 Hey guys and welcome back to Market Talks here on Coin Telegraph with myself, CryptoJeb. This is the show where we bring you some of our favorite guests from around the cryptocurrency world and we break down the latest in cryptocurrency and in the broader markets that apply to cryptocurrency. And today we have a very special guest, none other than Mr. Wonderful, Kevin O'Leary himself. You probably know him from the hit show Shark Tank. He's there on that show deciding on whether or not he should be investing in different companies, different startups and different products. And one of the things that wasn't brought on the show, although he did decide to invest in is Bitcoin. He's an author, a winemaker. He's pretty good at the guitar and he is with us today. We're gonna go ahead and roll that intro for Kevin and we're gonna jump straight on into it. Go ahead and roll it. Kevin, it is so good to be back with you. I got the wonderful pleasure of being able to interview you for a couple of minutes down in Miami at Bitcoin 2022 and here we are doing a full interview. How are you doing today, my friend? Great, very good. And it's been quite a wild ride since Bitcoin 2022. It certainly has, absolutely it has. At Bitcoin 2022, a colleague of yours, Mark Cuban talked at length about Bitcoin and I have to ask you my first question. Both of you guys got into cryptocurrency over the last couple of years. Did Mark get you into Bitcoin or did you get Mark into Bitcoin? I think we kind of got in at the same time. We've been talking about it. We've been working together on Shark Tank for over a decade. So we watched the whole process boil up but we're both highly regulated guys in terms of our other investments. I have a lot of investments in traditional financial services and what concerned me always about crypto was the rogue nature of it in terms of the eyes of the regulator. And so having to stay compliant, I wasn't really able to go gung-ho into crypto until 2017 when other jurisdictions that I'm an investor in like Canada and United Arab Emirates and Switzerland and England started to open up policy there and those were the first places I started to invest and so I've been pretty down the rabbit hole since then and an advocate for this because I happen to believe over time it's going to be a very productive project. I mean, basically Bitcoin's not a coin, it's software and that's the same for all the other projects and it's very productive in terms of whether you want to use it for payment systems or storage of wealth. It's really determines your use case but we need policy. That's where we're stuck now. Well, before we got started you just told me that you had just like half an hour ago gotten back from NCSL legislative summit in Denver, Colorado where you had legislators from pretty much all 50 states coming together and talking about crypto whereas two years ago nobody was talking about crypto. Why do you think legislators around the country are now talking at length about the cryptocurrency markets? Well, they invited me to address all the legislators. It was a remarkable summit because they haven't had it for two and a half years because of COVID so they had full attendance from all over every state was there. It was like a national convention, bipartisan I might add both red and blue states and full attendance and they wanted me specifically to talk about the crypto market and the new digital economy that's emerging in America. A lot of direct consumer and that was related a lot to data centers and let me give you the two big headlines out of that conference. First of all, crypto and data centers are on the mind of every state. It's gone from nowhere in their policymaking to top of the agenda for a bunch of reasons. They're watching what's happening in DC with bills from Lummis and Hagerty and Toomey and the discussion on stable coins, all of that stuff but the grand daddy asset is Bitcoin. And so what they're asking is, okay, let's talk about, let's just talk about Bitcoin mining for example. So Bitcoin mining is controversial because of the ESG mandate and the concern about using too much coal fired electricity to mine that into coin. And I pointed out to them that there are states that have assets that allow you to do it on a clean basis and build data centers and states that don't. And so let's take the case of New York City. There was a big project going up state New York about three years ago. It was going to be one of the world's largest clean data centers that was being built behind the meter which means direct power from Niagara Falls. And money was put in the ground. I was an investor in that project. I pointed out to the legislature. I said, look what happened here. We brought in hundreds of millions of dollars to build this one of the world's largest data centers. And as policy got wonky and unstable and they started attacking Bitcoin miners, we simply moved it to Norway with all the money, all the jobs, all the technology, all the opportunity gone from New York City. At the same time, states like North Dakota, Governor Burgum, he said, hey, listen, why don't you bring that technology from Norway you got and bring it over here? We'll give you an opportunity to do a clean giant Bitcoin mining slash data center. And that's what happened just last week. So there's have states and have not states. And I said, look, I'm just an investor chasing the path of least resistance. Some of you guys get it. Some of you guys don't get it. And the states that get it are going to get all the capital because you're talking about building 300 megawatt facility. That's $500 million. That's a lot of money. And you want those jobs in your state. That's the kind of conversation we were having. Well, it seems like the consistent consensus over New York City right now is that we're just going to make business a whole lot harder. And that applies to cryptocurrency as well. So I guess all the miners said, and for that reason I am out and on my way to North Dakota. And that's where all of the miners are going. I think it's really incredible that over the last five years, you said you were starting to get into crypto in 2017 that the last five years, this has gone from a niche community of a bunch of cypher punks who were just nerds about cryptography. And then they're like, wait a minute, I can make some money here. And now five years later, we've got publicly traded companies mining Bitcoin. As you said, 300 megawatt plant, $500 million investment, like it's nothing. I mean, they're dropping billions of dollars on mining infrastructure around the world. Like it's nothing. And we're in the middle of a massive bear market and that's happening. Bitcoin's down from $69,000 on November 10th, 2021. And now today, August 4th, 2022, we're down at $22,800. The market's down substantially, but still investment is rising. And so I want to ask you, you're watching the regulation, the regulatory space quite a bit. I would imagine you're watching the traditional financial and geopolitical space quite a bit as well. There's a lot of headwinds coming against cryptocurrency, but yet the fundamentals continue to push forward. What do you think that speaks to the short and medium term price of Bitcoin over the next two years? Even though we've got things like the federal funds rate going up, even though we've got things like, you know, headwinds from certain regulators and certain jurisdictions, Bitcoin's continuing to grow massively when we speak fundamentally. You're correct. I mean, it's not that I'm just watching this policy. I'm going to Washington. I'm banging down the doors where I can. I'm taking meetings with every senator or congresswoman or woman that'll listen. I'm just one of those private investors that are going to the hill and saying, look, here's why this has merit. Now the real potential, we're kind of stuck in a range on Bitcoin right now with $23,000. Big miners are making coin, getting a word coin around $7,000. So the economics are still there to put money in the ground. But the big opportunity, the mega opportunity for Bitcoin and why I stay long and why I continue to allocate to Bitcoin is when we get policy and institutions can allocate to it, sovereign wealth and pension institutions, they'll probably put 50 basis points which is half of 1%, up to 1% into Bitcoin. And that's where you're going to break out of this range. How high? Nobody knows because the demand is almost insatiable. Most large institutions want a position in crypto and they want the granddaddy crypto. They want Bitcoin. They can't buy it yet. So for all of the excitement when we talk about institutional buyers, I'm also in the indexing business. I service the institutions and the sovereign funds with indexing. And they all tell me they want to index for Bitcoin but they can't buy it. They don't have any policy. They don't have any compliance infrastructure. So we got to get this done. We got to get some policy. If it's just stable coins and Bitcoin, just those two asset classes, that's a huge win for everybody that's involved in crypto. Huge amount of capital will come flowing in. When that happens, we don't know. The first indication would be allowing an ETF with the underlying asset being mark to market Bitcoin itself like they've got up in Canada. That thing had billions in it as soon as it got announced. We don't have that yet. It just got turned down again. And that's why there's a war going on between the SEC and other regulators. A turf war as it might be on who's going to regulate Bitcoin. We don't have to go crazy. We don't have to get 100 or 10,000 coins. If we could just get stable coin policy, Bitcoin policy, maybe Ethereum, maybe Polygon, maybe Solana, that would be enough. That would be huge. That's a large amount of market cap just right now in crypto. Well then let's discuss that a little bit more length then what does it look like when we do actually have that architecture and that framework for regulation because Thomas Lee over at Fundstrat has been shouting from the rooftops. Regulatory clarity, regulatory clarity, regulatory clarity for the better part of a decade now on crypto because you're right. There's $100 trillion sitting on the sideline. If you put half a percent or 1% in there, you're talking $500 billion to a trillion dollars. That's almost double the current cryptocurrency market cap. That brings in retail year at five or 10 trillion overnight more or less. So that's why I think it's so important that we look at the regulatory framework like you're saying, but what does the roadmap on that look like? I've interviewed regulators on this channel before too and they think it's moving in the right direction but there's still such a dearth of understanding from Capitol Hill on crypto. Are we looking at two years and we're gonna have strong regulatory infrastructure where those sovereign funds are willing to come in big time or are we talking that this is gonna take five, 10 years and crypto is gonna have to really build this industry itself without the help of regulatory clarity and the institutions? Well, you're asking the right question. Let me give you the lay of the land as of this morning, as of right now. So we got a bill cooking right now just on US dollar and treasury bill backed stablecoin. That was going to be heard in August. It's been pushed till after the holiday till September. The reason you would care about that visa V Bitcoin would be if we could get that bill done and let me give you the nitty gritty on that bill. It's not that complicated. The initiative started with the TUMI and Hagerty. They both had different bills. There's other bills that is all around the concept of this. Think about a money market, a fidelity money market or a Schwab money market. There are rules about how those are built. They get audited every month and they're not allowed to own assets supporting the money market unit price that are have a duration of longer than 12 months. Same thing for stablecoin. It'll be the same idea. Look, if you're gonna put out a coin and back it with US dollar, have a US dollar there and if you're gonna use T bills to disclose how many T bills you have and what the duration is and let that be audited every month, then we'd approve that. And the reason you got bipartisan support for something like that, think about, well, let's pick one, US DC. That's the one that was the most stable during the crazy Luna situation when algorithmic didn't work and it cratered. Not US DC because it was backed by the US dollar. So let's just say those kind of, not just US DC, but any coin or any token or any payment system that's gonna be backed by a dollar sticks with those rules. That would be policy and they're going to treat it. The way they're gonna try and get around the whole issue is US DC or Ether or Tether or any of these things. Are they coins? Are they payment systems? Whatever. They're gonna look at it and say, we don't care. Let's call it a payment system, no different than when you're transferring capital. It's gonna be the same rules if we dictated in a money market fund and then let the market compete. And so you're gonna have different players with different amounts of Tbills, different amounts of cash, but the point is they would be regulation for them. And the use of those as payment systems would become global and it would be backed by the US dollar. That supports the US dollars, the default currency of the earth. What politician regardless of what side of the aisle doesn't like that. And so that's the likely first step. When institutions see that happen, let's say we get lucky and happens in September, that's when the focus goes to Bitcoin. That's when the granddaddy asset, the one that everybody wants, that'll be the next chip to fall. And I think that's when the big opportunity is gonna happen. That's after the midterms, after November 8th, the house is probably gonna switch. Lot of Republicans are pro-digital, pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin. All of that action is gonna happen in the back end of the year and early in Q1 of next year. I think we can get policy and perhaps an ETF backed by Bitcoin sometime in the first six months of 2023. That's why you gotta be long now. You have to, in my view, you wanna be ahead of the market. A really great point because one of the things that we're looking at as we analyze the market is that there's a large confluence of factors both inside and outside of crypto coming together. First and foremost, you have interest rates. They've had a huge impact on Bitcoin. We're seeing 75 basis point interest rate hikes next meeting September 20th to the 21st, the next FOMC meeting. We may end up seeing 75 basis points. CME is leaning in that direction with 60% likelihood. So if we see 75 basis points, OK, well, then we haven't plateaued interest rates. But if we see 50 and if not at this meeting, maybe the next meeting, we see 50 basis point rate hike. The Fed could start tapering that interest rate hike, maybe start printing money again in the next 12 months. The last time we saw that happen to spider recession in the first half of 2020, we saw Bitcoin explode 1500% in the span of 250 days up to $65,000. So we have the potential over the next three months of seeing rate hikes taper and over the next six to 12 months, the printer coming back online. On top of that, we have the Ethereum 2.0 merge slated to happen on September 19th. Now it's been delayed three years, but if that does happen, that would be equivalent to basically a Bitcoin having with the amount of new Ethereum being, its inflation slowed down by some project between 90 and 98%. That would be huge for the tokenomics of Ethereum. Then on the geopolitical front, you also, as you said, you have midterms coming up and the house may flip and Republicans seem to be much more open to kind of a libertarian stance of crypto, say, hey, let it develop and grow. You also have all the different factors that you just mentioned in the next six to 12 months. Are we going to see this catalytic event, this inflection point, where Bitcoin's downward movement since November 10th when we hit all-time high last year, are we going to see that start turning around back into a bull market because the fundamentals of Bitcoin are so much stronger today than they were 12 months ago, despite the price being 70% lower? I agree with you, but the thing that's holding Bitcoin back, everything you said there is correct. I'm not sure about ETH 2.0 because, wow, they keep bringing dates and coming and going. It hasn't happened yet. I'm a bit of a skeptic. I'll believe it when I see it, yeah. Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. I've talked to some of the proponents and there's a lot of people that are conflicted on that situation. Bringing down gas fees is not in everybody's favor. Obviously, if you're collecting the fees, they'll like them as they are. But I think it doesn't matter. These projects are all worth owning because you don't know who's going to win, but when it comes to Bitcoin, the floodgates themselves is compliance infrastructure at the sovereign fund level, the Norway fund, the Saudis, the United Arab Emirates, our own states, pension plans. If we were calling that asset, whatever we're going to call it, a commodity or a security, and we got that done, I don't care which direction it goes, why wouldn't you be allocating to any portfolio portion to Bitcoin, just like you would for real estate, just like you would for stocks, just like you would for bonds. That would really change the dynamic on Bitcoin. And when that happens, you have to make a decision. Do you get ahead of that curve, not knowing when that actually is going to occur, or do you wait until it occurs? Because it'll be, in terms of price appreciation, I believe it'll be dramatic. It'll be dramatic. You could have a gap up 10, 15, 20, 25% overnight because you've opened up trillions of dollars worth of access to a new asset class. That doesn't happen too often. And I think all of the productivity and all of the people that are working on the blockchain and all the projects out there, and I always remind people, Bitcoin is not a coin, it's software. There's lots of really smart guys leaving colleges that are engineering and moving to the United Arab Emirates or the Caribbean islands. They don't say stateside because they don't have any policy. So all that intellectual capital could come back stateside. There'd be a lot of things happening once we get policy, once we get regulation. And I think you're right. The timing is probably six, 12 months, but Katie bar the doors when that happens. It's gonna be really wild. Being someone with a lot of background in software, I'm sure you've heard of the S-curve of adoption where different technologies, the internet, indoor plumbing, microwaves, personal phones, cars, Google, anything, kind of just goes through this period of really fast growth. And we've talked a lot about the S-curve of adoption on this channel and a lot of times the S-curve of adoption happens at around seven to 12% adoption of the broader community that ever would adopt it. So let's say three billion people will adopt Bitcoin at one point. By the time you get to seven, 10, 12% of that takes off like crazy. And you ramp up to 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80% market penetration in the span of just a very short period of time. And a lot of people have been looking for this inflection point on Bitcoin back in 2020. Oh man, was that the inflection point when Bitcoin was going up to 65? Were we gonna moonshot straight to 500K because that's the beginning? I don't think that inflection point has happened. I think there are different numbers that people present. Oh, we've got 10%, 15%, 20% adoption of Bitcoin. Maybe that many people have bought five bucks of Bitcoin on Robinhood or they've opened a Coinbase account, but the number of people that are actually building part of their lifestyle in crypto, I imagine you'd agree on that probably one to 2% of the global community that has internet access. The S-curve of adoption is something that I've been really fascinated by over the last several years. When you see Bitcoin getting up to $100, 200, $300,000 and we start seeing two, three, four, five times more people in crypto than we saw in the first half of 2021, is that when that inflection point's gonna happen and then game over, we're in 2001, 2002, 2003 for the internet, but this time in crypto? Well, you're right. The theory of the inflection point is somewhere sort of seven to 15% and then it accelerates. I don't care what technology you look at, that has been the case, including all the way back to pornography. So I mean, it really, it goes back to when the adoption occurs and how fast it wraps afterwards but I'll tell you there's two things holding us up right now, let's stay specific on Bitcoin. The wallet infrastructure, whether you go centralized or decentralized, is shit. It's just not good. And I'll tell you, I don't mean, excuse my French, it is shit. And the reason I say that is it doesn't hook up to the existing compliant infrastructure for institutional investors. When they buy Bitcoin, it's very difficult for them to plug it in to their portfolio mandates because all of the other assets, the majority of them get marked to market at four or one in the afternoon, New York time. That's not the case for Bitcoin. It just keeps trading 24 seven as we all know. So if there's a disconnect to the way that their own compliance departments say, well, how do I monitor this for 24 seven trading? If you're using leverage, for example, you're not allowed to own more than 5% or you're not allowed to own more than 20%. There's all these rules by which institutions have to be compliant. So when I talked to these guys about and the women who manage these funds, they said, look, I love to own some Bitcoin, but there's nowhere to fit it in. I don't have any infrastructure. The wallets aren't secure. You saw the Solana hack again. I mean, we got a lot of work to do as an industry to clean it up, whether you believe in the centralized or decentralized model. I don't care. I use them both myself. But I have to admit, like everybody else in the latest in days, I've been ripped off on a decentralized wallet till I got the joke on security. Now it's hard to do that to me, but you have to go through the learning curve and a lot of institutions just want to plug and play. So you want that rapid adoption? Let's clean up the wallet system. I don't care, both centralized, decentralized, led institutions decide what they want to do. We heard the announcement, the BlackRock's working with Coinbase. That's not going to really change much because there's not many institutions that are going to use the fees that Coinbase has. They'll probably go to FTX or Binance to do that. But I'm not saying Coinbase won't give an institutional pricing, but it doesn't matter. There's no demand yet. We need to fix the compliance that you plug in, whatever register you've got, whatever wallet you've got works right into your system. And that's the kind of stuff I'm working on. I mean, I talked to so many banks, so many institutions, it's always the same story. I call up compliance. I want to buy a million bucks with a Bitcoin. They just say no, no, Nanette. And see, that's one of the biggest problems that we have right now. Like you said, infrastructure, there's no bridge, if you will, between the traditional ecosystem and the cryptocurrency ecosystem. They're on two different ships and there's no way to get between them unless you want to traverse those dangerous waters and weed into murky territory in a regulatory way. So two questions on that actually. First and foremost, that opens up a compliance question that the governments of the world need to resolve. But also too, does that open up a business opportunity? As a businessman, does that open up a business opportunity for a company to come in, offer a solution where these compliance departments have this issue? Here's this company that comes in with this solution to plug right into crypto and make it a lot easier on them. Fantastic question. That is the issue. And yes, yes, yes, it's a huge opportunity. Let me give you an example of how I have done it as an investor. I've tried to find geographies where policy is more advanced. Let's just take Canada for a second. So WonderFi, a public Canadian company, I'm a strategic investor in it, has 720,000 accounts now that are 100% compliance in every province of that country underneath the OSC order, 100% compliant. Now, when you operate under a government order, and the OSC is like the SEC, except it's the Canadian version of it, they are very limited in terms of which coins you can actually trade. And so we've got 14, 15, 16 tokens, 15 positions, coins, that's all we get to use. But that's okay. It's got all the big daddies in there. It's got Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and many others. But the point is they're regulated. We're not allowed to use a leverage, for example. We're limited in terms of what we can do in staking. All of these things are getting worked out with the regulator. But the reason that's a great business opportunity is when the Canadian banks wanna switch on, and that's an oligopoly of really sound infrastructure up there, we've got the compliance department ready to plug in. Now, I don't know when that's gonna happen. They're waiting for regulation basically on Bitcoin itself, just like every other bank around the world is. But when that happens, the business opportunities say, look guys, we've been trading this. We have a dealer broker and we have an exchange and it's compliant, and it has all the infrastructure compliance and it's got the tax reporting, plug it in. I'm doing the same thing in the United Arab Emirates, the same thing in England. I'm trying to use the compliant software that we've built up in Canada to do it in other jurisdictions while I'm waiting for the regulators in the US to give us policy. And everybody else is doing the same thing. I'm not the only person doing this, but I'm extremely optimistic that the regulated path with infrastructure for compliance is the long-term opportunity. Yeah, because I mean, you're talking about tens if not over a hundred trillion dollars worth of money sitting on the sidelines in like you said, sovereign wealth funds and pensions and all these different places that could be investing in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. You know, Norway right now, you mentioned Norway. Norway has their fund because they know they have a lot of money from oil and gas extraction, mainly oil extraction, but they're going to run out of that eventually. So they're trying to make sure that they can provide for their country at some point in the future. So that's a big fund too, as well, like you're talking about. But let's pivot a little bit then because one of the things that you're doing quite a bit of, as you said, you're going up the Capitol Hill, you're speaking in front of legislators, you're one of the people out there that's advocating for cryptocurrency in a big way. You're sold out for Bitcoin, if you will, not in a negative way, but in a positive way. You're an advocate for cryptocurrency. I think you would stand for the idea of education. I asked you the question in Miami, if on the first episode of Shark Tank, in, what was it, August of 2009, somebody came on and pitched Bitcoin to you, would you buy it? And you said, do you remember? I think I probably said, fuck no. Yeah, that you said something like that. You said, no, I probably wouldn't have bought it because I didn't understand it. And you said that you didn't understand it, so you wouldn't have bought it because you wanted to buy into something that you understood. So my question to you is, since 2009, up until 2017, obviously you learned a lot about Bitcoin. During that time, you became somebody who would have said what you just said about Bitcoin, to now you're one of the biggest advocates of it. I think there's a lot of people in 2022 that are in Kevin O'Leary's position in 2009. But hopefully they'll be Kevin O'Leary in 2017 or Kevin O'Leary in 2022 soon. How do they get there? You know, you're absolutely right. And my answer, you know, the pump shoves this in my face every time we do an interview together. It takes the old tape from CNBC and shoves it right up where the sun doesn't shine. I got to deal with that guy every friggin' week, okay? Just over and over again. But my point is when the market changes, I change. When there's a new, I'm not stubborn. I have to be realistic about what works and what doesn't. I truly believe 100%. I tell regulators this too. Within a decade, crypto will be the 12th sector of the S&P 500. We have to realize that there's so much intellectual capital going into problem solving around payment systems, around tokenization, around NFTs, authenticating physical assets. There's so much going on that you gotta be a student of it. You have to do it. You have to understand it. Otherwise you're gonna be left behind. I've got a whole team. A whole team in my operating company does nothing except crypto. We're looking around the world for new projects. I'm very fortunate. I get opportunities all the time. I'm a shareholder in FTX. I own a piece of circle. Polygon, H-bar, on and on and on. I'm in deep. I'm in there. We're at 20% of our operating company's balance sheet in all kinds of crypto opportunities because I get the joke. I understand where it's going. Now if you're not willing to take the time to educate yourself and build a team around you that can do the analysis, well, I think you'll be a loser. I think you'll underperform the overall market. I think you'll miss out on this new nascent sector that's coming into the market. You've got to embrace it. You've got to understand it. You've got to learn by buying it, managing it, understanding the volatility, and watching it. That's how it works. Yeah, well, and you know, the ultimate goal here is something that we preach constantly, which is this concept that we have a financial sovereignty. And the idea that we're looking for is the ability to take back control of our financial situation, our financial systems, and not having to ask everybody what we're going to do with our finances and doing that through Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. I believe Bitcoin was founded on the principle of, hey, these centralized institutions, these regulators, these policy makers, the Federal Reserve, they want to manipulate the currency. We need to take away the currency controls. We need to take away the ability to print and slow down the creation of the currency and do things with inflation data and manipulate the currency. We need to take away currency manipulation from the hands of the government because, oh, well, if the government prints money, then it's fine, but if we do it as counterfeiting, but the point is that that cryptocurrency right now has a lot of... Looks like we lost him. Did we lose him? Did he say, and as for that, I'm out? Well, I guess I'll go ahead and continue the question that I'll answer if we get him back, then we will go ahead and answer that. What I was saying is that right now, we're pushing for something called financial sovereignty in the cryptocurrency realm, and that's the idea of us wanting to take back control of our finances from the powers that be. And so what I'm looking for here is the idea of being able to take Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and use that to battle against the powers and systems that be. And that's what we're really looking for here in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. We want to be able to see Bitcoin be the place that we're able to run to and store our wealth where we're going to be able to hold it on into the future. You know, some of the things that Kevin was talking about were all these sovereign wealth funds investing in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, but ultimately, these sovereign wealth funds are more or less just investing for us. A lot of them have our money, the sovereign wealth funds. They have money that the taxpayer is paying into them. The pension plans is money that's being taken out in taxes. All of this money is ours, the individuals, and we as a community are giving this money to the powers that be. We're giving it to the bank when we buy a home. We're giving it to the bank when we take out a car loan. We're having it stripped away from us through the silent tax called inflation. And so really the point that we're getting at here with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is that it's not about any one individual. That's why Satoshi Nakamoto never came forward and revealed his, her, or their true identity. It's not about me. It's not about, you know, Kevin. It's not about any of us. It's about the concept of being able to take back power financially into our own hands. And if we are able to do that, that's where success is going to come from. I love some of what Kevin was talking about there before we lost him. Hopefully we'll get him back here in just a second. That education is really the gate and key to this. Yes, the flood gates are going to open and we're going to see sovereign wealth come in. We're going to see pensions come in. We're going to have a massive amount of money flow into the cryptocurrency space, but ultimately that's going to benefit us. You know, we want the pensions to benefit, I guess. You know, we don't know those individuals, but we want for us and for our families to be able to grow our wealth so that we're able to take back power from these powers that are trying to force us into a position where we don't have control over our currency. They do and strip us of our financial sovereignty. So what we're going to do, we're going to go ahead and read a couple of chats here. And it looks like we got him back. Kevin, hello. I'm back. Listen, just a comment on what you said there. I think the big opportunity is to merge both those ideas together. That's why I'm cool with regulation. If we can get the government to regulate it and put some rules around it, you get a spigot of capital as we talked about. You're absolutely right. But as a store of value, you've got the whole world wanting to look at Bitcoin. They just need policy and compliance. And then Katie bar the doors. I keep saying it because the opportunity, you want to see Bitcoin at 100,000 and above, you got to get the sovereign dudes involved. That's absolutely right. And it's going to end up benefiting the little guys like, well, us. You know, everyone watching this show, Kevin, you're a private investor. You know, we're going to be able to build that financial wealth for ourselves and project that into the future. And you know, Kevin, you really got started as an entrepreneur where you didn't have the success that you have today. You built a lot of this. And by the way, kudos to you for that. And I think there's a lot of people that are trying to get into cryptocurrency right now with that entrepreneurial dream. And they're in a position that maybe you are at a time. And so as an entrepreneur who's self-made, what advice would you give to people that are individuals and don't have the resources to put together a big team of analysts like you and I have, but they're doing it individually. What advice would you give to them from a business standpoint and also from a crypto one? Here's how I'm playing the crypto as an investor and as an entrepreneur, because I'm looking at it saying to myself, what discipline worked for me for 30 years in stocks and bonds and traditional assets? And that was the rule of diversification. And a lot of people say to me, I only need to own Bitcoin. I get that. That is the grand daddy asset, but it doesn't mean you can't own anything else. I think the opportunity is to get diversification and make sure that you have a plethora of different opportunities. I think crypto itself is a brand new sector. We talked about that earlier. So I'm a big believer in NFTs. I'm a big believer in the other projects, other payment systems. That's why I bought a piece of circle. I mean, it's sort of like give me diversification, but the asset that I want to get regulated first, it's gotta be Bitcoin because that is the one that started the whole thing off and we've gotta get policy around that. And that means as simply as allowing us in the US to have an ETF like they've gotten so many other places. Why are we so far behind on that? That means anybody could just, if they wanted to own some Bitcoin, could just buy the ETF, stick it in their online account, we'll pay no fees practically for owning it. That would be the right way to do it to broaden the market to everybody. That would definitely help with what we were talking about about a bridge between different people in the traditional financial sector trying to get into Bitcoin, where it's very difficult for them to, you know, go in and set up a coin base, set up a wallet, buy a ledger, you know, do these things. That would definitely help with that bridge quite substantially. But let me challenge you here a little bit on the idea of diversification because if you and Michael Saylor were to get into a room, I have a feeling you guys would heavily disagree on this. I'm not gonna tell you my opinion until after, but I want to kind of represent him for a second and just pit both ideas against each other. Michael Saylor, when I interviewed him a while back, kind of talked about the idea of diversification like this. Bitcoin is a ship that is being built and is getting stronger and it's steaming ahead. And then the US dollar and the rest of the, and the rest of the traditional financial space is sinking. So why would you want to be diversified between both ships if one is growing and one is sinking? Look, I know Michael and we're friends and we don't have to agree on everything, okay? My whole point is, how's that working out for him right now? Okay, it's great to say that when it's 60,000. It's not so easy to do it here when it's, you know, it fibrillated between 20 and 23,000. My point is, until we have institutional support, and Michael admitted this just this week on CNBC, he wants the institutions to be able to buy it. That's what would give it stability. And the way that mechanism works is that if I'm a sovereign fund and I'm being indexed by a company like mine, and they tell me they wanna keep a 5% waiting in Bitcoin, every time that position drops below 5%, I'm a buyer. I'm the bidder, I'm the market. And so you have this underlying support and perpetuity that gives stability to the asset. It finds its price range, and then there's always underlying bid of where 75% of the wealth of the world is in sovereign and pension. We don't have that. Michael realizes now that's why there's so much volatility in the underlying value of Bitcoin, and we're not gonna have less volatility till we get that bid. But the upside for all of us, whether you agree or not, is price appreciation. That's what matters. You own coin today at 23,000. You wait and see what happens after it becomes regulated. You'll own coin at 100 and above 1,000 because the rest of the market can participate. And I think that's the most important message everybody can get their head around when they engage in Bitcoin. Absolutely, I think you're totally right. But before we lost you for there for a second, I was about to ask you a question about this idea of financial sovereignty. Do you know Simon Sinek and the book Star with Why, are you familiar with that reading? Sure, no, I heard your position on it, and I totally get it. But the question is, where's the middle ground that lets the sovereign wealth guys buy Bitcoin? How do we get there? How do we get there? I gotta tell you, I talk to these boys every day, unlimited amount of capital ready to come at it when they get compliance infrastructure, when they get policy. We gotta get there. I mean, it's time to get there now. It really is, let's get there. And then everybody, if you wanna own all your assets in Bitcoin, that's cool. At least you've got policy around it. If you wanna have diversity, and you want some Swiss Franks, you want some Bitcoin, you want some Ethereum, you want some Solani, you want some Polygon. Okay too, let the market be broad for everybody. My coin is rarely can you have stability when all your assets are in one asset class. You get a lot of all there. But I wanna have a lot in Bitcoin. When I say 20% in what I've got across crypto positions, I got 32 positions. The largest right now is Bitcoin and Ethereum. So what I was gonna say is that, we've definitely got this massive what of billions of trillions of dollars trying to flow into Bitcoin. But how important do you think it is that people understand not only what Bitcoin is and the what of how much money can and will soon be flowing into Bitcoin? How important do you think it is that people understand why Bitcoin was founded and what it really stands for? It's mission, if you will. I think it's very important. I think it's the essence of using this technology and to create a great democracy in financial services. I totally get that. But I urge everybody, everybody that's gonna get involved in crypto, including my own kids and my extended family and all the people that call me. I've got millions of social media followers always asking me questions about this. I say start small. Take a thousand bucks. Open up a decentralized wallet, maybe a MetaMask. Open up an account somewhere on a centralized wallet. Buy a little Bitcoin. Understand how it works. You don't have to break the bank. Do 100 bucks, whatever it is. Just start to engage in the platforms so you understand the strengths of centralized, the weaknesses of decentralized and vice versa. Just get into it and start to learn. You don't have to go nuts. But what you learn in that process, just watching your phone, watching the pricing, understanding how you can take, you know, fiat currency and transmit it into your account and then convert it to Bitcoin or go through stablecoin, whatever you want. And understand what gas fees are and all this stuff because you're learning about the 12th sector of the S&P. I tell people, don't just read about it or watch YouTube videos. Do it yourself. Actually take some dough, put it into centralized, decentralized and do it yourself. Nothing is better than that. So Lully, and you know, I was about to ask you a final question, but I think you just answered it. I was going to ask you, as a businessman who's been in, you know, business for decades and you built a lot of wealth and you work heavily in cryptocurrency, what would be your number one piece of advice for somebody who's just getting into crypto? I have a feeling if I ask you that now, you'll just say, well, I just gave you the answer, wouldn't you? Well, you know, I've gone beyond that now because I have a compliance department. I have auditors that are external. I have to report to regulators all around the world each month and each quarter each year. I've tried, you know, and I want to disclose something here. I'm a shareholder in FTX. I'm also a paid spokesperson. I'm a big believer in what San Bank and Freed is doing. It depresses me that he's not stateside, that he has to stay on the Caribbean islands nuts. We've got to get policy to bring all that talent back to the U.S., but it took me a whole year to set up an FTX account, get all the compliance infrastructure within my own compliance offices. And you can't tell your compliance officer what to do. They are in an independent vertical. They're watching over you and yet you hired them. You know what I'm saying? It's kind of crazy, but that's how it works. And to get her over the hump on this thing took me a year. Then to get my auditor over the hump on it. So I'm using FTX because it's the closest one in terms of compliance to an institutional trading platform, but it took me a whole year. That's how long. And I finally got the position of the 20% of the portfolio and I have to report it daily, weekly, monthly. It just, there's so much work to be done. There's so much work to be done to get crypto up to where we're at with stocks and bonds. And that's the challenge the industry has. I'm an advocate for it, but I'm telling you there's a lot of work to be done. Well, Kevin, I really appreciate you coming on Market Talks with me. Thank you so very much for advocating for cryptocurrency on Capitol Hill and in front of legislators and on television with CNBC and Yahoo Finance and all the different interviews that you do. Your voice is very much appreciated here in crypto. And we're really looking forward to hopefully having you on the same end. And I love you guys because you're educating people. That's the whole key. And I'm going to make sure we get this out to everybody in my base. Very educational to listen to what you do. Thanks a lot, man. Thank you so much, Kevin. I really appreciate it. Guys, we're going to wrap out the show, but you need to go and follow Mr. Wonderful on everything. Go back and watch all the content on Shark Tank. There's some great stuff over there and some amazing one-liners from Kevin and Mark and everybody else over on the show. Make sure to subscribe to the Cointelegraph YouTube channel. Make sure to follow Cointelegraph over on Twitter and all the different platforms that it is on. And stay tuned because weekly we are bringing you here on Market Talks more content interviewing some of the biggest names in cryptocurrency. Kevin O'Leary having just exited the building. We're very thankful for him. Make sure to go and follow his content and make sure to keep following crypto because even though it's in a slump, even though it's down 70%, as you've just heard in this show, it's not going anywhere. The 12th sector of the S&P 500 has just gotten started. So if you're in crypto and you're like, man, the price is down 70%, take heart. It's not over. It's just the beginning. In fact, I would say crypto has not even gotten to the beginning, the real beginning just yet. You enjoyed today's video. Make sure to hit that like button, subscribe to Cointelegraph. That's all we got for you today. Peace.