Kevin O'Leary Buys Bitcoin And Starts Yield Farming | Pomp Podcast #563

Alright guys, bang bang, Kevin is here in person, how long has it been since you did one of these in person? It's been a while, I mean, you know Miami is wide open here, so here we are, where are we? you live you live in Miami now I live right on the beach right on Collins Avenue I love it I love the bohemian lifestyle I walked everywhere I have dinner every night I love the place uh I've seen you several times riding your bike we've gone to dinner have you ridden the bike mr wonderful there yes you got it back someone stole it and they stole it okay, big operation, they stole over 100 bikes that night on vespas oh so this wasn't a I didn't point to any crime, well, I found out later and offered a reward of 25,000, not for the bike.

You know, he wanted to catch the guy who did it, so his organized crime organization and they put a truck and they put the truck on a barge in the river and they took about 250 bikes that night off the streets of Miami and what do they do with them apparently? They sell them, they take them out to sea, they put them on a boat and so my wonderful lord is in some country in South America. Right now, long live the bicycle company that made it for me, I saw it on social media and said: let's make another one. even crazier, so I was there last week designing the craziest Miami bike you've ever seen.

It's pink, it's red, it's black. Although I won't have it, when you see it I'll be Mr. Wonderful Ala Miami, okay, uh, I feel like you've done a great job, shark tank, all the social media, uh, CNBC, etc., you built this massive audience , Yeah. uh how do you think about those things compared to investing activity? Do you still spend a lot of time investing or is it more now that you have the investments that you have, you've made those investments and now it's more important? the media approach and the type of content, I think there is a new model emerging and you are actually part of this new model and let me explain to you the way I see it over the last 24 months, so let's take a company that has business minded when I was contacted with that company here in Miami on the second floor of the Soho Club.

They were a bunch of crypto guys three years ago. A guy named J.R. Rand said: Look, I'm a Kryptonian, however, I also have a strong interest in psychedelics as medicine. I said you're crazy, those are illegal drugs. LSD is an illegal schedule 1 narcotic, the same as cannabis, psilocybin. All this. He said no, no, I'm going to the FDA to form a company and do clinical trials. There is no recreational use of this. and you know I want 3 million dollars and I said, you know it's too crazy, but I'm going to be my guy Alex um, who runs all of his adventures, he has a team, we'll do due diligence on it, it's pretty intriguing, it was three years. .

About two months ago, Alex worked on it and he really put in a lot of effort and research with his guys and the way my deal with Alex works to give them an idea of ​​how it works, so I probably already told them. I know, but go ahead, okay, so when we make an investment, you know I'm the bank, I lend you 15, so you know what's at stake. He borrows the money for me and invests it at my side. He gets his own actions from him, but he must. He gave me mass 15 so I know our interests are aligned.

This is the first time in history at mine halfway through, when he came back and said, "I'll take your 15 and I'll triple it with my own dough." why and he laid out the case for him, we ended up investing that went from a valuation of 20 million 20 million that we bought to now 1.7 billion, so it's my biggest winner in years, but that's the type of investments and how that story happened . is where social media intersected with the story of the mind by the time he got into Rolling Stone, he was in, you know, all the news magazines, he was in the popular press, he was all over social media because he was talking along with all the other advocates and the history built into a giant company that has over 300,000 shareholders, so my new model of pageantry is this: you want me to get involved in your business, okay, I want an ownership position, no I don't care what your last round was, I want to be a founder, so you'll give up the shares, but then I'll turn on my machine and if you have a story of merit, I'll explain it to other shareholders and hopefully we'll build this. do business together using all the tools that the new world has programs like this social networks yahoo finance benzingo cnbc cnn abc this is how companies make themselves known not only for shareholders to tell the story of their product why should you care microdosing LSD because it works or at least?

It potentially can do it and it's going through clinical trials and it can solve addiction, opioid addiction, anxiety, alcoholism, all of these things. Is there a specific type of business for which this works more than other types of businesses? Does it have to have something inherent? story behind it and some interest and that's really what you're trying to support as much as the actual investment itself. It's a great question, but the truth is that each company has to be able to tell its story in the best way. I care if it's a really sophisticated technology, I mean, it's much better when it's a consumer good or service, but right now the reason cryptocurrencies are of so much interest globally is that the history It was told by guys like you for years and slowly emerged as a store story. of wealth if you want to call it that or currency if you want to call it that, whatever it is, it's the fact that investing has been democratized by Robin Hood, by the Reddit crowd, by all the news channels, buy the cable channels , the business is part of the news every day every day, so if you can get followers who are interested in your investment philosophy, I invest sustainably and ethically, that's what I do, that's where I come from, that It's all I do and people who are interested in that follow-up don't have to do it.

They invest with me, they don't have to, they can bet against me, but at least they hear the stories of these companies, so my argument is that the value I have to a company now is the ability to take their story and blow it up, and then investors make their own individual decisions, but it's very difficult to get to that place and it's taken me as long as it has taken you and I want to use that power wisely when you think about public versus private markets, how much of this is better. suitable for public markets where there is a liquid share price, there are shareholders, people can make decisions every day, buy, sell, hold whatever, compared to the private market where there is not as much access for some investors , there's not that kind of liquid daily stock price, eh, and maybe the impact is more about helping the business build in terms of getting customers or driving known consumers to check it out or whatever, or It can work in public and private markets.

It is the most powerful platform to unite them. It's capital, you know crowdfunding, where you can tell a consumer of a product or service that you can become a shareholder at the same time. I'm very intrigued by that. I have a relationship with Start Engine, now one of the largest crowdfunding platforms in the world. world, so when a company has a hundred thousand customers who have tried their product, it is still private, we can go to the customers and say: look, you love our product, you love our service. Now we are going public. You can buy our shares.

You can buy them. Online you can invest 200, 2,000 or 20,000 in the company you've been supporting for five years and this is again another digital crossroads of capital, financing and debt for the consumer who does not have the same. time-related problem, like a private equity firm or a venture capital firm does where after seven years they turn into a pumpkin and they want to prepare shares and they want this and they want all these special rights. I'm not interested in that anymore. Do you prefer to raise 50 million? Let's do it in stock crowdfunding where everyone owns the same stock.

All interests are aligned. There is no time bomb. People can buy and sell their shares whenever they want. So for me, it again goes to the platform. What I try to do with my companies that are private is get their customer acquisition costs down and use my platforms to talk about their products and services. I try to get people to try the products, but you know, at the end of the day, um. I feel a responsibility, I don't endorse products that I don't personally use, I think that's it and I think people can smell it from a mile away, so I never do that, you know, I make things that I use or like or invest in. and I tell them. my story and you can agree or disagree, but at least I have that mega megaphone to go out and talk about it, yeah, um, when you think about building your career on the media side, there are a lot of people who listen and They are very interested in this and more, the founders are also interested in this, so one of the big secrets of venture capital right now is almost daily.

I have a founder who comes to me and says: how can I build my Twitter? build facebook how can I build instagram? You know? Should I Create an Email Newsletter? What should I do to have the same power? Maybe it's on a smaller scale, but I can speak directly to an audience that is in my vertical or in my industry. and I think there's a lot of value that can be built up there, what are the things that you did that you think, these were the big turning points, sure, obviously the shark tank was probably a big one, but are there other things that like that? it's how I built this massive platform and made a name for myself where people were willing to at least listen to you and listen to what I found that worked, you know, it's a complex question because the same thing happens to me.

I ask myself all the time how I can get a million followers. Well, it's not that easy. I mean, there are people who try to sell you services to do it. There are all kinds of consultants who try to do it for you. They want you to pay them 15 grand. All this happens every month, but the truth is that social networks are the great democratizer of people who are good storytellers because if you have interesting information that can help someone or they may find interesting, they will tell it to someone else and send them that link. to someone else and that actually that organic growth happened pretty quickly for me, it started, you know, fifty thousand one hundred thousand two hundred thousand, then a million and then another million and I never changed, I mean, I like to have fun on social media , You know?

I have, I'll play guitar in my pajamas on Saturday, I'm happy to do that, people play guitar, I like to do that, you know, just share it, I talk about stocks, I talk about bonds, I take myself very, very seriously issues related to politics. I just put it out there and it's all true and I don't do it and I think that's what worked for me, but I'm very happy to be in different verticals. You know, I can talk about watches with anyone in the world. Now I have a massive collection of watches I used to be a shareholder and fender I can play the guitar um I have a wonderful chef like a multi-million dollar business now my wine business is now the largest direct consumer in the country really yeah yeah we just won 5, 1 million in 20 hours on qvc last week, that's an all-time record, so these are different verticals that I'm interested in and there are different components that come into your universe around those interests.

I have a large following of people who like wine. Tell me more about the wine business than not. I don't know anything about this, yeah, so you know, here's something interesting that I learned growing up with a Swiss stepfather who really taught me in my teenage years how to, you know the difference between Bordeaux, Burgundy, DRC and Italian wines. all the varieties and I got interested and in Europe you know that wine is part of the family, it's not about getting drunk, there they just drink it, you know, maybe a glass or two glasses is no big deal, so the kids drink it watery. you name it and then I became quite proficient in the different varieties.

I was always interested in why you know. I am a wine collector and investor. I buy futures with a group in Boston. We invest millions of dollars in wine and try to guess. what varieties like this year are going to be terrible because it snowed last week in France, it actually snowed, it's unprecedented and the point is that when you get familiar with it, you realize that lifestyle absorbs you, so I started a wine business. in California where I mixed it and sold it and I was losing money like everyone else I eat a lot of money everyone invests it romantically and I'll joke if you want to be a millionaire start as a billionaire in the wine business because I lost a ton of money and then I met to this woman via Shark Tank named Annette Alvarez she was the wine buyer for Costco the largest buyer of wine in the world is Costco people don't understand that all the global wines they are fromthe biggest sellers came too and she said

kevin

um I was trying to sell her a deal on individual shark tank wines no one could get a hold of her it was impossible to get to her and I asked one of the guys in my office to go to the dark web and I hacked his cell phone number, which he had in 10 minutes, and I called him and left him a message and said, listen, I'm the guy from Shark Tank.

If you're a Shark Tank fan, I don't know if you saw that deal last night. a single serve Cuban wine deal and I walked in and I would love for you to tell Costco, uh, this is the dome wine or whatever, it was yes, and there was also another one called zips, so I left the message. and I thought, maybe she'll call me back ten minutes later. I was at our lake house the phone rang and I said this esannette alvarez I got your text you were rude to barbara last night at the shark tank I said what she said no you are so rude to her and I said I had to tell you something, annette, um, the only reason barbara gets the shark tank.

The thing is, I buy her a new broom every year and she didn't think it was a funny joke, but you're over two now, yeah, I know I thought she'd like it, but she didn't and we struck up a conversation anyway. She said I'm on my way to Hawaii for our annual vacation with my husband. I'll be at John Wayne Airport at one on Saturday, it was Thursday night, and if you want to fly here to meet me, you can bring me. your wife because I want to meet your wife too I told her why she said I just want and I want to see a real person and I told her pretty, let's go to uh john wayne and fly there, I have an hour of her time and she he told me this he said look do you want to sell wine with me I'm the biggest buyer in the world the only reason you have this hour with me is because I'm a huge fan of shark tanks I have some questions about the show I'd like to meet you it's great , but here's what you need to know about the wine business. 97% of the wine sold in the United States sells for less than $14 a bottle. 97 people don't understand that that's the whole wine bomb, that's basically what you buy. 60 dollars you are in the three percent to be able to make money you will have to be able to send me one hundred and fifty thousand boxes a day if I ask you for a taxi I need one hundred and fifty thousand boxes that is just my order of socks the next day I meet another hundred thousand you can't to do that you don't have the capacity you don't have the logistics you can't even understand how much juice that is if you want to achieve it I'm going to give you the name of a guy named Pat Roney.

He owns 19 vineyards and makes our Kirkland wine. He is our logistics manager. He can send me 2 million boxes. You form a wine company with it. You partner with 50 50. I know you have the logistical skills, so I will give you an order and you will be surprised at how much wine we can buy from you. I go to see Pat and Pat says I know you're coming and that called me. We are interested, let's format a relationship that we fought for six months on the terms of it, it ended up being 50 50. It has been a great success because she was right at the time we lowered our price between 11 and 14, we started selling, You know? hundreds of thousands of boxes and last week I broke a record never seen before on qvc.

We sold $5.125 million worth of wine in 21 hours, which means we have to ship a quarter of a million cases in two days. We can do it, but that's it. a business that is very profitable now, in fact a SPAC took over that company. I am now a shareholder in Vintage Wine States and it will be listed on the Nasdaq on June 6. Wow, is it also direct to consumer or is it absolutely I'm launching a new site that will be announced next week so I'm a little early here called Shop Mr Wonderful and it will have not only all of my wines but all of my Shark Tank products as well so it will be a massive direct to consumer game as a result of the pandemic organized by a great digital team there is a lot of work on this it is like extending the pageantry of the voice as we talk about the beginning of the program you know what I do with this voice these are products in the ones I invested in and I use wines I make my wife blends the whites I make the reds this is our family thing try it it's very honest if you don't like the wines send them back I mean you know you can send them back if you want but when it comes of wine, I've got your back, no one makes wine like me, yeah, crypto, I think when we met three years ago, maybe now, yeah, cnbc set.

I didn't know much about you other than how this. guy on Shark Tank, yeah, I don't think you knew anything about me and I told you that 50 of my net worth in

bitcoin

s I thought you were crazy and well, that's a good way to put it because I think in the segment. What you said was that I forbade you because you are. I remember we were on the set of Squawk Boxes and I thought: who is this idiot? Yeah, why would I put so much into one thing? And you didn't realize that, I think. He was playing a game with you and you were playing a game with me because right before the segment started, they were in the commercial and we were all talking or whatever and I was just hitting you a little bit trying to get you. to be excited and then you told me right before I said how much do you know, you have in this, I said 50, the lights, the cameras turn on and that was the first thing you shot, well I mean the ones that were then and but in 2017 I had started buying some

bitcoin

and some um, you know, ethereum at that time and a couple of others, I think we, uh, I don't remember when I bought my stablecoins, but you know what happened to me. because I'm in a highly regulated industry where you know all my indexing and all these financial services companies that I've invested in so I'm really regulated by regulators and I started talking about cryptocurrencies and wow what a negative response on that then.

Do you remember that it was especially in 2018 when the price of bitcoin fell from 20,000 to 3,200? So the lawyers in Washington clipped my wings pretty hard and told me you had to stop. I mean, you know you're a very regulated guy. and you're on TV talking about bitcoin, forget about it and talk about whatever you want or not, but I think a lot of people think that Elon tweets something or that there's someone who's really bullish and suddenly he's bullish. a little bit more bearish and they call the tap on the shoulder just like, hey, enough is enough, yeah, it's like if a conversation, you know, goes through the back door, someone just says hey, you know you should chill out on that or is it like that? . something that's more well stated in terms of the way it works is that I have to comply according to the compliance officers that work at these companies, every word I say, including this, this

podcast

will be reviewed for compliance and These are organizations with the that I have to be compliant because they have to be, they're telling the regulators that we're compliant and they have to make sure that's their job, so I started getting calls from a lot of them at different companies saying, very off your game and you've got I had to stop and I did and you know what happened, even if it was only eight months ago when the Swiss regulator the French regulator the German uh new zealand brent great britain switzerland and canada started taking out etfs the regulators had gone 360 ​​or 180 however you did it you call okay and I said, well, wait a second, I'm an investor in those jurisdictions, I have investments in all those jurisdictions, I'm a global investor, I have investments in all those currencies.

I'm going to buy some bitcoin however I can in those jurisdictions, we don't have it here in the same way yet, but I guess it's coming and obviously the regulators have lifted the curtain or made it easier, so I started. um I'm increasing my position to three percent, I'm a five in the operating company, so we have five percent in gold, for example, I said, let's go to cryptocurrencies, uh, to the three and we start buying coins and we start to buy ether and we started, you know, investing in some other things and then I started getting calls and I think I talked to them about this, I serve institutional clients and sovereign wealth funds and they saw me on cnbc talking about my three percent hold and The phone turned on and went crazy. and what it was about, it was about esg, it was about this issue related to sustainability and saying where your currency came from, but they were mine in China, I said, well, who cares, they are all fungible currencies, bitcoin It is a bitcoin, it is granted, it is a currency, they said.

Well, we're supporting the cold buying of coal, uh, miners. You know this issue that I predicted would blow up and I think I've been right about that, but it hasn't changed my interest in going long Bitcoin for a lot of reasons because I've gotten a lot more sophisticated now what I'm most interested in now is challenging I think. which is where the puck is going I'll tell you why so now I have a lot of capital invested three percent waiting in the operating companies there's a lot of capital and it's not performing well at all so why not do it?

I told my guys let's go into some d5 and take a portion of the assets and wrap them on the ethereum chain and start earning some interest. let's start looking at different ways that we can lend our assets and start earning four five six seven eight you know, I've talked about this, I've gone way down that rabbit hole and I'm really deep into it now, what's up? Guys, bang bang, I hope you're enjoying this conversation, but before we continue, I want to quickly tell you about the block five sponsor. Block five has four different financial products for crypto investors.

They can deposit cryptocurrencies and earn up to eight point six percent. apy into an interest-bearing account, you can deposit cryptocurrency and get a US dollar loan against your crypto collateral, you can use their cryptocurrency exchange and have no trading fees or you can get a new bitcoin rewards credit card, it's a card of normal credit that when you swipe, you will receive bitcoins back instead of cash back or airline miles. I am an investor in the business and a very happy user. I think you will be too when you visit blockfy.com again. blockfy.com

pomp

go check it out and let me know what you think okay let's get back to this conversation I hope you enjoy it so let's stop for a second so people understand where we are so you've got three percent of the operating company's assets in cryptocurrencies, you have five percent. gold uh the first question is why do you still five percent gold three percent crypto uh I think a lot of people who have fallen down the rabbit hole of cryptocurrencies invest it well so that it's five percent crypto three percent gold or They have literally gotten rid of gold, so why still have more gold than cryptocurrencies right now?

You know it's a great question and we've had that discussion internally every time we do our meetings, every Monday at 10 o'clock we review portfolio changes etc., I know. soon there will be a change because it comes out every Monday, it's okay, because we can't generate any interest with gold and now we are starting to get returns and make money and I miss it, as you well know, I had tremendous volatility in bitcoin in the last 10 days, which actually improves d5, makes it better. I'm making a lot more on my contracts now, so you know, I told the guys look, and this is, you know, brad, this is I haven't done it.

I even told someone this story, it's unique, it's on your

podcast

because it's so new, you only bring me the good stories, well you know, we talk about a lot of things, so I told the guys on my crypto team, look these d5 things. it's really complicated, it's not easy, you know, we have a meta skin format, we have all these other platforms, everything we have to make these contracts, this is very complicated, but there must be millions of people who have a little bit of coins that they want make four or five six percent with them, why don't you find me a company, a team that I can invest in that makes a commercialized d5 and I mean not corporate, so that someone who has a wallet. that takes maybe you know 20 grand or 10 or 5,000 I could easily do what I'm doing, that requires a staff of four people, you're basically talking about a better user experience, a better user experience, an easy way , hey, I choose, I want to do this and instead of having to go and do it myself, I can use this service to accomplish this, yeah, and so they created this team again.

It's in a different jurisdiction because it's Canada, which is very open these days in Vancouver. The team that one of my crypto guys introduced me to Ben is, you know, and they have almost 20 people there doing this. They are all former bankers. They understand the entire format. They are very, very, very deep. in the algorithms and all the code that they're writing and they said look we're looking to raise some money here um uh do you want to be an investor and I said yeah I'll take this on I'll do it uh? but I want to buy a third of the company I want to be a significant shareholder and we negotiate for a while because you are going to be you are going to do two things for me I am going to help your company but I am going to give you a lot of capital and you are going to manage it in the way thatI want to manage it and you are going to produce the things that I want because I know that if I want them, others will want them. they're like tax returns I want to press a button get a tax return I don't want to comply with the rules right no one does that yet I don't want to have to sit there with an account and sort out all my trades I want it automatically produces it's working on it , their team is working on it, so we put together a significant round for them, a $20 million round.

I'm the leader in that thing and I think it's going to be a great company. I haven't even announced it yet, it's called D5 Ventures. I'm going to change the name to Wonderfuy because it will be my vehicle and I think it's just the beginning. You know great things are coming, and then when? they go to d5, what exactly are they doing? They are taking bitcoins they own, ether and ernie, so there must be many other investors like me. I have made the decision to allocate between three and five percent, probably like you. it got away from me, I'm going to raise it because you're right, gold doesn't do anything for me, well, three plus five is eight, not five, so you can get rid of all that gold, you could get to ten, okay, but you know what? we're bound by certain covenants, how we manage the operating company, ten, I feel like that's at the upper limit of most conservative investors, right? so it still fits within the kind of bands, so to speak, if you're a conservative investor, most of your focus is outside of cryptocurrencies, yeah, one to ten percent is kind of a no-no, five percent. percent of institutional investors, 10, of course, are up. right now that number for the big guys is three percent, they're happy and they want bitcoin, they're not over that yet, bitcoin is the property, the digital asset, they want um and they want to store value, store value and already I've been right in That, I can't deny, okay, it's a volleyball, we might have to rewind the tape and they have to erase that, but my point is that it has inherent volatility, but imagine, here's my take on d5, OK?

I have the volume. I know I'm going to go up and down 38 a year, that's what's historically been correct, so we're seeing we've had a crazy vault here, we're literally recording this on a day when, uh, it's down 40 on a month, okay, so let's say in my case my challenger company of which I'm a big shareholder, now I say to the guys, look, let's put a bunch of cryptocurrencies on our balance sheet, okay? I'm going to own a third of that balance or whatever I own of the balance. I want you to lend it to me and get me a return of between four and a half and eight percent.

Now, of course, I have to market adjust the change in value because it goes up and down, but I'm a little bit agnostic because I own it, I don't really care because it's an allocation, let's say it's five percent, it's going to stay at five, I'll change it. every quarter adding and subtracting, but I want you to lend it to me, so the whole operation, the challenge operation, is to start making these contracts for me artificially so that I can go look at the market and see what the spreads are. All these different opportunities, I don't want to get too complicated, they basically give me what you are going to do for me and then others who are interested like me take their assets and imagine if I could have during these years had a five percent return? cent on my gold, that would have been amazing.

Well I can do that with my crypto so that's really what I'm doing at d5 and I think I have the best team in North America. Everyone says that, but I'm rooting for this team. because I've done a lot of due diligence on them and I think you know that in the next few months they will become part of our portfolio with a performance metric, so what you're basically saying is that you're going to keep the assets denominated in the asset correctly, so let's say just for easy things you have a hundred eth, you put it in, you want eight percent, so now you're going to end the year with a hundred and eight eight staying regardless of whether the price went up or down?

I could go back to fiat to just pay some expenses, but I'm going to stay on that balance sheet and you, as a shareholder, will go with me in the share price as my assets grow. that this is a really important piece that I think the traditional world hasn't woken up to yet, it seems like you're getting there now, um, once you leave fiat to crypto, yeah, you don't go back, I don't want to go back okay, because I would do? Well, I don't know, tell me how you think about it well, so you have 100 of your assets, you said I'll take three, I'll put them in cryptocurrency, yeah, uh. maybe that goes up maybe it doesn't at all, but let's say it's three to five percent, whatever the allocation is, once you put it into crypto, why don't you come back right?

The reason we would go out again, let's say, let's say our pact is. a maximum of 10, which is most institutions, that's the maximum scope, okay, so 10 is the maximum allocation because if you go, you basically know if you have lps or you have other shareholders or you have other constituents that you you said. For them, you have a diversification pact and it could be 10, whatever it is, but it's not much higher than that, so when you get to 12 at the end of the quarter in your crypto, you'll short it back to fiat. it goes back to 10 percent or maybe you know, um and then you sit in the weeds waiting for the correction and you buy back up to 10.

You know, I've been buying like you buy the dip, well, it's, it's, it's . It's not really a drop, it's keeping the three percent weighting, yeah, no, but I'm saying the drop in price, I know, I know, but for me it's fine, we're 2.4 and we said we're three, buy up three. because we've had a correction that you can't call that's a correction, well, I mean, look in 2017, there's six over thirty percent, I think there was two forty percent reduction, so it doesn't feel good, well I don't know when the asset drops, but it's not atypical for the type of historical bull runs, which, again, if you count it in the traditional world, there will be two forty percent drops, but you will go up 20 times in a year they're like I'm out, well yeah, I'm out of this, but in this case, you end up with more coins after that correction and then you lend them out and you get your and with that volatility you just got 200 basis points more return, the people don't understand that volatility is good for performance, it's not good for the stomach, but it actually helps you extract performance from your crypto, and when you understand those smart contracts and how they lend themselves um and I'm getting a lot more sophisticated. , so I look at it now with my team saying, "Okay, you know, you could even take advantage of this if you want, which we don't, but I think it's a crazy play, but you could really get nervous." your hair, why are you only aiming for four and a half to eight percent?

Some of these might pay twenty percent, thirty percent, what's their duration, what's the duration, well, that's why I'm asking you well, is it just what you're saying, hey, I want to be able to? to earn four and a half to eight percent forever and the 20 to 30 is only there for a couple of weeks or a couple of months, how do you think about the duration of the performance? So what we don't have is a long history of what that duration curve looks like you just don't have it, we're all pioneers in this and since I'm a bond guy, I've been a bond guy for decades, so what I look at it's the duration and the quality that you don't "You can't work with that yet, we don't know, so I said look, let's keep our contract short, let's understand the change in deltas, let's understand how inefficient the market is when there is a lot of volatility , let's just gather our own data keep our powder dry, let's just lend 50 of our positions until we understand it works and I should also disclose that I'm working with some of the bigger corporate guys I've opened accounts to manage some of my balance sheets. company.

I'm putting up to five percent of our fiat currency into a strategy like this on our balance sheets. I don't talk about it too much, but I let you know that I'm saying, guys, let's have an operating company. is sitting with you you know 30 million dollars in cash let's put a million and a half into this strategy we'll open an account you'll understand it works you're the treasure let me show you how it works how I'm doing it reveal it to uh if they're private we just have to reveal it to our LP what are we doing.

No one has told me no, I don't want everyone to want to learn, so instead of earning anything with our money, which we do. We are basically under inflation, we are losing money on our cash, you know, we are recovering, we are doing better than four and a half weeks ago, when the currency was very stable, now like today, you can get it. seven eight nine as you know, it's not impossible and I think I only put in five percent of the company's assets, why not do more if it's just performance? It's not necessarily taking the price risk in terms of that's the goal because compliance um The departments are all there we're tiptoeing you know the concern is it's really a three percent number right now there's some to five, but this is what everyone should understand: because I live in this world, the potential is enormous.

I have less than one percent of global corporations thinking about cryptocurrencies right now, so as time goes on, they see examples of what I'm doing and others are doing and they start tiptoeing around because you're talking about thousands of millions of dollars that are sitting on their balance sheets earning nothing so it will be good news and bad news because the more money you put into it the less return you will get there will be a lot of competition so right now I'm tiptoeing through the tulips , you know, almost double-digit returns. I think they decrease proportionally to the volatility, so this is what you need to understand.

I don't want to get too complicated, but let's say that when you put a large amount of bitcoins in your balance. sheet you're going to have vol you're going to have volatility the criticism of tesla that we've been seeing was shown on cnbc today all the balance sheets that contain cryptocurrencies are all down because people think, oh, what was it? To me, they have cryptocurrencies, that will affect their balance sheet, but at the same time they are lending them out if they are smart and they are generating a return that they have never made before on their cash, so over time. when people understand this, it will make up for it, I think people when they hear this will be very surprised to know that you are buying the dip that you are getting into on d5, you are gaining performance, right, those are several, uh, pretty sophisticated strategies compared to just bitcoin, right or, hey, I want to buy a mining stock, for example, because you're getting more and more into the weeds in the last couple of years, maybe they went from uh, hey, I probably shouldn't talk about that a lot of it's okay, maybe there's something interesting about three percent now, like, hey, let's start getting deeper and deeper into the weeds, where is this going to go in 10 years, like you fast forward and say, okay, wait a second like there's a lot of things that have to be built and get there eventually, it's just 100 corporate balance sheets or, you know, in digital assets, so there's digital dollars but also bitcoin ether, whatever performance there is, it's like a true decentralized financial system being built here. kind of like right under Wall Street or there's coexistence or just where we're going, I guess what's happening is money is looking for the most fluid way to be really productive and that's why d5 is so interesting in Instead of paying those crazy 200 bases for 2 fees that these wallets charge, I don't need those guys at all, maybe I need a ramp to put my fiat into ether or whatever, but after that I don't need them and I can go and do it. this for a fraction of those costs in a decentralized way, what got me into this was that we are always trying to find a place for our cash, like when we haven't found an investment, we want some kind of return on our cash and right now we have a lot of cash because we sold a lot of commercial real estate right before and during the pandemic because I'm worried about what's going to happen to all that office tower space, I'm not sure everyone will come back like they think.

One of the guys who works with Alex and who directs all of his adventures was one of our interns. Eric's name, heavy crypto, I'm not going to give you a middle name so no one bothers you, but he came to me and said, listen, you have a lot of cash here, why don't we start a fund, a structured product that does exactly what we've been talking about? And I said: why is it going to be a structured product? You said that in the jurisdiction we are going to put the fund where you We are going to invest the cash that they allow, we don't allow it here in the US yet, but there are other jurisdictions like Switzerland and everywhere, andyou simply report your earnings to the IRS like you said about any other asset and he worked. on that, uh, he went down the rabbit hole and, um, he's still working on it, it might still happen, but in the meantime I said, Eric, why don't you and Alice go find me a company that already are you doing this?

I don't need to have a fund, I have the cash, let's just buy the company and put our cash on the balance sheet. If we are big enough shareholders, we won't care and that's what we did and he. He found the company and introduced me to these guys in Vancouver, you know, D5 Ventures and I met the CEO and the whole team and I was like wow! and I showed the equipment to other investors and said: Hey guys, do you want to come with me? We put this deal together and this is how it happened and along the way, you know, I ran into guys, you know, Josh Richards, his partner Animal Ventures, all those guys, we all looked at it together and said this is cool, so we're partners. .

I think he's great, I mean, and he, you know, he, Josh is like a phenomenon, you know, a Gen Z guy who wants to be a part of this, so I said, "Okay, who's better at casting actions?", You were Josh, we did it, we did it with wine the other day and he shouldn't even be drinking, he's only 19, but I met his parents online, he's a cool kid and, you know, Griff, his mate, Mike Michael Gruen and all those guys, we had fun together and I. i actually introduced them to the cnbc team and i said you have to put this guy as the gen z guy like you're the crypto guy i'm the institutional guy he should be the gen z guy he's very smart i like him and I said you know you want to make a couple of deals with me, let's work together and find some things and he's been backed by some heavy hitters, you know, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, I know the whole story, um, I think part of it What's so fascinating is that you have a lot of different worlds that collide, so you have wine, you have watches, you have a shark tank, you have commercial real estate, you have your traditional type of business and investing, uh, venture capital, and then also I have cryptocurrencies, yes, and when all that comes together, it's fair to say that you're only looking for the best opportunities.

You'd be right, but you know I'm just like you. I want to enjoy what I'm doing. I want to get up during the day and say everything Nancy has planned for this day, including being here with you. I want to do it. I don't want to do things. I do not have to do anything. But I want to do things. I love working with entrepreneurs. I just like to find people and say, "Look, don't do that because I've been there before. It's a mistake. Do this or I can help you here. I can help you here and let me come along for the ride." let me bring shareholders to my side and let's do things together.

I have a community of entrepreneurs who enjoy, as you know, I work all day and all night and I love what I do when I get up and play the guitar in the middle of the night I was crying on the balcony the other day around two o'clock the morning I know they're mad at me on the beach but it was fun for a couple of minutes you enjoyed it I enjoyed it and for that kind of you I know it's like living your life because like there's no other tomorrow and trying to make some money because It is expensive.

Can I ask you a somewhat personal question? I'm sure I've never asked you this before. Do you have a number in mind that eventually you would say you know what fun I've had, but now I'm rich enough to walk away, is there a milestone or is it literally? You're going to die working and you'll just never retire you'll never stop I won't I'm not working for money anymore I don't need it anymore I don't want to lose what I have um and there's always another watch to buy and you know The reason I make offers is in my world, you have to make a deal to buy a watch so you remember what deal that watch was from and that's the collection, so I'm always making deals to buy watches, that's basically my look.

So now I have a huge collection of watches and that community is a very interesting global community. I have met some of the greatest collectors in the world, some of the princes of the Middle East. Now I'm friends with them because You know, we were on WhatsApp talking about different watches, it's a great community to associate with and when we find a rare piece, you know everyone gets excited about it and it's just, I don't know, it's just interesting, it I enjoy, so what is it? Why do you do it? It's literally just to get a watch.

Yes, you know it's a good question. You enjoy it. I know you pretty well at this point. Now I know you enjoy these things. I do it well, but I'll tell you why I do it. I tried it another way, I got my first big score, the sale of a learning company is a 4.2 billion dollar transaction, including debt, there were 10 of us as founders, we had all started in the middle class or, already you know, there's no money and and we had worked together for, you know, I don't know, 12 years or something and then there was massive liquidity and I remember when we closed we were in Cambridge and we were sitting around a table like this, 10 of us, you know, we had We had lunch, we ordered a lunch to talk and we closed the deal, so now we were funded and I told everyone what are everyone going to do.

I mean, like they know they bought our company, they don't need us. let's do and um, how old are you right now? I think I was 30, maybe 30, maybe 29. Okay, okay, around 30. Yeah, around 30. And I said, "You know, I'm going to take it." I'm going to take some time off. I'm going to go to all the beaches in the world. I just want to go to all the beaches in the world, including those in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand. You already know these incredible beaches. The northern part of Cyprus. All these legendary. beaches and I did it, it took me three years and at the end I was really bored, I mean, I just said, this sucks, it was depressing, this is it, this is all I do is go to the beaches, sit there and get drunk.

It's just boring and I got back in the game, I mean, I just started, I started trading like crazy and put my capital to work, I became an investor not a trader, I got great scores, I made a jack, you know, catastrophic failures, I lost millions. I made millions and then I got into the groove and figured out what I'm good at and you know, and then the shark tank thing came along and it became a huge platform, and then the CNBC thing came out and it was kind of like that. from just transformed into this uh you know like you know people know exactly that I'm pretty transparent, not everyone likes me, they think I tell too much truth about business, I think it's good, but anyway it is what it is in right now, so I'm like riding the wave looking for opportunities Shark Tank was renewed yeah, thirteen announced thirteen seasons, I mean, you know, nobody can believe what happened there like nobody, nobody, um, I have another show that I recorded on Telemundo here in Miami, which will be announced.

This week I'm excited about it but you know you have to keep it a secret until maybe next week I don't know when but Telemundo is a I'll tell you I've never been in that studio before, it's the most modern. studio in the world is completely digital everything is wired digitally even the signs are all digital they can change anything the temperature in one part of the room that's it and it's huge when jlo rehearsed for her super bowl act she did it on a stage in sound there the size of a football field wow and it was recording right next to it when me and I went and looked at it and went this place has its own climate zone it's so big the ceilings were so high yeah and it's just north from the airport it's a huge facility yeah um shark tank season 13 compared to the first time you went is it still just as exciting is it still just as fun or is it different now well some things have changed first What's more, venture capitalists have now realized that. they get to 100 million free eyeballs, so you have all these VC payback deals like with 50 million valuations, 100 million valuations and my attitude about it is I don't care what your valuation is if you want me as an investor. .

I'm making my own deal and you don't have to accept it, but that will give me a special position because I add much more value than your venture capital. Nobody knows who your venture capitalist is. I don't know the brand but who cares, they're all the same and they all want preferred stock and all that and I'm not saying they're bad people. I love venture capitalists, but I don't need them. I can grow my own money for my companies my way and I don't like preferred stock. I don't like stocks that are above me and have rights that I don't have.

That just bothers me, so I don't use that stuff. We have a lot of those companies now we have all these companies that say if the only ones we can get into the shark tank are right then we have to eliminate a lot of them because they're just gold diggers so we have some really. interesting direct-to-consumer stuff like there's a trend emerging in America, let's take the food group, for example, low sodium, low sugar, low calorie, totally healthy, like really eclectic verticals where people you know and Those who really care about health will make a different type of coffee or a different type of peanut butter and what I see happening in those offers is that when they go on the air, you sell five million dollars in an hour, yes, at a lot. people like that health thing, so that's a big change because in the old days we only had pizza sauce and you know, just hot sauce and salsa and now you know it's sodium-free sauce, totally fresh, no preservatives, everything that kind of thing and things like that and they really come knowing what shark they want, they know us so well now I want to deal with, you know, Damon and the clothes or you know, I want to do something financial with Kevin or whatever and anything in the industry of weddings, that's me, I love, I love, uh, I want.

To leave with the best Shark Tank story you've ever told me what's your best investment what are the potatoes yeah tell us the story and what's happened since you made this deal yeah it's called potato pack and it's a company that I'm imagining Damon being here right now and just laughing at him and he did, this guy shows up and says I take a potato, a real potato and you send me your image digitally and I print your face on the potato. and then I send it to someone for you in the US food and then they put the potato with little toothpicks in a little bit of water and the potato grows across your face and it takes months to make and crazy things happen.

I said that's really, really stupid, I mean, that's incredibly stupid and what a stupid business this is, and he said, well, what do you care about in business sales? And I said, of course, but no one would buy that crap and they said, oh yeah, look. In this, I had like 30 growth per month and I was very good at SEO, I was very good at digital, very good at social media, I was telling the story and I was sitting there thinking I'm never going to invest in this very thing. stupid and I said, well, how about I get some equity, but I want a royalty?

I want to, but wait, you've already seen an example of something stupid, yes, making money well, that's an important part, well, it's true, I saw that I want to do it. draw a cat for you yeah what was the stupidest, stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life what's the dumbest potato head or I want to draw half a drug using something incredibly stupid you pay a guy to he draws a cat and then he sends it to you by mail and Cuban invested in it he made a fortune I thought he was the stupidest stupid because he had the right song that he liked he had that dance he danced like a cat and it was like that I thought he's a piece of garbage what a stupid idea and he did a ton and really high margins because this guy would just sit and draw a cat and have other cat drawers so stupid that when I saw the potato partial I said there was room in my portfolio for a company of potato parcels, now remember the shark. tank, you figure you're investing capital, so you really want the internal rate of return on that capital to be a really na venture investment, it's a return on capital, not a return on capital.

He cares about that thing being broadcast and I got my money back in like 45 minutes, so it has the highest return ever for me and a shark, all because I had a dollar royalty on each potato and I own, I don't remember what percentage, I forget I own the company, but that thing just spun cash and I got calls from CEOs of big corporations saying, listen, I want to buy 1,500 potatoes for my global sales force and ship them and I want a discount. I say there is no way there is no discount. I'm the only kid in town.

There is a monopoly on Facebook. Nobody. If not, you put a face on a potato any way we can, in addition to our new gift box bomb, we receive a premium gift box with a beautiful little tag and a gift package with your face on the potato and it arrives to your door and you're just excited to death, we're putting them out by the hundreds of thousands and there's no discount, I wantI mean, this is Elsa's papa primo, so there it shows you with the right social media platform what you can do and these are real entrepreneurs. business is not a business so you make money it's a clock I'll tell you that I'm proud of you because three years ago when I went to the set of cnbc and you hit me with you were banned, you're not 50 yet Yes, but you're three, maybe five, maybe well you know you're going in the right direction yes we are and I think we could eventually exit our position in gold which is important we pay the way we own gold.

We own the gold to rebalance it, although it is more expensive, it is very liquid, but we also store gold and pay for storage, so it costs us money to maintain an asset that has no return and that is the argument that the committee makes about the gold. position we have saying think about this is inverted interest if gold stays stable it costs us to own it why don't we just allocate 200 basis points of the gold portfolio, just sell our golds, move to fiat and then just buy from you? know bitcoin, yeah, or you know everything you can, you don't have to just buy bitcoin, but buy a portfolio of different cryptocurrencies, you know cryptoassets and then make the contracts and I'm opening up to it, um, because there is evidence. the pudding and then it's just and you and the strange thing is that and you said it before you don't want to go back to fiat and then you're saying to yourself I'm going to live with more and more of everything because you are as you build that asset, but you feel very better by getting performance from it all of a sudden it's working for you while you sleep, rather than most people thinking that they just own bitcoins in their wallet and pay their ridiculous fees for their wallet, which is not necessary, I want I mean, people will realize these things and they will start to see that d5 can be much cheaper, less friction, you can still comply, I don't want to break any laws, I want to comply because I have many other assets and that's why I want this version of what we're doing in Vancouver with the guys at D5 Ventures, I want it to be compliant to the point where I just press a button to get my tax return, you know, that's how it works, yeah, I mean it can, so I'm very excited, I mean, obviously, you've been riding the wave for a lot longer than me, but I'm stuck. pretty quick, you're moving on, we just have to make you stop, uh, the other thing you once said was crypto garbage, not garbage, garbage that's a little above garbage, no, but I liked it and now it's legendary and everyone nails me to the wall on that thing they say they say they say you are the guy who called him trash okay ladies and gentlemen my friend

kevin

o'

leary

thank you very much I really enjoyed it time flies when I am Talking to you is fantastic, take care everyone .