Weiss (00:20:45):

Yeah. Exactly, property and taxation.

Preston Pysh (00:20:51):

So you work with high net worth individuals, and I’m curious. How do most of them view Bitcoin when you initiate a conversation with maybe a new client? How does that go?

Eric Weiss (00:21:04):

Generally speaking, a new client starts the conversation with some version of, “My daughter, my son, my granddaughter,” someone has been telling them about Bitcoin for some time. They’ve dismissed it for a period of time because it wasn’t in their purview, right? It wasn’t in their world. It wasn’t on their TV shows, their newspapers, and now it is. Now they turn on CNBC and they’re talking about this Bitcoin stuff. They open their Wall Street Journal, they’re talking about Bitcoin. They look at the cover of forms, all of this.

Eric Weiss (00:21:38):

So now they’re saying, “My kid was right, and I got to learn about this. I don’t want to be an idiot. I know a little bit. Help me learn a little more,” and then Bitcoiners hate this, but the truth of the matter is they’re not interested right now in the not your keys, not your coin thing. They wanted to feel like other investments they’ve done in their life. When they come to the conclusion that, “Hey, yeah, I like some exposure to this. I want to own some of this,” they don’t want to go to a firm they’ve never heard of, even if it’s a coinbase, right? They don’t want a new password. They don’t want a wallet. They sure don’t want a hardware wallet. They don’t want past raise, right? This is just 65-year-old guy worth $50 million, doesn’t want this. He just wants to buy a million dollars worth of Bitcoin.

Eric Weiss (00:22:29):

So we set up a fund to try to accommodate those folks and then give them some of the benefits that they may not even know that they want. So I have a fund called Bitcoin Investment Group. It’s more of a labor of love for the community than a profit center. I don’t make any money on it. We charge 1% a year. We custody the Bitcoin at Fidelity Digital Assets, which I think is probably the safest custodian in the world. Basically, it’s just a buy and hold. There’s no trading. There’s nothing like that. We maintain separate tax lots so that nobody in the fund is impacted by anybody else’s buying or selling of their Bitcoin.

Eric Weiss (00:23:08):

Then the really cool part is if someone wants to redeem and leave the fund, they have the choice to go back into US dollars or sell Bitcoin and give them money if they feel like making that mistake or we will wire them, send them, wire them, that’s so funny, we’ll get a wallet address and we’ll send them the amount of Bitcoin that they’re entitled to so they can actually take possession of their Bitcoin, which was the single most important factor in starting the fund for me. I think that even if you don’t hold your own Bitcoin, you need to be able to.

Preston Pysh (00:23:40):

It won’t take three days to clear. It’ll clear in 10 minutes or one hour.

Eric Weiss (00:23:47):

It won’t. Yeah, yeah. We offer weekly liquidity because Fidelity’s closed on weekends and certain hours, but really, it’s pretty much daily. You say you want out today, we’ll get you out today.

Preston Pysh (00:23:55):

That’s awesome. So I opened up some questions on Twitter for folks that wanted to ask you questions. One of the most common questions that people want to hear is they want to hear-

Eric Weiss (00:24:06):

I bet I guess.

Preston Pysh (00:24:07):

… the story, the story.

Eric Weiss (00:24:14):

Yeah. I couldn’t guess that one.

Preston Pysh (00:24:14):

So for people that maybe aren’t familiar, so you’re famous for orange peeling Michael Saylor into Bitcoin. So you’ve known Michael, I think what, two decades nearly?

Eric Weiss (00:24:27):

Yup.

Preston Pysh (00:24:28):

Two decades.

Eric Weiss (00:24:28):

Yeah, more than 20 years.

Preston Pysh (00:24:29):

So you’ve known him for quite a while. So you know his personality, you know what makes him tick for the most part, and when did you-

Eric Weiss (00:24:38):

Yeah, so does the whole world now, though, right?

Preston Pysh (00:24:40):

True.

Eric Weiss (00:24:40):

I mean, as you now know, what you see on the podcast is truly what you get. There’s no act, there’s no different version in-person when the two of us are hanging out alone talking. It’s the same as what the whole world gets to see.

Preston Pysh (00:24:55):

Well, I will disagree with you there, and here’s why. When you’re with him in-person, the breadth of what he knows is astounding. Is that the right word to use?

Eric Weiss (00:25:07):

It is astounding. I mean, there’s a good-

Preston Pysh (00:25:09):

It’s unreal.

Eric Weiss (00:25:10):

It really is. You get a little bit of an example of that. He just did this podcast with Lex Friedman. It’s four hours long and he goes into some other very interesting areas where you’re just like, “How do you know that stuff?”

Preston Pysh (00:25:23):

“How do you know that?” That’s what I walked away from the time that I spent with him and you. I even said to you as Michael walked away for a second, I said, “How in the world does he know all of this?” It is out of control, but tell us your story. How did it happen?

Eric Weiss (00:25:38):

Sure. Yeah. Like you said, we’ve been friends for a long time and we’ve always discussed technology and different investments in the space. It’s just what we’re interested in, and we were spending a lot of time hanging out at his place in Miami during the pandemic. We were trying to make sense of things that frankly just didn’t make sense to us, this K-shaped recovery, and government printing money and why were stock prices going up when the entire world is shut down, just trying to make sense of everything and a little bit frustrated, frankly, that things weren’t going in the logical direction a lot of times. He remembers that I said something along the lines of anytime there’s big change like this, there’s opportunity, and we just need to find that opportunity.

Eric Weiss (00:26:36):

Then I went back to talking about Bitcoin because that’s what I do. In the past, he’d been very dismissive as he’s talked about, and when I would bring up Bitcoin, he would change the subject politely or tell me, “All right. Enough, Eric. I don’t want to hear about it,” but this time, as he said, because of what was happening in the world, he was more receptive to it, and when I brought it up he said, “Okay. Tell me more about Bitcoin.”

Eric Weiss (00:27:03):

I was like, “Whoa! Okay. Here we go.” Then over the course of a few days, I downloaded everything that I could, which wasn’t enough to satisfy him. So he said, “Okay. If I want to learn more, where do I go?” I directed him to some books and some pods, and some folks to follow on Twitter, et cetera. We kept talking about it, kept asking more questions. I kept answering what I could and pointing them in directions where I couldn’t, and then it got to the point where he was like, “Okay. Well, if I wanted to buy some of this, how would I do it?” I helped him in that department as well.

Eric Weiss (00:27:40):

Then I didn’t have any insight to what was happening at the corporate level. We don’t really talk about things that only board members would be privy to or something. So I didn’t know what was going on there, but sometime later, I’m pulling into dinner at a restaurant down here in Miami and the phone rings and it’s Michael. Usually, it’d be a text. He doesn’t usually call, and I was like, “Oh, shit! Maybe something happened.”

Eric Weiss (00:28:04):

So I picked it up and I’m like, “What’s up?”

Eric Weiss (00:28:07):

He’s like, “Well, I bought some Bitcoin.”

Eric Weiss (00:28:09):

I was like, “Cool.” At the time, Bitcoin was about 10,000 bucks of Bitcoin, and I said, “All right. Welcome to Bitcoin.”

Eric Weiss (00:28:17):

He goes, “Yeah, 10,000.”

Eric Weiss (00:28:19):

I go, “You bought one Bitcoin?”

Eric Weiss (00:28:22):

He goes, “No, Eric. I bought 10,000 Bitcoin.”

Eric Weiss (00:28:26):

So his first trade was $100 million, purchased a Bitcoin, and I went from, instantly in that moment, I went from being super psyched that, “I got my buddy into Bitcoin. This is great,” to … Yeah, because if you’ve been in Bitcoin a while, you know that there’s some volatility and nobody gets a smooth path up. When your buddy invests $100 million when it’s down 15%, do you really want to hear, “I lost $15 million because of you”? So anyway, but as the world now knows, he is a person of tremendous conviction, who really does his research, and when the price dips, he’s just excited that he gets to buy more of it for the dollar. So yeah. That’s the story.

Preston Pysh (00:29:21):

Yeah, and you’re right. It seems like when he gets dialed into something, he just does such a tremendous amount of research. I noticed one of the interviews that he did that really stands out to me was when he did the debate on gold against, I forget who he did that against, but-

Eric Weiss (00:29:36):

Frank Giustra.

Preston Pysh (00:29:37):

Yes. Yes. So I just remember watching that and I’m like, “My God! He knows the 10Ks and the 10Qs better than the guy he’s debating for the gold miners.”

Eric Weiss (00:29:49):

Yeah, because he read them.

Preston Pysh (00:29:52):

He read them, but his depth of-

Eric Weiss (00:29:53):

Cover to cover.

Preston Pysh (00:29:54):

His depth of research was just, and ability to recall stats and figures, and I mean I saw this firsthand, it’s unfathomable.

Eric Weiss (00:30:05):

Yeah. So a lot of people will ask me what it’s like being Michael’s friend. As you know, he is got super comfortable house and it’s fun to hang out there. We take some vacations together and he is very generous. We’d go to great restaurants. So there’s that, but when people say, “What’s it like?” or whatever, really, the best part about being his friend is access to Supercomputer.

Preston Pysh (00:30:33):

To Jarvis, his Jarvis.

Eric Weiss (00:30:35):

Yeah. Exactly, and if there’s something going on in your life and you want some advice, he’s a good friend and he gives you advice. I mean, I had a situation a few years ago, just an anecdotal example, right? I had a situation a few years ago where I worked out a business deal with a group of people that I knew and then we were starting a new company, a new endeavor, and at the last minute, I got screwed out of the deal by some unethical behavior. I was really pissed about it, and I could have sued and I had a lot of legal grounds to sue, and I was talking to Michael, I was like, “What do you think I should do?”

Eric Weiss (00:31:14):

He’s just so smart and so pragmatic. He’s like, “Eric, you’re fighting over ownership in an idea.” He’s like, “Of all the great ideas I’ve had in my life, very few have worked out, most fail.” Basically, he was like, “You should just let this one go,” and it was really hard for me at the time and I was like, “You know what? I’m clouded by emotion here. My buddy’s really smart. He’s good at business. I’m just going to let it go,” and it turns out that deal didn’t work out. It didn’t turn out to be a huge missed. They they didn’t make a ton of money on it.

Eric Weiss (00:31:51):

I still have a good relationship with some of the people involved in it because I didn’t sue them. So that’s really the best part about being friends with Michael is access to his perspective and view on things, and you’re right. His brain works in a very interesting way. So from my perspective, he’s got this chronological view of the history of the world, and for any given time, century, date, whatever, he will have some idea what was happening-

Preston Pysh (00:32:23):

That was shaping, yeah.

Eric Weiss (00:32:24):

Yeah, and he’ll know what was happening in Europe, what was happening in Asia, what was happening here. So when he gets new information, it’s against that backdrop of what was happening. So when he studies for that gold debate against Frank, he has the benefit of having a view of history and civilizations and developments. Then when he got into Bitcoin, he started focusing on a Bitcoin standard perspective of it and the monetary aspect as well. He had the basis of history to overlay that monetary piece, and it all just clicks for him really quickly.

Preston Pysh (00:32:58):

At the conference recently, Peter Thiel made a splash with his speech and just some of his thoughts. So I’m curious if you have any opinions or insights from Peter’s comments.

Eric Weiss (00:33:12):

I mean, who might have criticized Peter Thiel, right? I think that everybody who comes to Bitcoin does and should come with a healthy degree of skepticism, right? This is something new. I’ve heard a bunch of FUD, and you need to prove to me or I need to prove to myself through studying that there’s something here, right?

Eric Weiss (00:33:35):

I feel like the Warren Buffets, Charlie Mungers, Jamie Dimons, I think those are the guys that he took a shot at, right? I think those guys, A, are old, right? That’s relevant because they’ve enjoyed the world the way they’ve seen it for a long time. They know that they’re on the back nine, so to speak, right? Maybe they’re not open to embracing something new, especially since they are traditional finance guys, and this upsets the entire traditional finance world a little bit. It’s very threatened by no trusted third party. These guys made a living being trusted third parties.

Eric Weiss (00:34:22):

I mean, JP Morgan is nothing other than a trusted third party, right? So I understand why they would maybe choose not to see it, but I think it’s more constructive, generally speaking, not to attack these folks and more to view everybody as somewhere on this progression from against it, skepticism, open to it, acceptance, loves it. We got to move people along this progression in a constructive way.

Eric Weiss (00:34:53):

Truth be told, I think there’s a lot of evidence that Jamie Dimon has moved that direction, right? At first, it was, “I’ll fire anybody that I find trading it at my firm,” and now his firm sells it. They sell Bitcoin funds, they’ll rip you off, but they sell third party Bitcoin funds because too much money was leaving the bank and they said, “All right. Give them what they want.”

Eric Weiss (00:35:15):

So what’s the next step? JP Morgan, I think, was involved in the creation of Zcash, actually. So they’re not anti-crypto. They have had crypto group that had more than a hundred people in it four years ago. So they’re aware of blockchain and the benefits of it, and they even have their own JP Morgan coin now and stuff. So I think there’s just no need to be so toxic. Let’s just bring people along, and whether they buy a little or a lot, we need everybody.

Preston Pysh (00:35:43):

Yeah. Yeah. When I think of some of his comments and, I mean, he was really banging up individuals who are just part of this traditional system and calling Bitcoin or this whole crypto ecosystem rat poison and all that. I think he was going after them for their inability to just maybe think creatively and be open to this new form of doing finance, right? I really struggled with this for quite a while, just speaking personally, right?

Preston Pysh (00:36:13):

I was angry at the traditional finance that they weren’t willing to do it, and it almost seemed like people were doing things to undermine it, and maybe some were. I think the more that I’ve thought about it and the more that I’ve come around to just being in this space and seeing the disparity between this older way of thinking and this new vibrant ecosystem that’s just, I mean, Miami was a perfect example of that idea.

Preston Pysh (00:36:42):

I think it’s about order. I think it’s about these individuals, and you said that they were extremely successful in this environment that allowed them to rise to the top and be Primadonnas and just apex, Michael likes to use the word apex predators of that environment.

Eric Weiss (00:37:00):

Absolutely.

Preston Pysh (00:37:01):

As that environment looks like it’s changing, whether that was an animal or a human being, as that environment appears to be changing and shape shifting around them. I think they fear that they’re losing control, and they’re seeking order in this environment that seems like tectonic shifts around them that maybe they can’t control.

Preston Pysh (00:37:25):

So what people like myself and many others I think are looking at them and saying, “You’re evil,” I think it’s actually more them just trying to cling to order and control of what allowed them to become the apex predator of finance or business or whatever, right?

Eric Weiss (00:37:43):

Yeah. The analogy I’ve used in the past is they’re like a professional baseball player at the end of their career, and then someone comes along and says, “Baseball’s over, man. It’s all about ice hockey,” and try getting that old baseball player to learn how to skate and start playing hockey because baseball’s over, they have no appetite for it. They’ve crushed it in the construct that we have. They’re good. They’re at the end, anyway. They don’t need to learn it again. They’re going to be just fine. They don’t need to learn something new, and they just have no appetite for it, but as Heller said, it’s like, “Why are you asking Buffett about Bitcoin? Would you ask your great grandfather his thoughts on a new technology?”

Eric Weiss (00:38:29):

You just wouldn’t, and Buffett, for as smart as he is and he’s a Columbia guy and I’m a Columbia guy and I like value investing, and I have mad love and respect for Warren Buffet, I really do, and I admire a number of things about him, including his humility and a whole bunch of other things, but Bill Gates was his best friend for a long time and he never invested in Microsoft and he was asked about that and he just said, “I just don’t understand it.” He’s like, “I understand Coca-Cola, I understand Gillette, I understand insurance,” and he’d explain in detail, “If I gave you $100 million and told you to get people to stop drinking Coca-Cola, you couldn’t do it. There’s nothing that’s going to happen tomorrow that’s going to stop people from shaving, so Gillette’s going to be just fine.”

Eric Weiss (00:39:16):

He had this great simplistic approach that worked for him. It was indicative of the time that he did it. You couldn’t really do value investing like he did now, but yeah, it served him well and I don’t think he has any interest in seeing something new.

Preston Pysh (00:39:28):

All right. So let’s talk about a topic that’s hot and heavy these days, and a lot of it comes down to ESG, the environmental stuff. So much of this just seems like it’s coming out of ripple with Chris Larson, with him, with his announcement. There’s so many articles that have disputed this. When I just personally look at Bitcoin, it’s like the ultimate capacitor, right? Like Michael, I’m an engineer, right? So I’m looking at this and I’m saying, “It’s a capacitor.” It’s a battery that any excess energy that’s being produced, and I don’t care if you’re doing a waterfall or a solar array, there’s going to be moments where you need so much capacity for energy during peak times that it’s over producing and it’s not easy to turn off, and there’s Bitcoin ready to just soak up every ounce of it and preserve it with near perfect energy loss, with near perfect no energy loss.

Eric Weiss (00:40:32):

No energy loss, yeah.

Preston Pysh (00:40:35):

So it’s just I think for us in the space, it’s extremely frustrating to hear the FUD that’s out there. How would you characterize this FUD? Is it malicious? Are there people that are trying to sell their own bags? Is it just people just don’t understand it because it’s super complex? Is it a political play? How would you bucket this and then kind of define the magnitude of those various buckets?

Eric Weiss (00:41:04):

I absolutely think it’s malicious. I think that the generation of the FUD is malicious and there are someone or some group of people behind it that are literally bribing journalists, bribing Greenpeace, bribing others with this narrative, and they’re funding research just like any funded research is going to deliver the results you want like the tobacco industry, the Greenpeace, whatever.

Eric Weiss (00:41:37):

It’s like, “I’ll give you $5 million because Bitcoin’s bad, but we need you to really make the case that Bitcoin’s bad.”

Eric Weiss (00:41:43):

“Okay. We want the $5 million. We’re happy to do it,” right?

Eric Weiss (00:41:46):

So I think that the FUD and the data is all manufactured. The problem is the folks that are doing it are very good at it, and we’ve got this environment, especially with social media and all the ESG perspective globally that it’s catching on.

Eric Weiss (00:42:07):

The first level is malicious. The second level is ignorant people who care about the environment, who are taking this and running with it and just saying, “Here’s my data. Here’s my research, and you’re bad,” right? So it is a problem. It can be combated with ethical research, honest research, good reporting, and I feel like the tide is starting to turn there now.

Eric Weiss (00:42:30):

So it looks like it’s going to go from, “You’re not green enough,” to “Well, you’re using too much energy. You shouldn’t be using energy at all. You should be doing proof-of-stake,” and they’re going to keep coming up with something new and we’re going to keep having to shoot it down with facts, but we have the benefit of having the truth on our side. So hopefully, we will prevail.

Preston Pysh (00:42:55):

The other thing we have on our side is even if they, let’s just say a country gets it completely wrong and they ban it, right? I obviously don’t want that to happen here in the United States, but let’s say it happens in one of these major economies. Everybody has to do it simultaneously across the planet at every single country for it to even remotely have an impact on how the full nodes are going to accept their decline blocks that are being found by minors. Long term, it doesn’t matter what anybody’s opinion is.

Eric Weiss (00:43:30):

I don’t have worries about that. My concern is more I want people to appreciate Bitcoin. I don’t want it smeared-

Preston Pysh (00:43:42):

With lives.

Eric Weiss (00:43:42):

… with lives. Yeah. So because there’s no centralization, because there’s no company, because there are no marketing team or marketing budget or ambassadors, I think all of us feel an obligation to scream the truth as loudly as we can, and that’s why the more credible folks that we can recruit to the space to have a megaphone who feel the way that we feel in our objective, that’s what we need is credible sources, and I think we’ve done a great job of that, and I think that going back to the government officials, I mean, Gensler’s right up there, I think. I think he’s on our side.

Preston Pysh (00:44:23):

All right. Here’s one for you, Altcoins. How do you view this?

Eric Weiss (00:44:29):

So I view all of digital assets, all crypto assets, I think of it in different segments. So right now, we all get painted with the same brush, right? Crypto. We all love to say Bitcoin and not crypto, but there’s a whole outside world there that’s a lot bigger than just the Bitcoin world, and we to try to help shape their perspective in a constructive way. The way I view it is Bitcoin is seeking to be a digital property, digital store value, digital gold, right? Nothing else in the digital asset class is a viable competitor to that.

Eric Weiss (00:45:08):

The market that Bitcoin is going after is massive, right? We’re talking gold, we’re talking all of hundred trillion dollars worth of low-yielding sovereign debt, $17 trillion of negative yielding sovereign debt, savings account, checking accounts. Our market is hundreds of trillions that we’re going after, right? Then you’ve got actual scams, you’ve got actual things in there that are dishonest pump and dump pieces of crap that are barely analogous to a casino. It’s-

Preston Pysh (00:45:40):

Would you say that’s a majority of all these other tokens?

Eric Weiss (00:45:44):

I have no idea. I don’t bother to parse. I really don’t. There’s a lot of crap out there. So that’s another segment. Then there’s this segment in the middle, and this segment in the middle of defi and NFTs and smart chains, and all kinds of really cool technological things, I view that as liquid venture capital. So it’s like an equity market. That’s equities, that’s liquid venture capital, companies doing cool stuff in this new digital asset world.

Eric Weiss (00:46:20):

Bitcoin, I think, is probably the true base layer of value in this digital economy, but they’re going to be cool bells and whistles and smart contracts and NFTs and other things, and maybe metaverse stuff or whatever. I don’t hate them. I don’t think they’re all evil. I think it’s just liquid venture capital in a new world.

Preston Pysh (00:46:43):

Do you see most of the regulation that’s going to come out to really segment basically Bitcoin and then everything else is equity or do you think that it’s going to be a grayer line there between things like Ethereum or the Binance? There’s a few of them out there that seem like they could potentially get bucket into the same classification as property, as Bitcoin.

Eric Weiss (00:47:06):

That’s the multi-trillion dollar question. I mean, Bitcoin benefits from having a very simple value proposition, and not a lot of moving parts. Ethereum is a bit of a [inaudible 00:47:22] device, right? There are a lot of things going on there. They’re getting tremendous competition from other chains, Solana and others. I mean, if you’re ostensibly centralized like I think Ethereum basically is, it’s like how else do you just say, “Well, I’m going to push it out a little.” I’m just like, “You can’t,” right? So I think that Ethereums got competition problems.

Eric Weiss (00:47:46):

Then by the way, if they switched to proof-of-stake, they might actually have security problems, too, because then it starts to look a lot more centralized in my mind, but anyway, so I think that’s just a very competitive environment, people not wanting to pay $100 for a transaction and do 15 transactions a second on Ethereum when Solana can do 50,000 transactions a second for fractions of a penny in transaction fees. They’ve got competition, and it’ll be based on developer talent and where the money goes, et cetera, but I don’t view that as competition to Bitcoin. I don’t think they’re competing to be a store value.

Preston Pysh (00:48:22):

Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting. I was talking with Adam Back probably a year ago about some of these other tokens that were popping up, and he said to me, he says, “The thing that I find most ironic about it is that the competition is competition that is more and more centralized because they’re able to do more swooptie things, faster clearing times.”

Eric Weiss (00:48:47):

Absolutely.

Preston Pysh (00:48:48):

So he’s just like, “It’s interesting to me that it’s decentralized in branding and marketing, but here’s Ethereum and their competitors, which are even more centralized than they are, and in order for them to compete, they’re going to probably have to become more centralized,” and he’s like, “It’s just completely antithetical,” but-

Eric Weiss (00:49:10):

Absolutely. There is a spectrum, though. There’s a viable, legitimate narrative that says security is important, and Bitcoin I would say is the apex predator in the secure side, right?

Preston Pysh (00:49:25):

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Eric Weiss (00:49:26):

I don’t think we have any competition from a security point of view, but there’s a spectrum where people say, “Well, if we gave up a little bit of security and we could have a little more centralization and, therefore, get a little more efficiency, does that have some value?” So they’ll move along that curve and they’ll have that discussion, and you hear the VCs talk about this, and they’ll try to weigh what’s the right balance of security, centralization, efficiency, and that’s fine. That’s a legitimate discussion, but for me, the ultimate value is in that security and sending your wealth 100 years into the future.

Preston Pysh (00:50:07):

Yeah. That was something that I guess came out today with Michael’s interview with Lex that he had some comments relating to being able to warp that buying power 100 years into the future, not just being able to send it from Tokyo to New York, but to do it 100 years from now is-

Eric Weiss (00:50:25):

Yeah. Moving it not just through space, but through time.

Preston Pysh (00:50:28):

Time, yeah. Unbelievable.

Eric Weiss (00:50:31):

That’s a hard concept for people.

Preston Pysh (00:50:32):

Yes. Yeah. Without loss, without energy loss is the way he likes to describe it, which is just-

Eric Weiss (00:50:38):

Yeah.

Preston Pysh (00:50:39):

Yeah. There was a-

Eric Weiss (00:50:40):

It works for you because you’re an engineer, the energy loss piece.

Preston Pysh (00:50:42):

Yeah, and I think that’s why I enjoy listening to Michael so much because like him, in my undergrad, I did aerospace engineering as well, and just hearing him describe things in a very engineering way for me is it just clicks.

Eric Weiss (00:50:56):

It clicks.

Preston Pysh (00:50:56):

I know for a lot of people it’s probably maybe the polar opposite, but for me, I’m really-

Eric Weiss (00:51:03):

I’m not engineering. Yeah. Sometimes when we’re having conversation and he just go, I’m like, “Dude, I don’t know what you’re saying.”

Preston Pysh (00:51:11):

Speaking of engineering, there was a really interesting announcement at the Bitcoin conference or maybe a day or two before where I guess Lightning Labs has figured out a way to transmit tokens, yeah, Stablecoins over the Lightning network. Oh, my God! You talk about engineering at a level that just makes your eyes roll back like, “What are they even saying now? How in the world are they doing this on the software side?” but I’m really curious and can’t wait to dig into some of that some more because there’s a lot of people in the space saying that all these competitors that we were just talking about, Altcoin, in the Altcoin space as far as like security tokens and things like that might have a real competition on their hands with this new announcement out of Lightning Lab. So we’ll see what that entails and see if we can try to understand a little bit more before we talk about it more.

Eric Weiss (00:52:03):

I think that’s a huge thing. By the way, John Seth explained to me how Lightning can be used for Stablecoins. I can’t say that I fully understood his explanation. I certainly didn’t understand it well enough to share with you, but you should chat with him about it because he definitely gets it, but I think that may be the killer app, right? Being able to move Stablecoin on Lightning, I think may be the killer app because that’s-

Preston Pysh (00:52:36):

It’s all synthetic, it’s all synthetically created with Bitcoin backing. Is that what you’re getting at?

Eric Weiss (00:52:43):

No, no, no, no, not Bitcoin. Doesn’t need to be Bitcoin backing at all. It could be tether, but-

Preston Pysh (00:52:47):

Oh, okay.

Eric Weiss (00:52:51):

… basically, if we can do that, which I’m told is completely possible and very doable, and I think according to John Seth, that’s already been done in the past or something. So really, it’s not fantasy, but the beauty of that is the killer app might be having a non-custodial wallet on your phone that has the Bitcoin savings account, right? So you keep all your money in Bitcoin and then when you need to transact, you have a USD or Euro or whatever digital wallet and Stablecoin account in there as well like your checking account, and you’re buying something for $10. You take $10 a Bitcoin and transfer it over to your Stablecoin side and you pay $10 a Stablecoin. So you have that savings account, checking account thing. I think that might be one of the true killer apps.

Preston Pysh (00:53:43):

This thing’s moving out so fast. Is it moving so fast that central bank digital currencies just don’t even have a prayer? Is it just in a completely different time horizon than Bitcoin? What are your thoughts there? Because when you say things like what we just said, it almost seems like they’re going to arrive to the scene five years later after they do their testing and their studies and all this stuff that I’m hearing the timelines and I’m saying, “Based on where this debt market’s at and where this bond market’s at and the destruction of the inflation prints and all that,” I’m looking at that timeline and I’m saying, “You’re in a different universe if you think you’re going to compete with the pace that this thing’s moving out.” What are your thoughts?

Eric Weiss (00:54:30):

It appears to me that the US government is saying that they don’t have an interest in doing a digital dollar. It seems that what they want to do is they want to have US dollar Stablecoin that gets issued by FDIC-insured banks, right? They’ve laid out the criteria of what the banks will have to do in order to issue the Stablecoins. Having a central bank digital currency in the United States would be a sticky wicket, right?

Eric Weiss (00:55:03):

Look at the reaction in Congress when the government wanted to trace every transaction of $600 or more. So with the CBDC, obviously, they couldn’t help but know every single transaction that everyone does. There’s a lot of control issues there, “We don’t like you,” or “We don’t like what you said. We’re just going to delete your wallet,” kind of thing or freeze it or whatever.

Eric Weiss (00:55:23):

So I think that maybe the US government doesn’t want touch, but they do want to proliferate the dollar. Stablecoins can do that. The current paradigm we have is the banks issue the money, anyway. They need to give the banks a reason to exist. So they keep them in the framework. They keep them in their traditional role by saying, “Okay. You guys issue Stablecoins.” It’s going to take them a while to get there. They’re not there yet, and then it’ll be really interesting to see, well, is it going to be real agnostic? Will it run on Eth? With it run on Bitcoin? That’ll be super interesting. I’m sure it’ll be agnostic, but interesting questions that need to be answered, right?

Eric Weiss (00:56:06):

In the meantime, we’ve got all the private company. The private sector is saying, “We’re not waiting for you. There’s tremendous demand for US dollar Stablecoins. So we’re going to spit them out algorithmically or backed or otherwise.”

Preston Pysh (00:56:20):

What point do you see Bitcoin crossing the chasm for capital inflows of high net worth family offices? So there’s a lot of folks that say, “It’s actually too small for my investment. Come back to me when it’s 10 trillion,” right? When do you see that line being crossed where everybody’s got to have a little bit of this in their portfolio?

Eric Weiss (00:56:46):

That’s a good question. I don’t know that I have a US dollar figure number that’s coming. I think it’s more a matter of as high profile individuals stand up and say, “I own this. I believe in this. I support this,” you’ll see family offices, wealthy people, whatever, someone they respect, they start to move over. When they bank with Goldman Sachs, when Goldman Sachs says, “Yeah, we think a 5% allocation of Bitcoin is prudent,” they’re price agnostic. It’s like, “Okay. Take 5% of my portfolio and put it in Bitcoin,” not, “What’s the price of Bitcoin?” It’s an allocation, right?

Eric Weiss (00:57:28):

So I think as the individuals and institutions that these people respect start to go, they’ll start to go. No one wants to be first. It still feels like first. I think that’s changing pretty drastically here. Janet Yellen said the other day, I mean, that was a massive, massive thing for her to say, “Satoshi’s innovation is real.”

Preston Pysh (00:57:53):

Yeah. Oh, my. No.

Eric Weiss (00:57:55):

Whoa! Right? We’re going to outlaw Bitcoin. Janet Yellen, sharp lady. I mean, very smart person. I don’t know. It sounds-

Preston Pysh (00:58:05):

It’s come a long way from the yellow notepad behind her that-

Eric Weiss (00:58:08):

Right?

Preston Pysh (00:58:09):

Right. Yeah.

Eric Weiss (00:58:10):

Back to my point before, we need to allow everybody to progress. Bashing Janet Yellen and calling her an idiot doesn’t get her from there to here. Education does, being constructive does, being cheerful and constructive, it’s what I like say, right? Let’s move people along because at the end of the day, we want this thing to be for everybody, and we don’t get there by alienating people, right? We have all said no before we said yes.

Preston Pysh (00:58:38):

Yeah. I like that. I like that a lot. That’s advice that I can personally take as well. When I’m talking to folks, people who you can tell they want to own some, but they’re a little skeptical, they’re a little scared to be quite frankly, they’re looking at it and saying, “I have no idea what’s holding the price where it’s at, and I know it has 70% annual volatility,” or whatever it is. So what I find myself often telling those people is, “If you’re really skeptical, just take a 1% position. If it has 70% volatility and it’s 1% of your portfolio, you’re not even going to notice what it’s doing,” right?

Eric Weiss (00:59:17):

Correct.

Preston Pysh (00:59:18):

Because it has so much asymmetry, if I’m right, it’s going to be a massive performer inside your portfolio, and they say, “1%, that’s it?” I say, “Well, based on the price of where it’s at today, it’s 1%,” I said, “but if the price was $500,000, I’d tell you you probably need to have about 10% of this stuff in your portfolio,” and they stop and they’re like, “Well, what? That doesn’t make any sense? What are you talking about?”

Preston Pysh (00:59:46):

I tell them, “Well, at 500,000, the likelihood of it really taking over and really being the foundation of global finance becomes that much more probable.” So I’m curious if you would agree with that from a sizing and portfolio construction standpoint. If you don’t, I’m curious to hear what your advice would be for some of these folks.

Eric Weiss (01:00:09):

Sure. So back in the day, Pomp used to have a phrase, I think this is probably 2016-ish timeframe, Pomp used to have a phrase where we would be at same events and stuff, and he would get off zero, just get off zero was the phrase that I wish you would bring it back because, unfortunately, it’s still relevant, but when someone gets off zero and they buy that 1%, they start to pay attention to it, and that’s the key, and starting to pay attention to it and not being intimidated by it and feeling comfortable with it. That’s the key.

Eric Weiss (01:00:44):

So I think that’s good advice that you’re giving. It also helps demystify it, but I think it’s really good constructive advice. The other thing that I use is it’s hard for people to envision the grand vision, but it’s a lot easier for them to envision, “Maybe this is a good digital gold,” and if you can envision that it’s digital gold, then you can envision it going from 40,000 to 600,000 to get to that 12 trillion, right?

Eric Weiss (01:01:15):

So if we can get people to just adopt the digital gold, and gold is an easy comparison, right. It crushes gold in every possible way from movement, storage, stronger, harder, no delusion, relatively speaking. I mean, it’s easily a better digital gold. Even if that individual doesn’t want to accept it a digital gold, they’ll probably accept that their children view it as a digital gold. So it doesn’t matter if you don’t get it as long as you can see that the younger generation gets it, and there’s more of them. They keep coming. There’s people who are with money now who are born with-

Preston Pysh (01:02:00):

Oh, they’re coming. Yeah, they’re coming.

Eric Weiss (01:02:01):

Yeah. They were born with an iPad in their hand and they don’t care that you can’t touch it like a gold bar. They like that they can zip it around and buy stuff and their video game with it and everything else.

Preston Pysh (01:02:11):

They like that you can’t touch it.

Eric Weiss (01:02:13):

They do. It’s not a burden, right? So yeah. Dinner with a guy recently. He was a young programmer out of Stanford with graduate degree and his question to me was, “I just don’t understand traditional finance.”

Eric Weiss (01:02:29):

I’m like, “What do you mean?”

Eric Weiss (01:02:30):

He’s like, “I just don’t understand bank wires.” He’s like, “We had to do it the other day. I don’t know why anyone would use it. There was all kind people involved and permissions and still took a whole lot of time and then we didn’t get in before the wire went down.” He’s like, “Why does the wire go down? Where is it going? I don’t get it.” He just didn’t understand why we used this stuff-

Preston Pysh (01:02:51):

Oh, it could be that complex.

Eric Weiss (01:02:54):

… when we have a better solution. It’s not fantasy. It’s here. You could do it right now. Why don’t you just do it? It was really … So that’s coming. Those are the conversations that you have with the family offices. They’re not living in a bubble. They’re not these stuffy old people in suits. They’re just normal people curious about what’s all this talk about, but I also have to say that recently what’s been most helpful is the geopolitical events, being able to talk about what happened in Canada with the truckers.

Preston Pysh (01:03:28):

Oh, yeah.

Eric Weiss (01:03:29):

That was huge for explaining. Most of the high net worth individuals that I talked to are living in first world country, primarily the US, and it’s like, “This doesn’t have any value proposition for me, dude. My money’s safe in the bank. I don’t give a crap about this. I get why maybe somebody in Venezuela or Argentina needs this, but I don’t need this.”

Eric Weiss (01:03:49):

Then they see what happened in Canada. Then they see what happens in Ukraine and Russia, and they see that countries have just decided they’re going to seize oligarch stuff because their country of origin is Russia and the US isn’t at war with Russia and these people didn’t have any due process, but we’re going to take their stuff anyway, but, okay, but these are smart people that got rich because they’re smart in most cases and it’s like, “Well, I’m a rich American. What happens if my yacht is in a country that isn’t the US and that government just decides they’re going to take my yacht or my house in another country and they just decide to seize that or my money in a bank in this other country? How do I know that doesn’t get seized or my gold?” So they’re starting to open their minds to the censorship, resistant, can’t be taken away kind of thing.

Preston Pysh (01:04:43):

Wow. All right. Final question, Eric. Tell us something fun about yourself and then give us a book recommendation for Bitcoin.

Eric Weiss (01:04:52):

A book recommendation for Bitcoin.

Preston Pysh (01:04:54):

It doesn’t have to be Bitcoin if you don’t want.

Eric Weiss (01:04:58):

Book recommendation stuff. I mean, Atlas Shrugged, I think, is when I read it after college, it instantly became my favorite book. Then I actually read it a second time, but I read it as a fiction book that aligned with the beliefs that I had that I wasn’t really able to articulate at that time, and fast forward to today, it’s absolutely frightening how we see reality trending in this direction. So I think it’s a book that’s more relevant now than it’s ever been, and is certainly worth reading if people haven’t.

Eric Weiss (01:05:41):

Something fun about myself? I don’t know. What about me is fun? Saylor and I play a lot of chess.

Preston Pysh (01:05:47):

Oh, wow. Really?

Eric Weiss (01:05:48):

Yeah. So we play a lot of chess. Neither one of us are as good as Jack Muellers. That’s for sure. That was kid was like-

Preston Pysh (01:05:57):

Oh, I know he’s good. Is he-

Eric Weiss (01:05:58):

I think was Illinois state champ in high school or something.

Preston Pysh (01:06:03):

No way. I didn’t know that.

Eric Weiss (01:06:04):

Yeah. He’s legit. He’s legit, but Saylor and I are about the same level, which is good because the outcome is not certain when we start and it’s a game that we like because it requires so much focus that it’s tough to turn off your brain from our world because, obviously, Bitcoin never stops. So you can always be checking something or Twitter never stops or whatever. There’s always stuff to pay attention to. We like the fact that chess is all-consuming and you need to focus or you’re going to lose.

Preston Pysh (01:06:38):

I love it. So who plays the gambit more?

Eric Weiss (01:06:43):

Saylor does. Saylor does. He likes to play white.

Preston Pysh (01:06:47):

Of course, he does. Of course, he does. Of course, he wants to go first. That’s pretty cool. Okay. I didn’t know that. Have either one of you guys played Jack?

Eric Weiss (01:06:59):

We have not. We have not.

Preston Pysh (01:07:01):

You guys never-

Eric Weiss (01:07:03):

I don’t want to play Jack, man. That’d just be a bet. The difference between someone his level and someone my level is it’s not fun.

Preston Pysh (01:07:10):

I’ll tell you this, Eric. If you guys recorded a game of the two of you playing chess, I guarantee you that thing would have a million downloads. I guarantee it.

Eric Weiss (01:07:23):

I mean, I don’t think I have anything to do with that Saylor eating dinner would probably get a million downloads.

Preston Pysh (01:07:27):

No.

Eric Weiss (01:07:27):

It would be steak, by the way, but I mean, we played some marathon games. I mean, one little anecdotal story. We flew back from New York recently and we were playing a game on the plane, and then we got off the plane and we continued the game in the car to the house, and then it was already nighttime. We were playing on an iPad and then we set up the game from the iPad on a real board and played on the board and it ended up being … It started as a way to pass the flight, and it ended up being a three or four-hour game.

Preston Pysh (01:08:08):

Hey, so are you familiar with Magnus’? Magnus Carlson has an app. That’s a trainer app. Don’t tell Michael I told you this.

Eric Weiss (01:08:17):

Really?

Preston Pysh (01:08:17):

Yes. What?

Eric Weiss (01:08:17):

I’m writing this down.

Preston Pysh (01:08:19):

I’m literally pulling this up on my phone as we’re talking here. So it is called Magnus Trainer. You have a subscription to this thing and it literally runs you through all of these sessions and trains you how to think from a first principal’s way of chess to clear up-

Eric Weiss (01:08:43):

Really?

Preston Pysh (01:08:43):

Yeah.

Eric Weiss (01:08:44):

So obviously play as well?

Preston Pysh (01:08:45):

Well, I’m terrible. I’m absolutely terrible. I literally started learning how to play chess four years ago. Never learned as a kid or anything. So I just-

Eric Weiss (01:08:56):

Me neither, dude.

Preston Pysh (01:08:57):

I just took it up four years ago.

Eric Weiss (01:08:59):

Same thing. I think it was actually three years ago, just before, yeah, no, actually, it’s four years ago now. The first time seller and I are playing, were playing on his outside board of his house. I moved my pawn, and he kicks paw off the board and he looks at me and he goes, “En passant,” and I go-

Preston Pysh (01:09:21):

Oh, yeah, yeah. What is that?

Eric Weiss (01:09:24):

I go, “What is that?” Our friend Ray is standing there and he just looks at me and goes, “It’s a thing.” I didn’t even know the rules. So I took it upon myself to-

Preston Pysh (01:09:35):

So that’s interesting. So we’re all in the same. So I got this app, I have this fascination with studying the brain. I talked with it, Robert Breedlove, and I did a recording on some of the books that I’ve read about the brain and whatever. So I had a buddy. He was like, “How in the world can you not play chess, Pres?”

Preston Pysh (01:09:51):

I was like, “I don’t know. I’ve never played. No one ever taught me.”

Preston Pysh (01:09:55):

He’s like, “I’m going to play,” and he’s just annihilating me, right? So my first instinct from markets is you got to study the absolute best in the world if you want to get good at it. So I pull up, I read about Magnus, right? Then I see that he has this app, this trainer app. So I downloaded this thing and I’m starting to go through it. It helped me just start from a first principles kind of way. I subscribe to it and then-

Eric Weiss (01:10:24):

Really?

Preston Pysh (01:10:24):

Here’s the weird thing that I was doing. I’ve been totally slacking lately and I’m not that good, but whenever I was really trying to beat my buddy, I would make sure no matter what that I played a couple games before I would go to bed each night because they say that as you go to sleep, then your brain’s replaying everything and that’s how you get better. Some of it gets into piano players. They’ll go and practice the night before, and then as they sleep, their brain continues to work on the piece and then the next day they can play it flawless, right? So I’m doing this Magnus thing each night, but you need to download this thing. You need to download it.

Eric Weiss (01:10:58):

I’m going to download that as soon as we’re done. I mean, I had a lot of catching up to do with Saylor. So I actually found an international master in Siberia and I was taking lessons on Skype for the first two years just to learn how to play the openings, theory, anything. So then I got to a level where we’re competitive, and the truth is I’m not trying to be the best in the world. I just want us to have a healthy distraction and it’s good when we’re about the same level. So yeah, but I’m downloading that app and I’m going to give it a shot.

Preston Pysh (01:11:36):

I don’t want you to be at the same level. I want you to start clobbering him and I want to hear about it.

Eric Weiss (01:11:40):

The man does not like to lose. I can tell you that, and he doesn’t lose often in life. So yeah.

Preston Pysh (01:11:46):

Eric, what a pleasure and thank you. I really enjoyed myself in Miami. It was awesome hanging out with you guys and thanks for coming on the show.

Eric Weiss (01:11:53):

Loved having you there. It was great. Thank you so much for having me on your pod. It’s surreal to be like on the pod that I watch. It’s just wild.

Preston Pysh (01:12:02):

I’m humbled. All right. Well, thanks for coming on.

Eric Weiss (01:12:04):

Keep in touch, man.

Preston Pysh (01:12:05):

Absolutely.

Eric Weiss (01:12:06):

Thanks. Chat with you soon.

Preston Pysh (01:12:08):

If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin-specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that, and it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. With that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

Outro (01:12:41):

Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consultant a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.