Still Early: Bitcoin’s Mispricing, ETF Flows, & the Quiet Race to Accumulate

What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of doctors 1974198792972000 and whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we sell. Hey. OK, I say when we sell. Hey guys, thanks again for tuning into this episode of The Last Trade. We had a very fun and lively conversation with Bram Konstein. It's always a pleasure to have him on the pod. We like to get into it in regards to gold and Bitcoin and how the new monetary order will be reset in the timetable it'll happen on. We also touched on, you know, obviously gold ripping it to new all time highs and then the launching of the Guild network in partnership between on ramp private clients and then early riders, the Bitcoin denominated investment fund that's pioneering Bitcoin has its hurdle rate. There's been a lot of questions on what is even her early riders will have a piece about that because I think a lot of folks are interested but don't really know. We haven't done the best job of explaining. So you will touch on a little. Bit of that in the show. And then a little bit about on ramp and really just helping individuals understand what we're doing here. I think there's a lot of questions on is on ramp right for me? Does it serve individuals and ultimately we're building the financial institution of the future for individuals all the way to the largest corporates and sovereigns in the world. A lot of it came from background and building the space for the past half decade and realizing the existing custody solutions just were not prepared or being built in a way that was going to withstand. What the market needed? Ultimately having centralized problems with the custodial situations we see today at the coin bases of the world and then obviously with FTX blocked by Celsius, etc, etc. But then also realizing after onboarding thousands of clients and billions of dollars to collaborative custody providers, that ultimately that also was leaving people with a sour. Taste in their mouth because they had to deal. With wallet configuration files, uploading C phrases, what happens if the third party provider goes down? How do I recover? And so that's really where multi institution comes about. It perfects both versions of that in the sense that you have institutional grade key holders managing those keys in segregated bank vaults with institution institutional controls, but then you layer on the legal governance of each key holder is only working on behalf of an on ramp client. It's a really elegant model that has us grown at a very fast pace. And so I think over the time, you know, these next few weeks and moving into the future, I'll be sharing a little bit more about what on Ramp does. And not only, you know, the custody, but then ultimately, how do you actually provide financial services for the future where when Bitcoin goes to 150 thousand $350,000, you're not running off into a cave to try to find your plastic device to move your assets and who's looking over your shoulder? What's happening? You actually have permissions and processes in place in the same way banks and equity brokerages have controls in place to move your funds around. So a few weeks ago, we had Lloyd's of London bless our custody solution and add $100 million policy across the board that comes at no additional cost, which is huge. And then ultimately we offer lending, trading, inheritance, planning, Iras, and, and much more. If you have any questions on that, you should really reach out. You can reach out to me at Michael at honor@bitcoin.com or to our general e-mail at Hello at honor@bitcoin.com and we'll happily answer any questions, send you any materials. Brian, our chief strategy officer put together a really great piece on what is multi institution custody and breaking down a lot of the controls that people sometimes miss. They're not necessarily familiar with how on ramp works, or also how institutional grade key generation is fundamentally different than just a single C phrase and a hardware device. At the end of the day on rent functions as your private banking. Partner, we coordinate key holder activity, we remove the technical burdens from yourself or your loved ones. If you think you're ready, you're OK with the technical burden. And then we provide personalized trust, minimize experience, tailored really for your wealth preservation needs. I encourage you to reach out, shoot us a note, send me a DM. We always enjoy. Talking with our clients and we're doing a lot more in the future, so we'd love to get you plugged into what we're building. Again, Michael and honor and Bitcoin calm and I hope you enjoy the show. All right, welcome back to the Last trade. We have yet again five people on the podcast. We have Tim holding up his orange juice. Tim, I don't know if that's actually good for you. It's a lot of added sugars in there. Yeah, Tropicana is no no bueno. Orange coin Good. That's what, yeah, we'll say. We're kicking things off here. Before we hit record, Tim Kotzman was eating a calzone. 10 AM Eastern Tim that's. 10 AM calzone very rare. Tim was eating a calzone. We were just like, we need to start this thing. I slept really well last night. You know when you get a good night's sleep and you just, you're ready to rock'n'roll. This past week I've chatted with so many people that listen and they just have like wonderful feedback. Somebody was referencing the plastic device notion and was saying how with their friends, they talk about the American peso in a same form or fashion around, joking around and I really appreciated that. So thanks for listening. And we get a lot of emails, appreciate getting more of them, but it's a fun show. Yeah, no, it's, it'll be a good one. So we have, like I said, 5 people on here. So it's the usual crew. We got Tim Kotzman, Michael Tanguma, Brian Cabelis, and then we're joined by Brahm Khanstein. Brahm, thanks for joining us this week. It's been, I guess, about a month or so since you previously joined the last trade. How are you doing? I'm very good guys. I also talked to like 6 people today about Bitcoin and I'm still bullish guys. I'm it's crazy. I love that I can think about this every day and I love that I'm joining you again. So happy to be here. Yeah, I'm excited for it. For the listener. So what? What can you expect this week, Brahm? I think you're the one who's really coined this idea of Bitcoin being asymmetric opportunity based on publicly available information. And so that's really the best way to describe it. And what I hope to bring to the table, this group will bring to the table for this week's episode for those who are tuning in, is we're just going to be breaking down a lot of the publicly available information over the past week or so that is going to support the thesis for Bitcoin. Not only this year, I know I like to joke around, we're we're still looking at the 80s on the Bitcoin price. And it's been two months, certainly perhaps three months of this. And it's very tiresome. But what gives me hope is to know that there is a lot of bullish momentum behind the scenes. The five of us and those that are listening to the show as well are in this weird place on the Internet where we're just tuning into a ton of information. And for those who really aren't paying attention, they're missing the the forest for the trees. There is an opportunity here. Bitcoin is incredibly mispriced, and so we have a lot of information that we can get into this week that will support that thesis. So what do you guys think? Am I, am I the only one who thinks the price is a little low? Shouldn't it be higher? I mean, I just put up the. Terminal 84 kind of feels like a new, a new base, maybe a new 58K, which I mean, I think that's pretty bullish. Just holding this, this level, which you know, a few years ago would seem pretty incredible to most. Just going back to your, the comments around, you know, the asymmetric opportunity on, on publicly available information. I think one important thing to call out there is there's an ever increasing amount of publicly available information that is well curated, well crafted and more easily accessible than it was 510 years ago. So the reality is, you know, all the, all the information you needed was available 10 years ago as well, But it took a lot more effort and digging to get to the truth to get to having a very constructive thesis on Bitcoin today as we sit here like it is much, much easier. There's much less friction to understand Bitcoin, to find the materials you need to get there. You know, you have Larry Fink and BlackRock providing educational materials on Bitcoin, calling it a risk off asset. So there's there's just much less friction in the way. And so right now is like literally the best time for someone to, to learn about Bitcoin, to actually open their mind to it and sort of, you know, put behind them a lot of the preconceived notions and FUD that they've heard for years and just actually dig into the publicly available information. And they'll realize pretty quickly that it's a very asymmetric opportunity and very mispriced. And you know, Sailor has his quote around the 1000 hours of research or whatever. Like that level of research that's required is, is on a downward slope overtime. So like 10 years ago, it was probably multiple thousands of, of hours of research required to really understand Bitcoin. Now it's probably, you know, five years ago is probably a few 100. Now it's maybe 100. And and you know, if you, if you find the right materials and you're already a pretty intelligent person, maybe it's a a few dozen hours of, of research for you to grasp why you should own some Bitcoin. So very interesting times, but yeah, it's good. I will caveat, it's all true except for there's 37 million crypto tokens today. And so for as much of the signal, there is a lot more noise in a market. You know, I think we talked about it last week or on final settlement like $100 billion has been invested in crypto venture capital and less than a billion dollars in total into Bitcoin. It's an insane just like proposition when you think about it. So anyway, just worth throwing out. There's a lot of signal, but there's also just no shortage of noise. Given people's mental models of something, this and you is very hard to like wrap your heads around. Yeah. You know, if you're unintelligent like me, just a good place to get information is from Brian's research that he publishes every week. So I would call that out. One thing on that 37 million crypto token data point, Michael, one thing I wanted to talk about, maybe we could start here is that there was an interview yesterday with former SEC Chair Gary Gensler. And so Gary, you're, you're a little bit outdated. He said on the interview. There's 10,000 to 15,000 crypto tokens. The numbers. Like that, that amount gets created in like a week by the way. Yeah, it's a. Million a month now actually. We need to, you know, we need to upsize that number a little bit for public interviews. But his point remains true. So what he said that the core thing to call out there is that every asset, so outside of just Bitcoin and this cryptocurrency noisy space, every asset trades on fundamentals and sentiment. And what he said in the interview is this field referring to cryptocurrency is 99% sentiment. So he noted that there's 10,000 to 15,000 tokens. We, we know there's way more than that, but he's like, you should just start to question the fundamentals actually behind these tokens. And then he also compared it to the precious metals market, right, where there's only two, it's really gold. I mean gold is over $20 trillion asset. I think silver is like one and a half, $2 trillion. And so there's only one other asset class that is similar to precious metals and it is this, let's call it digital asset market. But really the market is Bitcoin. So did you guys catch that interview yesterday? Were you surprised to see those comments? Do you have any other thoughts on on what Gensler shared? I did see it and I think Gary definitely owns Bitcoin. I, I, I would go as far as say that he definitely owns some corn. And it's not entirely surprising to me because, you know, this is a guy who taught a blockchain class, you know, many years ago before he was the SEC chair. I think while he was in the seat, while he was in the position, he was very much just focused on, you know, what in what his mind was like consumer protection and protecting people from the crypto scams, etcetera. Now, you could very easily argue that he went overboard in terms of, you know, enforcement, enforcement action without really like due process around a lot of these things. But I think now he's in a position where he can be a little bit more honest and transparent about his views. And I think, yeah, he he'd sort of danced around it, but was pretty clearly like saying Bitcoin is different than the rest of this crypto space. And that was sort of his core message of that interview. Yeah, I just want to say like I watched part of that class and yeah, I, you know what I think like this is not. This is clearly, you know, an intelligent person and I I just really like to think that if you do the work, if you teach a class, you know how I've seen him talk about Bitcoin. I cannot imagine he doesn't understand what it is and how it's different than the rest. You know, and I, I agree with Brian that, you know, in in that position as the SEC chair, he's also forced to follow some sort of of policy, of course, that that was there and kind of like bark his personal beliefs. Maybe that's the the world he operated in. But I thought it was really interesting how actually quickly he turned right. This is one of his first media appearances after he was removed from that position. So to then come out like this I I thought was interesting. Yeah. I mean, they're all tokens. They're all, you know, tokens in my mind, whether it's your negative yielding bonds that you know you'll never get claim on or their equities that are 10 to 100 X multiples your altcoins. As our friend John Pierpont Morgan says on the screen, gold and Bitcoin are money and everything else is credit. You know, whatever you can take delivery of and reduce counterparty risk for what money is. Everything else is a derivative of it. And we've just lived in a 30 to 50 year anomaly where we D pegged for anything that was sound. And so everyone's made-up reasons why things have value, including NVIDIA and including the 57 million tokens. And whoever gets left holding those bags are ultimately going to be losing out. And like that was taboo to say five years ago, even three years ago, maybe three months ago. But the reality is there's like a global monetary ordering being reset with people taking delivery of BTC and gold. And so whoever figures this out sooner than later is going to have more purchasing power than others. It's really that simple. Yeah. I mean, on that point though, if you can take delivery of something, does it make it money? I mean, Tim, are your orange ties money? You take delivery of those every single day from Amazon. How many do you have at this point? You know, it's give or take a dozen. But back to the former SEC chair for a minute. I mean, I think you guys are being a little too kind or just not covering the fact that he is literally freaking Public Enemy #1 there's no one that has been more detrimental to this entire space than that individual. And I hope that I'd never meet him in person. I do not respect the man and I think he needs to go away. That's what I think. That that's a, it's a fair take to him. I think even when he was chair and he was doing, you know, he was propagating a lot of the choke point stuff, which is a totally fair criticism of him. But at the same time, even when he was chair, he was one of the only people that would stick his neck out and make the distinction, call Bitcoin a commodity and then refer to pretty much everything else as a security. And so that was, you know, back then, like when he was chair, like that was not really being talked about as prominently. And now it's pretty much accepted common knowledge that like, OK, Bitcoin is, is at least from a legal perspective and in terms of like how it's regulated, it is a commodity because it has no central issuer, etcetera, is actually decentralizing all of these things. These other things are are probably unregulated securities. And so that's why they need this, this market structure bill that, you know, probably carve out some other designation for these crypto tokens, which are like quasi securities. But yeah, I mean, Tim, it's a it's a fair take. I like to see you get emotional and and angry at Gary but he, especially with the peels, understand Bitcoin for sure. Especially with the pink painting is it is it's perfect for for the sentiment. I, I do want to just caveat that like whatever all these people say, I can never like take you take them with a greater than a greater salt, whatever something greater than that would be greater than that would be because. Handful of salt. A handful of salt, a boulder, because like if some you know would layer it, it's like almost the opposite of what they say. So when they're in their place, they're saying something, they're thinking something else. And when they're out of their place, they're saying something, they're making something else. It's like they all have these strings attached, whether it's their pocketbook or whoever is paying them. So I don't know. It's kind of hard to discern. What's happening? I'm glad you said that, because we talk about Larry Fink on the show. I don't like Larry Fink at all, actually. There's a lot of things I don't like about him, but we put my personal vendetta aside. These people, they just go where they they see an opportunity. So like BlackRock was pretty early in the ESG stuff. They thought there was a big opportunity there. They wanted to make money from all this stuff that obviously has totally cratered in terms of a thesis. Let's hope that black, you know, Larry Fink stepping into Bitcoin doesn't mean that something catastrophic happens to Bitcoin, since he's now a big, loud, loud and proud proponent of the asset. But I, I totally agree. I mean, these people all have vested interest. They want to make money. One thing I did see, despite the choppiness in the Bitcoin price this year, I don't even know what we're down year to date. I don't look at that. But I bet still has positive flows. So what we're seeing is, Brian, to your point, bitcoins been hanging around 80,000 for a while now and it feels like this is the new floor. I mean, we did go into the mid 70s I think around the announcement of the tariffs and just kind of the broader uncertainty in the markets. But we've recovered. We're back in the mid 80s. I don't want to be here next week, but it's at least good to see that there is this support and I bit and now other buyers. I mean, strategy is an obvious one, but the ETF flows are supporting the price. There's still been 2 billion of inflows into I bit alone. I'm not sure what the broader ETF ecosystem looks like. It's certainly a fraction of what we saw last year. There was $50 billion of inflows into I bet it was the most successful ETF in history. But even at 2 billion inflows for I bet this year, it's still in the top 1% of ETF inflows for 2025. So it's still a successful product regardless of what think actually thinks about Bitcoin. Regardless of what I think about think, there is a lot of interest and there are people who are continuing to want to pour money into Bitcoin. They haven't figured out that the ETF isn't the best way to do it. But that's, you know, that's OK. They're at least getting exposure. Yeah, that's right. And I think all of this is, is indicative of of, you know, it's related to what I referenced earlier around like it's easier to learn about Bitcoin right now in the sense that the sort of some of the veil has been lifted around the toxicity of the asset. And this is I'm speaking particularly about the Tradfi world. And, you know, I think to date, a lot of the ETF flows haven't necessarily been like what you would consider Tradfi or institutional allocators. It's been a lot of retail through their brokerage accounts. That being said, I think going forward, what to look for in these ETF flows is actual institutional allocator stepping in because, you know, these people have long diligence processes. So, you know, the ETS went live a little over a year ago. And probably three to six months ago is when they started to have that veil lifted of like, OK, this is going to be an acceptable thing to own. I'm not going to get fired for owning it necessarily. And so now that that veil is lifted, it opens up the door for them to educate themselves on the asset. And so I think that's what we're just starting to. I think we're still very early in that process of actual institutional capital flowing in, but it's, it's an education process. And again, it takes some time to run it up the chain, get approvals from various investment committees, all these things. And so I think that's that's what I'm focused on In terms of the ETF flows in particular is like when do we start to see a little bit of mixed shift in what is actually driving those flows as opposed to retail through their brokerage? When is it actually larger institutions stepping into the ETF? Because I think that'll be a very strong signal of like, OK, this education is permeating and people are getting now, you know, comfortable with the thesis and not feeling like it's this super toxic asset that they can't touch. Brian, Brian, let's be honest. The Bills been lifted because we fired Gary Gensler. That's why the Bills. I mean, that was part of it, you know, stopping the choke point stuff like, you know, that was certainly part of it. I think it's, it's also just signalling from the administration, right, That like they're embracing it. So like it's OK and not only is it OK for individual citizens to own it, but you as institutional allocator, it's OK for you to learn about it and think about the IT in the context of your portfolio. Yeah, it's OK. Don't worry. You you can own it. You're not going to get fired. I could actually, maybe I could get fired for owning the ETF, but you're not going to get fired. Now if you own Bitcoin. That's a great thing. Checks it you want a we don't have to go any here, but I I do kind of disagree in Brian's take of I think we're still in a mini bear market and outside of sailor, he's the only person and then like hedge funds on the basis trade, nobody's stepping in. But that's a different conversation. Jackson, do you want to share? We talked to the family office the other day and we spent 45 minutes talking to a gentleman. We met New York and then he was like, wait, BlackRock doesn't hold the Bitcoin, It's Coinbase. Because I think there's something there that's worth just calling out, that there's a very big gap in understanding of where risk lies in this market. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it was kind of dumbfounded actually from that conversation. But you can't really fault these people, right? You see BlackRock steps in, they're sponsoring ETF products, kind of assume that there's adequate due diligence done. The issue though, kind of lies. It primarily lies in the fact that Bitcoin is a digital bearer asset and it's a there's a finite amount of Bitcoin. And that's crucial to understand from a counterparty risk perspective, because if your counterparty loses the Bitcoin or is hacked or compromised in some way, it does result in a permanent loss of capital. And with Coinbase in particular, that in my opinion, is one of the most existential risks to the industry. It doesn't mean that Bitcoin ceases to exist, but the fact that Coinbase has about has their hands on about 2 million Bitcoin out of the 21,000,000 total. And I guess about 20 million or so have been mined or close. We're getting close to that point. So they have about 10% of the total Bitcoin supply in custody, which is a major issue. And so even firms like BlackRock are using Coinbase as the custodian for their product. Coinbase has hundreds of millions or hundreds of billions of dollars of assets under custody. They have an insurance policy that covers a couple $100 million. So they have insurance actually on like a call it like 10 basis points of their assets under custody. And if you're investing into the ETFs, I think outside of Fidelity and there may be one or two others that use other custodians like Bitco, you just have counterparty exposure to the largest honeypot in the industry. So just something to pay attention to there. Yeah, I always think about Steve Lee, who works for For Block was on a podcast a few months ago and he referenced like if something happened to Coinbase, he estimated it would like sort of set back the industry at least a decade. And so it's, it's maybe existential is not the right word because I, I agree with you, like Bitcoin doesn't just go away if something like that were to happen, but it would, it would be extremely detrimental to sort of the trajectory of adoption that we're on. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's that. And then there's the component of the the, the more the more successful coin bases, the more likely they are to fail because we did a report breaking down the vibe it hack. And ultimately, as the honeypot grows, the return on investment grows with it. And so whether it takes five years, seven years of social engineering, embedding yourself an organization. And then there was the other aspect that I was telling him that I think we we kind of talked about on this pod or maybe behind the scenes, but it came out publicly that like Coinbase, people sell their like employees sell their credentials. I don't know if you've heard this Bron, but like they like the dark web. The most expensive data is Coinbase credentials. But then it came out of three weeks ago that Coinbase people were taking the data and selling it. And this is where social engineering, yeah, they had to send an e-mail from a legal perspective. So it's just a whole can of worms that most people just don't understand. And and they think BlackRock is holding the Bitcoin in some like, I don't know, in the in Larry's briefcase, what would they hold it? And they have no infrastructure they have, they don't have no acumen to understand this asset class. And and on top of that too, like it would be one thing, it would still be bad. It would be one thing if like the the custodian that BlackRock chose was like a Bitcoin focused company. Coinbase is not that they are a shit coin casino. Just this week they had, I guess an employee kind of go rogue and launch a meme coin on there like L2 called base. It ran up to 20 million market cap and then dumped 99% in like 30 seconds. And so like that's a like a literal insider who created a meme coin, tweeted from their main account about it. That then led to the run up. And then obviously the, you know, the people who knew about it dumped it on on, you know, retails head as it came in. So like this is not anywhere close to like a Bitcoin focused company. They're completely distracted by broader crypto and you know, I think they own a very small amount of Bitcoin in their treasury. So it's just like, you know, it would be one thing if you had single custodian risk and and they were actually a Bitcoin company, but like BlackRock has single custodian exposure to a non Bitcoin company in my mind. And they do have precedent for doing this because I think Charlie Lee was their CPO and back in the day they dumped all their Litecoin before they listed it on retail. But anyway, keep your Bitcoin at Coinbase at your own risk. Yeah, One Direction I wanted to go in was talk a little bit about Bo. Hines Bo. Everyone's talking about Bo these days. He's the executive director of digital assets for the US government. I guess they're digital asset or crypto arm. And so one thing I wanted to call out, it kind of ties into what you said, Brian or Michael, I forget at this point, but you're not going to get fired for owning Bitcoin anymore. I think it was you that said that, Brian. And so you're certainly not going to get fired for owning Bitcoin if the US government is taking a positive stance on the asset and wants to buy more of it. It's funny because Pomp did an interview with Bo Hines. I didn't catch the whole thing, but I kind of read a summary of it and it was funny in the in the trailer video, Bo Hines is like, we want to buy infinite amount of Bitcoin. It was like, come on, man, there's not. That's like maybe Ethereum. Maybe Ethereum has an infinite amount of supply, but there's only 21 billion Bitcoin. But he knows that. I think his broader point was the US government is incredibly, I think that's what he was going for. I know, I'm just nitpicking. I'm sorry, Bo. We know Bo's an avid listener of the last trade. But point aside, the, the most important thing here is that the US government in a matter of like 6 months or so went from very adversarial to this asset or this technology or form of money to let's acquire it. We, we got to do it in a budget neutral way. We're still trying to figure out where it's going to come from in terms of budget neutral acquisitions. It looks like bit bonds will be something that could happen. I think one of you said maybe this year has a bullish take, but it perhaps will take longer than that. But the really thing this is all about the publicly available information, right? So if you're piercing together different parts of the puzzle information that lives online, the US government has taken a very positive stance. They've made it clear that they are not selling, right. There's a strategic Bitcoin reserve. They're not selling the Bitcoin that's currently held in custody from previous confiscations, criminal activity. So that's about 200,000 Bitcoin. They want to acquire more Bitcoin. And the critical thing here, too is that there's a deep enough understanding that they recognize that Bitcoin is a geopolitical chess piece. They know that there is a waning demand for U.S. Treasuries, specifically on the long end of the curve. So we can also talk about what's going on in the Treasury market, but there's a waning demand from adversarial countries to buy U.S. Treasuries. They've been accumulating gold at a substantial pace. There's actually an interesting chart we can look at too, with the, the PBOC, So the China's central bank acquiring gold at a rate far more than they've publicly disclosed. So these other countries are, they're acquiring gold because they want a store value. They want to de risk themselves from confiscation, from debasement from the US government. The US is aware of that, but now they understand that Bitcoin is part of this pro dollar dominance stance and that Bitcoin is actually an opportunity to leapfrog all their adversaries. So I just think this is incredibly bullish. I don't care anymore. I'm not upset anymore that the price is at 80,000 because what I'm realizing in real time is we have a lot of things to be excited about and, and you just got to, you got to just peel back a couple layers of the onion, but all the information is there. Yeah, Brian, what do you think? Yeah, I I 100% agree. Maybe I have a little contrarian take because I did listen to the whole thing. I mean, isn't it wild that this guy in the White House is talking about Bitcoin like he's doing? You know, I mean, we're joking that he says like, oh, yeah, we're going to buy an infinite amount. Of course you cannot buy an infinite amount. But I think he's more saying, like, we want to buy as much as we can. And I think it ties into what Jackson said. I mean, I'm in Europe, we're pretty cooked, but with the level of debt that you have, you know, you're also pretty cooked. And I think they know, right? Of course they know, like, how can you ignore that, right? So I think it's been interesting to to look at the US from my European, you know, viewpoint and look at Europe also, you know, and how they are reacting that America is basically focusing on themselves. You know, I think I think it's a pretty crazy reaction. You know, they're not calling America a bully and this and that, but I'm thinking like, no, there's finally an administration and that seems to understand that there is a mathematical certainty that this path that you're on is a is a pretty doomy and gloomy path, right, in terms of servicing that debts. And so my idea here is kind of that the the people that are there now, you know, if you hear Besen talk, for example, you know, we are going through some sort of monetary reset, I'd like to be a part of it. It's like professionally for them, this sounds like the pinnacle of their career. Like, you know, these are the guys that saved America from the infinite debt spiral, you know, And So what I actually think is that they are they are so vocal about it, which is also strange, right? Because it would be strategic if you if you wouldn't talk about it and then you just buy and then you talk about it. So I think that is interesting. I don't really know how to how to judge that. But just announcing like Bitcoin is a thing. We want to buy as much of it as possible. Scott percent talking about Bitcoin becoming a store of value when he's asked a question about gold. You know, I sometimes feel they're thinking about it every day like we are we are doing right. And, and with the bit bonds that that were mentioned, you know, that that is such a logical concept to try at least when you can easily reason that, you know, as you mentioned, the, the, the long dated government bonds, yeah, you know who's going to be crazy enough to buy them? It was Europe before, but now they are like, F that, right? So that I, I, I, I don't know if that was very contrarian, but I just think like it's, it's I'm, I'm, I do think they're serious about it. I, I really do think they're serious about it. But we need to understand that we are in a crazy bubble and that the rest of the world really isn't paying attention. Like, it could even be that even if the US, well, actually comes up with an audit that shows how much Bitcoin they have, that's one we're still waiting, right? Let's say they start buying. I think the scenario of the rest of the world thinking America has gone crazy. You know, they're ditching gold, they're buying Bitcoin, they're really crazy, you know, so we're not even going to follow them. You know, it might as well be something that that that could happen. All caviar. That's that's all right. I think that for every time they say Bitcoin, they say gold at least 10 to 100 times more and where it possibly bubble, bubble like focusing and I'm just super and I know I get shit for it for being super fascinated with what's happening with gold, but it's the ultimate. It's the thing that every Bitcoin investor should look at as the precursor to what's going to happen with BTC. Not only price, but like reserve status and the fact that these countries are taking that first. There's a liquidity profile and a global inertia for thousands of years that has existed and Bitcoin just can't do that today. So all the bit bonds and all that stuff I think is true. It's just like it might be a small portion of Bitcoin and then majority of gold. There's a crazy stat for like every 100 to $200.00 of gold's price movement. It's a whole market cap of BTC, right? So like so gold right now, like $3300 a Troy oz. You know, Jackson, I don't know if he pulled up the chart, but there's a PBOC chart that's just insane about the the tons. And the other angle to just when you think about the monetary reset, the person or the group that I look at is like really forward thinking is bit Fenix and Tether. If you go listen to Paulo and you look at their balance sheet, it's like goes back-to-back to like almost like biblical times. It's like a third in their land. They're buying all this land all over the world. It's a third in gold. They own 50 tons of gold and then they own 50,000 to 100,000 BTC. And so you can kind of see this like framework playing out. And I think part of it, bro, I don't know if it's intentional on their part, but the reason why it's being discussed is because people are eventually have to wake up that they're they're 6040 doesn't actually hold the weight that it did. And they're going to have to realize they have to revert to hard assets. And that's a hard thing for everyone that you go talk to your friends and family and they're like, that's crazy. What are you, what do you mean? I got, I got my, you know, magnificent 7. And there's just going to be a rude awakening coming with a. Yeah, the on the gold piece, I totally agree with you Michael. I think like the the dynamic is very logical to to assume that if gold is ripping, making new all time highs every day, every week, what that naturally leads to is, you know, individuals, corporations, other entities, financial allocators and even nation states looking at that and saying, OK, well, why is that happening? Why is that happening? It's because it has, it's a hard asset with objective monetary properties. And so then the 2nd order of thinking from that is like, OK, well, what else is a hard asset that has objective monetary properties? And so like, I think you know, one in the data and just price performance, you've seen gold lead Bitcoin historically, but it's also back to the education part of it. It's like if you see gold ripping, there's a higher likelihood or a higher tendency for someone to seek out other hard assets with objective monetary properties because it would logically follow that in this environment where people are searching for neutral reserve assets that can't be debased or seized, then you would look for other ones outside of gold as well. And you know, primarily a digital version of gold. And so I think it's all very constructive and you're spot on that the inertia of gold is actually very important for the educational process around Bitcoin, particularly in this moment as you know, nation States and really everyone around the world is is watching gold's price just RIP. Yeah, it's, it's an absolute constructive mental model and framework for everyone from an individual to a sovereign an individual. Most individuals would have to underwrite their Bitcoin thesis on on gold in some capacity, but that layers into how we built this business. Like gold failed because it ultimately centralized and lacked transparency and there was too many claims on it. So anybody any for the past 14 or since honoramps existed, specifically multi institution, everyone would be happy with the plastic device or leaving it on Coinbase. And it's like, well shit, man, I kind of want this thing to work because I got a lot of money in it. We might need a better form of custody. When you think about sovereigns holding it, are they going to park it at Coinbase or in the central bank and then have a problem with it again? And so that logically, to your point, Brian, when somebody starts to like allocate one percent, 10% of their sovereigns balance sheet, well then they're going to have to look at where gold ultimately failed. Who does it sit with? And they're going to have to come to these like natural conclusions on maybe I want a better form of custody. So I think it's the whole notion of, you know, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. It's very similar here. Yeah, One thing I wanted to talk about as well, it ties into all this is the Mag 7. I mean, I almost don't want to own any of the Mag 7 just because of the name Magnificent 7. I mean, come on. I don't know who came up with that. But one thing that a lot of investors maybe aren't paying enough attention to is just the impact on the trade war on technology stocks and specifically Apple, right, being consumer facing. I know there's been some back and forth in terms of what might be included or exempt from tariffs, but everyone loves to talk about bitcoins volatility. Why don't we just talk about Apple stock volatility? I mean, everyone owns Apple stock, right? So one thing I wanted to point out here, it's recovered a little bit, but you can see on April 2nd when the tariffs were announced, there was a 23% drawdown in a week, right? In five trading days. This isn't Bitcoin, this isn't the spooky cryptocurrency that everyone's concerned about. This is one of the largest companies in the world, that little shy of $3 trillion market cap now. So 20% correction. I think it's recovered. It has recovered a bit now. So we're down 12% since the tariffs were announced about two weeks ago. But I think what a lot of investors are discounting the fact that their retirements are so heavily concentrated in a handful of companies that are 25 or 30% of the S&P 500. Why aren't people more concerned about that? Or maybe they are, I'm just not paying attention. To that, Jackie, I was. I was going to pull this up as well. Sorry, but this is go ahead, Tim. It is Apple stock is a, it's too volatile. It's a speculative asset and everybody needs to sell it. Why would you own a speculative asset that can go to 0? It's a good point. Tim Cook is absolutely cooked. But I was, I was, I wanted to bring this up. This was so this was originally a a table that BlackRock had put together and some of their materials friend of the show Sam Callahan updated it with since Trump's liberation day. And so this is sort of tracking major geopolitical events and how various asset classes. So it includes SPX gold and Bitcoin on here. And so I think this is, you know, not being talked about enough that in this very short window and you know, caveat all this, like I don't like talking about short periods of time in terms of analysis. But like for the purposes of this chart, I think it is important to, to reference that since April 2nd when these these tariffs really went into effect and, and all this volatility and uncertainty sort of manifested, SPX is down and Bitcoins basically flat and gold is up. And so it'll be very interesting to see what happens going forward from here because this is just a, you know, 10/12/15 day period. But the reality is, is that Bitcoins actually held up very well relative to other asset classes in this extremely volatile period. And so well, it hasn't ripped like gold. Just the fact that like it wasn't down more than the S&P is a stark divergent from, you know, where we were even a year ago in terms of the correlation to to broader markets. And so yeah, I just thought this was this was worth pointing out. I mean, guys, This is why it's an asymmetric opportunity. I think what Brian said before, you know, a rational next step is to look at like digital gold, etcetera. But yes, that's all all true, but we know that, right? And I was thinking about I had AI was looking it up. I had a tweet last week. I said something like gold adoption is based on narrative and Bitcoin adoption is based on math and physics. You know, like the only thing that gold has on Bitcoin is a 5000 year old narrative or the narrative of it's been used for five for 5000. There's physics. There's physics involved. In yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, digging more gold out of the ground isn't the flex that you think it is. But wait, no, wait, wait, wait. So my point is that why why is it an asymmetric opportunity? One of the things is, you know, and, and connected to the public information that you can find is that on the characteristics of all the characteristics of gold, except for how old it is, are inferior to the characteristics of Bitcoin. If you just take a neutral rational approach and study that, that that is what you'll end up with. But the narrative is so strong, you know, I mean, I've heard there's a Dutch guy who has a commodity fund and he talks about gold. He's also a Bitcoiner and he thinks Bitcoin is better than gold. But his conclusion is just like, yeah, central banks are buying gold so you can be pro Bitcoin, but they are still buying gold, you know, and my idea around that is, yeah, that's because of the narrative. It's they buy gold because everyone else buy golds, right? Who's going to be the sucker that that buys Bitcoin if you see all the all their reactions. But once you realize we are living in an exponential digital age of humanity, you know, this is post mail and e-mail and candles and electricity and horses and cars like this is gold and and Bitcoin, you know, so this takes some time. So we can go through it strategically, we can philosophize about it, right. But I think it's it's the asymmetry that's here that shows us that not everyone made the most rational decision and move into Bitcoin. Yeah, I would say there's a big fallacy in whole. And what you just described is that you can't say no, no, you can't say it's a narrative because then somebody will just tell you that there'll be a better narrative for Bitcoin. You have to anchor back to why gold has value and there's objective properties to that, and then Bitcoin improved on them. And that's why it's the logical next progression for the people that are missing it. But if you layer that gold just has a narrative, then the next thing that somebody, if I was on the other side of the table would be like, well, Bitcoin has a narrative. And that's the only thing that. Trump's Bitcoin in if you compare them next to each other, the narrative right, the the history, the narrative that surrounds the history is stronger than than that of of Bitcoin. But part of the narrative of gold saying, you know, it's used in jewelry. That's actually pretty bad, right? That that's, that's a flaw I I would say, but I agree with you. It it it builds up on the characteristics of gold that are good in gold, But once you research them, there's only one logical conclusion is that those characteristics are stronger and. And yeah, you guys are saying the same thing. So I've guys are saying you guys are. Agreeing because I think Brahm, your point is just like it's very clear that on those other lists outside of the history and the track record, it improves on the qualities. Yes, Michael's point I think is like it's those qualities though, even though in there's ten years to Bitcoin, there's still exist and they're still important. And that is also. Outside of narrative, what drives gold? I agree, but I'm saying the asymmetry, the opportunity here is that once you understand that right, those characteristics are better in Bitcoin, you know, that's, that's what you should act upon. The other thing that we we can only pontificate because we we didn't live through it is that this is happening so fast, so independent if the whole world figure this out, like these sovereigns are Apple from a liquidity profile. I don't I don't haven't fully baked this out, but they can't just all ape in to BTC at this current moment. So it's just independent of like if they got it today or not, there's still a situation that has to go through a natural progression of the capital flows coming in in an orderly fashion. So it's not just like, well, I get this is going to be the next gold and I'm going to buy it. I don't, I don't know how that fully bakes out. But that's another aspect of this is like people just can't. There's also the risk profile, like 15 year track record. You're going to ape your company or like Apple's balance sheet or Warren Buffett. There's still a chance. It's not like predestined preordained that it exists. Gold. It's pretty sure it's not going away in the next 10 years. What's in your water bro? What do you mean? You almost sound like a bear. No, it's just being pregnant. Yeah, it's it's a real I. Think I'm making a joke. I think it's pragmatic. These people have to be pragmatic. But then again, that's where the that's where the opportunity is. I mean, where we are at after all the study that we did, we wake up and think like, damn, I don't have enough. Those people are definitely not there yet. Yeah, right. So that's the opportunity, that gap for any, anyone serious to move into that. The and the other problem, I forgot, I think it was the guy we talked to this week. Jackson is most wealthy individuals are not in the game of getting wealthy other than the game of not losing their shirts. So like bitcoins looked at it and you could still lose your shirt. Like that's their mind frame. So like, that's just, again, a natural order of think about gold monetizing. And there was something else before it. Somebody didn't just ape it all into the shiny rock that it was surrounded by. Or it's like, this is the thing. It's just a process. It sucks, but it yeah. Oh great, This is why. This is why by the way, bro, This is why multi institution exists. I told Canvas we were walking out of an office and like, we make no one happy. So we're either crazy or we're on to something. Because if you think about it, BNY Mellon doesn't want to do multi institution. They love holding the asset and and doing the things they do. And then the hardcore bitcoiners want to hold the plastic device into Valhalla and it's like, well shit man, maybe that doesn't actually make sense. So we're either crazier or we're on to something. But when you think in that frame, you got to like be neutral to like, just how do you actually get there? And that's where a lot of this like stems from. It's just having all these discussions. I agree. Yeah, the two of you. Oh, go ahead, Tim. Jackson, you can tell me if this is exactly what you're about to say. Maybe we need to schedule a bit a gold versus Bitcoin and Michael can take gold and Brock can take Bitcoin and it's just like a whole 90 minutes of them just going at it. I would not every minute. Funny enough, we're we're. We're not doing that because there are complimentary and accretive, but we're actually doing a report on gold and Bitcoin and I sent it to Larry last night and Mark Vollick from Incrementa. And ideally they both come on the show and it's less about what's 1 versus the other. It's just how do you actually like navigate this new the world with because an 80 year old doesn't shouldn't have 100% of their BT their money in BTC. The cuts in half. They're like retirement just cut in half and their heart is going to their hearts going to go out in the meantime because they just lost half their. Purchase power. That's why it's tougher because I mean, if you just think about where a lot of the capital sits, it's in the hands of people that are, you know, over the age of 506070. And so in their minds, even if they understand Bitcoin to some extent, they, they don't think it's going to 0 necessarily. They don't necessarily want to subscribe to a potential 50% drawdown. And so, yeah, I, I think you're totally right. Like it it, you know, someone's age demographics also matters in terms of how they perceive gold versus Bitcoin, But it's not an either or thing. Like I think there's going to be flows back and forth between these two assets for the next several decades. It's just funny because I don't know gold. I'm just explaining. I like heads, not. Hold Yeah, You got some chains, dude. You have some jewelry. That's your allocation. But that's just that's only if I go visit Brahm and I get stuck going out one night with him and like I lose everything. I at least have, you know, I can take, I can take the jewelry off. That's how you sell it yourself, yeah. Yeah, yeah, you can't wear your Bitcoin. You can only play with it apparently. That's right, you can. Put like, that's what you can put like, yeah. Have fun playing with your Bitcoin or something else. Yeah, Speaking of Trump, I wanted to say, well, Tim, first you reminded me. I was like, who does Michael remind me of? And then your comment was, Oh yeah, he reminds me of Peter Schiff. He just loves his gold so much. But Michael and Brahms debate reminded me of what's been happening this week with Trump and Jay Powell. What's happening there, guys? I mean, we got got the two Titans battling it out yesterday. Powell's like, you know, we're not cutting rates, blah, blah, blah. Trump, I think, said this morning he's like, we need to get Powell out of the Fed. General, he said that a few Times Now. Yeah. But he reinforced. Guy. Yeah, he reinforced his stance cuz like, Trump wants rates lower. Powell's like doing his dance. You know, we're, oh, we're so independent. We make all of our decisions based on all this data we have. And so, yeah. He has breakfast with percent every week though. But they're. Just crushing. They're crushing the calzones. Yeah. Yeah, it was not. I watched that whole interview that he did yesterday because as you know, I'm an avid tea leaves listener and it was, there was a few interesting points. I think 1 was just the outrageous claim that, you know, he admits that we're on an unsustainable path from a debt perspective, but then he caveats that by saying we're not yet at an unsustainable level. It's like, well, dude, like interest expenses over a trillion. It's the largest line item. We've got 36 trillion in debt. Like how could you possibly say that we're not already at an unsustainable level? That's one. And then to the broader take away for me was sort of comparing and contrasting him with Besent. So Besent also did an interview earlier this week. I think he was in Argentina and he, you know, they're saying things that are similar in the sense of like, you know, we're not basically signaling like it's not yet time to like push the panic button. And Powell's being, I would say a little bit more conservative saying like, you know, we're here, but we're here if we need to be. But like, we don't see signs of of needing to like step in and really turn on QE or or lower rates. And he's being pretty firm on that. Where as percent had a few comments in his interview where he was basically saying like we have the treasury has a big quote UN quote big toolkit to deploy if this uncertainty and volatility were to continue or worsen. And there's there's a few things in that proverbial toolkit. I think the one that he referenced that would be sort of a primary move would be treasury buybacks. So basically that would entail the Treasury, so not the Fed is not involved in this. So it's basically a what you could call like a stealth version of QE where the Treasury Department is buying back treasuries on the longer end of the curve. And so that would in theory sort of stabilize and support longer dated treasuries. And so I think, you know, the Treasury is always doing buybacks. So they're already doing buybacks. But his, his basic signaling was like, we could increase that if we needed to. And so I think that's kind of what we're seeing play out now is like if Trump can't get Powell out, which like I'm kind of skeptical that that that'll happen. Like I think Powell probably sees out the rest of his term. It might be that the cent and the Treasury are are sort of enacting other forms of, of stealth QE prior to to getting someone else in in the Fed chair that would actually just cut rates and and actually turn on the printers. So that was that was that was sort of the takeaways for me from those interviews this week. Maybe Jackson, you can pull up what I send you about LBJ. This is crazy guys. I just I just saw this. I said this to Jackson, but I'm I'm thinking about how they're the interaction between Trump and Powell could be, I don't know, Jackson, if you can show. I got you here. It's like an excerpt from the book. So from a book, I'll, I'll read it. So here's wait, wait, let me read the tweet. If you go up 11, here's here's LBJ literally slamming Fed chair William Mcchesney Martin against the wall to print money. And there's an excerpt from a book that says there Johnson got Martin alone and did not mince words. According to different accounts, the six foot 6 foot 4 Johnson pushed the shorter Martin up against the wall. He went ahead and did something that you knew I disapproved of and that can affect my entire term here, Johnson said, as Martin recalled later in in an oral history. He took advantage of me and I'm not going to forget it because here I am a sick man. You've got me into a position where you can run a rapier into me and you've run it. And then below that it says something like, you know, Martin, my boys are dying in Vietnam and you won't print the money I need. It's pretty crazy. That's pretty crazy. But imagine these conversations right now, right? Because as I just said, like I think there is a plan. Like they have a plan to do something. They understand the problem. So they it's a crazy plan. I think it's very brutal. You know what they're doing. It's very unpredictable also. But I don't think there is no plan. So feels like they're constantly running into these little challenges, right? One is Jerome, listen to me. And if he, if he's not doing it, you know what what you said, he's doubling down in the media saying four or five times like Jerome Powell should be removed. You know, I, I think this is a huge battle at that level, right? Like they're really battling it out and depending on the outcome because Jerome Powell, like he said a few months ago, do, do you think he's going to reiterate that a president cannot really fire him? You know, like that that is part of the whole scheme is that no one really actually knows how the Federal Reserve works, right? So. They don't, they don't actually know how it works. I don't know Brian, I mean anyone here, but specifically Brian Parker Lewis had a a report called Ender's Game. He had written it prior, prior to like I think even coming into Bitcoin, his he was tasked from his hedge fund to learn about what would happen if the Fed had to unwind its balance sheet. And so he went through the, I guess it's the minutes of the Fed meetings. They released them five years after the meetings. So like they don't release them, you know, one month or one year, five years later. So every, you know, if you go back from like 2015, it would be 2010, 2016, 2011. And they were just every time consistently wrong about everything they thought they were doing, like everything objectively was incorrect. So they don't have much of A handle on what's going on or what needs to be done because of the notion of the reflexivity. And it's a, it's a market with too many variables. You cannot centrally plan it. But they still haven't caught up to that. Yeah, I think that was one of the other quotes from Trump this morning or yesterday. He was like, you guys are always late and you're always wrong. It's like the worst employee and you can't get rid of them. It's a great take. So where do we go from here guys? Oh, I wanted to talk about Ethereum. I'm sorry if any if any people are to this on the show are holding Ethereum still? You should be questioning all of your life decisions. In Bitcoin we talk about ego deaths and in crypto they talk about ether death. I so Speaking of Parker Lewis on that topic, I like this tweet that he shared. I think it was yesterday. The guy who got a Luna tattoo is selling his eeath. Not everyone is going to be able to get out. The institutional guys that were pushing this fraud coin like the Winklevoss brothers and Novogratz are ejecting. If you're still holding no one to blame but yourself, that is an ugly chart. That's a really ugly chart. Do the bank? I've been meaning to look this up. Do the bank list guys still have like a a Twitter like do they still exist online? Yes, this is because I think they. Do area miss out money? Can you imagine just going to work every day and like talking? They have a there was another tweet that said I guess they have the ETH dot sound or ETH dot sound money. It's like a chart that was meant to show post whatever upgrade and the deflationary and there and somebody posted it like that's not what that's supposed to like show on the website because it's actually inflationary. I don't even know. I can't follow all the mechanic, the tokenomics, but yeah. Because no one's using it. So what that was supposed to show was that as people use Ethereum, there was a, when they did the, you know, transition from proof of work to proof of stake change, the sort of mechanism that would then burn tokens as transactions happened. And so that would in fact make it deflationary over time. So you see on the charts like goes down for a little bit and then just start spiking back up and is now above where it was before they they did this transition because no one's using it. And that is also related to like just the flawed system in general where they tried to push activity to these secondary layers that were faster and cheaper. But then it's like, OK, well then nobody's using the main chain. So it's actually inflationary now. And so, yeah, so it's a total if you. If you're listening to this podcast and you want to know about other cryptocurrencies, please reach out to Brian at honor@bitcoin.com. He was the professional institutional research writer for Coinbase and he was forced to write some very interesting things and so he knows much about crypto. Way too much. Way too much, honestly. On a different topic, we should talk about Brahms. One of these other things he says that I love is never stop talking about Bitcoin. And in that same vein, you should never stop building in Bitcoin. And we recently announced Brahm joining on the early writers side and also the Guild network. So Brahm, do you want to share a little bit about this tweet you shared on? Now, given everything we've talked about, the importance of actually building and kind of changing the world from the ground up. Well, I think we have to realize like we talked about, right, we are very early, but I do think we all see the world going towards a certain place, you know, and especially with AI, like I think Bitcoin and AI are like the main things that I'm looking at that I really think that this idea of abundance of, you know, how the Internet created, like the democratization of information, Bitcoin does that with sharing value, access to private property, digital private property and like AI is doing that with productivity. And so that you now see like that base is so quick that more and more creative people are actually invited to to build right in in tech. And I think that when we have like these two tracks that are developing next to each other, right, a better money that's replacing a bad money, more democratized technology that's actually inviting more people to to build and create an abundance together. We need a certain way to measure the winds that could possibly be made with with all the technological innovation. And I think we talked about this before in many different ways. But yeah, if you measure any technological advancement that's deflationary in an inflationary money, then you're going to offset all the possible gains. And I think we all agree that, you know, Bitcoin is the best way to measure any value in the world, but especially everything that's coming at us with all these, you know, rapidly, like rapid technological advancements. And so I love the idea behind early riders and, you know, as a Bitcoin denominated venture fund that, yeah, because we can literally build everything that comes as an idea to our mind. We have to be very diligent about what we spend our time and energy on. But I think adding the Bitcoin element actually, yeah, kind of enforces that and really gives us focus in the things that that we are building and hopefully also finding entrepreneurs that that see this future developing, wanting to build in this space. Having, you know, investments into Bitcoin actually makes you I think a more diligent and focused entrepreneurs. So I'm excited to see if we can combine these, you know, different developments that are happening next to each other, you know, basically together in in a Bitcoin denominated venture fund focused on, you know, building the world of tomorrow. So I'm very excited to see where we can take that. Yeah, very well said. I think what has me personally excited on all of it is in you particular getting involved is the network and your background, but also network that you've accumulated via the Bitcoin for Millennials podcast. It's one of the my like, I think greatest pleasure isn't the right word, but like, I think it's something I'm like proud of is helping individuals get off the rat race and into the, the Bitcoin world to build in it. Because ultimately what happens and everyone this resonates with is like, once you see it, you're kind of dying a little bit inside every time you go to the Fiat job, whatever it is, because you know they're building not for the future, but you obviously have the the responsibilities from the family, the children and all the things associated. And it's hard because there's not that many opportunities yet in the Bitcoin space. And so the idea is for individuals, and we've seen this already is from individuals that want to seat at the table to see what the next thing is. They want to take their professional experience at the Google's, the apples of the world. And there's certain disciplines and they want to be next to other builders that haven't fully made that leap yet, but want an inside track to when do they actually join a company or how do they like come up and form an idea? To your point around deflationary tech and and remote work, there's a huge opportunity for like overachievers to actually do multiple things at once while still, you know, mining dollars. And I think that's how we further this whole thing is to de risk it for individuals because historically it's been I have to leave my company, but people have liabilities. They have people counting on them. And I think that's just the ultimate way to produce value. It's like if you can give that vehicle via the Guild where we can all come together, Riff fund new companies, have new people found them join firms, you're just going to accelerate this. And and the last thing I'll say for, and we talked about this on your podcast is there's a notion that flies around about there's risk adjusted. There's never better time to buy Bitcoin risk adjusted. There's never been a better time to accumulate a shit ton of Bitcoin because all the ideas are floating out there, but they actually haven't really been executed by the highest level operators yet because those people still work at the Googles and, you know, whatever deals, whatever the hot Valley firm is. And so either that person is just finding Bitcoin or they haven't even heard about Bitcoin yet. And that's what this next wave has me most excited about is that price is the ultimate barometer from the awareness. Yeah. I would add that you know, this, this idea, this concept really emanated from what was already happening sort of organically across on ramp, our sort of base of clients as well as on the early writer's side in our LP's and sort of our network of founders and entrepreneurs. And the Guild is really just an attempt to formalize that in some sense and create a private forum for people that understand the principles of Bitcoin, or at least curious about them and have some domain expertise, whether in Bitcoin or outside of it, that want to talk about it, want to riff on ideas, want to maybe found a business, want to like you're saying, Michael, like get off the Fiat rat race and actually contribute to what they know is, is sort of the future and this new monetary order that's that's forming. And So what, you know, part of it too is like, there really doesn't exist that type of forum for folks because Twitter is extremely fragmented and disjointed and obviously full of a ton of noise. And so it's hard for someone who's you know, and we talk to people all the time that are like interested in Bitcoin, but they're totally on an island because none of their Co workers in their tratified job and none of their peers understand Bitcoin. But they want to talk about it. They want to explore ideas and think about these things, you know, more regularly, and they don't really have a forum to do that. And so the Guild is really attempt an attempt to formalize a a structure and a forum for folks. And so sort of the initial members of the Guild will be honor and private clients as well as people in the early Routers network, including LP's and sort of our group of advisors. But obviously this will grow over time. So if you're interested in learning more, please reach out to any one of us about it. So, Brian, that includes me. Am I in? Yeah, you're in the Guild, Tim. Oh, wait. You're only in the Guild. Hang on, Michael, Tim, you're only in the Guild if you do the tie reveal, because we've been recording for over an hour. We haven't seen the tie yet. I was. I was assuming maybe you got some of the calzone on it. You're embarrassed to. Show it's cool, it's cool. It's it's, it's a, it's a reasonable length today. Yeah, that's not too crazy. Reasonable length and I would just request that we have at least one Guild event at pub key because I just love their cheeseburgers. Yeah, definitely there there will be events both virtual and in person that are are a part of the Guild as well. So good, good call out there, Tim. Yeah, all, all Guild events will be in New York. Just so Michael has to go to New York because he loves it so much. Brahms gonna hold one in in Vegas. I've heard he's, he's gonna, he's is everyone here going to Vegas? I think Tim, Tim will be there. He he lived in Vegas at this point. I think you are coming too, Mike. I don't know if there's enough likes and and comments on these pods coming up about Vegas and what people's plans are. Maybe we can coach and to to Get Me Out there. Michael, there's actually a gold conference happening at the same time as the Bitcoin conference. You might want to go to that. You should get a get a yellow tie. We'll get a yellow tie for the the gold difference that. Would be something. Hey guys, hope you're enjoying the show and a little bit of the. Spicy takes between gold and Bitcoin. This was really a fun one. I just wanted to let you guys know that on Ramp really is your trusted guide and crafting generational wealth. Our clients not only get access to the best custody solution on the planet Earth. Yes, on the planet Earth. If you have any qualms or questions about it, reach out to me. I'll explain why, but then we obviously also offer the Lloyds of London $100 million policy lending, trading, inheritance and much more, including Iras. And if you're somebody that is either higher net worth and needs more white glove onboarding from how do you build the account? Even though it's super simple and it takes about two to 8 minutes? We can walk you through that. And provide complete concierge onboarding via our private client team. You get access to additional tax inheritance advisory support and then you also get access to the new Guild network that we announced. Our private clients are going to get opted in and or they as long as they opt in where they can get access to equity investments in the Bitcoin ecosystem via our relationship with early riders. It's the venture capital firm pioneering Bitcoin as the heart rate. At the end of the day, we've been timeless prudence with the tools of tomorrow and partner and churning in our clients, you know dreams and making them into lasting legacies. If you want to reach out, please reach out to me or on ramp at hello at on rampbitcoin.com and we'd love to speak with you and see if we can serve you. Well, it might be a good place to wrap it unless Michael, you want to just do a quick single point of failure of the week. Just really quick. Think you had mentioned something a couple days ago where there was an issue with a password manager. Does this ring a bell? Yeah, that that just came to mind was somebody. We just hear, we hear about these all all week long, but the one particular stood out that somebody stored and this happens a lot. I don't really understand why, but people assume that encrypted password managers are always encrypted. And so they parked their seed phrase on the password manager. But the problem was that two years ago the password manager had some form of, I don't know if it was infiltration or whatever happened, the data had been hacked, but there was a lot of data. So it took two years for whoever had got this information to set to throw it and their, their funds were swept. And two years later and you know what just came to mind as it probably wasn't even the initial hacker because they sell the data afterwards. And what it is, is like you just run scripts on the bit 39 C words and then you can find it. And this is what I think I've heard from other people that have used like collaborative custody. They'll take like one person had one key and this has saved them in that sense. They had one key stored on their Google cloud. So they took like the picture of the C phrase and they put in cloud, but whether it's Google people that work at Google or somebody gets access to your G Suite, they can just run a script based on those words. And now you can do it via like whatever image processing. So you can get the words off the, the actual image to find it. And so they were able to get the words uploaded into the device. It was only one key. So they weren't able to take the, the funds. But the the key story there's don't put your C phrase or any personal encrypted information for a digital bearer asset online. Yeah, and you can understand why people would do this too, because they perceive there's some level of security, whether it's like an encrypted password manager or it's something else. But it's a challenge. The embedded thing in that is that a lot of people don't feel comfortable with managing the seed phrase physically indefinitely, especially don't feel they may not feel comfortable themselves. And then in most cases, they don't feel comfortable that their spouse or children, whoever would be able to recover this. And naturally they look for like easier solutions from a tech perspective to store it. But then you open up other vulnerabilities. So I mean, it's, it's really challenging. It's, it's not as simple as just memorizing words and, you know, forget about it. That that could work if you're like a single person and you have no one else that relies on you maybe you don't want to do that though, even if you're a single person, if you have a lot of Bitcoin because something you could have an injury and you could lose all your Bitcoin, who knows but the point being is it's just increasingly difficult and then Michael, you pointed out that this is only going to get more sophisticated. So technology is moving incredibly quickly. We're using a lot of tech every day at On Ramp to, you know, make ourselves more efficient. And so people that have malintent are also using these technologies to we go after something that's becoming increasingly more valuable with time. So just something to pay attention to. It's ultimately why we have a business and why our clients are happy and why how we help them. On that, Tim, we can't let you leave without, you know what's happening in the corporate Bitcoin adoption world that Wise put out this report. What's the what's the rumblings from the the True North and MSTR crew? They're basically just saying higher right over time. We're not going to be in the 80s forever. No, it's super interesting to see more and more structured products, ETFs coming to market. And the fact that you have less than 100 or so public companies and less than 100 or so structured products on the market, it really just kind of tells you how early we are. Can I ask a very dumb question? Yeah. What is MSTY? It's basically a covered call strategy. What does that mean? It means that you're selling the shares and creating income from it. I don't fully understand but all I see it is all my Twitter feed and I didn't know if it was like the latest crypto token or if it was what it what it was. Everyone was saying that they were selling their Bitcoin for MSTY so. It's an altcoin, so it's an altcoin. Yeah. So basically anything that's not Bitcoin is an altcoin, right? Tim, did you see, did you see your boy AP Abacus tweeted out, I think last week that he was, he was saying there's 22 large corporates considering a Bitcoin allocation. Any any rumors around who those might be? One of his first tweets on that basically said that they're big corporates, but they're not going to be like a levered log strategy, like micro strategy sort of thing. So, and of course, one of my friends said, you know, it's funny how people can put stuff on the Internet and word it in such a way that they can't be wrong, right? It's like at some point this will happen with two companies and it's like it's that's good to know. It was vague enough. Yeah, yeah. And and certainly Michael, what I how I described that MSTY covered call strategy is like literally not accurate or complete, right. You're, it's a whole strategy where your, your shares could be called away, but you're creating income because you're giving people the option to buy it at a certain price. And we don't need to go into all of it. But it, the fact that that specific product within a handful of months has $2 billion in AUM is super interesting, especially in the mini bear market, right? 30% drawdown that we're in, as you mentioned. So I think it's really interesting you saw Rex, I think earlier this week or late last week come out with some filings for like a whole slew of additional ETFs. And I think it just makes sense that like what some of the true North guys are saying, Ben and Jeff and and others is like take advantage of this time to build, right? That's what I'm trying to do is like, how can I be thoughtful right now and put things in place so that when we do get some sort of bull market price action that we're in a really strong position to take the next step and and not be flat footed from an investment perspective, from a business perspective, from a education perspective. And so I think that's that's largely the take away on on that front. It's a good point, like we're all insanely busy on this pod and and we're kind of in this little like wall. Imagine when things RIP. I know we need to wrap it. Just that reminded me of the Intuit stuff. What's the deal with? Is there any legs to that? Or is that just like a blind call, you know, call to action of like, hey, quit censoring Bitcoin and you guys should adopt it? Or is there more to it similar to like like there's a few, there's been a few, some things happen like GameStop and then others you don't really hear again about it. Yeah, there was a specific college group that was censored by Intuit, and that's what got on Matt's radar. But yeah, I mean, from what everyone said, I think it's an engagement letter. I don't personally think there's going to be anything constructive that comes out of it other than kind of shining a spotlight on it. But I hope I'm wrong because like people should not be censored just because they own Bitcoin, want to have a business in Bitcoin. I mean, I'm not going to, you know, name names, but people in the True North group that are setting up entities right now, like they can't get bank accounts still be, if you put the word Bitcoin anywhere in there, right, you got to say the word media. You got to say the word, you know, digital gold, say gold, right? And, and, and real quick, something that you guys are really hitting on today is this education piece, but also the job piece. And I've been getting some inbound from people that are like, Hey, I'm really excited to meet you in Orlando or Vegas or wherever and like I want to get into the space. Like what do you, what's your advice for or thoughts around like how to create a business, how to get a job? And I know there are some job websites out there, but I think anything that we could do on on that front to just point people to the resources that are already out there and then shine a light on that would be really helpful because that's some of the inbound that I've been seeing. For sure. Yeah. And so real quick before you wrap up, so and Tim, that's well said. Couple thoughts. First, we got to do a bullish and bearish round, could be really quick. So just everyone get those ready teed up. And then before we get into that, just would ask for the loyal listeners of the show, if you can rate 5 stars on Spotify or Apple, or if you could like or comment, that would go a long way. I frankly don't want to listen to Michael talk about gold every week, but I do it for the listeners of the show. And so if you could show your appreciation to like and comment, I would really, you know that I would express my gratitude. I'll maybe I'll give you a shout out on next week's episode if you want one. If you don't, if you just want to give back a little bit, add some value, that goes a long way. So too quick. Bullish and bearish. I'm bullish on bodega owners near Tim's apartment. He's crushing calzones every morning, some fresh OJ. Good business idea that ties into 10 People want to get involved in the space. Maybe open up a bodega that accepts Bitcoin near Tim's apartment. That's a good one, bearish Brahm. I hope I'm not stealing your Thunder, but the price or the chart of bitcoins performance post having is pretty ugly right now. So I could pull it up just really quick and sorry if that was yours, but look at this real quick. Look at where we are. We're living. I already said this last week, we're living through the bearish, you know, post having world at the moment. Or look at this purple line. It's just it's really it's really sad to watch, but it's not going to be there that much longer. So TuneIn for next week. Let's see if we can go higher. Tim's always, Tim always likes to point, he likes to say higher. So maybe next week we'll be higher. Who wants to go next? Is that a segue for me to go next? Sure. Bearish on meme tokens that are not Bitcoin. And I'm, I said bearish, right? I hope so. And I'm bullish on the interview at the White House with Bo Hines where he did say, hey, it's possible we're going to sell gold and buy Bitcoin. It's possible we're going to use money from tariffs to buy Bitcoin and there's a lot of other ways that we can figure out how to buy Bitcoin. I mean, I don't know that it was anything that wasn't said previously, but to be repeating those things, they've done everything that they have said they're going to do to date. And so watch what people do sort of thing in addition to what they say. And everything seems to be lining up for a a pretty bullish rest of the year. Yeah. I'm I'm bullish on bitcoins emergence as a risk off asset. So going back to that chart, that table that I pulled up earlier and just, you know, the past few weeks, again, if we were here a year, 2-3 years ago, it would be remarkably surprising to see Bitcoin hold up in this environment how it has. And so I think that is indicative of people, you know, beginning to recognize Bitcoin, Bitcoin and its true nature, its objective monetary properties that make it, you know, really one of the more risk off assets you could possibly own. And my bearish take, I'll take the opposite side on the Bo Hines interview. Like I kind of think he's just like, you know, the you can just you can just do things. Well, he can just say things and like I, I personally don't put like a ton of stock in what he's saying because I don't think he's necessarily in a decision making seat of like when, you know, if and when the US government buys Bitcoin, like I don't think it's Bo Hines. It's like driving that decision. So I think he's kind of in this mode of like, I can just say things and get people bolts up. So that would be, that'd be my bearish, somewhat bearish. Yeah, we're, we're going to clip that Brian. We're going to send it to Bo, see what he has to say. Seems like a great guy. I don't know, Bo seems like an awesome dude, but yeah, he's just saying things. All right, I'm bearish on central bankers not figuring out Bitcoin, but that May is bullish for the plebs more. I'm saying it because I think, yeah, if as a country you're fading Bitcoin, then yeah, you're really going to fall behind. And I'm bullish on the fact that I was thinking about a tweet I wrote. Why am I bullish? You know, we're in this whole trade war thing, you know, once the trade war dust settles and there will be like, many accords that have been signed out of logical necessity, right? Like countries eventually will want to trade with each other. So I think that's happening. But yeah, after that, do you think that countries or certain blocks will happily trade using a currency someone else controls? I don't really think so. You know, So I'm very bullish on the need for a neutral decentralized alternative, which, you know, I think we all think is, is Bitcoin. So it's going to be interesting to see how that eventually pans out because there's this term that is a neutral instant cross-border final settlement, you know, that is Bitcoin. And eventually that is what all these countries and blocks need because the trust is clearly gone. Which is OK, because the whole point of Bitcoin is that you don't really have to trust each other in order to and exchange value with each other. So there is technology for that. Love it. I was going to be consistent and go bullish with gold, but I'll I'll take a turn and say, you know, bullish on BRAHM and the network that's growing within this ecosystem that we're crafting on on ramp early riders and the the individuals listening here. It's just true, like we need best in class people to get us where we want to be. All these things are fun to talk about, but the reality is you need the individuals to build it. So very bullish on folks that are coming in that are world class as this price rises and then bearish on I think just a conflation of digitization of value in Bitcoin. I think that this next bull cycle is just going to see a lot of people lose their shirts, getting chasing the shiny objects and yeah, anything anybody can do to help them, whether it's sending them the right information, sending them to Brahms podcast, ours or others, it's going to be important now more than ever because there's going to be no shortage of ways that people are going to lose their money as this asset appreciates. Bearish, bearish real world, real world assets. Yes. Bearish real world assets on the blockchain. Tokenized real estate. Another quick business idea. Someone could start a great orange tie company. Figure out a way to let people embroidery their BIP 39 seed phrases on on them. Well, figure this out. Everyone wants an orange tie. Now there's a business opportunity around the orange tie opportunity, I'm telling you. I'll tell the the opportunity is somebody does the drop shipping with the Bitcoin company's logo on it and then gives 20% to the company. So they get the branding and there's the there's the business idea. There we go. Wants to serve on. Love it. All right, guys, it's been fun. Cheers boys. All right, thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that on Ramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit on rampbitcoin.com/contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private Client advisors.