The Last Trade E019: The Institutional Allocator’s Journey to Bitcoin-only with Glenn Cameron

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 1974198792972000? 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. And we're live gentlemen, very interesting day to be meeting here. I was just saying markets are going a bit haywire right now. Oils up, interest rates are up, markets, stock markets are relatively flat. Consumption numbers are coming in low here in the United States below expectations. But we're here yet again to talk about Bitcoin. It's going to be chaotic out there. We've got this. Very pure protocol in the Bitcoin network that we can anchor to, and more people need to learn about it. And that's why we brought in Glenn Cameron from Cartwright to discuss what he's doing in the United Kingdom, advising pensions, giving investment advice, particularly around Bitcoin and digital assets at Cartwright. So we're very thankful to have you this week. Glenn, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah. I guess before we jump into the music conversation, let's talk a little bit about your personal journey. You seem very up to speed with what's going on in Bitcoin and educating your clients about the opportunity that lays before them. So what is your journey, particularly within Bitcoin? And then tell us a little bit about a little bit about Cartwright and what you're doing within Cartwright yourself. So yeah, So what happened was my previous role I was working as a portfolio manager managing multi asset class portfolios on a discretionary basis. So basically controlling exactly what happens in the portfolio. And within this larger company that I was working at, there was a private wealth division where they were managing the wealth of high need with individuals. And some of our competitors were starting to give their clients access to crypto in adverts and commerce. And there was like a chat group where we would talk about markets and what we were thinking and whatever. And the head of that private wealth division asked for a volunteer to look into crypto and how we get our clients access to it. And I'd kind of had an interest previously and so I put my hand up and said okay, I'll do that. And so we ended up doing a load of research and then looking at fund managers. You know that that we used to give access to our clients and then went through all the due diligence process and whatever and then got a particular fund manager on the buy list and then that fund manager came out to South Africa, which is where this job was. I was working Cape time and they sort of did road trip around the country with us talking to all our clients about what they do and the reason to make an allocation and whatever. And then, yeah, and then. And then I started to kind of dabble myself and started by I bought Bitcoin, but I also, you know, bought uni swap and polka dot and and then and then I kind of. And then I came across the Bitcoin standard and I read that. And then I started to look at some of the other cryptos more closely and I suddenly realized, OK, we're making a big mistake here. But then at about that time, I'd been offered a job at Cartwright before, but I had to go home for family reasons. So I didn't take the job at Cartwright. But I always kind of intended to come back to the UK. I've spent about 20 years of my life in the UK and that's kind of about slightly less than 2/3 of my career. And I always wanted to come back. So I called up Sam, who's the Director of Investment Consulting, and said, hey, is that job still available? And so we had like 2 interviews about two hours each. And near the end of the second interview, he said to me, okay, one last question, what do you think about crypto? Right? And by that time, I'd kind of worked out the difference between Bitcoin and crypto. So, you know, I kind of thought the question might be a trick question, like a filter, Like if you say you like crypto, then you're not going to get the job. So I told him what I thought. I thought, listen, I think Bitcoin's the only real thing here. These are the reasons why and whatever. And and after I'd finished, he said to me, well, that's exactly what he thinks. And I explained to him what I've been doing at my previous employer. And so he said, well, if he gives me the job, he wants me to lead IF it in this space. So it's kind of funny because my official title is head of digital assets. But Cartwright think the only digital asset worth anything is Bitcoin. So I'm actually the head of a digital asset, right? Yeah. And we're doing a number of things in the space. Yeah, I can tell you about about the various avenues we're going down with Bitcoin. You're the head of Bitcoin? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it just sounds more fancy if you say head of Digital Assets, right? Yeah, of course. What was it? What was it like personally for you at the end of that? In that second interview with your boss now to get to that point where you realize we're on the same page, this is awesome because in the world of institutional finance, there's a lot of noise and a lot of people who are still at the beginning stages of their rabbit hole journey that are a bit agnostic and want to do research on all these different crypto projects. Yeah, it was awesome because so my previous employer, once I figured it all out, right? So we'd have these once here, we'd have these investment away days and all the portfolio managers and like the Chief Investment Officer and all of us would go off site for a couple of days and we'd always have things on the agenda, right? So I pushed to get Bitcoin on the agenda and then I had this whole presentation explaining what I had figured out and whatever. And out of like 30 people on the investment team, I think there was one guy who had my back, right? Everyone else was, you know, laughing at me and thought it was absolutely ridiculous and whatever. And you know, because it's a traditional mindset, right? And obviously, when you dealing with large amounts of money that doesn't belong to you people, they slow to change their minds about things. You know, I mean, it's always been the case that when the new asset class comes into play, when it comes to institutional investors, happen with high yield bonds, happen with private equity. You know, when you first start talking to people about it, they just kind of poo poo it and say, you know, this is ridiculous, we're not interested. It's too risky, it's this, it's that. And then the next thing it's mainstream, right. So, yeah. And Sam, so that's that's the director of investment consulting, his name Sam Roberts, he kind of what happened was so he he was working through 2008, so was I. But he kind of figured something doesn't add up here, right the way financial markets are working, what's going on, it doesn't make any sense to me anymore. And so he started reading a lot and kind of by chance came across Austrian economics, right? And then all of a sudden things started to make much more sense and you could make sense of what happened back in the financial crisis. And then he became a gold bag, right? And then came across Bitcoin as in about 2013. Started dabbling in a little bit, but I don't think I mean, he told me he didn't really realize the significance of it. And then went the same route that a lot of us have gone. Started buying NFTS and crypto and all of this kind of stuff, and then started looking into it more. Read the Bitcoin standard, right. That's definitely a rite of passage, I think for a lot of people that have kind of figured out, you know, the signal from the noise and and then and then the next thing was he hired me and we spent the whole of last year figuring out what we want to do, how we're going to educate our clients. Yeah. And so that's kind of where it all came from there. The story is so fascinating because of the threat of the Bitcoin standard and. I just got like a little nostalgic thinking about, you know, when I was reading that 2017 and all the stuff going on then. But the this angle of, you know, Austrian economics, which is effectively just, you know, two schools of thought. One is like first principles thinking and then the state not into not needing to be intervening or be in the middle of of coordinating economic activity. And those are very like simple concepts. But if somebody can pick up that book and get through it, it's almost like the litmus test to the 30 people you referenced. And one of them said, no, like there's something else happening here. The other 29 thought you were crazy. It's not that that book is such a a good kind of though you you said ride a passage but like almost like a filter because a lot of people. And I don't know if it still gets brought up, but I know Marty, you've been around and Jesse on Twitter, where like that book is so polarizing where somebody looks at it and they're like, how could how could this be? And they just like, throw it on the floor. There's. And then if you can read the whole thing and you come out the other side, you're like, well, of course this makes sense. This is like this is very obvious and not that complicated. There it is. Yeah, it's. A hard. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, go ahead. When we do education sessions with our clients, right, we always give them all a copy of the Bitcoin standard, right? So yeah, And and also in the company, anybody can buy Bitcoin. I mean, buy the Bitcoin standard and expense it, right. And the people who do read it end up coming to me and saying, okay, how about that? Buy this thing, you know, in fact, helping somebody earlier buy Bitcoin, move it on that garden trays or hardware wallets, help them put it on and whatever. So that that that book works a treat if somebody wants to read it, right? Yeah. It's a hard book to read though. Like I think most people coming from finance, in particular Glenn, are probably not ready to read that right out of the gate. Like because it it really punches you on the nose in terms of your worldview about like what brings assets value and like attacking Keynesian. Norms and so that. That all under the bus. It's it's a painful read. But if you can get through that if you can like check your ego at the door your your your sense of like comfort at the door, it it is. I've told safety and it's more valuable than my Stanford MB A. In fact, it's sort of replaced my Stanford MB A because it actually explains the world and the world of value and in a way that that nothing else had before. It's just hard to get through. It's hard to accept. It's so fascinating. This is what makes us pod, I think special in like our diverse opinions but also backgrounds, but also how we got to Bitcoin because Jesse just said it was like. The easiest read and I feel like Marley, Marty, we need to be on this side or the middle because it was as inherent knowing that the world is completely messed up and it never trusted anything. And you read it was like, oh, this just like made it all make sense. And I remember reading it while I was at Wework and we were just like burning money. And I was like, this isn't real. And then you're reading this book and you're like, this actually starts to make sense. So yeah, it's fascinating because I could see how both sides look at And the other ones like, this is insane. Like literally can't get past the first couple chapters because this is like, this is blasphemy. This is not what I know or been taught. Yeah. And I actually think we're finding out something very important here in the context of Cartwright, like for your company, for the investment consultants within Cartwright to go out and actually articulate Bitcoin to people, it's most important to arm them with the education and the knowledge beforehand. So when we a lot of the focus on this show has been all right, how do we educate? Institutional investors and get them to come around to the thesis of Bitcoin and why they should get some exposure. And it really starts internally at institutions like Cartwright. And you need to equip your employee base with the knowledge to then go out and articulate that to your clients. And there's a lot of operations to all this, and if you were just gonna send people out there blind, like, yeah, you should get a Bitcoin exposure. It's probably not going to be as successful as sending out an army of consultants who are actually equipped with the knowledge to articulate the idea and the investment thesis behind this appropriately. Yeah, I mean, so the way that's kind of evolved within the company. So there was Sam and I, who understood this thing and wanted to pursue it and saw why it made sense and whatever. But the other investment consultants didn't know anything about the Bitcoin except what they read in the mainstream press, right? So the way it kind of happened was, OK, we're going to, we need to educate our clients on this. So we put together, because there's a lot to explain when it comes to Bitcoin, right? And it's kind of where do you start? So we put together 5 educational sessions, each one's an hour. The presentations only take about half an hour and then we leave about half an hour for questions and discussion at at the end. And as I put them together, I present them to Sam and then you hear suggest changes and stuff like that and I make those. And then you say, right, the next step is present to the whole investment team, right? And, you know, so at the first session, you know, there are a lot of eyes rolling and a lot of skepticism and whatever. But over the months as I've developed those educational sessions and I've had to do them for the investment team, all of a sudden I've got people in the investment team calling me, asking me questions, sending me messages on teams. A few of them have read the Bitcoin standard now and now only let's say over the last couple of months people have been coming to me saying to me, right, I want some Bitcoin, show me how to do this and whatever. So it is a long journey. I mean that's 18 months and I've had a captive audience. So when you're dealing with, you know, other, you know, clients and stuff like that, you don't always have the time. You know, you can't kind of nail them down and whatever. So it's a long journey to getting people comfortable, you know, with why. What is this thing like? Why should I care? Isn't it a Ponzi scheme? Isn't it just a load of rubbish? You know, why are you talking to me about this thing? And a lot of the investment consultants are kind of worried about approaching their clients because they don't want to be the one who approaches their clients and says, hey, I think you should make an allocation to Bitcoin. And the, I think the sort of unreal fear is that the client's going to turn around and say, well, if you're into that stuff, then I don't want you to be my investment consultant anymore. But my experience, because I've done loads of these educational sessions now, is that when I'm doing it for trustees of these, you know, charities, funeral trusts, pension schemes or whatever, I'm always pleasantly surprised we're actually in the session because a lot of them are professional trustees. So they'll sit on like 10 or 15 different pension schemes, and they're kind of worried about the reputational risk. So during the session, they'll ask all these sort of skeptical kind of questions or whatever. And then after the session, they'll come to me and say, hey, hey, do you mind telling me where I can get some Bitcoin, You know? So it's kind of a bizarre situation, but we always knew it was going to be a long journey and we're just kind of getting ready because the investment consultants are now at a point where they're saying, okay, I'm willing to talk to my clients about this. Obviously Sam and I are ready. So we just wanna be prepared. Yeah, it's an awesome little anecdote, A vignette, A microcosm of how this plays out everywhere, right? Like you are patient zero. You've caught this orange bug. And you are. Slowly spreading this, this sickness, this disease that is Bitcoin belief just by exposing people to the value of it and talking to it. And you have a captive audience with your your, your colleagues and you're slowly moving the needle within your organization. And I think, and I think that's happening everywhere, that's happening throughout society, in families, but also in organizations like yours. And that's why we're like really excited to talk talk with you today because you are at the front lines of of moving the needle in the finance world about the perceptions towards Bitcoin. And by the way for people listening like if if Glen's story sounds a lot like yours, if you are the orange pill champion in your organization, we would love to hear from you because we're trying to connect with with people like this. And and I I think it something you said earlier was really interesting to me about about how in your world this isn't really that new of a concept of having to introduce a new investable asset to the menu. You talked about how private equity wasn't a thing and how high yield debt wasn't a thing and wasn't on the radar of of the investment consultants and and the pensions as an option to include in their portfolio. And that you know your industry has seen has gone through this, this adoption curve of these other investable assets. And that because of that sort of recent learned wisdom you and and your boss see Bitcoin as on that same journey as and. And I don't think that we often connect the dots there about how there are other assets that didn't exist, you know and and were thought of as crazy at first recently you know in the last few decades. And the Bitcoin is is walking that same journey and and can and will continue on the adoption curve to normalize in the same way that private equity did as an investable asset. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, like, to be honest, okay. So I've worked with. I've taken over pension schemes where they'll have, say, a private equity allocation and it'll be sort of deep in the J curve. So I mean for the audience, what that means is there's just money kind of being taken out of the pension scheme to meet capital calls from the general partner of the private equity fund. And because of the way the fund is valued, there'll just be this sort of negative or definitely underperforming listed equities can be for like 5-6, seven years. And I've had clients that have kind of looked at that and said let's get rid of this private equity. If I'm not understanding that, that's the way it works, right that. You know, you go through the sort of death of the Jacob and then you come out of the other side and you only see the returns from years 7 to 12. And the interesting part about that for me is that people were willing to make an allocation to private equity without even understanding what they were investing in, right. And I think what it is, is that it's kind of in the you know. The investment kind of community milieu or particularly on the client side where it's kind of now the accepted norm to have private equity and and as soon as there's no reputational risk or anything like that, then if somebody suggests them, hey, you should have a allocation to private equity, they'll kind of. Do that even not really understanding what they're doing or what it is or how it works or anything like that. Just because they advisor or, you know, the investment professional that they're working with says this is what we should do, and I don't think we're quite there yet. With Bitcoin, if you just go to somebody and say, hey, make an allocation to Bitcoin, they're going to, they're going to blink, they're going to say why? Well, why are you suggesting this, you know? But I think we're getting there. Yeah. That's a good example of how, like the J Curve aspect of private equity is. That's what makes it a different asset class, right? Like it has its own idiosyncrasies that you have to understand in order to dabble in that. And here Bitcoin is the same thing. It has its own idiosyncrasies that you have to learn about and grapple with and understand. Yes, it's volatile. It has this crazy increasing scarcity mechanic built into it every four years that programmatically will happen. And that's really the, the core of it that you need to wrap your head around finite supply and increasing scarcity in order to understand why this is a different asset that has value alongside private equity and everything else in your portfolio. But it. So you know, and of course we all know that we all feel how we are earlier in that educational process in terms of the mainstream accepting that there's any merit there because most people don't even know the Bitcoin has a 21 million hard cap, let alone that there is a having coming in six months. People just don't know. And that's why it's such a a phenomenally interesting time for for all of us on this call. Because you know, we know, we know something that the rest of the world doesn't seem to process and and it's it's pretty exciting because then it then it becomes like being an early adopter of private equity. It's like being Bain Capital in the early 90s and you've got you know that things are mispriced and there's a big opportunity because nobody else is doing it. And I think that's where we're at right now. Glenn something that Jesse something that Jesse just said that is fascinating is there's there's almost two parts this whole equation. And you reference all the idiosyncratic or the idiosyncratic nature of the asset from understanding the underlying fundamentals, but it almost feels like that's a component. But then also there's the chaser that you reference with the private equity that people kind of like are gonna. Pass FOMO in exposure. Well, no. Just say like they're not gonna FOMO in, but they're gonna follow the lead of the black rocks of the world and and other firms. But then there's a secondary part. That precludes people from coming in even before BlackRock or even if BlackRock, which is the whole aspect of like does this thing just evaporate overnight, right. Like there's this chicken or egg thing that's always just like stuck in my head is that somebody can maybe not even be able to go down to understand the nuances or the like. They see a number go up. But it's like, well, I can't even really understand this because even if I got it, I can't allocate material amount of wealth to it because there's not even guarantee that it's going to exist in a year or ten years because historically it hadn't existed for investors. So I don't know if there's like a question there, but that's just another component of this is like even if you've got the fundamentals, you're like still how do I hold this long term and not look like an idiot because it just disappeared. Well, I got a question. This is building on something Jesse and I were discussing before Michael and Glenn hopped on, which is a dinner that we had last week. Michael with an asset manager and he had that same question like why should I? Tell my clients that they should be allocating the Bitcoin if it can go to 0. If it goes to 0, then I look like a terrible portfolio manager and I just flipped the frame on them is like, I get that I understand that career risk, but you also have to think about the career risk on the other side. If it runs to 200 K2 5500 K, God forbid, and you're sitting on the sidelines, they're going to ask you why didn't you get in and so just trying to juggle. That career risk dilemma that a lot of managers see themselves in and articulate that and then sizing accordingly with that in mind and expressing the trade-offs appropriately to your to your clients. Yeah, I mean, so The thing is that like the difference between, say, something like private equity and Bitcoin, right, is if a pension scheme, if a board of trustees. In conjunction with whoever the advisors are, make an allocation to a private equity fund and the thing blows up and does really badly. I mean it's it's not great. It's not going to look good. But at the same time there's kind of a level of more acceptance of that kind of thing where they they would kind of go well. That's investments, you know, there's risk, right? But. I think in people's minds with Bitcoin, if they make an allocation to Bitcoin right, and it turned out to be an illusion and went to zero, I think people would be a lot more harsh with them. But I get your point Marty, which is, which is our point, right? Because in in Sam, in my head this thing is kind of inevitable. And so we're on that side of the equation because we've got a better understanding of it than the people we're talking to. And we're saying, you know, do you want to be making your first 2% allocation to Bitcoin when you know the the people who did that earlier, their performance is, you know, leaving you in the dust? You know, we did work with, I mean, this is the kind of thing that we showed clients just as one part of what we showed them, but we kind of say them, right. This is what your portfolio looked like over the last five years, right? Let's put the 2% allocation to Bitcoin into your portfolio. You know, historically what would have happened if we'd made that 2% allocation to Bitcoin and we'll take that from equities because that's the next sort of most volatile thing in your portfolio. And we show them that the maximum drawdowns in the portfolio are no bigger, the volatility is no bigger. And then it makes this massive bump to the portfolio's performance over the last five years, right. And we say. So now the reason why we want to talk to you about this is because what if this keeps happening, you know? And then we obviously have to explain to them why we think it's going to keep happening. But yeah, when when you frame it that way, I'm sure you get the response of of past performance is not indicative of future results. And and yet we know that the conditions looking forward are just as positive for for Bitcoin, in part because of the programmatic nature of increasing scarcity, but also because of the, you know, inflation, the mounting sovereign debt. So how do you answer that like inevitable objection that pops up from people about, well, it doesn't matter that Bitcoin was the best performing asset of the last decade. That doesn't mean anything going forward. So the way we deal with that is we we, we talk to them about monetary premiums. Right. So we use the example of like, so there's a type of Ferrari. I can't remember, it's a vintage Ferrari. I can't remember what the model is, but it's the most expensive vintage car in the world, right? And we say to them, if this car's value was just in its utility, you know, just getting from A to B, it wouldn't cost, you know, $30 million for the car. So there's certain assets that contain a monetary premium, right. And people kind of get that. And we say, you know, if you buy like a just a normal car, you know, whatever, make a Volkswagen or something like that, you nobody considers that an investment, right? They understand that it's a depreciating asset and its own only value is a means of transport. Right. But with a Ferrari like that one, the the person who's bought that Ferrari, they definitely think that it is an investment and a good place to store their wealth, right? And so then we explained to them that all financial assets have a partly A monetary premium, right, but the monetary premium embedded in different asset classes. Is dependent on the currency in which they denominated. So if the real value of the currency is falling, then people are going to be looking to put their money into assets to protect it from that depreciating value, right? Then we kind of show them the what's happened to the money supply both in the US and the UK, right in the in the US it's kind of tripled since 2008. In the UK it's doubled, right. And then we show them the implications of that, right. And and so we start with the, the Cape ratio, the Shiller Cape ratio and we show them you know what the valuations of equities are compared to you know the 100 year averages. And then we also look at like property. So we look at value to income multiples in property, you know and they sort of. Three times higher. So the the residential property in the UK and the US then in the US it sells at about 9 times average earnings is the average house price and in the UKI think it's slightly higher and before 2008 you could buy a house for about four times annual earnings, right, So somewhere between 2:00 and three times. And so we said to them, these things are overvalued because people are not just buying them for the intrinsic value from the because of the income they can earn from the asset. They're using them as a place to store their wealth just like that Ferrari, right. And now you've got something right that you don't need to manage, maintain. That is strictly scarce, can be traded globally 24/7, 365. It's very liquid. And so the people who are buying those Ferraris are probably going to say, hey, this is a hell of a lot easier. You know, if I want to sell that Ferrari, I can't sell it in a week. I've got to put it on the Sotheby's auction. It's a whole and the high transaction costs and whatever and here's something that's very scarce, they can park their wealth and it save themselves from that debasement, you know. So that's kind of the way we we go about explaining that. It's a really fascinating way on the position and of going to the like most I haven't heard it in that way is like the most non fungible thing that you would give up to being very valuable. It's like a Ferrari. It's vintage of course. Like it's most people would say yeah I agree it's worth that I wouldn't pay it. But it it's worth that. And then somebody who's valuing it, working backwards to like the fungibility and you know what you reference all the things we know about bitcoins properties and like well then that would have some value if you can get all that monetary premium captured in something digital that can't be replicated. Yeah. And and going back to Marty's point, right, about being on, you know the the wrong side of the all of this is what we say to clients is. So if the thesis is correct, right, the capital that flows into Bitcoin has to come from somewhere, right? So it's going to be coming out of all those other assets. So probably when this thing starts to take off, it's going to be at the same time as the values being sucked out of all these other things. So it kind of acts like a bit of a black hole, right, Just kind of sucking value into it. So we're saying the risk is that you don't have an allocation, not that you do. Yeah. Yeah. Get that black hole insurance. Yeah, Yeah. Or you or you're hoping that overvalued equities in terms of PE ratios keep going up or or you're hoping that housing, if you're, if you're going to buy a rental unit, you know to store your value in the house. You're hoping that that housing becomes more unaffordable. And conversely the those premiums that have built up in those, those asset classes that have been become monetized because the money is going bad. We've monetized all these other assets as store value assets and they're all over inflated because of it. And you're right. Here comes this little black hole that is a more perfect store of value that has all of instead of that house. You can store your value perfectly through time without any, you know, loss, any evaporation along the way, no maintenance, you don't have to deal with tenants, You know, you don't have to pay property taxes. That's a much more attractive store value asset once people actually understand the option at hand. Yeah. And again going back to like framing, using that as an example, Jesse, it's like how long do you really think this can persist in these other asset classes cuz whether it's real estate? And the value of housing going up to a point where it's literally becoming unaffordable for the vast majority of, well, just citizens in the United States will focus on our real estate market or equities. When you look at PE ratios, like how high can they really go before it gets insane, we know, Kane said. Markets can remain illogical far longer than you can remain solvent, but at some point the end of that road does come and and. Things have to fall back to reality, yeah? Yeah. There's so much irrationality in markets, right? So we're trying to explain this to our clients because The thing is, okay in a world without Bitcoin, what do you do? You look at the thing that can give you a real return, right? But if you. You know, if you put all your money and things that can give you a real return, it's going to be very volatile. And so for our kinds like defined like mature, defined benefit pension schemes or charities that are actually relying on the income from their portfolios or female trust that are more mature where they're paying out for funerals all the time and stuff like that, they can't afford to have the volatility because. If you're drawing the income on a very volatile portfolio, you'll deplete the capital faster than you know, 2 portfolios with the same return, but one's more volatile than the other one. The volatile one will reduce the capital more quickly and so. You know, so, so The thing is you can only invest so much in the things that are going to give you a real return. Then you got to look for OK, what is going to dampen the volatility, what is not correlated here and whatever. And so they go and invest in, you know, bonds and whatever, and we've got to match the liabilities of the portfolio. You know, for the type of clients is, is and whatever. But the reality is a lot of the time they're not getting a real return on a huge chunk of the assets. And we're saying, look, just put 2% of this thing here and it'll compensate for that, right? It'll it'll kind of make up all of that negative real return on you that you're getting on a huge chunk of your portfolio. It sounds like a no brainer to me. I mean it's either that or you you're buying NVIDIA at 100 hundred times price earnings. 245 the last time we checked. Yeah. Yeah, it's absolutely crazy. Yeah. It's like I, I, I send emails to the other investment like I sent one the other day right, with like the the yield, the dividend yield on the S&P 500. OK, including buybacks, right, versus and this was before the big rise in yields now right. And then that compared to the yields on say 10 year treasury, right. And then you do the same comparison now, right and equity should be way lower because you know you used to get about the same yield on both right now you get a much higher yield on treasuries, but the valuation of equities hasn't gone down. So there's like all these irrational things that they don't kind of add up. And I I think this is kind of what Sam kind of was thinking about back in 2008. It was like, hey, this, this game that I've been doing for such a long time doesn't make sense anymore, right. And then you get this thing that gives you a different leans on the world and you realize, oh, because what I said to the other investment consultants was we're dealing with, you know, 10s of millions, hundreds of 1,000,000, you know, in aggregate billions of pounds. But we never think about what is actually at the base of it, what is the money? You know, we, we're thinking about equities, bonds, property, private equity, all of these things. But they're all denominated in the sphere currency. So if that thing's losing value, it doesn't matter what all of these assets are doing, right. It's a kind of first principles kind of thing from the ground up. First, figure out what's going on with the thing that's at the at the Foundation. Yeah, That's why I think all the benchmarks are, are flawed because we talk about real returns, but what are real returns when like the CPI print is what, you know, historically was 2%, it was much higher and now we say it's 3% and it's probably 10%. You know, like these numbers have all been skewed. So looking at that tail end of your retirement, what actually can you buy? What can you do when the stake is, you know, $20 a pound or whatever it cost? Yeah, So what we did was, so at first I was trying to write articles about Bitcoin. We brought like a PR agency that gets them published in all the different publications that are relevant for our client base. And I was trying to write Bitcoin once, but whenever I wrote one, they were like, I don't think this is going to fly with our audience, you know, So we changed tack and we were like, let's just write about money. We won't mention Bitcoin, right? And so the first article was we used that old analogy of like, you know, like a fish doesn't know that it lives in water. It spends its whole life in water and doesn't even know it's in water. And that's what how we live with money, right? We kind of operate with this thing. But we never questioned like where does this thing come from? Like, I can't remember what documentary it was, but I I watched this documentary where they went around London and they they interviewed people and they said to them, where does the money come from? You know, and like most of the people were like, well, the Bank of England's got gold in its vaults and then they issue pounds or or other people who were saying no. What happens is we all put our money in the bank, right? And then when people need to borrow some of it, then the bank acts as an intermediary, you know, so like not one person actually knew what was going on, right? The reality of the situation. And it's the same with investment consultants, right, Like all of our competitors. So there's more than 10, definitely, maybe as high as 20, like large investment consultancies in the UK And if you look at their name with the word Bitcoin in it, they've all got reports writing Bitcoin off, right? And it's because they don't understand things from first principles. Now it reminds me, I think Peter Schiff was going around Occupy Wall Street asking the same question here in the United States and everybody was like, oh, it's all backed by gold. It's like, no, it's not not backed by anything but the faith of future production of our economy. And it is scare. It is on the scary thinking that the vast majority of the world are fish and water who don't have any connection to. What is arguably the most important tool they use on a daily basis? Money. Yeah, well, you know, it's like they say on the notes, backed by the full faith and credit of whatever central bank or whatever, right? So people are under the illusion for some reason. I wonder why they don't think that nobody ever does it right that I can take a £50 note to the Bank of England and they'll swap it for gold, right? And of course that's not going to happen. And so it's like, so then you point that out to them and then they go, yeah, but it's still backed by the government. So I go okay. Well, if you take that piece of paper and you give it to the central bank, what are they going to give you in return? Another 40 pound note, you know what I mean? So and that's such a mind Bender for people. It's almost like it's almost because it's so it's so what's the word I'm looking for? Like outrageous, right? That that when you tell them that they can't, they can't, they can't like, wrap their mind around it, right? Yeah. It's, it's there's that component and there's a component. We had it on one of the earlier shows. At the time they had the chart from like Financial Times in the UK, inflation was running 20% like groceries. And there's this aspect of like the mental model from an individual. It's like 1 unit of currency buys you more eggs every week and the other one buys you less. And for folks on this call, they've been like stacking like you materially see the life, your life materially change when not from like. Philosophical level, just of like the comfortability and optionality and all these things. And it's just like this thing that they've been living in and it's like there's something dragging you down and it's like, what is it? What is it you're looking at in? And it's almost like sometimes to know what it is, is scary in itself, right? So like, there is this problem that is out there. I thought this was just the way the world works. That's on a more micro level, but I think it's important because it's what we've been saying on this podcast. It's like individuals like yourself and Sam that recognize it. And then it was something that I thought of earlier. I'm curious like how much you think of it is like we know there's individuals in in firms that feel the same way that it resonate and listen to this. But it's something that I've always respected Marty for on on his other pods and just always being out there and not not afraid to speak up which is very important. We've seen that past couple years, a lot of things that don't make sense and it's very important to bring those things to light and have the conversation. And it made me think, like how much is Cartwright? Like leading the space because there's two people there that are working very closely aligned. So you have that air cover of like, I'm not just a crazy person, Sam's over here, you know, and Glen's over here versus people are alone on that island in firms. And so it's just like more of that. One, how much you think that's a component that you have like a partner in this? But then two, just from anybody listening out there, it's like it really is the time to speak up because it's so paramount from like your career that you know the business. And that we know we're right. We've done the work. And so now it's time to just be able to find those partners. And then most importantly, the pensioners at the end of the day, yeah. So it's kind of interesting, right? I mean, like, so first of all, to your point, Marty, with the defined benefit pension schemes, right? So the way it works is people work their whole life for a company and at the end there's a formula that works out that, OK, we'll give you 60% of your final salary for life as long as you live for, right? But in that formula, it kind of says we'll increase your pension by the rates of CPI or whatever, right? And the pension scheme itself is only on the hook for the rules of that pension scheme. So if real inflation is actually 10% higher, the pension scheme itself is not on the hope for that, right. So, So what ends up happening is when those people retire and their pension goes up by only a certain percentage every year, you know, the real purchasing power of their pension is actually declining. So 10 years after they've retired, you know, even though they've been getting those inflationary increases, which helps, you know, the they're still kind of, they've got less purchasing power on a monthly basis, right. Whereas with charities or with defined contribution pension schemes there, you know, the, the investment portfolio's performance determines what the beneficiaries of the assets actually get, right? And there's no kind of cap because there's no rules that say, hey, once we've gotten here, we don't need anymore, right? And then in terms of what you were saying, Michael, I mean, I think there'd be a lot of times because if you're just surrounded by people who are skeptical about this thing and think that it's all some kind of fugazi that I've kind of, you know, become delusional about or whatever, and you don't have anyone around you who can see what you see. I think I would have battled with that. And there even times there, even times where because I'm out there battling against the perception of Bitcoin, because wherever I go, there's just skepticism, right? And then I'll, I'll go and confide in town. I'll say, Jeeps, I need a break from Bitcoin, you know, and it's sort of that I need a break from Bitcoin. I need to be. I need a break from being that guy that has to answer everybody's questions and, you know, all the criticisms and the skepticism and all of that kind of stuff. But you know, Sam believes that in to a degree that gives me a lot of comfort Like he's told me before that he can see a world where in 10 years time, not just through the allocations through our clients, but also through other avenues that we're pursuing to do with Bitcoin in the company where he can see that this will be 30 to 40% of our whole business. You know, so when somebody that I respect that much says something like that, then I'm like then all of a sudden the the motivation and the belief kind of comes flooding back into it. So it's I think it's definitely important to have people because I think it's also important to hear those kinds of things from people that you respect very high. Because, I mean, you know, if if you're just hearing it from other, you know, you know, people that you don't know, whether they know what they're talking about, then it doesn't really help that much. Yeah, definitely sounds exhausting. It sounds like that guy that we're at Thanksgiving. But every day, yeah, you know, I was introduced like when I do the presentations for the other investment consultants, I always start the meetings by saying it's time for another episode of Crazy Bitcoin guys. It's awesome. Same on on that to the extent you can share, be curious. You know how you, so you're having this these discussions you're educating, but we talked about one side of the coin which is you know just the asset and why, why it should be a percentage of a portfolio. But then there's the other side of who your partners are, counterparties, how do you evaluate, how do you think about whether it's custody firms and and their brand, what other currencies they support, Just anything you can share about like first principles, thinking of how you guys are evaluating the space. Yeah. So there's kind of three or four areas that we're looking at Bitcoin for, right? First of all is Bitcoin playroll. So paying our own staff a little bit of Bitcoin every month and giving them the option of taking some of their salary in Bitcoin. The other thing is we're talking to companies about holding Bitcoin as part of the corporate treasury. And then obviously we've discussed a lot about institutions making an allocation to Bitcoin and then sort of more related to the Bitcoin corporate treasury. So in the financial space now like because of all the ESG stuff, right, clients want to know that you your your own company. So card right is net zero, right. So we're just doing our normal business and then we send all of our activities to a carbon ordered firm and they come back to us and say right, you're going to offset 30 tons worth of carbon and then we have to go and buy enough carbon credits, right. So we came up with this idea because we got contacted by a Bitcoin miner here in the UK where they're doing two things. They're looking at using generators powered by landfall gas. And also they, they're basically taking animal waste on these big livestock farms, putting them in anaerobic respirators, capturing methane, running Bitcoin miners. And they're kind of battling A, to get the financing to expand and B, to to get the carbon credit because you have to get verified, you know, by one of these verification bodies or whatever. So what's interesting for us about that is when we go spend a whole lot of money on carbon credits, it's, you know, some organization goes and plants a million trees or protects a piece of forest or whatever, and then we get carbon credits, right? But when we buy those carbon credits, we don't end up with anything. There's nothing on our balance sheets. It's just an expense. So we were like, hey, why don't we rather buy bid, right? And this miner said to us, they'll give us the carbon credits for free, right? So that way we end up getting the carbon credits and we get the Bitcoin on our balance sheet, right? And then we thought, hang on, why don't we offer this to our clients? They're all buying carbon credits too, right? And we could say the same thing to them. Hey, when you do this, it's just an expense. You don't end up with anything. Why don't you rather buy Bitcoin and get the carbon credits you need? But then the problem has become that we can't get the guy verified, right? So we are actually now speculatively looking at could we become a verification button. So that's specialized in Bitcoin mining operations where we kind of go and look at the operations and then kind of verify what they're doing so that they can get the carbon credits and then the rest of it plays out And then like in terms of the actual institutional staff. So what we found is so we've kind of looked at all the different options for because we want the Bitcoin to be in a fund. The reason why that's important is because we hold all of the clients assets on an institutional investment platform. So everything from you know multi asset credit, equities, property, everything is on the investment platform. And then when we need to rebalance a portfolio or move things around or whatever, all the assets are in one place. So the first thing was we need a Bitcoin fund that can go on the institutional investment platform. But then we were saying how do we make sure given the nature of the asset that the Bitcoin is actually there because we don't want to be holding paper Bitcoin, right. So we, I mean if you buy an equity fund, you don't expect to see, you know, have a look through to, I mean it's basically impossible because the the equities themselves are held by a custodian. Everybody just kind of knows that these entities are heavily regulated and whatever. And if they say they've got an allocation of X to this company, you know that together, right? But if you buy a Bitcoin fund and they say, yeah, we've got, you know, X amount of Bitcoin in the fund and your allocation's there or whatever, how do we know they're not lending it out or we're hypothecating it or whatever? So then we started talking to you, we first started reading fund prospectuses, right? And the litmus test for us was, can we take an in specie transfer? So can we say we want to disinvest but we don't want the pounds or the dollars, we want the Bitcoin. So when we withdraw, give us the Bitcoin, right. And in most instances that's not possible. But then the second thing was, hey. We want to be able to check that my Bitcoin for this client is in the fund at any time, right? And you know a lot of the funds that's also not possible, right? And then the third thing was they were like concerning like once you start reading the risk disclosures in the fund perspective systems, you start seeing things like if there's a hard fork, the manager has absolute discretion on which fork to follow, right? And then the gating provisions. So if the manager deems and they don't kind of specify the exact sort of things that would need to happen before they prevented investors from disinvesting, they don't spell that out. They just say, you know things can happen and if we decide that it's a good idea to gate the fund, we gate the fund, right. So then I'm like hang on, you know, we know that this thing is not popular with governments, central banks, anything like that. And then you've got a lot of big institutions who 12 months ago thought were telling us that this thing was rubbish and rat poison and all this kind of stuff. Now all of a sudden saying, hey, we want to open our funds. And now when I read all of the terms and conditions, they're telling me they can gate the fund, they can choose which fork to follow. I can't verify if the Bitcoin that I think I've invested in is actually there. And this is a different type of technology where all of these things should be possible and it's a global asset, so why can't I take it into PC transfer, right. So those are kind of the main issues we've been kind of wrestling with and that's why, you know looking at the Onram solution is very interesting. Yeah, I appreciate you walking through that. I think you know anchoring to. Independent of you know Cartwright or or on ramp, I think the the core theme there at least what I identify is you've you've looked at this asset very deeply, you've studied it, Sam is studied as well. You've come and started you. You came from a first principles perspective. How do you value it? And so you would do the same when it comes to how do you store it from a custody perspective, your counterparties, the delivery mechanism that you're recognizing that this is a different asset. And the the thesis is long term, that's where everybody goes. It's just an asymmetry, asymmetry in the education of it as a financial instrument, but also in how do you safeguard it. So the past 15 years, the things that have happened don't happen to you for in your counterparties. So it's just it's very reassuring and also you know it's great to hear as far as like you guys are at this forefront, but you're thinking about it from the full stack. And that's the thesis is that's how everybody will will think about it over time. We're still very early. So we know a lot of people go into the GBTC trade or the BlackRock trade. But as that education, you know, continues, as content like this comes out, it's just becomes known that you want those things because it doesn't map to the traditional world, the traditional finance world. And so hearing you guys and how you're thinking about it is just very positive. Yeah, like, I think what's a bigger risk then making an allocation to Bitcoin and going to 0, right? Is making an allocation to Bitcoin okay and it goes through the roof and you all of a sudden find out that the fund that you're invested in has a huge hole in its balance sheets. And guess what? Bad luck for you, you know. So, and you can imagine what would happen to the reputation of the new investment consulting firm who gets that wrong, right, Because our clients, if we come to them and we say to them, listen, this is a good allocation to make in your portfolio. And we've done all of the due diligence and this is the best way to gain access to this assets and then we get that wrong. That's gonna be a big problem that's gonna be on the front page of the Financial Times. It's such good framing because I know Marty's a big fan of the man and the coma analogy and the thought of if we forget FTX or we just we think about all the allocations that institutions had on FTX that are effectively 0 now and we just. You know, go to sleep and we wake up in 5 or 10 years and Bitcoin does what it does. They have no exposure and and they're gonna see what happened to it and then they're gonna realize that. And that's just not FTX, that's, you know, there's ten different scenarios where that happened that institutions were, they thought they're holding spot BTC and their counterparty, you know, effectively went to zero because of leverage. Yeah, or other things. Yeah. And they crypto fund managers here in the UK who, you know, who are holding their funds, you know, ten, 1112% exposure to crypto assets in hot wallets. Well, they're probably the assets weren't even there on FTX. But there were also pension schemes, particularly in Canada, who had allocations to FTX and other, you know, crypto assets and stuff. You know, there were big venture capital firms that had investments in these kind of stuff. And so that's definitely a reputational hit, you know because particularly with like venture cap firms and stuff like that, you expect them to kick the tires and kind of know exactly what they're investing in. And when they're investing in you know something that's just hot air and that kind of comes out right, then how can you trust them on anything else even in the traditional asset space, right. So you got to get this right and it's complicated. It's a long learning process, you know multi signature, multi party computation, all of these kinds of concepts, they don't exist anywhere else, right, except in the space And you know, so I mean our competitors if you said it in what's a multi signature Bitcoin wallet, they're not going to have a clue, right. So it's a big learning kind of journey we've had to go and. It's it's very telling that you know, it's clear from all the things you know about crypto and and Bitcoin and going far down the rabbit hole you have come out. Aware of, you know, some of these hallmarks of when a fund knows what they're dealing with like the ability to take in kind distributions, You know the fact that multi sig is a superior form of custody and people should be using it. These things, these things are things that you're aware of and yet most of the fund managers out there dealing in this don't use this stuff or aren't talking about it or. Are you know aren't actually as far down the rabbit hole as you are and it becomes very revealing right that you know this is this is how we got connected because you took interest in in how onramp is doing things differently with with specifically with regard to these topics because we understand Bitcoin pretty deeply and have set it up in in what we believe is a better way the right way for a fund or. Any sort of custody in our opinion. And you know, so Glenn, you're you're at this stage where you can see through the bullshit that a lot of people out there, a lot of fund managers, crypto fund managers, talk a big game but don't really understand the technicals, the, the deep. Considerations of how to deal with this asset in the right way and how to ensure the right kind of assurances for the end client. Because you can have separately managed accounts where the assets live on chain in the cold storage vault and you can prove that 24/7, 365, that's just so different from the traditional world. And and you can smell the BS when people don't know that. Yeah, well, I mean that I've, I've been, you know, I get like invited to these lunches or dinners with fund managers and whatever and like, so I'll be talking to them about it and I'll say, so who's the custodian, right. Then they'll tell me the name of the custodian and then I'll say, do you have any financial relationship with the custodian? And then that's, I mean besides the fees you pay them for customs but like ownership or anything like that. And I'll go, oh, yeah, there's subsidiary of ours, right. And then I'll say, OK, so is it like a multisig solution and they'll be like they'll go, yes. And then I'll go, is it multiparty computation or multi signature? No, no. It's multiparty computation. And then I'll say to them, OK, well, so who's holding the three keys? Oh, no, the custodian holds all three keys, right. I mean, I'll say them, but like, how do you know that they're not just, you know, like some employee and organization? It's not just going to take all three keys? Oh, no, they're all in different departments. Right. And I'm like, you know, like we're talking about large sums of money here. You know, like that's not ideally the way you want to do things, right? You want this thing to be rock solid. I don't want to be and Sam doesn't want to be. You know, you know, not being able to sleep at night, wondering if you know a few people in one organization are going to collude and end up with in the Bahamas with our bit. Yeah, I think, I think Jesse brought this up the other day. But we have a lot of exciting stuff coming and it's just like when you want to move the asset, it should be like moving glaciers, it should be a process it you should know that there's a lot of participants involved and a lot of processes involved when you're thinking about this kind of allocations. Like Marty mentioned, this is people's lives, their assets, the as a fiduciary. And it just hasn't been treated as such. And we've just seen these things just like, evaporate overnight. It's actually kind of like mind boggling when you really think about what happened last year in 2022, because it's just like $100 billion went up in, you know, smoke. And everyone's like, oh, I guess that was another cycle, just like it was another cycle. Like it's just really insane to think that money is so like just out there and, you know, being flowing through the system that people can just lose $100 billion. It's like, oh, it was. We just write it off. We didn't do the due diligence. We watched Sam play on his, you know, World of Warcraft. Then we thought it was amazing. We get wrote him $100 million check. It's just it's nuts. Well, it's nuts, but I think, Glenn, you and Cartwright, you and Sam particularly are great example of the mark. Mccartwright, not Sam Bankman, Freed, but. Yes, Sam Mccart. But like a great example, like the market learning in real time and creating better standards, I mean, that's one thing. That I've been saying over the last year particularly after the FTX blow up is the standard hopefully come next cycle will be multi party, multi jurisdiction, multi CIG for custody of these assets. Whether you're engaging with somebody like on ramp Unchained, whether you're holding Bitcoin for business or an institution like you just mentioned there is a proper way to do this. Everybody on this call knows this. And it's just getting that model out there and making it the standard. And I think the efforts that Cartwright is making in this direction could be used as a flagstick out there where people can point at and say, no, they're doing it the right way. If you're not doing it this way, we're not going to give you our money. And we just need more institutions like Cartwright, like on ramp. Getting out there and just getting the standard out there and then literally forcing the market to say this is the best way to do it. If you're not doing it this way, you're not getting our money. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy, right? Because also if you look at the regulatory space, right? So you got the EU, you got the UK, the US, and they're spending all this time and energy figuring how to regulate a whole lot of rubbish. You know, really it's like if if if they understood what we understood right, it would be way simpler, right. You got one thing here, right? Figure out how to do it for this one thing, properly make standards and regulations around that done right. But instead you're trying to do it for 10,000 different things, you know, 9999 of which are just, you know that that it's literally like people are investing in Pokémon cards. I mean that, you know, like I, I watched this video of in the US Senate where they were questioning Gary Gainesley, right. And they. So the one senator, or maybe he's a congressman or whatever says to him is, is it if if I buy a a Pokémon card, right. If I sell somebody a Pokémon card, is that a security? So Gary Genser goes, no, of course not. So he says, OK, what if I tokenize and make a digital asset out of that thing is Adena security? And then Gary Genser says, I would have to think about that, right. I'm just thinking what are you people doing, man? We're literally you're essentially that is what you're doing. You're investing in 10,000 things that are as good as Pokémon pots. Yeah, yeah. You're wasting so much time and effort, and that's another. I think important thing of this bear cycle is it's the demarcation between Bitcoin and crypto is becoming clearer and clearer. It's not as clear as we'd like it to be yet, but I do think there has been a lot of progress in the distinction between Bitcoin and crypto. Maybe it's not, Gary Gensler may have it to some degree too. And yes, you see and the problem we deal with here in the States and probably imagine in Europe and UK. As well is just trying to rid ourselves of the crypto grifters who are trying to suck all the energy. And that's when you talk about the regulatory environment. Here you have, like Brian Armstrong and Novogratz and Ryan Sulcus, like we need to Bitcoin and crypto need to fight together. And I'm just like, get the hell away from me and let us like, work on actual important things. Can Glenn, can you actually, can you speak to how important that is? I think that's a very important topic because to Marty's point, what we're starting to see is that when people are starting to look back at the asset, they're you know, doing the research and realizing Okay, there's a there's a big difference. But part of that, and I think we've talked a little about this Marty and Jesse separately, is it's a dirty little secret in the industry that you have a trillion dollar roughly market cap across crypto assets. But the majority when you like start to break down by firm 80 to 90% of their assets like under custody or the any of the trading revenue is all directly tied to BTC. But then it brings up a little while are you supporting all these things if you have regulatory burden you know headache when it comes to just infrastructure, right. There's tech debt, there's all the things associated and this goes back to like kind of the the, the Fiat world of like how can you raise if you only have this one asset from all these people? Because there's that group of 30 people. That you referenced Glenn, that are sitting at these investment firms and part of the things like, well that can't be it like just one like what's the total addressable markets like. Well, it happens to be everything but in their mind they're like in their mind they're like no, no, we gotta go figure it out until like that's what's happened. And so if you think about like this silver bullet and then we kind of like have known that this is the winner. It's like, well, you could take out so much of, like your headache of just. Being Bitcoin only, even if you don't even believe in it to be honest, like you can believe in that Bitcoin has a certain value. If you just focus on that, you can go so much deeper with clients and your company versus having to deal with all this crazy nonsense that every week and every month there's something else getting thrown at the wall of where does this getting designated? Who do you have to go to another country? So anyway just curious like how you guys are you know if that impacts how you think about counterparties or or your your partners. So I'll talk in my personal capacity. I can't really talk on car drives on behalf with about what I'm going to say. But so I I've got suspicions right, because if I look at the direction of travel for the regulations particularly in the UK but also in the EU is I think what they trying to do is make sure that the regulations that they write allow for the tokenization of other assets and for CBDC's right. It's kind of like, you know, like with trust where if you're wealthy enough and you can hire the right individuals, you can protect your assets from capital gains tax and all these kinds of things. And they can't just say, okay, we're just going to scrap trust because trusts have all of these kind of other purposes that are, you know, required. So, you know, they have to kind of if they're going to, if they're going to try and close a loophole in the regulations, whatever, they've got to be careful that they don't. That doesn't have unintended consequences. So I think that they're looking at the space, right and they're saying okay, how do we regulate this thing in such a way that our agenda, right, in terms of are we going to tokenize money market funds and bonds and equities and going to have these private blockchains owned by, you know, the big asset managers, investment banks and all that kind of stuff. I think they're doing it with one eye on that at the same time that they're trying to, you know, shut down all the rubbish over here and kind of throwing Bitcoin, you know, into that, you know, inadvertently maybe. And so and and and also the other thing that's, you know, kind of weird about this whole situation is, is that. The, it's like a moving target, right? So you look at like, what are the regulations right now in the UK, right? And they say there's going to be 5 further phases to the development of the regulation. They're only at phase one, right, which only really covers things like AMLKYC promotional materials. You've got to get registered as a digital asset service provider, various things, right? But then there's these four other phases. And when you look into what those four other phases are, it's just kind of headings on a blank page, right? So nobody really knows what's going to happen further down the line and whatever, right. So it's almost like you have to figure out what is the rock solid way that we can set things up so that pretty much no matter what they come up with, they can't find a problem with what we've done, right. Yeah. Yeah. Regulator's bad. It's all so tiresome. It's, I mean, look, I'm all for them, you know, because like we said, you know, the 99.99% of the stuff is rubbish, right? So like when I see them making things difficult for for that kind of stuff and protecting people from that kind of stuff, I'm all behind them. All I want them to figure out in their head is that there's a difference here, right? Yep, that's. Jesse and I had conversations last week. And this topic came up, you know high net worth individuals, CIO's and investment firms and and very interested but kind of came up with the regulation and you know the government and the thing that gives me personally peace and building a business around this is Bitcoin being deemed A commodity. It's the equivalent of gold. In my mind, if Bitcoin was to be banned to be the effect of similar to banning gold. And then anchoring back to being in Texas and the understanding of property rights, you know, we talked, we talked exactly about this, you know, the gold bullion depository, I don't know if you know, Glenn, there's a, there's actually no state bullion. There was the first state bullion depository for gold is here in Texas. Kyle Bass brought UTEMCO, which is now the largest pension or I'm sorry, endowment in the country between University of Texas and A and M. And their gold was in New York City. And in like 2014, there's a bunch of articles about this. He got in armored trucks and had it driven down to Texas and they established this. So the gold sits here like on Texas soil. So anyway, the long way of saying I think that to your point of having a singular asset, that feeling very confident, as confident as you can feel on your property rights, that is, is deemed by the state in that regard, give some peace. But you go into this other stuff and you're like, what am I holding in the next day? It could be literally, like, banned. Yeah and and going back to the the Pokémon cards thing like they're wasting so much energy trying to figure out like where do you draw the line on on things what's the security what not like how do we address the 30,000 crypto tokens that are out there and figure out a framework for assessing it. Does the how we test apply what's the security what's not And and I feel for Kerry Gunsler in that situation because he kind of got he fell into a gotcha where it's like obviously a Pokémon card is not a security. But then, if you're talking about tokenizing, it, isn't it obviously not a security in that situation. But the difference is that you would only tokenize this thing if you. You would probably tokenize this thing with some stipulations about, like, you know, retaining some slice of the of the supply for the people who are doing the legwork of tokenizing. And then now suddenly you're talking about like a you know, a premine. With an expectation of profit based on efforts put in And then now you're talking about a security because you've added these other these other elements this, this company model to what was a commodity trading card. And and the the net of it is they're they're going to waste so much time and frankly it sort of provides some air cover for Bitcoin to continue its adoption curve before regulators realize that that's the only. The only thing here that will have staying power and and and could actually be a threat to the traditional financial system in terms of in terms of what is the de facto money for for for people to use you know, nobody no no U.S. government employee can can in in their right mind. You know advocate for Bitcoin over the US dollar but so long as they are not viewing it in that lens that's sort of what's allowed because they're preoccupied by dealing with Pokémon cards and that's fine but it it's all such a waste of of of energy when at the end of the day the only thing that will have staying power here is the the one that is actually a commodity and and. The one that will continued on its course towards mainstream adoption because of its inherent properties. And, and I know we've touched on it and Jessie, you're focused on the regulatory side of things, but it really should be like we should beat the drum and beat it into people's heads like Bitcoin. Only from a practical standpoint, running a business is the most advantageous strategy that you can employ. Like regardless of the regulatory side of things like trying to figure out uni, swap, yield, farming, staking, all this DEFY crap, like it, you're just going to spread yourself so thin with so many man hours doing research on roads that lead to nowhere on bridges that lead to nowhere. While you could have been focusing on value added services built on top of the Bitcoin protocol whether it be payroll, multi sig. Custody lending products whatever it may be like the the companies that have the Bitcoin only focus This is why on Rams Bitcoin only it's why 1031 million this invest in Bitcoin only companies is when you have that focus and your ability you have the ability to go a mile deep into a into Bitcoin and actually provide services is going to massively benefit you in the future whereas. If you're an investment firm trying to figure out all the 10,000 different crypto currencies, do research on them and try to educate your clients and consult them on how they should get exposure to this diversified world of crypto currencies. You're going to spread yourself too thin. You're going to send your clients on bridges to nowhere, and all the while you're not going to be able to focus on adding the value added services on top of the most important asset here, which is Bitcoin. That just reminded me of anecdotally, we've been having a lot of discussions and I can't remember if it was with a a legal team or RIA last week that they said one of their clients had had a bunch of Bitcoin and other stuff and they were like curious and they were moving it around. And if you guys remember like Black Friday in the States with like poker where you got to a site and it was like the feds have like, seized this. They got to their token site at one point and they were like the the government has seized this and it's like just like drop the computer through it in the trash and we're like, I'm never going back to any of this like, crap. It's like you literally can wake up one day. And I think of, without naming names, a VC and the crypto space invested in some stable coin a couple weeks ago, whatever. And it's like, oh, not for us investors. You gotta go to Bermuda and they gotta hop over to this island to get exposure to this stable coin. It's like, what are we talking about here that how can that? That does not sound palatable or interesting to have to just go to sleep at night wondering what, like hurdles you need to get through today just to live to tomorrow. Yeah, well, like Sam and I got like on this line of thinking, right Sam and I got invited to this lunch by this crypto fund manager, he's got a backcoin fund, right. And so they the they have like the chief investment officer there of the of the crypto firm and whatever. And I said to Sam before I went, I said, I'm going to ask, like explain to me why you're not only focused on, back on why you focus on all these other things, like what value do they have? Like what are they doing in the real world? They've got all these fancy bells and whistles and they promise all these things or whatever, but what are they actually achieving, you know, except you're just kind of moving these digital things around in cyberspace. But you know, and he, he had the opportunity to give me, I said just give me one example. Nice. And the example he chose was file coin. OK and so and and The thing is, right. So anyway, I thought, OK, let me go and do a little bit of research on file coin after the sledge. Right. And it turns out that because of the economies of scale, it's way cheaper to do file storage. No, no, no, Not through Filecoin, right? Stabilized instead, yeah. So that's why the price is like, I think it's about 99% down from the price it was near the end of 2021. And it's just like what I said to Sam is that's the other thing is if we're going to go to a fund manager and say okay, we're choosing you as our Bitcoin fund manager. I want somebody that I really respect the way they think. And I, you know, I think they, they know more than me hopefully, right. But when they say things like that to me, then it becomes very hard for me to think that they know what they're talking about. Yeah. And they're ultimately of much going, you know what I mean? It's like, yeah, if you, if you don't understand what I if you don't understand more than me, then why am I paying you? Yeah. Such a simple, such a simple way to to get to the bottom of the bullshit. And you've got this, you've got this, this added knowledge that I, I don't know how many people in the world really know this stuff at this point it's it's probably 100,000. Maybe it's 10,000. It's very few and far between. Well, importantly though, that number is growing and Glen, you're proof putting of that like and that's what gives me incredible optimism. It makes me incredibly bullish. It's slowly but surely over time more and more people are beginning to realize this. There's better educational content and more of it than there ever has been at any given point in time. And the high watermark of Knowledge is just getting higher and higher and eventually. Over time it it'll get to a point where you have people that are hired specifically with your set of understanding and your knowledge base throughout institutions across the world where we finally get past all the BS. Of course there'll be more BS moving forward, but I'm I'm a strong believer in that it'll it'll get less pronounced throughout each cycle because the crypto industry has had 15 years to prove. Use case outside of Bitcoin and they haven't really done so successfully. File coin. Funnily enough I think their offices are down or down the street from where I am right now and it is a completely idiotic idea. Like it's all like why do we need any of that stuff like distributed file? Like do people really have problems getting access to files? And it's a blockchain, a solution now like just self hosted on your own server like. Sorry, I just kept hearing follow coin. I had a I had a I had this mental shift and model shift last week of it's like what we're talking about right now, honestly is literally the least sexy thing. And it's it's like the custody like, we're so early. We haven't even figured out how to hold this thing where there's a consensus of like, this is the right way. And to the point I'm already saying it's like once we figure that out, like we can start. We're we're just getting this base and we still got to figure that out And then the capital won't see you know orders of magnitude and price appreciation and all these interesting things that will continue to grow. But we literally so early that we haven't figured out like oh you should store it this way that you can feel comfortable and the custody in general is what I'm referring to an MPC and like who should hold it and should have unilateral control and it maps to the old world. So just a fascinating time that we're this early and to Jesse's point, that. 100,000 or 10,000, it's still very asymmetric in the amount of people and the knowledge that's been held. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually a lot more people than that because like, I mean, Sam's kind of been around because I was in Cape Town for a few years, right. And so I kind of don't have the networks and us, but when we've been to like conferences, right? So there was this like digital assets conference for institutions in London, right. And it was literally like, you know, going into the Death Star or something like that, right. And so Sam said, hey, why don't you invite these couple of guys that are bitcoiners? And the one guy's like a really senior guy in an investment bank here. The other guy was he's like he works at a investment technology company where I get we where we get our all our investment software. So I think there's like probably one Bitcoin at least or maybe 2 in every single organization, right. And so it's going to slowly kind of spread and metastatize from those individuals. You know, they're going to slowly kind of as I've done, you know, we we've created a few more bitcoiners and Cartwright and yeah, yeah. It is funny how the the best way to visualize and conceptualize what's happening here is through like disease propagation. Not disease, Slime mold. Let's go with slime mold just a little bit more. Yeah, whatever you want to call it, it's you know you can, you can see that you can see the the world of of. Gray people, and then little dots of orange suddenly spreading their orangeness across the Petri dish. And and that's how this goes. It's spreading in real time. Marty's a block clock right behind his hot sauces at a 2727 Thousand. Yeah, about 27. Again, no. And the other thing I mean, we talked about this with. With Chris from Fidelity. But that's the other thing too. I think Bitcoin in the thesis has a lot of tailwinds where like we mentioned the beginning of the show, markets are completely haywire right now. Like you have oil above 90, the stock markets flat, you have yields going crazy, the dollar strengthening like Glenn, like you mentioned, like nothing makes sense right now and people are being forced to ask these hard questions like why has everything gone so haywire? And again, talking about tailwinds, whether it be the having having individuals like yourself in institutions that have the ability to influence decisions of people with a lot of capital, we're simply just the incumbent financial system going completely haywire as the Fiat experiment sort of runs its course like this. Is all Bitcoin just going to be waiting here? And that's Bitcoin only. People have been screaming for the rooftops for years now. Like the crypto stuff is noise. It's really Bitcoin. We're here to educate, like when the time is right, like we're going to be here, we're going to help you get on the ships. But it is pretty insane to think about all the tailwinds they're lining up heading into next year. I I was talking to Sam earlier and I think one of the biggest ones is what happened in February 2022. We had Japan, the UK, European Union, US all confiscate Russia's assets, right? That's the big one, right? That's when Sam was saying to me, when he saw that he was like, Bitcoin is now an institutional asset class. Yeah, because. And I think that is like, I'll tell you a story without him mentioning any names, right. So I got, I got invited to this dinner, very fancy kind of Haas with like, I don't know, £100 million or whatever, one of the big fund managers. And they've got like somebody who was a very senior minister in the British government on the Advisory Board. And it was like, so we're all sitting around this fancy dining room table and he was sitting on the other side. And the idea was we don't discuss between ourselves. He's kind of the focal point and we all ask him questions. So somebody asks a question, then he answers, then somebody else gets a chance to answer a question, Right. So the first question was from the chief investment officer of this fund manager saying, what do you think's going to happen in the regulatory space in the crypto world? And he was like, look, you guys can go away and look at what's going on at crypto. You don't in regulation for crypto. You don't mean to tell me that. What's more interesting is if I tell you why the regulations come in, right. And he said that in discussions with, you know, like the most senior people in the British government and about their conversations with the US government, right, that the US have told these senior British officials that they see, he said, crypto as a national security threat. Right. But I kind of in my own head translates that do they see Bitcoin as a national security threat? And I think the reason why is because if people use this as a treasury reserve assets around the world, right, and they stop using U.S. Treasuries for that, that would have massive implications for the US, right? So I don't think he was saying that they think this is inevitable, that there's a big chance of this, but they see it as a risk, right? And so? Yeah, just something that frames my thinking because it's allied to their actions that they took in February 2022 because now sort of you know, the 80 countries around the world to sitting thinking hang on a second, that same thing could happen to us, right, if we do something that they don't agree with or they could force us to do things or say we're going to take your assets or you know, and so, yeah, so I think that that's what's kind of opened the door to this, you know, becoming an institutional asset class, just think it's going to take a long time for people to realize it. And you just hit the nail on the head why it's so important for you guys on the being able to take delivery because that's the big concern is you walk into effectively a trap where you're ending up with tokenized Bitcoin and then you just, you turn it off whenever you want. Yeah, exactly. I I, I think, you know, like, so there are institutions that are basically in bed with the US government. I mean, they've gotten to the position where they have because they're kind of so close to the government, right. And now you're going to give this, give your money to these people, right, that are so close to a government that thinks Bitcoin's a national security threat? Doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Yeah, very interesting and. It's coming. Yeah, it's coming. Amped up by that one holding up this Bitcoin war bonds. We have to create the custody solutions that make this impossible. The Executive Order 69420 Building on Executive Order 6102. You guys know the story that Safety kind of made famous about what the Bank of England did in the run up to the First World War. You know, that sounds. I'm forgetting it. So they're basically, so it doesn't sound like a lot these days, but back then it was, you know, the GDP of the UK, right? They needed to raise £370 million. So they issued war bonds at a higher interest rate than the normal government bonds, right? And only 120 million got taken up, right. So there were 250 million short. And So what they did secretly, and this was uncovered because the Bank of England decided to do a history of the Bank of England. So they hired these professional researchers and archivers and gave them access to all of the information of that time held in these vaults down below the Bank of England, Right. And what got uncovered, probably inadvertently right, was what they did was they loaned the 250 million to 2 senior members of the Bank of England in their personal capacities. And these two individuals then use that money to buy up the remaining bonds. And then they said to the press, this is proof that the the countries behind our entry into the First World War because the war bond issuance was oversubscribed and when you say light in 2017, right and a. Good thing, good thing. Nothing like that happens anymore, Glenn. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But that. Was their version of the the trillion dollar coin or whatever? No, that was their version of weapons of mass destruction. It's like that. There's a lot of demand for this war bond. We're going to war and. And Glenn, I you know the the example of how? This isn't potentially national security threat. It's it's just so rich because it it it's chickens coming home to roost. I mean it it is really just that the US got so comfortable being in this position of exporting U.S. Treasury bonds, new debt issuance in order to sustain a quality of life for, you know, U.S. government budget. That was unsustainable. It was not rooted in balancing a budget. It was deficit spending. And we got so comfortable with that and normalize that and we haven't balanced the budget in 22 years and how dare anybody say, you know what, I don't feel comfortable participating in that kind of system where inflation is, is an exported tax. You know, in exchange for the US military being world police, you know, and and how dare anybody say this is not a system I want to participate in. And in fact, I would like to hold money that is finite. It is. It's pretty rich that it's a national security threat because the national security that we're talking about here is the monopoly on inflation. Marty, Marty Jones hasn't come out in the show yet and we try to keep him in the cage for the last trade. But it is extremely frustrating because it's really bitcoins biggest threat to the national military industrial complex. And if the US government and those in power actually cared about the security of the individuals, they were thinking about the actual security of American citizens. They would recognize that the debt situation that they've created over the last. 100 plus years is the actual security threats and Bitcoin is a way to sort of release and lessen the pressure that your everyday American citizen is feeling and allows them to escape the security threat that the government has created with all this debt. And these people do not have your best interests at heart. That's I'll be Marty will say it, Marty Jones will say it lightly There. I was going to say, I'll tell you another irony, right. So that's because once we've explained our thesis about Bitcoin and how it fits into portfolio and what function it provides and whatever, then the usual questions come. But isn't it bad for the environment? Isn't it only used by criminals? You know, all of this kind of stuff, right? So we figured, okay, we've got to address all these things. And the ESG framework is what everyone believes in, right? Right here or wrong here. So let's use the ESG framework to evaluate Bitcoin, right? So in the energy part, talking about the military industrial complex and everything, I point out the fact that after the US went off the gold standard in 1971, they did that deal with the Saudis, which created the Petro dollar, right? So at the same time that you're criticizing this thing for being in bad for the environment, the global reserve currency is also known as the Petro dollar. That's a pretty ironic thing, yeah. You guys have had a lot of time to think about this. I like it. I hadn't heard a lot of these anecdotes, but they're really they're really good to. Be able the position yeah, we talk about what the deal was that essentially we'll sell you as many weapons as you want right. And then you're part of the deal is you price oil in dollars, right. And then the rest of OPEC did it. And race is ancient history, you know, So this thing is actually the solution to all that kind of stuff, right? And they're trying to. I don't know who, I don't know if it's misunderstanding, but it certainly feels like there's an agenda here, right? Which is your point at the solution. And it's like you project all the things that you're guilty of onto it. You know, it's a Ponzi scheme. It's bad for the environment. It's, you know, all of these things, right? Yeah. It facilitates money laundering. It's like me to say you guys, trillions of dollars, literally. That's funny. I never thought about that way that the energy exists, like the energy exists of the Ponzi and the money laundering. It's just being deflected to a different direction versus it's still like there. They just have to put position it in a different way. Yeah. Before Marty Jones gets too far out of the cage, I think we should wrap up here because I can. I'll I'll channel that energy for rabbit hole recap in a couple of hours. But Glenn, just before we wrap up, like any party notes to any of the individuals who may be in similar positions at different firms across the world, like, what would your advice to them be? Yeah. So number one is read the prospectus, right? Make sure that the vehicle that you invest in is bankruptcy remote, right. Because one of the things that we set our clients is this thing exists outside the financial system, right? So one Bitcoin is always going to equal 1 Bitcoin, and it doesn't matter what goes on elsewhere, you're gonna still have that thing, right? But in some of the risk disclosures of the fund prospectuses that I've read, it's specifically lists as one of the risks that if there's a bankruptcy event, the Bitcoin could get bailed into the bankruptcy, right? So then what's the point of Bitcoin, right? And the second thing is, if the fund manager, the litmus test for us is, can we take, can we take custody of the Bitcoin ourselves? So do you allow an NSPC transfer and then show us how your custodial solution convince us that you know there's absolutely no way that you can? Because when I read through the prospectuses, right, what I want to see is for them to specifically say rehypothecation is not allowed, right. But they don't say that. So it's kind of like if you don't state that in the rules of the fund, how do I know that you're not going to do that at some point. So make sure that the custody solution, because this is a unique asset where you can have three people, five people, as many people as you like making sure that that Bitcoin is there. So make sure you set up a a solution like that. And you know like that famous fidelity thing is get off 0 right, the wrong allocation for Bitcoin, the only wrong allocation for Bitcoin is 0 right. And I would also say that institutional investors, you know, you don't have to go to your full allocation at once. In fact, the way we would suggest to our clients to allocate to Bitcoin is to, in our case, palm cost average or dollar cost average into the asset, right. And if you're worried about risk, make sure that you set it up in such a way that rebalancing is easy, so you can control the risk of the whole portfolio. Yeah, those are the last things I can bring up here. That's fantastic guidance. Yes, but I'm very happy that you exist as a person, that you're in the position. That he does exist. Awesome. Yeah. Glenn, I'm really thankful for you for being a leader and speaking up and sharing, because I think, you know, we all want to be unique. But I think a lot of the thoughts you have, a lot of people are thinking about and they just, you know, either don't feel comfortable and insane or or or just need somebody to help them kind of like frame that. That model of what they're looking for, So I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Yeah, keep crushing it. I think this episode's gonna be very well received. Good stuff, man. All right, that's all we got this week. We'll be back here on the last trade for another episode next week. See ya.