Arthur Hayes On The Early Days Of BitMEX, Where Bitcoin Is Going, And Why We Are Over-Indexing On AI

Avi Felman (0:00)

Are you bullish on AI stocks?

Arthur Hayes (0:01)

No, I think we're wasting trillions of dollars of capital globally. Yes.

Avi Felman (0:07)

What?

Arthur Hayes (0:08)

Absolutely. I know I'm starting an AI company, and I'm gonna have to explain it to you in front of me.

Avi Felman (0:12)

Okay. You think that we're wasting, in data center build out, or in what way? Like, what are we, what's the money on?

Arthur Hayes (0:19)

Very high level, okay.

Avi Felman (0:39)

We're coming here from Token 2049 I have a very special guest today, Arthur Hayes. Thank you for sitting down with me.

Arthur Hayes (0:45)

You're welcome.

Avi Felman (0:47)

I think it's fun. You live in Singapore. Obviously, I don't think a lot of intro is needed here, but I do want to start by asking you a little bit about your background.

Arthur Hayes (0:59)

Sure.

Avi Felman (0:59)

So I know that you were born in Detroit, Michigan, right?

Arthur Hayes (1:03)

Buffalo, New York.

Avi Felman (1:04)

Buffalo, New York, but your parents...

Arthur Hayes (1:05)

I lived in Detroit for a while.

Avi Felman (1:07)

You lived in Detroit for a while. Your parents worked for General Motors.

Arthur Hayes (1:11)

Yes.

Avi Felman (1:11)

That's right.

And how did you end up coming from a world, your parents are working for General Motors, you end up founding the largest crypto perps exchange in the world? You invented the perp itself, if I'm right. Yes. Take me through that journey. How did you...

Arthur Hayes (1:31)

Yeah. I mean, I love Detroit and Buffalo, but they're kind of boring, at least for me in my own sense of being. And so, yeah, as a kid, I always wanted to go somewhere else and travel. And obviously, traveling in the early 90s is a lot more expensive than it is today. So you were limited to what you saw on the television in terms of your hopes and dreams. But I remember distinctly when I was in high school, I read a book called Ugly Americans. It was about this guy who graduated from, I think it was Dartmouth or some Ivy League school. He was a second-rate football player and he didn't know what he was going to do with his life. Somehow he made his way to Tokyo and started doing index rebounds on the Nikkei and different Japanese indices. In the book talks about his time in Tokyo. I think it was maybe the late 90s, some around there and I was like, wow, this sounds like a lot of fun.

Much more interesting than being like everybody else and going to New York or LA or whatever else that most Americans think they're going to do after they graduate from university. I was like, okay, I want to go to China because I think that that's the new up and coming economic power. This is like 2000 when I read this book. So I made that decision in my living room right before I went to university that I was going to study Chinese and move to China. So when I got to University of Pennsylvania where I went to undergrad, I basically took a minor in Chinese. I studied the language.

I did my first study abroad in-

Avi Felman (3:01)

Can you still speak?

Arthur Hayes (3:02)

Very poorly.

Avi Felman (3:03)

I don't use it at all.

You got a sentence to say? Rather for all the Chinese lectures out there.

Arthur Hayes (3:10)

I'm not going to embarrass myself.

Avi Felman (3:13)

Oh, man.

Arthur Hayes (3:14)

But yeah, and so I moved to study abroad in Hong Kong. It's been six months there in the university. Loved it. Somehow found a job at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong doing sales and trading for my junior year summer, got an offer to come back and work there, and I never left.

I've lived between Hong Kong, Singapore, a little bit in Japan for the last 20 years or half of my life. My entire professional career is in greater China, essentially. I've never had a job in America.

Avi Felman (3:47)

Really?

Arthur Hayes (3:47)

You've only worked out here.

Avi Felman (3:49)

Wow. You've only ever come back to America to visit?

Arthur Hayes (3:51)

Yeah.

Avi Felman (3:52)

To see your family or? Exactly.

That's kind of nuts. Do you still feel American?

Arthur Hayes (3:57)

I mean, I don't like passports as a general concept, so I don't think that you have to be American or Chinese or Japanese just because you were randomly born in some country and they have a piece of paper that says this made up name on it. I completely reject nationalism as a concept. I am Arthur Hayes.