337: Kingdom Trust CEO Ryan Radloff On Advancing Bitcoin Adoption

Ryan Radloff is the CEO of Kingdom Trust, an independent qualified custodian focused on leveraging technology to provide customized and innovative custody solutions for clients including alternative asset investments. He previously was the co-founder and CEO of CoinShares, which led the charge for crypto adoption in Europe. In this conversation, we discuss Ryan's background, why he started Coinshares and how they grew, the importance of leveraging Kingdom Trust's Choice product to get Bitcoin into retirement accounts, and why Bitcoin provides the ability for savers to financially outperform investors. =============================== LVL is a mobile banking app that provides an integrated Bitcoin and traditional bank account experience for a flat $9 monthly fee. They have no trading commission like Coinbase and no hidden spread like Robinhood. Your cash is held in a private, FDIC-insured checking account and you can buy and sell Bitcoin as many times as you want and only pay the monthly $9 flat fee. Legendary Bitcoiners Jimmy Song and Willy Woo are already advisors and we liked it so much that we invested in the company. This is a no brainer and it will save you an incredible amount of money, so go sign up at lvl.co/pomp or use promo code "pomp". =============================== The Trends premium weekly report helps you understand market trends poised to skyrocket and how you can pounce. Join the private network of 5k+ builders, founders, and investors spotting tomorrow’s trends. Expand your network, and discover the next big business idea before it explodes: https://trends.co/pomp/ =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 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://www.pompletter.com

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast. Simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Ryan Radloff is the CEO of Kingdom Trust, an independent qualified custodian focused on leveraging technology to provide customized and innovative custody solutions for our clients, including alternative asset investments. He previously was the co-founder and CEO of CoinShares, which led the charge for crypto adoption in Europe. In this conversation, we discuss Ryan's background, why he started CoinShares and how they grew, the importance of leveraging Kingdom Trust's Choice product to get Bitcoin into retirement accounts, and why Bitcoin provides the ability for savers to financially outperform investors. I really enjoyed this conversation with Ryan, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first is Level, spelled L V L. They're a mobile banking app that provides

• 0:56Speaker 00

  an integrated Bitcoin and traditional bank account experience for a flat $9 monthly fee. They've got no trading commissions like a Coinbase, and they have no hidden spread like Robinhood. Your cash is held in a private FDIC insured checking account, and you can buy and sell Bitcoin as many times as you want, and only pay the monthly $9 flat fee. That's right, $9 flat fee, and you can do as much trading as you want. So legendary Bitcoiners Jimmy Song and Willie Wu are already advisors, and we liked it so much that we invested in the company. This is a no-brainer, and it will save you an incredible amount of money. So go sign up at L V L dot C O slash Pomp. Again, L V L dot C O, and you can use the code Pomp.

• 1:40Speaker 00

  That'll get you a $9 monthly flat fee that has both cash and Bitcoin, and you can trade as much as you want with no other fees. Go check it out. The second sponsor is Trends by The Hustle. Their premium weekly report that helps you understand market trends poised to skyrocket and how you can pounce. They've got a private network of over 5,000 builders, founders, and investors spotting tomorrow's trends. I'm really enjoying the community and I highly suggest going and checking them out. So you can expand your network and discover the next big business idea before it explodes. Go to trends.co/pomp. Trends.co/pomp. Go check them out. And don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Ryan. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. Got Ryan here. Super excited to do this. Thanks so much for doing it, man.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward to it.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  We are recording this on a very big day for you guys at Kingdom Trust. But before we talk about all the fun and exciting stuff, let's just cover your background. For people that don't know you, kind of where'd you grow up? What'd you do before you ever discovered Bitcoin or crypto?

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So I grew, I'm a southern boy, grew up in the, grew up in the South. My dad, dad was a football player. He played for the Falcons and then retired down in Hilton Head. So I was a, was a football player, played against your old, old school Cardinal Givens from North Carolina. And, but went to, studied at Duke and then when I was at Duke really got shaped by, you know, by the, you know, like the academic world. And I remember getting a phone call from my parents about halfway through when I was at Duke. And I was pre-law at the time and I got a call from them back in 2000, end of 2007, early 2008 that they lost everything. And I remember I was, you know, sitting there in school.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  I only cared about football and girls and whatever you, whatever you care about when you're, when you're that age. And I was like, what do you mean they lost? You lost everything? Like, what are you talking about? I grew up. You know, fairly comfortable ex NFL player, et cetera. And they're like, yeah, everything's gone. It's like evaporated. And I was like, wow, surely this is not possible. So I ended up like looking into it, actually pivoted my whole life from going pre-law to studying economics and specifically like macroeconomics. And you know, from there became like really disenfranchised with this whole, I figured out actually how money worked when I was there. So got really disenfranchised with the way the legacy financial system works, actually what economics meant. And at that point, when I graduated, it was 2009 and there was nobody hiring back then

• 4:55Speaker 02

  unless you were either a bank, you're going into law school or med school. That was it. So went and worked in the financial markets before Bitcoin. And I remember how much I just hated it. And you know, I'm kind of in the middle of this, like a lot of us were at that time, like this period of really deep frustration with what's going on in the legacy system. And then bam, in 2011, beginning of 2012, someone sent me this white paper and you know, so the story goes. So I grew up as a football, southern football player, you know, American, I love America. And you know, I, and now, you know, full-time Bitcoiner.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's so interesting to hear kind of your take on the 2008, 2009 crisis. You are one year ahead of me in school and I always say that there's probably like a five-year kind of band or demographic of kids who were in college or kind of right after or right before. When that happened, we didn't have enough financial assets personally to really be affected.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  We saw parents, friends' parents, like we saw the kind of economic carnage and it gave us a front row seat without actually kind of getting hurt personally. And I think it really drove a lot of people to say like, what the hell is this? What is going on, right? And drive people to just learn more about it, which you know, in today's day and age, obviously that education proves to be super helpful, but also too, it led a lot of people to Bitcoin as well.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt. And I look at like I'm drawing on similarities right now with what we're going through. And I remember the date, it was the end of 2007 when the banks foreclosed on them. And they lived in that house for, it was basically a year after where we really felt anything massive that was going on. And I, it's, I'm looking at the same thing right now. And I see the same, you know, videos that you're, that you see on Twitter where you see like endless WeWorks and like endless commercial buildings that are just empty. And it's got, I have that same eerie feeling, but like this time around. I feel fortunate to have gone through that at a period where obviously it was terrible for my family, but I, I'm definitely have come at the, you know, this crisis that we're in right now with entirely different.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Mindset and understanding of, okay, it's not, you know, I understand what's happening right now. And, you know, now this time around, we all have different choices, like we have exit signs that we can look at. Uh, and it's totally, you know, I'm, I'm super grateful to have gone through that. Period. It was a very impressionable period for me, but, and now I feel like we have something. That we can add to this crisis here that helps people realize that there is an exit. And that's part of my mission here is to, you know, make sure that we are. Educating the people that were hurt the last time around that this, this crisis, we actually have. Uh, an exit sign for you. And that's basically what I've dedicated my entire life to doing.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that. Tell us a little bit more, once you saw the Bitcoin white paper, read through it, uh, kind of how did you transition out of this legacy financial system into working on Bitcoin related things?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, immediately, the first thing I thought about when I read the white paper was like, holy crap, this is like. Aust, like finally Austrian economics has something to hang our hat on. Like that was the first thing that hit me and everyone's like, what are you, like, what are you talking about? This is some like bubble technology, internet monopoly money. And I looked at it and I saw this like scarce programmatic monetary supply. And I was like, well, holy cow, there's something really serious here that is like deeper when you start. You know, coming in that age where I just learned like what we did with. Uh, you know, money supply and like Infineon played it since the seventies. I, I realized that there's something deeper here. And what I, I went on this like realization that for the last 30 years, really since like we ended the gold standard, 40 years.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Um, Austrian economics has this like gold argument, like it's some put on society and it's a very negative. Argument and it isn't necessarily trying like it. We haven't had a tool to out compete. Uh, the other side of the argument. Really, it's been like the other side is going to fail. And we have this gold standard. And when I read the Bitcoin white paper, I realized that, wait a second. In a digital age, we have something here that can actually compete. Uh, rather than us just banking on the legacy system failing. So as soon as I realized that back then, I was like, I gotta dedicate, you know, after going through what I went through with my family. And seeing like everything ripped from them without even having a clue what was going on.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  I just realized that I need to dedicate every hour of my life towards, you know, expanding and advancing this, this reality. So that's right then and there is when, you know, is, is what I saw. I didn't, you know, people that I've worked with, obviously like Melton at CoinShares. They come at things from like a, they're, they're a lot more tech focused in this space. When, when I came at it from like this weird place where my family lost everything. I'm disenfranchised with this kind of Keynesian experience, experiment that I grew to understand while at Duke. And now I saw this like, okay, now we have a gladiator in the arena with Austrian economics. It's not some like. Bet that the other side is going to fail. It's like a competitor.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  So that was my big like eureka moment. It wasn't the tech. It wasn't anything like that. It was the, it was this like gladiator that we have in the arena now.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a really interesting way to look at, uh, most people point a finger and say, oh, they're going to fail. And the only other option would be gold, you know, standard or something like that. What you're basically saying is, no, no, no. We don't need to wait for that other system to fail. Actually, now here's a thing that can one go compete, but also two. If it is the better system, the market will determine that and it will eclipse it over time, right? It, it's almost like this more offensive position than just a defensive kind of wait and see approach.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  That's exactly it. And you know, I think that even even now, like you hear a lot of our fellow Bitcoiners that will kind of point at some, you know, sovereign currency blowing up and say, you know, this is why you should own. Yes, that is a part of the narrative, but like we are out competing right now. You look at, you know, what savers are doing with like Square each quarter, what like you're seeing the Charles Schwab millennials buying GBTC. You're seeing, you know, the movement of us with the fidelity announcement, we're moving the ball forward. It's not, it's out competing. It's not just a narrative that the other system is collapsing. We're seeing a exactly what I hoped we would have seen back in 2011, 12, when you read that white paper the first time.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  So I'm just, you know, I'm waiting for, I think we still have, obviously it's still early and things like that, but it is not just this kind of sit back and wait for the old system to fail. We're going to advance this and be competitive and earn the belief in the users, not just inherit them when a debt-based system fails. And that's, that's a critical thing that I think most people that are on the other side of the fence don't understand is that we don't view this as a, we're here for when you guys screw up. We view it as we're going to kick your butt. And you know, I think, you know, that that's a big part of the Bitcoin community right now. And it's fostered from what Satoshi was really looking to build.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  I love it. Tell me more about CoinShares. You ever started a business that ended up going into a very, very large business? Kind of what was the impetus for the idea and how did you guys get started?

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, back then it was really cool to say that we're, you know, you're going to build this like regulated framework for Bitcoin and to advance it. And that was like the cool thing that everyone was saying. And you know, we saw really what happened is I was working for a fintech. So post banking, post Wells Fargo, when I came out of Duke, I was working for fintech. This fintech helped companies hedge their currency risk, which was really cool, like Twitter, Google, Uber, all these companies use it to click a button and see, okay, here's my Vietnamese dong to dollar exposure. And they moved me to London to expand that fintech business into Asia Pac and EMEA.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  So I was sitting there in the forefront of like right in the crossroad of like tech and currencies. And I looked at what the Winkle bosses and the Solidex guys were doing at the time. You know, my fellow American counterparties were making no progress with the exchange traded product discussion. And again, what that era of people were trying to do was put like regulated wrappers around Bitcoin. We still are in many cases to advance it. And I looked at, okay, well, London is like the third largest ETF market behind Japan and New York or the United States. And I was like, well, wait a second, nobody's really taking control of that narrative over here in Europe. And we have this amazing platform here. So that was the birth, that was it. That was the, that was the goal of CoinShares was to advance the regulatory footprint

• 13:18Speaker 02

  and the regulated digital asset platform for Europe and globally. And we did that. And along the way, we launched exchange traded products on the NASDAQ. You know, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin. We then, you know, we expanded that out, brought on Meltem, which was a massive part of the growth, both in the US as well as over what we were doing with managed strategies and giving investors the ability to express into some of the more cutting edge parts of the space that you couldn't put in the ETP wrapper. And now CoinShares is still kicking butt. I mean, they're, you know, we've got, they just hired two people that came in from Wisdom Tree to expand that institutional footprint into the rest of Europe and Asia.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  And, you know, Jean-Marie, Meltem, Danny, Frank, and that team is, you know, they're, they're kicking butt. So I'm super pumped that, you know, that the company's doing as well as it is. And it's very mission focused too, is to advance our industry and, and keep pushing the regulatory structure to help people gain access and exposure to our space. I just need to get back to the US.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  What, what was the kind of biggest lessons learned, right? As you went out to build this business over the last couple of years, obviously grew to quite a large size. You spoke with everyone from regulators to traditional financial firms to institutional investors. Like what are just some of the takeaways either that surprised you or people watching and listening wouldn't necessarily know what you think is kind of really good data points for them to understand?

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, you know, from my standpoint, I, you know, I beat my, I think what most people don't understand is how, actually how few institutions were, you know, were in the market up until, I think, this year, really. You know, we, we, I beat every door down in Europe. I mean, I talked to every pension fund, and maybe I was just too American and too, you know, too much of a, of a sales-focused guy, but, you know, we didn't see any institutional movement whatsoever. And then, all of a sudden, we figured out, over in Europe, that these products could be open in access to the grassroots movement, where they could trade these in their retirement accounts, and it just exploded. And, you know, we saw our investors go from like, a few thousand to 30,000

• 15:30Speaker 02

  plus, once we figured out that a way of kind of positioning into the pension accounts over in Europe. And I think that, so what's interesting, I'm curious to see what the stats end up being through the rest of 2020. And, you know, we saw this big Paul Tudor Jones announcement, but from my experience, like, I have not been able to move the needle as much in the institutional market as I have the grassroots retail movement. Because I still, despite with all of the announcements that are going on about XYZ institution doing this, you know, I still think that we are way in the grassroots retail movement. And I haven't seen many companies move the needle

• 16:10Speaker 02

  yet. So I would say that, to most Bitcoiners, kind of frustration is probably what I, what I saw the most there. And if I would have spent more time, I would have spent more time on retail and less time on institutions back then.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really, really interesting, because Robert Kiyosaki has this framework where he basically talks about gold and silver as like God's money, and Bitcoin as the people's money, right? This idea of, you know, it is so democratized, it is so transparent, and it has been adopted by the people first. It's one of the first assets, if not the first asset, where kind of the institutions, the Wall Street firms, the, you know, quote-unquote wealthy and elite, didn't beat retail to it, right? It is the everyday person who actually has benefited from Bitcoin more so than many of those institutions.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I, you know, I, like, You can have them. Like, I know that, like, I'm pumped that for my fellow Bitcoiners that are out there in the institutional grind every day, like, I'm pumped that they're doing it. But, you know, we don't, I, I, like, I look at the community and part of me says, well, we don't need them. And I think that is still what's really cool about, like, our grassroots movement. Maybe that's just like my socialization coming out of the 2009 when I saw these institutions just kind of throw up on Main Street. And I view, I view this as still like a people's movement against that. But, you know, we'll see. I mean, I think, I do think, however, the Paul Tudor Jones piece was the single most changing or dynamic for the institutional

• 17:38Speaker 02

  market I've seen in the last six years since I've really been focused in here. And I think that, you know, he really de-risked the career risk of, you know, institutions expressing a view here. So we'll see, you know, that is exciting. And I think that there's, you know, now, obviously, we have some big names like Fidelity and the others, that's, you know, Nomura and Kmenew with coin shares. We have some big names that are starting to lean into this. And I'm excited to see what the next two or three years holds around that. But for me, I'm going to stay focused on, you know, the, on the grassroots part of it. And we're going to, you know, we're going to cater to Bitcoiners. And I'm really excited to see the amount of like Bitcoin native financial service companies that are

• 18:19Speaker 02

  kind of focused on that. I think that's just as important as what the work is that our brothers and sisters are doing on the institutional side.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  So you came back to the United States, and you now are the CEO of Kingdom Trust. And so maybe talk us through a little bit, kind of what happened? How did you guys, you know, acquire that asset? And then kind of what's the plan in terms of what you guys are going to do?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, you know, it was time just to come back. I was in London for, it was supposed to be eight months, turned into five and a half years. And I love it there. I think, you know, it was kind of the point in my life where I wanted to be back in the United States, grew up here. I've got, my dad, obviously, playing football has become very sick. It's public out there. And I needed to, you know, be here on the ground, kind of in the South. But really, the main driver commercially was, you know, I talked about what we saw in the retirement market in Europe. And I look back here and you know, I saw this Charles Schwab report where the top five holdings of millennials and Schwab was GBTC. And you know, I saw this like massive

• 19:27Speaker 02

  $28 trillion market that was just screaming, oh my God, like it's just yelling at me. So I realized that, okay, this is an opportunity. I think it's the single largest addressable market for Bitcoin right now. So naturally, as someone that's looking to advance Bitcoin, saw this as a reason that I need to go, I need to go advance it. I need to go jump into that and advance that. So if you, if you study the US retirement market, Kingdom Trust was the first qualified custodian ever to custody Bitcoin. So as a Bitcoiner, I love that. You know, it's a company in Murray, Kentucky. So it's like middle America, like there's no airport in Murray, Kentucky. You know, you got to drive two and a half hours to the closest airport. And it's just this like middle America company that I saw as a route

• 20:11Speaker 02

  to kind of build this 20 year business of advancing Bitcoin and retirement accounts. So I just fell in love with it. And I think the people, you know, we have 80 people there. And I just thought it was a perfect platform to keep advancing Bitcoin and specifically in the retirement market. So that was really the, the crux of it and what we saw there.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  Got it. And so obviously you guys have been advertising on podcasts and other places, Choice, which is a self-directed IRA product. And so maybe just explain kind of philosophically, like what is the point of using tax advantage dollars to buy Bitcoin? And then we could talk about mechanically how it actually works.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. So like, I think, taking a step back about that, we as Bitcoiners, it's amazing when you look at our industry, we're doing all these things like stacking sats every day and like counting the exact amount of coin that we are accumulating. And it's like a, for some, it's a hobby, for others, it's a lifestyle. And what's interesting is that none of us, most of us, and I look at, look at kind of the rest of my fellow Bitcoiners, like most of us aren't thinking anything about the, the tax element of this. And if we're going to hodl or hold for a long period of time, or maybe never sell, or if you're going to trade for, trade in and out, you know, what are the most tax advantage ways where you keep more coin to yourself?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  And you know what, that was a big part of why I felt it was so important to like advance Bitcoin in the retirement market. So the idea here and what we've launched is the product called Choice and Choice is a way for you to invest in the digital assets market or the legacy market from one retirement account. So today in your Schwab account, you can only trade like zombie legacy federal like stocks and stuff in the legacy system. Bitcoin is not okay. They don't let you do that. And then before it was only you could only trade crypto, but none of the legacy stuff. So we viewed that as a problem and we wanted to integrate the two worlds. So Choice is a way for you to have choice as an investor between the legacy markets and the digital market. You can trade any stock

• 22:14Speaker 02

  or ETF plus any cryptocurrency from one account. And I think that's and that's important because now you can start hodling and trading in a tax deferred way instead of just in your, you know, in your non-tax qualified accounts. So as a hodler, you're becoming more elevated and sophisticated and thinking not just how much coin I'm accumulating, but how much net coin am I accumulating after taxes? And I think CoinDesk did a great piece on it today on tax, on just the concept of tax and Bitcoin. And I think we need more thought leaders that are just hammering that. It's not just about retirement. There's other things that matter as well.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so obviously, one of the things that people hear about is, hey, I'd love to use my tax advantaged dollars in my retirement account to buy Bitcoin, but historically, I haven't been able to hold the private keys, right? There's been ways to do it, but it's kind of been indirect exposure. So I buy some asset and that asset that gives me the exposure, but I actually want to hold Bitcoin. And I think to me, this was the most fascinating part is you guys figured out how somebody could use those tax advantaged dollars, buy Bitcoin and still retain their private keys. So maybe talk a little bit just how mechanically you guys are actually doing it.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you're right. I mean, most of the, pretty much GBTC dominated the US retirement market up until now and recently with what we've launched with Choice. And the idea is that I believe every Bitcoin company CEO has a responsibility for its Bitcoin users to help them own their own keys, right? So in a retirement account, the best way of doing that is what you do is you set up a retirement accounts with Choice. And then under the retirement account, you actually form a, what's called a single member trust or a single member LLC. And that's, and that single member LLC and trust actually holds

• 24:05Speaker 02

  the coins and you can hold those yourself. And this originated back in the gold days. There was a bunch of gold bugs that wanted to have, you know, not have the gold at Deutsche Bank and wanted to hold it in their retirement account themselves. So what was structured between the legal, the regulatory, the back and forth between lawyers and the IRS is that a retirement account could be structured in a way where you can have it at the top level with a single member LLC and trust underneath it. And then you can hold the keys yourself underneath that. And your requirement is to report back the positions of that to the custodian for the IRS annual filings. So it's amazing that the structure exists. It's been in place for a long time. We have people that own much more than just Bitcoin.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  You can own fire trucks. You can own physical gold. It's amazing what types of assets are held. So it's also really, holding your own keys, if you're getting into Bitcoin, is sometimes not, it can be daunting. So there's a, again, as a, my goal is to advance Bitcoin in the US retirement market. And I think along the way, we've identified partners that can help us do that the most. And I think, so what we've done is we powered this solution using Casa. So Casa has developed a really good user interface app and then the hardware compatibility with owning your own keys in a multi-sig capacity. And they just nailed the user experience. So that was a, we were able to take that, what they've built, which is another Bitcoin company.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  And we could just use that to streamline this as a service. So before you had to set up all this crazy stuff to own your own keys. Now it's like an out of the box product. So as a Bitcoin CEO, I feel that we've got a good solution now for our users that have the ideological requirement, as I do, to hold your own keys. But then also to have other choices, hence our brand, to either hold them in cold storage with us or put those coins in motion in the evolving and upcoming Bitcoin money market and capital markets layer, which I'm pretty excited about. So it's those three things, starting with the nucleus being hold your own keys and then extending out from there.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Explain that last bit a little bit in terms of kind of that money market or the financial layer. What do you mean by that?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  So what's fascinating about, if you look at the trajectory of legacy financial system, we went from owning, you know, having your gold or whatever else there at your house. And it was in your possession, it was safe. Then we started depositing that into financial organizations. Somewhere along the way, we messed up and detached gold from the dollars. We ended up keeping dollars with the banks. And then to keep them at the banks, what they did is they started saying, hey, guess what? We're going to earn interest on your savings. We're going to deliver interest to you. So in lieu of you not having your cash or gold beneath your mattress,

• 27:06Speaker 02

  we are going to deliver interest for having it in our financial organization. And believe it or not, I actually think that we're going to take the same path as an industry. I think way this is going to work in the next five, 10 years is that you're either going to own your own keys or you're going to be paid on the risk for not having them yourselves. And in order for that markets to evolve, we are seeing, you have quite a bit of maturity that needs to take place over the last three or four years of these regulated prime brokers and the likes, so that I can put that Bitcoin in motion with other regulated financial institutions and earn interest on it. So what you're seeing over the last three years is this really healthy capital markets

• 27:51Speaker 02

  layer and what I call Bitcoin money market layer that is emerging between all these massive prime brokers that you've got that are regulated with deep balance sheets. I mean, you've seen CoinShares, the Backed Galaxy, the BitGo, the Genesis, the Fidelity, you know, you have all of these amazing outlets, Jane Street, Saskahana, Citadel. And what's happening is you're seeing this really good layer of digital asset capital formation that's emerging, that's allowing people to tap into it. So what I think is really cool is that, yes, I can own my own keys and have the largest percent of my assets, you know, in my possession, but I also want to put some of that to work and earn interest and yield on that. So basically, the way that we are going

• 28:36Speaker 02

  to be structuring our products is to helping users do that. And that whole industry is blossoming because it isn't just about the money markets. You're also seeing like the origination of DeFi and this other stuff emerge from that. But before DeFi and all that stuff, there's some basic lending that's going on where the interest rates are really competitive. And why they're competitive is not because it's some dangerous, uncollateralized market. It's because that they're natural commercial interest rates that aren't being manipulated at the short end of the curve by by central banks. So you're seeing these healthy Bitcoin money market and interest rate markets that are emerged. And savers love that. And we're seeing, you know, we are seeing massive

• 29:18Speaker 02

  demand with our 100,000 users at Kingdom for those types of products. So people want to hold their own keys with Casa, but they also want to take a piece of that and put it in motion. And I think what's cool about our industry is the better counterparties that we get into this, like Fidelity, you know, and all these others, that money market, capital markets layer is really starting to mature nicely and giving you a lot of really good options versus the legacy financial system. Good luck getting any interest on your cash, probably any more ever for as far as we can see. So that's what I see emerging and what I think is really interesting right now.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's also a very different framework to kind of pit investors versus savers, right? And I think that in the legacy world, savers have basically held on to an asset that's been devalued over time. So inflation eats away at the savings, it ends up not performing that well. Even if you get into, you know, kind of the best performing money market funds, you're still talking about, you know, kind of inflation mitigation, maybe you get a couple of basis points of outperformance over inflation, but it's frankly flat, right? Whereas investors, you know, if you've just been in the stock market, you're doing eight, nine percent annualized year over year. Now, all of a sudden, here comes this piece of sound money in Bitcoin, and the savers of Bitcoin have been compounding the growth

• 30:37Speaker 00

  rate at like 35 plus percent year over year for year after year after year after year. And you now are getting in this weird world where like the investment class is being outperformed by a savers class. The savers class just is holding a different type of assets. Maybe talk a little bit about that.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you're no doubt, that's what's happening. I think you've got this weird dichotomy of, in our industry and perception of our industry for that matter, that Bitcoin is, the only, the only kind of people that are Bitcoiners are some speculative punters. No, no, no. If you talk to the most of us in Cernus community, it's not an investment. They're literally are talking about it in terms of their savings. It's their life savings. So now, you know, what we're seeing to your point that you just made, is there's, what's, the only thing that's outperforming your savings are these other vehicles that generate cash, cash flow on those savings because it's rooted with hard money and quality money. So now what you're seeing is that market's getting so big, as you said, it ranges from

• 31:36Speaker 02

  eight to 30% annualized per year on your interest. Well, now, when you have margin that that's that big, guess what happens? The counterparties that come in and service that market start to improve materially. So what you see is that you start to see balance, investment grade balance sheets come in and starts to provide services around that type of interest rate market. Jane Street, Citadel, Saskahana, Coin, you know, these big names. So it's super bullish for us. And I know that there's a percentage of the followers here in Bitcoin that may say that that's like blasphemy for, you know, us to ever think about putting coin outside of our own. Casa account or our own cold storage. But it's not the way that it works. It's actually capitalism.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  You want to have your savings and hold that not at a bank, but have it yourself. But then you want to put a little bit of your savings to motion, put it to work. And I think that you're seeing that extension attract some really high quality counterparties now that are investment grade balance sheets to come in and capture that. And I think it's only going to grow. I think you're going to see that become one of the biggest stories in Bitcoin over the next three to five years is the capital markets layer emergence around that and the interest market layer. The challenge that we face as an industry, quite honestly, is that when you have the money supply that is decentralized, right? So not government backed. We have to figure out how we are going to handle our version of an FDIC, right?

• 33:02Speaker 02

  So the FDIC is put in place for the US dollar money markets that's there as a bank failsafe. Well, you know, the Bitcoiner in me would say, well, you know, what's about to happen in nine months when 60% of the US community banks are about to, you know, be out of that cash? But where is FDIC going to be then? But the taking a step back still and looking at that problem objectively, we still have that that problem or that matter that we need to address as a community is that if you're going to frame it in a money market or in a interest bearing world, where are those risk perimeters? And I think it's a really interesting discussion.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  There's going to be a lot of good debate, a lot of good debate and formation on that in the coming years. But what we do know is that the market is speaking and is speaking loud. And, you know, those interest rates are attracting big names, and I don't think that's going to stop anytime soon.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, obviously, we're big investors in a company called BlockFi. It's like up to 6% I think they offer on Bitcoin. And then the other thing too, that is really interesting to me is some of these other types of products, right? So they've got a product that basically you can deposit Bitcoin and get a US dollar loan against it. So you don't have to sell your Bitcoin, but you can get some US dollar liquidity. As we kind of unpacked it, what shocked me was using Bitcoin as the collateral ends up making it lower risk than most collateralized loans, right? Because what they'll do is they'll actually take an over collateralization so they'll give you kind of 30 to 50% LTV. And then if at any point there is price volatility, they're sitting on an asset that is highly divisible, right? So they can only sell fractions of the asset into a very liquid market.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  And that's a way for them to actually drastically reduce the risk, right? You know, I always tell the equivalent of a car loan. Usually you take out the loan, but you take the car, you drive around and the bank can't come and say, okay, you got to sell the front, you know, the front door, right? Okay, we're going to sell the backseat this time. It doesn't work that way.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  No, it doesn't. It doesn't. And it's, you know, it's fascinating and I agree. You got the, and that's like part of the benefits. Again, this is, this goes back to my point. This is, we have hard sound money at the nucleus here, right? And when you put that at the nucleus, you can start to see really healthy capital formation, like capital markets layer start to emerge around that. Because as long as you have this hard money at, you know, out competing, this is the issue with debt-based money. And, you know, this is another example of us out competing. And I think you're going to see this capital markets layer get more interesting. You're, you have more and more people that are switching their belief of Bitcoin from this speculative thing into, oh, this is my, this is my inflation adjusted savings

• 35:41Speaker 02

  that like, that, that I'm now going to leverage, uh, rather than this is me taking a punt, right? And I think the, the amount of people in that community is growing at, as we speak right now. Uh, and with that, as BlockFi has been one of the most cutting edge companies in that arena, you're starting to see these really good options as a saver and, uh, the counterparty risk is improving and improving. There's still, I mean, look, at the end of the day though, just like the gold guys have been telling us for 300 years, it's like 3,000 years, whatever. It's not your coins, uh, you know, not your keys, not your coins. But now I have optionality and choices, uh, as a saver on difference, different things to do there. And it's really, I, I'm excited for it.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think a key piece, you know, you said it a couple of times, and I think a lot of people who are excited about those types of companies basically say, "Look, don't put 100% of your savings into kind of revenue generating or cash flow generating type activities, or put it to work, right? Save 90% or whatever the number is that you're comfortable with, and take a small portion and go ahead and use that as risk capital."

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  It's a very kind of, you know, not risky approach to getting some yield, but also making sure that for the majority of it, you're holding your keys and you've got that sovereignty. Today, you guys obviously announced a really big deal with Fidelity. So maybe talk a little bit about what exactly was announced.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what we, today we announced that we have, in Choice, you have three options, as we just talked about. You can either hold your keys for your Bitcoin. You can put your Bitcoin in air gap cold storage with someone else, or you can put your Bitcoin in motion into these markets later that we talked about. We, you know, as a mission, what I'm trying to do is trying to deliver the best possible choices to our customers. And as a subset of that, as you just heard, I'm trying to advance Bitcoin in the US retirement market. So what we announced, and what we're proud to be a part of and humbled, is to leverage the Fidelity institutional platform and team,

• 37:46Speaker 02

  and use that platform to give access to it to the United States retail and retirement market through Choice, our product. So Fidelity is powering the Bitcoin cold storage, if you choose that option to, instead of owning your own keys, to keep it with Fidelity. And I think it's important because, you know, as we talked about, I think there's a lot of people with retirement accounts or that are looking at Bitcoin and are kind of waiting, "All right, well, Fidelity is involved. I've got my 401K, my IRA with Fidelity." If they're holding it, you know, I've been hearing about it from U-Pomp or from everyone else for three to five years. Maybe, you know, maybe it's time. And I think us being able to have the opportunity to leverage their institutional products

• 38:30Speaker 02

  and provide access to that for retail is what we've done there. And we're very excited about it. I think it's big for Bitcoin. I think it's big for the US retirement market. And I hope it's just the first step of many more to come as the Fidelity Digital Assets team and mission continues to grow.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  And I think they have been a massive contributor to our movement and I'm thrilled to be able to work with their team. Tom and Christine and and and the whole group over there are really cool to work with.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, and one of the things that you guys are doing, so obviously, working with folks like Fidelity, obviously, is a very big kind of stamp of validation, if you will, to some degree, and people kind of trust that brand, but also

• 39:18Speaker 02

  We had to pass their diligence, that's for sure.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, but there's also this element of like, if I want to take my retirement account, turn it into a self-directed IRA, right? Which I've done, I've got a choice account personally, is I also am not boxed into just Bitcoin, right, which I actually think is a really important piece of this, because you and I are, you know, kind of hardcore believers of hardcore believers. And frankly, we probably are willing to take much more risk when it comes to an asset like Bitcoin than than most people. But if I wanted to, I could actually go buy stocks, I could go buy other alternative assets, I could kind of do all of this stuff out of this self-directed IRA. And so I don't get pigeonholed in saying, oh, if I convert my retirement account into this new structure, then like, basically, I have to keep it in Bitcoin forever.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  So maybe talk a little bit about like the optionality that people have and why you look at that as a positive.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's amazing, like, we looked at, you know, you look at the retirement market and, you know, what's happened the last three or four years is that there's been some of these companies that have emerged and they just do Bitcoin only. And they charge, and what you have to do is you have to sell all of your stocks and all of your mutual funds, and you have to move cash over to this group. And they're charging like 10% on the way in. So 10% of everything you move in, they're charging. And, you know, it's amazing where you're having to dump all, you manage this stuff over here at your Schwab account and then send it over here. And, you know, it creates this friction and I don't think that's what's best for Bitcoin. And I don't think that that's what's best for users. And, you know, I view this option of and choice that we've provided,

• 40:54Speaker 02

  where you can go from legacy markets to digital markets, as just like the upward momentum of integration of these two worlds. Like, I don't think it's any Anything that we're doing that is necessarily overly innovative. It's just that now what we're seeing is like, look, hey, rest of the investment world. Bitcoin and the extended blockchain industry or crypto industry is at the table. We're not going anywhere. So now we're here, we're part of the portfolio, whether you guys like it or not. And now investors are able to participate in your world and ours from the same technology rails that they've been doing for the last 30 years. And I don't think we'll be the only ones. I think it's only a matter of time before you see the exchanges start to offer

• 41:37Speaker 02

  legacy assets like stock trading. I think you'll see the big, you know, the mothership fidelity and Schwab start to offer crypto trading soon and Bitcoin trading. I think this is an industry, you know, us with choice. We're kind of running through that gap as hard as we can right now for the people that want one account, legacy and digital, and then have the option of how they want to hold their digital in a, in a, in a forward-thinking way. So we're trying to be our generation's next Schwab and fidelity and really understand from the Bitcoiners view, right? We understand things like our people want to own their own keys and our people want to keep stuff with fidelity or our people want to, you know, put it in motion. It isn't just some like siloed. And we see that extending into the world of DeFi beyond just Bitcoin too.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  I mean, people are going to want to start baking, staking, you know, earning other types of yield in the industry out of their retirement accounts. So I think that's where we'll stay competitive, but it's only a matter of time before you see the coinbases and the Schwabs and the Fidelities at the mothership level offer both access as well. And I, look, as a Bitcoiner, I'm pumped about that, you know, you know, I know I'm here, we're all here to make money and, you know, advance commercial and shareholder terms, but as a Bitcoiner, I think that it's, my best thing that I can do right now is get Abby Johnson's attention that we're seeing, you know, 20,000 plus people on our waitlist to open a choice account. And that if they integrate Bitcoin and the rest of the thing in their fidelity accounts, that's, that's, that's a big win for Bitcoin, I think.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  So that's what I'm hoping that we're, that we're going to do. And I hope that the big players take notice and take Bitcoin or industry as serious as we do.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  One of the stats that you told me early on that blew my mind was there's like 7 million people who already own Bitcoin, but they have none in their retirement account, right? And this would be the equivalent of saying there's a bunch of people who own stocks, but none of it's in their retirement account. That would just be unfathomable. But in Bitcoin, that's the truth, right?

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Dude, I was so embarrassed that I was one of them. Like, I bought my first Bitcoin in 2012. I sit there, I stacks. I got my wife signed up with Lolly. I do all of this stuff, alright? And I didn't own any Bitcoin in my retirement account. So, and we did the math. If you take the cross, there's two ways of getting this. If you take the cross, there's 7.1 million Americans that have already made the leap, alright? The leap to buy Bitcoin or take the dive into our industry, so to speak, and have a retirement account, but don't have Bitcoin in their retirement account. And if you also look at people's investable discretionary investable money, they usually have three to four times

• 44:18Speaker 02

  more investable discretionary money in their retirement accounts than they do their non-retirement accounts. So, when I say this is the biggest opportunity for Bitcoin, especially in this kind of stock to flow model that we look at, I'm looking at 7.1 million Bitcoiners that have three times more investable money in their retirement accounts that aren't using their retirement accounts to hodl. And that's what we're focused on. And if we convert some more people over to Bitcoin along the way, that's great. But for now, we're just, if we stay narrow focused on that, that's big enough. And I think that it's massive to me. And I think that if you look at that, there's 28 trillion dollars,

• 45:01Speaker 02

  28 trillion that is in the US retirement market. And it's just, I just think it's a really big opportunity for us to all go out and evangelize about and make sure that these Bitcoiners know that you don't have to just have your retirement savings at some zombie bank that's telling you that Bitcoin's not okay. And the other thing, by the way, just because I'm ranting about, we have 50,000 people in the US, 50,000 that work in the Bitcoin industry or extended Bitcoin industry, like blockchain industry. And most of those companies have 401ks, like employer-sponsored 401ks. And what you get is some like, you know, for like some time interval

• 45:45Speaker 02

  like product that rebalances for you and says, you know, here, put $16,000 of your money a year in this, and we'll tell you what happens with it later. And I, you know, I just, it's amazing to me. And you talk to some of these CEOs of these Bitcoin companies. And, you know, you say, well, why, you know, your employees wake up every day to advance this industry, but they can't access that in their employer-sponsored retirement account. And I think that's an equal injustice. And it's because the same thing, like these, some legacy provider and bank is saying, no, no, no, too risky. Meanwhile, you know, they're the extent of that is in this kind of rat fed rat trap cycle of printing and, you know, stock, you know, this whole stock inflation bubble there.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  And I think that our, you know, our community has an opportunity to opt out of that as at the employer level too. So I think you'll see a lot emerge there in the next year or two as well.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. What's kind of the goal with Kingdom Trust? Like, where do you guys sit 10, 20 years from now? And kind of how do you get there, right? Can you just paint the picture for us as to what you're trying to build and what the vision is?

• 46:50Speaker 02

  I think the first thing I'm thinking about right now is just the 7.1. Every day I wake up and I'm trying to reduce the, that number of 7.1 million Bitcoiners that own Bitcoin and don't have a retirement account. The next thing I'm looking at after that as a business is that we actually, you remember that fire truck thing I told you about? We have, we custody over 20,000 assets. And we have about 14 billion in assets under custody today. So we custody things like REITs, private equity, physical gold. You, it's across 20,000 of these things. And what I'm really interested here over the next 20 years is where this intersection

• 47:30Speaker 02

  of our tokenized extension of the Bitcoin economy grows to and how that converges with the world of alternative asset investing. So where we're looking to be is at that forefront of where they're colliding. And if I, in 20 years, if I ever stop advancing Bitcoin, what I hope that we've built is like our, as a Bitcoiner, our, our community and generation's fidelity in Charles Schwab. Where, you know, you know that if, if you want to put your, you want to have optionality of holding your keys in your retirement account or putting it in motion with, with some of the most interesting baking or staking mechanisms and where that blend is between tokenization and alts. We're going to live in that. We're going to nail that.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  And we're going to do it in a timely fashion, not too early, not too late, and stay grounded in, in the Bitcoin community. So that's, that's, I think, where the mission, the mission is. I wouldn't say that we're purely a Bitcoin native financial company, because I, that's not what gets me excited. I'm excited about the integration of our industry and the legacy industry and how that's going to look. And I think we have the opportunity as, as believers, as early adopters, we have a responsibility, actually, to advance that. So that in the next financial crisis, like how we started, that you've got individuals that aren't completely tied in to what nine regional central banks are doing.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  And all of your assets basically have this incredibly high correlation to what they decide is best for your savings in future or not. It's rather to integrate these two worlds and make sure that people are getting the choice of both of them that's best for them. So I think that's, that's kind of our goal. We'll see. I think right now, I think there's a big enough challenge with just the 7.1 million and just, you know, just making sure that they know that we're here for them. They can hold their keys. They can put it in motion. They can keep it with fidelity. And that if we do that well, I'll consider it a success no matter, a success no matter what.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I always tell people that there's the legacy system, the base unit of account is the dollar, it's fiat, it's inflationary, it's yada, yada, whatever. There's an alternative system, that alternative system's base unit of account is Bitcoin. And if you believe that there's two systems, and the second system, the one that you weren't born into, if you think that has any chance of being successful, 1%, 3%, 5%, whatever chance or probability of being successful, your portfolio should match that percentage, right? And so it's kind of this thing, like, I never understand why people say to me, oh, I know there's two systems, like, yeah, that other system has a shot at it. I don't know, it's 2%, but like, I don't own it. It's kind of just like, all right. And that's why we kind of started with

• 50:16Speaker 00

  just like, hey, get off zero, just get off 0%. And then once you do that, then you can work your way into, okay, what is a healthy kind of exposure to a second system that actually is a competitor in the arena, as you described, right?

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I love, when did you do that? You started that like, three years, was that two or three years ago, I think, when you started that? And, and we tried to meme that too, through coin shares and tried to extend that. And, you know, it's not, everyone's going to be a little different. But the number, you're right, I mean, the number, we don't provide advice as a directed custodian. But, you know, you're totally right. And most of our clients are now saying the same thing, like, okay, well, it's not zero, it's not the right number. But it isn't 100% either. And I think that's the point of having that choice and that optionality of, and also, there's a decision to make, once you decide, by the way, that zero is not the right number, then, okay, I think there's a second degree of decisions. Once you kind of start the rabbit hole,

• 51:12Speaker 02

  you have, you have a nexus of choices, or, okay, do I want to hold this myself? Do I want to hold this with someone like Kingdom Fidelity? Or do I want to put it in motion and leverage? Now, for a lot of newcomers, you're not going to do the motion and leverage. You probably start with fidelity, it was probably the easiest. But, you know, eventually, I think that that, you know, the more that we can get people past the initial rabbit hole, and we're thinking in those terms, the better. And it's going to be, it's the same, we just take the same recipe the gold guys have done for 30, 50, 60 years around that, you know, it's not your gold, not your, it's not yours. Same thing with us. So I think that we have As CEOs and people that are advancing Bitcoin for people that are coming in,

• 51:57Speaker 02

  right, we're getting off zero, as you say, there's also an equal responsibility, I think, as a service provider to make sure that we are also educating them on the importance of owning your own keys in the same way that that we've seen other bearer assets do before us like gold and but but also give optionality and choice from a financial provider standpoint. So that will be, we still have a lot of work, though, to get to get people off of fully off zero. And I think that, you know, but but I think our mission and the announcement in the retirement market with fidelity digital assets today is is a good step to that.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  This is where I should tell everyone, if you want to go sign up, go to retirewithchoice.com/pomp, obviously, so they think that I'm a genius. No, but before I wrap up, I ask everyone the same two questions, then you're going to ask me one to finish it. First question is, what is the most important book you've ever read?

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Um, most important book I ever read?

• 53:04Speaker 02

  I mean, honestly, it's a series of books. It's Harry Potter. I am, you know, I love Harry Potter. I think that it's a, it has a lot of, it's taught me a lot of life lessons.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  What's the number one life lesson you've learned from Harry Potter?

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Expect the unexpected and be ready and stay humble. It's three things.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  That's pretty good. The second question is a little bit more fun. Aliens believer or non-believer?

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Definitely believer. You not see the videos earlier this year?

• 53:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, but those are UFOs. That doesn't mean that there's aliens.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  I think it's, I think, I think math, I think, you know, mathematically and probably, it's probable that there are other organisms that are outside of Earth. Absolutely. Yes, I'm a believer.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  I'm with you on that. I think the big question is, do we want to find them or do they want to find us? Right?

• 53:57Speaker 02

  Right. I think we want to find them. And that's why that's the I'm a big Elon fan for that reason.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think we want aliens coming here. And frankly, I don't know if they want to be here in 2020. So what one question you have for me to to finish up?

• 54:15Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, we're in terms of, and what do you think is the most important things that we can do as a Bitcoin community in the next, you know, through the end of 2020 and the next two to three years? I mean, we've got election cycle coming up. We've got, you know, all sorts of, you're seeing Brock, you know, we have this interesting thing about Brock running, you know, A, what do you see the most important thing for the Bitcoin community to be doing in the next year, a few years? And, you know, what, how should we be thinking about the intersection of like money and politics too? You know, so kind of a two-part, a two-part question. I know it's a bit, that second one's kind of loaded, but we'd be curious to hear thoughts on, on both of them.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, so for the first part, I actually think we should just let time expire. What I mean by that is like, we're pretty much doing everything that we should be doing. I don't think that very many people in 2008, nine, 10, 11, thought we would get to this point this quickly. And so when you look at it that way, it's like, all right, we've kind of been doing the right things. If you talk to most Bitcoiners, we pretty much know what we need to do, right? We need to get more people exposed to the idea of Bitcoin. We need to get more people to understand why. We need to get more infrastructure in place. Like, all of these things are not hard to kind of conceive mentally. It's execution, and that just takes time, right? And so it's the work you're doing, it's the work that other companies are doing to just, again, build the

• 55:39Speaker 00

  products that are necessary to make this stuff much more user-friendly, much more easy, use tax advantage dollars, like kind of all the things that we've learned from the legacy finance system. Incorporate those, all the things we learned from the tech industry, incorporate those, and like just go build it. So I think that just like that stuff takes time. And I almost never talk to somebody who I'm like, wow, no one's ever thought of that idea as to how to like, push Bitcoins adoption forward. It's more of just like, who are the teams that are actually building and executing?

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Are you doing it? Yeah, like exactly, are you waking up every day to do it? Yeah.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  I think that's a key piece of it. And then in terms of like the kind of politics and money side, like, I've got a very, I think, weird, nuanced view, the first being like, all politicians are the same. Right? And when if you kind of just accept like, okay, if all politicians are the same, who's in office, who's not in office, like all that kind of stuff? Yes, there is some variation of impact that they can have. It's just not nearly as great as we all kind of fear when it's somebody from, you know, an opposing political party gets in office. So when Barack Obama's elected, right, all of the conservatives are freaking the hell out like, oh, my God, you know, the president's going to ruin the country. Then Donald Trump gets elected and all the Democrats are, you know, freaking out like Donald Trump's going to ruin the country.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  The good thing about the United States is that like, we do live in a democratic country that's got tons of checks and balances. And like, sure, can they make an executive order and kind of overstep bounds? Yes. But as we've seen with both presidents, they get reined back in by the court systems and kind of all that kind of stuff. So like, if you come at it from, one, the job's really hard, right? Two is they're going to make a lot of promises they're not going to be able to fulfill. And then three is like, as a citizen, if you rely on the government to save you or like create this environment where you're going to thrive, like you're already screwed. So if you kind of accept those three things, then it comes down to like, okay, I'm in charge of my own life. No one's coming to save me. Like, what do I do? And I actually think like, that's the area where the intersection with politics becomes really interesting.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  Because now what happens is you really look at government officials and say, hey, your job's not to run my life. If your job is not to provide all of these things for me, actually, your job is just to give me the tools, the access and kind of empower me to go do the things I need to do for my life and things that make me happy that, you know, allow me to be prosperous, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, look, everyone will argue over what are those things? And like, that's kind of the controversy of politics. But I think that the more we can get kind of facilitators into these government roles where they understand like, hey, as a government official, whether it's at the local, state or federal level, like, if I can just put the hands in, or if I can put the tools in the hands of problem solvers and like, get the hell out of the way. It tends to be like a pretty good strategy and it actually tends to be one where like you can get reelected a lot of times.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  Sure. And so I kind of think that like money is a great example of that where we're seeing the government step in and be like very heavy handed, very kind of essentially planned and like we know best for you. And then if you look at the results already, now we're only, you know, really weeks into this thing. And I'm with you in that like, there's a lot of kind of economic carnage to come. But already, the rich have gotten way richer and the poor have gotten absolutely demolished. And like, you can say all you want that you're saving jobs, you're doing all of this stuff, but like, are you actually saving jobs? Right? And I wrote this whole thing today about, if you look at the federal spending, right? So, a lot of people don't know, for the last six consecutive fiscal years, the US government has collected more federal tax income

• 59:04Speaker 00

  each year. So, last year was the most federal revenue, tax revenue that they've ever collected. The year before that was the record before it got broken in 2019, and all the way back for six years. But every single one of those years, the federal deficit has increased as well. Absolutely. And so it's like, wait a second. And I'm not talking about just, oh, there was a deficit, so the national debt got larger. I'm talking about the actual annual deficit that was ranked in that year was bigger than the year before. And so you have an ever-expanding kind of deficit. And you start looking like, oh, why the hell is that happening? Right? And so I started doing all this research. And basically, what it comes down to is really simple. It's demographics. Forty percent of the expenses of the US government are for people over the age of sixty-five. Yep. Now, people can argue whether that's good, bad, indifferent, you know, what, I frankly

• 59:47Speaker 00

  don't care. But it's just now you're getting into a world where like, the only way to continue running a country, where you have an ever-expanding annual deficit that's contributing to twenty-six plus trillion dollars in national debt, is you have to either, one, say, hey, this is going to collapse at some point. Or two, if you were a business, you'd go to the equity and debt markets. Well, you don't have to go to the equity and debt markets because you got the money printer. And so what do you do? You just print money in, keep going and go.

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  It's better than the equity and debt markets. Right. And so then, like, basically, what I said was like, okay, so if you keep going to the money printer, then you're basically arguing one of two things. Either, one, we know what history shows us happens when you devalue a currency, and we're going to solve the short-term problems and ignore the long-term impact. Or two, we actually think we can defy history, and we can devalue the currency, and it'll never happen to us. I wish that people would just admit like we're in bucket one, but I actually think a lot of people are in bucket two. And there's like this American exceptionalism or elitism that just says like, it can't happen here.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  And like, I don't know, is that happening in one year, five years, 10 years, 100 years? I don't know, but I do think that that is the most interesting like vantage point or perspective on the intersection of money and politics and all this kind of stuff is like the politicians know what they're doing.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  And they're choosing to do the short term things in order to get reelected and mitigate damage in the short term, all that kind of stuff. I think Bitcoiners, again, going back to kind of low time preference and this like very long systematic view are just saying, this is not sustainable. I don't know when it collapses, but I'm not going to wait for it to collapse to then like have a safety net. I'm actually going to go and protect myself by getting exposure to the other gladiator in the arena. And therefore I actually am going to bet on this competitor because I know the other competitor is weak, unsustainable and can't go the distance.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  That's right. And I think it's fascinating perspective. Yeah, I agree with you. And I think those two points, I mean, we can't sit around and wait for that for that either. And but you're right. I think we're all share your, your, your view is that we're just kind of looking at this like, well, this, this isn't, this is not sustainable. This isn't going to work. So I think, but at the same time, we have to also look back at our industry and say, well, this isn't ready yet. This is, this, this isn't as big as it needs to be to be able to inherit that. So we got to keep, you know, you got to keep progressing both.

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  I couldn't agree more. Where, where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Kingdom Trust and Choice?

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, so if you go to, my Twitter handle is at Ryan Radloff with two Fs. And then if you want to find out about Choice, go to retirewithchoice.com. And you can see all the stuff with the optionality fidelity with CASA, with ability to assets with CASA and the others. So, and we're announcing a, a big partnership, our big partnership next week with who's helping us power the, the rehypothecation and the lending and money in motion part of your Bitcoin next week. So we're pretty excited about that. So retirewithchoice.com and at Ryan Radloff. Thanks.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  Awesome, Ryan. Thanks so much for doing this. I'll do it again in the future.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, likewise, Paul. Talk soon. Thanks.