The Pomp Podcast - #1482 Chris Kline | Tax-Free Bitcoin Is Here!

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

Chris Kline is the Co-Founder & COO of Bitcoin IRA. In this conversation we talk about the bitcoin strategic reserve, what Trump administration could do for bitcoin, Czech central bank consider holding bitcoin as reserve asset, how many other countries are getting into the game, repeal of SB121, banks holding bitcoin, and putting bitcoin in your retirement account.  ======================= BitcoinOS is bringing Bitcoin into a new era. For the first time, Bitcoiners can access real DeFi across the entire crypto ecosystem, powered by revolutionary zero-knowledge technology. No more trusting sketchy bridges or giving up security. BitcoinOS reunites all of crypto around the chain where it all began. Follow BitcoinOS on twitter @BTC_OS and Be early to Bitcoin again. ======================= Meanwhile is the world’s first licensed and regulated life insurance company built for the Bitcoin economy. Protect your loved ones with sound money built to manage life’s uncertainty and a broken financial system. Their BTC-denominated Whole Life Insurance policies allow HODLers to pass more BTC on to their loved ones and a tax-advantaged way to access BTC for liquidity during their lifetime. Visit their website at https://meanwhile.bm/ to join the waitlist for a policy and to learn more. ======================= 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. 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, we've got an amazing episode with Chris Klein. He is the co-founder and COO of Bitcoin IRA.

In this conversation, we talk about the strategic Bitcoin reserve. We talk about what possibly Donald Trump and his administration could do for Bitcoin. What's going on with the Czech National Bank, how they want to put billions of dollars on their balance sheet, how El Salvador, Bhutan and many other countries now are getting into the game and what that could mean for the Bitcoin market. On top of that, we talk about the repeal of SAB 121 and banks holding Bitcoin and what that could mean for your portfolio or various financial products that you may want to use. And then we talk about putting Bitcoin in your retirement account. What are people doing? How

are they doing it? What's the tax benefit? And also, what are some of the trends and how much are people actually benefiting from having done this in the past? This conversation is filled with unique insights, and I think you'll learn a lot if you watch the entire thing. Once you get done, leave a comment, let us know what you think, or jump on Twitter and let Chris and I both know what you agreed with and what you disagree with. Here's my latest conversation with Chris Kline. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make

a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin OS. They're the ultimate upgrade to Bitcoin. Bitcoiners can now experience the magic of the entire crypto world, including DeFi, scalability, privacy, and more, without giving up control of their hard-earned sats. Powered by revolutionary zero-knowledge technology, Bitcoin OS lets other blockchains plug into Bitcoin,

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Visit their website, meanwhile.bm, to join the wait list and to learn more about the world's first Bitcoin life insurer. Again, that's meanwhile.bm. Go check them out today. All right, Chris, I thought a great place to start the first conversation is this Bitcoin strategic reserve that President Trump has promised really seems like it's gaining steam now.

And it feels like if the United States is going to actually buy Bitcoin, many other countries will follow. We saw recently that the Czech National Bank, the central bank of the country, came out, And they're actually advocating for a 5% allocation in their central bank reserves. We know that Russia is mining Bitcoin. They're saying that they're using it for transactions. We know that El Salvador owns Bitcoin.

They continue to buy at least one Bitcoin per day. I think the country of Bhutan has like $1.3 billion worth of Bitcoin or so on their balance sheet, which is almost 50% of their GDP. How do you evaluate whether the United States is actually going to buy Bitcoin and what it would do to the Bitcoin market if they do it? Yeah, well, we already hold some, right? It's on the balance sheet. And I think they probably hopefully are already mining or buying it.

I've always said, you know, the Rust Belt area is a place where we used to build steel and that now we have too much competition in the geopolitical. That would a great place where we could possibly put mining operations and actually start producing it here at home. But, yeah, for for the Strategic Reserve, my big thing is it's a lot like gold, oil and our military strength. We can project power. He who held the gold made the rules. He who holds the Bitcoin is going to play by the new rules. This is really going to change the map globally because you talk about countries like Bhutan and others. They were they weren't on the map is like a G8. Will Bitcoin be a piece of the power and national sovereignty?

And you just think that it's kind of an equal playing field where a Bhutan can have some sort of like economic mobility against other countries? Or how do you look at the smaller countries? Because it feels like El Salvador and Bhutan weren't on anyone's kind of go card as countries that would do this. But maybe there's a little bit of an innovator's dilemma, right? The big countries don't necessarily need Bitcoin. I think that the small ones probably have more to gain from it because they can fast track themselves from the third world to the second world to the first world. But the big boys are going to need to have it, especially when you talk about Russia and other parts of Europe that are saying, hey, obviously the U.S. We've made it pretty clear since July in Nashville that this is our intent.

And now those that wanted to do it have been elected and they're in office now. So it's going to be kind of a race to aggregation is how I look at it. And it'll be interesting to watch. Argentina is going to be a really interesting story ahead. I think where they were at, where they were almost about to do what El Salvador did a few years back, but the World Bank and IMF came in and said, no, no dice. Now they've got a new president younger and that's a larger South American country. I used to compare it a little bit a few years ago to domino theory that happened in East Asia, Southeast Asia with communism is this could start spreading out because you see countries start having success. Populations want to feel that same success life lifestyle for an average El Salvadorian is is better than it was before this drastic change. My favorite part about El Salvador is that they, you know, they have like if you look at their timeline, there's there's all these giant eruptions of their volcano that just wipe out civilization.

Right. And they said, you know what, we're going to turn the table there. And we're actually using the power, the geothermal power from the volcanoes to mine the Bitcoin that they're creating. And then the birthright that they're putting in, if you're born as an El Salvadorian citizen, you have a right to a piece of Bitcoin. These are revolutionary changes for just for a small country that can really become a powerhouse in their region. and it could become a real trading. You could see foreign domestic investment come in because their stability, right? Everything's all about stability for investment.

And this could be something where their currencies were just battered, right? I mean, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000% inflation in Argentina to finally have a little bit of stability could do just wonders for their local economies. What's interesting about El Salvador is obviously tourism has significantly increased, but also Tether moved there.

A number of other companies are moving there. So it seems almost like the Bitcoin on the balance sheet obviously has an economic impact, But then there's this like halo effect that occurs of what you're really doing is you're tapping into a network of people and you're signaling to them that you have a different way of thinking about the world. And that is attracting people, capital, businesses, et cetera, to your country. And so it almost is like an economic development tool on top of the pure economic like exposure. Yeah, it's it's kind of a badge of forward thinking, future thinking. We're not living in the past.

We're looking towards the future. And they're writing the pages as they go. Right. This isn't they didn't have a 10 year plan or a 15 year plan. It was we needed something drastic. Let's make a change. And now they're seeing the effects of it. And the leadership keeps getting reelected as a result of it. You know, if you look at our lifetime, what was the story of South America was one coup after another coup after a dictator after dictator. And now democracy through the people's currency, which is Bitcoin, in my opinion, could just thrive down there. Now, another recent development is the repeal of SAB 121, which will significantly increase the ability for the banks to hold Bitcoin. One of the things I've always found interesting is it seems like the banks want to participate here. They want to hold this stuff. They would like to bring kind of new customers, new revenue to their bank.

What are you hearing or seeing there and how do you think that will actually impact the market? Game changer. I think I saw you mentioning it on Fox a couple of weeks ago. it is a big deal because if you're a bank and you've got to hold an obligation to hedge the asset, you're not going to do it. I mean, that's basically they killed the idea with SAB 121. Rescinding that and taking that obligation away is huge. We've seen it over the years. We'll have large institutions, hedge funds, even like sizable RIAs. And the minute custody comes up, if they're holding it on their balance sheet and having to offset it, that messes with their economics

because now they have to tie up other assets kind of like just in escrow to protect themselves. Now you take that need away. I think you're going to see a lot of the big groups either either just naturally putting it on the balance sheet or perhaps using it to build new products. Right. Like a real estate jointed Bitcoin concept, which I know there's some groups that are looking at that now. Yeah, I think Newmark said that what they basically want to do is they want to lend dollars to real estate investors, have them essentially do like a refinancing or recap. They'll wipe out the previous debt. They've got new debt on it. but then rather than cash out refi uh and give the additional cash to the real estate owner

instead what they want to do is they want to take that additional cash and buy bitcoin with it and so now from a lender's perspective they have obviously the real estate as collateral now they have bitcoin that's sitting there as well as part of the collateral and then obviously the real estate owner uh is going to not only have their real estate that they've got the leverage on but now they've got bitcoin exposure as well so it's kind of this very interesting way to uh put what is a traditional asset like real estate with bitcoin but you're not actually changing what you're doing right you're still got a building you're still uh putting tenants in there you're still using kind of your traditional mortgage on it but now introducing

this bitcoin thing almost feels like bitcoin is becoming the tool to juice returns yes public companies doing this etc it's like a finance mechanism is like okay our core business stays the same but now we have this entirely new asset class that we can utilize in collateral or yield uh and all the other tools that are associated with it i think you're gonna see we're pretty smart guys uh there's a lot of smart guys i mean we're in here in new york and there's it's epicenter of brilliant guys and gals out there the now the brains are going to start thinking about this they never even thought because it was like it was restrictive oh well i can't really do much if i've got it tied up like it limits my abilities almost puts me in handcuffs now i have

open game and i can build new gateways and new ways to onboard and off-board things we'll see i think we're already gonna we're already seeing it and a lot of folks are being coy about it too uh because they i mean if you're going to aggregate or accumulate in any way shape or form you want to do it before we run out right i mean 19.5 million are out there 21 million total a lot of them are accounted for and we're going to start really feeling the essence of supply constraints as this having kicks in what's interesting i guess is um if you put bitcoin with real estate also blackrock has a uh fixed income or a bond fund uh they're putting up to i think it's 15 of the fund in bitcoin oh wow it feels almost like uh a lot of investors are saying wait a second our

our core businesses, fixed income, real estate, whatever, we're going to try to juice our returns. But also what we're really doing is we're trying to outperform on a relative basis. So if I'm the only fixed income fund that puts even 1%, 5% of Bitcoin, and I'm able to increase my Sharpe ratio and drive a higher return,

now when an investor goes and says, I need to allocate to a fixed income fund, well, which one performed the best? That you're going to be at the top of the list. And they may not even realize the reason why they're juicing the return is because they've got a 1% allocation to Bitcoin. So it's like it's like this very unique thing. And to me, there's only 21 million Bitcoin.

So if Wall Street is going to embrace it in this way, it feels like this is really where kind of net new demand can come from for the foreseeable future. That alongside the nation states, we don't really know how much they'll accumulate and and if it starts to be successful for them. So, you know, we we held gold for a hundred for a hundred years because it was a balance of payments. Right. Mercantilism and Bretton Woods, Bretton Woods, too. we held oil because through the 70s, because basically the OPEC, we became the OPEC dollar instead of the gold, gold reserve dollar. This is a new era. And if the if countries, even the United States find that it's gives us strength. Remember, we're kind of like a household, we've got a lot of debt, we've got a lot of interest on that debt. And we've got to have

hard real assets underneath it in order to have a balanced sheet. And so I think you'll start seeing some positives out of that. And they may accumulate even more than we anticipate or and Loomis is very bullish on it as well. And she's at the head of this in this in the Senate subcommittee. Do you see a world where the United States or other countries would actually sell part or all of their gold reserves to replace it with Bitcoin? Or do you think that most of these countries are going to do kind of net new purchases? They'll keep the gold reserves and then they'll add Bitcoin to the reserves that they have. That's an interesting question. I mean, I could see I see the use case of, OK, gold is very stable. Right. So you really don't ever want

to take it off the balance sheet. But and there's groups that are mining it. But I would say that You've probably seen net new for most groups, maybe some balancing over time because, you know, what is it? Nineteen trillion is the market cap for gold. We're at about two trillion. So we'd have to the price if we got parity would be about nine X that it is today. If that happened, there may be more argument for that. But that's an interesting point. Will they buy new or will they sell off something to to accumulate? And who's going to mine it as well? Like who's going to make it a part of their infrastructure? I love what Saylor said is that the first country that prints their own money to buy Bitcoin wins.

wins. And I think you're going to see, I mean, we know how to print money here in the US, right? We've been doing it exponential levels since pretty much the 1970s. And we've just kind of put just napalm to the gasoline with 08 crisis and then with the COVID crisis. So we know how to print money. And if that was the strategy, then we're pretty set for it. The printing presses are ready, right? I think right now we're adding $1 trillion to the national debt every 100 days. And so I previously came out and said that I thought we should print $250 billion, which I like the idea of printing money but uh it is that much of an urgent uh kind of national priority and it's less than 30 days of printing right like we're talking about uh a rounding error essentially

um and you're going into a market where there's you know called two trillion dollar or so market cap um you are gonna push the price up as you start to try to accumulate that much bitcoin um but you probably end up with i don't know three to five percent of the entire bitcoin network yeah right uh or uh the bitcoin that's available and so um that feels like a pretty good position to be sitting in is to be the number one country with the most bitcoin owning you know approximately five percent of all uh potential outstanding bitcoin um feels like you're kind of in the driver seat yeah i think you check the box as being the leader in the space uh and others are going to try to keep up with that uh overall and and it's a percentage of g of their gdp so that they they

really can't ever get to our level but they'll try to be somewhat of a parody as far as a percentage into their balance sheet. Yeah. How do you view, it feels like Bitcoin was the first asset in my lifetime for sure. And probably in a long time where individuals were able to adopt it before the institution, before the nation states, because they're very bottoms up, you know, type thing. And, you know, I've been doing this long enough now where I get messages on a weekly basis from people who say, Hey, back in 2017 to 2018, you know, I bought a little bit of Bitcoin. I just kept a dollar cost averaging into it. And now I'm retiring or, you know, I had a huge student debt And I've been able to pay that off or, you know, whatever the thing is, it feels like there's a very real kind of human story here of how this asset and a lot of like I'll call it the meme around it.

You know, buy a great asset, hoard it forever. Dollar cost average into it. These are timeless investing principles that people are using to actually acquire the asset. And it seems to be paying off. Yeah, absolutely. It's my favorite part, actually, about Bitcoin is other than having having it was like the big thing for me. Once I saw that, I said, wow, we're we're punishing producers as opposed to we reward producers here with reelections in most countries. That's why we get into these inflationary places. So, yeah, the human element is the coolest part. And when we started early, so I'm a few years later than you, about 16, 17, we were on the same time. I called him my engine nerds.

We would put out a press release that, hey, did you know you could put this in your retirement? And the guys would be retired IBM engineers, retired NASA engineers, or for folks that were forced back into the workplace after retiring because of the 08 crisis and the housing crisis that took to big enough hits to watch their stories and their narratives. One of them in particular, I was while I was walking down here from down, I was walking down Lexington and he called me. He's in Florida, Rocket, Rocket Ron. he's he was our 11th client and he actually we crashed our holiday party a few years back in vegas and he brought these hockey jerseys and they were bitcoin his daughter made him bitcoin ira i had the number one and he had a number 11 and so they're like i haven't hanging up on my wall just that because you change people it changes people's lives uh i was i was mentioning a couple weeks ago

with this executive order was coming out and kind of the construction of it this is the first time an executive order has come from the white house uh from an executive branch that is actually beneficial to the individual sovereignty of regular Americans. So if you go back 100 years and you look at FDR was, hey, we're going to take all the gold so that we can find our way out of the New Deal and get into get out of the Great Depression. And then the executive order to take us off the gold standard from Nixon in the 70s. These were all almost detrimental because it changed. It was what's good for the country, but not for the individual. We're an individualist society. We're a collective and we and we wear our flag proudly. But at the end of the day,

individual sovereignty is an important thing and watching people be able to take just take control you know that uh ron was uh he worked for nasa and he was a heat shield expert he retired from nasa and then he was done he thought he was done he was going to enjoy his his golden years uh and he uh he got pushed back into the workforce because of his 401k took so many hits in the 08 crisis just it was a bloodbath for a lot of folks so he went back and worked somewhere i think siemens or something and once he was able to i remember the day he called me he was like Chris, I am now re-retired and I'm so happy, but he couldn't stay that way. Now he does. So the heat shield guys are the guys you can't replace. So like at SpaceX and Titan and Blue

Origin, they've got AI running and they got young kids, you know, youngsters that are building all kinds of cool stuff. But the guys from NASA that knew how to keep the heat shield intact, he's actually down at the lab today working on some kind of space age thing that's going to get us to Mars. That's the re-entry of the heat shield. That's like hardware that these guys have in their brains. And so he does it for fun now. He's he's back working because it's his passion, not because he has to. And that's what Bitcoin can do for people. It really it really can change their lives. It's amazing. What are you seeing with people putting it into their retirement accounts? Right. Like that that to me feels like your retirement account by nature really forces

you to be a long term thinker. Yeah. And there are penalties if you want to take money or value out of that thing. And so you guys have built an entire product around this. What do you see there that people are doing? And maybe are there tips or tricks that you see that people should be doing, whether it's buying ETF or buying spot Bitcoin or anything like that? Yeah. Well, to the ETF, like I said in 2019, because remember that was when they first started talking about it at 18, they said, hey, ETFs are coming out. And everybody was excited. I said, I was the one guy that I applaud ETFs because it's mainstream adoption. It's easy. Click, click on a Fidelity 401k account, you have access. But to me, ETFs were a lot like putting gas in a

Tesla. It didn't quite make sense. You're forcing a new age product into an old age old age infrastructure. So but folks kind of blend it out. But most of our folks are purists at heart. They want to hold the real thing, have it in a one to one ratio and and and also know that it's in a cold storage segregated wallet. And it's the real thing, just like there's folks that like to buy a real estate asset, like a physical house or a building, as opposed to a REIT or an ETF for that same with gold buyers. They like to have the bars or the coins in a safe somewhere as opposed to an ETF, because there are pros and cons to both, right? There's ratio changes, camels change, requirements for those groups change. Also, we haven't seen a mass liquidation

event out of the ETF yet. I'm curious to see what that looks like, because we saw when ETH staking got really big and there was the race to the exits back in 22, the line got long, right? The queue got really long. So it'll be interesting to see how that all works. For us, our platform was designed to make it so you could just easily open an account, fund it in three ways. You could contribute, which is really common. You get your max contribution every year. You can roll over an old 401k, 403b, or you can take and transfer an existing IRA that you have. Folks will take a piece of that and put it over. Part of the reason I think we have a retirement crisis in this country is because people are apathetic about their retirement. They think it's just

something that I said it and I forget it and it's there for years and it'll hopefully be there and maybe I'll make a little bit of rate like compound interest. But then you get to the finish line and you're like, oh no, I didn't keep up. Northwest Mutual just came out with a piece. They took like 5,000 people and surveyed them in 2019. Said, how much do you think you need to comfortably retire? And the number was about 550, 600,000. In just three years, they went back to the same 5000 people. Now it's 1.5 million because people just can't keep up. I'm sure you're feeling that even just your mom and others like it's my dad. He's I don't know if they'll retire. I don't know. It's not on the it's not their short term game plan isn't a date that I'm

going to retire. And I think that's what most America is feeling right now. So not it's not like Bitcoin is your catch up tool, but it's a diversification piece that you could be left behind in this retirement crisis ahead because you take back from the generation before us, our generation, which is, we've just been hit every way, right? I mean, I was graduating high school and the towers fell. I was getting out of college when I said the house is burned because it was the fall of the housing crisis. And then I'm a small business owner building up this platform when COVID happens. We've just had to fight our way up. And the next generation is almost becoming complacent about it. Except for, I don't know if your kids are into this, but my daughter,

she has some earned income from some commercials. And then she works for dad. She does like, puts together envelopes, stickers on things. And she puts it all into her Roth IRA with Bitcoin and Ethereum. Those are her two favorites. And she had she has me check it every day. You know, she likes to see how it's going. She's watching it on. She text messaged me. Hey, dad, you see Bitcoin this morning? You're trying to get them at least engaged in it because it's not supposed to be a boring part of your it's not something you just set for getting. It's there. It's not like pensions from the past. This isn't our grandfather's economy. You've got to actively be a participant in your retirement planning. One of the things that I think really resonated

with me is uh the generation before us kind of the boomer generation they had housing like that makes up you know approximately 50 percent of the net worth uh they were basically able to convert dollars into an asset hold that asset for a very long period and watch it just grow and the dollar got devalued and the asset price went up um most millennials and younger actually feel priced out or many of them feel priced out of the housing market and so i say that uh like satoshi gave us a different set of keys yeah right and basically they're now using bitcoin there's no down payment. There's no approval of a mortgage. There's liquidity. So if they ever need to sell, like there's a lot of advantages, you know, carrying costs to the home, et cetera,

you can't live in it. Right. So it's kind of a different component there. But it does feel like an entire generation is realizing, hey, we can use this thing. Now, what's interesting about the retirement accounts is people of all ages have retirement accounts. So, you know, you have a young child, they're using it all the way up to people who literally are about to hit retirement. And so if it's good enough for your kind of traditional portfolio, usually it's actually pretty good for the retirement portfolio as well, right? Yeah, absolutely. We actually did a case study in 2020 where we figured out that 75% of our clients were born before 1976, which was just a shocker because most folks think Bitcoin, especially even a few years ago, was it's a young man or woman's game to have the older generation embracing it at the level that they were, especially with retirement. And these are folks from all walks of life.

They're not all like Rocket Ron where they're all nerds and things. There's Nurse Nancy from Missouri that was, she thought she was going to have to work her entire career. And now she's retired early and traveling the world with her grandkids. And so everybody has their reason. I think a big thing is to find your why as you're planning your retirement. Just like in any business or any life plan is know your finish line. What am I intending to do? It's not just about stacking dollars and then golfing every day, unless you are a big golfer.

I don't think I can do that. But it's all about what am I going to do with that time? because everything that's the most scarce asset we have other than maybe Bitcoin is the time that we have here with our family and their friends and building our dreams. And so for them, I think retirement is a big place where diversification is key. And it's cool. You know, what's really cool to watch is the folks that have been successful from 16, 17, 18 that have gone from, you know, 50,000 to a couple million dollars because they got in early and just huddled. They're planning what they're going to do next. And they're going back to the traditional assets.

So they use that key, like you said, Satoshi gave us a new key, that key opened up a whole new set of keys. And now they're not priced out of the market. Now they're able to go into and do investment property, invest, diversify themselves into real estate and house flips. And we've got a guy, my favorite one is he actually put, he lives in an agrarian area in eastern Kentucky, and he, he buys with his IRA, he buys John Deere tractors, and then he leases those out to farmers nearby. And his business, though, is inside of his IRA. So the asset is held by the IRA. It actually holds John Deere tractors. And then his payments that he makes come back in in a tax-deferred, tax-free setting, which for crypto, what better place to be than some kind of tax umbrella? Would you agree? Absolutely. What do you actually see in terms of people putting assets into these retirement accounts? They're buying Bitcoin. What is like the impact of that? I think you said that after Trump got elected, you see like a significant increase in the value of people's portfolios. so our mission as a business is and it's been this way for a few years is to help americans retire and just yesterday i got a call they did a data point um trump has been helping people helping americans retire in our platform in particular since election day so we looked at election day to inauguration day and the average client has a 69 increase in their portfolio uh from in just that short amount of time so uh this is the moments that can happen now it's not always like

that you don't get 69 every quarter i mean if that'd be just unheard of we all know the volatility that happens. But these are long-term hodlers. Plus, we've also expanded. While we are a Bitcoin IRA, we've added because we listen to our clients. They wanted more. In 17, they wanted Ethereum. Later that year, they wanted XRP, and we had to support the first contentious fork with BCH. And then from there, it was all about adding what were they most interested in. We're up to, I think, about 80 different coins and tokens now. Obviously, of the 14 billion that we have assets under custody. The lion's share is Bitcoin and Ethereum. But you get some interesting ones that you get. I kind of say there's like a fanboy or cult mentality around some of these startup

projects that happen. People get really excited about them and sometimes they'll go all in on them or they'll put a piece of it towards it. But that's really kind of what you get is they get this excitement. I've never seen people more excited about their retirement accounts than in any financial instrument that I've worked in before. And are people like dollar cost averaging in? So they're saying, hey, every time I get a paycheck, put some money in are they doing like more lump sums what is the way that uh maybe you see people on the platform doing it and then are do you guys have kind of um suggested you know uh hey here's the the framework or the model you should think of in terms of how to fund these accounts yeah

so obviously you're you can do your up to eight thousand dollars a year in your contribution and we we're strong proponents of that you should maximize what you can put away because if you do it in a trad it's lowering your tax liability if you do it in a roth setting you're gonna have have tax-free distribution down the road. So it's a tool that the government gave us. Roth is actually named after a senator from Delaware because we had a savings crisis in America. And he said, we got to give them something. We have to incentivize them. These tools are available and it's so much better than taking a savings account and watching it grow and then having the capital gains implications whenever you liquidate and those things. So you

max out there. With 401ks, oftentimes they make you do like a lump sum rollover. They don't let you do piece and parcel. But that doesn't mean you get $100,000 shows up and you buy all Bitcoin or Ethereum that day. We are strong proponents of the dollar cost averaging and doing your research on any project that you're looking at. I see a lot of folks that will do, some people get really crazy about it. They'll do $100 a day for 100 days. Some folks, they just, they set it and forget it. They're like, here's my entry price. It makes it very easy for me. And then they're continually aggregating with their annuals that come over. But usually what you see is our average account starts around $35,000. We go as low as a $1,000 minimum. So you've got everything

down from there. But then after a few years, their average account size is about $150,000 to $175,000. And they're hodlers. They set it and they're excited about it. They check it regularly just to see how things are going and what we're up to and new things that we're adding and tools that we're building for them. And we try to keep them as engaged as possible. I'd have to say for a retirement asset, the highest engagement possible would be in the Bitcoin and crypto world. Yeah. And well, I guess it's also just, it's an asset that trades 24-7, 365. It's constantly in the news, right? There's all these components to it. What about taking things out, right? So people hit certain ages, the tax incentives start to kind of kick in,

et cetera. Like what do you see kind of on the other end, right? A lot of people are young. So it's like, hey, get money into there, go buy this stuff. But what about on the kind of- We see it in two ways. So we also see inheritance. So grandpa passes away and now the grandkids have come in and found out like most of them didn't even know grandpa bought Bitcoin. And when you see an inheritance in a traditional financial vehicle, and you can ask anybody that does any of that kind of legal work is they just sell it to cash as fast as they can split up the cash and move on. Right. Not in crypto. They're so excited that they're like, hey, can I keep holding this? I don't want to get rid of grandpa's Bitcoin. I can't believe he did this. He left.

What a great legacy to leave for me and my family. So that's one piece of it. The other piece is you once you reach 59 and a half, you're eligible for distribution. Once you reach 72, you're required to take distribution out of some settings. The beauty of self-directed IRAs and the way that we've structured our platform is you don't have to liquidate to dirty dollars to fulfill that distribution requirement. You can take out in kind. So you can do it on our platform. We can just open up a brokerage or a non-IRA and easily transfer it over and it just stays there. And it's kind of like what you would do at Fidelity, moving things over. Or if you're really savvy and you're like, not my keys, not my crypto kind of guy,

then you can open up a cold wallet and we'll go through the micro testing, whitelisting and all those things to transfer the asset out of the wallet that we had for your IRA into the wallet that you want to hold long-term. That is probably the most common distribution method that we see.

People want in-kind. Yeah, they want to take it in-kind because they're not done holding it yet. They're looking at the Tom Lees and all the projections of 250, 300, the sailors that say it's going to be a million a coin. And if they don't need the cash right now, they'll take it out in kind and just longer, hold it longer term, which is pretty, pretty

interesting. What, what is the tax treatment on the distributions just for the people who don't know how these, these IRAs work? So it's, it's ordinary income. So, and that's why you want to distribute later in life, right? Because you're not, you're not at that point in time where you're a peak earner. So you're not at the highest tax bracket. Most folks are in that 10, 15% tax bracket. What's really nice though, is when you're inside the portfolio, you can buy and sell all day long. If you're an avid trader and you're trying to move things around, you're not going to have to face up to the 15% or 25% capital gains taxes. I did a study back in 2016. I went to, I think, Puerto Rico for a conference, and I needed a talking point. I put together what was known

back then as the $100 million mistake or $50 million mistake. I put two guys, each gave them $5,500 and gave them the hindsight of they bought at the pennies, sold at the peak in 2013, gave like all the same trades, but the guy that was in the IRA setting had $50 million more at the end of it. And this was back 16, 17. I'm guessing it's probably a half billion dollar mistake now of just that, because every time your purchasing power goes down, right? You're, you can buy less of the asset because you have to ante up to uncle Sam before you can go back in, uh, with the IRA, you don't have to do that. So, and then when you hit distribution age, uh, with Roth is really beautiful. Uh, you can take like my daughter will plan if she goes to college. I don't know if

you're having this conversation with your kids yet. I think they're a little younger than mine. she just turned 11. If she goes to college, she could use it for higher education expenses. So you can take it out of a Roth, tax-free, no penalties, and do it. And you can also do the same thing for first-time home buying expenses in certain situations. So those are two tools you have. And then if you're just taking it out in a Roth setting, it is 100% tax-free. And I think that's the most powerful tool that folks don't take advantage of in today's marketplace. But it makes complete sense, right, is if you can use this because the tax incentive is available. One of the things I always tell people is the tax code is there for everybody, right?

It doesn't matter who you are, where you come from, what your education level is. Like, everyone gets the same set of rules. You've got to understand it, though, to use it to your advantage. And obviously, if you're fortunate enough to have a dad who understands it right, then you probably end up in a better situation. She's actually been on a podcast with me. Well, what's crazy about it is I wish that more parents would teach their kids this stuff. Yeah. Well, they don't just harder. Right. I mean, we went through school. I don't remember tax planning 101 in high school or college. I don't remember. I mean, I remember we had this

thing called a Maritown in like fifth grade where they taught us how to write a check and balance a checkbook. That was about as far as it went. But there was nothing about how to invest, how taxes work, what long term savings is, what's compounding interest. These are things that you kind of have to go and do yourself. You have to learn yourself. And, you know, the conspiracy theorists out there will say, well, that's how you control society. Right. Because if we're the more educated we are, the more powerful we can be. Because you meet with some of these tax planners and things as you, I mean, we've matured in our success. And you're like, wow, I wish I would have known that trick five years ago, right? But you just have to keep yourself, the financial

literacy is a big issue in this country. It's crazy. It's absolutely insane how bad it is. One of the things that I found is when people are asking me about Bitcoin, yesterday, I was talking to somebody and he's an older guy, he runs a financial advisor business, and he's not a bitcoin guy he's actually was like this is like made up internet money like you know whatever right and um there were some other people in the room and one of the things that i took away from it was uh i said look you know you have this retirement account people kind of feel like it's their money but you know it's not like it's their brokerage account or their dollars they could spend today and so i said why don't you put one percent of the retirement account in not not one

percent of your entire portfolio but just like out of the retirement account and it actually was much better received because people were kind of like oh this is like you know 20 or 30 year money Yeah. Let me let me give it a shot. Right. So what is your pitch to people? You know, if you get to sit down and you get 60 seconds with somebody and you're like, hey, this is why you should put Bitcoin in your retirement account. So I think the biggest thing is not being left behind. This is a this is a revolutionary monetary policy instrument. It's we've been through what I've been through 10 years of this. Others have been through 15 years of it. We've been beaten, battered, left behind. But now we're center stage and the executive order that just came out is going to open floodgates of investment from institutions and individuals that at one point in time felt uneasy about it because they kind of follow the path, right? They follow the mob mentality of, oh, if Bitcoin is dangerous, I mean, it's notorious to get it into an Uber in any city. And I have my like Bitcoin backpack on or something. It's like, oh, there's years where they're like, oh, are you OK?

And then there's years where they're like, man, I totally missed out on that. is I think the big thing is you have to get off zero. Start somewhere. If it's just, hey, we're about to hit April. A lot of folks don't know this, but you can do your contribution from last year up until April 15th and then this year's contribution as well. So if you're over 50, that's $16,000 that you can benefit yourself on your tax bill and put into long-term savings. Start there. What a great place to start. You have to kind of take the leap and start. And it's not, you don't go all in. Some people do. And I understand that's their mentality that they're betting all their chips, just like a guy that pushes all on red at the

roulette table. I get that. That happens. But at least push something onto the table because you're just going to keep kicking yourself. You know, my favorite memes are the ones where they show the guy that's like 60,000 Bitcoin. Oh, take my money. And then 55,000. Oh, I'm so glad I didn't buy that. And then 75,000. Take my money again. We've got to break that mentality where that because we're driven by fear and greed, right? That's what most human beings are driven by. You've got to learn to take that out of the equation and just get started somewhere and find that allocation that you're comfortable with. Most folks will start. We'll see somebody that's got a million dollars in their 401k because they've worked somewhere for 30, 40 years and they'll start with two thousand bucks. But then a year later, they've now added more, added more, added more as they get that comfort level to the best way to get comfortable with Bitcoin is have experience with it.

buy some. Even if I sit at this. So in L.A., there's this coffee shop. It's a Starbucks, but down the street from my house. And there's this old man group. And I was going by there and I would like make a few jokes. They called me corporate because I would always come in and suited booty ready. And then one day I just decided to sit down and get to know them. And almost all of them were anti Bitcoin at the beginning because it was the year it was the rough years. It was the 19 or the 22, 23 years. And now almost all of them have an account because just over time, they hear me talk about it. And I'm not the guy that's like, oh, you're going to get rich with this, is that this just makes common sense. If there's a new tool in the overall

economy and people are using it, not just guys that were ahead of the curve, but now you've got nation states, you've got institutions, you've got individual sovereignty. These folks are getting involved in this. At some point, you've got to get your foot in the game. Otherwise, you will, you're already, I think we're all behind on retirement. I feel behind on retirement. And I'm and I'm a retirement guy. Uh, I think everybody feels that way, but you know, as Americans, we're kind of like emotion reverse. So we'll, we'll kind of just push it away. You know, you put it underneath the, uh, the rug, push it under the rug. It'll be, I'll deal with it later. Uh, but sometimes dealing with those, those tough realities is, is where you get the most growth

as an individual. And I think it's a great place to start is this year. You know what? I'm going to max out my contribution. That's like just a simple goal. I'm going to make sure that I put my eight or $7,000 away. And I'm going to put it there and I'm going to decide what tokens or Bitcoin or, or other assets that I'm interested in doing that. Just start there. I mean, you have to start somewhere. Yeah. It's a, it's a no brainer. I think, I think every single person should go and look at this. Where can we send people to open up an account or learn more about the product? So obviously you can go to just Bitcoin IRA.com. We actually have forward slash pomp. So, and you can call our phone line. That's, this is something I'm really proud of about our

platform is. You can't call Coinbase. You can't call Kraken. These large groups, these guys built amazing platforms, but they forgot the human piece of this. We've always committed to the human touch. We're talking about people's retirement money. Holy grail. So we've got folks that will answer the phone within about 90 seconds or less as our SLA, except for if it's like a crazy day, might go to 120 seconds. But talk to somebody. We have retirement vice presidents and juniors of Retirement Solutions. Most of these guys have been with me for about 10, some of them 12 years. So they're committed to this. They've helped thousands of folks get themselves onboarded. Have a conversation. See if your 401k is eligible. Find out what your max contribution is.

Determine, you know, their steps, their simples. There's all these tools that are available that we can teach you about. So start there. You can call. The number is actually memorized at 877-936-7175. And for the fans of Pomp, we have a special that we put together. So make sure that you mention that you heard about us on Pomp or use the link that's provided. And we've got some special rewards and things like that for your audience. We're excited to share this with your folks. Bitcoin IRA dot com slash Pomp. Yep.

Easy to remember. Can't forget it. Yeah. Thanks so much for doing this. I think you guys are building an amazing platform. Obviously, people putting Bitcoin in their retirement account is kind of a no brainer. I've done it. I think a lot of people are interested in doing it.

So we'll hopefully send some people over your way. I had a question for you, by the way. So you thank you for your service. You're a military guy. You went out when and fought for our freedoms and those things. Where do you want the country to be in 10 years? Like what's what's your what would if you could manifest things, if you could whisper in Trump's ear or the next or J.D. Vance's ear? Where do you want us to be?

Are we headed down that right path? What are you looking for? Let the let the people decide. I like to get out of the way. Right. And I think you see them starting to do that. that's kind of the promise of their campaign was, hey, we're going to deregulate. We're going to let people speak freely. We're going to let people transact freely. We're going to kind of give power

back to the people. But, you know, I don't think that any one person can dictate, hey, here's where we should go or this is the best path. I think that the beauty of America is give the power to the people and let them take us. And you see, you know, recently, Boom Supersonic is a plane that went supersonic. It's the fastest plane that broke the sound barrier that was privately developed. Yeah. How cool is that, right? Like, let the people do what they want to do. Bitcoin is a great example of this.

I think there's going to be many others. And so just, you know, give the power back to the people and they'll take us to the promised land. That's where innovation comes from. Get out of the way. What Reagan said, I'm the government. I'm here to help is the worst thing you can do. A hundred percent. Well, thanks for having me, Dave.

I really appreciate it, man. Of course. Thank you for doing this. We'll do it again in the future.