Why This Wall Street CEO Says Bitcoin’s Price Isn’t Nearly High Enough

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 extra ever assembled in the history of darkness, 1974198792972000 and whatever we're going to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we sell. Hey, OK. I say when we sell. And you're back with another episode of The Last Trade. This was one of the funnest podcasts we've done to date. We had Ted Smith, former CEO of Sotheby's and I believe Madison Square Garden, among other firms on the podcast. It was wide-ranging. He's super engaging, high vibes kind of guy. I think you guys are going to really enjoy it. Quick word from On Ramp. On Ramp provides a financial services built on multi institution custody. At the end of the day what we provide is our clients and our clients friends and family. Peace of Mind. No more having to deal with a hardware device tucked in a sock drawer or having to worry about a third party custodian send you phishing emails and wonder if your assets are OK. Now we completely understand that you know one, not one size custody fits all. So you don't have to move all assets over to multi institution custody. But I will say, signing up, going through our onboarding process, it's self onboarding now or you can have concierge, but then getting a test transaction through doing a withdrawal and really feeling the power behind having multiple independent institutions have to verify with you over video verification before movement of assets is super powerful. We encourage you to check us out. You can reach out at hello at honor@bitcoin.com or Michael at honor@bitcoin.com if you want to shoot us a note with questions or you can sign up for a consultation or just again through the self onboarding now. I hope you enjoyed the show. We'll talk to you later. OK. And we're live. It's the last trade. There's five of us here. We got some special guests as well. For those who are not on video, we can just rattle off the names real quick. So we have big Tim Kotzman. Tim is showing up to the podcast today from the backseat of a taxi cab. Tim, great to see you not. A police car. It's not a police car, it's a taxi cab. Not this time. That's the next episode. Stay tuned for next week. And so we got Michael as well, Michael Tanguma and Brian Cabela's on the on ramp team. Gentlemen, good to see you. I see you guys enough so we don't we don't need your introduction. And then Ted Smith. Ted, it's great to meet you just before we hit record here. Thanks for joining us today. You're the you're the guest of honor this week. How are you? Wow. Thank you. It's great to be here, Jackson. Appreciate it. Excellent. Well, certainly want to get more into your background on the back half of the show. But what we do here at the last trade is we always pull up the Bitcoin price chart. And so this was actually Tad, just so you know, this is a very sad moment for us the past several months because we just looked at 80K for week after week, what felt like it was an eternity. And then last week we started to see some positive momentum. It's actually I think it was cuz Brian wasn't on the podcast last. Week, so that might have been it. So finally we have some green candles to look at. The price is getting close to 100K. Gentlemen, what are your thoughts here? What's what's driving Bitcoin right now? Just broader, broader recognition of its inherent monetary properties. I think just people getting educated every day. I, I, you know, put out our newsletter this morning and what I was really talking about is just, you know, we we've said this in the past, but on a risk adjusted basis, if you consider all of the backdrop, all of the positive tailwinds that are constructed for Bitcoin adoption going forward. 96 K whatever at 97 K it's just extremely mispriced. It's it's in arguably arguably the cheapest bitcoins ever been. If you're considering where we are, how we sit here today with government adoption, government support, corporations adopting it. And again, the education is just permanent permeating around, you know, this isn't a tech stock. This is a superior monetary asset that you can store value into the future. And that's that's really all this is. And and you know, I've been saying this for weeks, but you know, with everything going on, it's really the most bullish I've ever been on Bitcoin. Even when we were hanging out in the 70s and the 80s, it was it was only a matter of time before we started to move back up. So great. Great to be back in the 90s with you, Jackson. But yeah, this is everything's going according to plan in my mind. Just week after week, my complaints push the price higher. And so just a quick recap. So it's actually May 1st, we're recording on Thursday. This will come out tomorrow morning. Just to recap what happened in April, it was it was a crazy time in markets. A lot happened in the span of a month. We had the announcements of the tariffs on April 2nd, all sorts of volatility, uncertainty in terms of trade relations, what was going to happen with the yield curve. Bonds are spiking as well. What actually where we ended up in terms of asset class performance was gold was about 6% up for the month of April, peaked at about $3500 an ounce. I think we're sitting close to 3233 hundred. So still incredible performance for year to date. NASDAQ and S&P were both about flat. I want to say NASDAQ might have returned 1% in the month of April, S&P was just about flat and Bitcoin 12% in the month of April. It didn't feel like that in the trenches in the middle of the month that did not feel like this is the outcome we're going to have. But Ted, maybe I'll throw it over to you. What what do you make of just what happened in the month of April in in markets and with Bitcoin? Well, the context for me, for my answering your question is I'm a strong ardent proponent of the liquidity philosophy and how it drives Bitcoin and asset prices. Whether you credit Michael Howell or Raul Powell or Julian Patel, take your pick and liquidity has been on a monster run in the last 6 to 8 weeks. Gold has been telling you that story. It's sort of front loaded it. Bitcoin is coming in very strong to catch up. And you could argue the dip prior to the last sort of period of time was baked in when liquidity began to shrink in October of last year. I'm definitely on that train. The fact that we have buyers emerging everywhere, we've got strong secular bullish trends, all of that to me says number go up. And if anything, it feels a little bit like the tail end of the chopped solidation we had last year, except that the liquidity situations probably even more bullish right now. So I'm not surprised. I think the other thing that I would observe in the month of April and you put your finger on it is it was interesting to see the NASDAQ, which is also liquidity sensitive go One Direction and Bitcoin go a different 1. And I would attribute that now this is just armchair, you know, post hoc trading analysis if you will, if that much. I would say that the stocks in the NASDAQ were much more sensitive to the economic cycle and also frankly to the effect of potential tariffs and the uncertainty than Bitcoin. Was Bitcoins essentially immune to it? In my opinion, if anything, it's a positive. And then the final point. And so therefore, you would see them diverge quite naturally, whether you call that a flight to safety or you call it a limited flight to safety, which is to say Bitcoin is safe in a tariff world. I'll take that as a friendly amendment from the floor. And the final thing I would pile on to this is that Bitcoin is probably sniffing out that the Fed is going to move. Now whether they move on rates or whether they move on the supplemental leverage ratio or whether they do whatever was best and said yesterday so-called Treasury buyback, I'm not sure there'll be some fancy version of non QE, QE and Bitcoin sniffing that out. Yeah, that's a great, you know, summary of what's going on. I think you and Brian, you know, brought the the sophisticated right side of the curve. I'll go on the other side and say, you know, maybe it's not just fully Michael Sailor, but there's about nine other sailors in the market currently right now that are heavily bidding this price up and accumulating BTC, whether it's GameStop, what is it Metaplanet just coming into over the US And then I'm sure there's no shortage of behind the scenes pre specs that are picking up BTC ahead of going public. So there's a lot of demand. And then you have the tailwinds as Tad alluded to with liquidity. We pulled up that chart previously. We've talked about for the past few weeks, you know, gold front front ran that cycle and we've seen it kind of temper off. And this is I think what happened like 6 months ago as well where gold broke out and then kind of like, you know, took a step back and Bitcoin ran. And if that's what is ahead of us, we have a pretty exciting next cut a few weeks or months ahead of us. I came across this chart that reinforces more of the relationship between Bitcoin and gold. And so this is from Tephra Digital. And Ted really ties into a lot of what you just said in terms of liquidity cycles, gold tends to front run. But if you look here, it looks like we're just with the price action this week, Bitcoin seems to be sniffing out the increase in global liquidity, which Ted, I believe you mentioned was the past, what, 6 to 8 weeks or so. And then so this is the ratio of Bitcoin to gold. And so you can see here it tracks over the past three years or so through the collapse of Luna and FTX, the the initial launch of the Bitcoin ETF's. And you can see what that really dramatically increased the ratio of Bitcoin to gold, which really just speaks to investor ability to get access to this asset class, which previously really felt uninvestable for a lot of people. But I'd argue now if you look on the right hand side of this chart here, we've seen a, a decrease of the Bitcoin to gold ratio, meaning gold outperforming Bitcoin really in the month of April and March as well with uncertainty and just yeah, general uncertainty around tariffs, recession, growth fear, etcetera. But I'd argue now we're really poised to see this number or see this ratio go higher because we have gotten through this period now of consolidation and correction in the Bitcoin price. And it's, I always like to joke about this tad because it's kind of a blessing and curse. We do this podcast because a lot of it can be redundant, but it's also important to help investors remain convicted in the thesis. And so I could probably close my laptop and never look at Twitter or X again. And I would feel very confident that Bitcoin goes higher because I know the structural situation of the Fiat system is more debt, more dollars, more liquidity, etc. But it's good at least to have a pulse, maybe for those who don't have the same conviction that we do, that things are looking to improve here in terms of liquidity expanding, which will drive the both gold and the Bitcoin price higher. Yes. And I love that point. I mean, for me, this is the North Star for huddling and to allow you to hang on during the tough patches. But for those who try to trade in and out or take positions, it's a little bit tougher to use this kind of analysis, the one that I'm mentioning, the one that you're mentioning, because the timing of these things has a high degree of variability. And if you have limited time issues on an option trade or trading position or any sort of time sensitivity, it's a bit more, it's a bit more problematic. But if you step back, you're a Diamond Hands Hodler and you just need that positive reinforcement. This is exactly the kind of chart you want to see, and exactly the kind of analysis you want to look at. Absolutely. One thing I wanted to jump to, I think we wanted to start here, but we just got, we got too excited, we got too excited about 97 K. So we had to just briefly chat about that. But I want to pull up this clip here and let me know if the audio isn't coming through. But we're going to take a look here at what the Black Rock CIO said about the digital asset space, and particularly in Bitcoin. I'm not a deep enough student of kind of the institutional ecosystems in the other coins right now. But in terms of the conversations that we've had with institutional investors, they are really largely focused on Bitcoin right now, particularly in this environment. Ethereum is still a a distant second so. Yeah. So we're not even talking about revenue generating protocols or anything like? That and remember, we're talking about, you know, the, the, you know, institutional investors who are, you know, broadly in 6040 equity bond portfolios and, and looking to figure out what that, what the new sources of return and diversification will be for them. They want both of those and that's what's bringing them to private markets. It's bringing. Yeah, it's a, it's a great clip. It kind of comes back to we discussed last week with I think it was the head of institutional on Coinbase's side referencing pensions, endowments, family offices, starting to look at gold as a trade and then indirectly BTC because of its properties. I think historically, we've obviously said bitcoins, digital gold, but that was more of us trying to sell the market versus the market fully, like embracing or appealing to that. And with gold's breakout inflationary environment in the 6040, kind of moving away from a nominal or a real return. Now you're starting to see that I think liquidity flow from gold's trade into BTC. And that's what I think she's referencing in the markets also picking up on. And that's kind of the divergent that we saw with the NASDAQ and then hard assets like Bitcoin and gold. And I don't think that's historically been there. We wanted it to be there. And on the margins, you know, for the Paul Tudor Jones and Druckenmiller's. But for the rest of the market, I don't think that trade has been as at the forefront, but it's starting to become which is obviously ultra bullish. Yeah. And the the bigger signal from that clip to me is the the clear distinction or delineation that she's making between Bitcoin and the rest of crypto. And I think that's kind of what the interviewers question was trying to get at was, you know, are institutional allocators actually thinking about these things differently. And and her answer I think is very telling that particularly in this environment of market uncertainty and tariffs, etcetera, people are looking for incredibly neutral stores of value. They're not looking for high beta tech exposure, which I would characterize sort of the rest of crypto charitably, as you know, much more akin to technology stocks relative to Bitcoin being, you know, this purely monetary asset. And so that was the biggest take away from that clip for me is like she's telling you how these people are thinking. They're talking to folks every day. And so that again, going back to like the education component, like the idea that Bitcoin is truly different than the rest of crypto is continuing to manifest in the brains of, of allocators across the world. And, and you know, the, the key point there is like the reason that's happening is because the 6040 isn't working. Bonds and equities are going down. So you actually need a real diversifier. You don't need higher beta tech risk, You need something else. It's going to preserve value. And so that's, you know, Bitcoin is, is sort of fulfilling that role that, you know, people have been studying it for a long time, have understood, but the broader market isn't there yet, obviously. And so I think that's, it's just a really clear signal that, you know, slowly but surely the these these concepts and these ideas of Bitcoins true nature are, are starting to emerge. Yeah, one thing to call out, it wasn't in that clip. Both encourage anyone listening to go check out the podcast. It was very informative on Black Rocks overarching, you know, Bitcoin, but digital asset securitization strategy. And she referenced something we've kind of like speculated on that 50% of the flow into ibit has been purely from retail investors that weren't comfortable with getting access to any other Bitcoin product. And she referenced that in like, I want to say 22. They had initially launched a private placement and maybe even before then they were strategizing. Do we really want to offer Bitcoin because of its accessibility? So simple. You can download a mobile wallet, you know, River Cash App, Coinbase, but they had to go full circle and realize we'll know people want the ibit brand or the BlackRock brand. They want that, you know, security around it of the rapper along with Coinbase. But it's interesting because like they saw that they're sophisticated enough to know that there's probably better products out there, but there's also the market that's still coming up the curve. And I think they're going to go full circle and ultimately have to do a bunch of other things like in kind delivery once the market gets educated. Because the thing we talked about here, Ted, is the ETF's are great, but anybody that builds a material position outside of 2 to 3% of our portfolio wakes up and realizes what counterparty risk looks like in the Bitcoin space. And then they ultimately are going to ask or look for better products. You know, I, I agree and institutional investors are really very different from the mindset I think of the retail investor or even the what I would call the non institutional family office investor or ultra high net worth investor. And the fundamental difference is if for an institutional investor, it's not their money. And and that is such a key point because when you are investing someone else's money, you have fiduciary responsibilities and you have to have evidence based approaches. And evidence based approaches often are quantitative. They often have earnings statements, they have cash flows, they have analyst reports. When you think about all the sort of apparatus of institutional investment, all of that stuff is a necessary precondition of investing at a fiduciary, a legally fiduciarily acceptable level for other people's money. And so that means institutional investors, everything else are probably or are least likely to be slow to invest in an asset that does not produce Fiat cash flow. A very important point, everything else being equal, you're and so then the question is, why is it that anyone would invest in something that doesn't produce Fiat cash flow? And the answer to that is overwhelmingly narrative. The narrative of Bitcoin versus gold of of Bitcoin versus liquidity, of Bitcoin versus safety, of Bitcoin versus counterparty risk, those narratives. And what's so powerful about the ETF and so powerful about the environment that we're in now. And by the way, the narrative has changed dramatically right in the last six months. Suddenly the regulatory risk around Bitcoin has faded away. So that narrative risk is essentially gone. Liquidity is rising. Safety is a new narrative that's come on the and when you look at the change in narrative from the perspective of an institutional shareholder or institutional investor, it's a completely different situation. It looks a lot more like gold. And that means it's safe for you to put it some into someone and into the money that's not yours. And so I look at it and I say the institutional investors are not surprising to me that in this narrative environment, they're prepared to take a gold looking like flyer, well, not really a flyer, but wade into this new pool and that should probably accelerate as the narrative continues to get better and better and better. But that's a totally different situation from retail because retail is perfectly comfortable when they're doing their own money investing in a narrative or frankly even investing in a flyer. So back to what Yano was saying, what's the narrative of Bitcoin versus, say Ethereum versus say, Solana versus say Sweet from the perspective of an institutional investor, very different, the narratives for those, if you're not investing your own money, those are a long putt for an institutional investor. Yeah, it's, that's really well said, Ted. And and you know, the other thing I, I would point out is, you know, just, you know, we, we've talked about the liquidity conditions we talked about. This divergent in, you know, Bitcoin being more recognized for its true nature. But you know that if Jackson, if you could pull up that other tweet from tougher digital that shows the actual sort of restrictions that are still in place around the ETFs at most banks and wire houses around the country. It's really remarkable to think that, you know, these ETF products were the most successful sort of financial products ever launched, all the capital that's come through them, yet, you know, most people still can't access them through their traditional brokerage. And so this is like a massive sort of signal to me that like, you know, I don't think we've even scratched the surface of what these ETFs flows could look like over the next five years, despite them being, you know, so you know, exceptionally performing over the past year. This just tells you like, you know, that that slow moving approach your referencing Tad is, is certainly still the case. You know, I think Tepra puts out this chart every few weeks and and you see you see new check marks every couple weeks, but it is, it is a slow process. And so I think just as these channels continue to open up as as that Overton window continues to shift and people continue to, you know, recognize Bitcoin for what it is, you're going to start to see, you know, pretty incredible flows into a lot of these products. Yeah. One of the incredibly remarkable things about this too is that the Bitcoin ETF's were still the most successful ETF complex I've been in particular last year, even with all the restrictions here. So you can see about $30 trillion of assets under management restricted from fully participating in the Bitcoin ETF complex. Despite that there was $50 billion of inflows last year, right? So and bitcoins a small market still, it's 1.81 point $9 trillion today. So it doesn't take a ton to move the markets. And Brian, just reinforcing what you said there. We haven't really seen, I feel like it's the first pitch, right? It's it's not even the full first inning for Bitcoin adoption within the managed wealth space, within the institutional space. Tad, one thing I would love to hear your thoughts on too, is particularly on gold in the institutional investment community. Because I remember a handful of years ago before I switched over into the, the Bitcoin space, we would have investment strategy calls. I, I worked on a manager research desk. So we looked at hedge funds and all sorts of private asset strategies. But we had a monthly investment strategy call and gold like was never really talked about by the investment strategy team. It was maybe, oh, if you want to express a bearish view on XYZ, you might want to have 1% of your portfolio allocated to gold. But we really haven't been for several decades in an environment where people actually think about neutrality, sovereignty as part of your counterparty risk, as part of their investment thesis, at least from my purview. So are you, would you agree in terms of your experiences? And do you think now that these themes are more in vogue as it relates to allocating capital in the institutional space? Well, specifically from the institution space, we can pivot to ultra high net worth or retail in just a minute. But remember that in a world where you can do what gold does and do it with an instrument that uncontroversially produces Fiat cash flow a la bonds, you don't have any need to go to gold again. So from the perspective of investing someone else's money, the first thing they're going to ask is, well, what am I going to get and when? Right just that's the client is going to say, what am I going to get and when? So in a world where bonds are satisfying the need to produce the cash flow, you don't actually have to have gold as a narrative at all. What's remarkable about this period and the prior period where gold wouldn't parabolic in the recent in recent history is the basic idea of 6040 broke down and that the cash producing or Fiat cash producing instruments were not doing the job. And in that environment you got to say, and I think Jackson, for the reasons you said, in that environment you got to say, OK, well I need something else. And so it's not going to produce, it's not going to safely to an institution produce cash flow. So it's going to have to have a narrative that's tried and true and take one 5000 years old that has lots and lots of statistical correlations with unusual of event that are risk off and does well. And then by the way, you can divide every possible financial chart by gold and see every Fiat chart in the world divided by gold. We all know what those look like. And you say, OK, well this narrative is really powerful. It's tried, tested, it's formally an actual form of sovereign currency around the world. So OK, it's worth a try. I get it. And that's how in my mind institutions think, which is I'm going to default to the tried and true if the tried and true doesn't and doesn't produce cash flow, I've got to have an absolute rock solid narrative. So. Yeah, It makes a ton of sense. And those markets are small to begin with as well. There was actually I wanted to pull up a chart here. It's like if you're managing considerable capital as an institutional investor, you don't want to be moving, you don't want to be moving markets by scaling into a position or in and out of the position. And so I think that's still a large impediment to Bitcoin adoption is if you look at this, you look in the top right side here, Bitcoin 1.8 trillion. It might be a little bit higher than that today, but it fluctuates, right? And so this was actually a chart of of money and then also precious metals crypto Bitcoin markets produced by Nye Day just to show that the markets that actually exist for a non sovereign store of value is incredibly small. I mean, gold is a $22 trillion market. The entire precious metals industry is only 24 trillion. So Bitcoin 1.8 total crypto market caps about 3 trillion. I think it's down about close to 20% from all time highs a few months ago. But so these, particularly Bitcoin in the crypto space, will have to actually expand in terms of their market capitalization. There needs to be more liquidity, at least in my opinion, before institutional investors will come in, in scale here. But there's really not many other options to go to. I mean, there's gold. And then I hadn't really heard much about platinum or Palladium outside of a few like niche macro funds that I worked with back in like 2019-2020. Same with silver. You know, I love about your point, Jackson. I mean, lots of lots of elements that I love, but I got to say one in particular, how funny it is that even that with the institutions, which are the highly rational investors in theory, right versus the D gens, the number has of Bitcoin, for example, has to go up significantly from here in order for them to put money to work, which in turn will make the number go up. I mean, when you think of think about that for just a minute, meaning it's the price isn't high enough for them to have interest is really what we just said. Now, in a world where the supply could adjust, you know, you would just print more Bitcoin, print more Bitcoin, print more Bitcoin and provide supply. So the institutions could come in in this world. You don't get that option in this world. Bitcoin has to hit a certain minimum efficient scale for the very super large institutions to make it to, to come in in a way that adjusts their portfolio results in some meaningful way. And that means, and by the way, we ain't even talked about sovereigns, forget institutions for just a minute, that that means we're just beginning. What'd you say? First inning, bottom of the first, I don't remember. What you said it. Was baseball. I grew up in Denver. We didn't have baseball there. So I you know, I'll, I'll tell you by into the first quarter whatever you like. Love it. Yeah, this is, this is something we talk about a lot because that paradox or reflexivity is embedded in a lot of things. One of them is you may have seen this chart, Riverhead sourced it where you see, you know, I think most people would educate and know that this has been a retail driven phenomenon. Our thesis says it'll continue to be for a number of reasons. 1 is simply because individuals are consensus of 1, so they can allocate much more material wealth than like you reference governance going to getting consensus will take much longer to take that view and then take a larger position. But then also because the individual holds the vast majority of this asset, they are by nature the most sophisticated because they've been in the market the longest. And so they're the ones that are looking for the most sophisticated products. And that's ultimately something that you haven't seen from the traditional, like smart money, Wall Street building products and services. Like the ETF, again, is sophisticated for, you know, pension endowment. But for an individual that's holding $100 million, that's the last thing they're going to want to put their assets in. And so from a market structure perspective, it's something we pay attention a lot about and how we build our products because we're preparing for when the market has more material positions, they get more educated and they naturally are going to look for the same products that the individual, which has never really been seen. And so when we talk with institutional allocators and specifically large Trad 5 firms, some CR model and are starting to talk about what's maybe incorporating, but others are like, why would anybody ever want anything other than an omnibus wallet full of a bunch of coins? And it's like, well, let me explain why. And so that's a huge opportunity And I know you said on the investment side to actually invest in products and services that are ahead of that curve. Exactly, exactly. I couldn't agree more. So hey, right, the headline number go up. Tim, can you can you point higher for us just to make sure we're on the same page here? Tim Orange coin is good. What's going on with this tie situation? I don't know if you feel bearish. Casual Tim, what is this? You know, it's opposite, Dave. The price is going up. So you know, there's there's no possible way that the tie could be long enough, right? I don't, I don't just don't know how it would go if Jackson asked me for the tie reveal. And how long is the tie right? I don't have a tie that goes all the way down to my shoes. So there's just no tie today. I think the audience is going to be very upset about this, Tim. They might not even be able to publish the episode. Yeah. Tim, can you, can you speak to a rumor I saw on on Twitter this morning that NVIDIA is considering putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet? Was that the other large corporate that your buddy AP Apagus was referring to? I have no idea. It really seems like a rumor mill at this point, right? So yeah, I as soon as I woke up at 5 or 6, right before I texted Michael for the very first time, right? I saw an account that has a lot of followers, but right underneath the announcement, the comments are like, so what's your source? What's the source? I am the source, right? And I'm like, this is this thing doesn't have legs as of yet. Truth is it it to me it doesn't make a lot of sense, right? Because when you when you think about some of the most successful companies in the world, NVIDIA is right at the top of that list. And this for them is a net distraction if you ask me. I don't know what it would do necessarily to their shareholder base. I'm not sure in the near term, you know, and I you quoted Sailor just a minute ago, Tim, I think you're spot on. Sailor says really the people that are very young and or desperate are the ones who are appropriate for this. And in the case of corporations, he always points at zombie companies or companies that are shells that are the ones that are right for it. And I think he's right. I think the most successful companies in the world actually can afford to be the last ones to do it. So I don't know why NVIDIA, I don't know why NVIDIA would be on that list. And if it were, by the way, to me, I, I'm not an NVIDIA shareholder anymore, but I used to be it it to me. If it were, I'm not sure it wouldn't be a sell. Interestingly enough, it it would be it would be signaling something to me that's a little strange so. How about the subsidiary for Metaplan? I want coming to the US in Miami. Have any thoughts? I'll throw it over to the group. I'm pulling the tweet up as I speak to it. But so backed by $250 million of initial capital to essentially give access to U.S. markets to Metaplanet. Yeah, I mean, Tim, this is kind of our TAD. Excuse me. This is exactly what you pretty much just said, right? In terms of the video is going to be potentially one of the last companies to adopt it. They don't really have the urgency or need to, but companies like Metaplanet have seen wild success in adopting a Bitcoin treasury playbook. So gentlemen, what do you think about this announcement that just came out, I believe yesterday or today rather? Yeah, it just seems like, seems like every day there's a new announcement about some sort of corporate adoption, whether it's, you know, something like this launching A subsidiary or all these the SPAC deals that we've seen with 21 capital. And you know, I know there's a number of other ones in the works. It seems like there's a, you know, at the margins, at least, as you know, this is not a widespread phenomenon just yet, but at the margins, it does seem like there's, you know, people scrambling to, to get Bitcoin in, in a vehicle that is accessible to public markets effectively. And so I think, you know, you know, if we're first pitch, first inning, whatever it is, like I, I think we're just scratching the surface of, of companies attempting to do this. I think one thing we've also talked about is like, you know, while this, while this broadens the landscape, broadens the access for people with a brokerage account, people that you know, aren't necessarily ready to manage private keys or hold the underlying. That's all well and good. But I think the reality is, you know, people are going to wake up in five years and not necessarily want proxy exposure through a levered vehicle. And so I think it's going to be very interesting to see how it plays out. We we talked with Pierre Rashard last week about this and you know, our question to him was kind of like, is there a, is there a level of saturation? Do we need all of these public companies that are basically Bitcoin proxy leverage exposure? Is there a point at which, you know, the market just doesn't need all these different vehicles? And does, you know, is there some economies of scale that just lead all the capital to flow towards strategy predominantly? Ted, I'm curious your view there like it, you know, because we're seeing more and more of this in your view, do do sort of public market investors need all of these different options? Is it, is it, you know, there's obviously going to be differences, right, like leverage ratios, how much risk they're taking. So, so there's sort of like a different, you know, different flavors of these things. But is in your mind, is there a saturation point where like the market's like, all right, we don't, we don't need all these Bitcoin treasury companies. Well, they all have the same. Well, let me step back. If they're all shells or approximately shells, I mean, obviously sailors got a 500 million software business in it, but it's a, but they're essentially shells. Then the question is how do they differentiate themselves And any market where you have a whole bunch of competitors that have very low levels of differentiation to me is not something that's an exciting investment. And so when I look at it, I say with respect to strategy, stroke micro strategy that has and you said it Brian, you said they've got huge scale, which you know a sailor doesn't buy into this thesis at least as far as I can see. But the huge scale will give them things to do other than Bitcoin per unit share going up in the future as that and ways to innovate around that, that I think will be tremendously important. The rest of them in order to differentiate themselves, they have to be doing something materially different. The thing that has me intrigued back to your point about Metaplanet, where we started on this is so in terms of their announcement, what I'm the story I'm going to tell you may be entirely coincidence and I'm not being cute. I'm actually just entirely coincidence. So I've been eyeing Metaplanet for a couple of days thinking, you know, I, I really like the way it's moving. It might be fun to put some something for the kids in there. So I called JP Morgan yesterday and I said I'd like to buy Metaplanet. And interestingly, I'd tried them about six weeks ago and at that time they were sort of talking about getting a stock in the Japanese exchange and I almost lost the will to live. I said, think about the paperwork. I'm, I'm not doing that. So then I, I saw that they have this MTPLF little OTC ticker now and it's like 2 bucks, 93 or something at the current trading price. And it's, by the way, if you look at the, it's moving up very nicely. And I think Simon's doing exciting things and you know, it's a higher beta option than strategy. Maybe a little bit around the edges. It'd be worth having putting some for the kids, you know, you never know. So I called JP Morgan yesterday, said can I have some MTPLF, and they looked it up on the screen and they said I got to call you back. They called compliance and they said it's an OTC stock, less than $5, we won't sell it to you flat out. So I sit there and I think, OK, well, maybe if I were Simon Grovich, I would say, well, I would want to be over here in the US with access to US capital and to make it really easy to people like Tad who want to buy some. Maybe this is coincidence, but there's your story. But they're separated entities, right? It's not like a feeder like a feeder. Fun like this is completely different because my understanding is metaplanet success comes from the arbitrage with that current market and all the other ancillary things like this would be fundamentally different. So be trading on its brand recognition a lot. I couldn't agree more and you have high expectations for the level of information I'm going to take in before I buy. Yeah, I think that's the interesting aspect of this. It always reminds me of the zero to one book. If if anybody has a monopoly, they never tell you it's a monopoly. And then if you don't have a monopoly, you always say you have a monopoly. And so Sailor saying that, you know, he doesn't really have a Moat is him telling you maybe he does have a Moat. It feels very Pareto distributed. There's going to be a large winner. I like the notion of that's been thrown around as like a, you know, strategy was the Immaculate Conception in the corporate treasury game. You can only do it once, but TBD. But to your point, it's hard for us to in good faith be excited about some of this stuff because it all looks the same and it's hard to tell somebody why don't you just buy spot BTC. But obviously for for Bitcoin and if it gives institutional capital a reason to to get exposure, it's good, but it's hard to see the return profile makes sense and. By the way, it's actually worthwhile not at this point in the cycle if you still believe there is a cycle, I do believe there's liquidity cycles. It's actually cause for concern. What do I mean when you have, call it X, more than a dozen, maybe 80, whatever the number of companies is, whose sole focus is to try to differentiate on providing some version of alpha with respect to a Bitcoin treasury strategy. And you can imagine that would be an invitation for the marginal person to be adding too much leverage, to be extending themselves too far, to put too much risk into the system for the hedge funds that are buying and and trading it, to be borrowing too much from their banks. All of it intensifies the level of both enthusiasm on the way up and the potential risk on the way down South. Look, I don't mean I'm bullish on these things. I think things at this point in cycle look very good. But this is a party with leveraged Bitcoin equity that is going to really be raucous. And you know, a little farther in the cycle, a little bit bubblier, a little bit more speculation, a little bit more parabolic curves on these assets, and you can bet your bottom dollar I'm a stand near the door. Yeah, I mean, you said this in a lot more sophisticated way than I have or will ever. But this is the sentiment I've been sharing internally and externally is I grew up with the understanding, you know every, you know, there's no such thing as a free lunch and money doesn't grow on trees. And ultimately if it also, you know, the marginal cost of production things trend to. And if you're printing money out of thin air to buy an underlying hard asset, ultimately that has to go back and mean revert and. As they say, you either run out of money or you run out of air, and neither one of them is good. Exactly. And then the the last part in all of that is more of this is kind of like bird's eye view. But historically in bitcoins 15 years, there's always been these centralized concentrations of the capital that are aggregated and then they kind of diffuse or disperse like it throughout. And we never know where the assets go, but they're always just gone, right. You have FTX, you have blocked by your Celsius, you have all these things, you never really know who's holding them. And you know, not to get conspiratorial, but it's just always like funny because we're always like blame it on the underlying, but we never know where the actual, you know, there's a lot of people holding paper BTC that have been waiting for claims for three years. And what you just described is kind of a proxy for that where you have 10 different entities absorb a lot of BTC. They blow up the BTC goes somewhere and disperses, but you never really you're going to point to the like the animal spirit. So you're never going to point behind the strategy. And so there's just a lot of, I think a lot of wisdom in what you're sharing that the market should pay attention to because we're going to get into the animal spirits again as liquidity increases and people are going to forget previous cycles, you know, cautions. Like Michael, you're exactly right. I mean, we, we forget the Fed in terms of liquidity right now is basically tight. I mean, it continues to be tight. I'm not talking about necessarily the rates, although I happen to believe they're too high and I'm entitled my opinion. Jay Powell actually runs the show. It doesn't matter what my opinion is. But I also think liquidity is a bit tight and the liquidity you're seeing around the world is mostly not US liquidity except insofar as the dollars rolling over and the yields on the tenure a little lower because of growth expectations changing. The reason I say that is it's been a while since we had a really, really RIP roaring parabolic move. And we've, you know, it's easy to say we've forgotten. I mean that little thing we had last in the fourth quarter of last year and that was nothing compared to what this thing could do. When the when the Fed, I mean the Fed starts printing dollars, the whole world wants dollars. And when it starts printing dollars, like really printing dollars, we've had an unusually long period of tough, tight money relatively for the Fed, we're going to forget those animal spirits are going to be explosive, and it'll be. Exactly the moment where we don't want to, you know, where we don't. Want to leave the party? And to throw more gasoline on that, now you have a friendly administration and regulatory environment to digital assets. And so you're just throwing, you know, like a dynamite or whatever the analogy be on top of the, the, the, you know, building on fire. And it's just going to be a pretty It'll be fun for a while. I mean, a perfect example strategy then MicroStrategy was a heck of a lot easier to sell at $400.00 than it was at $544.00 last November. What do I mean, it's at $544.00 even though it's gone up a hundred $150.00. And like, what was it a week? I mean, you guys would know it's, it says the FOMO sense is overwhelming. OK, now's the time to sell. It's just hard, really hard. It's a lot easier at 400. And you know, it sounds kind of a yawn. In fact, what is it, 396 or something today? It's easy to buy and sell today, even on the day of earnings. So, and that's the mindset. Ted, do you have any thoughts on just we didn't talk at all about sovereign accumulation of Bitcoin or mining or what I'm gener, I'm generally just curious to hear your thoughts. We talked a little bit about institutional adoption, but we haven't talked much about sovereign central banks. I think it's incredibly early for that, but I would love to be wrong about it. I think it'd be interesting to see what happens if the US moves forward with starting to accumulate Bitcoin in more of a budget neutral manner. But what are your general thoughts just in terms of like, I guess my question would be, what do you make of the 1st 100 days or so in terms of the US policy with Bitcoin and digital assets? And then what are your thoughts through the end of 2025 then however many months, that is seven months or so on U.S. policy, but then also just sovereign game theory around this asset class? So I would characterize the first 100 days of policy by this administration with respect to Bitcoin and the strategic reserve, which is let's stay narrowly focused on that for just a minute or sovereign accumulation. I think of Bitcoin strategic reserve as appropriately sober. And what I mean by that is they've launched a study. Six months is a good period of time for a study. I think they're actually really thinking it through. There are all sorts of dynamics for the world's reserve currency leader to think about a Bitcoin reserve. It's easy to announce the intention. One they didn't go into. The sort of. They didn't do a self immolation of printing dollars to buy Bitcoin without taxpayer support, without the extra education, all these different things. They're thinking it through and they're proceeding cautiously. In the meanwhile, they are galloping on the stablecoin legislation, which has clear and present benefits for the US dollar and the US Treasury bill situation. And they are actively working toward some version of what we call the Fit 21, which is the financial market restructuring or structuring, so people will know what a token is and clarify which regulatory agencies make sense. So for me, the fact they've queued the strategic Bitcoin Reserve carefully and thoughtfully, they're not slow walking it because they're actively moving along on it, in my opinion. But it's appropriate that it goes slower than the other two. And now that's a slightly different answer than countries that are in the back to the sailor quote, the young and the desperate. The young and the desperate are really all about Bitcoin. And you can think about what countries in the world are both either young or desperate. And in those instances, as long as the IMF in particular makes it hard for them to adopt Bitcoin, then you could imagine a world where those things where those countries are in effect doing some version of a strategic Bitcoin reserve. But what's more likely for them, honestly, what do they really want? What they really want is stable coins. What they really want is the US dollar and to be on the US and have U.S. dollar currency pegged, in my opinion. So stable coins will be good for them. So I don't see in the near term a lot of countries adopting it except with respect to what I would call the US dollar adversaries. As a hedge example, if I'm in China or I'm in Russia or I'm in a place where I'm concerned about the long term ability of my ability to use the US dollar in any capacity with the recent weaponization of the dollar. I'm not trying to say any political, I'm just saying the Biden administration put in place is pretty tough sanctions for Russia after the Ukraine invasion of the use of the dollar. I've now if I'm a country that is often adverse to the United States interests, I would certainly be buying gold for the reason that we said and I would potentially quietly be accumulating Bitcoin, Bitcoin. And the reason is it's almost a call option on the future reserve system. You're not sure how it's going to play out, but the one thing you can pretty much guess is that Bitcoins going up and the more of those you have, the more power you'll have, the more seats you'll have at the table to figure out what the final monetary world's going to look like. So that was a long winded way, but I hope it was helpful. Yeah, I think, I think this kind of underpins some of that. This chart recently came out, I think Incrementum put it together, but it's showing close to $325 trillion in global debt money supply and then ultimately hard assets, gold and Bitcoin only make up 5% of that. And so in a world full of debt and counterparty or potential counterparty risk, specifically around adversaries, IE, you know, Russia and Treasuries, you may want possession being 9/10 of the law. If you take delivery of that, you're hedging yourself out from the counterparty risk of a, you know, the US dollar or corporate bonds or bonds. And so I think this is part of that stacking. I never thought of the, there's an interesting aspect you mentioned about the IMF and that kind of ties into what we've talked about as a little inorganic in the hash rate. Like post the past 24 months, it's kind of really, I mean, it's gone insanely parabolic where it's been rumored, you know, that certain countries are mining with nuclear energy. And that would be a very kind of like subtle way to start establishing a reserve without actually buying in the open market by leveraging natural resources. And that goes back to the the hungry and young countries are probably already doing this today, some in Latin America and some in the Middle East, by the way, all of this. At both your point and my point, my point more so than yours which is more forward-looking even than mine. All of this is a, call it a medium term answer, medium term being sort of five years. Because at the rate of AI and agentic transactions and the use of agentic AI to conduct e-commerce and deal with currencies, the dollar, some non digital version of currency isn't going to cut it. And in that world, again, what I would want to do is I'd want to have some Bitcoin, which is the perfect digital form of capital if I'm a country or sovereign nation, just to make sure everything comes out OK for my people. Yeah, it's if you're a sovereign nation by the name of Italy. Apparently we're concerned about Bitcoin. I saw this. I saw this article today. It was the Bank of Italy talking about pretty much saying that they don't like the pro Bitcoin, pro crypto stance that the Trump administration has taken, citing that Bitcoin and crypto assets with their high price volatility pose meaningful risk to investors. They also somewhere in this article as well, it was I believe Italy, maybe France as well, didn't necessarily like the idea of pro dollar dominance via stable coins. So Ted, do you, do you think that this is, is this related at all to the trade wars, trade alliances? Do you see like how do you see, I guess the EU in terms of adoption of Bitcoin digital assets, stable coins? Do you think that the dollar is going to consume more of that market in global trade via stable coins? Or do you think that we're going to see more fragmentation because there's just like this battle between, there's just been this ongoing battle of D dollar, D dollarization or not? Yeah, there's a great book, Hat Tip to Marc Andreessen, published in 2014 by a guy named Martin Gurri GURRI called The Revolt of the Public. And the central thesis of it is the traditional way to think about politics has always been wrong for quite a it's been flawed. And the way to better think about it is there are those who believe that the power of the center needs to retain control over all aspects of what a system or social system or economic system do. And the other is the periphery of that system trying to pull power back to the people, to the populace. It's exactly the reason I, I say that as a framing device is Europe is the epitome of the center. They are all about a monstrous bureaucracy in Belgium. And even when they're not operating as a monstrous bureaucracy in Belgium, telling everybody what to do, their countries are little versions of Belgium that are telling everybody what to do. So this is exactly the opposite of the sort of philosophy that you have that is sort of Bitcoin oriented, frankly, right, which is Bitcoin is all about the periphery. It's giving people power, it's giving people autonomy. It's giving people libertarian freedom. It's giving them choice. That is exactly what Europe does not want you to have. What they want you to have is no longer fall, fall in line. They want you to be a good citizen. They want you to go forth and within the framework of their controls, create great tech companies if you can and, and, and employ people and they want you to have a happy life and good for them. That's a totally different way to approach it. But is it any surprise that the bureaucrats don't want Bitcoin anywhere near them? The last thing, the last thing the European Central Bank wants is a population of 300 + 1,000,000 people running around with Bitcoin or Satoshi's. Because you don't have enough Bitcoin for that. But you know what I mean, A bunch of SAT's. They don't want you stacking SAT's. That makes all sorts. That makes their life a lot easier, a lot more difficult. So to add what Ted said, they want you to do all that also with no power. Depending on what? Country. Yeah. No power? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, so, you know, look, Europe has wonderful qualities to it. It has the most amazing people in the world. It's one of the greatest museums on earth, if not the greatest museum on earth. It's a fence house. It's incredibly creative people. I'd rather eat food in Europe any day. But I I prefer our policies to theirs for sure. Hi everyone, I hope you're enjoying the podcast. Ted was a riot. We're looking forward to having them on other other episodes. Quick word from on ramp. Obviously, you may all know that we provide multi institution custody, which you might not know is that we offer a whole suite of financial services across the board. Maybe you're not ready to onboard, but your friends or family might need a trusted counterparty that provides then Peace of Mind as they're buying Bitcoin or need access to loans, tax advantage accounts via IRA's or just the ability to get access to our private client services so they can get white glove treatment, virtual family office access to private equity exposure in the Bitcoin ecosystem. If any of that's appealing, please feel free to shoot them a note, share this podcast with them or our website. And as a quick reminder, if you like and subscribe to our YouTube channel and via your favorite podcasting app, it goes a long way for people to find the the high signal in the space. Where do we go from here? So we've been recording for close to an hour now. I don't know if any of you guys wanted to flag some topics we didn't cover already. There was the Charles Schwab CEO, which could be interesting. But yeah, Michael, go ahead. Yeah, before going in transition, I think any topics that like rattle off a lot of the public market stuff that's going on, I think Galaxy they're filed is coming or is is filing to come to the US Schwab announcing I think getting a little bit louder about the launching crypto trading. There's a few others on the banking side, I think rumoured potentially Ripple. I think Ripple's been rumoured almost by everyone. But with Circle there's a lot of like at the highest level of finance positions or the table being set for what people are setting up for this new administration, the liquidity flow coming in. So I think Tad or anybody just chat a little bit about that because I think it's the complete opposite side of what we just talked about with Europe in the sense that something we talked about for weeks that we know we're coming into an inflationary environment. People need to hold hard assets if they're going to come outside of that and have, you know, purchasing power to buy things. And I think the US knows that and that's part of this new strategic version of getting Bitcoin in everyone's, you know, IRA or ETF or just spot. So it's it is promising to see the innovators in the highest levels of finance trying to embrace that. But also just curious on where the risk lies or who's doing it right, who's not? Well, I think it's going to be for me a, a pattern of let's experiment and innovate and if it works, keep doing a little bit more of it, keep doing a little bit more of it, keep doing a little bit more of it. And if it doesn't work, adjust. I'd rather see that which I think is a very sustained. It's a little, it's like the difference between a melt up in the stock market or in the crypto market or Bitcoin market rather than a parabolic move. I don't think we need parabolic moves. We needed to roll some bad things back parabolically, you know, swiftly and they did that. But now in terms of innovating going forward, I think we can move at a healthy pace. And I think a Galaxy coming here is terrific. Novogratz is great. I think he's got a great firm. I think all of those adjustments are make sense. The one thing I would say, which you didn't mention, Michael, if I May, is by the time this podcast comes out, but at this moment, we're still 2 hours or one hour and 53 minutes from the close today and tonight is strategies earnings. And we do have Tim Kotzman on the phone on the. Don't you think we ought to get him to commit himself right now before the earnings come out about how that's going to go and what's going on? Don't you think? I think so. Yeah, I think we ought to ask the maestro, what's your prediction, Tim? When this is aired tomorrow, they're going to be able to listen to this and then look at the screen and what are they going to see? What do you think? They're going to see AV shape recovery like every single time with Bitcoin, with MSTR, right? You'll have the curse Dales and the Peter shifts of the world posting their posts, and then you'll see the the after hours and tomorrow morning the price trying to to tank and then just ripping right back up. I mean it just a tail. The last big one time meaning the last the last big one was. Wasn't his 21 + 21 plan back in November if I'm not mistaken? Do you think we're going to get a $21 billion ATM at the equity or is he going to double down and go for more? Yeah, I was going to say 21 at a minimum. Wouldn't be shocked to see 42 or whatever 42 * 2 is or $121 million. 2 * 2 is if he actually does an $84 billion equity issuance at the market. That may be a V, but my prediction is it'll be a deep one. Yeah, yeah. Or $121 billion ATM. I think anythings on the table. So it'd be interesting to see what happens at 5:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. I'm sure you can find watch it on your own or find a group on social media that's doing a watch party. That's how big this is. What Tim, give us some insights into what's going on in that that world? This is something that I personally don't follow as close. I know the conference is coming up in the next couple days. You got different derivatives. There's the MSTY, you know, the other publicly trade, I guess maybe on that, what's going on, but also what's the sentiment like with an E21 launch and how do people feel about that, you know, from a flow perspective and interest from that segment of the market, the true North market? Well, we had an awesome true North call last night, invite everybody to go watch that. Dan in particular was kind of on fire with like just different theories and even mentioning Joe Burnett, I think actually came up with this idea of if you think that strategy does not actually own any Bitcoin, then you can like sort the stock, but long something else. And like it was a very interesting way to basically still get 10% and be hedged in case strategy doesn't have any Bitcoin, right, which we we believe they do have a lot of Bitcoin as of this morning. I think the what is it? Cantor Equity Partners is like 5.2 XM NAV. So that's an interesting story. Last night I kind of lost my cool little bit and said, look, we can stop, stop talking about GameStop until they actually put Bitcoin on their balance sheet, right? It's a little too much Free Press. The vibe is off in my opinion there. And yeah, there was there was something else that I'm missing. Conference coming up. Oh yeah, the the conference, the first ever true North World on Cinco de Mayo. So Monday, that'll be a lot of fun. So that we'll have about it's sold out. I think about 150 people. We have like a whole page full of sponsors. Of course the sponsor ticket was only 500 bucks, but you know, when you see UTXO and Deloitte and these other names up there, you're like, all right, we're we're in business, you know, as far as just, you know, getting to know people and and so that'll be basically a four hour podcast live, right, 12 to 4, then the strategy party, then the True North Party. So that'll be a lot of fun. Yeah, I'm hearing from people that people are just, you know, coming into next week in Orlando, very business minded, right? People are all the things that you've touched on so far in the show. They're they're looking to raise capital, they're looking to build relationships. They're looking to, I mean everything from building a business to trying to get a job to trying to get on a board. I mean, it's like up and down and all around just people really getting in position for I think what's about to happen. So I think that's super interesting. I think the what you guys were talking about a little bit earlier, maybe it's not attractive from an investment standpoint for the 500th Bitcoin Treasury company, but it's probably it's still interesting to them if they are the web design company and the only one that's putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. The interview I put out yesterday on the Treasury's pod is actually literally that a web design company in the UKI think it's a $6 million business to go to the Bitcoin for corporations handled there. You know, they're doing announcements about adding two or three or four Bitcoin to their balance sheet. But if they're the market leader in that segment, what does that mean as the CAGR on Bitcoin goes down? Do they just dominate that sector and obviously just do whatever they want? But as an example, you know, maybe it's maybe it'll get an investing audience, maybe it won't. But a lot of what we talked about last night on True North was, you know, if you're going to not buy more Bitcoin or more MSTR shares and you're going to allocate to something further out the risk curve or or with a different risk profile, it's just something to be thoughtful on. And then quickly on the structured product front, if Bitcoin is the hurdle rate and Bitcoin is just the best performing asset for the foreseeable future, call it the next five years, the next 10 years. I think there is a place for all these products so that investors can become educated and analyze what's the best product and between a suite of products really build their their new portfolio of the sixty 40s on the way out and bitcoins on the way in. But you still have everyone having different needs. I think right, just dialing in those different volatility factors through these different structured products could be you know is very powerful and and will continue to be so. Yeah, 111 angle of that is, you know, if you add the President's son to your to your board, that could always help in the, you know, profile of the corporate strategy that that could be a differentiator. One of the the things I struggle with and by the way, I 99% agree with my buddy Tim here is if he and I happen to agree by the way, about the hurdle rate, which that's appropriate to use for people who in effect are selling Bitcoin to do something else, to invest in something else. When a company undertakes A leverage Bitcoin equity strategy, think about how the dynamic of how they allocate capital inside the company becomes. On the one hand, they can put capital into their Bitcoin treasury strategy, which is growing between 40 and 50% a year, depending on which internal rate of return you want to use. On the other hand, they can put it in, I don't know, a web design business or whatever else the other business is how many businesses in the world are delivering a consistent volatile but consistent internal rate of return at the rate of Bitcoin dot dot dot without doing any work. Think about that very few. So the moment, and this goes back to the NVIDIA point we made, the moment you bring Bitcoin into a treasury strategy from the perspective of a classic corporate machine. If capital within the corporation is being financed externally and then going to the most exciting investment projects, Bitcoin inside the machine will suck all of the capital out of all the other projects that don't perform at the level of Bitcoin. The treasury strategy by definition will eat the whole enterprise from the inside out. Now, if you aren't in the in that capital, if you were simply outside like investors, we all are, we already making that decision. Why would I want to invest in, I don't know, X Company, General Motors or Eli Lilly? I'll make one up when I could put it over here in Bitcoin. And that to me is a, for me, a higher return on capital. The same problem you're once you're inside a corporate hat, you have the same problem. So I find it very difficult to see that companies that have businesses other than the bitcoins treasury strategy, unless those businesses are the rare few on earth that are effectively money printing monopolies will be able to sustain A and grow a Bitcoin treasury strategy. If their capital allocation process is thoughtful. I don't see how it works. Yeah, Ted, I like you. You know, we haven't we hadn't met formally, but you effectively just described how we built this business on a Bitcoin standard and then we spun out a venture firm that's Bitcoin denominated. Tim is an advisor on. But it was with that exact understanding that when you look at every preference when you're building a business, from hiring to how you spend on ads or whatever underneath the sun, it's not to say it has to you don't spend the money because that's what it's for, but you need to make sure you're more discerning and the return on capital is higher. And the realization was that the incumbents have too much pork and fat built in. And so the people the firm's called early riders because the early adopters of the strategy are going to leave the firm because they they won't be listened to and then they come build with us on that standard. But when you build on that standard, you're inherently more efficient and you're going to out compete the others, not only because you hold a better form of money, but constraints are the design surface of the world. And so when you put constraints on yourself, you're going to come to the most efficient outcome. And that's how we actually rebuild. So that whole imploding happens. And in parallel, we're going to build on a better standard AI. And I love that, Yeah. That's awesome and and by the way, give it five more years and you can be sitting on the beach and your agentic AI can do it for you. The only other thing I would say for people who don't care about MicroStrategy but care a lot about Bitcoin, what my what Tim was talking about tonight is really important also because if Sailor comes in not 21 billion, but 42 billion or 84 billion or whatever billion it is that he does as an ATM, that is new demand for Bitcoin and not a little bit so up and to the right as Tim famously says. I guess I'm going to go to the beach for the next year. You're here to hear it. Make it a good beach. That's the advice. No financial advice today, but the only advice I have is making a good beach. I love it. One thing, Tad, that we do on every episode, There's actually two more things I want to do. I want to do quickly, the single point of failure of the week. And so I'll explain that in just a second. And then I want everyone to be prepared to have maybe a bullish and a bearish thing that they want to share just quickly and Tad, if you if you're interested and you want to would love to just hear a little bit more about your background if you have the time. So you think about if you want to do that or not. Why I just pull up the single point of failure of the week, which is here we go. Ledger confirms physical scam letters requesting seed phrase and fake security upgrade. So I actually think this ties into the Charles Schwab CEO interview of this week. So ultimately, Bitcoin is perceived to be uninvestable by many people still because of maybe they're not opening up the block, but they're opening up the Journal or Bloomberg and they're reading about the couple that loses $5 million of Bitcoin because they throw their hardware wallet out or they read headlines about FTX or whatever the next FTX will be blowing up. And this perception just plagues investors, both retail and institutional, because what's embedded in investing in Bitcoin is not necessarily, oh, I invest in Bitcoin and it goes to zero. I don't we all think it's not going to zero. I think we're long past those days. But what's even worse is I buy Bitcoin, I'm right about the investment thesis, but I mismanage the asset. And so ultimately it's probably worse to make the allocation and then and then one day not have the allocation anymore because you lost your device or you end up on the next FTXI think ultimately this ties into the Schwab news because the CEO said very confidently that they would be the premier firm for crypto or something along those lines. And so they would actually want to launch a spot Bitcoin and perhaps other crypto asset trading custody solution within the next 12 months. And the CEO mentioned that their clients trust Schwab, right? And so naturally, people may want to hold off on making an allocation into the space until they actually can work with a firm that they trust. And so this is something I don't think any of our audience would necessarily fall for a scam like this. But the unfortunate reality is a lot of people do. I think somewhere in this article it may have mentioned or might have been somewhere else, the amount that was scammed in similar manner last year, it might have been $12 billion of Bitcoin and crypto. So. It can I point, can I just pull something really quick up because it just basically it'll it'll make it more. This is similar from the block. This is unrelated. I mean, it's definitely related, but it's different incident. There was an elderly, elderly person. They probably weren't always elderly. Maybe when they bought this they were a little bit younger, but they lost $330 million in BTC. This was a phishing scam, I believe, or social engineering. I'm sorry, but it goes to Jackson's point that there's just a lot of education still coming into the space. Yeah, this was social engineering. And yeah, it just do your diligence. Make sure you know who your counterparties are and don't pick up the Google phones or the emails that get sent that say reset your password or I think yesterday I got hit with a, a firm, I won't mention the, the name of the firm, but it was like it was obviously a phishing e-mail and they said, you know, pull your assets off to like another wallet. The level of sophistication when it comes to hacking as this asset grows, we're only at 2 trillion today market cap for BTC. What happens when it's 5 or 10 trillion? It's going to be the Wild West. So just be vigilant. Yeah, I I think that's good advice. I mean, you know, for me, it's a very real question about do I fear the sort of counterparty risk that I in in theory make myself immune to by cold storage on the one hand, or would I rather just have it at my, you know, in an ETF form at JP Morgan and know that I'm going to call them now, 1 is so analog and ancient and almost boomer that you got to laugh at it. But think about it. It's not so much that it's the relative level of security and it's and by the way, you don't even need to be hacked. It can just be an error. I'll tell you, I have been sitting on an e-mail literally for three weeks from Coinbase because Coinbase is taking their wallet where I have my NF TS and they want to merge the assets in that back into the Coinbase main app. And I got to tell you, this is just, I want to get in there and deal with this like I want another hole in the head. I, I know that I've got some, you know, I've got some nice NFTS there and I don't know how, you know, I'm going to send them back to this thing. This is just a total nightmare. I think one thing I know is I'm going to send them out of the wallet and they will not be in the Coinbase account. Wait and see. And this is not even a hack. So I, I look at that and I say security has many different dimensions depending on the cohort that we're talking about. And people that are absolutely fluid coders think cold storage is an absolute slam dunk and I'm a complete idiot. On the other hand, it's it's tricky, you really do. The cohorts are very sensitive to different aspects of security and so it's all around us. Is it Schrodinger's cat about it being alive? Is that and. By the way, the famous book that I also recommend, in addition to Revolt to the public, is called What Is Life? That he Wrote. It's about 120 pages long and it is extraordinary. What is it? Can you say that again? What is life? OK, so. We'll have to look that. Up the reason I brought that is because there's a 1.5 trillion, I know you guys or your firm's a very large investor in Ledger and this is where the majority of assets sitting at 1.5 trillion and folks that have like certain amount of assets will upgrade to our product. They usually diversify. So they'll park some in multi institution, but what's come up increasingly is like inheritance and all the things associated, they're like, no, I got it. Like I got it, but I need to do this for my wife or loved ones. Like, OK, but what's come up is they haven't touched the device in like 3 years or five years. And so generally, it's like, to your point, it's the last thing you want to do because you're always in sales, right? Competing with the status quo and status quo is just doing nothing. And I came up with this like, it's like Schrodinger's box in the sense of like, you don't know if the assets are still there. So if you don't touch it, they're still there in your mind, but you're afraid if you go touch it, they're not going to be there. And similar to your circumstantial like if I don't do anything, I think I'm good. But if I go do something now I can mess everything up and go to 0. And so that's been an interesting and and a shill for us. We help in that whole process, but it's just such a key thing. And you bought it at 10K, now it's 10 million and you're like, man, I don't want to deal with this. It's still there. If I don't touch it, it'll always be there. Yeah, it's I, I 100%. So in fact, the best place to keep my art, I think, is with Pascal, point of Ledger I, I, I think you're exactly right. But I just need to get it over there. And I fear, you know, all the sort of steps I need to go through to do it. And all I can see is my art disappearing and not being recoverable. So I'm terrified. Yeah. And so I know we're coming up on time, but this ties in a little bit of your background. I would love to hear a little bit of the Sotheby's journey in particular and how that led to digital assets if it did. And the main reason why is because in a different life, I worked for a high end auction company for a very small time and Heritage was the place we actually sent numismatic coins up in Dallas to. And so I was always familiar with Sotheby's and I kind of took an accelerated approach to Bitcoin because being younger, I collected like baseball, basketball cards and then Pokémon. So I knew scarcity. And once I heard 21 million and having to be in like the auction business for a little bit, it was like, well, of course this thing has value. It's just now you have to underwrite how much value it has and what happens to be almost everything. And was always wondering if that was a product of kind of what influenced your journey to understanding this space or whether it's something completely unrelated? Michael, you said it better than I could have there. There's literally not a ray of light between what you just said and and my journey. None. Yeah, yes, scarcity. I guess it's just the thing that makes us all tick. And then once you you get it. And now you just have to figure out how scarce is this thing and how much does everyone else want it. And if it's super scarce and everybody wants it, well, then there's value. And as you. Implied and as you implied and I was alluding to earlier, in parts of our economy or assets where they don't produce Fiat cash flow, narrative drives the price. So that's how you can sell a Picasso for $20 million, which is paint and canvas. It's the narrative. And by the way, you can have two Picasso's that look almost identical, and one will go for 20 and one will go for two. And what's the difference? The year they were painted? Narrative. You know what the kids call it these days? I like to it's, it's all vibes. You know, it's all vibes. You get masa, you get masa and you get some, some tether and you get some loud guys. And now you got the vibes for the next the next big thing. But they're right. I mean, we're think of us as a species. We're all about the vibe. We are so and, and by the way, anyone who invests on Wall Street and is very focused on the analyst reports and earnings and the PE, all that stuff, if they don't think those stocks are vibes, well then they haven't seen the list of the highest performing stocks in the first corner in the S&P 500, which as I recall, Palantir is right at the top. Yeah, You know, it's the strongest, strongest vibes is Tim Kotzman. He came on the scene and you know, the vibes just have been getting stronger week after week, him showing up. You know, my first talk with Tim Kotzman and this I'll never forget because it was November 5th, it was Election Day. So I've always, I've sort of got it always sort of logged into my mind. It was Election Day. So your life changed forever that day in more ways. Than so many ways Brian so many ways so yeah I have been the CEO of Sotheby's I sold that company I am a partner in one roundtable partners and 10 T holdings which as you noted before I'm the former CEO of Madison Square Garden and I've had a long career basically at the intersection of technology disruption and creative businesses and a whole range of things but honestly Michael, I couldn't improve one minute on your statement of how you came to Bitcoin mines exactly the same which is when you understand that value is what we say it is then it's very easy to see that a piece of code could have tremendous value so. You got it. Nice, you nailed it. Well, I guess we could wrap it. We I don't want to go over, we didn't do the bullish and bearish, but I also want to be respectful of everyone's time. No bearish takes this week, Jackson. We're back in the 90s. We're RIP roaring. I'll say world coin coming to the US, but we'll, we'll save that for, we'll save that for another, another time. The only reason I'm bearish, the only reason I'm bearish is because next week you're going to see some things that are going to make you even more bullish. I'll leave it at that. All right. You'll definitely leave it at that, Tim. The only reason Tim's bearish is because we're not bullish enough. I got it. Well, Tad, thank you so much for joining us this week. It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it guys. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank. You all, it's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, this was a lot of fun. 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 Rat Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. 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