Ended up flipping about $1,500 into a quarter million within three or four months. So I said, hey, this makes a lot more sense than... In 2025, there's a lot going on when it comes to crypto. Why someone should put their money into cryptocurrency. Why does a wire take three days? It makes no sense. What if the money was just there and I can do it right now? You're just betting on other people saying that it's valuable. It could feel like a tool-ups kind of deal. I think it's a f***ing pair with skin. See? yeah listen i don't understand i can launch gaz coin today and my followers would send me half a million quid and i could f**k off bitcoin you don't have to do anything you just buy it but it's a monetary it's an ability to share money peer-to-peer reduced cost help me understand the difference between the built-in leverage that digital assets have versus something like a real estate yeah you may get a little bit of a drip from your real estate but that's what digital assets is all about that's what bitcoin's all about the crypto market doesn't have any of this leading at pro into fraud. Get out of here with that. portion of their portfolio should they be putting into the crypto space? What we're seeing in family office land is about about seven and a half percent. People that are going in on this heavier are in the 30s, 40s, 60s, and even up to 80% allocations. There's been no company or no industry under a $2 trillion market cap that has failed. How do I take what you're doing and how does it better my life? I'm kind of new to this whole... Bitcoin crypto conversation. Good friends with Mark Moss had him on the show and that very much blew up. There's a lot of people that are very interested in this whole Bitcoin crypto environment. You're doing some really cool things. First of all, I would love to just get to know your story. Just kind of would love to understand more of like how you're thinking about the world when it comes to investing crypto and all. We got some fun reaction videos for you to react to. And then just also want to talk about current news and events. The main purpose though, is I want someone that's watching this or listening to this to be like, how do I take what you're doing and how does it better my life? That's the whole, every podcast that I go into is like, how can the guest better the person that's listening or watching this? And again, in 2025, there's a lot going on when it comes to crypto. So with the world's longest intro, welcome. Thank you, Vando. I appreciate it. And yeah, you're going to see more and more of this conversation continue to pop up. You're going to see more people that have I've been in digital assets and crypto for a while. Now I start to talk more about it because so many developments have happened in 2025. Mark's a great dude. I know him. There's obviously a lot of other people behind the scenes still that are coming out. But yeah, more than happy to share a bunch. So I've been involved since about 2015, 2016. And at that time, I was maybe 17, 18 years old. And so I ended up flipping about $1,500 into a quarter million within three or four months. and I was studying investment banking at the time and financial analysis in college. But when that hit, I was like, wait, something's different here. And it wasn't like a gamble. If anything, you're looking at altcoins and VC stuff now and you see all these different projects pop up. But back then, there was only really a few and they had to be utility based. There was no like memetic investing to the degree that there is now with Farcoin, Hawk2. It wasn't that mainstream, that crazy. And what was Bitcoin's price at the time? I got in around $800 Bitcoin. Oh. Ethereum. I still have the screenshots on my phone. Ethereum at like 30 bucks. XRP at like three cents. You got other token projects that were like underneath a tenth of a penny that are now worth 20, 30 bucks. So I remember going through and the market cap at that time was about 200 to 300 million. So very early on in regards to how much money was there. but I got into the whole Bitcoin thing, went down the rabbit hole. I said, hey, this makes a lot more sense than all this financial engineering and fiat world in the US dollar world. And so made a hard pivot into digital assets, made money there. But once I made that money, then invested into courses to learn how to do business, learn how to do marketing, econ, like a bunch of different new age kind of businesses that were blooming at the time of social media ads and all that kind of stuff that was promoting these business models. So went ahead and did all that. worked for Grant Cardone did a lot of digital marketing over there, which was fun. Started my own businesses. And then flash forward to now, my partners and I have a hedge fund called True Capital. And we're focusing on helping investors, family offices, really just people that are not really native with the space, have a trusted partner to help them with digital assets through our fund and other products that we may launch in the future. But that's really what I'm up to now. So I'm a big framework kind of person. So before we get into like all the niche strategies and we're excited i'm excited to dive into a lot of that stuff if you had to take a step back like what would be your overall whiteboard presentation for why someone should put their money into cryptocurrency yeah good question so there's really i think two frameworks to think of. I have experience in hard assets like gold and other things like that as well. I've been an investor. I have other investments and stuff like that. But coming also from like a digital marketing background, there's things that are constant. What I mean by constant is that energy is constant. Product will be constant if you're promoting an e-commerce brand. Those things will be constant. So what things can scale without drag? And when we look at that with capital, we usually look at investing into a software company rather than a local brick and mortar because it's lighter. It's not as heavy. It's not as clunky. It doesn't have a lot of the drag that you would essentially have, but you still have product. You still have something that people want. So when you go into the commodities world, it's usually backed by demand, backed by a need for that product. Think of oil. You can drill oil as much as you want. you can get. as many oil wells or whatever on a piece of land to extract as much oil because oil has a big demand of cars, driving boats, planes flying and other things that we use oil for. So that demand is constant and it makes sense to have energy going into pouring that product out of the ground. That alone, if you just take those frameworks of energy having to be constant to meet a demand, to build the supply to have the demand. You can then take it on steroids and think of, okay, well, what inefficiencies do we have in other markets? And one of which has been capital markets for a long time, but there hasn't been anything to help catalyze and speed up the processes of capital markets. And so the reason why people want to look at digital assets is because if we're at 1x speed on everything right now, imagine going to 2x speed, 1.5, 2, 3, etc. What does that enable you to do? Well, in a business, the reason why people do software versus brick and mortar is because it's scalable, not as many administrative tasks to do. And AI is even taking over a lot of that right now. So the human race is getting an upgrade because the tools are allowing us to speed up our processing times. They're allowing us to speed up the processes that we had to do. Why does a wire take three days? Makes no sense. I'm with you right now. Why are we waiting three days? Yeah. And the reason is because banks want to have control, make their overnight rate, etc. So that way their solvency is there. But what if it wasn't like that? What if the money was just there and I can do it right now? What other things does that disrupt? And so that's what digital assets is all about. That's what Bitcoin is all about. Each crypto and each coin has their own theory and way that they want to approach this stuff and make, you know, good product market fit projects. But the point is, it's like we're getting a big upgrade. The speed is happening. The intellect is now available with AI. to be able to speed up our cognitive functions. And so when people catch up to that, then they get a big unlock and that's what digital assets provides. So are you saying that, you know, leverage my, my framework is like provide value, amplify that value. So anytime I'm thinking about investing in something, it's like, how do, how does the value prop work? And then, then the person that can leverage value proposition usually are going to do well, hence why scaling for sure. Help me understand the difference between the built in leverage that digital digital assets have versus. like something like a real estate like let's use maybe real estate or gold as an example versus because i i'm the what i've been told when it comes to bitcoin is that there's like built-in scarcity so it's like and so as we're printing more money obviously it's going to it's very much just like potentially gold like it's just going to be more valuable just by default but then it's a lot more uh transparent than gold meaning it like that the thesis would be more money should flow to more transparent and usable. Like you can't like you could have a bunch of gold, but it's like you're not necessarily gonna, you can't translate that into fast dollars. And there's a lot of, there's less transparency. So is that is what I just mentioned, like the built-in leverage, or is there other things that I'm not comprehending right now that makes Bitcoin more leverageable as an asset class than real estate or? Yeah, so let's divide both of those. Real estate is completely different than gold. They're two totally different asset classes in and of itself. Now. we'll take the argument of a single family home. Multifamily, you get a lot more leverage because you have more doors. So you play a little bit of a different game. Let's say you did a single family home. Okay. Single family home, mortgage is 2,500 bucks. You rent it out for 3,000. You're making $500 a month. Let's say the 2,500 and all that stuff includes the interest, the mortgage, all that kind of stuff. Cool. You're making $500 a month. Now, depending on how much you borrowed, depending on how much is actually in the property on your down payment, what you're really playing is an equity game. You're getting a house for free by putting a couple thousand dollars or tens of thousands of dollars down and you're hoping that it cash flows What happens when the toilet breaks what happens when there's a problem with the product then you have to Actually fix that you have to pay for that and depending on what that you know expense looks like You either have to deal with the insurance if it's a really big, big issue, or you just have to come out of pocket for it and you typically lose money on the monthly cash flow for that. That's heavy. That's clunky. The actual business of the wood, the business of having this physical matter here is heavy. It creates gravity. It creates drag. You can't just go travel everywhere if you have all these problems with a physical product. And so that's why. And if you have to fix something, you're not, you don't have the world to help you. You have a very local market, which could be inefficient. Exactly. And very inefficient. Travel time might be considered part of the cost. Like you have all these inefficiencies that are just tied to the physical world. And that's okay because that's what's built society for, you know, tens of thousands of years. Real estate's not going to go away. But what's more attractive? Something that is clunky, heavy. maybe spits off a little bit of cash flow. And yeah, you might get a levered bonus because you're doing equity play with a home or having something that is built for scale, which is the gold conversation, or sorry, the Bitcoin conversation. With the gold conversation, the parallels are very similar in regards to Bitcoin and gold because of the mindset that goes into the production of the asset and then what it's used for. Comparing Bitcoin and real estate is really just a store of value conversation. And yeah, you may get a little bit of a drip from your real estate, but you have so many other factors in the real estate compared to Bitcoin. Bitcoin, you don't have to do anything. You just buy it. And sometimes that freaks people out because it's so easy to do. Then doing all the financial paperwork for a house, having all the problems come up with a house. Like, do you want the stimulus that comes with something like that that has a lot of drag? Or do you just want the appreciation? Because you can get the appreciation just by buying something like Bitcoin, right? So that's a mental unlock that people have to do first. But on the Bitcoin and gold conversation, gold, you have to have not only the locations, the permitting, you have to have the government approval. You have to also have the neighboring claims not try and disrupt your operation. So you have to have security costs. You have to have all this below the line labor is what it's called just to secure the property. Then you have all the equipment, manufacturing of that equipment, expenses that go with it. And then the operational risks of all of that happening just to pull out X amount of ounces or grams every single day. There's processes. There's successful people doing it. We have, I've evaluated that. We've gone down project financing, looking at, you know, different providers from Goldman Sachs and other providers as well that kind of do that. But you still have one big component, which is operational risk. It's why people will choose a software company over a labor risk company. operational and execution risk. And so you have the production side and securing of the land, all that kind of stuff that happens in Bitcoin. But now you have servers doing the mining rather than people and equipment. Okay, great. And operational efficiency, just in that alone. So then it really just becomes an energy arbitrage. All of that energy being constant in mining gold gets you a heavy asset that then has to be transported, has to have security for that, has to then be refined. has to then be sold to a trade desk to an end buyer. A lot of steps in that entire value chain versus once it's mined, once the product comes out of the ground, once the product comes out of the algorithm, you have it. Yep. And one's way more transparent to the world immediately. One's less transparent. And it's beamable. I can send it to you right now. I can't send a billion dollars of gold to you right now. It's impossible. Like too much logistical nightmare, like too many things going on. And so then when you look at the gold market, you see all the derivative products built on physical gold, built on in-ground asset gold. There's so much there just to access that commodity. So it still has weight and people still come to gold. It's not going to go away. But when you have that same mindset then to Bitcoin and it's just digitally transferable, you're like, oh, my gosh, it's an upgraded version because of the infrastructure and the energy exchanges there to secure the network or to actually get the. gold to do the extraction. But now you have the ability to instantly tap into it. I had gold bars physically when COVID hit. I bought gold bars and silver and Bitcoin. And I just waited about two years. Bitcoin and silver did nothing. Or sorry, gold and silver did nothing. Brought it back to the dealer or the broker or whatever. Lost about 15% on it because they take their fees and they sell it to you at a premium, right? So all of a sudden done, lost 15% of my money. Bitcoin had quadrupled. Like, okay, well, that was a better investment. But just to sell the physical asset, I had to not only take all of that material, bring it to my house, lock it up, store it. Then I had to undo all that and drive back just to lose money, let alone all the time that I had to deal with all that stuff. So even getting in and out of said market is a pain in the ass if you have the physical thing, not with Bitcoin. You could make the argument that Bitcoin and gold are pretty good to compare in a world because it's like, what makes gold valuable? It's just a bunch of people that says gold's scarce and valuable. And you could say the same thing about Bitcoin. But you also could say now, because I want to compare it to the stock market, you could say that, okay, in the stock market, you're investing in underlying businesses. And you could also, there's a lot of things that you could say around, you know, fiat money and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, it's like you're investing in businesses that are, you know, creating, getting returns and whatnot. Whereas Bitcoin, you're literally, it feels like you're just betting on. other people saying that it's valuable, but the underlying asset in itself is literally predicated on other people saying that's valuable. So it could feel like a tulips kind of deal. It's like, oh, this tulip's worth this money. Why? Because a hundred other people say it's worth this money. Whereas like a business at the end of the day, if it's providing value at a certain place, there will be someone that says, I will buy this because this machine will kick out cash. For sure. And that's one argument that can be made. The other, so I have a buddy of mine who's a big Wall Street guy. He's a hedge fund guy, family office guy now because he's made his money, but he's made his money through stocks and through third option agreements and that kind of stuff. So the underlying consistent energy of someone's company is then layered up with a capital stack and that money gets extracted with public markets or with the next investor up, kick the can up the road for the next valuation. So he can make his money from, you know, seeing that dynamic occur. And the same conversation goes down with Bitcoin. Well, it's only as valuable as the next person says it's valuable as the next valuation of the asset. The other problem with that thinking, though, when it comes to Bitcoin specifically, is that it has all these vectors of how people can try and put it into a box. And then the other vector shatters the other theory. So one could argue the tulip theory, right? Hey, it's a thing. It's not actually real. It's just going up in value. People are buying it. Great. But we forget that we live in a big network-based society. Facebook's not tangible either. It's just a click of a button on your phone and you're connected to everyone. So same thing with Bitcoin. It's a monetary network. It's an ability to share money peer-to-peer, reduced costs with an underlying asset. It's kind of like MasterCard and gold at a baby. You have a payment network that's collecting 3% of every single transaction. We have now thought that that's normal to pay 3% on everything. That's right. So if we just look at it now as a payment network, not as this digital gold thing, what would it what would the value be of a payment network that unlocks every single person that has a smartphone to actually transact? Well, then that's a different conversation. Right. And so that's why Bitcoin people can't necessarily wrap their head around it. Sometimes I can't either because it has all these vectors that people don't necessarily think of. And until it's positioned a certain way, you're like, oh, there's there's a valuable attribute there. and then it's connect it's protected by energy it's protected by okay and it's decentralized here okay and then the you know the things start to click and then that's when people start to become bitcoin maxis because then they go off the deep end and think it's the only thing in the world that has value i don't think that's the case but that's where the arguments get made okay so not financial advice but someone watching this who's is an accredited investor might have some alternative investments have money in the market and all what what portion of their portfolio should they be putting into the crypto space i'll just say because i i want to talk about true capital and your four strategies and some of your thesis is there but just overarching i would imagine people like you are probably more heavy in in in that from an allocation standpoint but if you had to take a step back what what should someone like myself or others that are like hey I don't want to get left behind. I'm not a 100% believer, but I... I'm not dumb. And there's like with what US is getting at, like what Trump is saying and all, like, I'd be an idiot not to take this seriously. For sure. Well, his stock just decided to buy $2.3 billion worth of Bitcoin. Trump stock? Trump stock. Yeah. DJT, the media company. You have Michael Saylor and all these other public equities that are buying Bitcoin and then selling you a piece of paper. So the first thing is knowing how you're going to get allocation. Do you want the underlying asset? If there is a finite amount of gold that can not be accelerated through production, there's only a finite amount of gold, how much of that would you want? And I'm not trying to, you know, create a FOMO out of it, but the reality is, is it's finite, and it cannot have an accelerated production schedule. So if you know that it's finite, how much of that would you want? It's kind of the first thing. Now, going about it, family offices have different structures than individuals like you and me. Accredited investors can participate both through some of the things that family offices have structure to and just buying it directly. Now, if I was going at this from a portfolio perspective, just from taking the institution's recommendations. They're saying now 2% to 5%. What we're seeing in family office land is about 3%, about 7.5%. That's where family offices are landing right now. Above that, you then have a bigger tolerance for risk and you have a bigger tolerance for gains. At the same time, when you're a big sovereign wealth fund or big family that has billions of dollars, you're more concerned about preservation of capital than the full growth of your capital. Because you have all these other vehicles that can also produce a different type of return that maybe has a lot more documentation or trusted counterparties and stuff. But people that are going in on this heavier are in the 30s, 40s, 60s, and even up to 80% allocations of their own capital and their net worth into digital assets. Now, a big concentration of that could be into Bitcoin only if they don't understand some of the other technologies that are out there. I'm really big into Bitcoin from a personal standpoint. Liquid net worth Bitcoin is where I first tell people to go because it has a two trillion dollar market cap. There's been no company or no industry under a two trillion dollar market cap that has failed. So it's already reached the point of de-risking a lot of that. Is this going to be a real thing? Is this even real? Well, now that you got basically every single big public figure buying it on their proxy equity company and you have institutions involved. It's something that you should at least get allocation of the finite asset to. Now, if you just want investment exposure to it, you can buy an ETF. You can buy other ways to buy the hedge or the leverage. Is that what you recommend for someone who's just watching this or like, I'm sold, I want 5%? Do you just recommend dollar cost averaging into an ETF or should they go on to an exchange? What's the best way to get Bitcoin? Coinbase, just buy the actual spot asset itself. On Coinbase? On Coinbase or any one of these other providers at the end of the day. It's all relatively the same. Coinbase is probably the biggest one here in the States. But getting- FTX? Yeah, that's not gonna happen. Well, that's people's fear, is like you go on a Coinbase, but how secure is Coinbase? Well, Coinbase- Or Robinhood. So there's two sides of it. The reason why FTX was able to get away with a lot of stuff that they did is because they were offshore. And as a United States investor, a lot of us are more sophisticated than others around the world. I'll just say that, not because of opportunity, but- America is known as its tech hub. It's known for its innovation. And then it's also known for its regulation and its scrutiny on bad actors. Like that's what it's known for. Other countries, you can get away with a lot of stuff just because either they choose to not take a look there or maybe they get, you know, a little cut of the action or something happens there. But the U.S. is usually seen as like that gold standard there of regulation. So the downside of that, though, is that you drive a lot of the innovative technologies offshore. So in that example, he had to go offshore. And because there wasn't as strict of policies and rules in regards to accounting, he rehypothecated a lot of his assets, which created this synthetic crypto balance sheet that he took loans against, even though some of that stuff wasn't free. Now, banks could literally do the same thing now. The difference is, is the brand. that the US regulated banks have versus an overseas exchange, innately you feel that, you feel that difference. And then in addition to that, he was a big trader. So he was trading against his own people that were on his own exchange, but that some of those trades went south. And so he had to cover his position. If he didn't have that loss, he probably, an FTX probably would have been. cleaned up in the books, would have been packaged up better to be in exchange for the United States because the technology was there, the brand was there, they were building it. But you drove a lot of stuff offshore, which then creates skepticism with talent that they probably needed to help them get to the point where Coinbase now is and other exchanges that are coming. What's the difference between going on to Coinbase and actually buying the real Bitcoin versus buying an ETF that tracks the price of Bitcoin? Yeah. So... So. difference between buying gold and buying a gold ETF. You have a piece of paper, which is an IOU to the asset. Now with ETFs, it's an IOU to a collateral pool to a DTCC that actually owns the collateral itself. So you're like... three or four layers removed just to get access to that asset. Now, Bitcoin is very easy to store because it's a couple of passwords and passphrases, and you can set it up in a way where it has extra layers of security so you're not the single point of failure, but you want to own the asset overall. That's my firm belief. Now, if someone has more of a pension or maybe a 401k or Roth IRA, IRA, and they're... unable to get the actual physical asset there are ways and other products coming out and emerging like our fund we can actually help people roll over Roth IRAs and IRAs to come to the fund which is a direct digital asset fund but if they're just not comfortable with even storing the digital stuff you can buy the ETF that's what they're made for at the end of the day you don't want a bunch of people that aren't technically competent buying this stuff causing a fit etc you're letting other people do that for you The trade-off is that you just don't own the assets. So just because you own the ETF, like let's say you wanted to go move to Africa right now and you wanted to have your assets. Well, you're not really moving the collateral by having a login to your brokerage account that has the ETF to then settle in the local currency. You want to be able to transfer that digital asset with you, move to Africa and start to exchange that local. So really comes down to what your life preferences are too. I have something in cold storage. I have a little bit of exposure with ETFs and stuff just to try those products out. There's no difference in regards to a portfolio allocation. It just comes down to if you want to own it or not, and I recommend owning it. Okay. Let's talk about your four ways that you guys work as a fund. And I just want to reiterate, if someone's watching this and they're like, hey, I want to put 3% to 5% of my money exposed to digital assets, you would almost recommend, say, you're probably best off. dollar cost averaging that into bitcoin yeah okay so this is now for the person that's like okay i want to go a little deeper i want to i want to like go you know with the 20 30 46 like i'm betting on this and i don't want to put all my money in in the gold equivalent to bitcoin yeah so i want to do other strategies that's where i assume where you guys come in you guys are working with family offices and all and i would assume that you have money in bitcoin but you're also betting on digital currency. but doing some other strategies to, I would assume, get a greater return than just putting your money in Bitcoin. Yeah, that's the theory of any fund, right? If you're in an equities fund, you're betting on that your strategies are going to outperform the market. That kind of thing. The Bitcoin conversation is interesting, though, because on one hand, you have a whole commodity Bitcoin that's appreciating at a very substantial rate right now, which will taper down probably over time, but it's appreciating pretty rapidly. But that kind of creates a big cape that covers. all the innovation that's going in the real areas of digital assets. Like there's upgrades to networks that unlock huge, huge adoption potential that most people just don't really hear about, don't care about. And so that's where we really come in, which is we want to accumulate more Bitcoin. We want to accumulate these projects that have good innovation that we think can outperform, you know, Bitcoin's performance. And then we have market. technologies as well. So we have trading algorithms, and then we participate in swing trading, you know, throughout the year, if it makes sense to go long, short, etc. So that's kind of a holistic approach as to what we're doing. But if we just shift the conversation from Bitcoin to alternatives, we are seeing one of the biggest upgrades to alternative assets in the world, like right now, just in the past month, we have seen so many things become tokenized. And right now, we're just seeing private credit move over, we're seeing stable coins actually start to make the dollar faster, more nimble, et cetera. We're seeing those like, yeah, first move is to get this stuff sort of tokenized. But steps two, three, and four, a lot of people don't know what that looks like yet. And in some ways, we're still discovering it as a human race, like what this can else be used for. But the idea of tokenizing an underlying asset can disrupt a lot of infrastructure as we know it. Because- Like title companies and all. title companies, data centers. I mean, there's a whole nother realm of how we can actually approach things differently and not just have massive monopolies control a lot of the functions that we are surviving on today. And so like just this past week, I've gotten off of three different companies that are all deep end projects. One of the deep end projects is around the data center conversation. Others have been around mobile. Others have been around other networks. And because everything's synthetic and it's networks, a lot of people kind of can't wrap their mind around what a network is or, you know, where this is going to fit in with all the other networks. It takes a type of brain to figure that out in and of itself. If it's a VC company, if it's a, you know. company that is in the traditional sense of building a network, you have to have the right mind for that. But then when you have the digital assets mind collaborating with that, you have a whole nother world because everything can go global very quickly. It's not just a local network. It can go international very quickly. So a good example of that, there's a tokenization product that's doing that with stocks, bonds, commodities, basically every single asset that you know, can now be invested directly. throughout the entire world, no matter where you're at, into the U.S. markets. That amount of capital, a family office to come into the U.S. market had to have entities set up in different offshore registrations, a feeder fund, and then maybe U.S. entities to move money, have all the auditing, all the paperwork in place, just to be able to buy U.S. shares of Tesla. Or they can just buy directly in one or two steps. a globalized token of that equity. That's a big deal. And if that happens in a lot of different industries all at once, the reason why most digital asset investors or even just family offices that are looking at digital assets don't know how to evaluate it fully sometimes is because they don't see that product market fit because they're not in it day to day. They're not doing the deep research. They're not actually seeing what partnerships are actually being connected with a lot of these platforms. to see second, third and fourth order thinking. They're just seeing the promotion on their Twitter. They're just seeing something on the headline news. Maybe if it reaches newspapers, I don't even know if digital assets are in newspapers now, but point is, is that they're getting their information pretty diluted in that conversation. And it's gonna be that way for the next probably five or so years, because if you looked at five years ago, what was the sentiment around Bitcoin with all the institutions? It's bad, it's bad, it's bad. It's called FUD in the... you know, crypto world, but fear, uncertainty and doubt. Yeah. Don't look at this. Nothing to see here. It's all bad. It's all, you know, drugs and, you know, skeptical stuff while they build the infrastructure to offer to you as a product. So it's already happening in these other parts of it. You're just not hearing about it because they want to keep their their cards close to their chest. So I'm I'm not that smart when it comes to Bitcoin or in crypto. So let me try to rephrase what you just said, tokenizing alternatives. So in another way is like if I invest in an alternative asset right now, I need to be accredited, need to do all this paperwork, blah, blah, blah. Or like if I invest in angel funds and stuff, I got to do all this stuff. I invest in the angel fund. And that's the thing. And you're saying there's a way to make it easier for accredited or non-accredited people to access this more efficiently, more. authentically and you could take some industries that are really hard to get to or like let's say the minimum buy-ins of half a million or a million bucks make it where the ordinary person can invest am i am i totally missing the mark on this or is like you're saying you're you're essentially saying we're going to use the power and the leverage of cryptocurrency but you're not just going to invest in a perceived value. We're going to go to hard assets. We're just going to take the leverage of the technology and make it a better experience to invest in assets that you were already investing right now as an alternative. 100%. You hit it pretty spot on. And if I was too complicated and you cut it down, that's even better. Sign me up, man. But it's already happening. You're seeing companies like Blackstone, UBS, BlackRock tokenize their funds because you have better liquidity, easier onboarding experience. I mean, it's changing our current infrastructure. So sure. So as an investor, how do we get in front of this? How do I juice my returns knowing that this is only going to get more popular? So what you're going to see over the next probably one to five years is an upgrade to USDC, meaning a lot of the funds, the private credit funds, the BlackRock funds, a lot of these ETFs are going to get upgraded to USDC. Reason for that is- What does that mean? USDC is US dollar stable coin. It's- Founded by a company, Circle. They're about actually to go public. BlackRock owns a little bit of it. They basically have a- Does Donald Trump own some of it? I don't know if he does yet. I mean, maybe. But the two basic stable coins out there is Tether and USDC. Tether is kind of the pegged US dollar digital version that's been around since the beginning of digital asset industry, but it's offshore. It's overseas. So it has that skepticism around its books and that kind of stuff versus this pristine, regulated, blah, blah, blah, blah, USDC. And can I put money into USDC right now? Yeah. Yeah. It's a one to one equivalent. So. Anything on this digital asset world, like anything on these chains, are usually transacted with digital forms of dollars, USDT or USDC. I'm not settling in cash every time. Does that make sense? Yeah. So I can put money into USDC now and could it grow in value? No, USDC is a one to one dollar. Okay. So one USDC is one USDC. So instead of converting my Bitcoin to cash. You're just converting it to- USDC, digital version. Okay. But no one's storing their money into that unless it's the equivalent of a checking account. So if you look at our current accounts, checking, saving, that's where it holds cash. Yeah. The banks then leverage that to go rehypothecate and take loans. But you still somewhat have access to your cash, even though you really don't own it, but you still have access to it. That's the safety net. USDC is that for digital. Okay. I understand. USDT could be that, but that's an offshore company, so that's neither here nor there. But USDC is regulated. So let's just take that example. We have now a digital bank account that can interface with all this digital world. What you'll see is these institutions start upgrading into what's called on-chain products, bringing all this stuff on a blockchain, bringing all this stuff onto things that can settle with USDC, because USDC provides instant settlement. You don't have to wait T plus one, T plus three, whatever for it to settle. It makes the bank's jobs easier. The governments are, the USDC is pegged to the government's balance sheet and the US dollar, what it represents. So it's just an upgraded digital version of it. So when you have USDC being the preferred rail that a lot of this stuff settles in, that then speeds up everything happening in financial markets now. So you may see things become more volatile. But what that also means is that. You will be able to participate into products typically at a lower cost because there's not a bunch of overhead. The big offices that BlackRock has, the big offices that all these banks have, it's really just a brand play for consumer banking. Investment banking, there's not a lot of BlackRock HQs. Not nearly as much as it when it comes to Chase Banking, for example. So you'll see a compression in all the costs that would typically go into managing a fund, managing the settlements inside and outside of the fund. And there will be service providers that help with that. But the first step is you're going to see all these products become on chain. Once they become on chain, the accessibility will be easier because the management of that financial product is easier now. So that's step one. The second step you will start to see then is all of your voting rights are usually not going to be or right now they're usually owned by the broker to then forward you the letter, etc. You can have that directly. Saving is more efficient. more efficient. So you see a compression, banks will become more profitable. You don't need to act with so many people, but you'll start just seeing that compression in that chain happen. And then you'll start seeing three and four, which we'll get to. So another way to say this is the USDC, you're not going to, the underlying using that's not necessarily going to make you rich, but if you are early adapter, you could access other investments that are going to have a better return because it's more efficient than doing it. Or it's just going to be the same return, right? If you're earning 13% right now in private credit through all this clunky paperwork or 13% in private credit by just doing this digital transaction, which one are you going to prefer? You're going to prefer probably the digital one, not the heavy clunky thing. So that's what I'm saying. This upgrade is happening like with production of gold. You have all of these heavier things. You're now becoming lighter, thinner, more compressed, more transparent. The logs are all there. You don't have to go on trust me, bro anymore. Right. It's becoming institutionalized. Yeah. You could even say, even if it's at the same rate of return, it would actually be safer and more transparent. The USDC versus the, is there should, there will be a log and a track record. That's where the fees are going to come in. So all of that, you know, gutting of infrastructure and costs that are coming from, you know, BlackRock's, you know, overhead, they're just gonna say, Hey, this better fund is going to have slightly higher fees, but everything's instant. Everything's settled. Okay. Properly USDC. That's the offset. So they're going to charge even higher fees. They may charge a higher management fee because it's tokenized rather than it being their clunky infrastructure. And is that where your company comes in or you guys make money off the fee? No, we're not BlackRock. So BlackRock, you know, they make money off of their funds. They make money off of the USDC. We are our own fund. Okay. So explain how you guys work. Yeah. So people can come to us with USDC. They can come to us with Bitcoin. They can come to us with USD. They can come up with cash. We would then invest it into digital asset platforms, coins, et cetera, for them on our Bitcoin allocations, our alternative coin allocations. And then we can trade it in the market as well with our algorithms and with some swing trades. Okay. So typical market participating, you know, participation, trading in markets. But then the long-term allocations, anyone can buy Bitcoin. So again, if you're just getting started, you can buy Bitcoin, go do it for yourself. But then if you don't want to underwrite and you don't want to try and evaluate these digital asset products, you don't know how to, that's one of the big core pillars of why someone would come with us. Because we're reviewing this stuff and rebalancing, reallocating two different coins. If we see there's. you know, better market opportunity elsewhere. And what are your minimums on like for people coming and working with you guys? Yeah, so right now we're at a 250 minimum. And then that may increase depending on how the current rate is going. But I'm actually flying out to California in like two days to go talk about opening up fund number two. Okay. So we may open up multiple funds to help people because we have different algorithms, different technologies that provide different exposure, you know, the whole nine. But digital assets is revolutionizing finance. So I've even seen the fund world change and not really look, you know, not really understand this two years ago to now needing exposure because all their clients are asking them for exposure. Right. So we think we're positioned in a really good spot now because we have all the paperwork, we have the infrastructure, we have the security in place to be able to bring on clients in a big way and then also use our technology. Yeah. And I'm just curious more how this works. So if someone gives you $250,000, do they have... liquidity, they lock up their money for a certain period of time to give you guys the ability to do your thing. How does that work? And then what are you targeting? Like a greater, like you're obviously targeting greater return then. So like how does, what are those, I understand you can't give investment advice. This is, you know, just because you're pasted that doesn't mean future, but I'm just curious, like I'm just asking for a friend, I guess. Yeah, sure. So the product is, it's a one year, it's a fund that has a one year lockup. Quarterly redemption, yeah. Okay. The allocation will be between Bitcoin, alternative coins. We have some algorithmic trading technology, and then we also do swing trades. The mix of that depends on what cycles that we're in for which technology we're using. So we have three different algos. That will depend on cycle because we have one that's good for bear markets, one that's good for bullish markets, and we have one that's good for more ranging kind of markets that's chopping sideways. So that technology kind of rotates in and out. And then on the swing trading side. Also comes down to liquidity in certain market cap coins. We have our mandates of, you know, what it is that we can or cannot invest in. The point is, is you have an active management layer and algorithmic technology on long term positions, on short term positions and day in and day out type of trading. So it's a balanced, structured product for those four main pillars, like I said. But again, anyone can buy Bitcoin and hold it and that's totally fine. But we're just providing kind of like that advanced level of support when it comes to, you know, getting onboarded. They get all the documents, they get their portal, they have institutional grade security with Bitco. They're like the number one crypto security institutional type of company. 15 years, no, no issues with their security at all. So you have all this stuff kind of packaged up that's never really been accessible prior, mostly because of the algorithmic trading technology blended with these things. You can go do Bitcoin on your own. You can go search coins on your own and pick one. Hopefully it works. You can do swing trading on your own. What is swing trading? Swing trading is if you think Bitcoin is going to go from 100 grand to 120, you put in some orders. If it hits 120, you get out. If it goes down to 80, if your stop loss is at 80 grand, then it sells the order and you lost 20% in that order. Now, you can do swing trading a lot of different ways. You can do it on different assets. It's nothing new. But in digital assets, there's ways to do it that give you some hedge and allow you to actually take advantage of the upside. Okay, very cool. This is fascinating. XRP, you believe in it? I heard a theory back in the day that it was going to be backed by the U.S. and blah, blah, blah. Yeah. So they have a great product for banks for settlement. At the core, that's really what it is. I'm not a big XRP maxi. I've seen it super cheap. We now see it back at $3. I think if you're going to go and look at something like XRP, you have to have a completely different mindset than a Bitcoin or an Ethereum. Like those top three to four coins are distinctly different. And so sometimes people will try and take, it's going to be backed by the US like Bitcoin is. So that means it is good. They're two totally different mindsets. And so I'm not really well versed in XRP from a long-term hold perspective, quite frankly, because I mean, if you... bought it at its peak last cycle now you're barely breaking any of them like You have all these other things that are suppressing, like the SEC was suppressing it for a while. We had a lot of governments, you know, suppress its actual technology. But the point is, is with any digital asset and with all these innovations, like XRP had real innovations and still does. But you had this regime in place for so long that did a natural suppression, cut off banking, cut off all this stuff to not let digital assets thrive. And so, you know, good thing that the president just got in and has a big digital asset based candidate or a cabinet because it'll open up so much more innovation. So while XRP may have a lead now, it doesn't mean that other products may not come and have more innovation. But again, I'm not a big XRP guy. My partner is more into Ethereum and a couple other like tokenizing platforms rather than US dollar platforms. What's the pitch for investing in Ethereum over Bitcoin? Man, if my partner was here, he would go so... Call your partner, no kidding. Yeah, hey, John. No, so he comes from the BlackRock world. He comes from the institutional side of things. And from my perspective, because I come from a little bit more, I don't want to say the streets, but more just like not Wall Street world and adapting digital assets in a different way, he's looking more at infrastructure and scalability. cross chains for compliance governance you know all of these other things that are important to really big players versus the the bitcoin thing ethereum and bitcoin are two different products overall one's a big protocol that has all these different layered applications that can do all these other you know fantastic things bitcoin's like a payment network with lightning if anything and then you know more of a gold conversation so you have to kind of have people that are specialized in a field yeah in digital assets because it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger You're not going to listen to someone who loves to trade meme stocks talk about Apple. You're not going to listen to someone that talks about MicroStrategy talk about Apple. MicroStrategy is a levered bet with an underlying commodity with an assumption growth rate of 30%, 40%. And they're adding access to capital markets to do so. That's different than making an iPhone that has cash flow and service revenue. They're two different things. So even though they look the same on the ticker, on the chart. If you don't understand the technology of the company and the people behind it, you're going to miss it. How do you, in a world where, I think I saw Brett Favre on an ad the other day talk about some type of day trading thing. I don't think it had anything to do with crypto. I was just thinking to myself, I was like, you've got to be kidding me. But that's kind of when I think of crypto and I think of all the people on the internet and like TikToks. It's like, okay, there's legitimate. things going on, but then there's a lot of scams. You got the Hawk to a coin, you got just like a lot of rug pulls, but then you have straight up fraud. Like people, I imagine like sending your Bitcoin over and then they just run off with your money kind of deal. So how do you know, what's, what's, how do you not lose your shirt in this space? And how do you do basic vetting? Like, are you a basic, like, Hey, if they don't check these three things, don't even talk to them. Like you have a framework on this. There's definitely a framework. And I think I think the word scam gets thrown out so much. So like even just someone that has a good intent and maybe just not as good of a product, like it may be up to speed or whatever. They're like, oh, scam. It's like, no, dude, he's like the only guy building the product. He's like two or three developers maybe and he's competing with Coinbase. Like that's not a scam. Yeah, most businesses fail. That doesn't make it a scam. Yeah, exactly. And so there's a fine line there with digital assets. Like just because you can get it on the charts. Like, so in the past, like investment banking, you had to go through this whole process to have liquidity in your stock and you had this betting to make sure that you had cash flows and all that kind of stuff to even trade with the ticker yeah like that was the bared entry now it's a few clicks to make something so is it the technology's fault or is it the user's fault it's the user yeah it's the person behind it all so when you when it comes to you know creating these types of coins and projects whether it's an nft whether whether it's a coin, you also have to understand like. Everything may look great on paper, but the developer may be lying to their internal team the entire time. And as soon as the mint happens, as soon as the marketing push happens, they pull. Well, they, as the business owners, gave too much authority to this person, the developer, for example. So a lot of times it puts these other people in a bad spot because it's like you may have done everything right. You may have done everything perfect, but if you have a bad apple in this digital space, that. has too much control over this entire thing, that's where a lot of those rug pulls happen. And so, you know, whether that's by intent of this whole meme, coin, pump fun, you know, kind of thing. Whether that's the intent of it or not, it's still a real risk. And so that's kind of number one. The second part of evaluating a team is, sure, let's say they cross all the boxes there. Does the economics of their token make sense? So then you have to go back to the U.S. dollar. Does the tokenomics of the U.S. dollar make sense? We print 7% to 8% per year. We had a massive print a couple of years ago to cover everything with COVID and that kind of stuff. Okay. What assumptions are true about? how we're printing money now, and where did that get me with my current thinking? Did I acquire the right assets? Did I have the right long-term outlook on cash or short-term outlook on cash? Did I use my cash properly? And then let me think of how that will apply in tokenomics. If you're going into digital assets thinking that the issuance schedule and the way that the math works with the coins is the same as the... let's say it's the same as the US dollar and you apply the same strategies, if you have a little bit of US dollars, you're going to be trapped in a different system. It's not that this is a scam per se. It's like your mindset approaching both are the same. It was very common when people had nodes as a service. Hey, buy my little mining rig. I'll give you my coin. You send me Ethereum and I'll have all these miners produce a coin. Well, that coin was being diluted tremendously. And when you gave me the ETH, I was able to pocket it and give you these coins that were just dropping in value like crazy. It's the same thing with the US dollar and the peso, right? And so that currency arbitrage, that currency war in digital assets is true in the real world, but they don't understand in digital assets. So that's another big pillar that people have to think about. So if the tokenomics makes sense and the team is right, then you have to just make sure that the lockup periods and like anti-dumping protocols are in place, that kind of stuff. Then you gotta see it Does this product have the marketing that's actually going to actually get the attention? And does it even have a good product that solves problems? So you have a standard business with the extra cautionary wall to sell your product and sell your tokens to investors because so many people have been burned. So those are like the three to four headwinds that are against the digital asset team right out the gate. Now. The next sort of layer of it, it's like, okay, now they have product market fit, they have a good team, etc. Are they in the right places? Are they getting the right pitches? And so that's just from a business execution point. That's business 101. That has nothing to do with digital assets. It's just, is the idea good? Is it good enough to be in front of the right people? Are the people smart enough to talk a certain way to the right people? Are they going to be like Bitcoin maxis and completely talk over their head and not get a real conversation? I'm kidding. So those are all the risks with a digital asset product, protocol, whatever. Then you have the investment side, which is market caps, your backing. Is it backed by a VC fund or is it backed by a hedge fund? Like you have all these other elements that talk, you know, that really go to talk about, does this thing have longevity? Does it have enough time to get product market fit? Does it have enough time to get adoption? And if it does, great. That's when you actually have a strong enough protocol that you can then say, okay, it has investment potential. And so each sector looks a little bit different. Every group is a little bit different like you want to take the same mindset of investing in a car wash company as you would A fintech company two different markets execution teams management teams all have to be different So it's investor level like investor Due diligence at the highest level just not being applied to digital asset. Yeah, it's a lot did So I think it's I think the moral of the story is if you want to be more sophisticated in the crypto space or in the digital asset space and you want to work with someone like yourself, how do you do, how do you do, so let me, I'll just be honest with you, like how do you do due diligence when someone doesn't understand 80% of what you just said the last four minutes? Yeah, that's why one, you need a team, you need a partner. But like how, like is there, is there like a, There's a checklist. Is there a Yelp reviews that I can go to, to be like, how legit is Robert, you know, like. Yeah. That's X, that's Twitter and financial markets, right? Is this guy legit, a scam, whatever? And then you got everyone arguing in the comments. But I think the three things in digital assets you gotta know is one, who the team is. Who the team is. Two is the tokenomics. Tokenomics, which is, what's another way to say tokenomics? The value prop or is it? Just think about it like shares. Okay, okay, like underlying. How many shares issued? What's the total supply? How much is circulating? That kind of thing. And then does it have product market fit? Okay, I can get that. Those three things? Yeah. are harder in digital assets because things innovate so much faster because everyone typically has access to the same tools. And then you also have to just have very high level people. It's like the talent pool is smaller too than creating an AI startup or whatever. And when you say, if you don't understand those three things, don't, don't. Yeah, then don't invest in the product. Don't invest in the protocol. Okay. You're better off betting on just following what these big institutions are doing, which is buy Bitcoin. Yeah. Or buy an underlying asset and sell shares. That's their product they're giving you. They're keeping the Bitcoin in permanent capital in their C-corp, you know, company that's traded public and giving you a paper. Do the same for yourself. Didn't GameStop just buy $50 million in Bitcoin? They bought, I think it was like 4,700 Bitcoins. Just to... What's the thesis there just to have on their balance sheet? So my theory with this whole Bitcoin treasury asset side, where all these companies, you have four different types of, some of them are calling them DATs, which is digital asset treasury companies. But really you have four different types. You have Bitcoin being the core strategy, meaning they're arbing the heck out of the Bitcoin volatility. Their main thing is being a trading house. Think of microstrategy. They want so much volatility in their options that that's their business. Then you have operating companies that are like an apple. If they bought Bitcoin, they're just buying it because it's another thing to have on that and maybe integrate it into their stuff, right? Like different than being a trading house. The third one is what I like to call a lifeboat strategy. And then that kind of dives into two different ones. There's short-term lifeboats and long-term lifeboats. short term meaning hey i have nowhere else to place this capital for the next one to four years i'm gonna give it to the government i can't invest in any more you know equity i have to do something and that's what actually started microstrategy that's how they came across bitcoin but you're gonna have a lot of companies mid caps even large caps do this because they don't know to do the cash and then you have the small caps which is kind of the fourth category that are buying bitcoin to try and get some good pr try and prop their stock up and that's it You know, it's like you don't actually have a business. You just have a ticker and you're trying anything to grab capital. So those are kind of the four different categories of that. You mentioned MicroStrategy. You had a video on MicroStrategy. I believe Michael Saylor. Is it legit? Is it not? What is MicroStrategy and how would you do it? MicroStrategy is a holding company of Bitcoin that's able to raise capital because of its size and because of its entire team having the talent and the abilities to issue these types of financial products to investors. with an inherent call option on Bitcoin's price. They think Bitcoin's going to be a million bucks. Well, then they're going to ladder all these synthetic financial products with that in mind to give you different access at different price points and give you different parts of the capital stack. And your thoughts, do you think it's too risky or do you like the concept of it? I don't think it's too risky. I think uniquely, he's kind of one of the only people that could have pulled that off. Michael Saylor. Because of his deep understanding of physics and his MIT brain, he gets the computer level and he gets the real world capital level and how things are magnetized towards a center point of gravity. So it used to be gold. Now it's more Bitcoin, as he stated. So he understands the scientific side and the capital side. The structure of it all. All he's able to do by securing his Bitcoin bag is, A, securing a sovereignty for MicroStrategy. They're able to now withstand and have a longer lifeboat, if you will. That then created a lot more product market fit for a public equity for all these other pensions to actually purchase. So now they've actually gotten bigger because of that, which has provided further legitimacy. You wouldn't have a pension. go into buying Bitcoin from FTX because there weren't able to interface. There was no compatibility. So he provided an on-ramp and off-ramp for a lot of these people to be able to buy and sell the shares. Now, what he is doing is dilutive in nature, issuing more shares and buying more Bitcoin, easy accumulating more Bitcoin, giving you a piece of paper. The paper will still go up over time, but it's just not the underlying asset. So what he's doing is legitimate. The next entrants that you have are going to now start offering more yield-based products like bonds and other products like that, which is different from what they're doing. And I don't think that MicroStrategy will cross that over in the near future because it's a different mindset and infrastructure overall. But you can build different financial products off of gold. You can build different financial products off of commodities. He's just probably the loudest, the most... Best at marketing. Best at marketing. He's got such a good team behind him. to spread this message. Yeah. But at the same time, it's also a complicated message. Like I've spent a lot of time studying it. Sometimes that's why even like when I'm communicating. it might sound crazy or it might sound that it's just very sophisticated. It's because I've digested a lot of material in these different vectors and it's connected for me, but it's kind of hard to explain. Yeah, and you did a great job, but it's still complicated. And so there's like multiple levers. We're going to get into some reaction videos. Before we do that, though, one last question. Help me understand Donald Trump, this administration, how different it is with him in office being pro-digital currency versus Biden. Yep. That's part one. Producers hate when I do this. Sorry, Joel. Part two of that question is what risk is if he loses and he's obviously not going to run again. But if, you know, JD Vance or whoever decides to run does not win, are there some things that are like, are there some things that you are potentially worried about if that if, let's say, it goes the other way, 180? For sure. So first, you have to understand what happened during 2020 to 2022. Mostly with... Biden winning his election. However he won it, I'm not going to get into that. But the main two things occurred. One, you have a massive print of the U.S. dollar. Two things happen when you print the U.S. dollar that much. You have a devaluation of the currency and you have whoever's accepting those dollars assuming the debt of the United States because whoever gets the dollar has to repay that thing back. Look what we're doing in Ukraine. giving them a bunch of dollars. Oh, you can't pay up? Well, then give us your minerals. You're doing a national exchange to take over a country, take over a part of the world, keep a part of the world suppressed by having them use your currency. You control them. So a massive print occurred, and then rates got jacked up. When rates got jacked up, you're now forcing more energy to come back to you because you loaned all that money out. You're now trying to recoup on that and force these nations to... use the US dollar. The same time that that was happening, you have Bitcoin and crypto companies getting debanked. So what the print was not just to save the economy, it's also a move. It's a chess move. It's saying, hey, we need to make this dollar the number one product in the world. We can make it, we can print it, and it has the same amount of demand. We need to increase the demand by making people need it more and flood the world with that product. at the same time suppressing our competition. Simple business move. Like if your incentive is to cut off one company from taking your customers, and then you do a crazy move like that and flood the market with your product for free. Amazon has done that in the past. It works, right? So that's what was happening under the Biden administration. The operation was called Operation Chokepoint, where they were having these banks closed down, unable to. actually reopen or bank crypto companies. And I know this from two factors. Prior to Biden, a fintech company that I'm now in discussions with, had to go through multiple banking partners. Would secure one six months later, debanked, debanked. Another partnership, and then six months later, debanked. They couldn't do business and get the app off the ground, even though it can change a lot of people's lives, because it had this crypto component. So you have... banks not wanting to interact with crypto companies because of it, then you actually have authoritative crackdown on crypto companies banking at all. Like it's illegal to bank them at all. So with that occurring, you then have to think, okay, where does that talent go? The energy is not destroyed, it just moves. So that's where we saw this offshore movement happening. A lot of the other scams popped up. And whether they were scams or not, I'm not going to argue that point. But the point is that government activity. changes incentives and changes behavior. So if it cuts everything off here and you got to leave and you got to go build somewhere else, someone has a bit more friendly. So with those operations that occurred, something distinctly happened. I think it was a 2023 March or something where three banks went under, like in the same week, Signature, Silicon Valley and Silvergate. One of them was restored. The other two weren't. Why is that? They had crypto in their balance sheet from a company customer perspective. So it's very obvious what they were trying to do. So now with Trump winning and you have a digital asset friendly regime, well, also you had Gary Gensler in the SEC suppressing markets, but just the infrastructure of being able to get a company up and going was harder. And now you have a digital assets regime. So David Sachs, love the All In podcast. Shout out them, they're great. watch them all the time but david sax and his whole crew have come in and they're vc guys they're tech guys they understand the operability problem with banking, with a lot of fintech apps and that kind of stuff. And then they also understand the technological implications of not being a leader in this. So by getting rid of older policies and getting the newer policies in and unshackling banks from some of the restrictive policies, you then have new infrastructure able to be built. So an example of that was Saab. I always forget the numbers, but the Saab 121 or something like that. Banks are now able to custody Bitcoin before they couldn't. So if you just look at the timing of everything, when I got into Bitcoin 2015, 2016, there was too much disruption and too much noise happening. But all these banks were building blockchains. 2020 hits, all these other operations of not being able to help crypto companies was occurring. And then now they launch an ETF. Well, it's because they were behind the ball. The institutions and these governments were behind the ball. And any industry that has thrived, they want regulatory capture to be an option. So if you don't have that infrastructure in place, inherently, you're going to suppress it. Like if you know, if we're talking about something and you know you're going to miss out, you're going to try and suppress it to get your shit together to then, you know, get done. So same thing happened. So now we have the first start gate, which is all the ETFs, all these different companies. You now have Saab 121 or whatever it is. Then you also have the repealing of agencies. So I believe this Pelosi, it was either Pelosi or Elizabeth Warren. She had like an agency dedicated to choking down crypto companies. Not only did that get like revoked, but there's also a new policy in place saying, hey, any government, any official that tries to do this again, it's illegal. So now they're creating the shields and protections to let this thing thrive. So the risk is, is if that policies and those policies. aren't carried forward. This next two-year run to three-year run is all that's really left for digital assets here in the States, because if they come with another authoritative crackdown, they're going to try and find some way. So part of the US's optimism right now and why these conferences are getting bigger is that we finally have a trusted regime that can hear and sort of front run the unwinding of policies from a different administration in the future. So that's a lot of the work that's going on right now. And so we definitely are going to need another four years from a pro-digital asset policy. And I think, to be honest, the next Democratic individual, whoever's running for president, probably will be digital asset friendly because they're going to need it. Yeah. I don't think that they're going to be against it as much. You can't be super against because now that you have a lot of skin in the game. Exactly. Yeah. Now that it's here, I don't think it'll be as restrictive. But... they may still try and work things to become more government controlled. Whereas, you know, Republicans are usually more government, less or less government, more private industry, that kind of stuff. So that's going to be the next battle, the next frontier. And I think we're going to need another election cycle to keep things private, give us a bit more runway. And then from there, if we even have a president, cool, like it might be an AI candidate. I was just talking to my girlfriend yesterday. I'm creating AI content in a lot of different ways right now. and it's pretty scary man like i don't know if you're using hey gen or how are you using uh so yeah hey gen is one hedera is cool because you can make the baby i think that's fun okay but then you got we should do some of that yeah we should do a baby clip but um but yeah there's just all these different tools that are coming out and in in 2020 i actually met with presidential campaign team managers um and learned a lot of the advertising that was going on knew that podcasts were going to be big called that in 2021 it's like ai is definitely gonna be the next thing for presidential candidates it's gonna get crazy crazy yeah anything else you want to say before we hit reactions um no i think we're good to go for reactions brother good good all right let's let's i've i've not seen any of these other than the last one let's roll all right let's see what's up what's he making the whole crypto thing i think it's a period risky dude yeah listen i don't understand i can launch gas coin today and my followers have sent me half a million quid then i could off you know and that's That's basically how it works, you know. I think it's a very efficient way to get a lot of money out of the young, hopeful, ambitious young men of this world into the pockets of the worst San Francisco as you've ever met. Yeah, I think that's more of the memetic stuff for sure. Things that don't have product market fit. You can easily get hocked to a coin and get rug pulled on it. So that's where the due diligence thing is key. But I think even just changing the interface of maybe how some of these meme coins look compared to real investments is a valid point. because it has happened. You can't deny that stuff like that hasn't occurred. But I think it's mostly just that conversation we had earlier, which is. has to change the UI to make the investor thought different. Are you a fan of more regulation? There's like split. There's some people that say more regulation, better, but I'm someone that wants to throw up in my mouth the more I say regulation. So what are your thoughts on that? Well, for digital assets, yeah. More regulation. Yeah, because we've had none. Other than it's bad. That's been the issue. So a lot of digital asset companies would go in, they'd get invited into the SEC. They'd have a DOD or DOJ person there sitting in with them. after they explained everything that they're doing, the next day the DOJ would send them a notice. It's like, okay, I'm not gonna go in and tell you what I'm doing. It's kind of like you telling your parents disclosing things and they ground you. And then you're like, okay, maybe you're not gonna have them wanna tell you. Yeah, or hey, give me some rules so that I don't break them, but don't just blanket it. So that's what was going on the past four to eight years. So more regulation in this space means those things that I was talking about, protecting this asset class, giving it guardrails to not. you know, be screwing over investors or, you know, any of that kind of stuff, but giving it some proper guardrails with people that understand it, it'll go a long way. Great. Let's hit the next one. Here are three reasons I would never invest in crypto. Come at me, bros. I'm Tyler. I'm a former financial advisor and portfolio manager, and now I make financial content for free so that you don't have to pay for it. Number one, it's not an investment. An investment, by definition, is expected to generate cashflow via dividends, interest, or rent. Crypto produces... none of these, making its value entirely dependent on market sentiment and future buyers. Number two, it has no fundamental valuation model. Stocks can be valued through company earnings, real estate on rental income, and bonds on interest payments. Crypto lacks the ability to do, well, all of those things, meaning its price is based purely on supply and demand, aka speculation. Number three, it is not a store of value. And if you think it is, I do not think that word means what you think it means. If I deposit $100,000 in a savings account and at day's end, it's only worth $70,000. where did my value go? So enjoy your tulips, my tulip bros. And I do truly hope this works out for all of you. All right. I want a hot take. I don't want a political, political take. That's a lot. So financial advisors are never going to recommend Bitcoin because they don't have an incentive to sell you the product. And to be fair for this person, I don't. I think he does some, okay. Yeah, I don't know if that's one of his takes though. That was his first thing, being a financial advisor. I haven't even gotten to the three points yet. But the first thing is, if you claim you're a financial advisor for some posturing on the video, I get it, I'm in marketing. Like, cool, you're a financial advisor. But number one is, you are not allowed to even sell the product because this product has not been able to be sold. BlackRock just came out with an ETF. By the time that you allow people to actually buy it, Bitcoin's probably like 500 grand to a million. So. What are you going to say then when the whole narrative changes, when I could have bought it today at a hundred, now it's 500 and your, your value is going to change. Cool. So that's the first point. The second is doesn't, I think the first point that he mentioned was, it isn't able to be valued because it doesn't provide, it doesn't have the same definition of an investment that he does. And that's fair. That's a fair argument because you can say an investment is supposed to give off a drip. Yeah. That's fine. But would you consider gold then an investment? Yeah, I would imagine he would not be a fan of gold. That's just based on his content. Not a fan of gold. Cool. I think what he's a fan of is index funds, low fees, index funds, dollar cost average. And that's the majority of the advice that you're going to get from every financial advisor. So it's not even against him. It's just that system is going to recommend you bonds. Bonds are the worst investment right now. They just did another issuance of UST bills. The interest rates had to jack up because no one would buy them. The bond market is... drying up right now because the U.S. debt is not as sexy as it used to be. So just because it has a drip, cool. Is it even keeping up with the print? That's the bigger question here. So yes, having that stuff is great, but I'm younger as well. So his incentives may be different. His timeline of his life may be different. You know what I mean? Like at a certain point, you de-risk. Yeah. You know, like I've de-risked some of my businesses. So you get to that point at a certain point. Nothing against him, but you're going to miss out on bigger growth just because you're using an old framework on a newer tech, and that doesn't work that way. Now, the other point that he made, it can't be valued because it's only based off of supply and demand. That works in the realm of a productive asset. Productive assets have scheduled cash flows. You do a discounted cash flow model. You then try and get the valuation of the stock, and you have some sort of premium on that. and you're running a mathematical calculation, what you're not looking at is a global view. What's the global problem? Because that game of every single thing having cash flows. is done by every country around the world. China does it. Argentina does it, et cetera. But look at the actual currency that they're transacting in. The underlying economical unit, if that's being manipulated, then all of that is bullshit. If I'm printing the dollar at 8% more per year and my bond is giving me 2% in return, I don't care. I'm losing money. It's being taken away from me because the 8% is going to beat the 2% every day. That's the issue with the financial advisor mindset. It's that they're not looking at the underlying unit economic that it's being defined by. If you're making 50% per year, but the currency is getting devalued by 100% per year, you're guaranteed getting a 50% loss in your money in that example. So it's changing the unit, like the economical unit. Now. the US dollar is still very strong. We're actually seeing more purchases come into the US dollar because the topic we talked about earlier. So it's still holding on to its strength. But if I had to bet all my assets in one system or having a couple of different systems working for me, I'm going to choose a couple of different systems. That's fair. Yeah. Okay. And then the store of value, any take on that? Store of value conversation. I mean, gold's been around forever. Real estate's been around forever. Values of properties have gone up. not because the wood is more valuable. It's because the fiat currency is getting debased. So everything is a store of value. Mindset wise, that's what you're looking for. You don't want the paper. You want a store of value. So would you, I know cryptocurrency is known as a currency in the name, but I see it more as just straight up investment that has utility. Is that fair to say? Like we'll call it a currency, but I think that third point could be fair. It feels more like an investment. I disagree with the, it's not an investment. Well, it's like, okay, I get your whole point, but people are putting their money in. It's growing. They can cash it out. You could, there's other investments out there that don't necessarily pay dividends and cashflow. Like, obviously that would be what I would want, but the whole play in putting your money into Bitcoin is it's going to appreciate based on supply and demand. So he makes good points, but then the points are, he's almost saying like, That makes it a scam. And it's just like, well, no, that, or I don't know if he said the scam, but he maybe alluded that it was a scam. And maybe the other angle is like, well, that's one way of thinking, but just because that's how we've done it the last 50, 60 years doesn't mean we have to do it like that going forward. For sure. I mean, look at this house. Right. Is it a scam or not? You got into it. You're getting utility out of it fully from. the lifestyle and also the productive value. So you're making it a productive asset, renting it out, that kind of stuff. But if you just bought this and no one was housed in it, you have your taxes per year, you have the appreciation of the more people coming into this market, et cetera. It's not that the wood is getting more value. It's not any of that kind of stuff. It's literally supply and demand. So to say that supply and demand is not a factor in any store of valued asset versus a productive company, you can't have one without the other. it's innately what investing is for, is to keep your money and your value over time. Okay, next clip. There's a reason why real estate has created more millionaires than any other asset class. Now, with that said, I have Bitcoin too. I have crypto as well. I think you should be in every single asset class. But to say that crypto is better than real estate from a holistic standpoint, I disagree. I really disagree. Maybe it might be better from an appreciation standpoint, where you're going to be able to enjoy more appreciation over time because Bitcoin is more volatile. So you'll be able to enjoy a bit more appreciation. But at the same time, you can get a lot of depreciation. It could absolutely lose value as well. And you don't get cashflow from cryptocurrency unless like you're hedging it or something like that. And that always goes up and down. It's not consistent income all the time. Yeah, so valid points, but it's more of a outdated view as to what it's now become. Everyone's right when things are small. Hey, your business isn't gonna be successful, dude. Like it's not gonna work. And then you become successful. Okay, well, you know, I should have built a jockey a little bit more. Obviously, it's now gotten to a different point. But I think his main point is saying consistency in cash flow plus leverage is why real estate's better. I would agree if you're playing those two games. If you're playing a different game, then this is going to be a better asset. And it is fair to say, like, you made a point earlier in the show that you were like, hey, physical asset, there's more inefficiencies. Yeah. There's also, in a sense, some more safety because it's like. It's physical. This exists. I like, I'm not, I'm not hallucinating. Like this exists. It's not just this thing on a ledger. So there's an aspect of it that, yeah, there are inefficiencies, but there's also an aspect of like, I can touch and feel this. Yeah. And that's the whole network conversation where people can't think of networks, like just because it's not real to you right now. It's real to you for your podcast. It's real to you for the media to get dispersed everywhere. You don't own all these phones. You don't own all this stuff. I know. So it's just a different mindset. But again, I'm not saying I'm fully 1000% only Bitcoin. Real estate is around like 330 trillion of all assets on the globe. It's a big asset class. Bitcoin's at like two, maybe two and a half. That will probably converge as people will probably get rid of their clunky assets for a different asset class. So if this goes from 330, let's call it to 300, and this goes from two to 30, yeah, you're gonna get a big speculative bump there. That could probably even help you de-risk and go into some real estate too, you know? So it's just timing of different asset classes. But I do agree that real estate's a good asset. I'm gonna buy some in the future, but for now, stick to Bitcoin. Stocks versus crypto. Number one, stocks represent ownership of a company. These companies have revenue, may have profits, may be paying a dividend. Cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, often lack intrinsic value and are often based on speculation rather than the fundamental performance of an asset. Second, the stock market has shown consistent returns over decades. Cryptocurrencies don't and it's so speculative based on news, social media, and regulations. Diversification. The stock market represents various industries, companies, geographies. Cryptocurrency performance is generally pretty highly correlated to other their cryptocurrency performance. The stock market is pretty liquid. The crypto market can often suffer from thin trading, especially for smaller currencies. The stock market is regulated by bodies, structure, governance, and audits. The crypto market doesn't have any of this, leading it prone to fraud. So you already mentioned underlying value. I don't know if you need to talk about that. But when you talk about stability, diversity, liquidity, I feel like crypto is very liquid. Yeah, I was going to say, the last two points, liquidity and regulation, are being handled. regulations being handled, but liquidity, dude, penny stocks don't have liquidity. Get out of here with that. Anything that's brand new in markets is not going to have liquidity. The bigger ones obviously do. So that was hilarious to me. What were the other two? Diversification? Yeah, diversification is a fair point, but also the S&P is not as diversified as you think it is. No, it's a mag seven. Yeah. So it's interesting to me when people think they're diversifying in the S&P 500. You're betting on America, which is not a bad bet, but you're not. you're not, it's not 500 individual stocks. They're in all the same sectors. So it's not a, yeah. So from a diversity perspective, Bitcoin is considered the apex asset because it is the diversity asset. Like everyone's usually correlated in stocks and a little bit of real estate, maybe even a little bit of private credit. That's why alternatives is growing as an asset class is because there are other things that are needed to help juice the returns because the stocks and bond portfolio isn't going to do it anymore. So again, a little bit on the older side, and that's okay. But when it comes to the underlying value, that one is probably the biggest thing I'll debate them on because Bitcoin has its underlying value being a monetary network and all the things that we covered earlier today. But if you buy stocks and you buy common shares, you're getting diluted all the time, all the time. Common shares are dilutive in nature. You're lower on the capital stack. You're the last to get paid out in a bankruptcy event. Further up the capital stack is better. So investment banks usually get a series A preferred stock or maybe series B, which is not really the best, but anything that is a preferred stock above the common share, any stock investor will say that is a better stock because I am first, I am de-risked. The owner of the company is a common share stockholder. Any other people that bought common stock, I'm ahead of them. So it de-risks me. So there's no other better stock option agreement than a Series A preferred stock, 100%. And if you can get those, then great. But most people buy common shares and then they get diluted. They don't know what they're buying into. So similar to how tokenomics work with crypto, same thing happens with shares. It's all made up. It's all fugazi fugazi. It's all numbers. Yeah, but I think in... The underlying value also, you are investing in an actual, like this thing, this is how we make money, this is how we're sending Coca-Cola. Yeah, it's a marketing campaign. Whereas Bitcoin is your, again, the underlying value is based on your belief, my belief, people's belief. One person can argue that. And it's very similar to gold. I mean, and a lot of these people are anti-gold, by the way. They're at least consistent. Makes sense. That makes sense. It's a marketing campaign at the end of the day. Like that's... And coming from the marketing world, like I get what they're saying and why they're saying it and what they believe to be true for them to say these things. I 100% get the whole value chain. You have to unlearn some of that stuff and open your mind to accept new information. But on the point of common shares, cool, if you're getting diluted, it doesn't matter what they're doing over here. It's a marketing campaign. It's a sham. Now, companies like Apple, the Mag7, they're going to continue to appreciate because they get these massive contracts and you know, whatever, like it's a different conversation. But in a normal common share issuance of a company that doesn't get the velocity, to get these types of contracts or have good product market fit. People get diluted in nature. If you bought into a company and then they rose capital or raised capital right after, you got diluted. So how long are you going to allow that to occur? Well, if the company doesn't grow and you've had all these raises occur, you're diluted basically to zero. That doesn't make any sense to me, just on the point. However, just because it's a productive asset. and you have stock, you just have to know where you're at in the capital stack. And if the company is going to beat that dilutive nature. Next clip. A central bank digital currency, I believe, is a threat to liberty in this country because it creates a mechanism for the government to be able to wipe out your bank account or wipe out your dollars if you say or do something that the government disapproves of, as you see in places like China, as you see even happen to the Canadian truckers, the Freedom Envoy, losing access to their financial bank accounts. I think a central bank digital currency takes us further in that direction. Well, I explained that to Donald Trump, and I give him a lot of credit for being intellectually open, getting to the bottom of it. He took advice from a couple of other people who he trusted around him. A few nights later, I saw him mention that. And again, last night when he and I were at that rally together, came out strongly in favor of what I believe is the right answer, which is to oppose the creation of a central bank digital currency. Yeah, 100% agree. There's nothing really to debate there. is really the debate. that the central bank digital currency thing provokes is less government or more government. Yeah. That's really what it comes down to. And that's where you get the divide of liberal versus Republican or libertarian, whatever you want to call it. And in one regard, with our current cash systems and credit systems, it is clunkier. So there are multiple steps that have to occur to them for them to get to you. They can still get to you, but that's one illusion of safety. But at the same time, if they can compress that time window, just because we have the ability to do so with digital assets, does not mean that it can't be used for bad with governments. So they may have their own internal blockchains and ledgers, but them issuing that as a product to everyone else, I don't think is right. Yeah, I agree with that, Tay. Any parting shots, final words? I know we've been here for a while. This is like a true masterclass, and I do appreciate you going deep on this. Anything that was not said. Or anything that you would like, final words that you're like, hey, I wouldn't want to come all the way to Tennessee to not at least share this. Yeah, for sure. I appreciate that. I'll just say like, look, digital assets has changed my life. Navigating it has been a lot of learning lessons and stuff for sure. But you can't borrow someone else's conviction. Yeah. At some point, got to cross the lines. You got to go ahead and use it. See what it means to you. Because to my Wall Street guys, it's not going to mean much to them other than more trading activity. To people that are kind of stuck and aren't getting ahead and they're only making that 10% per year, like give it a shot. You know, if it's making 20% per year, you just doubled your return by taking another idea, you know? And so because it's changed my life in a rapid way, I'd say you have to give Bitcoin a shot. Buy some. get tangible with it, just go down the rabbit hole. Now, when you go down that rabbit hole, you'll find all the manipulation that's happened in the fiat currency world. People that benefit from that manipulation are governments, bankers, et cetera. So they're the ones that also control the media. All the education that you've had on financial markets, if it's come from them, are making you believe a certain thing about their products. If you just understand that. Give the orange pill shot. Go down that rabbit hole. See what that gets you. Because it changed my life. You're seeing everyone else kind of awake now and really talking about it. Just give it a shot. Robert, thank you. We'll have access to all your stuff. And you have social media. You got your own YouTube channel. If people want to learn more about your services and what it looks like to work with you, we'll have links down below. Appreciate you making the trip. And I'm grateful for this master class that I get to sit like. firsthand. And my conviction is I very much get this. And that's why if you look at my portfolio, I'm starting to diversify what I would be putting in the stock market and using some of that and putting it into crypto. I'm not at the 20, 30, 40% yet. Maybe we'll get you there. But maybe you'll get me there. And my headspace is in business, business, business. So I'm not even in the mindset of diversifying my money right now in a ton of places. But I very much see that this is going to be a big, big part of investing and diversifying outside of value creation. Well, on the business side, and I'll leave you with this, Bitcoiners, we say, you know, I mine more fiat to throw into Bitcoin. So it's flipped. Yeah. So I still build my businesses and stuff. I have my own allocations and all that stuff. But it's a game. Once you get to that stage, it's a good unlock. Robert, thank you. Yeah.
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