The Pomp Podcast - #1467 Ethan Peck | How To Get Microsoft & Amazon To Buy Bitcoin

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

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

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

probably seen that there was a proposal put forward to Microsoft and Amazon for them to put Bitcoin on their balance sheet. That proposal was written by a live human being. It's a guy named Ethan. How do I know that? Because I went on the Internet. I did a bunch of research. I dug and I dug and I dug and I found Ethan. But not only did I find Ethan Peck, who's the deputy director of the Free Enterprise Project. But I got Ethan Peck sitting right here with me. And now we're going to talk about exactly what he did, why he did it, how these shareholder proposals work, and what it's going to mean for Bitcoin on public company balance sheets. And so here's my episode with Ethan Peck. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast

are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guest as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin IRA. Are you a crypto investor with a retirement account, but don't have any crypto in your retirement account? Then listen up. This is for you. Bitcoin IRA is revolutionizing the way Americans save for retirement by helping smart investors diversify their savings with access to over 75 cryptocurrencies. With world-class

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All right, Ethan, let's get started with this. You put forward a proposal to Microsoft for them to put Bitcoin on their balance sheet. How the heck do you do that and why did you do it? First of all, thanks for having me. The reason that I did it is because Microsoft has a lot of cash on its balance sheet, cash, cash equivalents, and bonds. And so just because of inflation, their cash is being debased constantly. and the bond yields are not outpacing the true inflation rate,

they're losing money for their shareholders. So what I do at the Free Enterprise Project, we're a three-person team. We just submit shareholder proposals to companies. So essentially, we own shares in the companies. And if you own a certain amount of shares, you can submit a proposal that's voted on at the annual meeting. Just a lot of our proposals deal with

sort of getting corporations out of politics, back to fiduciary duty, out of sort of woke stuff, unnecessary environmental commitments, not, you know, we're a conservative organization, but we don't even push right-wing values on corporations. We just get them out of politicized things. So like ESG, DEI, all the things that kind of seem like the corporate world went crazy for a little bit. You guys are basically showing up and you're saying, Hey, stop the nonsense. Get back to building your company. Just focus on your fiduciary duty to shareholders, which is drive profits and create shareholder value. Exactly. That's exactly what we do. Okay. Now when you show up and you're

like, hey, Microsoft, buy Bitcoin. You're also saying create shareholder value. Exactly. So I just, you know, I've been a Bitcoiner for a couple of years, but I never thought to submit this proposal to any company before because I didn't want to push my own values on a company. It wasn't until it sort of clicked for me that, wait, corporations are losing a lot of money for their shareholders holding so much cash. What's the answer to this? Well, obviously it's Bitcoin. So I just thought, you know, corporations have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to solve this problem that they're not adequately addressing and the best solution is bitcoin until someone else can come up with a better solution corporations should look at this

and so that's all you know very humbly went to corporations as if whoever saw the proposal it didn't require them or mandate them to buy bitcoin it just sort of asked them to do an assessment um there's also another reason for that it's sort of lame to just sort of ask for an assessment but if you ask for too much uh then you might be infringing on their what's called ordinary business and the SEC might just not allow you to have that. So there's a very like complex process here. You, I can say this, I don't think you can say this, but you're an expert at submitting the shareholder proposals. How many proposals do you think that you and your colleagues have submitted over the years? For the last, I've been doing this for three years, I would say like

close to 150. Okay. So you do 50 a year, one a week almost, right? Of these proposals. And you've got a lot of experience of getting denied where people will say, uh, Oh, you have too many characters or, Oh, you violated this or whatever. Like the companies are looking for the technicalities so they don't have to hear the proposals and they can clear a bunch of these things out of the way and they just get to do what they want to do. Is that right? Yeah. So there's a lot of nonsense. Like if you go above 500 words, even if you have like one time I had too many apostrophes. So like a word with an apostrophe counted as two words, it was like a 501 words or too many dashes. they'll omit the proposal or a link counts as one word but like two links count as two like that

and if you do anything you have to request by a certain deadline and ask for a meeting within a certain number of days if you ask for a meeting with them like seven days out from when you requested not 15 days out they can omit it so there's a lot of technicalities to it so on one hand anyone could submit a proposal and i really want to try to inspire like a grassroots movement so if anyone's listening they own shares in a company they want to do this too reach out to me i'll help you do it because the more of us that are submitted i shouldn't be the only one doing this the more of us that can submit proposals like this it puts more it's more of a grassroots movement you know uh asking a company not just coming from one person that would be

much more effective uh but at the same token you don't want to risk getting it omitted because once the sec decides okay you can't submit this proposal because you use the wrong language at this company then you set a precedent at that company and you can't submit the same proposal for a number of years. And so if you're interested in submitting a proposal, someone listening, reach out to me. I'm happy to walk you through. So basically, it's really important when somebody submits it to make sure they submit it the right way. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk Microsoft. So why did you pick Microsoft? You said they had a lot of cash. Why did you think to submit this? You do this for a day job, but you said that you never thought about Bitcoin. Were you just sitting there

bored one day? Explain this process of how this ends up getting submitted. Well, I'm always trying to be creative and trying to get corporations back that are fiduciary duty. So I've submitted a lot of unique proposals that no one submitted before. One of them was asking companies to only have board members exclusive to that company so that you don't have companies with directors that sit on multiple boards at the same time. I think I was the first person to submit a proposal like that. And then I just saw this problem of inflation with companies holding a lot of cash. And I was like, OK, where's the next place I could submit to?

Microsoft happens to be an off-season one. Most shareholder meetings are in the spring. so like april may uh are the are most of them microsoft's like one of them that happens to be in december and when i had this idea it was may and so the deadline for submission i think was june so then i just okay microsoft's a big company they have a lot of cash they fit this problem they're up you know and also i would be lying if i say that i didn't like the dichotomy between microsoft and microstrategy just in the name just literally microsoft and microstrategy you thought it'd be funny yeah you're definitely a bitcoiner all right so so you submit the uh

proposal and then walk through what is the process and like who finds it did you send this to somebody in bitcoin world like you know bitcoiners are psychopaths and they got like all kinds of alerts up all this stuff whatever but like walk through like how does this become you know somewhat of a national story yeah i i didn't make it a national story at all i submitted it in june and completely forgot about it like i told you i submit 50 of these uh you know our organization not just me um and so uh in october they had to publish the proxy ballot with the sec and so when it went public i just started seeing like all these bitcoiners started you know the cyber hornets are amazing and so they made it viral they put the pressure on microsoft and they deserve

more credit than me i just to me it was just submitting another 500 words trying to get corporations back to you know focusing on fiduciary duty which they've been ignoring for a long time And that was it. And then Bitcoiners took it from there. All right. So as part of this, at some point, you're going to get three minutes to present to the Microsoft board. Every proposal that gets heard gets three minutes. Was it special for this?

Like, why did you get three minutes? And then what'd you do with your three minutes? Okay. So most of the time it's three minutes. Sometimes it's two, sometimes it's like four or five, but it's usually three minutes. And when I saw a sailor tweet at Satya Nadella, I thought, okay, I have to, I have to let him get the three minutes instead of me. Like he's interested in talking to Satya Nadella. Let me try to reach out to him. And, you know, one thing led to another finally contacted him and cyber hornets. Yeah, exactly. And just offered him my three minutes. He was very generous with his time. and when we spoke he said listen like let's try to get in front of satya uh why don't we offer them to withdraw the proposal in exchange for me meeting with satya um you know and i feel at

liberty to disclose this because sailor said it publicly on twitter um and so i i said to microsoft like we'll withdraw the proposal and with not submit one in 2025 and not submit one in 2026 if you just agreed a one hour meeting with sailor you know he'll sign an nda anywhere you want in the world and they said no like they would rather just expose their company to a lot of like negative press obviously publicly fumble i mean like and that just shows you how close-minded they are and how early we are i don't think every company's that close-minded were they were they annoyed by this they didn't seem annoyed they just were sort of like like you guys run your thing we don't care we're not gonna do this we don't think you can get the votes yeah to me it's

like a sort of a blockbuster moment you know not buying netflix just and also microsoft very famously didn't get involved with smartphones in like 2008 uh so it's just another one of those moments yeah um to have gotten the proposal approved how many votes would you need what percentage it'd be 50 so you need more than 50 of the votes to say yes and then you could um actually get this done yeah and what then they but that would just be a study yeah for now you know hopefully with a different sec um and less bias we can sort of start to push you know the envelope on requesting great bigger things like an allocation uh but you have to be careful and so there's a way to do this without you know sort of uh setting the wrong precedent okay uh it only got

0.5 approval yeah um a lot of people look at like oh nobody wants this but really there's a lot of large asset management firms that own huge blocks i think blackrock in particular at microsoft owns like 10 or 12 percent is that right so they own seven percent i think seven and a half but they control like 12 of the vote because a lot of people are not voting their shares so it's not like 99.5 of microsoft shareholders don't want this it's not exactly like that it's more like you have the top five asset managers and the top two proxy advisory services iss and glass lewis who basically advise the pension funds on how to vote so when you have like those seven right there they're controlling 90 of the vote just them so when you if you go oh for seven on them you're

already at like 90 exactly so if we just flip blackrock we're already at 12 so it's just like it goes in chunks it's not like like like a vote for a president all right uh you talked to black rock about why they voted no not just me it was i invited parker lewis okay to join that conversation yeah and uh when i talked to geode capital i also invited uh andrew hones and jesse kobernick i'm trying to like pass the ball to pros in the bitcoin community as much as possible someone's better than me at convincing them let them do it like i let sailor speak um and um so i spoke i spoke it's really the investment stewardship department at these companies that decide i think a lot of people don't know that like a lot of people look like oh well black

you see a lot of stuff on twitter like oh blackrock's definitely gonna vote for it you know they're buying up all the bitcoin um i wish it worked that way but how it really works is you have BlackRock owns thousands of companies. Every company has 10, 12, 13 directors up for vote and five, six, sometimes 10 shareholder proposals. They have tens of thousands, sometimes a hundred thousand items a year to vote on, which is a lot of research that they have to do going into it. Right. And so they have investment stewardship departments that all their job is just to vote shares for every company. Okay. And they vote on behalf of their clients they're not you know and what happened unfortunately a lot of these investment

stewardship teams are staffed i'm going to be polite with sort of um pro esg people old school it's it's a mix of like old school and like sort of woke millennials that see the world in a very specific kind of way uh and so they they're sort of hesitant towards bitcoin so even if blackrock's going up and buying all the a lot of bitcoin there there there's a disconnect there and so what we have to do is we have to convince them because remember like now we submitted amazon it's the same exact i can i don't want to dock them but it's the same people vote like literally the same people voting on that proposal uh so we have to you think that they're gonna vote yes uh on one hand there's a negatives and positives to it like

they seem to have made their mind up on the other hand instead of just having like 15 minutes with them we now get more time and more time with them so you we get to like more exposure to to this issue a lot of them were naive on a lot of on bitcoin like completely naive on about it and so uh we just get another shot at orange pilling them so to speak um and so there's some good part about that you getting to engage with the same people and i wasn't saying they weren't all closed-minded like there was some open-mindedness um that but you know they're not 99 of shareholder proposals and any issue doesn't pass and so when you have a brand new shareholder proposal at a company that's like already successful i think i saw you say this on fox the other day

like microsoft's already successful like why do they have to rock the boat so they're not going to rock the boat at a successful company on a first ever proposal once they have more exposure to this i think that there's a better chance to sort of build momentum and sort of get that number up um in the future and so microsoft because it was only 0.5 approved uh you can't resubmit for a couple years yeah on bitcoin for microsoft you have to pass five percent so really what's important is um should you go to companies that have really big uh retail shareholder bases right okay so that's a really good idea and i'm looking at that too i only got one good idea there you go you got my good idea so there's a couple different things that i'm looking at

one it's companies that have a lot of cash so that's why i submitted to amazon and microsoft so because they have the biggest problem two is companies that are more likely to to do something like this like a smaller company that might not have a lot going for them that's not really successful you know they might throw a hail man they might be more likely to throw a hail mary and purchase Bitcoin. And then the third thing is, who are the biggest shareholders? So I think that it's worth submitting

to all different kinds of companies and just seeing how it plays out. You gonna do Berkshire? The deadline passed already this year. So we already submitted something else there, but definitely next year. Why not? They have a lot of cash.

Come on, we gotta get Buffett to do it. Imagine Buffett having to buy Bitcoin because the shareholders told him to do it. that'd be you know he'd cry yeah he'd say oh no i said that this was like harvesting dead baby brains and the media would love it right yeah they would be they'd be having a field day asking him about bitcoin eat it up uh i don't think it'll pass though no all right so uh what's your goal like what uh what do you hope that you can kind of accomplish with this uh my goal is just to get companies with every proposal even with the ones that deal with esg it's just to get

companies back to fiduciary duty like i'm a bitcoiner but i swear i'm not doing this because of my own stack like i i just i really just think that companies are losing their shareholders a lot of money every year it's a big problem you know when you're a lot of people that you know that are not bitcoiners they're just investing in the market because they have no they're if they just keep their money in cash or you know it's losing value due to inflation so they're either buying bonds it's also not beating inflation so they invest in the market they just buy the s&p or they buy indexes. And when you have every single company in these indexes, except for MicroStrategy now and, you know, Tesla, not holding Bitcoin, that's a lot of value being

lost just from their cash and bond holdings. And so, you know, why not help America? Why not help American shareholders get back to, you know, producing value for the shareholders? You mentioned Tesla, they already own some Bitcoin. Do you think that that's a potential target where you could go and get them to up the allocation of Bitcoin? So they already own some? yeah um but they also have less of a problem so you know they're not as i'm not as interested in submitting to tesla because they don't have as big of a problem as a lot of other companies but if they're more likely to you know up their their their bitcoin holdings that's something to consider so i'm looking at that too got it um and you're doing this pretty much by yourself right now

you've got your like colleagues but they're not bitcoiners are they well they are they're becoming bitcoiners oh really yeah okay wait what does that mean uh well i think you know one of them red red bitcoin standard now and and so so they're becoming more interested becoming more interested i mean your guys organization this whole idea of get back to fiduciary duty get away from all the like nonsense whatever like it does i would think lean itself for people to have kind of a propensity to be aligned with the ethos of bitcoin around you know free speech and merit based uh you know kind of money and in those things right yeah well um definitely like my colleagues believe in sound money uh and and so um but you know not everyone and there's a different

road to Bitcoin for everyone. And they definitely see the value in Bitcoin and they're becoming more and more. They've never been against Bitcoin. And when I asked them, can I submit this kind of proposal? They were like, yeah, go ahead. How does it fit within the framework of what we do? And I explained it like just, you know, it's in line with companies fiduciary duty to not lose their shareholders money from holding a lot of cash and bonds. And they're like, yeah, that makes sense. Go ahead and do it. So that's what we did. it's crazy what who's like the coolest person you talk to after doing this sailor yeah probably so all right who else anybody else reach out to you or uh did media track you down or anything uh

well yeah i spoke to a couple different members of the media uh you know uh today stories i think new york times bloomberg um now doing this it's an honor uh i mean we're basically the same new York times and podcast. Well, the same here, we talk about the truth and they're the propaganda, but I don't know if you can say that before the article comes out because the article may be changing if they hear you say that. Um, and, uh, yeah, just, you know, Parker Lewis talked on, uh, Marty bent. Um, everyone is so helpful. Sam Callahan, everyone is so helpful. They're very interested. Uh, really cool. You know, Bitcoin, that's part of what makes the Bitcoin community great. It's like, I was never really part of it. I was always just following,

uh but uh as soon as i reached out like hey i submitted this proposal like wow it's interesting tell me about it so everyone's willing to help all right what do you need help with now a couple things so looking into submitting at different companies also looking into expanding it you know as a more grassroots movement uh different shareholders submitting it uh you know similar proposals uh and i think that growing you know building momentum on this proposal so that it's uh and also engaging with asset managers the people that vote uh growing the momentum and getting companies to sort of you know it's gonna it's a process but i think it'll happen and the asset management firms you mentioned blackrock who are the other big ones

So Vanguard, State Street, a lot of times it's like Geode Capital, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan. With Vanguard and JP Morgan, I didn't even bother contacting them. But Goldman Sachs, they revealed that they bought a lot of Bitcoin. Charles Schwab is getting in the game. Vanguard, they're the ones who said that they're not going to offer the Bitcoin ETS, but aren't they really big investors in MicroStrategy? They are. They're the biggest shareholder. They're the biggest shareholder. so it's kind of like talking out of one side of your mouth while you're doing something else right that's exactly what i've been trying to tell the asset managers like how could you justify voting against this proposal while buying up bitcoin while you know you have a lot of exposure to you know companies that are very much tied to the price of bitcoin like not just microstrategy

MicroStrategy, Riot, Marathon, Coinbase, Block, Tesla has Bitcoin. You don't have a problem there. Why do you have a problem with Microsoft owning 1%, right? A lot of the answers that we got back was like, well, it's too volatile. And you know, why shouldn't they just kick that money back to shareholders? And I said, yeah, maybe they should kick that money back to shareholders. But that's a different question. You know, I'm not, Microsoft already determined that they're holding 75 billion in cash, and they're not giving that money back to shareholders. So even if they were to give 20 billion back to shareholders, then the question becomes, what do you do with the other 55 billion? It's the same question, right? And they didn't really have much of an answer for that. But

I'm hopeful that they'll eventually see the light. I think that this is going to happen. I hope so. It could take time. And frankly, there's a lot of bias against us, uh uh my organization because why because we've been like the leading anti-esg pro fiduciary uh sort of shareholder proponent for years there's a couple others doing great work nlpc jerry boyer um you know but we've been doing we submit the most i think we submitted the second most shareholder proposals of any proponent last year but you guys are doing it as a non-profit Yeah. Right. So you guys aren't necessarily making money off of this. It's very much a kind of philanthropic activity to go and say, hey, look, we want you guys to do right by shareholders. Yeah.

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

like these the directors of these companies it's such an echo chamber how does it work okay so you essentially you just nominate you can nominate a director and they're voted on it's like an item at the meeting same as a proposal most meetings all the directors up for nomination were nominated by the board okay by the company they're nominating their own you know candidates uh and they pass with like 95 so i've been to hundreds of meetings like i don't think i've ever seen a director receive below 90 so that just get and i think the only time was when like exxon like intentionally kicked off two directors and they got also like two percent or something and so that was like it was like known that it was going to happen so it's really it's not really it's not really like a vote

it's it's really the asset managers determine this is what's going to happen and you think that there's a chance like share like the retail shareholders and certain companies could uh could pull it off retail shareholders have a better chance because they're people yeah you know what i mean uh asset managers are massive institutions um they're the blob yeah they're the blob and they own each other uh but again like it's their investment stewardship departments that decide this and so we have to appeal to them uh and it's going to take time uh but i think that as things change as we get our new sec uh that's you know not as biased against the organizations and shareholder proponents with a certain viewpoint um companies are gonna move back to neutral uh

and i think you're seeing it already i honestly so when you guys put forward more proposals you guys need help with amplifying the message you need probably the organization uh what is the name of the organization behind the project uh national center for public policy research and we have a couple different programs that sounds like some smart people shit all right so you guys need donations there yeah right that helps if you can go to nationalcenter.org actually the president called me and he said uh can you set up a bitcoin address oh really yeah yeah yesterday and so uh i'm gonna do that too all right and why because he's like all these bitcoiners they seem crazy like if they're gonna be getting excited about us maybe they give us some money yeah do

Do you know what the budget is every year for the organization? I'm honestly not involved in any of that. I just keep my head down and do my work. All right. And then the third thing is that you need other shareholders who would want to submit these proposals to companies where they've held. How many shares or how much money does the portfolio value have to be? Right. So it's $2,000 worth of shares for three years, $15,000 worth for two years, or $25,000 worth for one year.

And you have to have held it consecutively. So if you have $2,100 worth, but it dips below 2,000, the clock resets as soon as it does. So you have- So if somebody out there has got 50 grand worth of a stock and they've held it for at least one year and it never dipped below 25,000, they're ready to fire. Yep. Okay. And where can we send people to find you if they want help in submitting these proposals?

You can go to our website, nationalcenter.org, or you can send me personally at epec at nationalcenter.org. All right. epec at nationalcenter.org. Somebody reaches out and says, hey, I want to submit, you'll help them figure out, make sure they don't mess it up. And then maybe we can just like overwhelm, we just take over the S&P 500. Just like, just, you know, DDoS attack them with all these proposals. And then they're all going to be calling each other and be like, hey, you got to vote on this thing? Yeah, I got to vote on this thing. And then the stewardship folks, they'd be like, are you kidding me? We got to vote on this 47 times this year? Exactly. And, you know, and then you get to

engage with them so you can reach out to them sometimes they're closed-minded they don't want to talk to you um but um a lot of times they you know they'll hear you out for like 20 30 minutes and you get to talk like this is why i think this proposal is a good idea and uh we basically have to win them over if you want the proposal to win there's another element of it too though so like i've come to their agreements with companies they a lot of times they don't want the press so i'll submit a proposal and i'll say listen we'll withdraw the proposal if you meet me halfway and settle on this and we sign an agreement this happened a couple times one that i could speak about because they violated uh their their agreement um oh yeah you had an

agreement they violated it yeah who did that best buy oh best buy all right yeah what was the agreement basically well this is very divisive which best buy shouldn't be involved in at all but Best Buy was giving money to a lot of organizations that sort of advance trans ideology in children, okay? And so we tried to stop that and we told them, listen, this is inappropriate and your shareholders are divided on this, that you can't take money of all shareholders

and give it to organizations that half of them, more than half of them, okay, vehemently disagree with. Like, it's very divisive. That's crazy. Like, just so we're clear, If you take shareholders' money that more than half of your shareholders disagree with what you're doing with the money, that sounds like you got a pretty good argument about, hey, knock this off. Exactly. So they came to an agreement with us.

They stopped giving to a couple of organizations that do the most radical things on LGBT issues. And so they agreed to stop. We came to a private agreement. And so you guys had put forward a proposal. Yeah. You pulled it. We pulled it. So it never came out that they were doing this.

And I think someone there leaked it or something. And they violated what? They went back and started donating again? No, they, someone, we were supposed to be like, usually when I come to these agreements, I'm not allowed to speak about them because a lot of times they want it to be like under wraps. So sometimes companies, you know, you're out,

there are companies out there that do agree to like pull back the wokeness a little bit. Sometimes you just don't see it because we come to like private agreements. But that one, I think somebody must have leaked it Because like my emails with them got in like SEC documents. Oh, really? Yeah, you can look it up.

And what, somebody from their side? I have no idea. Yeah, but it wasn't you. No. All right. So epec at nationalcenter.org. Yeah. And as long as somebody's held more than $25,000 of stock for a year, you said $15,000 for two years or $2,500 or more for three years straight, then they can submit these and that'd be helpful as well.

Yep. Amazing, man. Well, listen, I don't know how you thought of this. It's amazing that it's like your expertise and what you do for a day job. The fact that you're a Bitcoiner, kind of put those two things together and fire it away. You've definitely changed the conversation, right? And kind of pushed the tempo. And even though Microsoft didn't do it, that's fine.

You're on Amazon. There's others, I believe, that are coming. Keep at it. And I think that, you know, it's kind of like a wall. You just keep smashing that hammer and you never know which is the one that's going to finally break through. and once you get one my guess is that you'll get a lot more first domino and then the rest fall

thank you so much for doing this I appreciate it