#1467 Ethan Peck | How To Get Microsoft & Amazon To Buy Bitcoin

Ethan Peck is the Deputy Director for the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project. He also wrote a proposal to Microsoft and Amazon for them to put bitcoin on their balance sheet. In this conversation we discuss what he did, why he did it, how these shareholder proposals work, Saylor’s 3 minute pitch, how it gets approved, and what the impact will be. ======================= BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $500 in rewards. ======================= Polkadot is a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain technology aimed at creating Web3. Created by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot empowers users to build decentralized applications with ease. Backed by industry leaders, making it a preferred choice for big names, Polkadot stands out as a leading choice for investors seeking a reliable, future-proof solution in the growing world of Web3 technology. Learn more at https://polkadot.com/. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on guys? Today is going to be an incredible episode because I went and I did a ton of work that all of you are about to benefit for. Here's what happened. Some of you have probably seen that there was a proposal put forward to Microsoft and Amazon for them to put Bitcoin on their balance sheet. That proposal was written by a live

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  human being. It's a guy named Ethan. How do I know that? Because I went on the internet, I did a bunch of research, I dug and I dug and I dug and I found Ethan. But not only did I find Ethan Peck, who's the Deputy Director of the Free Enterprise Project, but I got Ethan Peck sitting right here with me. And now we're going to talk about exactly what he did, why he did it, how these shareholder proposals work, and what it's going to mean for Bitcoin on public company balance sheets. And so here's my episode with Ethan Peck.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:36Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:18Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:46Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:51Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Ethan, let's get started with this. You put forward a proposal to Microsoft for them to put Bitcoin on their balance sheet. How the heck do you do that and why did you do it?

• 4:00Speaker 02

  First of all, thanks for having me. The reason that I did it is because Microsoft has a lot of cash on its balance sheet, cash, cash equivalents and bonds. And so just because of inflation, their cash is being debased constantly and the bond yields are not outpacing the true inflation rate. They're losing money for their shareholders. So what I do at the Free Enterprise Project, we're a three-person team. We just submit shareholder proposals to companies. So essentially, we own shares in the companies. And if you own a certain amount of shares, you can submit a proposal that's voted on at the annual meeting. It's just a lot of our proposals deal with sort of getting corporations out of politics, back to fiduciary duty, out of sort of woke stuff, unnecessary environmental commitments.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Not, you know, we're a conservative organization, but we don't even push right-wing values on corporations. We just get them out of politicized things.

• 4:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So like ESG, DEI, all the things that kind of seem like the corporate world went crazy for a little bit. You guys are basically showing up and you're saying, hey, stop the nonsense. Get back to building your company, just focus on your fiduciary duty to shareholders, which is drive profits and create shareholder value.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Exactly. That's exactly what we do.

• 5:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when you show up and you're like, hey, Microsoft, buy Bitcoin, you're also saying create shareholder value.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Exactly. So I just, you know, I've been a Bitcoiner for a couple of years, but I never thought to submit this proposal to any company before, because I didn't want to push my own values on a company. It wasn't until it sort of clicked for me that, wait, corporations are losing a lot of money for their shareholders, holding so much cash. What's the answer to this? Well, obviously, it's Bitcoin. So I just thought, you know, corporations have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to solve this problem that they're not adequately addressing. And the best solution is Bitcoin. Until someone else can come up with a better solution, corporations should look at this. And so that's all, you know, I very humbly went to corporations as if whoever saw the proposal, it didn't require them or mandate them to buy Bitcoin. It just sort of asked them to do an assessment.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  There's also another reason for that, sort of lame to just sort of ask for an assessment. But if you ask for too much, then you might be infringing on their, what's called, ordinary business. And the SEC might just not allow you to have that.

• 6:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's a very like, complex process here. You, I can say this, I don't think you can say this, but you're an expert at submitting these shareholder proposals. How many proposals do you think that you and your colleagues have submitted over the years?

• 6:26Speaker 02

  For the last, I've been doing this for three years. I would say like, close to 150.

• 6:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so you do fifty a year, one a week almost, right? Of these proposals. And you've got a lot of experience of getting denied. Where people will say, oh, you have too many characters. Or, oh, you violated this, whatever. Like, the companies are looking for the technicalities. So they don't have to hear the proposals. And they can clear a bunch of these things out of the way. And they just get to do what they want to do. Is that right?

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a lot of nonsense. Like, if you go above five hundred words. Even if you have, like, one time I had too many apostrophes. So like, a word with an apostrophe counted as two words. It was like a five hundred one words. Or too many dashes. They'll omit the proposal. Or a link counts as one word, but like, two links count as two, like that. And if you do anything, you have to request by a certain deadline. And ask for a meeting within a certain number of days. If you ask for a meeting with them, like, seven days out from when you requested, not fifteen days out. They can omit it. So there's a lot of technicalities to it. So, on one hand, anyone could submit a proposal. And I really want to try to inspire, like, a grassroots movement. So if anyone's listening, they own shares in a company, they want to do this too. Reach out to me, I'll help you do it.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Because the more of us that are submitting, I shouldn't be the only one doing this. The more of us that can submit proposals like this. It puts more, it's more of a grassroots movement, you know, asking a company, not just coming from one person. That would be much more effective.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  But, at the same token, you don't want to risk getting it omitted. Because once the SEC decides, okay, you can't submit this proposal because you used the wrong language at this company. Then you set a precedent at that company, and you can't submit the same proposal for a number of years. And so, if you're interested in submitting a proposal, someone listening, reach out to me, I'm happy to, you know, walk you through it.

• 8:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So basically, it's really important when somebody submits it to make sure they submit it the right way.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, when, let's talk Microsoft. So, why did you pick Microsoft? You said they had a lot of cash. Why did you think to submit this? Like, you know, you do this for a day job, but you said that you never thought about Bitcoin. Were you just sitting there bored one day? Or like, explain kind of this process of how this ends up getting submitted.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Well, I'm always trying to be creative and trying to get corporations back to their fiduciary duty. So, I've submitted a lot of unique proposals that no one submitted before. Like, one of them was asking companies to only have a board members exclusive to that company. So that you don't have, like, companies with, you know, directors that sit on multiple boards at the same time. Like, I think I was the first person to submit a proposal like that. And then I just saw this problem of inflation with companies holding a lot of cash. And I was like, okay, where's the next place I could submit to? Microsoft happens to be an off-season one. Most shareholder meetings are in the spring, so like April, May are most of them. Microsoft is like one of them that happens to be in December. And when I had this idea, it was May. And so the deadline for submission, I think, was June.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  So then I just, okay, Microsoft's a big company. They have a lot of cash. They fit this problem. And also, I would be lying if I say that. I didn't like the dichotomy between Microsoft and MicroStrategy, just in the names.

• 9:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Just literally Microsoft and MicroStrategy. You thought it'd be funny?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:30Anthony Pompliano?

  You're definitely a Bitcoiner. Alright, so you submit the proposal and then walk through, what is the process? And like, who finds? Did you send this to somebody in Bitcoin world? Like, you know, Bitcoiners are psychopaths and they got like all kinds of alerts up, all this stuff, whatever. But like, walk through, like, how does this become somewhat of a national story?

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't make it a national story at all. I submitted it in June and completely forgot about it. Like I told you, I submit 50 of these, you know, our organization, not just me. And so in October, they had to publish the proxy ballot with the SEC. And so when it went public, I just started seeing like all these Bitcoiners started, you know, the cyber hornets are amazing. And so they made it viral. They put the pressure on Microsoft and they deserve more credit than me. I just, to me, it was just submitting another 500 words, trying to get corporations back to, you know, focusing on fiduciary duty, which they've been ignoring for a long time. And that was it. And then Bitcoiners took it from there.

• 10:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, so as part of this, at some point, you're gonna get three minutes to present to the Microsoft Board. Every proposal that gets heard gets three minutes. Was it special for this? Like, why did you get three minutes? And then what'd you do with your three minutes?

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Okay, so most of the time it's three minutes. Sometimes it's two, sometimes it's like four or five, but it's usually three minutes. And when I saw Sailor tweet at Satya Nadella, I thought, okay, I have to let him get the three minutes instead of me. Like, he's interested in talking to Satya Nadella. Let me try to reach out to him. And, you know, one thing led to another, finally contacted him.

• 11:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Cyber hornets?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And just offered him my three minutes. He was, you know, very generous with his time. And when we spoke, he said, listen, like, let's try to get in front of Satya. Why don't we offer them to withdraw the proposal in exchange for me meeting with Satya? You know, and I feel at liberty to disclose this because Sailor said it publicly on Twitter. And so I said to Microsoft, like, we'll withdraw the proposal and not submit one in 2025 and not submit one in 2026. If you just agreed a one hour meeting with Sailor, you know, he'll sign an NDA anywhere you want in the world.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  And they said, no, like, they would rather just expose their company to a lot of like negative press, obviously publicly fumble. I mean, like, and that just shows you how close minded they are and how early we are. I don't think every company is that close minded.

• 11:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Were they, were they annoyed by this?

• 12:00Speaker 02

  They didn't seem annoyed. They just were sort of like.

• 12:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Like you guys run your thing. We don't care. We're not going to do this. We don't think you can get the votes.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, to me, it's like a sort of a blockbuster moment, you know, not buying Netflix. Just and also Microsoft very famously didn't get involved with smartphones in like 2008. So it's just another one of those moments.

• 12:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Um, to have gotten the proposal approved, how many votes would you need? What percentage?

• 12:29Speaker 02

  It'd be 50%.

• 12:30Anthony Pompliano?

  So you need more than 50% of the votes to say yes, and then you could actually get this done.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And what then they, but that would just be a study.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, for now, you know, hopefully with a different SEC and less bias. We can sort of start to push, you know, the envelope on requesting great, bigger things like an allocation. But you have to be careful. And so there's a way to do this without, you know, sort of setting the wrong precedent.

• 12:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, it only got 0.5% approval.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:03Anthony Pompliano?

  A lot of people look at it like, oh, nobody wants this. But really, there's a lot of large asset management firms that own huge blocks. I think BlackRock in particular, Microsoft owns like 10 or 12% of it, right?

• 13:13Speaker 02

  So they own 7%, I think, seven and a half, but they control like 12% of the vote because a lot of people. They're not voting their shares. Mm hmm. So it's not like 99.5% of Microsoft shareholders don't want this. It's not exactly like that. It's more like you have the top five asset managers and the top two proxy advisory services, ISS and Glass Lewis, who basically advise the pension funds on how to vote. So when you have like those seven right there, they're controlling 90% of the vote, just them. So when you, if you go 0 for 7 on them, you're already at like. 90. Exactly. So if we just flip BlackRock, we're already at 12%. So it's just like, it goes in chunks. It's not like, like, like a vote for a president.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  All right. Uh, you talked to BlackRock about why they voted no. Not just me, it was, I invited Parker Lewis. Okay. To join that conversation. Yeah. When I talked to Geo Capital, I also invited Andrew Hones and Jesse Kobernick. I'm trying to like pass the ball to pros in the Bitcoin community as much as possible. Someone's better than me at convincing them, let them do it. Like I let Sailor speak. Um, and, um, so I spoke, I spoke, it's really the investment stewardship department at these companies that decide. I think a lot of people don't know that, like a lot of people look like, oh, well, you see a lot of stuff on Twitter like, oh, well, BlackRock's definitely going to vote for it. You know, they're buying up all the Bitcoin.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  I wish it worked that way, but how it really works is you have, BlackRock owns thousands of companies. Every company has 10, 12, 13 directors up for vote and five, six, sometimes 10 shareholder proposals. They have tens of thousands, sometimes 100,000 items a year to vote on, which is a lot of research that they have to do going into it, right? And so they have investment stewardship departments that all, their job is to vote shares for every company. Okay. And they vote on behalf of their clients. They're not, you know, and what hap- unfortunately, a lot of these investment stewardship teams are staffed. I'm going to be polite with sort of, um, pro ESG people, old school.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  It's a mix of like old school and like sort of woke millennials. Uh, that see the world in a very specific kind of way. Uh, and so they they're sort of hesitant towards Bitcoin. So even if BlackRock's going up and buying all the, a lot of Bitcoin. There, there, there's a disconnect there. And so what we have to do is we have to convince them because remember like now we submitted Amazon. It's the same exact, I can, I don't want to dox them, but it's the same people vote, like literally the same people voting on that proposal. Uh, so we have to.

• 15:52Anthony Pompliano?

  You think that they're gonna vote yes?

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Uh, on one hand, there's a negatives and positives to it. Like they seem to have made their mind up. On the other hand, instead of just having like 15 minutes with them, we now get more time and more time with them. So you, we get to like more exposure to this issue. A lot of them were naive on a lot of, on Bitcoin, like completely naive on about it. And so, uh, we just got another shot at orange pilling them, so to speak. Um, and so there's some good part about that. You getting to engage with the same people. And I wasn't saying, they weren't all close minded, like there was some open mindedness. Um, that, but you know, they're not, 99% of shareholder proposals on any issue doesn't pass.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  And so when you have a brand new shareholder proposal at a company that's like already successful. I think I saw you say this on Fox the other day, like Microsoft's already successful. Like, why do they have to rock the boat? So they're not going to rock the boat at a successful company on a first ever proposal. Once they have more exposure to this, I think that there's a better chance to sort of build momentum and sort of get that number up.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  In the future and.

• 17:00Anthony Pompliano?

  So Microsoft, because it was only 0.5% approved, uh, you can't resubmit for a couple of years.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:06Anthony Pompliano?

  On Bitcoin for Microsoft.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  You have to pass 5%.

• 17:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So really what's important is, um, should you go to companies that have really big, uh, um, retail shareholder bases?

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Right. Okay. So that's a really good idea and I'm looking at that too.

• 17:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I only got one good idea here. There you go. You got my good idea.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  So there's a couple of different things that I'm looking at. One, it's companies that have a lot of cash. So that's why I submitted to Amazon and Microsoft. So because they have the biggest problem. Two is companies that are more likely to to do something like this, like a smaller company that might not have a lot going for them. That's not really successful. You know, they might throw a hail man, they might be more likely to throw a hail Mary and purchase Bitcoin. And then the third thing is, who are the biggest shareholders? So I think that it's worth submitting to all, you know, different kinds of companies and just seeing how it plays out.

• 18:02Anthony Pompliano?

  You go do Berkshire?

• 18:05Speaker 02

  The deadline passed already this year, so we already submitted something else there. But definitely next year. Why not? You know, they have a lot of cash.

• 18:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Come on, we gotta, we gotta get Buffett to do it. Imagine, imagine Buffett having to buy Bitcoin because the shareholders told him to do it.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  You know.

• 18:19Anthony Pompliano?

  He'd cry. He'd cry. He'd say, oh, no, I said that this was like harvesting dead baby brains.

• 18:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And the media would love it, right? They would be, they'd be having a field day asking them about Bitcoin.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Eat it up.

• 18:31Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think it'll pass, though.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  No.

• 18:35Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So what's your goal? Like, what do you hope that you can kind of accomplish with this?

• 18:41Speaker 02

  My goal is just to get companies with every proposal, even with the ones that deal with ESG. It's just to get companies back to fiduciary duty. Like, I'm a Bitcoiner, but I swear I'm not doing this because of my own stack. Like, I just, I really just think that companies are losing their shareholders a lot of money every year. It's a big problem, you know? And when you're, a lot of people that, you know, that are not Bitcoiners, they're just investing in the market because they have no, they're, if they just keep their money in cash. Or, you know, it's losing value due to inflation. So they're either buying bonds, it's also not beating inflation. So they invest in the market, they just buy the S and P or they buy indexes. And when you have every single company in these indexes, except for MicroStrategy now and, you know, Tesla, not holding Bitcoin.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  That's a lot of value being lost just from their cash and bond holdings. And so, you know, why, why not help America? Why not help American shareholders get back to, you know, producing value for the shareholders?

• 19:34Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned Tesla, they already own some Bitcoin. Do you think that that's a potential target where you could go and get them to up the allocation of Bitcoins? They already own some?

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they also have less of a problem. So you know, they're not as I'm not as interested in submitting to Tesla because they don't have as big of a problem as a lot of other companies. But if they're more likely to, you know, up their Bitcoin holdings, that's something to consider. So I'm looking at that, too.

• 19:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And you're doing this pretty much by yourself right now. You've got your colleagues, but they're not Bitcoiners, are they?

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Well, they are. They're becoming Bitcoiners.

• 20:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really? Okay, wait, what does that mean?

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Well, I think, you know, one of them read Bitcoin standard now. And so

• 20:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So they're becoming more interested?

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Becoming more interested.

• 20:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, your guys' organization, this whole idea of get back to fiduciary duty, get away from all the nonsense, whatever, like, it does, I would think, lean itself for people to have kind of a propensity to be aligned with the ethos of Bitcoin around, you know, free speech and merit based, you know, kind of money and those things, right?

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, definitely like my colleagues believe in sound money. And so, but you know, not everyone, and there's a different road to Bitcoin for everyone. And they definitely see the value in Bitcoin and they're becoming more and more, they've never been against Bitcoin. And when I asked them, can I submit this kind of proposal? They were like, yeah, go ahead. How does it fit within the framework of what we do? And I explained it like, just, you know, it's in line with companies fiduciary duty to not lose their shareholders' money from holding a lot of cash and bonds. And they're like, yeah, that makes sense. Go ahead and do it. So that's what we did.

• 21:07Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy. Who's like the coolest person you talked to after doing this? Sailor?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably Sailor.

• 21:13Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, who else? Anybody else reach out to you? Or did media track you down or anything?

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I spoke to a couple of different members of the media, you know,

• 21:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Did they do stories?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  I think New York Times, Bloomberg, now doing this. It's an honor.

• 21:31Anthony Pompliano?

  We're basically the same, New York Times and podcast, same.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Here we talk about the truth and there propaganda.

• 21:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know if you can say that before the article comes out, because the article may be changing if they hear you say that.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  And yeah, just Parker Lewis talked on Marty Bent. Everyone is so helpful. Sam Callahan, everyone is so helpful, very interested, really cool, you know, Bitcoin, that's part of what makes the Bitcoin community great. It's like, I was never really part of it. I was always just following. But as soon as I reached out, like, hey, I submitted this proposal, like, wow, that's interesting. Tell me about it. So. Everyone's willing to help.

• 22:10Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. What do you need help with now?

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Couple of things. So looking into submitting at different companies, also looking into expanding it, you know, as a more grassroots movement, different shareholders submitting it, you know, similar proposals. And I think that growing, you know, building momentum on this proposal so that it's, and also engaging with asset managers, the people that vote, growing the momentum and getting companies to sort of, you know, it's gonna, it's a process, but I think it'll happen.

• 22:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And the asset management firms, you should mention BlackRock. Who are the other big ones?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  So Vanguard, State Street, a lot of times it's like Geo Capital, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, you know, with Vanguard and JP Morgan, I didn't even bother contacting them. But, you know, Goldman Sachs, I recently bought, you know, they revealed that they bought a lot of Bitcoin, Charles Schwab's getting in the game, so.

• 23:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Vanguard, they're the ones who said that they're not going to offer the Bitcoin ETF, but aren't they really big investors in micro strategy?

• 23:15Speaker 02

  They are. They're the biggest shareholder.

• 23:16Anthony Pompliano?

  They're the biggest shareholder. So it's kind of like talking out of one side of your mouth while you're doing something else, right?

• 23:21Speaker 02

  That's exactly what I've been trying to tell the asset managers, like, how could you justify voting against this proposal while buying up Bitcoin while, you know, you have a lot of exposure to, you know, companies that are very much tied to the price of Bitcoin, like not just micro strategy, micro strategy, Riot, Marathon, Coinbase, Block, Tesla has Bitcoin, you don't have a problem there. Why do you have a problem with Microsoft owning 1%, right? A lot of the answers that we got back was like, well, it's too volatile and, you know, why shouldn't they just kick that money back to shareholders? And I said, yeah, maybe they should kick that money back to shareholders, but that's a different question. You know, I'm not, Microsoft already determined that they're

• 24:05Speaker 02

  holding 75 billion in cash and they're not giving that money back to shareholders. So even if they were to give 20 billion back to shareholders, then the question becomes, what do you do with the other 55 billion? It's the same question, right? So, and they didn't really have much of an answer for that. But I'm hopeful that they'll eventually see the light.

• 24:26Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that this is gonna happen.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  I hope so. It could take time. And frankly, there's a lot of bias against us. My organization.

• 24:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Because we've been like the leading anti ESG, pro fiduciary sort of shareholder proponent for years. There's a couple of others doing great work, NLPC, Jerry Boyer.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  You know, but we've been doing, we submit the most, but I think we submitted the second most shareholder proposals of any proponent last year.

• 24:58Anthony Pompliano?

  But you guys are doing it as a nonprofit.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So you guys aren't necessarily making money off of this. It's very much a kind of philanthropic activity to go and say, hey, look, we want you guys to do right by shareholders.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there might be a way to do this in a in a for-profit way. You know, it's hard, like Carl Icahn sort of does it. But unless you have like billions of dollars and you can really move the ball. I think that it sort of has to be a nonprofit thing because if you just own $2,000 with the shares, then the avenue that you have to take is submitting proposals, also nominating directors. That's another avenue that I started thinking about, like these, the directors of these companies. It's such an echo chamber.

• 25:42Anthony Pompliano?

  How does it work?

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Okay, so you essentially just nominate, you can nominate a director and they're voted on, it's like an item at the meeting, same as a proposal. Most meetings, all the directors up for nomination were nominated by the board. Okay, by the company, they're nominating their own candidates. And they pass with like 95%. So I've been to hundreds of meetings, like I don't think I've ever seen a director receive below 90%. So that just get, and I think the only time was when like Exxon like intentionally kicked off

• 26:17Speaker 02

  two directors and they got also like 2% or something. And so that was like, it was like known that it was gonna happen. So it's really, it's not, it's not really like a vote. It's really the asset manager is determined, this is what's gonna happen.

• 26:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And you think that there's a chance like share, like the retail shareholders in certain companies could, could pull it off?

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Retail shareholders have a better chance because they're people.

• 26:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? Asset managers are massive institutions.

• 26:45Anthony Pompliano?

  They're the blob.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're the blob and they own each other. But again, like it's their investment stewardship departments that decide this. And so we have to appeal to them and it's going to take time. But I think that as things change, as we get a new SEC, that's, you know, not as biased against the organizations and shareholder proponents with a certain viewpoint.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Companies are going to move back to neutral. And I think you're seeing it already, I honestly.

• 27:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you guys put forward more proposals, you guys need help with amplifying the message. You need probably the organization. What is the name of the organization behind the project?

• 27:25Speaker 02

  National Center for Public Policy Research and we have a couple of different programs.

• 27:29Anthony Pompliano?

  That sounds like some smart people shit.

• 27:33Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So you guys need donations there.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? That helps if you're.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  You can go to nationalcenter.org. Actually, the president called me and he said, can you set up a Bitcoin address?

• 27:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really?

• 27:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yesterday. And so I'm going to do that, too.

• 27:46Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. And why? Because he's like, all these Bitcoiners, they seem crazy. Like if they're going to be getting excited about us, maybe they can give us some money?

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you know what the budget is every year for the organization?

• 27:56Speaker 02

  I'm honestly not involved in any of that. I just keep my head down, do my work.

• 28:00Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. And then the third thing is that you need other shareholders who would want to submit these proposals to companies where they've held. How much, how many shares or how much money does the portfolio value have to be?

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Right. So it's $2,000 worth of shares for three years, $15,000 worth for two years, or $25,000 worth for one year. And you had to have held it consecutively. So if you have $2,100 worth, but it dips below 2,000, the clock resets as soon as it does. So you have.

• 28:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So somebody out there's got 50 grand worth of a stock and they've held it for at least one year and it never dipped below 25,000, they're ready to fire.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 28:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And where can we send people to find you if they want help in submitting these proposals?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  You can go to our website, national. NationalCenter.org and or you can send me, you know, personally at EPEC at NationalCenter.org.

• 28:52Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, EPEC at NationalCenter.org. Somebody reaches out and says, hey, I want to submit. You'll help them figure out, make sure they don't mess it up.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 28:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And then maybe we can just like over when we just take over the S and P 500. Just like, just, you know, DDoS attack them with all these proposals. And then they're all going to be calling each other, be like, hey, you got to vote on this thing? Yeah, I got to vote on this thing. And then the stewardship folks, they'd be like, are you kidding me? We got to vote on this 47 times this year.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Exactly. And, you know, and then you get to engage with them. So you can reach out to them. Sometimes they're closed minded, they don't want to talk to you. But a lot of times they, you know, they'll hear you out for like 20, 30 minutes. And you get to talk like, this is why I think this proposal is a good idea. And we basically have to win them over if you want the proposal to win. There's another element of it too, though. So like, I've come to their agreements with companies. They, a lot of times they don't want the press. So I'll submit a proposal and I'll say, listen, we'll withdraw the proposal. If you meet me halfway and settle on this. And we sign an agreement. This happened a couple of times.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  One that I could speak about because they violated their, their agreement.

• 30:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, you had an agreement, they violated it?

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Who did that?

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Best Buy.

• 30:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, Best Buy, all right.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:07Anthony Pompliano?

  What was the agreement?

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Basically, this is very divisive, which Best Buy shouldn't be involved in at all. But Best Buy was giving money to a lot of organizations that sort of

• 30:18Speaker 02

  advance trans ideology in children.

• 30:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  And so we tried to stop that. And we told them this, listen, this is inappropriate. And your shareholders are divided on this, that you can't take money of all shareholders and give it to organizations that half of them, more than half of them, okay? Vehemently disagree with, like, it's very divisive.

• 30:40Anthony Pompliano?

  That's crazy. Like, just, just so we're clear, if you take shareholders money that more than half of your shareholders disagree with what you do with the money? That sounds like you got a pretty good argument about, hey, knock this off.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Exactly. So they came to an agreement with us, they stopped giving to a couple of organizations that do like really the most radical things on, you know, LGBT issues. So, and so they, they agreed to stop, you know, we came to a private agreement and

• 31:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you guys had put forward a proposal.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:05Anthony Pompliano?

  You pulled it.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  We pulled it and they

• 31:07Anthony Pompliano?

  So it never, it never came out?

• 31:08Speaker 02

  No.

• 31:09Anthony Pompliano?

  That they were doing this?

• 31:09Speaker 02

  And I think someone there leaked it or something.

• 31:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And they violated what? They they went back and started donating again?

• 31:17Speaker 02

  No, they someone we were supposed to be like usually when I come to these agreements, I'm not allowed to speak about them because a lot of times they want it to be like

• 31:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Under wraps. So sometimes companies, you know, you're out, there are companies out there that do agree to like, pull back the wokeness a little bit. Sometimes you just don't see it because we come to like private agreements. But that one, I think somebody must have leaked it because like my emails with them got in like SEC documents.

• 31:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really?

• 31:41Speaker 02

  You could, you could look it up.

• 31:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And what, somebody from their side?

• 31:44Speaker 02

  I have no idea.

• 31:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but it wasn't you?

• 31:46Speaker 02

  No.

• 31:48Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So epac at nationalcenter.org.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And as long as somebody is held more than $25,000 of stock for a year.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:58Anthony Pompliano?

  You said 15,000 for two years or $2,500 or more for three years straight.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Then they can submit these and that'd be helpful as well.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 32:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing, man. Well, listen, I don't know how you thought of this. It's amazing that it's like your expertise and what you do for a day job, the fact that you're a Bitcoiner, kind of put those two things together and fire it away. You've definitely changed the conversation, right? And kind of pushed the tempo. And even though Microsoft didn't do it, that's fine. You're on Amazon. There's others I believe that are coming. Keep at it. And I think that, you know, it's kind of like a wall. You just keep smashing that hammer and you never know which is the one that's going to finally break through. And once, once you get one, my guess is that you'll get a lot more.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  First domino and then the rest fall. Thank you.

• 32:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Thank you so much for doing this.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  I appreciate it.