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What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of darkness. 1974198792972000 and whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we sell. Hey, OK, so I'm behind. I say when we sell. Thank you for joining us for this week's episode of The Last Trade, a podcast from on Ramp Media. On today's show, we're joined by Shaolin Maidan, Chairman of the Hedge Fund Association and Co founder of Formidium, a multi asset class fund administrator and the global leader in back office services for digital assets. Shaolin shares his journey from hedge fund manager to fund administrator in the digital asset space. He articulates the importance of being involved in businesses you invest in, in the value of having professional experience in building new infrastructure. Sean also highlights the role of AI in improving fund administration services and the potential impact of artificial general intelligence on the economy and job market. We also touch on the impacts of inflation and how Bitcoin provides a solution for those who are falling behind. We explore the increasing scarcity of Bitcoin and how it sets it apart from gold as a store of value, as well as the growing adoption of Bitcoin by mainstream politicians and the need for leaders who understand the technology. And now, time for the show. Gentlemen, back for another week. It's beautiful here in South Jersey. The sunsets here, you forget how good the sunsets are until you get back. I've seen a couple of those posts the the I think two nights in a row is that is that you outside having a nice glass of rose and just watching the sunset? We don't get those in Texas. Not at, not at least in central TX. Marty, are you a Rose guy? I'll drink some rose every once in a while. I want to call myself a rose guy but. So not rose all day, rose once in a while. Yeah, every once in a while. So you can ease into the, you ease in with the Rose with Marty, and then you can go to the harder stuff later as a as a sunset. It depends what the wife opens up. That's what I'm excited for. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're joined by Chalamaydon from Permidium doing fun admin for a bunch of the funds in the Bitcoin and broader digital asset space. Full suite operation. Welcome to the show Shell. It's great to have you. Thank you for having me guys. So before we jump into the particulars of what you guys are doing it for Medium, why don't we learn a little bit about you, your background, what I understand you're former hedge fund manager run family office, you're chairman of the hedge fund Association. What was your career like before from For Midium and why did you decide to step into the fund admin space for all these digital asset funds? Yeah. So I started in the financial services business, in the alternative business. That is about three years after I started in financial services. So this will mark the 24th year in alternative investments. I started in hedge fund consultancy in 2000. In the year 2000 in New York, I kind of spent a few years doing that. 2004 I entered the fund of funds, hedge fund of funds world. Back then it was still a bit of an emerging world. People didn't really understand, you know, what hedge funds were, let alone funded funds. So funded funds were pretty necessary part of the ecosystem. I was promoted pretty quickly to portfolio manager right before the financial crisis, precisely May 2007, and had the pleasure of managing multi strategy hedge fund portfolios throughout the financial crisis. Unfortunately, the firm that I was with had some other issues and we were basically shuttered by the parent company and I had to go look for a job and that was round about 2010. As you can imagine, the environment wasn't very pleasurable back then. I had a young family, quite stressful, but interestingly enough, I had this notion and this belief that I should be in the family office world. I felt that I'd be well placed there. I also wanted to expand my horizons outside of hedge funds and understand, you know, things like real estate investing, private equity, venture capital structure credit a little bit more. And so I got into a family office job, which was I think pretty, pretty forward back then 2010, not a lot of family offices were hiring pretty, you know, sought after Subs or position, I think. And I helped build this family office that had a pile of cash after the financial crisis because they had sold their company right before steel prices had collapsed and they held it in cash. And it was actually quite informative to my investment strategy as well, just learning about their story. But I had the opportunity to do that for about 7 years, built out of portfolio across asset classes, both direct and through funds. Amazing experience. But around 2017, I don't know, I call me somewhat paranoid, I guess, but I felt like I wasn't adding value. And as an intellectualist, I feel like in order for you to compensate me, I have to add value. Now, our returns were good. We had double the AUM, but I felt that I could do more. And I was also a little concerned. Not concerned, but looking forward into the future and wondering if things like artificial intelligence could effectively replace allocation probably way ahead of that curve, but nonetheless felt that I had to take, you know, my personal destiny into my own hands. And like a lot of people do when they get that feeling, I became an entrepreneur. Mind you, at that point I was 42 years old, so probably a little bit older than the average startup entrepreneur, startup fund manager, but nonetheless, you know, felt this was my my time to do it, my time and my life. So I started Bodhi Tree asset management. It was a quantitative macro firm. My background is macro. It's a passion of mine, still is, although much harder to understand the macro these days than back then. And I ran a quantitative strategy. I had some family office backers. I built out a number of algorithms across asset classes, and those algorithms were really meant to be a precursor to an eventual move to using artificial intelligence. I did that for 5 1/2 years. But along the way, only about a year after I started the fund, I needed a service provider, I needed a fund administrator. I needed a whole bunch of things. You know, you don't necessarily need a fund administrator or pardon me, an auditor at the get go, but you might need a fund administrator. You might need some past results fixed up for performance fees, just simple accounting, things like that. And I ran into the founder for Medium thought with it what they were doing. It was very interesting. By the way, it was not called for a medium at the time. It was called Sudrania Fund Services inexpensive, you know, efficient, great service or so why don't, why don't, why don't I try this out? Lo and behold, it turns out that I was one of the first clients of the firm. So it's kind of been an interesting journey because I've seen the firm from the beginning and the, really the, the, the point of the firm was and what was articulated to me was, you know, we have a vision to use technology. I got really interested and began chatting with the founder probably once a week, twice a week, really just giving my input based on this experience that I had already had. And about a year later decided, you know what, this hedge fund thing is kind of difficult. Maybe I should hedge my bets like a hedge fund manager right? And I invested in Sodrani. I ceded the firm with 0 revenues or or near 0 and began to advise the firm. Came on as an advisor and continue to advise the firm and saw the firm growing. While my hedge fund was was difficult to say the least in terms of growing, it was not trading crypto, probably should have been. And I ended up at the end of 2019, right before COVID writing probably the largest, one of the largest checks to date that the firm has received on my behalf. And, and, and, and those of my my syndicate to further invest in the firm and took on a effectively what was a Co founder role. And then I really began to advise the firm. And the first thing I did was move into crypto and digital assets, which which we can speak about. And yeah, the story of Sudrania and then for Medium is pretty well known, I think for those in this space, rapid, rapid growth. We did an acquisition in the meantime of a firm called Triple Leo, which was a pioneer in crypto fund admin, took over the clients. That was very difficult to do it in a pandemic do it in when you're experiencing hyper growth. But between the years of 2020 and mid 2022, we effectively saw 2000% growth in the business partially under my stewardship and of course under the stewardship of our of our fearless founder. So that's, that's my story. 2022 going through that bear market, I kind of said, you know, I can't do both. It's very difficult. I was doing both, by the way. It's hard enough to be a hedge fund manager. It's hard enough to run a fund admin. It's impossible to do both, especially if you want to grow both. I think that's the key to manage money. But to grow business is a completely different thing. And so I decided to let go of my hedge fund, my baby and focus on my my attention on for medium and as well as my personal investments. That's my story. At On Ramp, we believe that Bitcoin will be the most important asset to own in the 21st century. Our Multi Institution custody solution is the safest and most secure way to ensure that your Bitcoin remains in your and your family's possession for decades to come. Multi Institution custody maximizes security and minimizes counterparty risk, leveraging Bitcoin's native properties to eliminate single points of failure that have historically complicated Bitcoin ownership. On Ramp provides Peace of Mind for your Bitcoin journey. For more information, check us out at on rampbitcoin.com. Incredible, incredible journey to Formidium. That's funny. I used to actually work at a fund of funds in the alt space as well managed futures fund that index CTAS. That is a a fascinating industry and it was a it was a good experience for me young 2122 on the portfolio management team. I think the best part of the fund of fund just get to talk to all these managers with different strategies and get a a pretty wide perspective on on what's going on in the world. Yeah, I'm just gonna agree. So Shaolin, how did crypto come into what Formidium was doing was was that it sounds like it wasn't there from the very beginning and then like what was it that led you or your your Co founder to decide that that would be a big part of the strategy for Formidium? So I think it's safe to say that a lot of the vision of the firm is being directed by me, not a lot of the management, but definitely a lot of the vision. And that kind of, you know, stems of course from my background as an allocator, investor, being the office guy, former hedge fund manager. So I became interested in crypto and Bitcoin after the crash of 2000 17 the previous crash. So I began to invest in crypto on my own. I was investing in some of the well known protocols that we know today, like, you know, chain link Bitcoin theory of etcetera, and really getting my, my, my, my feet wet, if you will. And it came to, you know, I really surmise that as an entrepreneur, I think it's, it's good to be a, a good position to be in as a big fish in a small pond. And that is something that we could do in crypto. And we had all of five clients by the way, when I, you know, gave my, my further round of investment to Sudrania, but it became Co founder. But I, I, I had a vision and I was really also it was informed by my macro trading as well. If everyone will recall in 2019 and even 2018, we had trillions of dollars of negatively yielding debt. It almost seems like a forgotten memory at this point, but central banks had negative interest rates and long term bonds were trading at negative yields. It was a surreal environment, impossible to trade my strategy, which had a lot of fixed income. And it just led me to believe that, you know, if this is going to be the case, I need to find ways to hedge myself. And that's how I learned about Bitcoin and said, you know, well, if I'm investing in this, others will probably start following at some point. And fund administration is a nice fix and troubles business to be in. Why don't we do this? Secondarily, because the ethos of the firm was to fix the issues that we saw in traditional fund administration. A lot of that revolved around the technology and building our own technology systems. So it seemed very suited to build a new stack, if you will, around crypto and digital assets because we already had the capability to build technology solutions around accounting. So to me, it just made a lot of sense and we just went forward with it in the in 2020 including an acquisition of Triple EO. Yeah, I think the the visionary aspects really important because you were on a call once and you brought up the the notion of some of the stuff you're doing on the event side that we can talk about. And you referenced the investment in working with firms like On Ramp and others that you work with as a vision of like bridging into the future and how there's an old world that's kind of like moving away. And curious if you saw that at the time and that was part of it or that like was solidified further down after running for midium and seeing that like the old guard is just not going to catch up to this. Like how did that realization 'cause you said it once on a call and it always stuck with me of like you're while you while we're smaller, not just us, just any firm that's in the space. It's an investment in that we will be the leaders in the future because of where it's going. And I thought it was very astute. And I'm just curious if like that's how you looked at it from back in the day when you got involved or did that like thesis kind of did you grow into that thesis over time after seeing the market and also seeing, you know, everything in the financial plumbing and how it's just fundamentally broken and that they can't come back from it in the existing models? Yeah, I think that not only do I hold that notion, I've tripled down on it really. I think that there was a lot of good things that I learned being in the family office world, managing money for wealthy people, but it doesn't necessarily parlay to the individual person. So when you're when you have billions of dollars, OK, your main concern is capital preservation. And you know, if you can compound that money a couple of bits above, you know, a 6040 portfolio, you're golden. You're doing great, right? And so when I structured my hedge fund, I was really trying to meet objectives around that like, hey, look, you know, I can get you two or three points of alpha, I guess the 6040 portfolio. Look how great I am. The truth of the matter is that in order to differentiate yourself as a start up and be outstanding, you really have to have something that's different and it's solving a a true problem. I thought I was solving the problem. Certainly the results of endowments and and other multi asset class investors, I've proven that my thesis was correct that the model was broken. The endowment model is what we called it, but it wasn't good enough to run a fund. And so, so, yeah, I mean, the, the sort of returns that were being generated in amongst crypto managers, the sort of opportunities, the new technologies, I I realized that I kind of need to kind of, you know, pump up the paper, throw it out and start all over. And I have to have a younger mindset. And I think that is actually something that all hedge fund investors know. A little rule of thumb with investing in hedge funds is you kind of want to invest with young and hungry guys. That's, that's, that's always been a thing. And I always viewed myself as young and hungry. And I am hungry and I'm young at heart. I had to relearn a few things. And, you know, to answer your point, it's exactly right. Like I'd rather be in the frontier and cutting edge of, of opportunities rather than trying to compete in, you know, very crowded and competitive spaces where, I don't know, there's really very difficult to have an edge unless you're say, Citadel or, or Millennium. It always has. To be evolving and coming back to the fun at the fund admin side of things and. Trying. To upgrade the the services the the incumbent fund admin landscape via forbidium. What are some of the top of mind problems that exist with typical fund administrators that you guys are looking to to upgrade and and improve on F Forbidium? I think it's really a question of, I think owning your own software and being able to do the accounting internally is, is incredibly important because off the shelf systems don't give you the sort of flexibility you need to handle emergent and exciting asset classes. And that's where I want to be. I want to be the leader in everything that's new and cool is what I say. And you have to have your own tech in order to do that because it's not worthwhile for an off the shelf system to handle, you know, XYZ, you know #454 rank protocol, on point market cap, if you know what I mean. So I think that that is important. I think that we are dedicated to building out our own technology across the board, which is, I call it an end to end system, which is connected as opposed to having competing systems attempt to communicate with each other. And that allows a much more seamless experience. Also the name of our accounting system, but it, it, it, it gives, you know, clients that ability to, to have comfort that, you know, the work can be done. So one of the things that is notable, notable about for medium is that we rarely, if ever say no to any sort of work. We want to get our hands on it. It's going to be a little messy in the beginning, especially if even the manager barely understands the asset class. It's hard for us to understand it too. But one thing that we do dedicate ourselves to is learning. About things and then once we've learned about them, we, we, we automate it and that's a big part of what what our what our, our mantra is automation automation automation reduce the number of mistakes, increase the efficiency, increase the delivery times and make the client experience overall easier. So I think that is the difference between for medium and others. I think the work, the staff that we have, the dedicated workforce, the the desire to make our clients happy, that's something that is lacking. And we were just speaking about that before the call started. But that's something that I think is lacking that that we and only a few others have. And it's going to be important because technology will make a lot of different asset classes very easy to do. So how do you differentiate yourself as a business? I think you differentiate yourself by improving the the the trajectory and the potential for success of the businesses that we serve. I think that is a lot of people can do accounting, albeit few can do crypto accounting. Even fewer could do D5 instead of the more complex parts that we specialize in. But the service I think is paramount. Yeah, it it strikes me as like you're a great microcosm of infrastructure being built in, in this nascent landscape of crypto. You know, we're focused on Bitcoin, there is a broader crypto ecosystem and everybody needs picks and shovel businesses and there's massive entrepreneurial opportunity to do to create a service that is needed and helps people who are, you know, themselves stepping into this landscape and need various services need need to buy picks and shovels and. You know. We, I, I think we, we spend a lot of time in Bitcoin and in crypto in general, thinking about like, when will the rest of the world figure out that this is the future and, and just, you know, start showing up. And to me, it, you know, it takes time because the infrastructure, like your business needs to be there in order for people to do business, you know, to arrive in, in the new frontier and have what they need in order to stay. And so, you know, it just strikes me as like this is how this process plays out. This is how an industry grows from a frontier into into, you know, a challenger to the establishment or mainstream, you know, tradify way of doing things. And and that just takes time and and entrepreneurial endeavor to prove out that there's a better way to do things. And we've already built it. And it, you know, just, you know, just show up and start using this new service or this new asset class because it's, it's been, it's been proven out, it's been de risked and everything you need to succeed is, now has been built by the entrepreneurs who came before you. So, you know, I, I, it's, it's exciting because to me, this is how, you know, for medium and, and businesses like it is, is how is what's necessary for crypto, Bitcoin in particular, to become the, the juggernaut that we believe it can from its, you know, its inherent properties, but it, it has to serve the needs of people. And the way that has to happen is through businesses like yours serving those needs. Yeah, I mean, or go ahead Shaolin, because I want to add you, but I want to hear your response first. I I know look I agree. I will say that having Trapfi routes helps because it creates a pathway to transition from a traditional to a digital world. You know, we're speaking with regulators all the time. You know, as mentioned, I'm the chairman of the Digital Assets committee for the Hedge Fund Association. The Hedge Fund Association is the longest standing trade group on behalf of the hedge fund industry was pivotal in terms of some of the negotiations around Dodd Frank in 2009 and 10. So yeah, of course we're members of other groups as well. So I think, you know, having tradified roots, but also being very open minded to what the future is going to look like and not attempting to thwart it like I think some others in the unnamed banks are trying to do or at least gobble it up for themselves. I think that's that's that's key, Yeah, I think. Part of what Jesse alluded to and what was exciting about your story and, and really fascinating is how many businesses and things have been impacted by individuals scratching their itch, either starting the business or as you found like imagine for Medium, if you hadn't been involved in what it would look like. And I go back to the story. It's kind of a little weird now, but Chris Sacca, who was an early, early like tech guy, he was at Google. He was one of the first checks into Twitter and ultimately wrote a check. And then when someone does when like you referenced right to check into a firm and you excuse me and you naturally need to de risk it, you start to provide value, you start to show up. And in his story, he would show up to Twitter and he was just like, look, this is the feedback and there's the stories of you like people are trying to figure out how you're going to monetize it. And he would just start, it would take him a year or two trying to explain the value of Twitter. And then eventually he just started buying their shares and end up owning at least at 1%, like one point, maybe 10% of the business. And that story rings true to similar to what you were describing of you were in the hedge fund space, you needed a better product, you started using it. And then you're like, well, maybe I can write a check because this makes sense for an investment opportunity. And then naturally wanted to get your hands dirty and improve it. You started to de risk it to the point you invested. It's even, it reminds me of similarly, like I was an early Unchained client when they moved from the, the, the loan product to the vault. And this is pre like caravan from the wall at config. And it was like tinkering with it and it was like ledgers and, and the USB sticks and the website and just like naturally trying to like you just like scratching an itch of like, I need a product to solve for custody. And then you start providing feedback and you know, I went and worked there for a few years and it's just this natural thing to Jesse's point of like, you got to like be in the weeds using it, needing the product and you naturally start to like just give back, whether it's via economic or personal gain. And then it ultimately like starts to build this ground up infrastructure that's going to be ultimately needed to build where we want to go. And like all of those learnings, at least on our side, like kind of transition along with Jesse's into like what we're doing here at On Ramp. So that the story that you shared just really resonates because it was like starts very small, but then it naturally can grow into something very big. And for anybody listening, this is like a great, you know, great time to like, if you're thinking about OPS or you're thinking about ways to leverage your professional experience into building, it's the perfect time. And I think that's the key is professional experience. Cause historically in Bitcoin or crypto, it's a lot of people that are generally tinkerers and they didn't really come from having already like an ingrained sense of professional like background to infuse in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And I think that's where the magic happens when somebody has their existing knowledge and market experience and expertise and then they map that to this new system. I think that's when I've seen historically the real like foundational stuff be built versus somebody that's like naturally just like tinkering and doesn't really have the frame of reference of how the existing world has worked and where it can be grafted on, if that makes sense. No, it makes total sense. And I can tell you as I learned this from my own investment experience as well. And it's funny, you mentioned guys like Chris Sacca, they were very informative in kind of my strategy as well, which continues to be my strategy today, which is that I generally only tend to invest in companies that I'm involved with because I know that I can have meaningful impact in improving those companies. I like to say if even if you look at my LinkedIn profile, it says taking companies from zero to one in the fraction of the time, if you just avoid the really dumb mistakes of which I have made every single one, you will have a successful business. And it's kind of funny when I evaluate and look at businesses, I can tell within a few minutes just by speaking to the founders what's wrong and what's right. I keep my mouth shut. But if they want my solicit to solicit my advice, I'll, I'll tell them. And I'm very frank and direct about it because I don't think there's any other way You, you can be no here and there. Of course I'll invest in the hot deals in Silicon Valley if I can get my hands on them. But by and large, if I'm going to write a check to an early stage company, I need to be involved and you know, it's probably going to be in financial services. I have been involved with the jewelry company. It's complete zero. You know, I, I wasn't involved actually I invested passively. So a lot of my passive investments when I wasn't involved, a lot of them didn't really amount to much. But when I'm involved, I've noticed that particularly with young entrepreneurs, I can be tremendously helpful. And I think that's, that that's a natural transition. I think for those of us who have had a little bit of success in our lives and, you know, have earned some money and, and still want to be involved, but know that, you know, we have to hand it over to perhaps a younger generation that has some very good vision. But crossing your TS and dotting your IS is absolutely important in running a business. And that's where where guys like me can come in. No, that's awesome. Makes a lot of sense. It doesn't get talked about enough. But to really allocate capital well specifically in venture like you kind of have to have built things before because how are you supposed to discern if somebody's stories is true or not 100. Percent. 100 percent No. I. Mean especially in a space like Bitcoin specifically, I know at 10:31 we're very involved with a lot of the portfolio companies and from the allocator side, like if you can actually add value, it is scarce in the Bitcoin space. It's a nation and nobody and we're still figuring out how to build things and it is cool being on the cutting edge. And now you see the emergence of AI, which is a topic I'd like to talk about with you Shaylin, incorporating it into for medium. And I know you mentioned you built your your quantitative algo with the idea that it eventually turned into AI. So being earlier to the trend back in 2017 and seeing where it is now, has it progressed more than you thought it would? Is AI on a trajectory that that you assumed that you assumed it would at this point? And how disruptive do you think it can be to the industry that we're in that's fund management or creating Bitcoin financial services? I'm going to give a standard off the shelf response on this, but it is absolutely outstripped what I thought it could be. I can tell you that the first day that chat to BT3 came out, I signed up and I push it on the entire team and it really became very influential in terms of helping me continuing to to evolve my view as to what I thought, you know, the future of our business could look like. So as an example, and I'm being very honest with you, so our offshore center, our Center for accounting and all things operations is located offshore. We have client service reps in North America, but the hardcore skills that are required to do what's needed in this, in this job are located primarily in India. But with that, at least in the past could come some limitations. Perhaps an e-mail comes in and it's funnily worded right, You have communication issues. Well, the interesting thing is though, is that when, for instance, I have my team now run all of their correspondences through chat to BT, making sure that there's no spelling mistakes. I think these things really matter in a business, right? They create the value where I, I, I really truly believe that, you know, in the near future, the not too distant future, you're not really going to care where the work is done anymore. You're going to care that it's done right. You're going to care that the communication is nice and efficient. You're going to care about those sorts of things. And AI helps tremendously in doing that. I mean, you can barely know English and run an e-mail or thought through AI and send something out and, and you know, as long as you know how to, I mean, you don't need to understand English to do accounting, right? So, and, and, and again, you know, India is an example of a bilingual country. English is the, is the, is the national language. Actually, I don't think a lot of people actually know that it's one of the, one of the national languages. But the point being that now you really can't tell. And it's to me as an investor, as an entrepreneur, it's such a major arbitrage that anybody who hasn't done it or hasn't set up shop, I don't know how you can run a business where you have a shortage of workers in the Western world, if that's that's known shortage of graduates. So even if you could find one or two or three good guys, it's hard to build a team, it's hard to build the necessary redundancies. If that guy leaves, we're done. You can't run a business like that. You can't have that sort of key man risk. And so I think a lot of people don't understand some of the limitations that are happening on the entrepreneur side, where in an ideal world, if there was a, a good supply of Labor and the sort of things that are needed and consistency of that labor in order to do the work for you, the clients, you would have your operation set up in a certain way. And if you could do it cost effectively, that's key. How do you how do you, how do you administer a, say, a $10 million venture fund or a crypto fund that wants 24/7 service in the United States? It was doing D5 with multiple wallets. The accounting costs alone would eat up a good proportion of the return of that fund, right? So how do we do this in a way where we can still create businesses in the United States where entrepreneurs can still have a chance to compete against the, you know, the big monopolies, if you will, and do it cost effectively? And that's what AI is allowing us to do. It's something that I saw a few years ago in the Sudrania model, which was appealing to me, but it's even more appealing now with AI. Have you made the leap yet? Is being an interesting one to talk to. You made the leap that like AI is kind of in my mind synonymous with deflationary tools like software, right? Like you just need SAS software if you're going to run a business similar AI. It's it allows you to do more with less. Have you made the leap on bitcoins? Very similar in that sense. Like you referenced, if somebody gets leverages the tools, then they're going to be successful. If they don't leverage the tools. It's pretty straightforward. But this notion that if a company in a future state does not have some form of treasury in sweeping of cash flows into BTC, they're kind of working backwards because of just how bad. I think pre 2020, this could probably be more debated or not true, but given what we know about the amount of M2 money supply and everything that's happening with inflation, it's probably closer to 15 to 20% year over year. And that it's almost like upgrading in the same way. Forget about like, you know, the idea of money and the ideology and all the things that people in Bitcoin talk about just this idea of like upgrading from an analog dollar to a digital form that preserves or increases. Have you, have you thought about that at all? I have and I don't. I think my answer is as good as the next person with all caveats. I viewed Bitcoin as disruption. I was, I, I've been a precious metals guy since the year 2001 when the the 1st or I guess the technology.com crash occurred because I began to get very interested in Austrian economics. As I mentioned, I'm a macro guy and I saw, I've been, I've been an Austrian economist. If you want. I also graduated from Berkeley with a degree in economics and I also have an economic history background from NYU at my master's. So I'm I'm an economics guy and a history guy too. And I was very enamored with Austrian economics and Sal money. And so the natural thing to do was to become an expert in gold. And I traded gold quite successfully in the global market of 2000 and 2:00-ish to 2008 and 2011 up to 2011. So I wish I had learned about Bitcoin earlier. I wish I had been smart enough. And I had mentioned that I was in a bit of an old school, old world mentality in a capital preservation mode, managing a family office, which I think that if you really want to make 100X sort of returns, it's probably a mindset you have to get out of. And that's something that I have to deprogram, deprogram myself on. But ultimately, here's my argument on Bitcoin. Its performance in the long term, once it's fully adopted, should be no better or worse than gold because it's effectively, in my opinion, the same thing, right? Gold already serves the purpose of what Bitcoin does. So there must be some other attraction to Bitcoin which we of course know about. It's digital transfer, blockchain, all the various things that you can ascribe to why Bitcoin is a superior, superior form of capital or money preservation from, you know, central banking, you know, profligacy. I think I view Bitcoin as a, as a disruption story as far as what inflation is. I think that inflation it really depends on like if food and energy are going up, if you have a billion dollars, you don't give a shit, right? It's not a big part of your, your expenditure. I think inflation is a real personal issue for people, right? It really depends on where you are and this economic, you know, totem pole, you know, and a lot of people are unfortunately in the United States and globally falling behind whereby inflation as we understand it, the price of gas, the price of food, the price of, you know, everyday items, hospital care, things like that is hurting people. It's absolutely hurting people. It doesn't hurt somebody who's wealthy, but it hurts. It hurts the poor. And I think that's where Bitcoin with an ability to access it cheaply, with an ability to access it in a fractionalized, you know, amount ability to own something with everything else that you want to own, be it real estate or, or, or or assets on the and in the stock market even are so expensive, I can think of very few disruptive asset classes. So that's how I look at it in this current current moment. I manage my own portfolio. I personally think interest rates are in a real state, meaning that they're above 0, right? It's just a nominal rate in dollars, nominal rate minus inflation. It's no surprise to me that's why the dollar is rallying against other Fiat trash. But and that's that's also why Bitcoin has been somewhat contained, right? We have the adoption of the ETF. But again, from a macro standpoint, the real drivers for Bitcoin like the kind that we saw during COVID where it was complete insanity from a fiscal and monetary perspective, in my personal opinion, are not necessarily there. Now let's go into the future a little bit. Given the economic situation of the United States and the world and the average person, I have no doubt that at some point the central bank and the fiscal authorities will, and the fiscal authorities have already done this, will basically give up and they're going to go, you know, full Zimbabwe if you, you know, And I think that's where Bitcoin really will shine. I think gold will do well as well. But because Bitcoin has the added factor of adoption, it's going to give you a exponentially better return than gold, whether you've been. Buying Bitcoin for years or just getting started on your journey? Our Multi Institution Custody solution is the safest and easiest way to custody your Bitcoin. With On Ramp and our partners at Bitco and Coincover, you can sleep soundly at night knowing that your Bitcoin is safe from exchange failures, the loss of seed phrases and broken hardware devices. On Ramp's Multi Institution Custody Solution eliminates any single point of failure, distributes counterparty risk and minimizes required trust, all while providing greater assurances that a client's Bitcoin is secure and auditable on chain. As a client of On Ramp, your assets live in a multi sig vault controlled by three distinct entities, none of which have unilateral control. On Ramp provides products and services that honor our clients ownership and control of the underlying asset. To learn more about Multi Institution Custody, check us out at on rampbitcoin.com. Yeah. I agree with that, that the early stage adoption is, is I think key for you know, looking forward. Why? Bitcoin. Stands to outperform gold, but then the the magic sauce for me the thing that I've just, you know, I get zealous about so sorry I'm going to get on my soapbox, but is the increasing scarcity function of of Bitcoin is, is what sets it apart truly from, from gold because gold is is what 1 1/2 to 2% supply growth every year from gold mining and it's a 12 to $16 trillion asset right now So that's boy that's $320 billion every year of new supply that has to be absorbed by net inflowing demand. And you know so that's three billion wow 30 billion a month of of, of new supply creation that has to be absorbed by the market. And that's, I feel like that sets the price, that sets the ceiling for what gold can be in, in the global asset landscape is like, you know, how large of an asset class can gold be? Well, it has to, the market has to absorb so much demand every supply every, every month on, on on average. And then Bitcoin has this, you know, every four years, the, the amount gets cut in half such that, you know, 100 years from now, it'll be a zero creation. And that means that that ceiling of what it can possibly be just keeps ratcheting up because the amount of supply creation every month, every year ratchets down and then that the market has to absorb less. So if those, if those statements are true, then Bitcoin, the ceiling of what it can be keeps increasing. And then the IT serves as a savings vehicle that allows people to buy now and hold for more than four years to see their purchasing power appreciate over time versus gold, which serves as a store of value without promising anything about, you know, growth. Really, Bitcoin doesn't make any promises either, But that's the math, I think. And, and so, you know, that's I think in, in addition to early stage adoption, I think the increasing scarcity side of, of Bitcoin makes it something that is a better treasury asset to bring it back to what we were originally talking about there of, you know, if you hold this thing for over time and yeah, it'll be volatile along the way, but on net, because of the increasing scarcity and the early stage adoption, it will grow in purchasing power. And therefore, if you're if you're an individual or a business, you're well served to have it on your balance sheet. It certainly can't hurt and especially in a negative real, real interest rate environment, which, you know, it seems like based on the trajectory of central banks, based on what I've been reading, we're creeping towards that again, looks like it it's they're trying to hold the line. They're trying to hold the line. And that's what's keeping, I think, an all out, you know, feast in crypto assets and commodities at Bay. But you know, the, the the numbers just don't look good in my opinion. And I think that, you know, we saw Powell even admit that yesterday that the things like the job numbers, for instance, are not as rosy as the statistics might might be displaying. So, you know, well, did every did every we know the hit. Sorry, I was like didn't. They come out yesterday if we go there because we've been saying this for over a year. It's like, didn't they come out that they are cooking the books with the numbers like we've always known like these numbers on the employee and they're all just like, you know, kind of like smoothed over. But I think somebody from a very senior position came out and and described it well. It was. Pal calling them out right they they can never explicitly admit that they've been cooking the books on the job numbers I. I've got a, I've got a part time job, Uber Eats. I, I work, you know, part time at the gym and, you know, you know, at night I sell my clothes on Poshmark. I've got three jobs. Three jobs, yeah. Yeah, that sounds sustainable and healthy for an economy. Well, I. Mean, I mean, Powell's comments yesterday and the combination of that and the letter that Elizabeth Warren and one other senator sent earlier this week, that is a scary predicament that we find ourselves in because historically you've always had this separation between the federal government and the Fed. The Fed's supposed to be operating independently, it seems like, and this has been going on for over a year now between Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell to a certain extent, maybe over a year. But it seems like that independent nature of the Fed, the federal government is trying to erode that, to force interest rates lower, to improve, quote, UN quote, improve the economy during an election year. I think that if we if we want to just take it back to AI and this is kind of the I'm not the most popular guy at the cocktail parties nor. Are we? Look, I've been around the block, OK? My dad was in the automotive industry in the in, in the in the late 80s, early 90s. His business was obliterated during that recession. And I remember distinctly you'd read the New York Times. I was really into always a kind of, yeah, like young guys are like, interesting in the news, interested in the world. And I'd read about how it was unusual how long it was taking for people to kind of get jobs. That was something that hadn't really been seen. Usually you'd have a recession and you just snap right back and people start working. It's part of the business cycle, right? Same thing happened after.com bust, right? Each and every cycle that I can remember, starting with the 1990s, early 90s recession has been followed by an increasingly tougher market for job seekers to find jobs. And usually what ends up happening, depending on your age, of course, But if when you once you get to my about my age, which, you know, I'm going to be 50 soon, it's, it's, it's harder. It's harder. And, and you know, we know, I think retrospectively, when we kind of philosophize and look at the past, we know that technology efficiencies offshore and all the list of things that have, you know, affected and hurt workers in the Western world and globally too, by the way, I mean, there are people getting jobs offshore, but there's a lot of people who don't have jobs too. Just to be clear, I feel like this could be the last cycle. I think we're that close with AIII. I, I, I fail to understand how you get a recovery as we've understood it in the traditional sense. Once you hit AGI, artificial general intelligence and by, by a lot of respects, you know, that's, that's, that's in 2027. It doesn't mean you don't need people then. Just want to be very clear about that, but it just means the number of people. You might never need more people. I think you're, you're right. Something that nobody talks about is like when you understand, you know, individual looks at Bitcoin and efficient use of capital, how much fat exists at like we know the zombie companies that exist that are publicly traded. And you think about all of that coupled with private companies. And if inflation increases and your margins decrease and all the things we know with business, you naturally have to fall into leveraging deflationary tools like AI. It's like how many things just kind of just move out and you can just build efficient businesses. And if those companies probably don't do it because it's already entrenched in their model, as you know, it's hard to kind of back out of a big business and, and switch the operating model. So, but somebody will leave that company and go start a better firm for 110th of the cost and 110th of in 110th of the time, 110th of the cost. And then they'll be able to undercut any of the cost from the legacy business because they can just do it more efficiently. I, I, I agree, and I think that a lot of people are looking at this negatively too, when they don't necessarily have to be. What does technology allow? I think technology gives us transparency, and I think transparency equals freedom, right? The more you can gatekeep the tools for becoming successful, the fewer people who can become successful. Now you can just go on YouTube and learn about whatever crypto you want. You can learn about how to date women and this everything's on YouTube, right? Travel. I'm traveling to, as we mentioned, I'm traveling to Europe and I can take a, you know, a bunch of videos and create my itinerary and just run it through chat with BT Amazing. So you are creating more sovereignty, I think for the worker where people can become entrepreneurs much easier, right? They can start servicing business, They can use AI to help businesses as perhaps 1099 or contract workers rather than, you know, being beholden to the man, if you will. Yeah, I I agree. I agree. When you went to the political stuff, Marty, I was just thinking about Trump making Bitcoin great again in America. What? What was the quote that came out yesterday that all the bitcoins come into America? All the bits going to be made the. Rest of the Bitcoin. Will be mined in America. Which is. It's great to see, honestly, somebody cheerleading for Bitcoin. I think it's a smart move on his front. And there was another headline today too, that due to the energy infrastructure build out that's required for all this Bitcoin mining and the increased demand coming from AI, like there's a strong argument to be made that Bitcoin being this pioneer species for low cost energy can can help AI proliferate. Sort of goes in first, builds out the infrastructure, gets the power deals and then as hash rate goes up, you know, it becomes uneconomical and you just replace it with with AI data centers or a mixture of the two. On the on the Trump statement, it it is good that mainstream politicians are now viewing Bitcoin as a way to win votes. I sure hope that the Democrats respond at some point soon by trying to copy this move, because that would be, that would be the way that we avoid this becoming a partisan issue. And that could just, you know, that could be painful and, and hamstring adoption because, you know, if, if Bitcoin adoption is a is a political statement, then, you know, companies and individuals would be more reticent to to adopt it when, you know, objectively it has properties that anybody should want to adopt. So here's hoping that that we avoid the partisan, partisan nature of Bitcoin becoming partisan by, you know, the White House realizing that they can't afford to alienate the crypto voters and and trying to win them back when Trump has made this move already. Well, you'll, you'll be happy to learn, Jesse, that the Biden administration announced that they're currently figuring out a way to accept Bitcoin and crypto donations for for this election. See that's. Great, that's the game theory in action right there, right? Like they didn't give a shit about about crypto until Trump realized that, hey, this is an untapped opportunity that I'm going to take advantage of. So good. Yeah, And even as mining commented, people, some people in the Bitcoin space, like we don't want all the hash right here. It's like, no, obviously not. But if Trump signals, hey, we're going to put a concerted effort here in the US to allow the Bitcoin mining industry to flourish and to grow. And you just put it out there, we're going to mine all the Bitcoin. You start this this game theoretical battle where you have countries in the least, like, no, we're going to buy all the Bitcoin. And so they just start spinning it up mining infrastructure and actually leads to a further decentralization of hash rate geographically and. And for that matter, I think we should probably give some credit to RFK Junior for making a splash with Bitcoin a year ago. And then, you know, somehow that made it through the the Trump Organization to to say like, oh, you know, this one really well for him and and Vivek too. I was going. To say I would, I would give some credit to Vivek Ramaswamy because I think I mean, my personal opinion, you know, I am a fan of all the, the candidates that have that have run. I mean, he's absolutely one of the smartest people I've ever witnessed speak frankly. He is just so knowledgeable about, you know, almost every single subject in a multi faceted way. And he certainly has the ear of a lot of young conservatives, along with the Trump administration, who's trying to woo them. Yeah, he's watching it. Happen he's extremely. Impressive. I had him on TFTC in 2022. Sorry if you can hear my son screaming down there and let's go there. But that was when he was he was still full on its drive and at the time I couldn't. Imagine he'd be. Running for president but looking back in retrospectus, I completely agree. He's extremely well spoken, knows how to and the other thing too, you know, I'd like reach out and actually engage people in conversation, even if they have differing views, which I really was impressed by when during his campaign, when he was running the Republic. That's. Incredible. I didn't know he was on TFTC. You got to go find. We were at the conference last year that we put on and, and I didn't get to hear his speech. But to your point, Shaolin, he everybody says that like he can just he just like or like he'll just go for, you know, 20-30 minutes, not even like at least it doesn't look like it's, you know, pre, pre rehearsed. He's just like talking. He's just like that. He just knows multi multidisciplinary, multifaceted. He can just touch on a lot of topics and really well articulate them well. Would it be nice to have leaders who actually know subjects rather than deciding all day long? Or an AD it'd. Also, be nice to have leaders under the age of 75 too. You know, maybe that would be fun. Yep. Yep. I mean with all go ahead, OK. You got it? No. I was just going to say I one thing conscious of his time, but Sean, you, you guys are doing a lot for medium on the side of, you know, the focus. We've talked about events previously privately. Would love for you to be able to share any of the stuff you're working on that you want to get out. I know there's an event happening in New York because I think there's, there's you're trying to be forward thinking and, and you can call out the conference if you want. I don't want to name the name. But again, going back to that point of like recognizing the old way of doing things is kind of done. This notion of like everybody's going to a big conference. It's like so much noise, all the things associated. And I thought that was an interesting dynamic of like how you're just thinking about other ancillary services and and products and businesses outside of for midium or tied to it, but not directly if you wanted to talk about. So I think that everybody who is watching this has to understand that when we at Firmidium are taking on untested clients, untested strategies, we're taking a risk too, right? We have to do tech build outs. We have to deal with perhaps certain individuals who don't have as much experience. You got to look at it from the service provider side as well. That being said, having been an emerging manager, albeit a little bit older when I did it, more experienced, I can empathize with the the hardships of being an entrepreneur at all levels. By the way, you know, I've got children and I, I understand how it is. So really when I really began to meditate over it, I just felt like, how can you be? I don't think just being a service provider is enough. We have to become partners in business, OK? And that means that not only am I providing you with good service, I'm helping you grow your business. And if I can help you grow your business, OK, that's going to benefit me, right? You're going to obviously, you know, the fees that we can, that we can charge obviously go up, but you're going to tell people about us. I mean, it's such a, a wonderful virtuous circle when I can help our clients grow their businesses that, that I don't know why more people don't do it. Now there are some nuances around that. I cannot favor a client, right? We're the accountant. We have to be unbiased. That is, you know, we are old school in that sense. So, So what? So then I really got to think about how can I create perhaps platforms that can help our clients and even be available to people who funds who are not our clients. You know, there might be different service levels and, and, and whatnot, but but nonetheless, how can I create a platform that can be available to the entire community? And so that was the genesis of our alts marketplace, Alts marketplace.com. And what it is, is the listing service where fund managers of all stripes, long short equity, it could be crypto mining, it could be global macro credit. Multi billion dollars, $15 million under manager. Everybody can list their fund, have a basic listing, make themselves visible to potential investors, have allowed those investors to kind of do some pre due diligence. So when they're coming to the manager, they can be pre qualified. And we're now complementing that with other aspects. For instance, if you have events, you can list them on our marketplace. If you have insights, you can post them on our marketplace, we'll distribute them. The reason we want to distribute your insights is because I think those insights are very valuable because so many people in this world do not understand what we do. We want to educate the end investor. And so I just see it as a win win. It helps me grow my marketplace. It helps you grow your business. I was telegrammed yesterday by someone who said, you know, I heard that you're looking to invest in a few interesting funds. We're actually on your alts marketplace. So what did I do? I looked it up and I have a call with them tomorrow. So this actually works. I'm using it. I think that other serious allocators really need to be using it. I will expressed a little bit of disappointment just to be honest with you with some of the allocators in not even wanting to look at digital assets. I feel that that is a breach of fiduciary duty based on all the conversations we've had on Bitcoin as an example. But nonetheless, I digress. I think that for people who want to be on the cutting edge, who are serious investors also marketplace as a fantastic duel. And the the last way I think that I can compliment that is again, I want to grow my community. I want to grow my community as service providers. I want to grow my community as fund managers and investors, high net worth investors and credit investors. So to that end, we are hosting dinners on behalf of Alts Marketplace members in various cities like Miami and New York and Los Angeles, where you know, I'll be in attendance as well, where you can pitch your strategies. And the beauty of this is because we're the accountant, we don't take any money for it. We don't take any money for any money raised. That is, we take money for costs. Of course, dinners are expensive, but we don't take any money for any money raised. If you raised $100 million on Alts Marketplace, I congratulate you. Please be my, please be one of our clients. It's very. Cool. I appreciate you bringing up the fiduciary stuff because we've been talking increasingly more with pensions and this notion we've thought about this, right? It's like, well, I don't have a strategy. It's like maybe that's a problem. You know, they're, they would bring up initially, maybe we get sued like they bring up, well, maybe we get sued. It's like, well, maybe you get sued for adopting or like thinking about Bitcoin. So maybe you get sued. If you haven't, you don't have a good response on why you don't. And I think the Wisconsin thing was a big deal because now everybody knows they're just dipping their toe. Nobody starts with 1.1% and something until like and so you don't hear it a lot. And I feel bad in saying it because it's obviously talking our book. We believe they need Bitcoin, but to hear it on the other side, it's like at a certain point it's going to be a breach and, and some people may get sued because they're like, why don't a it's going to be less about, I think why didn't you allocate it to me more of like, what is your version or what's your thesis on why you didn't allocate? And most people are not going to have a good answer or response. The answer that I typically get is I don't understand it and that the the answer that I respond is, isn't that your job? Yes, I mean we're. We're quickly reaching the point, if not already surpassed the point where I don't understand it is not going to cut it. To your point, Michael, I think investors who are putting their capital with people that are supposed to be fiduciaries, they're going to say you are not a good fiduciary of my money if you missed out on the the best performing asset of all time. And before we wrap up here, I know we have 10 minutes, but one question I'm generally curious to hear your response to Shaolin, is like what when it comes to managing fund admin for Bitcoin or digital asset focus funds, Like what are the biggest difference with these funds compared to traditional alt funds? I imagine due to the 24/7, 365 nature of the markets that a lot of these funds trade in and the nature of the assets that they're trading adds a bit of a wrinkle to fund admin, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's that, there's the 24/7 365, there's the fact that there are certain rules are not necessarily established. So we've had to make up the rules and standardize those as time has gone on. You know, we are, we speak to regulators as well and we explain to them how we're doing things and they're generally pretty cool with it. You know, Cayman's been a great friend of for Medium, as an example, the Cayman, the Cayman regulators, SEMA. So, so I think that is a challenge. I think that definitely the challenges are less going forward than and fewer going forward than they were in the previous cycle. The previous cycle was a bit of a mess. Unadulterated speculation, of course, that's great. You know, we like, we like that, but the lack of understanding on all sides of the requirements to properly run businesses, administer asset classes, I mean the whole, the whole 9 yards. A lot of the, the, the fund managers in digital assets are younger. They don't necessarily have Tradfi experiences. They don't understand concepts like best practices. I think that when you are attempting to go 100 miles an hour and achieve some a goal very quickly, things like best practices can seem like a hindrance. And what I always like to say is that it's better to go 60 miles an hour in the right direction than 100 miles an hour in the wrong direction. And I think that now that we have, you know, funds that are now being spun out, for example, from say larger, more established entities, you have a new generation of portfolio managers who understand these concepts more. People are a little bit older now. People have a little, maybe some people have a little bit of Gray hair Now. I do think there these things help and there is a sweet spot in terms of experience and type of experience that one can have, you know, to be a successful fund manager. I don't think that we were in that sweet spot in the previous cycle and we've seen a lot of fun shutter as a result, but I do think that we're in that sweet spot now. Yeah, the the days of giving your money to a crypto fund manager who has his Ledger under his bed, managing all your money or problem hopefully behind us, who knows there's probably still some out there doing it. Yeah. What do we think happens throughout the rest of this year? We've got the election, ETFs are picking up steam. We just had the having in April. What are our predictions tend the year? I, you know, it was kind of funny. I've kind of given up on understanding this environment now and I've kind of made the recent decision to just allocate my money out. So I have almost like the little internal fund of funds now. Maybe that's just what happens. I, I, I don't understand valuations to say in the S&P 500I. I, I think NVIDIA and, and you know, these companies are great, great, great companies, but at 3540 times revenues, I, I don't understand. So the way my mind works is let me find an NVIDIA competitor. Maybe it's even in the private market. So let me fund that. It's actually something I'm doing. Can't mention the name, but, but you know, I, I, my personal mantra now is that I'm always looking for disruption and cutting edge investments. I'll even give you an example. I've been investing earlier this year in the Bitcoin D5 BRC 20 ecosystem. So I think, you know, if, if, if, if you, if you like Bitcoin then and, and we all do, why not try to find what else we could potentially do with Bitcoin? So, so that, that's how I'm looking at my personal investments now is things that are different, either, you know, disruptive, cutting edge, or have some sort of barrier to entry as far as markets go. Yeah, I, I, I'm, I'm a little bearish. I'm a little bearish. Not necessarily on crypto. I think crypto is going to have to take a breather and it has been taking a breather since April. I think that could probably last all summer long. But until we get a very definitive aggressive rate cutting cycle that takes the yield curve out of inversion into kind of a steepening mode, I am hesitant to take on too much risk personally. That's, that's kind of my personal view. That's old man's, you know, you know, Catholic preservation view, but that that's how I see it. Yeah, I think it's a complete crapshoot what's going to happen. Everybody's trying to surmise what your own pal's going to do. Notice I didn't. Answer the election question on purpose. Definitely dodged that one. I think it's safe to say it'll be chaotic and highly controversial. I think that's yeah, that's the I've got I've. Got a I've got a a ticket out of the country round about call that. Call that an option, huh? It's tough. Because you, you know you have to, you can't put your head in the sand. You have to be aware, but then you also have to have the same. It's like using both sides of the brain that you know you can impact, it can and you can't let it influence almost anything you do in a day-to-day running a business. And so it's just like these two parts that are like hard to hold to. I think where you're explaining, Sean, it's like it's like there's a, it's all out of our control. And even if we have an understanding of where we think it goes, it's still out of our control. But you got to pay attention at least enough to, to have to get on that flight if you need to. And then it can't really impact your business because that's how you a negative outcomes goes. You just have to build and work. You know, with the only thing I would say, yeah, 100 percent, 100%, you know, crypt crypto effectively will say it started when would you say guys, 2910, right? And even then it was being adopted as Bitcoin very, very early. So you know, we don't have a cycle, a a down cycle of understand, a macro down cycle of understanding for crypto. We almost had it. We kind of had it during COVID and then the monetary and fiscal authorities threw so much money. I was shocked. I mean, I was utterly stunned that you could have negative interest rates and throw that much. I didn't think that these things were even possible. As an Austrian, you like, you tend to be a rational sound thinker about money. You're just kind of like what the what are you doing? And so, you know, now we have an inverted yield curve. Now we have fiscal spending which is albeit high, not necessarily additive plus anymore unless they just run bigger deficits, which of course is possible running 1520% deficits, I guess that's possible. I'm not counting anything out at this point. But we haven't yet seen that, right. And so it feels, and we haven't had job like real sustained job losses during the crypto cycle that began in the early, you know, early 2000 tens, we'll call it. So the answer is we don't know, you know, we really don't know. And I, I, I don't know either. All I know is that as somebody who does have a little bit of capital, I can make 6% fairly safe, 10 percent, 12% if I take some of the liquidity risk, that's not too bad. I have my crypto, I have my speculative long term kind of investments around alts, Bitcoin, BTCL, twos, you know, things like that. But I think that there is going to be an opportunity where those of us who understand this asset class and who have dry powder can have tremendous opportunity. I am begging and waiting for some managers to be down 30 and 40% because I will be the guy standing there to write you a check. That's all I'm going to say. We you should just you know what you should do is when Bitcoin goes 3040%, you should just you can buy into the fun spot Bitcoin. That's what I'm actually have to plan on doing that guys. So I'm just waiting. I love it this has been. This has been awesome. Really appreciate your time on this Thursday afternoon here on the East Coast. Michael, Jesse, anything you guys want to end up with? No. Thanks for joining us all and look forward to finally meeting in person whether it's in Miami or or down in Southern Florida or New York or the next kind of event you guys are hosting. So appreciate you jumping on yeah if. I could just mention, you know, we're on Twitter, follow us at for Medium, we're on LinkedIn. Again, you can just look up for Medium and you can look up Alts Marketplace. We had mentioned a conference in New York that's going to be on September 12th. It's navigating the crypto frontier. It's going to be at Station 3, which is the largest Co working facility for blockchain AI in New York City in lower Manhattan. So you know, anybody who wants to reach out to me is welcome to reach out via LinkedIn or you can just hit me up at my e-mail. It's first name, last name at formidium.com, firstname.lastnameishouldsay@formidium.com. Yeah. It's worth, it's worth pointing out Shalin's super responsive has been insanely helpful since we started working with Formedia, made introductions, we have a came in fun coming live that mirrors our onshore trust, introductions to legal teams, the whole 9 yards. So I couldn't recommend Formedia more from all across the board. So it's worth reaching out. Appreciate it, gentlemen. Yeah. Shalin, thank you so much. This is awesome conversation to hear your whole whole journey and perspective on on markets and crypto and AI too. Yeah, thanks for having me. And yeah, the, the, the future's bright, everyone. I think that focus, being a sound mind, being a little bit stoic about things, I think these are the things that will help us all get through it. Yeah, there's light at the. End of the tunnel It's it's glowing I. Always believe that, yeah. All right. We'll see everybody next week. Thank you for joining us. Thanks, guys. Thank. You. Thanks for listening. To this week's episode of the show, if you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that on Ramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit on rampbitcoin.com/contact. Schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.
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