The Last Trade E011: Multigenerational Security for Bitcoin with Matt McClintock

What you're telling me is that music is about to stop, and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of bodarous extras ever assembled in the history of doubtless 19. Seventy 419-8790, 297-2000. 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, I say when we sell. Gentlemen, what a week. It's been a lot going on in the markets. Not going to lie, I'm a little bit tired. Took a trip up to New York to check out what's going on at pub Key. We had a great minding meet up last night. I'm excited to end the the week of recording with this discussion. We're joined by the Executive Manning Director. Managing Director, excuse me, of Bespoke Group, Matt Mcclintock. Matt, thank you for joining us today. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to dive into what you're doing at Bespoke Group. I think it's actually a great, this will be a great followup conversation to the episode recorded this week with Morgan Rashard. But before we jump into that, like I said, there's been a lot going on in the macroeconomic landscape this week. And so I'll rattle off a few of the headlines that are top of mind for me and then I'll just throw it to the board here to begin discussing them. So last Friday we had the Bank of Japan make a a questionable policy move sort of changing their strategy when it comes to yield curve control. That sent the J, GB markets into a bit of hysteria and the yen was pumping against the dollar. We had Fitch come out earlier this week and downgrade the US is credit rating from AAA to AA plus at the same time the Treasury unfortunately for them came and announced that they're they're planning on issuing $1.85 trillion worth of debt throughout the rest of this year. And at the same time we have interest payments on the debt that we've accrued here in the US approaching a trillion dollars and WTI crude ripping above 80 bucks. I think it was sitting around $83 today the last time I checked. So all those headlines mind the narrative that is really been getting stronger and stronger in the mainstream which is that it seems like the Fed is going to be able to to execute a soft landing here With all those headlines of mind, what do you guys think about the the probability of a soft landing materializing on the back end of these these interest rate hikes that the Fed's been on? Really really low in my book it's it's kind of it's a little frustrating to to you know Marty I'm sure you experienced this where you write about something you're trying to draw attention to it week after week month after month and and then you know a year later it starts to play out and everybody's surprised by it and and you're like well I've I've been trying to talk about how. This is going to happen and and this is kind of the position that I've been in this week of like I, you know the the math on the national debt and where it all points to has been out of my North Star. In terms of why the US dollar is going to continue to erode at an accelerating rate and why Bitcoin makes a ton of sense. More sense than ever in this current economic. Climate and and future outlook. And it's it's happening now. You know you you can't. You can't go from zero interest rates from the Fed for a decade and then suddenly Jack up interest rates to five plus percent, knowing that the national debt will have to roll over what interest rates apply to the national debt. Such that you're 30 plus trillion dollars of national debt eventually roll over to a 5% interest rate, which means $1.5 trillion of interest expense. When you're already running $2 trillion of annual deficit and that's been normalized over the last 20 years, you can't have that happen and it not point to the bond market falling apart. And the continuing erosion of the US dollar, it's just finally happening and arriving in the mainstream. Yeah, I think I got that, Michael. I was just, I just anchor. You know there's these different takes. We fall on different sides of the curve where Jesse gets in the math. I just think back to Parkers just pretty much debt, not enough dollars. It's been like this and they have to continue to print it. Everything's bound to break because you have to continue to deploy more and more dollars into the system, hence inflation and just a matter of time between these little like cracks starting to show up in fissure and then we consistently see it every 36912 months. Shit breaks and everybody's like what happened and it's like we've been saying it the whole time. And and Japan is looking to our future too. Like Japan is just a little further along in this in this late stage Fiat process, they've had to embark on yield curve control. They approached it in a terrible way because they drew a line, They drew a line so low that on their interest rate graph and then the Fed has like quickly. You know raise rates way beyond that. So now when you draw a line you're you're beholden to defending that line and not allowing the free market to play out which is a terrible position to be in and and we're seeing that breaking with the the yen being the release valve for it all. So you know, if you want to know what's going to happen to all Fiat currencies eventually. Just look at what has been the trajectory of Japan over the last 10 years and then imagine that on a kind of compressed timeline, it maybe some countries they collapse way faster US, maybe it's the same rate, but yeah, that's that's the next decade for us. I think Japan provides some lessons, but I think there's some key difference, some key differences. I mean, the US is, you know? Much more important on the global scale, it's a much larger economy. But one certain case in point is just the aging population in the USI don't know. I think that in some cases I tend to agree, Marty, that a soft landing is impossible. On the other hand, I would not underestimate Washington's ability to financial engineer something that just continues to kick the can down the road. I don't think that argues against Bitcoin as the pristine store of value because it allows people to save wealth and kind of build up value in non-us dollar denominated terms. But you know, I kind of ascribed to this theory that yeah, all Fiat currencies are are broken and corrupt at their core. It's just that I think the US is probably the strongest of a terrible system and I think we're going to see. Other economies fall on much harder terms before the US, before the US follows suit. I think that one of the things that's been really interesting to see is the BRICS nations really starting to denominate trade agreements outside of the US dollars. So I wonder if we're starting to see a faster erosion of the US dollar system, excuse me, the the euro dollar system, which can then begin to undermine the. U.S. Dollar as a global reserve currency. Yep, absolutely big part of it you reminded me of Greg Foss likes to say that the US, the US dollar looks like the the best looking horse at the glue factory say it's ultimately it's not going to matter too much but for now it's it's in the best shape and. It's great to have auction, Yeah. And I actually, I listened to a podcast and actually the Galaxy Brains podcast that Alex Thorne has from Galaxy Digital, and one of his recent guests works for one of the chain of analytics companies. But he was telling an anecdote about the shipping vessels that sit off the coast of South America, different countries, Ecuador being one of them. They fish the land and then they smuggle goods into the country too. But he was saying that via their analytics, they were able to find that they're actually sort of doing what the US did in the 70s after we went out the gold standard began flooding markets with dollars for goods across the world, he said. They're seeing that with the digital yuan in places like Ecuador where there's communities in Ecuador beginning to transact with the digital yuan as the Chinese are sort of integrate it into their economy via these fishing vessels, which I thought was very interesting and is again like sort of trifens, the land playing out. But instead of the dollar flooding international markets with dollars, seems like the Chinese in some form or another, maybe on a very small scale at this particular point in time. Or doing that with Yuan which would play into that thesis you just described Matt, where it seems like the dollars dominance is waning. And then on top of that too like going back to like all these headlines and the soft landing. I agree. I think the Fed will find a way to create these facilities and kick the can down the road. But in terms of like having egg on their face, I think the really the signal here is everything going on in the bond markets and then you have WT I3 means the same time which with CPI from June being a 3.3%, we'll find out what it was in July Eker too. But when we get the August number next month, I think it's going to be surprising especially if WTI stays elevated, it even rises more and then the situation in the bond markets continues to deteriorate and then the Feds forced to pause in September, remember they don't have a meeting this month. So I think we could find ourselves in a scenario where especially oil ribs like it becomes pretty obvious that inflation hasn't been tamed and that actually materializes in CPI and that's just like big egg on the face for Jerome Powell. And I guess that's the big question at that point does the psychological, does the psyche of of people using the dollar begin to change like holy crap, they they just did all those interest rate hikes and they actually didn't tame inflation as well as they were. They were saying they did. Yeah, it is very notable that you talked about a few things there already like price of oil's up. Gold is reacting positively to this this week. That means that you know, people are are fleeing from bonds. Bill Ackman is betting that yields are going to go to 5.5% for 30 year U.S. Treasuries. Billionaire. Big personality and that that's that's a big bet and I wrote about this recently, this the bondholders burning platform. The math just doesn't add up. Bill Ackman's bet is more medium term based. He thinks that inflation is going to be sticky and it's here to stay basically. And and then, you know, I come back to the the 70s and the 30s and 40s. We had three waves of inflation. Did we just go through you know one up and down and and we're finding some sort of base here before the next structural set of inflation comes because specifically because the with interest rates going up. So fast. So over the last 18 months, the bodies are going to start showing up more and more. Now the banking crisis I think is not over. It's kind of more on pause. The bodies start to show up. the Fed has to print to stimulate us out of this. And then you get that situation where the Matt's talking about of it. It looks like a soft landing because they print so much, They print so much that markets start to go up again quickly. In order to try to paper over the the real harm that has been caused to to the actual economy in terms of businesses going bankrupt and and and job losses starting to materialize more. So you print a bunch to make it look like everything's fine, but that triggers inflation. So, you know, they've painted themselves into a corner. And and it's just a matter of time until the shoe drops. But when the shoe drops, it won't look like it's dropping because they'll print so much money. It'll look like it. It's floating in midair, you know, like I think that's the how this manifests in in reality. But when you're messing with the measuring stick, when you're messing with what a dollar is because you're printing so much of it. There's no way around it like that is an era of economic destruction. If you're using that as your unit of account, if you're holding those, that asset. And that means if you're holding actual dollars or if you're holding bonds, which are promises of future dollars. And in that context, gold, hard assets, gold land, Bitcoin do well. It's interesting cuz we keep talking. We talked about this with Dylan about the different CPI metrics and all these different ways to measure. And we talked about like the coast and the news and there's things that are happening on CNN versus what's happening in the real world. And I think about in the same example of Jesse, you reference the bodies and like we know the bodies are everywhere. If you look they're like just like sitting there there was this there was not to you but just in general like it's all the signs are there in a macro and micro scale. There was a recent, if you guys remember 21, I think it was late 20, but 21 during COVID there was a company called Hoppin that was like software like we're on right now, you know web video for you know basically to take what happened in physical world when it came to conferences and put online, it was a multibillion dollar firm. I think at the highest point they raised that close to $7 billion. On the valuation side, they raised over a billion dollars in in venture capital. And they just sold like the past week for a couple $100 million to RingCentral and they took the capital and they, you know, kind of dispersed it to the venture of, you know, pennies on the dollar. I think the CEO, you know, he made out like a bandit. He sold on secondaries. But the point in all that is like there's a big body there when you think about the amount of dollars destroyed, the trust from an LP to the venture side, the the valuation that was at that time, people took those dollars and went and bought cars and all the things from an employee standpoint, those people out of jobs. Now that inflation is running that, you know, capital amount of capital chasing fixed goods, whether it's oil, cars, whatever Bitcoin. But that's just like one example that's all over the place. And you reference Jesse Gold. Bitcoin and land. And it's fascinating because you talk about bonds, we talk about, you know venture all these different asset classes that people are traditionally like put whether they're you know their mutual fund or if they're a very high net worth individual. It's going into private equity via venture, other assets. So where do you park it if you know all these things, if you know that like there's bodies continue to pile up but you don't know where the actual trade is. And you see this also like Russia season 300 billion in treasuries. It all just like points to these things that are are foundational and Golden Land have been that for thousands of years. And it's easy and it's like if you put the time and you start to recognize bitcoins right up there and it's kind of crazy to think about, right because it's like a 13 year old asset. But it's like where else would we feel good Just personally people on this call outside of the three things we mentioned, maybe a few others that you know, you can touch, feel, grab, move at a moment. I mean, I guess you can't move the land, but you have other assurances around it. It's just a fascinating situation to be in because everybody would think that that's that's insane. But the reality is there is only so many things that I think anybody on this call will feel comfortable in parking, you know their wealth in. Well, I think that's that's a critical point because it's a matter of how do you store value versus what do you use it as a medium exchange. I know a lot of times we talked about this in the broader context of Bitcoin, but I mean, there's so many things that Jesse, you kind of particularly zeroed in on that I think are worth kind of digging in on. A little bit, because I was kind of making some notes on this. I I mean, look, we're looking at the largest generational transfer of wealth in the history of the world, and it's underway right now as the enormous baby boom population begins to die, transition their wealth to younger people. Sometimes they're old folks like Gen. Xers like me, but then more like more than likely it's Gen. Z and Millennials that are on the receiving end of this. There is a natural tendency for younger adults, kind of the, what I would call the inheriting class now, to be interested in 21st century assets. They're already used to a global world, They're already used to a digital world. A digital store of value is much more logical for a lot of the inheriting class then a lump of gold, a brokerage account, a piece of real estate that nobody's ever visit visited in a long time. So there's there's already this shift underway. Another thing I kind of wanted to 0 in on a little bit is again, things, things are just different now, which which undermines, I think, the likelihood of a true soft landing. I mean, I believe that like the, you know, the historian Neil Ferguson wrote a book called Colossus years ago, and it's basically documenting the the death of an empire. And it you don't have to be a genius to figure out, he's basically talking about the American empire coming to an end. This book was years ago, but look at it. We've got the gerontocracy class that occupies all the seats of power. And from the White House through both seats of Congress, through a lot of the, you know, a lot of the legislators across the country, we're generally speaking, we're ruled by a bunch of septagenarians and octogenarians. And not only is it a gerontocracy like our friend. Nick Carter talks about it's also what I refer to, what the the better word for I think is kakistocracy. And if you look that up, a kakistocracy is ruling by the least fit and most incompetent class within a society. I think that's kind of where we are. And if you look at it, you look at where the innovation and regulations are taking place, the innovation in legislation is taking place. It's not here. It's not the United States. It's in places like Switzerland. It's in places like Singapore. It's in places like Dubai. And what do we see as a result? Well, naturally we're seeing outflows of capital and outflows of talent, and that is a sign of a dying Republic. So unless and until we get a significant change in leadership really kind of across the board throughout this country, I think the United States is going to be entering an era where we're trailing economically from a policy perspective and from a talent perspective. And I think all of that stuff argues against the idea of a long of a long term bullish outlook on American hegemony. You know, back in the 70s and even the 80s, we had the undisputed most powerful military in the world and we had the undisputed global reserve currency. But now we see that as being eroded farther and farther as time progresses. And now we sit here, you know, in the first third of the 21st century, and there are significant fissures in the foundation on which American power is built. And so I'm afraid that if we don't find a way to provide some freedom and flexibility in how Bitcoin digital assets, other innovation is built, going to something that more represents a sound monetary policy than just this print our way out of any disaster we can think of. But I'm afraid that we're we're beginning to see the longterm decline of of a Republic. Yeah, absolutely. I always think about the intransigent minority concept of I I'm with you. I think that the, the only way that we can save the Republic from the inevitable decline that comes from having been the world reserve currency. You know, like I think about what has happened to. The UK over the last 100 years, they were the world reserve currency going into World War Two and and then that was kind of their last gasp of of dominance, you know World War One really and and fading away and since then it's been kind of a story of slow erosion of their global standing and and that's our fate too unless we can. Hitch our wagon to something that has eternal staying power economically and and can't be eroded in the way that, you know, a national currency can be eroded because of taking on too much debt by printing, you know, U.S. Treasuries. And so Bitcoin becomes this existential hope, this hope for for the American endeavor that we can. Ride this thing by just waking up enough people to the economic reality of what's going on and what drives Bitcoin to higher and higher over time. And so if you can get to that tipping point of the intransigent minority, which is a tiny portion of the population but a loud and vocal portion of the population believing in something such that they can influence policy of of the whole. And and that's something like 10 million US bitcoiners. So you know 130th of the population holding Bitcoin, believing in it, understanding it and seeing it as a way to build a brighter future for America. How far away are we from that we're that's that's within a decade's reach I think. And if we can get there, we can hopefully shape policy enough to. Do what RFK is floating. You know, RFK Junior is floating this ridiculous idea of what if we back a small percentage of our national debt with hard assets like Bitcoin? And it's a ridiculous idea right now, but that Overton window shifts. And you know, this is a fringe political character saying it right now, but there's substance to it. And if we, as bitcoiners, loudly encourage this kind of conversation? That fringe idea can increasingly become a mainstream idea as politicians receive positive feedback for talking about it. And hopefully we can, you know, converge on having enough American Bitcoiners loudly advocating for Bitcoin and politicians seeing this receptive audience, this energized audience, and catering to them. Such that we can find some way to shore up America's fiscal position by incorporating Bitcoin into our financial landscape in a more deep way. That's that's the way where that's the the path forward where the US doesn't fade into obsolescence and instead retains its power on the global stage. Piggybacking on that, This is why we brought Matt on the show this week, because I think what you and your team at Bespoke are doing to sort of empower that intransient minority that's getting getting larger is extremely important. I think the discussion that myself, Michael and you had earlier this week was extremely illuminating to me because I think your approach and your perspective and how seriously Bitcoiners should be taking their their holdings. And protecting it over time is going to be imperative to have successful and transient minority in the long run. So I think this is a good jumping off point to talk a little bit about your history, Matt, why you started Bespoken and how you guys are sort of integrating yourself into the world of Bitcoin. Yeah, I mean I think this is stuff that we're seeing all the time. So just as a maybe a quick background on a practicing attorney, my my focus and my career has entirely been around wealth transfer structures. So kind of broadly under the umbrella of estate planning but with an I not just towards what happens to my stuff when I die, but how do I then pass my wealth on? Well, I guess first of all, how do I structure it in tax efficient ways that are private, that are protected from potential creditors, that may seek to separate me from this wealth that I've built? And when it does, when I do pass away, how do I pass on my wealth, however modest or vast it might be? How do I pass that on to the people I care about in ways that set them up to become the best versions of themselves? So that whatever I saved for however many Sats I stacked or whatever during my lifetime, now it's time to give that to somebody else. How do I make sure that I give it to them in a way that is tax efficient, that protects them from bad decisions and maybe you know self destruction often? How do I help them not be vulnerable to have that well taken away from them and voluntarily from somebody else. And so that's that's been the essence of my career in 2017. Well, I guess you know as I've because I've been doing this for a long time, I've got a very broad focus in that world. The vast majority of my clients are highly affluent. So we're doing a lot of tax mitigation planning whether it's capital gains tax or gift and estate tax planning, but it's also kind of multi jurisdictional in scope. So we're we're based in Evergreen Co, but we've got clients literally all over the country. We've got a handful of clients around the world, and so in 2017 I got introduced to a client prospect. I guess at the time, they've had about $150 million worth of Bitcoin. So kind of OG quality type of person. And as you might imagine, you know, they're dealing with a significant amount of wealth. They're dealing with massive estate tax liability if they were to die. And even beyond that, they're dealing with the complexity of managing an asset like Bitcoin. That's a heavily concentrated position in their estate that is complicated for somebody to inherit in a way that they understand what it is and how to do it, what to do with it. And so they kind of exposed me to the edge of the rabbit hole, if you will, because at the time, Bitcoin was nowhere on my radar. But then I had this epiphany as I was talking with this person who would become a client. I had this epiphany that if we can figure out how to substantiate the owner, the change of ownership from an individual to a tax advantaged type of trust structure or other type of entity structure. If we can figure out the mechanics of of ownership, then every single strategy we've ever done for decades is on the table with the same stuff that we've done for private equity, venture real estate, equities, gold, whatever. That's all on the table. If we can simply figure out how to put Bitcoin in a trust of some sort to then get these benefits that we're looking for. And so I did some really interesting work for that client. And because of my background is, you know, I've done a ton of education through the years where I'm a presenter in continuing education for other professionals. I started teaching, you know, how do you do estate planning with Bitcoin? And there was a lot of interest in that topic. And so before long, we started getting more and more clients that had significant Bitcoin positions. I mean like massive, massive Bitcoin positions and it kind of allowed us to then pivot our practice largely towards that focus. And so on the law firm side, we've continued to do complex legal structuring for clients who have significant Bitcoin positions as well as other significant asset positions. But then an increasing number of those clients were wanting additional services that were beyond the scope of what the law firm is designed to do. We also saw an opportunity to take that to scale as an independent enterprise. So we still do have the law firm, Evergreen Legacy Planning is the name of that organization. But Bespoke Group became a a multifamily office really specifically serving highly affluent clients with significant Bitcoin positions. And so we are a registered investment advisory. We've got an RIA inside the Bespoke group and within Bespoke in addition to helping shepherd the clients strategies over time, helping them get the most out of the legal strategies that they have whether we set them up or some other law firm set them up. But we also facilitate qualified custody of their Bitcoin as long as well as their gold, their equities, their Fiat assets whether that's qualified custody with with custodians here in the US or offshore. So we can do qualified custody for Bitcoin as well as pretty much any other asset, whether it's in Singapore, whether it's in Liechtenstein, whether it's in Switzerland, so whether it's in Canada, we can we can support that. So clients can actually now hold Bitcoin along with their other assets in title held structures that are not on a financial institutions balance sheet that are in non-us dollar denominated terms, so they can get some dedollarization of their Bitcoin positions as well as whatever else. And so it's been really an interesting ride. So I mean that's what we do, you know, we're law firm on the one side and then we're the multifamily office on the other. And I would say that, you know, we don't believe that there is such a thing as an expert really in anything, but we're, you know, pretty damn good at what we do. Yeah, I would. I would go as far as saying you guys are experts. I I'll embarrass you a little bit on this pod. I used to do it in in meetings back in in chain where I would, you know, tell folks were talking to you about Bitcoin finance. It's like there may be somebody that knows the Fed better. There may be somebody that knows Bitcoin better, but there's nobody on the planet Earth, and I'd point to progresses that knows Bitcoin and the Fed better the combined. And I would kind of put you in that same realm when it comes to the work that you guys do on complex estate planning. And Bitcoin, because it's still so early and as we're seeing that's where a lot of alpha and opportunity exists because you mirror these two like disparate things, you put them together and then the market has been asking for them and you end up being a leader and then you can pave the way. And so that's where we've been really excited to have you on and share the message and I think it's important like that. You you well, you work with very large and affluent clients. It's always been since I've known you your interest in sharing the knowledge and information because you have that asymmetry. And it's important not just for a fluent it's important for me, Marty, Jesse, just the mere plebs that have small small stacks to protect it outside of certain liabilities or things that could happen. And so maybe that's a good way to kind of dive into how it's important from across spectrums. I think that was something I was ignorant to is. Estate tax and what that means if we passed away and how that's changing or how do we like just actually plan for revocable, irrevocable trust and why that matters? Maybe if you talk a little bit about that could be good, yeah. And Matt, I hear there's something changing about a state tax or or some threshold. If you want to touch on that too. Yeah, I'll, I'll probably touch on that first. That's probably the easiest. There's a builtin expiration date on the tax law. In 2017, President Trump signed the 2017 Tax Act, and what that did is that doubled the federal estate tax exemption from $5 million per taxpayer to $10 million per taxpayer. And every year that value gets adjusted for inflation. So this year an individual in the United States can pass up to $12.92 million worth of whatever wealth they've got to their beneficiaries without any federal estate tax at all. Now there may be a separate state level estate tax, but from a federal estate tax perspective, 12.92 per taxpayer. So that means a married couple can pass up to 25.84 million without having to worry about the federal estate tax. So I mean obviously the vast majority of people in the United States don't have an estate tax problem, but the nature of these tax bills, these revenue bills that get enacted, is there some kind of, there's a wonky provision I'm going to go into, but they they all end up with an expiration date called a sunset date or a sunset provision, which means that this law that went into effect in 2017 expires 12/31 of 2025. So what that means is Congress, without lifting a finger, without doing anything at all, the law will automatically revert on January 1, 2026. We're going to wake up on New Year's Day with a raging hangover and it's going to hurt even worse because we know that our estate tax exemption just got cut in half. So we're going to wake up January 1 of 2026 and the exemption has been cut from 10 million plus inflation to 5,000,000 plus inflation and the first dollar over the exemption amount, whether that's today or in 2026, the first dollar gets taxed at $0.40 on the dollar. So it's a it's a usurious level of tax in my opinion. I doubt I'm going to get a whole lot of resistance from this crowd, but the it's a very high tax rate. The the reality is there's a lot of kind of structural gymnastics we can go through to help people with the states that are much, much, much larger than this, you know, 12.92 million. We construct them in ways where they will never pay a penny of estate tax. There's a lot of work that goes into that but you know $0.40 on the dollar really starts to pay for itself. The couple of things I wanted to 0 in on real quick though are there is this state level estate tax that's just, you know, various states have them, most states don't, but like Washington has got state level of state tax, Maryland does, New York does. There's a handful of states that still have this state level of state tax. So people who live in those states, they kind of have kind of two bogeys to look out for. They've got the big one that's the, you know, IRS on the federal estate tax. But then they've got their state revenue authorities as well. So the planning gets more complicated for clients there but Michael one of the things I wanted to 0 in on with you come to your point you know club level planning which is that's me too guys. I mean one of these days I I tell my wife I aspire to someday need my services. I don't today, but the the reality is the regardless of how big your stack is or really what the composition of your estate is, everybody really needs to have some level of trust based planning. Whether that's a revocable trust which is like the baseline for everybody, or one or more types of irrevocable trusts which you get into for tax and other reasons. You ought to have some type of trust as the base layer of your plan. That's like your L1 protocol, if you will. Because what that does is that allows you to seize control of the decision making process. If you become incapacitated or ultimately when you die, you privatize things. Because if you don't have, if you, if you have a, if you have no planning at all or if you have a will that you've used as your base layer of planning, all you've done is now send the people that you care the most about into the courthouse of the County Courthouse where you died, in the county where you died, to then deal with the judge and say yes, your honor, no, your honor. Here's what you know. Michael's dead. Here's, you know, here's his will, or hey, he didn't have a will. Here, here's his who is entitled to his stuff. And they have to complete an inventory of the assets in your estate, and they're going to inventory your laptop, they're going to inventory your key signature devices. And the judge is going to say, what the hell is this? And they're going to have to disclose that you had a Schwab account, you had a stack of gold in a fire safe at your house. You had a house, you had a car, you had a Fiat account and you had Bitcoin. The judge is going to say, wait, what the heck is that? How is your fiduciary going to be able to report back to the court on whether they made sound fiduciary decisions with your Bitcoin stack? Regardless of how committed you were to Bitcoin during your lifetime, guess what? You're dead. And so now somebody else is responsible for managing the assets that you left behind for the benefit of the people you left behind. And if you don't have clear instructions, ideally in some privatized manner, like a, again, revocable living trust, that's the most democratic strategy. If there is out there every, I mean, everybody, without exception, in my opinion, should have a revocable living trust as the foundation upon which the rest of their plan gets built. And for the vast majority of people, that's enough. But within that trust, you have to deal with things like Bitcoin because. For so many clients, certainly the clients I see and the people I think the guys on this on this broadcast here, a significant portion of our wealth is denominated in Bitcoin. So you know, we got to deal with some pesky legal issues and fiduciary law issues in order to equip our surviving spouse, our surviving partner, our parents, our kids, our friend, whoever is going to serve as the fiduciary. We've got to equip them to deal with this asset in a way that allows them to protect themselves. Because if you have got a big stack of Bitcoin relative to everything else and then Bitcoin enters one of these protracted bear markets where we're now we're in a trough. Well, if you know if half of your wealth is Bitcoin, which is not uncommon, you know, could very well be 70 or 80% of your wealth for a lot of our clients, how are you going to, how are you going to justify the fact that you didn't divest even in this bear market? So you have to plan for all that stuff, especially if you're a Bitcoiner. So I'll kind of pause there and see how that lands with you guys. I think there was two things, if you can expand on that. I don't know if you fully mentioned, but like when I think of some of this stuff is like what inspires action and the things that I've heard from your colleagues were when I'm alive. It also is important for the revocable because of just our. Where we sit on the risk profile, whether it's being in Bitcoin, people knowing we're in Bitcoin and somebody sues us and now that's available for some kind of, you know, court action. But then the other part is basically the market selling by the family because of the requirement if you're incapacitated and they see this volatile asset, I think that. Really resonates or would resonate with a lot of folks holding Bitcoin because they're thinking about it as a multigenerational asset. And the fact that it can be just market sold because they didn't have the right planning. Instead of actually going, you know, to whatever was written in a will, I think really would wake or at least bring the light. That it's not as simple as just putting in a will and saying here passes to somebody that this order of operations, if somebody you know leaves the earth, it could just be sold in dollars given to that individual and then there goes the estate tax as well, no 100%. So a couple of issues I wanted to provide some clarity on. So it's really important to folks understand that if the trust is revocable by you, you've got zero asset protection. Why? Because you control the trust, you set it up with your own assets, you're the trustee, you're the beneficiary, you got the power to revoke, you get sued. That revocable, that revocable trust is not going to help you one bit. What the revocable trust does do is it privatizes and streamlines the process of managing your assets. If you become incapacitated, so the people that you want to step into your shoes can do so. They've got the power to do that without having to go get appointed by a court to do that. And then when you pass away the same thing, you know they, the trust itself didn't die, just the person who set it up died. So now a successor trustee or a backup trustee steps in and now they manage the trust assets for the benefit of the beneficiaries. Maybe it's a spouse, partner, kids, whatever. But we can do that without having to go through the process of court proceedings so long as the trust instrument is very clear, giving the powers to deal with these complex assets that may be heavily concentrated and provided that anything that has a title is actually titled in the name of the trust. So for for people who are looking for asset protection, that becomes a really sticky wicket. I mean it's it's possible, but it's it's complicated. You're only talking about irrevocable trusts in those kind of contexts and you're you're only talking about irrevocable trust established in a handful of jurisdictions. They're like I said, they're complicated. And what you have to do is you have to effectively air gap yourself from the control over the trust of the property inside the trust. If you create a trust for the benefit often of somebody else, and then there's some ways kind of strategically you can create some indirect access back to you, You know, not going to get into the details there, but you know you can create these trusts that can can often be shielded from future creditors. There's nothing you can do if you've got an existing creditor right now. If if the claim has already arisen, there's not much you can do about that. But you can protect yourself for that future rainy someday if you do it very carefully. Very helpful. Yeah, it's funny. It wasn't until like a couple of years ago that I really became aware of like trust structures and thinking about it from a personal point of view and it seems like. Correct me if I'm wrong, man, but it seems like it's becoming like a bigger sort of trend. People are getting smarter about these structures being able to secure and preserve wealth over time. And I imagine this is a product of what we're seeing with the government, whether it be be the estate tax or simply the fact that they seem to be getting more and more Orwellian as time goes on. It is, is. Have trust been misunderstood or or? Is the awareness around them just been lacking for a certain period of time and now people are beginning to get wiser? You know, I like to think so, Marty. I mean, I think that I like to think that the American consumer is getting a little bit more educated. The and one thing to bear in mind is that it doesn't really matter where in the US you live. You can avail yourself of the benefits of planning under any state, or any country for that matter. So one thing I'll mention is that very often, if we've got clients who happen to live in a state that's got just particularly poor trust laws, maybe the maybe the trust laws don't provide a level of privacy. Maybe the trust laws give the beneficiaries of the trust more power than the creator of the trust wants to give them. And so we can be creative in finding the right jurisdictions to structure the estate plan. So you might be living in Colorado or California or Alabama or someplace like that, but we can create structures for you. We can create trust for you. And really desirable jurisdictions like Wyoming, like Nevada, like South Dakota, like the Cook Islands, there's, you know, you got the freedom to select what law is going to govern the interpretation of your trust. And and now really, we're kind of talking about that in the context of irrevocable, more complex trust planning. But I do think that people are kind of awakening to this idea that there's a better technology for wealth succession than just using a will. You know, it's it's like people are buying Bitcoin instead of gold. Hopefully people are establishing trust instead of using a will or God forbid doing nothing at all. I think people realize and especially in the in the Bitcoin space, you know, a lot of wealth has been created pretty quickly in the last 14 years. And I would say really especially since 2017, there's been tremendous wealth built through the various cycles that we've seen even even the 5:00 or so years. I've been part of this conversation I guess six years now. So they've been a tremendous amount of wealth. And when people who were mining Bitcoin early or even just kind of speculating on it early, now they've got a family. Now they are maybe in their 30s or in their 40s and they realize, wow, this is consequential. And I'm sure not going to sell it and go buy something stupid with it or something that's dollar denominated and can be basically printed into oblivion. I'm going to hold this. I'm going to hold it long term. It's going to be a transgenerational asset. I mean, hopefully the word is getting out that there's a better technology for managing your wealth than just, you know, dying with a will or with nothing at all. And the revokable trust is, like I said, it's like base level planning for literally everybody. Yeah, it's actually it's jogging back when we first met and you really recognizing having the expertise on this side and then finding out the power of multi seg. And how that changes a lot I think that changes that's changed a lot of like bitcoiners at least it were still early. But perceptions of estate planning because of private key ownership, it is nuclear in the sense that you can't really give up that material because even if you trust somebody in the event that they do not safeguard that material, if you're incapacitator, if you're still alive and they don't protect it, the reality of funds could be gone. That changes the multi cig and how you're able. Can you speak to any of that and just like whether it's from examples of? Ways you've seen in structure or just like the power of how that kind of changes inheritance, the dynamic that hasn't really existed. I feel like it's just really starting in the market where you have like different solutions or at least different protocols in place. So people can navigate that where they can be sovereign in the sense that they have unilateral control of the asset by having keys distributed multi cig but then also planning for a future where. Their beneficiaries or whoever's part of that can actually recover because I historically incorrect me if I'm wrong, but that really hasn't existed because you either had one side holding a single, you know, say seed or some kind of, you know, extravagant way of how you would charge that. But that ultimately adds a bunch of complexity or the other side of it sitting on Coinbase or some other third party. While that's good and may fall under certain qualified custodian standards that certain people need, at the end of the day that's still giving it up, which a lot of people I think aren't comfortable with. So, yeah, yeah, I mean there's a lot, there's a lot in that Michael, but I'll, I'll speak to that a bit. So yeah, multi cig definitely helps a ton, especially in the context of this revocable trust centered planning like we're talking about like this. But it's important I think to distinguish between the mechanical transfer of key material which multi cig helps provide. I mean I use multi cig, I'm an Unchained customer as well on my like my personal stack if you will. But that that definitely helps a lot because as you know, I think everybody here knows obviously you can select who has key material, you can establish the quorum rules and that facilitates the mechanical transfer. So if I get hit by a bus or slip off the side of the planet somewhere, you know the two out of three that I've selected, there are my backup signatures, no problem. They now still have control over my key material. That's great, but what if the people they give the key material to, I don't plan to give my Bitcoin to. I want them to hold that and manage that for the benefit of my children. So you know, now we've got the, you know, the basically this custody if you will, that's now still multi sig. But these people who are controlling the Bitcoin, are they the same people that I want to have as the trustees of my trust? Maybe, maybe not. I mean, maybe they're really great at Bitcoin, but maybe they don't know my kids. And so maybe they're not the best people to serve as the decision makers for my kids. Now we've got a complication. And so if we're only concerned about mechanically transferring Bitcoin to somebody else, multi sig is a brilliant solution. And like I said, I use it myself. But when we think about the broader benefits that establishing a trust can provide, You know, I've got the ability through a trust I create. I can create a trust for the benefit of my wife, the benefit of my children in a way that can provide them almost impenetrable asset protection once I die. So, like, if I die and I and through my estate plan, I've established a trust for the benefit of my wife, if my wife, in a profound lapse of judgment, were to remarry because, I mean, you're not going to get better than this babe. I mean, come on, If she were to remarry and that marriage ends in divorce, I would not want the wealth that I've built with her, especially the Bitcoin that we've accumulated together. I wouldn't want that to be subject to the claim of her soon to be exhusband in a divorce proceeding so I can design the structure for her that provides asset protection for her. Same thing for my daughters. I can pass my Bitcoin or my other wealth to them with a protective trust structure around it so that if my children end up getting sued from a business creditor, they end up getting, you know, whatever happens, you know, they just get sued for whatever reason. A creditor would not be able to reach in and take those assets away from my children involuntarily. And so we got to deal with, I think, both the mechanical transfer asset aspects of Bitcoin, but also the kind of more qualitative outcomes that we're looking for, like the privacy, like the protection. Keeping my kids from saying, hey, cool, you know, Bitcoin is $100,000 and now I've got a couple 100,000 bucks. I'm just going to go you know go buy a really fast car and wrap around telephone pole and have nothing to show for myself. You know if I don't have a trust in place that puts some guardrails on how the money gets used or how the wealth gets used, there's nothing stopping that from happening. So you know we've we've got to kind of think through not just the mechanics of of key management, but also the more qualitative guardrails around long term wealth preservation for the family. And if my trustee that I've appointed to be the decision maker in my trust for the benefit of the people I cared about, if that trustee does not have control over the key material, just like they've got to have control over my Schwab account, just like they've got to have control over the title to my house, they've got to be able to do their job. So to a certain degree these signature controls start to break down. But we can build some protections in place by having multiple trustees, just like we've got multiple signature holders and so maybe each trustee holds a signature. Or again when we're dealing with really large stacks and we're needing to enter into some tax leverage planning, multi sig doesn't work. We have to use something like a qualified custodian because we have to substantiate ownership of the Bitcoin in the name of the trust or the entity, and the only way we're going to do that is with a qualified custodian, at least currently. Yeah, it's so fascinating because. Or go ahead, Jesse. I was gonna take it in another direction. So yeah, you go first. I was just gonna say it's really fascinating because they're different functions of the market. But we talked about this earlier in the week with Marty. It's like this is the natural maturation of a process and like what you just described, like it sounds extensive. It's the requirement for for large amounts of capital to come in in a very similar way that we're building it on ramps. Like there's certain institutions that need certain assurances or certain high net worth individuals that need mapping of what the old world looks like in traditional assets to be able to recover or know that they have, you know, like you mentioned the mechanical aspect of moving the funds, but then also the. The legal wrapper around it that mirrors what they're used to and their other assets before they can step in. And so I think what you just described is are the are the process and things that are just like we're still early but having them out being able to articulate them really and we've seen this first hand with with you know folks that we know. So it's it's really fascinating to see like you know this number of years in and stuff like this starting to happen and and it also. 30K makes sense for certain people when that price 10X is, it makes sense for a lot more people. And so it's just again, building that plumbing for people to step into the market and feel comfortable in the way they do it. That's right. And I don't want to step on Jesse real quick, but one thing I wanted to circle in on is that, I mean this is just part of the natural maturation of the market. We kind of have to have a foot in both worlds right now. You know, we've got the world as it is. We've got the Fiat world that is kind of the dominant world. We've got the legal frameworks that we have right now, We've got the tax frameworks that we have right now and we have this impeccable pristine asset that really is the bridge to the future. And so, you know, I don't think it's realistic to think that, you know, before Bitcoin or start to die, Bitcoin just going to take over the world and everything's going to be a Bitcoin standard. I think it's going to be a longer process than that. And so I think that the more likely situation is that organizations like On ramp, organizations like Bespoke serve as a bridge between the world as it currently is and the world as it's in the process of becoming. Absolutely. Yeah. That's how we see it too And obviously with the on the nose on ramp name choice, it's a it's a bridge. I I loved what you you pointed out about trustees being. Potentially key holders in a multisig arrangement and and how that you know can be done. It's like it makes a lot of sense that that creates that Ave. And so I was going to ask about a couple questions for you. If you're thinking about the math, you know if if 5,000,000 plus interest plus inflation is going to be the threshold in the future. That and let's say Bitcoin 100 X's over the next couple decades. That would mean that anybody with 50,000 or or more today in Bitcoin could then have a a an estate greater than the allowable limit before taxes kick in. So that would be a lot of people, a lot of bitcoiners and and so I guess when when does it make sense to start setting something like this up and? You know, what type of bitcoiners do you think need this who aren't currently thinking about it? Yeah, I think that's a great question and your observations are right on. I know it seems a little bit counterintuitive, but really the ideal time to plan is when values are soft. Because if you, I mean, I'm taking my own advice on this. You know, when I saw Bitcoin start to really pull back, I thought, you know. I've got a very high conviction with the low time preference, long threshold, long hold threshold for Bitcoin. So I created for myself an irrevocable trust that would then put the value of whatever assets I put in that trust out of my estate for future purposes. So I can get the I can get the assets out of my estate at today's value, and then all the alpha that takes place between now and then. If Bitcoin goes 2X5 X 10X or more, all of that lift is out of my estate from a estate tax perspective. Now, I don't currently have a federally taxable estate. I could die today and my parent, my family, have no concerns about the federal estate tax. However, I don't plan on checking out anytime soon and I have a longterm conviction that Bitcoin is going to be a longterm store of value asset. I got out of my estate this year. I started, or maybe it was last year, I can't remember. But it's like I started just shunting the biggest part of my Bitcoin out of my estate because it's it's stuff I don't plan to sell. I have a longterm conviction on it. Might as well get it out now. Grant that I'm in the I've got the luxury being in the business. I can set up one of these things for myself for free and I understand how they work, but I would say that people who have, you know, call it, I don't know today's terms. You know mid 6 figures worth of Bitcoin. Let's say that you've got, you call it 10 to 15 Bitcoin then and you've got a long time horizon and you've got a high conviction. Something like this might make sense and I'll tell you I mean another thing that we can that we've done. I mean I like you know I've done this personally. So I mean I know not only that you can do it and how to do it. I also understand what it's like to live with these types of structures. We, you know, it's it's legal. So we did some watch trading on our Bitcoin as the as the prices came, as the prices started coming back. So we could kind of reset our bases, claim some losses, reset our bases and so now all that lift is outside of our estates and I was able to harvest some losses all while this stuff is sitting inside this trust. Now the sacrifice that goes along with that is that I don't have my key material. I've got a trustee who uses a qualified custodian and I have visibility and I have a high level of confidence in that fiduciary, that Trust Company that I use. I can fire them at any time I want. I can replace them with somebody else, but I have to. I have to trust in a trustless environment. I have to trust. And so for me that again, this is the challenge of having to navigate the world as it is right now. Because otherwise if I have a longterm conviction that Bitcoin is going to increase in value, I don't want to give that to my wife, maybe someday my kids or beyond in a way that is to their advantage. That's, that's what's required. Because I do believe that the days of thinking, oh, I'll just kind of create a private key succession mechanism with a deadman switch in a single sig. Or I'll create a treasure map with my sharded bit 39 phrase and, you know, lead my family to find my Bitcoin someday. Those days are gone because the IRS and other taxing authorities are getting very savvy on a trace down blockchain transactions. And one of these days somebody's going to want to monetize that Bitcoin. They're either going to sell it, you know, when things are at peak froth or they want to borrow against it. At some point they're going to get KY c'd on that Bitcoin. Sorry to be the wet blanket. That's the world we live in. So then they're going to have, they're going to have to have a compelling story to tell under penalty of perjury with risk of incarceration where that Bitcoin came from. And if they don't have a compelling story that they can back up, they're going to have some significant problems. So we have to treat this asset. We have to respect this asset has the transformational store of value asset that it is and and give it the planning it deserves. Yeah, those are some really compelling points and but I can't help it but observe that you chose irrevocable trust. I had to OK, and I had to to get the benefits that I wanted because when I have a revocable trust, just like the revocable trust that Mike and I were talking about, just like that revocable trust, it doesn't give me any asset protection. It also doesn't get the value out of my estate because I I can control the trust and so it it it structures the privacy and it structures the inheritance for my family. But the value of the assets in the revocable trust are included in my estate and there's a whole litany of tax code sections that tell you that. But the specific type of irrevocable trust I created is called a completed gift. Which means that when I establish the trust, I take my hand off the wheel, I say okay, I've got to entrust somebody else to manage this. Here are the terms. And if they don't follow those terms, they get sued and they can lose their license. And so it's punitive for them if they mess up. But I take my hands off the wheel and then once I put the value, once I put assets inside that trust by transferring from my unchanged multi sig transferring from a single sig sovereign device into a qualified custodian in an account that's titled in the name of my trust that marks the completion of that gift. I then have to report that gift on a gift tax return to the IRS. And So what that does, I'm not going to pay taxes on that. But what that does is that erodes part of my estate tax exemption. So I just, I mean I did remember because we got to do the gift tax return this year, I'm on extension, so I got to file it in October. But you know, I've got that twelve points, whatever it was last year, 12 point, some odd million, 12.3 or something like that. Last year I had $12.3 million worth of exemption and I put you know, X dollars worth of Bitcoin and it completed gift trust. I then have to report that I've now used up X dollars worth of my exemption and now I have my 12.92 -, X as my remaining exemption. So now I've basically told the IRS that I have put this outside of my estate for the benefit of the people I care about in this type of legal structure that works that way. Then once I die, whatever. I mean all this, all the alpha Bitcoin hits new, all time highs, goes 3X5 X 10X whatever. All of that is outside of my estate when I die, and because of the type of trust I established when my wife dies, when my children die, when my grandchildren die, when my great grandchildren die, it's not taxed. I I chose a trust in Wyoming that allows the trust to continue for 1000 years without distributing the assets out so that the value, the assets in the trust can be used for the benefit of my beneficiaries. But unless and until the trust actually distributes the assets out to the beneficiary, it's not subject to a state tax for many, many generations. And so the value can continue to compound generation after generation after generation in a highly tax efficient asset protected structure for the benefit of the people I care about. And so that's the kind of trust I created. That's the kind of trust that we create for clients who have significant wealth. Yeah, wow. It sounds like a Wyoming Irrevocable Trust might be Bitcoiner's best friend. Wyoming is a good one. Tell you that. Like I said, your mileage may vary. Different jurisdictions have different laws. South Dakota is a great one. Nevada is a great one. Wyoming super bullish on just because they're pretty Bitcoin friendly. But I would tell you that their their trust laws generally aren't the best in the in the world. They're good, but they're not the best. But for Bitcoin, probably good enough. I. Mean I think we were talking about seven generation thinking last week on the show. This guy's well beyond that. You're going way further, which is. I completely agree. Like, bitcoiners need to be thinking about this like again. After our conversation earlier this week, I'm certainly thinking about it much more seriously. Yeah. I mean, Marty, I think, you know, I know we talked about it last week. I've made this statement before. I do think that, you know, proactive planning is the ultimate exercise and sovereignty. You know, we talk about not your keys, not your coins. I mean, I've said that a million times myself. I've believed that. And you know, I, I agree that to A to a degree that's true. But if we don't, you know, exercise our own sovereignty in creating a plan that privatizes the process, that establishes the ground rules, who's going to be appointed to make decisions, how they're going to make decisions, how the assets are going to be used. If we don't do that, we're not sovereign. And I would say that they can kind of you know rewinding a little bit you got to look at this as a spectrum. You know you don't put all of your stack in any one thing. You shouldn't have all of your stack in a self sovereign, you shouldn't have all of your stack in a multi sig. You shouldn't have all your stack in a single qualified custodian. It's a matter of degrees. And so I've got some walking around Bitcoin. If I wanted to find a lightning channel somewhere and buy Michael a coffee next time I see him, cool, I can do that. And I've got that at the ready. If I, if I, you know, want to fly around the world with the key signature device in my pocket, I can do that. I've got a qualified custodian that's got an account for my revocable trust. I've got a qualified custodian for the biggest part of my stack in this irrevocable trust. You know, I think that it's it's a matter of diversifying custody, diversifying control. But the control really begins with the bitcoiner, I think, taking responsibility for for this wealth in a frankly kind of a grown up way. You talked about sovereignty in early and then this. And like, I think about the ultimate sovereignty is like education, right? Like if you think about the the past 15 years, there's been a lot of Bitcoin loss. And I think about what we're talking about now in like 10 years, they'll laugh about what we're how we're structuring this in the same way that people were doing faucets. And I'm sure Marty's probably lost more Bitcoin than than I've ever accumulated. And that the multi sig you like we talked about it and you referenced this is the time. It's counterintuitive to set up the trust and we talk about it all the time. With custody, it's the same thing. It's like no matter what your setup is, you always want to think about if the price is 10X what it is, because it inevitably will be and you don't want to be left scrambling at that time. And so it's just education time spent and it's this thing I keep angering to that we just keep, we've witnessed the past few years really, but it's been since, again, Bitcoin inception. It's very easy to like really get Bitcoin your hands on it. It's hard to hold it long term, whether it's to the volatility, the exchange hacks, or to what you just described. Different ways that the law and rules can basically take it in the in the court of law if you're incapacitated. And so it really like it made me, I think we talk about it sometimes it's like bitcoins, alien technology. It really is in the sense of like there's just this whole new rule set that you have to, you have to plan around from the custody all the way to how the legal rapper is, how it takes care of it. And it continues to evolve and the tools and the the laws and the trust and the jurisdictions evolve with it. And that's part of the education and like the time and the proof of work and learning this stuff. So that if you and that's part of like understanding where it can go long term, because I don't think what we just talked about in the hours that each person on this pods independently looked at this would never do that if you didn't have this visit. This vision of a future where Bitcoin is worth acts and facilitates all trade across the world. And so it's just all this, just the anchoring back to the point of like it really comes down to education, which is the ultimate sovereignty because then you can think for yourself and plan for yourself and that is the proof of work. I mean that's that's the proof of work and what we do. I mean I think that's a really good kind of reference point which I hadn't connected before. Michael, I think you're exactly right. I mean you have to put in the work. You have to put in the work to learn about Bitcoin. It's it is alien technology. It's complicated. It's really hard for a non tech guy like me to get get his head around and then you've got to think through like a a guy like me. I mean, I'm an attorney. I'm a legal strategist guy. What the hell do I know about Bitcoin? Well, I, you know, put in the work and I continue to put in the work. And now I've dedicated my careers, my businesses, building a team that spans the US into Europe, building a team around this. And so, yeah, you got to put in the work. It's a it's it's it's absolutely fascinating I think to see the, you know, I don't know if this is where you want to go with this. But one of the things I would maybe kind of highlight is that the Fiat world Fiat wealth is pivoting to Bitcoin in a way that I am both surprised and encouraged by. You know we get to, we get to deal with clients at the very you know like Apex of wealth, like the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. And I was speaking earlier this week with a gentleman who is 80 years old, the founder of a well known public company had a big liquidity event back in 2010, 2012 something like that. And he was talking to a mutual friend of ours, mutual acquaintance. And this guy has positioned he, he used to be a typical 6040 equities to equities to debt or equities to bonds kind of guy like because it worked. So now he's about 20% equities, heavy cash, a mountain of gold in Zurich, physical gold, not paper claims on gold. And he wanted to talk Bitcoin and he's like right on the edge of making a fairly significant move there and he wanted to talk to me about it from a legal structuring. What do you think, kind of thing. I got to tell you that is not an unusual conversation for me. I've got, you know, Fiat Wales that are now increasingly interested not in crypto, they're interested in Bitcoin because it's a store of value and they see it as a long term store of value that's unlike anything they've ever seen before. So the word is getting out. So I think that's just super encouraging to see and we're just, we're gonna see more of that over time. Yeah. Yeah. I was just, it reminds me of Michael Saylor's melting ice cube point of everybody has melting ice cube and billionaires feel that. More than anyone. Because when you do the numbers on that and you realize you're losing 510% in real terms every year from holding cash, that's a pretty penny and and so it's fascinating to hear an 80 year old who frankly 80 year olds barely understand the Internet, you know, so, so Bitcoin is quite a stretch but the pain point is so acute that. This can resonate and it's connecting and it's virally spreading. Yeah, I was just going to say the, to your point, Matt, like on our side of the world like it's been, it's been very interesting to see the endowment and pensions in large institutions looking at it. It's not like a joke anymore. It's just like how do you size it? How? What's? What's the total opportunity? Is it gold? How do you know the big thing custody. We've seen what's happened in the past. You know what's the difference between digital assets Bitcoin. But I keep thinking it's like risk adjusted like at this exact time is there a better can you think of a better time from whether it's building a business or allocating? Because it's like it is $500 billion market cap asset and it punches so far outside of its weight class and the fact that basically everybody on the planet Earth or at least anybody connected to an Internet has heard of the brand Bitcoin and at the same time it sits here as this little like. You know what else is $500 billion as an asset that we know of, You know, that's small. So it's it's a fascinating time to be alive, to build something in this space. This is the one of a new industrial revolution in some cases. I mean, I don't, I don't use that lightly and I I know that falls on friendly ears here. But I mean we really are at a generational not even generational probably multigenerational inflection point. I mean, this is, this is an enormous period of evolution in really in human history, and I think that the sovereign individual authors kind of have it right that borders matter less. We are tribes of shared interests as opposed to tribes of a particular nationality. So you know kind of rewinding all the way back to the macro conversation with it, what does mean geopolitically and as a Republic or whatever, like I tell you that for a lot of our clients they don't care. They they have less faith in preserving Fiat denominated wealth, especially US Fiat denominated wealth. They had a minimum, they want some exposure, they not exposure. They want direct ownership of non-us denominated Fiat wealth. So they want things like the Swiss franc, they want other harder Fiat assets but they also want non Fiat assets that are not U.S. dollar denominated because they feel that wealth eroding underneath their feet and that's and that's real. And I I think that's just going to accelerate. I don't see any sign of that changing, you know, in a in a long time. And I think that's a great opportunity for for guys like you, guys like me. Yeah I mean I'm glad you brought you brought it back to the front because I was I would I wouldn't be able to live with myself. We're talking about all these great countries and shelling points for talent. The great country of Texas I think is a is a wonderful place where you don't have to get in water where majority of the the people on this call have decided is there their shelling point to build a better future. So you know we talked about Singapore and India and these these other places like Switzerland, but I think Texas is is going to be just a you know drive down 35 if you're coming from up north. I think my tires would melt on the Interstate on the way down there. You get, you get a snowbird. You gotta you gotta pick your spots. Well, we get we gotta get the Texas bullying vault to hold Bitcoin. We gotta convince the state of Texas holds a Bitcoin on the balance sheet and if it's a matter of time, it's just a matter of time. It really is. I mean it's you mentioned how many bitcoiners in the United States is like you got 25 million sitting in Texas, so they don't even know it yet, yeah. Well, I mean, now we just describe what you just described with like the caliber of clients that you have that are beginning to turn the quarter on Bitcoin. When you factor that in with like what you were mentioning with the endowments and pensions beginning to really give Bitcoin a fair shake and then you throw Black Rock and their ETF in the mix and then you backdrop that with the subsidy having that's nine months away. I do think that we have the potential for this next cycle, not only the backdrop of the halving, but everything going on in the macroeconomic landscape as well to like to to be awe inspiring. I've been through 4 cycles now and I'm mentally preparing for this next one to be like anything I've ever experienced. A date with all those variables in mind. And again, really linking back to the conversation we had earlier this week and then building on it today with this conversation. Like setting up these structures right now seems like a very smart move for anybody. And like Matt said, Matt said, like even if you only have 500 grand worth of Bitcoin, 15 to 20 Bitcoin right now. Like if all that money does flood in and we have this supply inflation reduction on the horizon, I think it makes a lot of sense to begin setting this up as quickly as possible. Yeah, you know in the and I think we all kind of get excited about the price action because we got the luxury of thinking about that here in the US And you know the ETF's that are inevitable whether it's this go around or somewhere down the road it's it's inevitable. I personally believe that Larry Fink is going to get his because he's Larry Fink. And I think that there's going to be, there will be a few others investigate will get, there's fidelity will get there's will be a handful of them that's going to make these companies acquire Bitcoin so they can then issue their paper claims against Bitcoin. And I think the end you know you factor in the having cycle that you're talking about next year I think we will see certainly will see price action in U.S. dollar denominated terms drive Bitcoin to all time highs on a large. Scale, I, Marty, I share your perspective that you know, we're probably going to see Alpha and Bitcoin unlike anything we've seen perhaps. I mean certainly in the six years I've been involved. But more than that, I kind of think about this more in the devaluation of the dollar terms. You know, I sit here in Colorado, I'm outside Denver, in the mountains a little bit. So you know, we've had a major run up on real estate just like you guys down in Austin have seen and the question then becomes, is my real estate really that much more valuable or is the dollar just buying that much less? The same thing is going to be true about Bitcoin. It's going to be great. We're all going to be super stoked to see the value of our Bitcoin go up in U.S. dollar denominated terms. Because guess what? The tax code is also denominated in U.S. dollar terms. However, you know, I believe that Bitcoin is as pristine asset, but are we going to see the value of Bitcoin go up because Bitcoin is inherently that much more valuable? Or is a sovereign currency that we measure it by just that much more eroded? It's probably a combination of those things, but I think the erosion of the value of the dollar is happening at a much faster pace. So I mean I I talked to my wife about this. You know, our our house is a very modest small house, just happens to be in a great community. The real estate that I've had has gone up precipitously in U.S. dollar denominated terms. But it's like, is it really worth that? Or is it just because you know everything else is expensive? Everything else is expensive not because it's worth more, it's just because the dollar is worth a heck of a lot less. Yeah, I mean I think that that that ties back to, I don't think it's like we we mentioned Texas or certain places. It's not like necessarily just a a meme. It's like there's food production, there's beef, there's oil, there's all these things that are natural to when a dollar loses the ability to coordinate economic activity, you need actual real goods and then a form of money that people will accept. And so that's like the longterm part of all this is you want to be in an area that. Can have our own soft landing for for lack of better work. None. I I think that I completely agree with that. Like Bitcoin's appreciation will be driven by the devaluation of the dollar in part and then also do people recognizing its inherent fundamental value. And I think that will be very interesting to observe as we head towards 2030, like how we do people selling houses, buying houses, begin to denominate the value of those things in sats and Bitcoin. And once we get to that flipping point where you go to a bodega, you go to a corner store and you have Bitcoin prices alongside like U.S. dollar prices and maybe the US dollar prices are changing every day, but the Sats are staying somewhat stable. I think that's when we'll know that that the Bitcoin standard is upon us. I know, but before we wrap up, because I remember Matt, you really wanted to touch on this. When we just when we were talking earlier this week, like we've been saying the government's been good night, buddy, the the government's been been encroaching on our civil liberties and this is really going to come into effect I believe in the beginning of 2024 in terms of what needs to be disclosed to, Fin said by Llc's from a privacy perspective. Man, you're really gonna push my buttons now, Marty? I mean, you said you wanted to touch on it, so. Yeah, I mean, you're right. You're right. But I mean, look, this is again, this is the sign of a weak Republic in my perspective. When when a when a Republic or when a government authority can no longer. Rule with soft power. They have to start ruling with hard power. And I can't read the year it was passed. Maybe it was last year, maybe it was 2021, something like that. But I think it was 2021 that Congress, unfortunately bipartisan Congress passed a corporate transparency act under the guise of, you know, you know, clamping down on funding of terrorism and all this kind of stuff and money laundering, whatever. So this Corporate Transparency Act then got sent over to the Treasury Department to go through the rulemaking process, which is this shadowy, murky process by which a whole bunch of bureaucrats who have never, you know, made, you know, altruistic decisions in their lives sit down and make rules about how do we interpret this Corporate Transparency Act and as a result of. These kind of backroom conversations that took place a new body of rules under the Corporate Transparency Act, or the CTA for short, will now take effect January 1 of 2024, where with very few exceptions, most of the exceptions are kind of irrelevant. With very few exceptions, every single US domestic limited liability company that's currently exists now or that is established in the future will have to register. With the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network inside the Treasury Department to disclose the beneficial ownership and control person information of those entities, disclosing the full name, the address, the date of birth and either the Social Security number or tax ID number or a special fence in identifier number. To just say, hey, look, you know what, we, we believe you guys are all above board. But you know what just in case, why don't you go ahead and come on in and register. And by the way, if you don't it's going to be $250,000 and probably a decade in federal prison if you fail to comply. And so every single limited liability company, even if you established it only for personal family wealth preservation, whether you're on RAMP LLC or Bespoke Group LLC or. Whether you're, you know, Marty's Mad Stacks LLC or whatever it is, if it's a United States entity or if it's a foreign entity that has to register in the US just because of the applicable state laws of wherever you happen to live. Well, January 1, you're going to have about 30 days to comply with this law. And it just, I get incensed about this because it carries with it the insinuation that if you have a limited liability company for whatever reason in the world. Just managing family wealth. If you have that, you are assumed that you are committing a crime, because why else would you be registering with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network now granted, under the law, the database that you register with is going to be secure and private. And of course it will be until it is not, at which point. Some nation state or some hacking organization that's got an axe to grind is going to penetrate this database. And now all of a sudden they're going to have the name of every individual who's got a limited liability company. They're going to have their name, their address, their date of birth, the name of the entity and their tax identification number to then do with what Malefactors will want to do with that information. I think it's the most egregious overreach and the most egregious invasion of privacy that I've seen even farther than the Patriot Act, so-called air quotes, Patriot Act. And so we are working as hard as we can to find ways to establish structures for clients that don't pull them into the disclosure requirements of the CTA because. You know, it's all well and good that we don't want to finance terrorism. I don't want to finance terrorism either. That's cool. But guess what? I live in America and there's supposed to be a sense of privacy. There's supposed to be a sense of freedom behind our personal affairs. And the burden ought to be on the government to create a compelling case that I am violating the law rather than me have to come in and register proactively with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to promise I'm not a bad boy. I think it's a just a terrible, terrible thing. So people really ought to know about this. If your congressman ever opens the mail, I would encourage you to write them or e-mail them. I can tell you I have tried and I've got crickets from the leadership in Colorado. Maybe in Texas you'll get better mileage, but it's it's not maybe going to happen and it's already the law. The law is going to take effect in January 1. And the the cost of non compliance is is very, very painful. What does that look like in practice? Like from or? Go ahead, Martin. I was going to say it's disgusting, especially when you consider that the US federal government is probably the largest financier of terrorism around the world. But go ahead, Michael. I was, yeah, I was before, before asking how he's going to be like Marty hasn't been in a cage and I think. Matt was going to wake him up or let him out, but I was actually just just curious. I'd rather go down the Marty Jones route, but I was just curious what does it look like in practice from existing LLC in 2024 or net new LLC? Like, what is what is that? Sounds like a sounds like a process the government couldn't even handle, let alone. Yeah, I doubt they. I doubt they have the infrastructure to take in all this data in the first place. Guess what? It's not their problem. It's yours. It's not, you know, the burdens on the burdens on you, the burdens on the government. So, you know, can you know the burden on enforcement? Yeah, big problem. But do you want to be the guy who's not compliant and get the knock on the door by the fence in guys to say, oh, by the way, Marty, we noticed that you didn't register your liability company with us. Can we have a, here's some nice jewelry. Would you like to have a seat in the back of the SUV and we'll talk about it, you know, in an undisclosed location, probably not quite that bad. But you know, for sake of drama perhaps. Yeah, it's just it's again, it kind of gets back to my point that when you are a dying power, this is what you do when you are a gerontocracy, when you are a kakistocracy, when you are on the waning days of your power, this is the kind of crap you do. And yeah, it's, you know, thank God for Bitcoin, as Cynthia Lummos likes to say, and. Thank God for options that give us the ability to at least move some of our wealth off of these shores in legal ways. I mean we don't do anything that's illegal. We see the law, we see the tax code as a playbook and it's there are advantages, there are opportunities, there are assets. The law is an asset if you know how to use it and that's what we try to do, you know and until they change it. I mean we follow the rules and if when they change those we when they change the lot we you know change what we did. But it's, you know, I say, I say, I'm probably kind of a legal strategist and opportunist more than anything else. Yeah, that's almost a call for for more legal minds to come into this space. We we talk about it that they're very rare. I'd love that. I'd probably hire them. Yeah. Well, thank you for the work that you're doing, Matt. I think it's extremely important both on actually the services that you provide your clients directly and then the education you're providing others in your industry to get them wise about what's going on so that they can onboard more people into these structures and then ringing the alarm bell about what's going on with the CTA. Yeah, it's kind of. Funny, I feel like I'm the crotch of the old man shaking his fist at the sky and yelling at the clouds and telling them to get out and telling the kids to get off my lawn. And the older I get, the crankier I get. But I but I do think that there's just some, I think this is crap. I think that what we're seeing is just crap. And you know, I'm just trying to do, I do what I can to let people know that there's, you know, the wheels are wheels are falling off the wagon. You know you need to do something about it. Agreed. Yeah, I like the joke. I think I'm bitcoins 32 year old. Boomer, We're kindred spirits here. I'm. I'm very much display it is so it was like a humiliation ritual. I'm 51, so I was born in 72, so I'm not quite a boomer, but I hear what you're saying. Definitely a boomer for Bitcoin purposes. Yeah, it's been credit. I know we had a new segment we went to roll out, but I think in respect of everybody's time, we can push that to next week. Gentlemen, what do you think? I think so, yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I think I will say for everyone listening, if you enjoyed this content, you might also like on Ramps newsletter. Just today we had Dylan Mcclaire send out his weekly roundup of everything that's going on in the macro landscape. An incredible free research newsletter where he packages up everything that you should know from you know him spending all of his time in the market on on Twitter and researching. And so that is available at onrampbitcoin.com/research. You also get you get 2 emails a week, one being Dylan's weekly roundup and the other being a week weekly e-mail about an educational topic in Bitcoin. Often it's it's something that I've written. Recently we had a macro Jack put out his The Digital Gold Rush which was an excellent. A historical parallel, digging into what happened in the in the California Gold Rush and how it relates to what's setting up right now for Bitcoin. I'm just a fun read for for everyone, so check out on me at bitcoin.com/research. Put your e-mail there. You can unsubscribe anytime and and look forward to sharing more. Shout to Macro. Jackie was just pinging us in a separate channel that he ran into Dave column up and upstate New York the last Thursday he had Dave D Emmy over the weekend was like, hey, do you know this guy Macroge? I was like, yeah, we actually went to the same high school, which is this funny small world. Yeah, they put something in. But I like to joke with Marty. They they put something in the water down there. There's a lot of these bitcoiners that are freedom oriented writing on Twitter. And yeah, that was the focus of our high school. They the purpose was to make sure that we left and knew how to write. So I guess it was worth it. But before we wrap up Matt Work and anybody, let's just find out more about bespoke group and and what you guys are doing, how can they get a hold of you if they're they're interested? Yeah, just the website is just www.bespokegroup.io and because I'm an old man, LinkedIn is probably the best, best venue for me. I don't get a whole lot of value out of out of the bird app or now the X app or whatever the hell that's all about. So yeah, LinkedIn. You can just find me Matt Mcclintock. Name's MCC LINTOCK. And you can find me there. Yeah. And it's. You can always find me through Michael. Michael's my man. And so I. You reach out to Tangum and he can. He can get me. We can send you some of the materials, he shared. Those are some of the best materials I've seen in in the space. So yeah, happy to to pass along some of the stuff you guys worked on. Yeah, I mean anything that I've given you feel free to to you know distribute paper the world with it. I'm waiting for my I'm waiting for like some on ramp swag from you guys. Yes, we we do at some point need to make some swag. That is, she's in the intermediate horizon. Priorities. Priorities, I guess Two weeks TM. Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining us and educating us about what you're doing and how we can be smarter about planning for our future. I think it was incredibly insightful and I think people are getting a lot of value out of this. Well, thanks for thanks for letting me share. I mean I'm, I'm passionate about what I do and I think that what we do really I guess kind of the last thing I'd say and I'll just promise I'll shut up. It's just what whatever we build in life represents the economic measurement of our success. And it's it's only the economic measurement, but it does represent our time on this planet and so. When we think about, you know, how are we going to, you know, pass that on beyond ourselves. That's that's heavy. I mean, what you know what what's more important than planning to leave the people that you care about behind in the way that honors them and really sets them up to be the best, the best versions of themselves? It it goes far beyond the mechanics because it's there's much more that's important than taxes. There's a human element. To this process that often gets overlooked. When we focus on the mechanical, we focus on the tax. We don't really think about the human element of this. But it's it's it's critical. I mean, I don't know if you guys have kids or not, but a lot of the folks that will hear this ultimately will. One of these days, those kids are going to have to go on without us and how are we going to set them up to really succeed and and. Be the the best versions of themselves. Free from distractions, free from you know predators that could take advantage of them. Yeah. So it's it's that's really the most important thing of of what I do I think is is trying to blend the technical tax, mechanical, sterile, quantitative side of structuring with the human element of dealing with the totality of economic wealth that somebody's built in the hands of people who someday that will receive it. Very nicely said. Appreciate you sharing that. Yeah. It's not for us what we're going to leave behind, who we're going to leave it to, what's our legacy is going to be. I think these are very important things to think about in these troubling but exciting times. I think. I think we're going to end it there. Gentlemen, it was a pleasure. Sitting down and discussing all this with you over the last hour and a half hour and 45 minutes. We'll see you guys next week on Last Trade.