Matt Hougan Discusses Cryptocurrency and ETF Indexes (Podcast)

is quite fascinating. If you're at all interested in anything from the gamut of e t f S to Bitcoin and quite bluntly bitcoins held in e t f S and everything in between, then this is the conversation that's gonna be for you. There are few people who are more knowledgeable about the entire process of creating, managing, mark ing UH, and administrating e t fs UH than Matt.

And taking that skill set and bringing it to a crypto firm where he's basically going to try and do for various crypto coins and crypto assets what he helped do with E t F S UH is really quite a fascinating conversation. I think those folks who are interested in this space will find it endlessly informative and entertaining, So with no further ado, my conversation with Matt Hogan. My special guest this week is Matt Hogan. He is the global head of research at bit Wise Asset Management.

Prior to that, he was the chairman and pretty much chief cook and bottle washer at u e t F dot Com that was purchased by Informa and the Inside et F conference is the biggest ETF conference in the world. You're you're still chairman of that event. I'm still chairman of that event. Yeah, I love it very much. Bit Wise Asset Management is the creator of the world's first cryptocurrency index fund. Matt Hogan, Welcome to Bloomberg. Thanks for

having me, Barry. I've been looking forward to this. I am a little bit of a bitcoin skeptic, but I'm open minded because I'm somewhat fascinated by the underlying blockchain technology, and you know, I'm interested in anything related to either E t F or indexes. So let's let's jump right into this. And why don't we start with your work at et F dot com right? What did you do there? So?

I I started as a freelance reporter for its predecessor, which was index universe and over that we left the worst u r O in the world with Index Universe and not a winner. No. E t F dot Com is just marginally better. Oh really, I would think that's a no brainer. I think it was a no brain. So we switched to et F dot Com. I eventually became the CEO of the business. Some of the things I'm most proud of that we did there. We built

the largest et F conference in the world. Inside e t F s we built the first e t F classification and ratings system. It's hard to imagine an e t F land that eight or nine years ago, things like tracking error were not available to most. That's just that's just entry level stuff. Is entry level stuff, but it didn't exist. No one had even gone through the perspectus is to make sure that they were actually tracking

total return indexes. Uh. It was a mess. So we built the first classification and rating system, which we subsequently sold. The fact sets now powers And that's how our mutual friend David Neated previously ended up at a fact set and then didn't they get bought by was it c Bolt? So so we sold our business in three separate sales. We sold our data business to fact Set, our events

business to inform A, and our media business. E t F dot Com the property to CBOE which is now BATS where we sold it to BATS which is now cbo E. To confuse matters more, we sold Dave with the data business to facts Set, and then he left facts Set to go to e t F dot Com at cbo E BATS. So it's it's virtually impossible to keep straight here. Now, Well, that explains my my lack

of understanding. So so your CEO of e t F dot Com at the start of the I guess, for lack of a better word, the e t F era, what was the industry like you mentioned some of the real basic metrics that everybody takes for granted with mutual funds that didn't exist. For people have to remember that early in the days of e TF no one believed in them, no one trusted them, and no one understood them.

There were huge myths about e t F liquidity. People didn't know what a creation redemption was, and people have no way to even answer basic questions like what are all the emerging market ETFs that didn't exist? Uh, no way to answer how well does this et F track it's index. So we spend a huge amount of time. I must have explained creation redemption. That's the thing that I think most of the investing public understands. The least Yes, give us a thirty second version. What is creation and

redemption of the underlying in an et sure? So let me start with mutual funds, because people understand them better. When you invest money in a mutual fund, you send them cash, and then the mutual fund managers sits on that cash overnight. Then they come into work and they pick which stocks to buy, and they buy stocks with that cash, and usually they're buying their existing model. Here's what our core holdings look like. Oh we've gotten this

much inflow. Great, go out and buy pro rata everything we already own in proportion. And then when you want your money back, the exact same thing happens in reverse. You say I want my hundred thousand dollars back, They sell a hundred thousand dollars of whatever stocks are out of favor, and they send you your ash. And that's that's a creation and a redemption in the mutual fund. But you're doing it in an e t F. When you buy an e t F, you just buy it like you buy shares of IBM. I buy my shares

like a closed funds, just on the exchange, right. I might buy a hundred shares of SPY and you might be selling it, and we'll get matched at the exchange level. What happens with an e t F is instead of the e t F going out and buying the securities, it publishes a list of what securities it wants to buy, and a big institutional investor called an authorized participant goes out and acquires that list of securities. Say it's the

SMP five hundred. They buy all five hundred securities, and then they send all five hundred securities to the e t F company in exchange for the same value of shares in the e t F, which they can just send sell on the broke on the on the markets.

Same thing happens in reverse. When these aps want to redeem shares, they say, we want to we have fifty thousand shares of the e t F. They send the fifty thou shares to the e t F company, and the e t F company sends them the equivalent dollar amount in stocks, which they can then out that You may wonder why does that matter? And it matters for a bunch of different reasons. I'll give you two. So first, think about when you send money to a mutual fund company.

They have to hire people who go into the market, decide what to buy, trade. It costs money that raises the fees. Uh. The other reason it matters is when you redeem from a mutual fund, they have to sell actual stocks. If those stocks have appreciated in value, they realize capital gains and the fund. The horrible thing about the mutual fund industry is at the end of the year, everyone who still owns those funds has to pay taxes

based on the fact that you left. Someone else sold generated a capital gain tax event, and the people who didn't sell are on the hook are left holding the bag. So I always look at ETFs as having to really um attractive qualities. One is there if you decide to sell your ETF and I don't, I don't get stuck with your capital gains. And second that whole um create and redemption process means as long as the underlying holdings have liquidly there's never a liquidly problem with the broader

SMP like E t F or Am I wrong? No, you are absolutely right. I actually think if the e t F came first, the SEC would never approved a mutual fund structure. Right, you're gonna make people share in the tax event. That's insane socialism for the tax for investors. Yeah, it's totally It's totally right. And you're absolutely right about the liquidity as long as the underlying as liquid. The e t F is liquid, which is why and people

get this wrong. Uh, the only bond funds that have blown up have been bond mutual funds because they have to redeem out and so liquid. Very often it's only the top third or top half of the bonds, and a lot of big indexes trade regularly. Are are deep and wide and have a lot, but by the time you get to the thousandth holding, it trades every Tuesday by appointment. Not a lot of liquid. Good luck. People

worry about bond e t f s blowing up. What they should be worried about is in a bond market crisis, corporate bond mutual funds blowing up and having real issues. I think that that could happen. So I have to ask the obvious question. E t f s were the hottest area in the markets what made you decide to say I'm gonna I'm gonna leave this behind and make a leap into the craziness that is crypto because you

jumped into it right in the middle of the Mayhem. Yeah. Yeah, although although it was the plan to jump into it started earlier than that, But that's absolutely true. I would say there are three things, Um, you know, when I got into E t F s UH, they weren't well understood UH. And they weren't widely adopted, and they were still a new and emerging industry. And the only skill I have, to the extent I have a skill, is

the ability to explain complex things in a simple way. UH. And I felt like a lot of what I wanted to do in E t F S had been accomplished. Right, I had helped create the first e t F rating system, I'd have to create the first et F classification system. UH. I had done some small part to move ETFs into the mainstream, and now they are the dominant UH way

people get exposure to the markets. So I felt most of what I had done, what I wanted to do, had been achieved, and I went looking for the next area of UH disruptive opportunity where I thought the quality of information was poor, I actually ended up with two. I ended up with with crypto and with options strategies, both of which I think are potentially very important, and both of which are really poorly understood by most investors.

But this unique crypto opportunity to be involved in the first crypto index fund appealed to my inner indexing nerd. So is there are there are you seeing parallels between how crypto is being perceived by the investing public and e T F And said, do you remember when people talked about e t f s as weapons of mass destruction? Sure? Do you remember when people uh wouldn't didn't think e

t s would ever? I'm out too much. I think they were the I Shares franchise was sold for a dollar from Morgan Stanley to b G. I right, it's it's um Uh, it's nice, Yeah exactly. I think someone called the Louisiana purchase of Yeah. I hope someone still has that dollar the wall somewhere. And but these were not uh people didn't think e t s would amount too much? Right, They were a last ditch effort to save the AMMAX and create trading volume. There people didn't

realize how good they were. And the same thing as crypto people are reflexively dismissive of crypto. H most people have given it about two and a half minutes of thought. If you give it two and a half minutes of thought, you think it's fairy unicorn money on the internet. And it takes it takes hours and days of really analyzing it to see where it might and may have value. So I see a lot of parallels so to me, and I know this is almost a cliche at this point.

Blockchain is so obviously useful in so many applications that we've only begun to think about. It's that the bitcoins and the ethereums and go down. There's hundreds of coins. It seems to be that there's a lot of speculative excess in the space. And I think that's what makes it so easy for people to you know, just yeah, okay, bitcoin, bitcoin, Bitcoin is the next you know, dot com. Uh, And it's the parallels of they're also I think those parallels

are accurate. Uh. I think it is the next dot com. But remember, um, the dot com bubble created uh pets dot com. But it also created Amazon. So I think there are two thousand cryptocurrencies out there of them are useless and we'll die a painful death. The sooner that happens, the better. There's also a lot of bad activity, bubble related activity that's getting cleared up. But from those ashes, if you call them ashes, I mean cryptos up over

the last two years, that's ashes. They're nice ashes. But from those ashes, I think will emerge import and things, just like from the dot com ashes emerge Amazon, Google, Facebook, et cetera. No no doubt about that. I'm gonna throw a quote at you, and I want you to explain it. You you said, you think, um, we need crypto to cut out the rent seeking middleman that creates attacks on society. Now we're all familiar with rentiers, or at least we should be, but give us a little a little details.

So crypto is the first time we've been able to engage in financial transactions between people who don't know each other without someone in the middle to verify those transactions. That's all that blockchain technology does. It allows you to replace someone in the middle verifying transactions like visa or like your bank and your friends bank with software that

does it automatically. And for free UH and so so much of the financial industry UH is at some level a middleman, like an escrow agent that verifies trust acrosses transact and crypto has shown that you don't need that, and that's a big deal. There's a huge deal. There's a huge deal. Now we're miles away, we're years away. It's an early stage technology. We're years away. But already you can go to IBM and you can wire money using a crypto asset internationally for much cheaper than you

can send it through a traditional banking system. So it is going to get here, but it is early, quite quite fascinating. So let's talk about some real world applications for UM. I think we want to separate the coins from the underlying software from blockchain and that technology. But you're focusing on the entire value chain from start to finish. So so let's start with blockchain a little bit. Sure, UM, what are some of the near future, not fifty years

future applications of blockchains? Yeah, for what's worth, I'm way more bullish on crypto assets than I am on blockchain. Really, that's the opposite of what so many people. It's almost a cliche to say, yeah, I'm skeptical about bitcoin, but this blockchain is is if you remember the early days of the Internet, the really early days when there were books and you look up a website and type it in,

everyone was really excited about corporate intranets. They're like, oh, it would be great to send files to Joe and accounting without having to walk over people thought exactly no, but people thought corporate internets were the thing, the thing. The The analogy between an open internet, which people are like, no one will trust that. Uh, it's the same between

private block chains and public blockchains. Public block chains that are open and accessible by anyone need a crypto asset to function, and I think over the long term, public, open, accessible UH technologies tend to win. Now, private block chains are important. I think they could revolutionized settlement. One of the things black chain does really well is settled transactions much faster. I think they could. Uh. They can memorials, morales data. I think they let you trace back transactions.

But I think they are actually modest improvements uh. And I think the massive improvement is this displacement of a trusted mentalman that public box chains allow. Huh. So one of one of my favorite examples is during the financial crisis, when we were securitizing mortgages by the millions, slicing and dicing them and then resecuritizing them and then selling them. That undoing that Gordian not became almost impossible, and banks ended up losing track of which bank owned which mortgage

that went to which house. And there were actual stories of something that should be illegal impossibility, people without a mortgage going on vacation and coming home to find that they were foreclosed on. All their stuff is out in the street, there's an armed sign on their door. How has I foreclosed on? I bought this house for cash that that should be impossible, and then banks foreclosing that

didn't own the mortgage, foreclosing on somebody. And the example I like to use is if blockchain was used as a methodology to track where each of those mortgages went, it wouldn't have been that same impossible to untangle mess. You could have traced exactly who owned which laggage and who own which property. As a fail safe, there would be no headaches at all. It's it's it's it's amazing,

and it's amazing that it exists. We all buy something called title insurance UH to guard against the risk that somehow, this this most important asset we've ever bought, it is not actually ours. UM. It is incredible that that still exists in today's society. I think that example is a great one UH, and there are many like that. So let's talk about you're still chairman of inside ETFs. Why

did you decide to keep that role. I still love ETFs, and I still think the E t F industry is evolving rapidly, and I still think there are a lot of things that people need to learn, particularly as we enter a different cycle in the market. So the ability to still influence that conference was really appealing. I like to keep my hand in. I'm also on the board of a small et F issuer UM, so I like to stay involved in the E t F space because

I still think we have miles to go there. So I speak at a lot of events and conferences, and every now and then there's a couple of you know, there's a good name or two that speak your conference held in Florida in February year. It's mind blowing the list of names that show up. So last year I got to interview Serena Williams as a as a favor to you, so I'll call I'll be calling back, uh that favor. But before I interviewed Serena Williams, I'm in

the audience watching Quincy Jones. And then after I'm done with that interview, I went back into the audience and watched was it a General McCrystal. So, I mean it was just like, and this year you have Michael Lewis, while'll be interviewing in February, Paul Tutor, Jones, Joe Montana. I mean you got s. Don't mess around, Bob Schiller.

Uh yeah, we don't mess around. Well we you know, one of the great things about running a conference company is that you get to indulge all your intellectual interests. So I love Michael Lewis, So why don't we want to have him there? Right? We love I love sports, so you can get football giants there. You had Alex Rodriguez the year I was one of the keynote presenters, and I wish I would have hung around. He was great, like I heard and I and how you find him?

I read a great article where he reflected on sort of the challenges that he had faced. I thought he would be an interesting person to listen to. It's four days, and so you can't do four days of creation, redemption and emerging market debt. You need to give people a chance to to reflect and think about other things. And Uh, yeah, we're really excited. I think having Schiller there this year, at this time in the market is really timely. Uh

and looking forward to that. Yeah, he's terrific. The anybody wants to look up the agenda, you just google inside et F Conference Florida and feb worry and it will show up. Um. It's always a great time. So the next question I have to ask is what do you hope to accomplish with this giant event? And and I don't know if I've I've tied this up correctly for people. I'm not just promoting an event. I don't want people to think that I go to a ton of events.

This and SALT. I mean, these are the two biggest conferences of the year. These are giant, two thousand, three

thousand people events. So SALT in Vegas, the last time I went there was an amazing that had hedge fund managers there and I got to run around and say under perform I got around, I wasn't the most popular there guy there, although that was yeah, that's true and um And then the first time I I went to this event, I was kind of blown away by how giant it actually was, and not just big for the sake of big big with really big names and really

interesting things. What do you hope to accomplish with this event? Yeah? So, so the event is focused primarily on financial advisors. Into my mind, it's a success if the people who come and take three days out of their lives to attend that away from their families, find a way to sustain or grow their business. And so to do that, I want them to learn at this particular year's event a

few things. I want them to think deeply about where we are in the economic cycle and what that means for clients and what that means for their bond holdings, etcetera. I want them to uh to think deeply about these new areas of the market that are opening up, not just crypto, which we talked about UM, but some of the thematic ETFs and whether those are performance chasing or valuable and interesting. And then one thing we try to do a little bit is asked them to think five

years ahead. I think the financial advisory business is going to be fundamentally transformed in the next five years. I think we're on the cusp of an era of mass customization for client exposures. Uh. And just like we talked about robo advisors five years ago when no one cared, I think getting people to think about mass customization, personalized indexing, E s G overlays now will be helpful to their

business in the years ahead. So uh, that's those are some of the things I want them to take away. So who attends these events? Is it just our I a s Is it? Because when I was there last year, I saw a lot of et F managers. I saw a lot of active managers. I saw a bunch of economists and strategists. Who's primarily in the audience? Yeah, I think. I think everyone from the traditional asset management industry is there.

So every e t F issuhe or every index provider, all the aps and market makers, also all the mutual fund managers who must be thinking about the E t F space are there to see and learn. And on the flip side, there are really two classes of investors. Uh, So they're they're a large number of financial advisors, and there's a rising number of institutional investors because they're increasingly using e t F s at the core or of their portfolio and not just on the edges, so that

that mix comes together. So I recall last year you had Tim Buckley the new CEO of Vanguard. There were a number of other you know, black Rock, State Street, Wisdom Tree. It was hard to walk around and not run into some pretty substantial entities. Have you ever sat back and calculated the total assets under management in that room?

I have not. That's a good question. I'm gonna I'm gonna guess it somewhere, and there'll be a lot of overlap because when you have the head of black Rock in the head of Vanguard up front, and then two thirds of the audience owns black Rock and Vanguard, there's a little bit of double counting. But I gotta think there's like ten trillion dollars in that board room. There's a huge amount of volume. There's a thing called the inside et effect, which E t F volumes tend to

be down for the three days. Is that is that a fact that used at least used to be a fact. I don't know. If it continues to be a fact, so many people from the E t F industry are in Florida for this event, that trading volume falls, Yes it's modest, but yes that is at That's hilarious and I just have to I just have to give my disclosures about this UM because we're all about transparency and

full disclosure. So I have been a paid speaker at the Inside e t F conference and the Inside E t F firm is co sponsoring a conference in T nineteen in in September in Arizona with my firm UM r W M or Heals Wealth Management UM called wealth Stack. And I would rather disclose that than have somebody after the facts say hey, why don't you tell us about

that UM. Two years ago I interviewed Serena Williams, which was the highlight of of my interview career as a tennis player, and we we played a couple of sets. She won six two, six four. It was closer than she was six months pregnant. Um. Actually this was right after she had a baby. And what was really interesting is what I'm fascinated by the non finance people that speak at events like this, and you guys do a

really good job programming. This is how many parallel learning experiences there are between non finance related businesses and whether it's the military or sports music. Uh, there's some really fascinating things to learn about process over outcome, about our own errors and biases, and how we can do better even when we make mistakes, how we can learn from them. Um, that sort of that sort of stuff is always really really fascinating. Who are you really looking forward to seeing

speak this year? Yeah, I'm really looking for I mentioned this earlier. I'm really looking forward to chill Or speaking. He's you've seen him before, I've seen him before. He's fantastic. He's fantastic again. And he seems honest and organic. He's totally organic, which is which is unique. Not everyone is a lot of people speak their book. Uh, and that's not true. I'm really excited about Michael Lewis. We've tried to get him many years and the schedule has not

worked out. He's one of my favorite authors. I see him around town in Berkeley and always want to like stalk him and ask him to come. Now you have an excuse. Now he's there, So I'm assuming you read The Undoing Project which is his previous book. The Fifth Column is the new one. I haven't read the new one, so I read it. We went down to Florida over the holidays. I read it on the plane and it's it's great, but it's infuriated, yea, because it's just why

are they making this mistake? You know what it is? The big short is infuriating, but you feel like the people who deserve to some of the people who deserves get punished. In the Fifth Column. There is no justice. It's like, wait, people are doing what No, that's wrong. It's just bad. Yeah, it's it's uh, it's quite fascinating. And I read that in anticipation of this interview were I'm looking forward to hearing you chat with him. Normally I would have held that book for my like February

March vacation. That's speech reading to me, um, But I'm like, no, no, I got a prep and I like to I like to read like a month in advance and then kind of go through my notes a week beforehand and it all comes back, but it's had time to percolate it. So Schiller. By the way, Schiller a prior guest, Michael Lewis prior guest. Schiller is amazing. You're gonna have a great I think he's not doing an interview, he's just presenting.

He's just presenting his outlook. He's you know, professors at Yale, for some reason, have a way to demand a stage and an audience. I think people will will love him. And he doesn't go too far out into the weeds, even though he could at any time he wants to. Definitely, you're you're certainly. I assume you're familiar with his friendship with Jeremy c which is hilarious. It is Larry and

Jeremy Siegel is magic on stage. Yeah. I love seeing Jeremy Siegel before he goes on stage, where there was the old professor sort of me into him, and then he goes on stage and he's just supernova. It's amazing to watch him. Fantastic. So when he was on the show, he was sitting where you were sitting. And for whatever, he's in the University of Pennsylvania, so they take the train in. They must have him teed up for a

dozen things. I'm interviewing him towards the end of the day, it's like five o'clock and so It's a long day for anybody, and for someone who's his age run around, it's a long day. And he's sitting there and I want to say, in like the last thirty minutes of two hours, he just starts swiveling with the chair and then before you know it, he just starts doing this. And I'm sitting there watching this, and you could literally he or him. You could hear the Doppler effected he

as he says of a long run. It was absolutely one of the things that and I just had like a grin on my face that you it must have taken a week for me to stop laughing. And then the amazing thing is he is consistently picked as um everybody's favorite professor, of course, and I always I always wondered why, and then you realize he's like this impish child, this delightful, this delightful leprechaun discussing um long term expected returns of equities. Oh, of course, the Wharton students love him.

He's just like endlessly entertained and the two of them couldn't be more different personalities. It's so great. Yeah, no, it really is great. I have to mention a quote of yours that I'm tickled by and get get a response. So for a long time I been saying that all the crypto heads are the new gold bugs. But but you phrased it a little differently. You said bitcoin was the new millennial gold discussed. Yeah, well, it's definitely true. Every generation has an asset that they love or a

way of getting exposure that they love. The greatest generation loved gold. Then people loved active mutual funds, gen X loved hedge funds. Millennials love crypto. If you ask millennials which would they rather hold gold or or bitcoin, it's bitcoined by a mile. Which would they rather hold equities or bitcoin? It's bitcoin by a mile. And I would say there are a lot of analogies between bitcoin and gold. They're both non sovereign stores of value. Uh, but bitcoin

is much more useful in gold. It's it's much more easily divisible. It can be spent, it can be stored, it's it's it can be transferred easily. Um. So it is it's like an upgraded version of gold. I think I get liquid with gold faster than I could get liquid with bitcoin in size, and I certainly could trade gold for more things than I could for bitcoin right now. That's definitely true. That is definitely true any early stage technology. Uh, it takes a while to get up the spectrum. I'm

not sure you're right about the liquidity in size. It depends on You can get liquid and bitcoin at very reasonable sizes very quickly. Certainly golds are deeper million in bitcoin. I I didn't know you were that well off, But that's that's what this is for a friend friend, so he wants to know how he can get the hell out of this, and uh, there are there are some dollar limitations on the coin. That is true. It is an early stage technology. Uh, and I'm not I'm not

claiming it's more established than gold. You know, if you look back at gold when it came off the US gold standard, it went through a period of rapidly rising prices and massive volatility and a years when it went up, a percent years when it went down. We just don't remember that. Uh, this is a new sovereign store of value. Would expect sort of an asymptotic rise in price, and you would expect massive volatility. And if I'm right about bitcoin, ten years from now, it will be boring like gold

to uh, and that's what we're waiting for. That's not the first word that comes to mind when I think about bitcoin. It's boring. But by the way, people forget how many draw downs has Amazon had, Apple had, gees in the middle of a major Successful companies go through that on a regular basis. We tend not to want to think about. That's right. And bitcoin has gone through seven six or seven plus draw downs in the past, and each of those that set the stage for a

new rally. Now I'm not saying that will necessarily happen here, um, but you know it's down, it's up over the last two years. So it depends on your perspective. So let's talk a little bit about the index that you guys are putting together. You created the index, you're using it as a basis for an e t F. You've already filed with the SEC. So let's talk a little bit

about that filing. What you're what do you disclosing that filing, and what should someone who's interested in buying an e t F that will hold coins an index of coins actually look like. Yeah, so, uh, we have filed two applications for cryptocurrency e t F S one is a index basket that holds the top ten crypto assets and one is bitcoin only. So wait a second, I could buy bitcoin when this is finally approved through an ETF.

That would be the hope that if the SEC approves the ct F, you will be able to buy it through an e t F the same way you buy gold through g l D or silver for through SLV. Uh. You know, it's the same idea. It's easy exposure in a familiar brokerage window to something you otherwise have to buy in a different way. And so there have been multiple bitcoin ETFs filed. For what it's worth. Uh, we're moving forward more aggressively on our end with the bitcoin

filing than the index filing um. But uh yeah, we're we're we're hopeful, uh and optimistic that we can work with SEC. They've raised legitimate issues, but we hope we can work through it and we'll see. And this isn't an i c oh so a lot of these initial coin offerings have been played with. Now this is an e t F equity trading vehicle that will hold bitcoin.

That's that's the hope. So now there's been a lot of scams not on that, but some of these wallets and various coin offerings, and people have been hyping it up some A number of celebrities got associated with this and got into trouble with your sec You're trying to do the most plane vanilla offering you can with bitcoin as the underlying asset. That is right. So so a lot of those I c O s were scams. I think we're illegal, uh, and we'll be will be prosecuted.

People are going to jail. I think people will are going to jail and I think they should uh. And it brought out a lot of bad actors in the space because there's such massive wealth accumulation. But that doesn't mean that there aren't legitimate thing. So right now we have crypto index fund that's available for credited investors. We have a Bitcoin for one for credited investors. But the hope is we can launch an e t F that gives that exposure to everyone. It makes it safe, cheap

and easy to gain exposure to the market. I hope you've picked out a nice um security symbols. Oh, the ticker ticker choice is a big deal. It really is. People don't appreciate Remember move that that exploded and you or hack for that matter, h A c K, which is now in the midst of litigation. I hope it

gets resolved sooner rather than later. Um. But uh, having and it's been shown even with equities, if you have a good ticker symbol, Yeah, it's worth a couple of percents in performance over time, And it makes perfect sense. It makes behavioral sense. I think it matters a great deal. And I can't wait until the day that we get to pick and disclose the time. I'm assuming you have one reserved than you just can't disclose. You never know. So so let's talk a little bit about the methodology

of the index. Is it simply just the ten biggest coins or the ten most liquid coins? How you putting that together? So at one level, the indexes for for our fund is the ten largest coins. But of course everything in crypto, which is why I got interested, is more complex than it is in equity. So like you and I could say what is the price of IBM, and we would say the exact same number. If you ask me what the price of bitcoin is, I'd have

to look at different exchanges merge them together. Um. So everything is more difficult, but it is a market capuated index of crypto assets. And and let me say why, I think that's an interesting strategy. Um, we don't know for well, yeah, well we don't know what will happen in crypto, right, it's early. These are competing protocols, they're

each optimized for a different use case. And I'm not smart enough to know five years from now whether Bitcoin or ethereum, or light coin or man narrow or these other assets will be the most important. I just don't know. And so the index gives you a simple way to make a simple bet, which is, I think crypto will be more important in the future than it is today. Uh. And if if that's the bet you want to make, you want to make a broadly diverse fig. So why the top ten and not the top Yeah, there's a

very big power law on crypto. So the top ten captures about in the market, and after that liquidity falls out. If you think back to the equity market, in the early days of emerging markets, you would only buy large caps and then large mid and now you buy everything. I think the same thing is true with crypto. Makes sense. I know the venture capital world has been very interested in everything from um, crypto to blockchain, So what have you.

Bitcoin has some pretty high profile backers. What do you see in the VC space when it comes to cryptocurrency. Yeah, a lot of interest and a lot of interest that's trickling into the endowment and pension space that's investing into crypto through funds like the injurycent Fund or some of the other funds. A lot of the firms are trying to solve one of two problems. Either they're part of a step publishing this institutional ecosystem. Because remember crypto emerged

as a retail asset. It trades on lightly or non regulated exchanges, so you're seeing a lot of investment into regulated exchanges like backed, which is from Ice, which is launching in Q one. Uh. That's one thing, and then the other thing is companies that are improving on the underlying technology and the blockchain technology or building applications on top of that. UH. And like any VC boom, valuations

are probably too high. They'll be a pullback, but but it's exciting and it means there's a big infusion of capital and big infusion of people working on the project. You mentioned the pensions and the endowments that have an interest in this um, what other institutions are looking at this? And and I would have to also bring up Fidelity. All companies made a big early UM jump towards crypto.

Tell us what you know about that? Yeah, Fidelities hiring up to a hundred and fifty people to build a way for institutional investors to buy crypto and store it with a name they trust. Right, one of the greatest brand names in the future. You'll ask yourself why Fidelity and why haven't I seen black Rock, State Street other asset managers. The difference is the Fidelity is a family owned firm, privately held, not public, still reputational risk in crypto.

The other big player in crypto is van Eck, also privately held, also a family owned firm. We know, we know John, and I don't think that's a surprise. I think they're free to do it. Fidelity saw that this is important. We know. We had conversations with two thousand institutional and financial advisors UH last year. There is dramatic interest in crypto. UH. They want good ways to get exposure right now. Most of the ways are retail oriented

and non institutional grade. And so they say on an opportunity to be first and they're doing it quite fascinating. I read a statistic a couple of months ago that I was kind of shocked at. Approximately of all the coins ever created have been lost, either there um in crypted password access has been lost, or it's physically on a drive that was destroyed or some source that. How

how accurate are those numbers? And if they are accurate, how can this ever really be a serious asset class If you know, think about all the VCR tapes and cassettes people have that essentially technology has orphaned totally. Well, you couldn't orphan this because all that's written on that is like a fifty letter code. So you could literally if you wanted to write it's a piece of paper

and you would have it. It is true that it's a digital bearer instrument, like a bearer bond or like a bar of gold, and so if you lose it, and what you would lose is that it's lost. Um. Again, you gotta think this is an early stage technology right now. The UI for crypto is terrible. If you want to email me, you can email Matt at Hogan dot com. My first name and last name, easy memorable. If you want to send me bitcoin. It's like fifty two random letters.

So I think the UI improvements will happen in and will become easy to save, store, and spend crypto. I think it's just a matter of software development. We have been speaking with Matt Hogan. He is the global head of Research. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and come back and check out the podcast extras, where we keep the tape rolling and continue chatting about all things crypto. You can find that at iTunes, Overcast, Bloomberg, Stitcher, wherever

your finer podcasts are sold. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast. At Bloomberg dot net. You can check out my daily column that's on Bloomberg dot com slash Opinion. Follow me on Twitter at Rid Halts. I'm Barry Hults. You're listening to Master's in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to the podcast, Matt.

I'm I'm so glad we're having this conversation. I was looking forward uh to doing this with you towards the end of last year and things just got so crazy with everything. I'm glad we waited a little while to just let everything settle out. But I have to ask from a well, first, was was bitcoin of bubble last year? Yes?

Total bubble, total bubble. I mean when we start the year like two thousand, did you started around a couple of thousand and then ended up at nineteen five something like that, and their speculative fervor, and there was every element of a bubble that you or I would recognize, including your bartender, your Cabby and your Pete was the top. And then was what is that retrenchment somewhere in there? Yeah, absolutely,

that's a that's a big move down. It is significant. Yes, it is still up, you know scent from the start of seen until now. So from a longer term perspective, you know, people love to make fun of holdlers in crypto to hold on for dear life. That's the same thing as buy and hold in equity, so you just have to have a little bit more perspective. But yes, it was a massive run up and a massive pullback the cues and as one from two thousand, two thousand

three down, So this is comparable. I think that's right. And it did the same thing that happened in the Internet, which is it attracted a huge amount of talent, attracted a huge amount of capital. Uh, and it's been very painful for investors. I think out of that for for investors, or for the people who just jumped on blindly when it had already begun to move aggressive the people who

jumped on blindly when it already moved aggressively. And also, um, you know, volatile, highly moving assets encouraged bad behavioral responses. There was bad activity, um, But it did bring a lot of capital and interest in development to the ecosystem. So I do think interesting things will be born from that. But yeah, it was it was a difficult year. So let's talk a little bit about E t F s. You were the CEO of E t F dot com.

We've already discussed how the industry has begun to mature and change since your involvement, and will will note that's a correlation, maybe not a precise causation. But I have to ask one of my favorite questions with anybody working in E t F. Are there e t fs that exist today that you think should not exist? Should not exist? Um? Yes, okay, yes, and I know exactly what you're gonna say, but go ahead, what is it? Volatility t F? Oh? Really, I'm wrong?

I didn't. That was really what did you want? What I was expected? Like the three X inverse? Yeah, I don't. I don't have a particular problem. I had more of a problem with those when they first came out because people didn't understand them. I feel that people understand them now and the quality of disclosures and information around them are better. My issue with volatility E T f s

is people still don't understand them. Uh, and they overwhelm the actual volume of volatility futures, and there's massive contango that just makes them. They're they're they're testing Zeno's paradox of whether they can actually get to zero, and I think they're doing so in harming and you can't just go halfway. You don't that I don't know. We'll find out. UM explain contango for people who don't understand sure. So contango is when you buy a future, you're buying the

right to buy it at a future day. Let's say thirty days in the future. Let's say oil to take account example, is fifty dollars now the future maybe trading at If you buy it at fifty five and the spot price doesn't move from fifty over the next month, that future is going to converge down to fifty, and you're gonna lose five dollars. That's ten percent of your money.

The problem with volatility futures is that they almost always trade in contango, and it is a very sharp contango, and so you're losing not just a couple percent, you maybe losing ten or of your money every month. And I think people bought those with the thought, hey, volatility is at record lows, it's going to go up. That thought was right eventually, eventually, um. But what they didn't

realize is you're not buying VIX. You're buying VIX futures, and there's just a massive delta between the words VIX and VIX futures, and that delta is squashing investors. So as long as I'm testing you, let's do backwardization. Backwardation is the exact opposite. If oil is at fifty, you buy it at forty five. As long as the spot price stays at fifty, you make five dollars, which is whatever.

Uh And and that's a more positive situation. My issue with e t f s and all these futures based ETFs is a lot of they're available to all retail investors, and retail investors may think I'm buying oil that's the spot number that I see on TV, and that's not you're buying oil futures. Now it's disclosed and disclaimed. Uh. And I'm generally in favor of ETFs existing in these markets, and and probably they should even exist in volatile but the educational burden required is massive, or else mom and

Pop can buy them and get crushed. So now they are a different gold DTF. You mentioned g l D. Am I misunderstand that I'm on the impression g l D represents physical gold held in volts it owns. But there are other e t F and I don't remember which that are actually trading gold futures, not buying the gold. That's right. Uh. And some of these are leveraged and some of them are inverse, etcetera. That's that's exactly right. So when you get into leverage, you may well use

futures to get those leverage. There may even be one x gold futures et s. I'm not sure. I don't know why anyone would buy gold always trades at a persistent entango that's about equal to the risk free rate. So you're just losing a little bit of money. Um. The one advantage it would give you is is their taxes futures, which if you hold them for short periods of time, is a beneficial tax treatment. So there may be a tax angle for short term traders of gold.

That's kind of um. So, so that's one particular e t F um that you don't think I ort to exist. I was wanted to steer the conversation a slightly different directions. So let me throw this at you. How do you look at the Darwinian process of all these e t F s coming out each year, most of which don't survive. Yeah,

I think that's great. I think that's great. If you didn't have that process, you wouldn't have a significant you wouldn't have the e t F industry for starters, right, the e t F industry really uh in real life was launched at b g I. When they launched a huge number of e t F s, it wiped out

bonuses at b g I for three years. All the executives were angry, but they were like, let's give this a shot, and and all of the a lot of the e t F that we take for granted today, we're spaghetti on the wall like a lot of factory t f s low volatility e t F s um So you can't get innovation without some misses. And so I'm fine with them being launched and closed. So what what is Jeff Bezos's comment if if you're not failing,

you're not taking any risks. If that's exactly right, you have to at least try and just recognize we don't know what's gonna work, but we won't know until it until we you know, put up the flag, pas, until we give it a shot. And you know, the first the first article about all the e t F s needing to exist, I think ran I'm gonna get this wrong. I think it ran in Investment News in two thousand and three. They're like, we've reached the end of e

t F innovation and development. You can already buy stocks and bonds and that was like that was it? Uh? And those those have appeared over and over and over again, So never discount. I don't think we'll ever get to the end of ETF And so let me ask you a different version. It seems that and you'll your geek so you'll appreciate this. We don't have a Gaussian distribution of firms and assets. It's say, very much a fathead long tail where you have the big four, really the

big three, Vanguard, black Rock, State Street. I'm trying to even think who is the next closest after them, and that's you get down the spectrum, I mean, your your power law distribution is it's three, and then it begins to fall off pretty rapidly. Why have only three companies captured so much of the investing public's mind share and

assets and the actual dollars share? Black Rock is six trillion going on seven trillion, Vanguard is five on the way to six trillion with a T. Why is it just a handful of companies that seem to be the biggest winners in this space? Because ETFs are a natural monopoly system, unlike traditional active mutual funds. In active mutual funds, you need a Cambrian explosion, different guys trying different things. In e t F land, a large liquid ETF is

better than a small, illiquid ETF. So if you already have good exposure to the SNP five, you don't really need other funds. Now other funds have popped up because

you get distribution in different channels. There may be two or three e t f s offering broad based exposure, but you're going to see severe concentration in e t F assets as long as they're dominated by index exposure, because larger is better in e t f s, and that is a good thing for investors, and I think it will persist maybe indefinitely and certainly for the next

ten years. So larger is better, and I'm going to guess that's the function of a combination of scale, quality and liquidity of those Yeah, scale it costs, right, It's it's cheaper to run a large et F than it is a small et F. There are just no advantages to a small ETF. Now, small ETFs can be liquid and they can do innovative things, but you can't launch a me too e t F without a unique distribution mechanism like trials Schwab has and expected to gain assets.

They will just all go mostly, not all, but mostly they'll go to the large players. And that's why it's a great business for for black Rock and Vanguarden and State Street. Quite fascinating. I know I only have you for a finite amount of time. Let's jump to my favorite questions. And I'm gonna throw a few curve bowls at you with this. Let's start. What's the most important thing people don't know about Matt Hoagland's which is an inside joe about Matt Hogan. Let's see, my career started

as a minor league baseball mascot. Uh. Yeah, I was a nine ft seal for the double A Portland's Sea Dogs. Um. Now, I I say that in jest. My career path has been very unusual. I've been a speechwriter, I've worked in biotech, I've been a biotech portfolio manager. I ran et f dot com, now I'm in crypto. Um. All those are only united by the the how much I like to talk about things that seem complex. Um. But but that's the new unique thing about my career. It's been very

varied over time. Well, well that's uh, that's certainly interesting enough. Why is this lighting up? Um? Tell us about your early mentors who helped shape this serpentine career of yours. Yeah. The number one person who comes to mind is a former guest of yours, which is Dave Nodding. Dave Nodding hired me when I was a minor league mascot to become a biotech analyst at the at the transparent mutual

fund he was running at the time, Macro Meta Markets Market. Yeah, we ran open Fund, which was the first mutual fund to disclose its trades in real time, way ahead of the way ahead of it. We had live video where you could watch us trade. Um and and I learned a lot of things from Dave. Uh. He continues to be a good friend and we've worked together at three or four companies since. Um. He he taught me the core importance of being honest with your colleagues when you

go to work. And I think the first company you work for in a serious way and the first sin you work for is really important in shaping how you view the world and how how your career progresses. Interesting and uh Dave is now with c BO when he runs E t F dot com. Yeah, he sits in my former seat. That's funny. So what in what let's talk about investors one investors influenced the way you think about things like E t F S or crypto. Yeah. Jack Bogel uh Is is the only investor who really

matters to me. Maybe my grandfather a little bit, but I'm one of the so I work in crypto, I'm one of the most boring investors in the world. I don't think I have traded my portfolio other to rebalance in eight or nine years. Uh and sort of the um the overwhelming math that Bogel presented right. I started my career on the active side as an active biotech

analyst and then an active biotech portfolio manager. I learned the hard way that active doesn't work, and so pivoting into indexing and learning from Bogel UH set the stage for my E T F career and set the stage even for my crypto career. Although that probably makes Jack Bogel want to throw his head against the wall and also a prior guest one of my heroes. That's fantastic

to hear. So let's talk about books. What are some of your favorite books, be they investing, non investing, fiction, nonfiction, crypto, or other. I knew you would ask about books. I

was thinking about the most important books I've read. The most important book to my life probably was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers, who both writes with unique clarity and also came at a time when I needed to rediscover my agency and ability to shape my life in the way that I wanted, and that was a very important book for me. Um after that, Uh, it's it's a weird amalgam of of a handful of poetry books and then whatever I've been reading most recently.

So the book I've been reading most recent Lee is a History of California. I'm a transplant to California. I moved there ten years ago. Everybody a transplant, I basically it. Uh. And my kids are learning all about California history the same way I learned about Virginia history when I was a kid. At the time, I thought that was just history, But it turns out you learned different things depending where you grow up. What's the name of the book. It's

named California. Uh. And I'll tell one little anecdote from it that that that empowered me. If you go to California, it looks like sort of the especially southern California, it looks like the Mediterranean. All the houses are in these Mediterranean styles. And I assume this was organic, but in fact it wasn't. It all started uh in in in

Santa Barbara, when Santa Barbara burned to the ground. And at the time it was twenties, Okay, at the time, there was a lot of advertising to get people to move out there, and people were deliberately casting it as the Mediterranean of the Americas, and so they built it

in its physical presence to look like that. And what that reminded me of was something that I had forgotten, which is the importance of narrative in the ability to shape reality and how how being able to define and see what it could be actually can lead to physical developments that that become entrenched and just become a part of society. And I thought that was an interesting life immenstating art there you go, exactly interesting. And as long as you mentioned poetry, Yeah, we're a very um hip

audience of listeners. Give us, uh, what's your who's your favorite poet or their favorite Well, yeah, August Klein's Dollars, Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow is one of my favorite books of poetry. I think Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow. Yeah, I think about fifty of the poems and there are terrible, but the other fifty are seen with such clarity and with with the kind of emotional connections that really resonate with me. Uh that it's it's an important book to me,

and I read it regularly. That is quite fascinating. Um, So I have to ask. This is a question I we were talking about earlier, and I'm actually debating making this a regular question because our conversation about it was so fascinating. But what was your first car? My first car was a terrible as I said earlier, a terrible choice. I bought a Volkswagen Jetta shortly after I got my first job, and that was the disaster in like nine

different ways. Really because my experience with Volkswagens, and this might have been cars of a different year of the sixties, eighties, whatever, they were indestructible. I had a VW Bug with three hundred thousand miles. My roommates Volkswagen Golf. We would just take it apart and swap out parts. I need a new fender and just take the old one to the junkyard. Hey, I need one of these five dollars like, you can't do that anymore. But they were pretty indestructible. Why was

the Jetta so so? For two reasons. One, it was utterly destructible it constantly broke down, and to like it was an aspirational purchase, right, it was a poor man's uh's BMW you you improved on that with a poor men company? Yeah? Uh so. So I bought it because I thought, I'm a biotech portfolio manager. I need this nice new car. I could have done so many better things with that money than by this terrible car with a poor historical track record of reliability, which I knew

when I bought it. But I liked the way it looked, and it was the people I was around owned Volkswagen Jettas, and I bought it. Uh And it was just a yoke on my neck until I finally sold it. That's very that's very funny. So, um, tell us about a time you failed and what you learned from the experience. Yeah.

Uh So. When I was a biotech portfolio manager at open Fund, I bought a company called Titan Pharmaceuticals, which had a drug in front of the f D A. This is this is two thousand was when I think I made this purchase. Biotechs obviously a binary I'll come at the f D A uh And it went against me and I lost a huge amount of money, uh for the company. And I learned two really important things from that. When it happened, I thought I was gonna

get fired because I was new to the job. And I just lost like two million dollars for the for the fund, which to me at the time having been a more money than more money than God uh. And no. One of the things I learned from my mentor Dave Nodding was all you have to do is own up to what went wrong and design a process so it doesn't happen again. And I did that and then just went on about my day. And I've used that with every subsequent failure in business, and it immediately clears the

air and gets you on a better path. The other thing I learned, which was unique to investing in biotech but has application, was I had focused entirely on the wrong thing. So the sexy thing in biotech, the thing everyone talks about is does the drug work? And the the does drug work question for Titan was true, it seemed to work, but that is not what the FDA cares about. The FDA is a bunch of doctors, the hippocratic ghost says, first, do know, they care only about

safety if it might work, but it's safe. They will prove it. This one there were risks, but there are also benefits, and they just shot it down and and it taught me that you have to frame things not from what you think is important, but what from the people who are in control of that I think is important. And in biotech that's safety. Efficacy is a distant second. And that's true like when I built the e t

F conference. When you build an t F conference, you want to focus on what's going to go up the most the next year. Where should people invest? What financial advisors want to learn is how can I retain and grow up clients? Right? They want to know I want to make sure I don't get fired, and whether I can build a better portfolio is actually secondary to do I understand this, Can I talk about this? Will this

help me win new clients? And sort of the ability to reframe what you think is important into what's actually important was an important lesson. So tell us what you do for fun? What do you do to relax or stay in ape outside of the office. Yeah, I'm a runner. I love to run, I love to hike, but I have uh, I have three kids, a wife who works, I work at a startup. I sit on boards. I have four chickens. Mostly I just try to keep all

this plate spinning. But when I do get away, I like to I like to run or hike or be outside. So I'm gonna I'm gonna back you up a little bit because slipped into that whole running hiking family thing. Yeah, was something about chickens. Chickens. Yeah, yeah, So we went to the feed store with the kids to get some hay because we thought it'd be cute to have hay

bales for a party for people to sit on. And in the feed store where two day old chicks, kids are very just sitting near near the They're adorable, so adorable, And so we brought home. I was convinced to bring home four chicks. Uh. They cost three dollars and seventy five cents each. If you want to know what chicks cost. Um, Yeah, I actually buy them by the dozen and it's a dollar rating nine. Well I should have learned. Um, Now they're two and a half months old. Uh. Now we've

invested money in a chicken coop. The first egg that we get, which will be in like a month and a half, it's going to cost me about two thousand dollars and better. The chickens are great. The chickens are great. Can you interact with them as a pet or they just dumb a little dinosaurs running around. Actually they're very nice. They're very nice. I mean they feed them. They should be feed them. They like you. They each have their

own personalities, Uh, distinct like you, noticeably different. You have the nice guys, you have sort of the sort of mean guys. They do different things. Um, they all look different because they're different breeds. Uh. They have a half life when you pick them up of about ninety seconds. If you hold them for more than ninety seconds, uh, they start to poop everywhere. And so you can pick them up and they're very cute, but the clock starts ticking them. You gotta like, you gotta put them down

before disaster happens. That's hilarious. When when I lived in the city or next door neighbors had dozens of birds, and they had a cockatoo that was a baby. And when they would go away, you know, the one bird that needed attention was gonzo. So we would babysit this cockatoo and even at like a year old, I would hold him on my arm. He would put his wing around me and the two of us would watch TV. There you go, And he truly had a personality. He was very smart. I taught him to laugh. But they're

known as really intelligent birds. Chickens aren't necessarily have that same reputation. So I was curious about the personality. And yeah, they still have some personality. We haven't watched much TV together, but but they do have personally. And all the kids, Okay, when mom makes chicken for dinner, that hasn't been Oh oh, so my kids are vegetarians are so this has not come up there, Yeah, hasn't come up, but they're ready to eat the eggs. Hold on a sec. You're not.

I'm a vegetarian. You are. I've had meals with you. So I'm an opportunistic vegetarian. So so, so my rule is, I'm a vegetarian unless around there's gonna beat at the table, right, unless it's going to be really exceptional or different. You have to experience the world. So that's fair, opportunistic vegetarian, that's absolutely fair. Um, So, our last two questions. If you were giving some advice to a millennial who was interested in a career of either finance or crypto. What

sort of advice would you give them? How do you think they should approach either of those fields? Interesting? And I'm not asking which would you steer them? I'm asking, Hey, what advice would you give them if they came asking about that? Yeah? So either I would advise them, as I do most young people, to take some time off and go travel and play around while they're young before

they get serious about their career. If they didn't take that advice, which I think is good advice, um, I would encourage them to think most about their company, the company they choose, and their direct manager, and think the least about their intro salary, or their title or even

what work they're going to be doing. It's vastly more important to engage yourself with a well run company, uh and with a good manager where you can learn good work habits than it is to make an extra four thousand dollars a year or to have a particular job that focuses on one skill set or another. So so pick your company careful, pick your manager really carefully, uh, and ignore all the rest. Sounds like it sounds like

pretty good advice. And our final question, what is it that you know about the world of investing today that you wish you knew twenty something years ago when you first began? Uh, that's a good question obviously by apples the easy answer um, or by bitcoin you know when it first come? Uh don't know? Or bitcoin at four thousand? Or do you mean if you had a time machine and could go by time machine? So that's an easy question.

I'm asking no time machine, no time machine. What do you know today that you wish you knew back then? That I get? Okay, great question. U. I learned every hard knock investing lesson there is to learn, uh, And so I could tell you not to do those things like uh like don't confuse. Uh your your lucky pick of a stock that went up with true skill. Uh, don't sell when you feel the painful feeling in your gut.

Just buy and holding, never sell. But you wouldn't listen, So UM, I guess it would be just buy things. Selling things is where everything goes asunder. Just just buy things and hold them, uh and sit on it forever. Quite fascinating. We have been speaking with Matt Hogan. He is the global strategist at bit Wise Asset Management, Global

head of Research. If you enjoy this conversation, well look up an intro down an Inch on Apple iTunes and you can see any of the other two hundred and fifties such conversations we've had over the past five or so years. Uh, you can find that at iTunes, Stitcher, overcast, Bloomberg dot com, wherever your final podcasts are sold. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack staff that

helps put together this conversation each week. Carol and O'Brien is my audio engineer. Par Excellent Medina Parwana is our producer. Taylor Riggs is our booker slash producer. Atika vl Broun is our project manager. Michael bat Nick is my head of research. I'm Barry Retults. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio Thinks