TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #560: How To Craft The Perfect Orange Pill with Jim Crider

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

Marty sits down with Jim Crider to discuss how to talk to your loved ones about bitcoin this upcoming Thanksgiving, as well as how bitcoin is seen in the world of financial planning. Jim on Twitter: https://x.com/JimCriderTX Intentional Living FP: https://www.intentionallivingfp.com/ 0:00 - Intro 1:55 - How to craft the perfect orange pill 11:24 - Keeping hype low 14:58 - Bitkey & Coinkite 17:18 - Establishing an understanding of money 29:28 - Dangers of social proof 39:57 - SOTE 41:30 - Attitudes toward risk 45:33 - What it’s like as a fin advisor 58:11 - Frankenstein portfolio 1:03:03 - Providing true value as an advisor 1:11:30 - Bitcoin siphoning value from other assets 1:16:31 - High level game theory & Trump’s buddies 1:19:48 - Unfortunate for those who end up too late 1:30:39 - Orange pill quick guide and plugs Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Coinkite https://coinkite.com/ Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Salt of the Earth https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

If Bitcoin does what we think it'll do, it literally has to do that to the detriment of other assets. I think it will probably be the first asset to really have this demonetization sucked out of to move to Bitcoin. I've managed to convince 100 families to adopt Bitcoin. I talk to financial advisors all the time. Most of them think I'm an idiot. Today, Jim Kreider reveals the hidden tax of Bitcoin asset value destruction. He believes we are on the edge of entering the suddenly phase and explains why nation states will start flooding to build reserves. It seems that Vivek knows a little bit about it.

JD Vance understands it. We have sold some of that 200,000 Bitcoin, so we have to go buy some now. That is much more of a signal move. Jim and I also discuss another large group of institutions that are on their way to stacking. You're going to see a wave of people start adopting Bitcoin when they can actually get paid a commission off of it. The first people to adopt it will be old school like wire house broker dealer types who are selling it as a product, not selling it as advice. the last people to adopt it will be, I think there's a decent chance we are about to enter like the suddenly phase. We're on the, right on the threshold. Yeah. We're looking over the

cliff right now. Like, are we going to jump? You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Trying to step up our game here, Jim Crater.

We've got a bull market on the way, and we've got to step up the production so that people can get high-quality, high-definition Bitcoin education. Yeah, I'm just disappointed you don't have chairs here that we're sitting on. Well, these are pre-1971 chairs. I bought them at Round Top, the antique fair, three years ago, and I made sure I found antique chairs that were made before we ripped ourselves off the gold standard. Okay, they're quite comfy.

They are. Lindy, very Lindy. shares are older than my parents or yeah they're like 60 years old now 63 years old 1961 yeah yeah you were just telling me you have a perfect hit rate in terms of convincing people to buy bitcoin yeah um yes somehow i uh i would say i i'm i have the advantage of having a captive audience most of time the hard people are you know like the people you already know um you know usually like siblings or old childhood friends things like that can be the toughest because you know like they perceive

you like if you have a good friend from when you're a kid they perceive you as like or at least for me personally it's like oh it's jim the the goofy 12 year old who would come over you eat all of our candy or whatever you know so they don't perceive me as actually knowing anything um so those are the toughest but uh you know for a living people pay me to like tell them what to do with their money so um you know they have some weight of trust you know what i do for like our financial planning clients like i've gotten some some hate over the years for not like on my website not talking about bitcoin and stuff um um i do that on purpose like most if you're if your parents or grandparents like we're looking for a financial planner or let's say you're a normal person and

were looking for a financial planner um they were they would go out and like if they saw bitcoin on the website there's no way they're going to hire them so i don't want to scare off like these people's parents or grandparents i want to be i want to captive captivate them uh and then i don't talk about bitcoin until they've become a client i've shown i've proven i'm not a moron through like tax planning and stuff and then finally once i've demonstrated that maybe you should believe what i'm saying then i'll bring in bitcoin um and there's an element of trust that you have to you have to really go in deep education the problem the education piece piece is interesting you have to speak to what they're where they're coming from on their level um and

what they're interested in so like i don't talk about running a node or hash rate or things like that um we talk to like what's money the history of money and most people find that really fascinating like wow i never knew that it's amazing how many people think that we're still on a gold standard oh that's insane like you literally oh what's backing the dollar like gold let's take a step back though like i was telling you this episode is probably going to drop either monday or wednesday of next week so right before thanksgiving right before we hit record we were looking at the charts it looks like we may hit a new all-time high today and so i think having you in the room and all of your experience convincing people to buy bitcoin and helping people understand

why they should have some exposure to it we have a good opportunity here for anybody who's currently traveling whether you're on a flight you're on a plane a train an automobile on your way home mentally preparing for the bitcoin presentation or the conversation that is inevitably going to happen if one of your family members knows that you're into bitcoin on thursday of this week how should how do you think they should approach the conversation and i think you just touched on a very important thing which is meet people where they are and how they're going to be most receptive to bitcoin yeah there's there's that natural tendency to want to be like i told you so um which there are there are some people who that's the best approach it's like dude i told

you and you should still buy some um i would say it's probably not despite what our ego wants to do that most of the time that's probably the the the lesser tactic we should take and the the other tactic we should take is more of like subtle humility um yeah prodding like i don't know like there's a book called never split the difference by chris voss he was like the top fbi negotiator and one of the taxes he tactics he talks about to help people sort of come to your side of the table is to first allow them to air their grievances or at least just their understanding so that's really important i think with bitcoin is like what do you think about it like what have you heard about it what do you know about it because you could have the best you know oh it's backed

by this and all these things you'd have you get the best arguments in the world oh the u.s is going to adopt it as a treasury and all these things but you could be saying those things but all they're telling themselves in their head is yeah but it's used by drug lords or you know it's going to boil the oceans they're not going to hear anything you say they're going to wait for you to shut up long enough so they can come in and say that what they think is a trump card you know like if you're playing if you're playing poker and you're sitting on a full house you're probably not even watching the flop for the rest of the game because you're just waiting until you lay down your hand and that's what happens if they think that they have a full house with their

gotcha they don't hear what you say so you have to allow them well what do you think about this what do you know about it what have you heard let them get off their chest that way they can actually engage in a dialogue versus being checked out that's paramount make them flip the cards first yeah like when you know about it they're going to want to say it like oh it's this like okay yeah i've heard these things too um and maybe again in terms of depends on personality maybe you go after that thing initially like you know oh boils oceans like oh yeah that's that was a big conversation point back in 2017 and you know they're saying by this point in 2020 you would take up all the energy in the world like clearly that hasn't happened so maybe there's

a narrative that informed why they would say these things maybe you should bring that up right then or maybe you should say hey if you really want to talk about this i will make sure we address that point but we're gonna have to build up to that point and there's again you have to you know you know it's your family you're meeting with uh for thanksgiving and or close friends so you know personalities but most people don't be lectured and told be told like i told you so i have fun staying poor let's not drop any high have fun staying poor is this thanksgiving okay i know i know you guys want to let's just keep it keep that one in the cage there's a there's a very limited people who who really they they enjoy that banter it's you know those people are you

can those type of people it's good for them they need to be shaken up um but for the most part you know uh they need they need to be grabbed by the hand taken in it's gonna be okay here's here's what's happening so yeah and most people don't want to sit down and have a lecture at like again like hash rate or something for like 40 minutes like they're you know hey let me eat my turkey and some pie. So again, trying to appeal to what they're going to find important, which I guess, frankly, they're going to look at number go up and say that that's the most important thing, which I mean, that's probably why 99.9% of us bought Bitcoin initially is because of number go up. So you have to speak to that to some capacity. But again, if you only speak to number

go up, the problem with that is if number goes down, they're going to come to you and say, i knew i knew i shouldn't have bought it so you have to anchor in into why does number go up over a long trend and that that requires anchoring into um like a deeper narrative and again that's how i approach it it has to be informed by like what is money what stores of value not just over the last few years most people think that what money is is what they see today versus what historical money has been um yeah it takes a deeper understanding and once once they once you can step people into identifying these things, they start realizing the U.S. dollar is total trash. Like they'll come to these natural conclusions on their own. It's like we understand

this not because we're like outrageously smart, just because like, yeah, I've seen a little bit more than I think maybe you have. The moment you see it, you can't unsee it. That's that's the truest part about Bitcoin is like once you see not only how Bitcoin works and the value profit provides, but alternatively, the dollar system, the fiat system and how systemically broken it is and the incentives of that system it's like oh you can't unsee that and everybody's feeling inflation yeah i mean many people are arguing that is the main reason why donald trump just won i don't know if you call it re-election but he's going to be our president again um maybe it's re-election but inflation so that's obviously going to be top of mind uh for people this

thanksgiving as well yeah i was talking to someone yesterday um oh they were talking about investment approach and normal money stuff and uh like i don't i don't i don't think our money's really that broken is it i just brought up how whatever 40 of our money in circulation has been printed in the last couple of years and like just that one little thing you know it's a matter of like helping people get off balance they think that what's happening right now is status quo and that's how all things have always been um and you can just sort of nudge them where they realize maybe my feet aren't as steady as i thought um that's that's step one and again that's that's easier to do like if they uh if you come at them abrasively and you knock them

off balance they might grab you out of frustration but if you nudge them out of place of compassion they might grab your shoulder out of like leaning on you and there's that it can feel sort of the same but i think most of us know when we're doing which way we're taking it yeah i mean i've certainly honed my pitch over the years if you talk to marty at thanksgiving in 2013 2014 he was like you got to get in now everything's burning uh if you don't get in like you're going to miss out and never effective these days well this is the and that's true it's true like well that's That was going to lead to a question like how much how much of instilling fear is a word I'm looking for. How effective is that in getting people to act?

Hmm. That's a really good question. This might be just personal. Personality. um the fear itself cannot be driven out of hype but rather out of like education and conviction like i personally i hate anything hypey that's i don't like big conferences or like social mixers where everyone's like you know whatever you're getting pumped up on things because that's purely emotional based like if you you know like if you went to a nightclub where it's like that is pure hype everything's there built up around this thing if you were to flip the lights on um in that

situation, like the environment would die itself because the whole environment is not built off of like depth and relationship and healthy community. It's based off of like dim lighting and loud music in the moment that stripped away, like, eh, you realize it's really shallow. Um, and I think that's how a lot of times we can, we can try to approach, uh, this fear-based tactic can be, um, it can be, yeah, have fun staying poor. We're all gonna, you know, the ships are, the ships are burning all these bad things which can be true but um once you turn the lights out it's not as clear to people yeah like wait hold on hold on yeah the the price the price drop what do you mean you know like i thought this was going to go up only because you know i thought i thought

we were going to hit her in her hyperinflation in the next two years what happened you know well i thought the having period you know it's like here comes the having this is your last chance having takes place six months later it hadn't really moved that much you know i hear that all the time i thought i thought this whole whole thing was supposed to be the big move it's like no like you so if you if you anchor into purely fear without allowing that to be informed again by something deeper i feel like a sort of broken record but it has to be it has to be anchored in something more than just like purely emotion emotion being excitement out of hype uh fear-based um yeah i guess the two things like excitement or greed or fear and either of those can be good

sticks and carrots um but neither of those are going to bring you're always going to have a stick or a carrot versus putting inside of someone like once you own bitcoin like i i relish the opportunity you know part of me sort of wanted kamala to win just so bitcoin i personally thought that if kamala won i would think that bitcoin would sort of go dormant for a few years based off of attacks not just specifically on bitcoin but all over like privacy in general it was like all right that's a silver lining if she would have won it's like cool i'll buy i'll buy some cheap Bitcoin for several years. I have that of like, sweet, I'll scoop it up for several years because I have that deep internal conviction. But if it was carrots and sticks only, I probably

wouldn't have that like, cool, I'll get to buy on the cheap. You know, if you want to buy the dip, it's because you have that intrinsic motivation versus fear based. That's why you see people, you know, the having cycle, you know, people get wiped out at the bottom because their carrot, they feel like their carrot just got snatched away versus having that deep internal understanding of what this thing is. What's up, freaks? This rip was brought to you by our good friends at Unchained. We've got a special event for you, an online event. Bitcoin is hitting its stride with massive ETF inflows, major geopolitical changes, increasing corporate adoption, and a proposed U.S. strategic reserve. 2025 is shaping up to be a defining year. I think it's pretty safe to say

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your Bitcoin off exchanges using CoinKite hardware, MK4, coldcardQ. Go to coinkite.com. Use the code TFTC. We have a code now. TFTC for 5% off at checkout. I really want to dig into meet people where they are and what I've found to be most effective in recent years is asking the question. I think it's really important if the Bitcoin conversation comes up and particularly if you don't force the conversation and somebody asks you, you start, it's like, all right, how would you describe Bitcoin or how do you view Bitcoin? Let's start there. I think that's like the most important opening for these conversations at the Thanksgiving table it's all right what do you understand how do you think bitcoin works what do you think it is

and then go from there yeah that does two things one and again it sort of it disarms people from that that that narrative they have built up and it too it helps you maybe they are super smart know about this you're not speaking way below them but most likely you don't understand much at all so you're not going to speak way above them it's a i was hanging out with some people few months back uh little gathering that i host and there are a few ladies in there who said hey i just want a bitcoin 101 so everyone came around we were having a bitcoin 101 and uh uh like 40 minutes later preston preston's talking about supercomputers and like ai and i could tell like these people who wanted 101 their eyes were glazed over it was pretty funny um and i think that's

what we tend to do is we want to we want to not that preston was doing this but personally like you want to demonstrate your depth of knowledge and show how robust this field is versus just meeting at the simple place of what they have questions about. They can build on that. Like day one for Bitcoin for me was not hash rate and all these things. Like I was amazed by the difficulty adjustment, things like that, but I didn't need, I didn't need to understand it. I just, I got there after a bit and understood like, okay, this thing's really cool. I'll learn about how this works later on. But those were built on layers of like, for me personally, how I really started to understand Bitcoin was, it was March of 20, right before the COVID

shutdowns, there was talks about it. And I had, I'd been dabbling in Bitcoin since 15, but didn't understand it. It was more like this investment. It goes up, I buy some, whatever, you know, but yeah, March of 20 talks of the government shutting things down, but, oh, it's okay. They'll probably give us money anyways, keep things going along. I realized like, that's not how money works. So my, my basis of learning about Bitcoin was, okay, our money clearly is broken if we, if they can just arbitrarily create it and give it out. So what in lieu of that is the best form of money? And I thought I need to look at real estate, gold, Bitcoin. Those would be the best forms of like long-term stores of value. I would just go on walks every day for several

hours. You know, at that point everything was closed. So I would just go on walks and learn about bitcoin and and all these things so yeah my my foundational approach is like what is money and again that's where someone asked me like jim what's what's bitcoin i think the best question is bitcoin is money um it's um again some people some people have other things that resonate with them more like oh bitcoin is more of like the the sailor type things of supercomputer blah blah blah it's like but like you know your aunt at the dinner table next or this week is is not going to want to hear like it's a group of you know cyber hornets protecting this thing it's gonna be like it's money it's a better form of money and here's why

yeah and i actually had this conversation last night my wife's aunt it's really my wife's aunt sister-in-law but she's essentially part of the family she's in austin we had drinks with her and her boyfriend and this question came up and they had a friend with them and she asked what what is bitcoin and going back to like answering it's money better money and then there's many ways to describe it and i i tip bounce ideas off each other here for to send people away to their dinner with with some frameworks but i think it was effective last night like i i approached it from the control of the monetary system first before even diving into 21 million divisibility saleability all that stuff it was like it's just better money that can't be controlled by central

authorities we live in a world which governments and central banks have very strict control over the money and they can decide on a whim what to do whether lower interest rates increase interest rates expand contract the monetary policy monetary base excuse me bitcoin's different in that there is no individual business central bank government that can decide to change the money and then you go from there like oh so it's like you have this hyper controlled system that very few people can change in this um somewhat anarchic system that that cannot be changed trivially if at all and then you dive into the properties of money by the way there's only 21 million bitcoin and um that is going to uh essentially win out the the monetary competition in the long run because

people will vie for the scarcer monetary asset yeah um bad bad approach terrible no no i think that's great um the the overarching theme of if someone can control manipulate it that impacts uh inflation and introduction the introduction of new units so yeah i think that is the most important thing it is something that cannot be controlled by an individual a group of people a government a corporation um and one of the most important factors of that is as a fixed supply that can't again be created by by an institution um that is foundationally why bitcoin is important um and i think it helps again to look at this from a historical lens Because you might say, well, yeah, that's not really a risk.

But if you help them understand, like, the manipulation through governments, people, corporations over time, like talking about, you know, I mean, all these classics we all know from reading Bitcoin Standard and everything. It's like, all right, glass beads. You know, I think people realize the frustration with the hijacking of money when you actually tell real stories. It's like, yeah, yeah. Glass beads. Like there's a reason that so many like groups in Africa were impoverished is because their money was hijacked by foreigners that had an easier way of, you know, creating money. Same thing with, you know, talk about the rhinestones. It's like, yeah, this dude came in. O'Keefe came in from what was it? From Ireland. Yeah. He sailed in, realized that their money really wasn't that hard. Yeah. You create more units and they start realizing like, OK, yeah, this this is starting to this sounds sort of familiar. then you talk about you know rome like yeah individuals you know i'm sitting out how many

uh if i was a uh maybe i made swords or something i don't know how many swords a day i need to sell so i figured i'd probably sit around my booth a good amount of time throughout the day so i just start whittling down some uh some coinage so i'm sure individuals were were creating inflation on their own by whittling down and then uh uh making some uh some denarii on their own and the government confiscating and and selling so it's like okay yeah that makes sense but not that's not modern and then you just seem to like well heck look at you move into the the 20th century and go to germany post-world war one move into man take talk about uh uh the confiscation of gold like that blows people's minds that actually happened like that's less than 100

years ago and just yeah this happened by force and immediately after the value of gold was repriced gold did it suddenly become more valuable your dollar became much more uh less less valuable And it's these wake-up calls. It's like, okay, it's starting to hit closer and closer to home. And you're hitting it from different points, different types of people, groups, individuals, nations, all this intervention. You're seeing a theme here. And then you go into, yeah, Bretton Woods, this gathering of people who are, you know, get together and think of a way to centralize control further in the 1971. And then by the time you hit that, it's like, wow, this really is bad.

This is my lifetime now. Yeah. This is starting to sound like Rome. Like this is starting to sound like these other things. I can see it now. And then I, what I do personally is I don't, uh, from there we might take a talk about like petrodollar system. Uh, I typically don't go there. Uh, but we'll leave off like really at 1971. And then I'll fast forward to, um, like cryptography and internet money to address the fact that like, this is not something that like some bro started creating in 2014 so he could buy a Lamborghini. I think that's what a lot of people have in their head. It was like, I had some young money that young kids use. They can hype it up and make a lot of

money. So you have to address like, no, this is something that was even being thought about since the 70s. Like the dawn of really the internet is exchanging value online. And then 80s was being sort of worked on. The 90s was really this rise of insanely smart people really trying to think through this but they kept coming across two problems and i just explained like real quickly like the two problems was digital scarcity and this like uh uh this ledger system that can't be manipulated by a single person no one could fix it like no one could solve these problems because it's really tough and then out of nowhere this person came in 2008 and wrote this paper and they they solved it and they they showed their work and they cited their sources so you're starting

to build up on like it's a credible thing that's been trying to be solved for for decades um rather And then there's this, if Bitcoin is presented as just, hey, it'll help you make a lot of money. It seems like an arbitrary, you're competing against every other stock or cryptocurrency or whatever. And if you don't present it as a solution to something that they are aware of, they think that you're trying to create a solution that is to a non-issue. So you have to show that there's an issue here and you have to distill what that issue is. And if the issue is broken money, they'll recognize you need fixed money. If the problem is, if the solution you're trying to create is how to make more fiat,

they might go look at Ethereum or whatever else because they haven't properly identified the need. So you have to get to that. And that's why, like, deep education on, like, history of money is like, oh, crud. Our money truly is broken. Bitcoin is money. The rest of those things don't really matter. um so it takes a little bit of time but like i like i love like i didn't have any clients who sold bitcoin like my clients who wrote it up to 69 000 wrote it down to 16 000 zero clients sold

i had several clients reaching out like hey when are we buying more um and we had a lot of clients scoop up a bunch of bitcoin like hey we're gonna stop contributing to 401ks and all those things so we can just load up on bitcoin at 16 000 um the only way i can do that for the amount of people I manage money with is to anchor an education because you know how many people get wiped out every four years do they ride it up high and then like you know I saw this in the 17 cycle when it hit like 18 or so then I dropped all the way back down like I remember talking to people who were like old families who were mortgaging their houses and stuff at like 16 17 000 bitcoin and most likely the majority of those people sold at five six whatever thousand um had they not done that

they'd be way ahead now but again they were probably anchored into either short-term fear or short-term like hype greed versus long-term thesis of money systems broken i even you know relate like it was i think it was charlie munger a few years back admitted that he doesn't think the u.s dollar will be the like primary uh uh like global reserve asset by the end of the century he didn't state what his opinion of it was he's pretty sympathetic to china where he was pretty sympathetic to china so maybe that but even people realizing like okay it's not just like in their head what they picture a crypto bro being it's this whole thematic something's wrong this does seem like the best solution that i've ever heard so i should probably own some just in

case it catches on yeah and i mean obviously charlie munger was never a bitcoin advocate him and um how am i forgetting his name warren buffett um believe that it was rat poison but squared squared and this but this does get to another point human social beings many of which succumb to herd mentality like now moving past like what is bitcoin why does it exist how does it work now going deeper into the sales pitch does the social signaling that we're seeing from the black rocks of the world fidelities and now nation states play into your pitch at all ish um i don't start there um i don't even get there in the middle that's like end because that that that is the that's the uh end game from a like game theory perspective

so if i lead off with institutions are adopting or something like that if let's say bitcoin drops i don't know what's going to go up to let's say it goes up to 200 drops to 70. And then BlackRock says, hey, you know what? We're going to get out for right now. If you're anchored into BlackRock owns it. And then BlackRock sells, you're going to sell, too. If you're anchored into this is better money, that's not going to change. So we have to start with that and anchor deeply into that and then allowing once you understand those things, then we start introducing the whole like the whole game theory side of things. That's where things really start blowing your mind is like it has all these principles. I think a fun way of

putting is like, if I wrote if I wrote a blog about like baking and I had 20 people like moms at home that read my blog and I would send it out to and I just issued this blog out and then I disappeared. And then 15 years later, like nation states and Fortune 500 companies, all these people are talking about that blog. And I know it's not even a company like it doesn't exist. Like that's amazing. And the fact that the Bitcoin has done that, like Satoshi to these like internet nerds rent, send out this blog and then disappeared off the scene. There's no marketing team or anything like that. It's just like a bunch of outrageously smart people who's captured an idea and started like running with it, um, on their own. Like people start realizing like, wow,

there's, there's legs to this and it's not being hyped up off of anything. Like this is truly running on its own um yeah so you anchoring into that side of things of what it is and the solution it set out to be um and then yeah talking through the game theory side of things though of yeah i think our that it starts tying into our current broken money system and like you tie it back into like hyperinflation and yeah like wealth always gravitates to the hardest form of money um then you can start going into like why not only individuals but also corporations nation states would want to start adopting this and then yeah going deeper into well because that's where people start understanding this i had a client probably about a week ago called me out of the blue um i

introduced them to bitcoin a while ago and they called like man this is awesome like they're just excited but they said jim i'm sort of worried though like do we sell do we buy like what i you could tell that their their gears were really finally starting to turn outside of just us talking. So we'll tell me what's happening. So, well, I've been thinking about this. It seems like it's actually a really big deal. And if it is that big of a deal, this could lead to the collapse of the Federal Reserve. Then what happens? And I was like, OK, like it was really cool that I didn't have to lead in there. And it's funny how they approach it. They approach it from this place of questioning and quasi fear based. And I approach it like that was the goal all along.

And I told them about Satoshi's Genesis block, how he put in there the newspaper article. And I was like, yeah, that's sort of that's sort of what we're going after here and easing their mind there. So then like even them recognizing the end state of a large scale adoption, like, again, if you anchor into the education, they'll start putting the pieces together. Like, OK, I see it. And if other people start understanding what the problem is, they're going to rush in. And suddenly, like everyone's looking for a fire escape. and so let's dive into this like path towards adoption in the game theory how do you paint the picture or tell the story of how you view it playing out potentially

if at all yeah do you get into i i try to i try to be really measured with my words and I really tend to try to be conservative with, with my language and with my proposition of things. So, you know, I don't want to rush into like, you have to buy now because the U S is about to adopt a ton, but I do, I talk to people about how it sort of depends on what's going on. So like, for instance, you know, I, I do bring up with, with people and I hosted a little event recently talking about like bitcoin in the current geopolitical and macro landscape um and talking through like yeah trump rfk at bitcoin conference said hey we're going to take this thing as a strategic reserve literally what like two days later our current uh administration was like

all right hey we're gonna start selling our bitcoin that's that has to be out of spite um we've been sitting on that bitcoin for way too long for it to actually just happen to fall the next business day they decide they're going to start selling so um people start saying like okay there is there is something like geopolitical happening with this money that some anonymous person online wrote about and created like that's pretty big why is this happening um so sort of allowing them to start formulating thoughts on their own um yeah taking it there and then um obviously just getting people intrigued through you know if you mentioned like, oh, people, you know, El Salvador, it's a form of money.

Most people sort of like, they're like, oh, that's neat. But sort of shrug it off. It's not this big thing. But I think when you start, you start talking through, yeah, U.S. possible adoption, other countries are mining, corporations are trying to get into it. Again, not allowing that. That cannot be, I can't underline that enough. That cannot be your primary thesis of trying to convince somebody about Bitcoin.

It's because other people are doing it. because the other person stops or moves to something else they will go along with it you know so i mean there's how many people like early adopters into bitcoin that spoke of these conferences who like went off to do like other coins and stuff how many of them took a tribe of people with them as well um because they were following that person not the movement and i don't want i don't want my family friends clients to follow a person an institution or anything i want them to follow the money um so yeah the game theory is cool i don't i try not to go there too much um

from a again i just try to be measured um this is good information there's a ton of people on their way to their to their thanksgiving destination thinking like i'm gonna uncle uncle bob's gonna come out like why should i buy bitcoin i'm gonna be like larry fink's buying bitcoin you're not and you're saying that's a bad approach i don't think it's terrible again if uncle bob is like a big like black rock apologist that might be the way to get him like in the door but the goal is not to just get him in the door the goal is to get him into to be a bitcoiner you know and bitcoiners don't buy bitcoin because larry fink bought Bitcoin. They buy Bitcoin because Bitcoin's better money. And if it means just getting them there at

first, it's just like, Hey, Larry Fink is like, all right, well, maybe I should go buy a little bit. I think that's okay. You know, I've taken flack. Like, I think it's okay for, you know, your great aunt Doris. It's like, Hey, maybe I should buy Bitcoin, but like, she's just not comfortable. Maybe she lives way off away from you. And like, you feel like it'd be a really bad idea for her to go and set up an account on an exchange and get a wallet and all these things. It's like, you know what? And that's going to take her five more months. It's like, hey, let's just hop into your account at Fidelity. We're going to buy the ETF today just to get some exposure.

I'm OK with that. I'd rather endorse own, you know, peripheral exposure to Bitcoin than nothing at all, at least to get our feet wet. So part of that, there is a place of like personality, meeting people where they're at and trying to get them in the door. And eventually people start adopting. I have clients like that. I have clients who at first, it's like, wow, OK, I understand what you're saying from a monetary side of things. But Jim, I'm not quite ready yet to like do all the stuff of like buying Bitcoin, self-custody and all that. OK, that's fine. Let's go ahead and buy these other things first.

And it's inevitable that within a couple of months they'll reach out and it's like, hey, I want to buy Bitcoin. And I want to where were those things you're talking about? Because, again, it's an it's an unpacking of of. The implications of what's really happening and if you can if you can educate them enough. they're going to take that on their own and it's going to pique curiosity and they're going to start learning i have i have lots of clients who have read more bitcoin books than i have and there are people who are like diehard dave ramsey fans and stuff historically and then i just introduce them to this give them enough where they go off they run with it on their own they

come back to me it's like man i just read this new book blah blah it's really cool because they have taken this ownership again it's it's it's it's a love of ownership versus like i always butcher this word, obfuscating or whatever, putting your ownership onto someone else. If it's Larry Fink or a podcast or whatever, those are Dave Ramsey. Like if people were just, uh, going along with Dave Ramsey, they arguably wouldn't have Bitcoin yet. So in the opposite direction, like the fact that you're educating your clients and forcing them to get down and understand this from a first principles perspective helps them

avoid the hero worship of a Dave Ramsey like character. Yeah. That's what it comes down to is the danger of hero worship. And maybe your hero in Bitcoin today will become the villain. You never know. Yeah. So, again, that's the risk. I don't want to do that.

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calcium magnesium potassium sodium no sugar it tastes incredible my favorite is the orange and the pink lemonade go to drinksote.com that's drinksote.com use the code tftc when you make your purchase and you'll get 15 off i'm telling you get on it freaks you're gonna love this stuff in terms of thanksgiving day pitch what haven't we touched on that you think's important man um do you ever throw out price predictions i i am measured with my words again there and i'll uh i'll hedge myself big time it's like all right here's say here's my base case well i always say this i'm probably really wrong because we all are in reality uh i'm probably wrong i guess someone someone out there is right

They don't know the right. Just statistically, someone's got to be right, I guess. But I'm probably wrong with what I think. And I'm like, here's my base case, just based off of how things normally work with Bitcoin. And we see these adoptions. Here's what I think, like, now that Trump's president or will be president. Here's what I think is pretty reasonable with him. Here's my outrageous guess.

It's probably way off. And I'm okay to do that. Again, I don't want to anchor in. I'll be like, hey, you should buy Bitcoin. It's going to half a million in six weeks or whatever, you know. Suddenly they're going to be disappointed if it's not there. um so just trying to again it's you're informing of the narrative i love i think it was pierre who had the chart of like the four-year cycle of like greed anxiety fear disbelief yeah yeah the whole

thing i love that chart um because it really does help shake out why do you have this place of euphoria and fear and that's and you have this new base of long-term adopters you can tell who adopted for what reason? Um, and the people who adopted at the end out of greed, most of them adopted because that was going to go, they thought it was going to go higher in a short term because you know, ultimate fiat was the growth that was the goal versus, uh, the long-term narrative of what is being built here. And you're okay if it drops. And if you do again, you have this new base of long-term holders. So yeah, price, we all got into Bitcoin because of number go up. I mean, that's Bitcoin's money. Money's a tool to help you do what's important to you in your life.

And I don't forget that I will if we hit Bitcoin, let's say if Bitcoin hits 300 the cycle, I will probably sell a decent amount of Bitcoin and go buy a house in the mountains. And you'd be like, Jim, that's so stupid. If you just wait another cycle, you buy three houses, the mountains, whatever. It's like, yeah, but Bitcoin's money and having a place for my family to gather and be able to give and be generous for other people to gather as well is really important to me and i want to use my money in that capacity and my kids are young i'm not gonna have that much time to be with them and to make memories so i wrote that now then wait another four year having cycle that's fine so um anyways i don't know how i got there there's this is this

tying of like you can't leave what is bitcoin bitcoin is money what is money money is a means of communicating storing and transferring value and like money how you use your money is communicating what you value um you know some people keep their money in u.s dollars or under their mattress because they really value security their problem is they think security is cash they don't see that there's risk in everything you do you know there's people who are like uh what they call they're like shut-ins you know uh hypochondriacs i guess they're afraid of everything And they think that sitting in their house away from everything else, away from all the elements, is the safest thing to do. The problem with that, like, you're probably going to be vitamin D deficient if you sit in your house all day.

You're probably going to get obese. You're probably going to have really bad mental health. So trying to protect yourself from X risk, you're presenting, directly presenting other risks to you. And a lot of people do that unknowingly with, you know, they're buying bonds. Oh, it's the, you know, it's the risk-free asset, you know, U.S. debt. um not understanding that there's risks in that as well so um yeah helping people articulate like well what are what are you risking by doing this or not doing this yeah it's important six directions no no it's important to

to really anchor people to this i think i think people are well equipped now and i and you mentioned a couple different archetypes of your clients like what would have been like the most surprising growth stories or um just stories in general of some of your clients that have gotten into bitcoin i think the funniest are the hardcore dave ramsey people like they came to me you know dave ramsey to the t um and again i remember particularly one family i've worked with for several years they were there with me at another firm i was at they followed me over when i started my own company i could finally actually really you know before i could talk about bitcoin as friends but not as clients so finally i was like hey guys you should

know something about me it's this is bitcoin i was like what do you think about it and they were totally caught off guard and um but we we talked for a bit and they they're like all right i want to keep learning about this and now like they're convinced that dave ramsey if he would actually humble himself and learn about bitcoin would be a hardcore bitcoiner i think those people are funniest because i agree like they if if every man if every american just followed dave's basic money principles like spend less than you make save aggressively like things like that the the u.s would be in a lot healthier space financially um so i i like those people because they have the simple things down i think bitcoin really is simple so if you can simplify like well

save money don't be don't be greedy okay we'll save this money what is money what's a better form of money if you can start connecting these things on a simple basis um they'll start building on each other so i mean other people are interesting or like uh engineers like engineers are known in in financial planning to be like the worst clients because they ask you well they ask you about everything which if you're if you're trying to sell cruddy products you don't want engineers because they're gonna you know take it apart and realize that it's a bad product I like engineer clients because they start asking all the really hard questions about what Bitcoin is and how it works, the depth of it. They want to really understand it.

And those people, they usually are, they take a while to get it, not because they're slow, but because they want to make sure they're not rushing into something. You know, they're auditing before they put weight on something. But once they get it, they really latch on. i mean you see this in the bitcoin space a lot like the bigger people in bitcoin come from an engineering uh uh background yeah and i mean moving along to like stay on like your client base and your business and what you do like how what i really interested to dive into is how has portfolio construction if at all changed for your client base now that you've introduced bitcoin and with the next wave of adoption seeming like it's on on the way and bitcoin

i think really elevating itself into a whole nother another sphere of um being becoming a geopolitical asset like how do you think it affects portfolio construction moving forward i want to speak to one thing right quick sort of on this um i hear a lot like oh blackrock owns it and fidelity and stuff. So it's going to be like, it must be a conversation piece amongst financial advisors. I talk to financial advisors all the time. Most of them think I'm an idiot, like completely write me off. Um, and they're not talking about Bitcoin. If they are actually at a reporter, reach out to me last week about Bitcoin adoption. He was like, man, you're the first person would even talk to me. Everyone else. When I tell them, he said, I'm, I'm just

writing a piece on, are you getting more clients or questions about Bitcoin from clients? And he said, the moment I say that, they just hang up on me. And it's like, you know why? It's because they are, but they're so tired of their clients asking about it. You ask about it as well. There's they're not going to have the conversation anymore. So just because we're seeing institutional adoption and even like financial institutional adoption, most financial planners are still stiff arming it. You're going to see a wave of money. People start adopting Bitcoin when they can actually get paid a commission off of it which is frustrating but hey i'd rather someone own it and that guy got commissioned than just not own it at all you know it's probably going

to happen is like these institutions are going to send a group of advisors to like a one or two day training course on like what is bitcoin and how do you sell it they're going to come back and feel all hyped up so they can finally sell this new product and make a bunch of money off of it so then you're going to start seeing a uh an institutional or a managed money adoption of bitcoin from that perspective but we're not there yet um do you think we're very close i mean i sent this tweet out yesterday and i think it's true i mean we've been talking a lot about it at 1031 we have a lot of conversations with potential lps particularly um people at endowments pensions and that's one thing we caution advisor managers about particularly is like it seems like the

career risk career risk around bitcoin could be flipping doing a complete 180 where historically up to this point it's if you're in bitcoin you're taking severe career risk because if something happens you're screwed now with everything that's happening um in the lead up to 2025 it seems like that's flipped so we could people in positions particularly uh capital allocators fiduciaries wealth managers could find themselves in a position where this time next year they're getting asked questions like why weren't we in bitcoin like why am i paying you do you believe that yes to an extent because i have a lot of those people reaching out to me um really yeah um it's a i think it's a frustration from the client and i would say it's when i say i have a

lot in the grand scheme of things it's not that many you know there's that that meme of the guy who's standing around the perimeter of the room and then the other people at the dance and he's Like they have no idea that X, that's how, you know, like most people have no idea that Bitcoin is about to hit an all time high. No clue. They don't know that it's being talked about as being a put on the balance sheet or that that's important. Most people have no idea.

And so, yes, I do have people reaching out and they're starting to come to me like, wow, this other advisor I've been working with for years, either he's never brought it up to me. And when I bring it up, it's he it's met with frustration or at best they'll say here, fine, take one percent of your portfolio and buy it. you'll shut up and stop asking me. That's how that's usually met. Um, I think it's going to, the problem is even if you have clients asking about it, there's so much regulatory and compliance, corporate bureaucracy, that's going to be a hold back as well. So like I have,

I have advisors who reach out to me all the time asking about my business and stuff. And I've talked to people who work at large institutions who've said, Jim, I want to talk to my clients about this, but I am not allowed to. I talked to a guy a few weeks ago and he, he was mentioning this. And I, frankly, I just helped him. I was like, dude, is it more, basically, if he stays at that firm, he's going to make a whole lot of money. I was like, dude, I'm not saying what's right or wrong for you, but you need to decide for yourself. Is it, is it better for you to stay here? Not tell anyone about Bitcoin, but you make a lot of money or for you to leave, go somewhere so you can actually help people in what you feel is the best way. And you're maybe not, not going

to make as much money. Personally, I would have to do the latter. I didn't get this industry so I can make a bunch of money. I got this industry so I could help a lot of people. So yeah, I think that's, I mean, you see that the same thing, like large firms, I used to get in trouble at a firm I worked at back in the day, because I would talk about tax stuff a lot. Large institutions won't allow you to talk about taxes when you're doing financial planning, because they have to take these, they have to consider like, who's the biggest moron at our entire company. And they're not going to use our right verbiage. So therefore we're not gonna let anyone talk about this. So I think Bitcoin from that perspective will not be sold, not because clients aren't wanting it,

but because the companies don't understand how you can properly use it. The first people to adopt it will be more of like the, uh, old school, like wire house broker dealer types, like a Morgan Merrill, BlackRock, people like that who are selling it as a product, not selling it as advice. The last people to adopt it will be, I don't know, maybe like the Ed Joneses or something like that, because they're sort of taking their time on things. Or unfortunately, I think a lot of the people will be like really good financial advisors. It's like the top of type of financial firm I run. It's called an RIA or registered investment advisor. Usually RIAs are like good cfp cfa cpa type people who really do good money management stuff i think that those people will

probably be some of the last to adopt it and ironically it's not they can like if they're working a small shop like i'm my compliance advisor you know i can say i want to talk about bitcoin as long as i feel like it's best for my clients i will um unfortunately i think a lot of these people are so ingrained with being good at talking about money and managing money they're too prideful to ask what is money and these people will probably be the last to adopt it um and i that's why i'm i am seeing people come over to me because they have really good financial planners who hit everything right on everything else but thematically have missed but what is the money and that's where people are starting to come over from from other institutions saying hey i've

worked with this guy for several years he's done a good job but it's starting to really get to my get to me that we can't talk about this big thing because it's becoming a bigger and bigger part of what we're doing now you you asked about how we how we manage like how this impacts our portfolios i started my company about four years ago um bitcoin has always been part of it um so i mean all of our clients have exposure to bitcoin in some capacity um it's gobbled up a very large percentage of portfolios for our clients right now if i had to guess uh average client exposure to Bitcoin would be probably about 45%. Oh shit. Um, about a year and a half ago, it was about 20, 25%. But again, as a function of price, yeah. Function of price. And then, like I said,

like back in, uh, whenever that was end of 22, when Bitcoin bottomed at 16, like we were proactively saying like, Hey, let's stop putting money to these other things and scoop up a lot. So when you do that, when you tell clients to buy a lot more Bitcoin at 16, it will, it will become a larger part of your, your portfolio. Now we do, we manage monies. Like I have a portfolio that I run as well. That's, I call it Frankenstein, real odd thing. I have clients who own a lot of Bitcoin and it's like, Hey Jim, I fully believe in Bitcoin. I promise. I love it. I think it's going to go up forever, but it's like, I'm 70. I need something with Bitcoin. If Bitcoin doesn't do well in the short term, I need something else. And these people, again, on from a big picture, they want something that still aligns with their thesis of our money situation. So they don't want to own a bunch of like mid or long duration bonds because that flies in the face of their Bitcoin allocation. They don't want to just sit on a pile of cash like, OK, well, what do I own to hedge against short term volatility risk of Bitcoin? And we talk through like what would cause that is a 51 percent attack that you're talking about, because that's a lot different than like a big macro event that takes Bitcoin down short term. It's like, OK, it's probably the macro event that's going to cause Bitcoin to blip.

And if Bitcoin drops for a little bit and I'm retired, I can't risk that sequence of return risk when I'm pulling out my portfolio. It's like, oh, well, and let's carve out this other thing. So we have a portfolio that like sort of is the antithesis of Bitcoin. You know, back in 20, 20 and 21, I took a lot of flack from people like I did a weekly Twitter space for a company where there's like ask an advisor or anything sort of thing. And every week you have some knucklehead. I had to be on purpose at some point. Someone asked me about having a U.S. dollar emergency fund, and I would take so much heat for saying, I think you should. People like, dude, you're such a bear and blah, blah, blah.

But I have had I've had a lot of people come back to me in the last couple of years saying, like, I own a lot less Bitcoin than I did in 21 because I had to sell at 16. So, like, basically all I own, I own I own Bitcoin. I own my business and that's about it. So I'm not a bear by any means. I want to make sure that you're protecting your Bitcoin. And sometimes that means owning a tiny bit less in a different type of asset. Or there's other things you can do. I mean, if you have a lot of equity in your house, set up a HELOC and allow that to offset.

And it would be like sort of an emergency fund sort of thing. So there's things you can do. Well, let's dive into that Frankenstein portfolio. What does that look like? Is it mid to long duration bonds? Is it short term bonds? No, there's no bonds in there right now. So it is our largest current position is Berkshire.

so i mean frankly like i'm guessing here but like i think if if at this moment if bitcoin were to go down a lot it because of some like crazy macro event that everything's melting down i would speculate that short term berkshire would go down a lot along with everything else you know it's an equity but you know warren's sitting on an absolute behemoth mountain of cash which you would take advantage of and deploy so i think an event like that would be opportune for um for berkshire hathaway so that's our largest position and we get a little bit more nuance there as well so like we have other like value and deep value funds um right now we own some oil and gas in that uh like our i'm sure you know like our strategic uh petroleum uh yeah our reserve is just and the

incoming energy secretary is very bullish for oil and gas yeah sure if you've been following that But we just look at our reserves. It's like, dude, that will last us like I don't know what's that today, but it wouldn't last us hardly any time at all. So we've got to refill that thing. We should have refilled it a few years ago when gas was super cheap, but we didn't. So here we are sitting on just a couple of weeks

of strategic reserves as a nation for oil and gas. So, yeah, then everything is talking about like, hey, if we, you know, once Trump gets in, open up these pipelines, whatever. Like, so we own some of that. So, yeah, there's like a lot of value, deep value, but then some commodities also like one that like we own like right now i own spotify in there um a little bit like that's sort of an oddball position but something i felt like would do well we bought that probably about a year year and a half ago and it's done really well um we bought uh we bought gold inside of

that thing that did a lot better than i anticipated it really i bought this to be really i told clients like look the goal for this portfolio is to massively underperform bitcoin i hope that happens but i also want to own it in case something happens with bitcoin in the short term this sort of the antithetical thing to it um so yeah and it allows us to not have like if you're you know if you're if you're a retiree the classic portfolio is like a 60 40 stock bond um i don't i don't like the 60 40 portfolio um so having this having frankenstein in there allows me to feel a little bit more ease of not having 40 in bonds and cash it is a somewhat bond substitute by owning all this deep value stuff yeah i think it's a smart play i mean

berkshire i mean warren just dumped a lot of his bank of america stock and it seems like he's building up that it's approaching what it's hundreds of billions of dollars at this point it's giant like unbelievable it's just by bitcoin with it um yeah so we yeah it's a lot of weird stuff i mean we have it right now we have exposure to india i think on a long-term scale internationally i think in india will outperform uh other international developed or developing markets over the next 10 15 years it's a weird portfolio that's why i call it frankenstein yeah that is certainly a frankenstein portfolio i mean but back to bitcoin like long-term trends saying people knocking on your door coming from advisors that won't let them get into bitcoin like

Do you think that'll accelerate the cycle and like, what is the, what is the profile of that is like, you're more, is it, is it wealthier individuals is that really are looking at their wealth to be like, I need, this is a massive golden goose. I need to protect. Yeah, that's is actually why I'm it's it's across the board, but this time around, it's a lot more wealthy people, like wealthy, older people. Like, I think, and maybe this is a reflection of me, I'm 34.

I think the average Bitcoiner at this moment, or at least up until recently, was probably like a 37-year-old dude with three kids, like, something like that. And that's what I've historically seen in times like this, is people 20 to 34 reach out about, hey, Bitcoin, financial planning, stuff like that. But what I'm having right now, like, a lot of people reaching out are in their late 60s to 80s and they own a substantial amount of bitcoin and their advisors they've been working with for the last 20 years has wants to have nothing to do with it and at first they would put up with it but now it's a place of like dude i'm friends with that guy but

he's doing me a disservice with my money i need to have someone else i'm getting that on a very regular basis now i'm having that conversation almost daily with yeah really wealthy older people which is pretty cool to see like it's not just this young person you know pie in the sky idea like these are really smart people who have been around the block for a while yeah what do you i really want to dig into this i mean i've had this thesis for a while and you alluded to it the ria the broader ria particularly like your big box ria shops like all they care about is the fees and does bitcoin as this better money this better store of value really eat into the industry in which you you play in i love that um man so good

i wish our money was better it would make so much of my job not necessary like a couple years ago was like 21 when that like in new braunfels where i live the average house went up went up in value by 30 that's crazy your house my house at that time i have at that point we had three kids like our house went up by 30% in value. That did not happen. Like we had, our kids were putting holes in the sheet rock with their heads and it was crazy stuff. Our house was getting trashed. The house didn't get better. Our money got cheaper. That's what happened. Um, if so, I had clients come to me, Hey Jim, I want to buy a house in the next year. How do I save for that thing? Like, do I, do I put in the S and P and hope the S and P doesn't

plummet, which ended up happening, you know, in 22, the S and P went down by like what, 23 or something like that do you put in the stock market and hope that you can keep up the housing market do you keep it in cash in risk that houses keep going up by 30 do you put it in bonds and try to clip some coupons like what do i do with this that's a question i had all the time and that would be a non-issue if our money wasn't just broken like we had people scrambling the houses went up by 30 because of the new money creation the new money creation itself made everything rise in price. And plus, like when you have the was the monetization of assets like you weren't a few years ago, you want to go buy a house. You're not just competing against me and, you know,

some other nice young couple. You're competing against like BlackRock and private equity companies. And the reason they're doing that is because they know they have to park money in something that can to can keep up at least with inflation. And once Bitcoin takes that role, at least they recognize it does. That's going to leave to an extent is going to leave real estate and go to Bitcoin. And that would be fantastic. I hope those parts of my job get taken over. I would love that because I want to help simplify and better people's financial lives. And a lot of things I have to talk about shouldn't exist. So yeah, I think that will happen. I did, I talked to someone, uh, I talked to someone last, uh, yesterday afternoon. She, um,

she says they're looking for a financial planner. They just pay flat dollar amount too. She said, I think it's crazy that financial planners will charge a percentage of assets under management. And I do allow for flat fees, but I played sort of devil's advocate. I said, I completely agree. So here's what you see in this industry is most good, like RIA types say, I don't bring any value through investment management, or maybe the extent of the value I can bring through investments is behavioral investing and rebalancing and some tax lost harvesting. But that's the value we bring through the investments.

Really, the value that we bring is through tax planning and equity compensation planning and business strategy and tax and estate. Those are the areas we can bring deep value to. But then you have this weird thing of you just said you bring no value through the investments, yet you tie your income to 1% of the investment rate. And I think public's starting to see through that and say, like, you're going to charge me $20,000 on a $2 million portfolio when you just said the value you bring is not even related to the value of my portfolio, but these other things, I'm going to pay you a flat fee. Anyways, I talked to a lady yesterday who said that. I was like, yeah, if that's the case, you should go hire, like, go hire a robo-advisor.

Pay it 20 basis points. Don't hire an advisor and pay it 150. But that's where I did meet her and say, well, like, that is the case of if you, most advisors are just going to buy the index and call it a day. Why would you pay someone 150 basis points to do that? It doesn't make any sense that I could counter that with like, well, here's how we manage our money. Like I can I can fully sleep at night having someone else pay it, pay us one percent on how we manage money, like because we beat the crud out of the market or at least we have. So anyways, I do hope.

I hope it makes it where I think financial advisors will always be necessary because there's just decisions like so much my job is emotional. Like I have clients, I have clients who are most of my clients are a lot smarter than me. I'm not that smart. Um, so it's not a big hurdle. Um, but I have clients who really understand the money, who are super successful with it, have great marriages. But when you meet the money and the marriage together, there's a lot of angst. And a lot of my job is to come in, help them communicate better and have a plan together. And then once you've done that, you can actually build better. So like there's, there's a family I'm working with right now. They have two financial advisors

outside. One's a great financial planner. One's not. Um, they have about $40 million net worth. We were talking, they hired me to audit their other financial advisors and we were talking. And after, after one conversation, the wife said, I just don't feel like we have a plan. And she wanted her husband to sell most of their Bitcoin. They're sitting on a pretty good amount of Bitcoin. She said, she really wants him to sell it. She said, I just don't feel like we have a plan. Like, that's ironic because you have two financial planners. And what we realized is they never had someone to step in the middle of their conversations and facilitate healthy vision for them. Like, hey, you're saying these things are important to you. You're saying these

things are important to you. You're saying the same things. You're just approaching it from different directions. And what I was able to do is they could actually articulate that. I could actually show there is a plan that exists. And because of that, now the wife feels way more comfortable with the husband buying even more Bitcoin because you could at least articulate what is the vision, what we're trying to build. So I think there will always be good value for having a financial planner. I just hope a lot of like the, the day-to-day stuff does get removed from, from better money. Yeah, no. And I wasn't attacking you. And I think what you do, like boutique, like, um, personal, like one-to-one, like you make a personal relationship

with your clients is very important and will be around for a while. I'm talking about like the Ameriprises like all these sort of factory RIAs that yeah I mean what I see like what I tell people all the time is like there's a huge difference between a financial planner and a salesperson who just happens to sell a financial product yeah like I was with somebody last week we're getting drinks at the Driscoll and they were they were talking about their fidelity advisor he's like yeah they call me once a quarter and some 24 year old who is just reading from the script of products they've been told to sell like this quarter that's i i worked maybe there or somewhere like there um i'm getting told all the time for like talking about tax stuff or like yeah you're

you're limited on there's someone on twitter the other day who put on like they they're asking about buying bitcoin they want to help their mom buy bitcoin at fidelity but their advisor always tells them no it's like yeah that's because they can only sell these three model portfolios or whatever like that's it and uh there's nothing personal about it there's nothing about leaving the script. Um, and, uh, the moment you introduce a better form of preserving your capital, a lot of that script is no longer necessary. Again, I love, I love the idea of demonetizing these other assets. Suddenly you don't have to use the VTI as a savings account. Use Bitcoin as your savings account. That's what money is for. Money is there to preserve

your purchasing power. Um, so I, I, I fully, I hope this stuff happens. That's something that's really interesting to talk through um with going back to the family like you know how much bitcoin should i own so i wrote a i wrote a paper a while back um i ended up i did not publish my thoughts on a number because i didn't want to like compliance to get down my back or the sec or whatever so i didn't publish the number but like if you're my research i did like okay if bitcoin does what i think it'll do well one you all time by hey we did it it's like uh uh are we live right now are people smash buying as we record i'm kidding i'm gonna be like lieutenant dan right now on new year's eve um uh oh with with bitcoin to go if bitcoin does what we think it'll do it

literally has to do that to the detriment of other assets like bitcoin's value in real terms not nominal but in real terms will go up because other assets lose purchasing power in real terms value is sucked into Bitcoin. Yeah. And that value is going to get sucked out of gold, real estate, stocks, bonds, money or whatever. And I think people start realizing, OK, the theme here. So that's where it really is. Like, I think it's dangerous to not own any Bitcoin. Well, why is that? Because you're the true value. Of course, the government can make it look like the value is retained by just, you know, pumping up the numbers there. But the purchasing power itself is being diminished. And I think when people start realizing that, it's like, maybe

should at least a little bit and i i haven't run the numbers in a while but like that point it was like my my my my numbers at that point was if you own four percent of your total portfolio in bitcoin um as the purchasing power gets sucked out of other assets and put in a bitcoin you would stay equivalent in purchasing power long term if you own more than four percent your total purchase down would rise if you own less than four percent it would go down that was my thought i'm curious to actually win the numbers now that it's that's gone up significantly since then i'm sure it hasn't changed you know if we're looking grand scheme of thing bitcoin a zillion dollars um it's probably moved from like four like 4.3 of your portfolio or something like that but i think it's

really that that could be in something interesting to bring up to to family you know i wouldn't that wouldn't be my leading conversation point is like hey you know if bitcoin sucks all the monetary value of all assets in the world you probably own four percent of your portfolio like that's not a leading thing because they're not gonna understand remotely close like again like the game theory of how you arrive at VTI and, and rental properties going down in value to go to Bitcoin. Like, why is that? Because they don't understand that they're using those things as money. So you have to go back to what is money. So it all goes back to that simple thing. Like it is first principles. What's money, Bitcoin, Bitcoin's better money. Houses are

really bad money, but they're being used as money right now because our actual money is broken. Yeah. And I think, I mean, meaning at the houses and particularly rental properties to get that cash flowing income stream i think 2021 really drove a lot of people towards bitcoin not then but now because you had that crazy expansion the monetary base zerp and then people went and bought a bunch of airbnbs and thought they were going to be able to do the fire lifestyle and retire on the cash flows from their airbnbs the rental properties and that quickly got cut at the knees And I've anecdotally known, I know quite a few people that did that and wound up just like eating a loss on the properties and throwing it into Bitcoin. They're like, because when you think about it, like the maintenance, the logistical headaches of trying to manage a portfolio, these rental properties, particularly if you're not a professional and you're just getting into it as a side gig to fire, to retire early and live off that income.

It's insane. Yeah. compared to the alternative bitcoin which is just like get the scarce asset uh very liquid very easy to secure and very likely that more people are going to adopt it i think particularly in the rental housing market people are waking up to that dude my wife and i her name's kindra kindra and i are renting right now we we i don't know gosh a little over a year ago um like hey what If we sold our house, we can buy more Bitcoin. Like, all right, let's do that.

And I love it. Stuff breaks all the time. And like the other day, our AC went out last week. And the first thing that went to mind was like, hey, not my AC to fix. Like, suddenly you're trying to build this portfolio of something that has, you have to think of like CapEx, repairs, vacancies. And then you don't control all the variables. It's like, oh, yeah, the cider's moved in.

wrecking the house like yeah yeah there's uh yeah uh oh man i'm kidding um yeah i mean three four young kids is tough on a place that's another nice thing about you know we we've thought about building something like a good forever home it's like i don't think we're there yet as a family um i could do drywall pairs all the time on it um now that's uh i think people i agree people start realizing there's an easier way to preserve my money than real estate i think real estate will probably be the first asset to really have this demonetization sucked out of to move to bitcoin personally that's probably where i'd go first like it would just be a pain then again i'm like i'm not a good hands-on if we if we measured manliness based off of like your ability to

fix stuff i'm really doing bad in that area so i would not be a good property manager um i guess you can hire property manager but there goes 10 of your gross revenue again like you're You're just getting taken away left and right. I think people are starting to realize, like, crud, there's something out there. There's got to be something that I can just, like, I can buy, put in this little device, or in my, you know, 12 words in my head, and then forget about it, and I'm not paying for repairs and all that stuff. So I'm curious to see how this plays out.

You know, you asked earlier about the whole game theory, the nation-state adoption. It is interesting. like you start looking at um where we are with like not just trump but it's like his cabinet and he's lining up like i think trump's sort of a goober like i don't think he understands bitcoin that well maybe he does and he's just playing his cards close but i think he does have people close to him understand it like it seems that vivic knows a little bit about it that uh jd vance understands it he's been on the show he knows about bitcoin jd like he had to disclose his, his assets when he was elected as the VP elect. Um, and like, you know, it was a pretty

good amount of Bitcoin, like a decent amount of support of his net worth. So I think people actually understand it. So that's, that's what's really curious. What, uh, ah, that was a point I want to make earlier. You asked game theory. This is the game theory that actually excites me is back in July, Trump and RFK said, Hey, we want to own $200,000, 200,000 Bitcoin as our strategic reserve what's more than that a million right you will back it was at the at the conference it was 200 because that's what we owned yeah that we confiscated through silk road and stuff that's what they wanted to keep like all right we're going to take that we're going to we're basically if we had done that if if current admin had not sold some what would have happened is theoretically

trump gets in presidency he moves our 200 000 bitcoin and just like relabels it as like instead of like confiscated assets or whatever it's called right now on our balance sheet and we actually give a title like strategic reserve. That'd be a cool move. But what's way neater now is it's going to be like true to his word. Let's say it's not even a million. He just gets back to the $200,000, 200,000 Bitcoin. He initially said we have to proactively go buy it. So before it was a passive retitling of what the Bitcoin is. Now we have sold some of that 200,000 Bitcoin. So we have to go buy some. Now that is much more of a signal move. The U S government purposely went and actually bought Bitcoin to build up a reserve.

So even if it's just the $200,000 that we initially said, the signaling there is way higher. So what current administration set out to do in order to start selling our Bitcoin, I think will actually lend itself to being way more bullish signal over the long term. I think that's really cool. Even if it's not, you know,

Lummis' million Bitcoin proposal, even if it's just $200,000. Yeah, I mean, And I mean, Bitcoin has been talking about this for 15 years, like the nation state game theory. And I mean, it has played out somewhat, like has been presented by these conversations over the years, which is the smaller, more nimble governments that have much less to lose and much more to gain will move first. We've seen that with El Salvador, Bhutan, obviously Russia, many people surmise, has some Bitcoin, Venezuela. And that's played out. I'm honestly surprised that strategic reserve in the United States is part of the conversation now.

I think that throws a wrench in the game theory and how many believed it would play out. The acceleration. Yeah. Yeah. It's, one might say, gradually then suddenly. Yeah. Yeah. like we very well maybe we're not again i don't i don't talk about these things with clients and

stuff like much unless it's like i can trust that they're not going to tape it as like take it as like speculative hype i don't go there very often because i don't want to build up this like crazy expectation but i think there's a decent chance we are about to enter like the suddenly phase like we're on the uh right on the threshold yeah we're looking over the cliff right now like are we going to jump yeah this really is we got our squirrel suit on like let's go i'm i'm really yeah uh all right not financial advice but what happens if we do take the jump off the cliff oh gosh um that's probably a bad analogy like we're the get in the rocket ship yeah we hit in a rocket ship um man i i will be a little bit sad personally it's like where where i'm at right

now is last few cycles you know i'm like lieutenant dan bitcoin goes up some and i'm sort of excited it on my own, but yeah, cool. I figured this was going to happen and it'll just keep going this time around over the last four years, I've managed to convince a hundred families to adopt Bitcoin. So right now it's like super fun. So like I have people reaching out to me all the time, like, wow, Jim, like, thank you so much. This is awesome. Like changing individuals' lives, changing, changing like generations, which is so rewarding. So I love this. And I, right now, frankly, I could stop bringing on new clients. I would probably be able to trim my work down to like three days a week, make a good living and be

done. But I know there's so many bad advisors out there who were telling their clients to like, don't buy Bitcoin. It's tulips and beanie babies. They're not doing, they're not even doing like good, like tax planning and stuff like that, let alone talking about Bitcoin. And that motivates me. It's like, I could be done growing, but I need to go reach more of those people. So the reason I'd be sad if Bitcoin, this is it. And just goes up forever at this point is that gives me less time to reach more of those people. And of course, like eventually everyone should own Bitcoin because there's just better money. Like one day Bitcoin will be really boring to talk about. Yeah. There's like, well, if Bitcoin stops going up, it's like, that's the point of it. Like

the purpose of Bitcoin eventually is just to be super stable. One day, one day we'll be there. Yeah. Part of me wants to see that, like, that'd be cool for me and for the clients who already own it. But it's like, dang, there's more people out there. I want to get on these boats, you know? so that would be the sad part um no i agree that's like one of the most rewarding things at 1031 is we have a lot of large family offices that are backing us and when you've developed these relationships and convince them that we are good fiduciaries for your money to allocate into the space you learn about how they built their wealth and they're really inspiring stories and by sitting down with them and learning how they built their wealth and their life stories

like you feel compassionate about like i really feel a duty to make sure that we don't really preserve this wealth but grow it yeah immensely because people work hard for their money and it would be a great shame and it will be a great shame for the tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions of people out there built a solid nest egg or potentially a great amount of wealth that see it get eaten into because they didn't have the proper advice from the people are supposed to be planning their financial future it will be almost like to an extent like sort of a jubilee though like there's people like i i have friends and family and lots of people who like work really normal jobs who have just managed to stack a pretty good amount of bitcoin and like

bitcoin does but you and i think it will do like they just went from being like the blue-collar person who can hopefully retire at 67 to being like hey let's talk about generationally now that's really cool. Um, I just want to, again, that's what, what bothers me is the people out there who I want them to be there. There's not there yet. That's what the thing about our current money system that frustrates me the most. Like every time I think about it, like I like start tearing up like 20, was it 21 when the inflation started like really heating up? Um, you know, we think about the impacts of inflation and get frustrated, but when food prices started going up a lot out of like out of quote unquote nowhere i was at i was at the grocery store and there's

an old lady behind me in line and she had to be like your cliche cat lady like i mean she had like hot dogs and cat food that's it and um and one of it was in one other item and i checked out and i was bagging my groceries and she starts going and the lady she rang up for like three items and the old lady was like she had to verify like that's how much this cost and she had to put one those things back and like intervene. But like, like, dang, that's what drives me nuts about her money. Like I picture her, maybe I'm, maybe I'm painting the wrong picture, but I know there's people like this, like old lady, husband's dot husband died when he was 64. She got his pension that doesn't have a Cola, or maybe it was like a 2% cost of living adjustment. Now she's 84 and

she's living off that little tiny pension that just lost 40% of its purchasing power. And now she's deciding between does she eat hot dogs for two meals a day does she feed her cats uh or does she get evicted from her house that she and her husband built her family in like that is that that's where it gets real it's like dude this is i don't care about yes one day i would love to have a house the mountains for my family and i like that'd be so nice like dude our money's broken when you think about those people like it's not about what else can they buy it's like dude this you're messing with people's lives yeah um i think walmart's financials dropped this morning and that was the one headline that stuck out to me and people are reporting on it is their their

biggest um growth uh demo was individuals and families making more than a hundred thousand dollars and so like walmart is becoming this place where typically it's what many would deem to be the place where low-income individuals go to shop and do their their bargain shopping and like people that were not too long ago considered middle maybe even upper middle class in some respects are being forced to go to the bargain shopping center it's pretty crazy yeah that's you know like a hundred a hundred thousand dollars in one what it used to be you're like oh you know like growing up is like oh one day i'll make six figures you know now like i talk to people all the time who just reach out. It's like, dude, just put an hour of my time. I'll give you free

time just to talk. And I hear stories like regularly, like I talked to someone just, just recently dual income household travel nurse. So they can make a little bit more money that versus being a nurse at home. Uh, they want to buy a house. Like some are really inexpensive, like deep South. That's like, so they can, they want to do that so they can have kids. And it's like, we want to do that, but we can't, I want to be a stay-at-home mom, you know, with the kids, but like, we can't afford it. It's like, that's crazy that it's really tough for families to be able to start having kids and have a parent that stays at home, despite having like a master's degree in nursing, all that stuff. Like we just made it so difficult. And that's

where you're seeing this sucking out of, it's not just money, like money helps you do what's important to you. Like money. The reason I got into finance in the first place, money's the number one cause of divorce. It's one of the top causes of stress and suicide. Like what men are about 50% of the population, but are about 80% of suicide. I think that has a lot to do with like, men are usually the one who is more responsible for the money in the household. Like that, that strikes a nerve, you know, it's like, do you want to get ticked off about our currency? Like, look at the impacts. Um, like you are stealing from people's ability to do the things they value because suddenly you are, you're taking that so we can what leave a whole bunch of

choppers in uh in afghanistan that now they're using is for their parades like that like they just created that money why do i have to pay the taxes why do what suddenly it's harder for me to buy these things suddenly like everyone feels like they need to go to walmart and buy less quality goods like now your kids are eating crud because you can't afford good food isn't organic whatever like or even not organic avocados didn't get 40 nutritious in the last couple of years yeah your your money that's used to buy them just got devalued so it's like well gosh i can't i guess we can't buy these things. I guess we can't buy organic beef or whatever, like fruit. We have to buy these other things. You go to the store like it's interesting that people you notice this like

I think you'd be blind to not see it. Like people who are generally healthier are also in a higher socioeconomical demographic. You go to the store and you see someone who just looks like they're sort of rough around the edges. Look in the grocery basket. They probably have a lot of really processed junk. And of course, we could say, well, eat less, but eat less quality stuff. But like, I just don't think that should even have to be a conversation point. Right. Man, that gets me riled up. Like the impacts it actually has on people, like the disease that introduces the angst in homes, parents fighting about money because like, well, you know, I want to I want to make sure we can do these things like, but we can't, babe.

I have to keep going. I wish you had more time to view this. Yeah, me too. But I can't because of this stuff. That is a there's a level of theft of time. um you know like that's it's infuriating it's infuriating and and it's corrosive to society because you mentioned like i want to go buy a house in the woods or in the mountains and many bitcoiners are thinking that way myself included like what am i going to

do next but i think it's important to anchor to the fact that we live in a society and yes bickway may go up and you may be able to afford that house by the beach or that house in the mountains but if society devolves around you to a certain extent like and you can't coordinate economic activity and you have essentially this drastically more um divergent two-tiered society it's not going to be worth yeah um living in to some extent right and so that i mean that's why we have fix the money fix the world out here and why i mean obviously like you said all get into bitcoin for number go up uh at the beginning but i think as you go further down the rabbit hole it's like oh no this is like a a problem that is at the core of society and if

we don't fix it things can devolve rather quickly yeah that's why we do the show that's why we do what we do try to push this forward and i think it's uh it's important that we get as many people in the life but i think i agree with you now if we're in the suddenly phase and we accelerate and you have a mass of people that are that are missing out that it would be incredibly sad which is why it is very important that you guys crush your thanksgiving day dinner presentations okay i hope your powerpoint's ready it is your moral duty yeah it's i guess closing thought there would be again like when you when you go back to the role that money has, you know, there are times that it's tempting

to be like, dude, have fun, stand poor. And there are people who like there. I have I have I have a few people that I know that's like that's how I have to approach them. That's the that is not the norm. Most people need to be met with like they have theirs. They have financial stress and angst. They have concerns. They have concerns about their current state. And they also have concerns about Bitcoin. Their concerns about Bitcoin is the unknown. So go there, address that. They think they know something. They think they know that it's used to buy drugs or they think they know that it's going to boil oceans or they think they know that whatever. So address that first and then build in proper education. Don't try to educate them about stuff they don't need to know

yet. Like if you think about your Bitcoin journey, maybe if you're maybe you're an engineer in your first place of of really getting into this was hash rate and all that stuff but most people aren't like you um so take it from where they are and that is that is a worry about you know getting to thanksgiving was expensive and like that was a big sacrifice well why why is that um what what is what is the problem itself and that problem is money the money has been uh it's centralized control which allows for a printing of new units like okay well what's the way around this. So, um, yeah, I know it can be tough to, uh, retain that composure. Uh, but I think if you can just anchor into remembering like, dude, money, money is an expression of values and these

people, everyone values things. Most people value relationships the most. So if you can go back there, um, and even if it's in the back of your mind, like why are you having this conversation? It's because you care about them. You want them to be able to invest in their relationships with their families and the people they love it's like okay then it's important that i can try to retain my composure so i can help them understand bitcoin so therefore they can do these things yeah optimistic too this is a way where you can help yourself are you were you worried about the plane ticket to get the tank of gas the train ticket you had to take to get the thanksgiving were you worried about chipping in that was your casserole a little bit more expensive

because the money's broken we found a solution to the broken money problem and we can make the world a better place we can make make your life easier it's not uh i think reframing to an optimistic like if you adopt bitcoin things are going to get easier instead of you don't adopt bitcoin the world's going to shit you're going to miss out positive connotation is important too as well yeah don't want to yeah especially thanksgiving try to try to try to show some thanks um so be prepared get the presentation ready uh get your ref links for your exchanges if you got them you know you might as well stack a little bit if you're gonna onboard people to to stacking apps on thanksgiving and uh right before dessert between the main course and dessert

you have a family smash buy you all get together you pull out your phones you smash buy a little bitcoin i'm kidding but uh good luck as you're going to pitch jim where can people find out more about what you're doing reach out to you if they're interested um in leveraging your services if you're if you're offering them yeah um you can follow my twitter or x i will finally yield to calling it x after what elon's done over the last few months like fine i'll call it x now so you can follow me on x it's uh jim crider tx is in texas um my my websites it's it's it's intentional living fp as in financial planning so intentional living fp.com on there there's 15 minutes on my calendar. If you just want to throw again, it's like, if you, if you have some weird

one-off question, you don't want a financial planner, but it's like, if I could just answer this one question, noodle it with someone else, throw them in on my calendar. Or if it's like, dude, I have this, I have this family member that I cannot get through, but if they hurt for someone else, like awesome, like schedule time more than happy to talk help in any way I possibly can. Jim, it's been incredible. I flung this topic on you. You crushed it. No, I appreciate you having me. Peace and love freaks. Thank you.