We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC011: Bitcoin & Traditional Finance w/ Andy Edstrom (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to our Wednesday release of the podcast where we're bringing you more information about Bitcoin. What an exciting week for Bitcoin news. We had legendary investor Ray Dalio say, I believe Bitcoin is one hell of an invention. We also had Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, put only one word in his bio on Twitter, and you guessed it, the word was Bitcoin. He also commented that I'm a supporter of Bitcoin and it's on the verge of broad acceptance.

Starting point is 00:00:28 So now that Bitcoin's starting to get a lot of attention, I'm going to have a conversation with a friend who's a money manager and a person who can talk about his perspective of dealing with clients who are trying to buy Bitcoin for the very first time. My guest is Andy Edstrom. He's the author of the book, Why Buy Bitcoin, Investing Today and the Money of Tomorrow. We cover topics like ETFs, what sizing is appropriate for your portfolio, what regulatory hurdles still need to be overcome and much, much more. So without further delay, here's my interview with Andy Edstrom. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. All right.

Starting point is 00:01:20 So like we said in the introduction, I'm here with Andy Edstrom and very excited to have this conversation because Andy, we've done, I don't know how many shows together, other people's podcast, but you and I have never had a one-on-one conversation like this. So I'm really excited to dive into this. Preston, I have a great time. I have fun every time we talk, so I am psyched to get into it. Well, let's do it. So here's what I want to start off with is just kind of your opinions on the market in general,

Starting point is 00:01:48 not even talking about Bitcoin, but just macro. You want to talk about equities, whatever. But I'll throw this out there and just kind of hear your thoughts. The NASDAQ did 43% last year, which was just insane considering the circumstances of COVID and everything else. The SMP did significantly worse, 16%. If you're comparing those, you know, those two performances, I mean, it's almost like they're in two different universes when it comes to investing. So I'm just kind of curious, just some of your general thoughts on that in itself.

Starting point is 00:02:22 Yeah, it's been a strange time in financial markets, to say the least. I've been in markets for about two decades now. And it's interesting to observe some of the trends, sort of, you know, what's, what's different this time, what isn't? I'm of two minds and I'm conflicted. So on the one hand, I feel like the growth trade is pretty extended. In other words, the entire decade, right, of 2010 to 2020, has been growth just beaten the pants off of value. As you know well, because I remember You've talked about earlier in your learnings and your sort of evolution as an investor, you start as a value investor, you know, Warren Buffett, all that good stuff.

Starting point is 00:03:06 Historically, a decade of outperformance tends to be about as long as it goes for growth versus value. And usually you get a reversion or value will surge back. Sometimes it's in the context of a major market correction or a bear market because growth valuations get extended. You get to 20 and then 30 and 40 and 50 times earning. and then people's rosy assumptions about the growth rates as some of these companies, you know, eventually run into reality.

Starting point is 00:03:33 Meanwhile, those left for dead, cheap value companies finally get bought. However, we are living through, as you know, a major shift between the industrial age and the information age. And so one has to be cognizant of that potentially being different this time. And so there's this constant struggle in my mind between, oh, how long in the tooth is this growth rally and when will we get a reversion to value versus, oh, wait, most of the economic growth is into software and automation and internet-enabled businesses, network-enabled businesses and entities like Bitcoin. And so, yeah, it's a,

Starting point is 00:04:16 it's a really tough call. I definitely think that valuations are pretty stretched. I think that investors are doing their DCF calculations like you like to talk about based on near- zero or very long-term interest rates. And so you get to sort of goofy valuations if you're assuming that, you know, the 30-year treasury is going to yield very, very low single digits in perpetuity. And that's where I think we are right now. It makes me nervous. So, Andy, I came up with a theory just kind of recently as I was looking at the NASDAQ chart and you and I are seeing each other right now. And I'm going to share my screen with you so you can kind of see what I'm looking at. And all I'm looking at is a chart of the NASDAQ over the

Starting point is 00:05:00 last, call it, I don't know, six to seven to eight years. Can you see the chart that I'm sharing with you, Andy? Yes. So when I'm looking at this, and I think everyone's accustomed to this narrative that we have six to eight year kind of business cycles, you know, historically. And ever since 2008, 2009, this thing has been relentless. And the duration of this bull market that we've seen is just unprecedented. But when I look at this chart and I zoom into various areas and you can see I'm zooming in. For people listening, I'm going to the end of 2015. The market started having this, it was kind of throwing a fit. And you went through, I mean, it was a very short period of time. The market went down negative 25%. And then immediately recovered, central bankers stepped in,

Starting point is 00:05:48 And everyone said that they had unlimited amounts of stimulus and QE that they could add. And this was probably around in the February of 2016 timeframe. I remember, Draghi came out over in Europe. And lo and behold, the market takes off again. Then fast forward a couple years into the future. We're in 2018, September of 2018. The market throws another fit. And it drops aggressively, this time 23%.

Starting point is 00:06:15 Central bankers step in. They say all their things, right? We fast forward again into 2020. And we all know we're all accustomed to this recent fit that dropped the 30%. They step in with unprecedented stimulus. So my question is this, as I'm describing this and we're looking at this chart, my question is, is the new business cycle post-2008, 2009, one of just total manipulation that plays out in a much tighter time frame,

Starting point is 00:06:44 but in which nominal prices just keep going up? Because when you look at the chart, it looks like that. Yeah, I love the phrase, it wasn't my original, but, you know, recessions are illegal. And even you could say bear markets are illegal. I am a big believer in the tail wagging the dog here in the wealth effect being so important in the U.S. stock market, which is now, I don't know, it went from 100% of GDP to 150% of GDP to, I don't know, it's probably like 175 now if I had to guess. And granted, this is the, you know, you're looking at the, you're looking at the,

Starting point is 00:07:18 triple Q, so this is just the tech sector. But as we know, tech, broadly speaking, you know, is now like whatever a quarter of the index. They can't let things normalize. It's not allowed. If things did normalize, then anyone with wealth, which is basically a large percentage of population, which has a propensity to spend, although granted rich people that own stocks spend less on the margin than folks that don't, we'll have a big problem if prices actually normalize. So I do think that we are stuck in this cycle now. They have to keep stimulating. It's going to be, yeah, it's going to be financial market driven pullbacks and recessions

Starting point is 00:07:58 that we see in the future. But this is going to be the game until, unless and until we get, you know, significant, quote, unquote, inflation. And I'm talking about consumer price inflation. Obviously, we see the inflation in assets. But I think that the Fed thinks that it can just keep doing this in perpetuity until finally they get a rise in inflation. So when I say they're, when they say that they're going to deliver inflation, I kind of believe them. We'll see what happens. My concern is you have all these people

Starting point is 00:08:28 in money management and the talking heads on CNBC. And I suspect everyone's looking for that event where the market sells off for two or three years and drops and has another 2008, 2009, or a 2000 kind of crash that would include this 12-year, 11-year bull market, whatever you want to call it, since 2008-2009 time period. I think everyone's looking for that. But I just don't necessarily buy the idea that it's going to happen. And I think a lot of it comes down to the interest rates. We haven't had interest rates. They're down at zero. They can't let them drop 5% like they did on all these other previous, quote-unquote, traditional boom bus cycles. So it sounds like you agree that maybe the cycle is shortening itself so that it happens every year, every two years,

Starting point is 00:09:18 and then the reflation is just. And the stakes are too high because because of the amount of leverage in the system, and I'm talking about leverage also in the equity markets, also on corporate balance sheets, just, you know, on households. I mean, it's everywhere, as you know. Debt is just record levels as a percent of GDP. If they let it unwind, then you'd get cascading, you know, you get cascading liquidations, right? This was the moment that the Fed had in March. It was when the Treasury market fell out

Starting point is 00:09:47 of bed. And I don't remember if it was just the long end of the curve or it was also the, you know, the middle of the curve. But basically, Treasury started selling off, and that's not supposed to happen, right? Treasuries are supposed to rally when there's risk off. And so if treasuries are falling when there's risk off, you know that the system is well and truly threatened. I think that the Fed and other central banks have realized that basically a major downturn in equities or risk markets will filter through to credit. And when the credit market goes, all hell breaks loose. This can't happen.

Starting point is 00:10:22 So Andy, let's transition into your financial manager. You have lots of experience doing this. And I'm kind of curious, when somebody comes to you and they say, hey, I'm interested in buying Bitcoin. You obviously have a response to them. but I'm kind of curious how some other peers or people that or stories that you've heard from other financial managers, what you're hearing them tell their clients as they say, hey, I want a 1% position or a 5% position in Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:10:53 What are they most people hearing back from financial planners and managers? It's a great question, Preston. I think the major problem that a lot of wealth managers face or that they articulate or that they're worried about is I don't have a product that I think is safe enough, compliant enough. Basically, I'm worried about getting sued by my client if I lose money in Bitcoin. My personal view on that, and I think I'm the exception, is that given what I know about Bitcoin, what the valuation potential is, i.e. the upside potential, as well as potentially the value of the hedge against inflation. Given how important it is to a client's portfolio,

Starting point is 00:11:34 own, it's hard for me to see how I wouldn't buy it for them, even with an imperfect product. In other words, it's a business. There's a classic concept in law. It's usually invoked in law, which is like there's legal questions and there's business questions, right? And to me, this is like kind of a business question. It's like, yeah, maybe there isn't a perfect product out there. Although there are several products that have come to market and that are growing.

Starting point is 00:12:00 You know, basically there's a whole world of options that are now of. available that weren't there a few years ago. So there's more. But I would say that's the main thing that people come to me with, the advisors come to me with. They say, look, I can't get it past my compliance department or I don't have the perfect product. So I'm not willing to take the risk. And so they just push them to an exchange like Cracken and say, hey, do it yourself? Yeah, it's, they prefer not to admit that to me, I guess. But I think that's got to be practically what happens is they, you know, they probably end up at Coinbase is my best guess in many cases. Wow. You know, I never even really thought of that challenge for a lot of them from a compliance

Starting point is 00:12:42 standpoint. But now that you say, I mean, it makes some sense. So tell us how you think about that from a compliance standpoint. I guess the Holy Grail, well, okay, as we know, the Holy Grail in terms of an investable product for wealth managers, for financial advisors, obviously is an ETF. And that doesn't exist yet. So next best is an SEC qualified custody product, which also does not exist. So short of that, you know, there are various fund structures out there. They all had their own pros and cons and various amounts of hair on them. There's several sort of direct buy options. I mean, there's DIM has one. The NIDIG guys have one. You know, Eagle Burke has one. There's several out there. and those come with their own hair as well.

Starting point is 00:13:29 Then, of course, there have been hedge fund structures around for a long time, limited partnerships. So we all know there's great scale. And that's a trust and it trades at a premium and it's not sort of a normal way, financial filer. And so none of these things are perfect. As you know, I'm working with Swan, which is a private client product. None of these things are perfect. But I think as an advisor, you say to yourself, well, I want the sort of clearly SEC qualified silver bullet solution. And we just don't have that yet. And I don't think we'll have that. I mean, to me,

Starting point is 00:14:01 that happens at 100K Bitcoin, right? So you probably miss a triple, you know, from here if you wait for that. Why wouldn't grayscale fit into a category that would be considered quote unquote qualified? They're a trust structure. By the way, you know, if you buy it on the secondary, then it does show up on your 1099 form, which is kind of like your normal brokerage form. Although they have a different form if you subscribe at net asset value. And that means you're doing subscription documents and qualifications and you're, you know, sending wires and stuff. You can't just buy it in the brokerage account.

Starting point is 00:14:33 And they are not, you know, sort of SEC qualified as far as I know. As far as I know, no, basically no asset manager has a, has a literally SEC qualified product, SEC approved product out there. And so that's kind of the downside as well as obviously the, you know, the premium to net asset value. I didn't even go through the whole, you know, laundry list. I mean, there's, you know, 3 IQ has a fund. I mean, obviously the Skybridge guys have come to market with a fund. Bitwise has been out there actually for a while, you know, having done all that good research on where's the real transaction volume in the Bitcoin markets, how much of it is fake?

Starting point is 00:15:12 But those are some of the downsides of Grayscale, as well as the fees, which are pretty high. I want to get back to Grayscale, but before we do that, what are your thoughts on Gary Gensler coming in as the new SEC chairman. Tell people a little bit about who he is and what his background is and then your thoughts on whether some of these regulations are going to change under his watch. So Gensler comes from the dark side of finance, just like me. He's an ex-Goldman partner. I was never a partner at Goldman, by the way. I was a lowly plebe, as some on the show like to say. And yeah, so he knows the financial world inside and out. Obviously, he was chairman of the CFTC. I think it was under Obama.

Starting point is 00:15:55 And he has taught courses at MIT on blockchain and crypto, quote unquote, blockchain and crypto. I assume that he understands Bitcoin better than most. And so at least he kind of sort of probably knows what he's doing. I think that he was actually maybe on record about concerns about Ripple being a security or XRP being a security years ago. And so at least, you know, he should know what he's talking about. about, which is arguably an improvement from some regulators, let's say people in regulation. I don't know if I'm going to name names, but it's been kind of a mixed bag.

Starting point is 00:16:35 In some respects, we've been really lucky. Obviously, we were blessed with Brian Brooks. So I would say that Gensler is on the net, probably positive, you know, for this industry and for Bitcoin. In the show notes, we'll drop Gary Todd at MIT, taught this course that Andy's talking about It's a 24 lesson course. Each lesson is an hour long and he goes in depth on how this stuff works. Quite fascinating to be able to get an MIT education on the topic from the SEC incoming chairman.

Starting point is 00:17:08 It's pretty neat. So over to the gray scale, why is nobody else able to compete with them in this space? It makes no sense to me that they have so much market share and they don't have any competitor. What is causing that? I wish I knew all of the discussions, you know, between the regulators and the various parties that have fund products now. You know, in fairness, Bitwise, has made a move. You know, they have, they now have effectively a similar trust structured product that is, that is trading. Although theirs is an index product.

Starting point is 00:17:40 And obviously, it's heavily, you know, skewed to Bitcoin. But of course, it had some holdings in, in XRP, which they liquidated quickly after the, you know, the lawsuit came to light from the SEC, which was a good move. in retrospect because price fell further. But they also have a Bitcoin fund, but it's not yet trading on the secondary. And so if you ask me, like, how come Grayscale was able to bring this product to market and guys like, I don't know, Bitwise couldn't follow soon with a similar structure on just Bitcoin? I wish I knew the answer about that. I've asked the question so many times and I just cannot find any answer from anybody. Yeah. Here's an idea of pressing, which is, because Grayscale, I think, came to market in like 2013.

Starting point is 00:18:22 maybe or 14. It was a while ago. I wonder if there was a change in regime in terms of regulator. In other words, if we had the election in 2016, like for example, I don't mean to single odd bitwise, but I'm not sure that they were in the market with a product yet. So if you sort of had, I don't know, if a grayscale sort of got grandfathered in under the Obama administration, I don't know, I'm just spitballing here. Maybe it got harder to get through the gates after you had the change in administration. It has to be something like that. Here's what's really funny. So I made this comment on Twitter one time.

Starting point is 00:18:55 Barry himself, and Barry Silver, just the guy who, the guy running the gray scale. And Barry responded to my question saying, how in the world do these guys not have any competitors in the space? Barry responded, and he said, and you know what? No one's made an offer to us to try to buy us either. And I was just, I was just, it made my eyebrows go straight up. Like, how is that even possible? How are the black rocks of the world?

Starting point is 00:19:22 Watching his assets under management on this trust just exploding and them not trying to buy it or compete with it. I just cannot understand it. And I'll tell you what, if anybody's listening to this and you feel like you have a good inside scoop as to the why, please, please, I beg you, tweet at Andy and myself to let us know so that we can pass it out to the rest of the audience and people listen and they can all understand the rationale. My impression to Barry, and I don't know Barry at all, is that he's been pretty clear about creating a holding company structure in perpetuity, basically, you know, sort of a kind of a Berkshire-Hathaway type structure.

Starting point is 00:20:02 I don't know if he's going to ever go public or not, but I think he's indicated that he's taking a long-term view on these things. So I'm not sure that people think of him as an asset seller, you know, as a guy who's exiting positions. My impression of him is sort of a long-term builder. And so in that respect, I sort of doesn't shock me that, you know, nobody's made an approach at him to divest Grayscale, not least because Grayscale is so core to their business. And again, you know, there's, I'm not aware of any transparency into DCG, but I have to imagine the Grayscale is the cash cow that's driving the bus that's supporting, I mean, that plus Genesis, right, plus the trading desk that's supporting the overall structure.

Starting point is 00:20:43 while he's getting to make more venture-type bets in investments that aren't necessarily going to be cash flowing in the short term, but are supported by these other cash-flowing businesses like Grace Gale. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year, bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all over the world. many of them operating on the front lines of history. This is where you hear firsthand stories from people using Bitcoin to survive currency collapse, using AI to expose human rights abuses, and building technology under censorship and authoritarian pressures. These aren't abstract ideas. These are tools real people are using right now. You'll be in the room with about 2,000 extraordinary individuals, dissidents, founders, philanthropists, policymakers, the kind of people you don't

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Starting point is 00:24:54 Go to Shopify.com slash WSB. That's Shopify.com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. So the ticker for what we're talking about here with Grayscale is GBTC. I'm sure most people are familiar with the ticker. Andy, talked to people who are hearing this, who maybe have GBTC in their accounts. Where isn't it an advantage? Where is it a disadvantage? Talk to us about the ins

Starting point is 00:25:23 and outs, the pros, the cons, everything. So as we know, Bitcoin trades 24-7, trades 168 hours a week. So GBT only trades 40 hours a week because basically trades over the counter on the stock exchange. So that's a disadvantage in terms of your liquidity and availability. Now, on the other hand, if you're a human like me and not an alien, not being able to trade 24-7 may not be such a disadvantage because, you know, sometimes people do dumb things when they try to trade around the Bitcoin position, right? I like where you're going with this. That's a double-edged, yeah, it's a double-edged sort.

Starting point is 00:26:00 When you think about being able to exit a position, if you're talking about your Bitcoin exposure, like, you know, hey, I have to peel some off or like it really moons really quick and, you know, I got to get some liquidity, et cetera, et cetera. If you want to get cash dollars out of Bitcoin, you've got to go through the exchange system, right? At least as a retail guy. I mean, if you're large, you can go over OTC desks, right, over the counter desks. But similar concept.

Starting point is 00:26:25 Getting your dollars out, as we know, with the major exchanges, sometimes they go down. Sometimes they have problems with their banking relationships. When you say they go down, describe what you're talking about. Some people might think, what do you mean they go down? That's right. I'm talking about literally you can. You can't sign into your Coinbase account. You literally can't access your money.

Starting point is 00:26:46 So you can't trade out of Bitcoin into dollars. And also you can't wire money out of your Coinbase account into your bank account. But it's down for how long, half hour or something is what you're talking about. Like internet. Yeah, that's fair. Their servers are down, right? Right, exactly. There's servers are down.

Starting point is 00:27:05 I mean, I think the last outage was more than half an hour. I mean, I think it may have been hours, but don't quote me on. it. And some exchanges are known for these outages where others aren't. I think that's fair to say. And we're talking about coinbase. Exactly. Which is kind of shocking, considering how long they've been in business that they don't

Starting point is 00:27:25 run a tighter ship. So that's another potential disadvantage. And so if you're an investor, you might say, okay, I want to hold the bulk of my Bitcoin and cold storage, which if necessary, I can move to the exchange. move to the exchange and liquidate and hopefully wire to my bank account if I have to. But on the off chance that I don't have access, you know, maybe I want to hold some percentage in Bitcoin trust and GBTC. That would be an example of a scenario in which you might do that. You know, another advantage for somebody potentially is they just don't want to deal with

Starting point is 00:28:01 an exchange. They don't trust them or I don't know, they can't, somehow they can't figure out the, you know, the interface. I mean, I have older clients that are not. not very tech savvy, not very computer savvy. It's just easier for them to hold a security basically in their brokerage account. That'd be another reason to hold it instead. Another reason to hold it, which is maybe not a great reason, is the premium has been pretty persistent historically, although it's been falling lately. There may be opportunities to buy when the premium is quite low and even trade out at a

Starting point is 00:28:34 larger premium. You've got to be, I don't know, either clever or lucky to get the timing right. There have been periods in history when Bitcoin is traded down. The premium disappears, you know, goes near zero, basically into the single digits. I'm talking about on premium to net asset value, i.e. normally you pay, you know, whatever, $1.20 for a dollars worth of Bitcoin, if you buy the Bitcoin trust, GBTC, but at times, you only have to pay $1.5, let's say. And when you get the recovering the Bitcoin price, then often the premium goes higher in GBT

Starting point is 00:29:06 and you get effectively some extra juice on the upside. Again, that's a trade, right? That's not something you want to count on, but there have been times when it's paid off in the future. So long-winded answer your question, but those are some considerations and sort of reasons why one might want to hold the Bitcoin trust maybe in addition to a core Bitcoin portfolio or as a substitute. How about from an IRA standpoint?

Starting point is 00:29:32 IRA is a very good perspective. And, you know, I personally have one of these LLC structured self-directed IRAs where I can buy Bitcoin outright, basically with an exchange account. But it's a pain. There's a bunch of steps. You've got to do a bunch of paperwork. It costs a lot of money. I mean, relatively speaking, it costs quite a bit of money.

Starting point is 00:29:54 And so there's all those reasons not to do that. And, yeah, it's simpler. You got you got IRA money. It's already there. You got your, whatever, your Schwab account, your interactive broker's account. on your TD Ameritrade account and you just buy a GBTC and much, much, much simpler than going through all the brain damage of the self-directed LLC structure that I mentioned. Do you have people that come to you and say, you know, I think that FinTech is going to be huge.

Starting point is 00:30:23 I think that Bitcoin or something like it is going to just revolutionize the way that banking's working. And I want to have exposure to these companies. I want to own companies that are emerging in this space, but I'm not necessarily interested in owning Bitcoin itself. How do you respond to that person and what kind of guidance that you give them? The framework that I often see is the, yeah, is the picks and shovels analogy, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. Service providers. And part and parcel of that oftentimes is the diversification argument like, I don't know Bitcoin's the winner, so, you know, I want to own the company that's got exposure to all of crypto. Okay. That was a stronger argument a few years ago.

Starting point is 00:31:03 in 2017. Even then, Bitcoin looked pretty dominant, but there was some doubt. Now there isn't much doubt, so it's a weaker argument, I would say. Now, having said that, you know, when I look at the stock price, I look at the chart of Square, it's pretty impressive. It is very impressive. PayPal has done well, too. Not as well on a percentage basis, but arguably, that's just because they were already a pretty sizable company. I mean, Square has narrowed their lead, close the gap on PayPal in terms of valuation. But yeah, these companies have done really well. So there is a reasonable argument for fintech exposure. There's no doubt that these guys are taking a big bite out of the banking system in general. I get that argument. For me, the thesis on even just

Starting point is 00:31:53 digital gold is clearer than that in terms of valuation. But I don't. Don't begrudge somebody who comes with that perspective and says, and looks at the banking system and says, you know, this thing's a dinosaur, you know, smarter, faster, leaner software-based companies are going to take a chunk out of it because that's true. That's going to continue. All right. So we had a bunch of questions from Twitter that people wanted to ask you. One of the ones that I liked was talk to us about how you think the game theory is going to play out from here. Yeah. Are we talking about just in general in terms of adoption and companies and companies and. governments and all that stuff. I've said before that I think Bitcoin has already won and we can take the easy path or the hard path. And I think we're on the easy path. I think that it gets brought adoption. Why do you think that it's already won? First, explain that to us. Yeah, I just think it's too hard to kill. I do think that it has reached, as Michael Saylor

Starting point is 00:32:48 said, maybe said it on your pod, it's already reached well over $100 billion in value. and everything that is network native, that is internet native, that has reached that valuation, has been dominant. And we're well past that, right? We're almost even in order of magnitude bigger than that with Bitcoin. So that's one thing. Two is just obviously when you delve into the network topology and you understand proof of work and the incentives.

Starting point is 00:33:15 I mean, it's sort of hard to imagine that something else is going to beat it. Because you have so many miners and so many rigs just globally distributed in, that network effect that it's using shot 256 and all. That's what you're saying with that. Yes. And then, of course, additionally, just the additional layers being built on top, the exchange infrastructure, lightning for micropayments, the wallets, you know, the integration with the major fintechs, you know, like we're talking about it was Square and PayPal, which was relatively recent, all this stuff. I mean, Bitcoin is so, so entrenched. Money is a network, is a network effect concept. It's a protocol.

Starting point is 00:33:54 So all those reasons, I think that Bitcoin is already the dominant internet native hard money. And as we know, when you dematerialize things, like Saylor says, it'll dominate, basically it'll dominate the world. So it'll be the world's hard money. And then the question is, well, will people want hard money or soft money? And I take the view that they want hard. Have savings. Yeah. And that's a fair point, too, which is like, you know, is it money or is it not money?

Starting point is 00:34:24 today in its current form. Yes, it's a good saving vehicle. It accumulates value over time. Is it good for transactions? No, it's not good for transactions. Does that matter today? No, not at all. Will it ultimately be transactional money? Yes, if it reaches its potential. And in the meantime, it's just a monetary asset similar to gold, although better than gold, as you know, in several key ways. And so, yeah, I don't, in the colloquial definition of medium of exchange across space, as opposed to medium of exchange across time, I would say today Bitcoin is not good money, but it is an investable asset that is on its way to becoming very good money. And in the meantime, yes, it's a good story value. I might have lost the threat on the original question.

Starting point is 00:35:13 Well, you asked, why is it won already? So now getting to how the game theory plays out, I've actually been sort of surprised at how easy the path has been relatively. Regulatory barriers are falling away. I think people in power in the United States and other Western countries, and frankly, across the globe, realize that the thing can't be killed. And it is real important that the powers that be realized that the thing can't be killed because then they probably won't even try. And that seems to be the path we're on.

Starting point is 00:35:42 So you've already got, obviously, you had adoption by individuals, then you had family the offices. You've had a little bit in wealth management, but not a lot. And then, hello, you know, the corporates showed up, the insurance companies showed up. That surprised me. I didn't expect to see insurance companies show up in 2020. And so who's left? Pensions are left. Governments are left. And each of these categories of asset manager or asset holder or investor has its own set of facts and circumstances and limitations. And they have the their own timeline and their own adoption curves. So they're all sort of separate adoption curves piled on top of each other. And they all have their own timelines. But there aren't too many

Starting point is 00:36:29 filters left or there aren't too many new pools of capital where there's literally zero allocation. But then again, we're still super early. Even with the hedge funds were kind of early, with the corporates were clearly very early. With the insurance companies were early, with the pensions, it doesn't seem to have even started. And with governments, we don't know whether it started or not. It wouldn't surprise me if it had. But that's kind of where I see it going. So eventually, I think every entity of any significant size will make an allocation

Starting point is 00:37:01 and the rate at which they do that will be different for each. Brendan Lane wanted us to talk a little bit about why we're seeing so many companies adopt it versus money managers that seem to be really kind of fighting it. at least on Twitter and the ones that I'm seeing, they're fairly negative, but you see a lot of business owners that are all about it. So what's going on there? What's going on, Preston? How come you figured out that you could buy Bitcoin years ago and it started stacking? Here's my answer. And it's a great question from Brendan. My answer to that is corporates have, for the most part, nothing to lose and everything to gain, right, from adopting

Starting point is 00:37:41 Bitcoin. And money managers are the opposite. In a world where, where I can store assets in a non-inflating monetary asset, that's Bitcoin, store value there. I don't have to beat, quote unquote, beat inflation by going to great lengths to have a diversified portfolio and invest in fixed income and invest in equities to beat inflation, you know, just to sprint to stand still in terms of my purchasing power. if Bitcoin reaches its potential, I can just sock it away in Bitcoin. And that will be bad news for the whole investment industry on average in terms of fees generated, in terms of assets under management.

Starting point is 00:38:26 Bitcoin reaches its potential. It's going to take a big bite out of all these businesses, including mine. So that's my answer is the wealth managers have, they have quite a bit to lose. The corporates really don't, as long as they're running a tight ship, as long as they're running, their businesses, generating cash flows like you've talked about on this show, and then accumulating Bitcoin and stocking away their retained earnings over time in that manner. When you think about how a business functions, they've got some type of machine or thing that's generating free cash flows. That's one of their assets that sits on their balance sheet.

Starting point is 00:39:02 It kicks off those free cash flows. And then what do you do with the free cash flows? You either invest them in marketable securities, maybe you buy another one of these machines so that You're producing twice as much revenue and bottom line. But at the end of the day, a lot of companies get pegged out at a certain point that they can't employ their retained earnings and those profits in an operational way and they have to do it non-operationally. And so like Michael Saylor is a great example of somebody who's like, I'm just plugging this money that I made into the Bitcoin network. It's not impairing any of the assets that are generating these profits that I get every

Starting point is 00:39:36 single month and quarter. And so it's kind of a no-brainer for him. But the other thing is, One thing that I think is an interesting point for money managers. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, Andy, is I think the volatility piece. I've said that money managers are, they're not only managing the money, but they're also managing the clients as much as they're managing the money to try to make sure that the assets under management stay and don't go somewhere else looking for some other manager. And so when you look at something like Bitcoin that has a ton of volatility, I would say it's more of this than maybe even the volatility. It's the narrative that you're in Bitcoin. The position could be 0.05%, but if that person has this implicit bias of, if you're in Bitcoin, you have no idea what you're doing because that's funny money and they pull their funds, that's a catastrophic event for a money manager. So you're spot on that the optics, as we say, right? The optics has been very tough in Bitcoin. And so it's a funny thing, right?

Starting point is 00:40:37 For my clients as an example, I have made, and my firm has made, optically bad investments from time to time. And it's always an uphill battle, a given example. We bought Puerto Rican bonds. I want to say like four or five years ago. And this was after, you know, the whole capital structure basically had fallen out of bed. Everybody thought that Puerto Rico and the various government related, you know, municipal entities were going to, we're going to fold. We found a bond issue, several bond issues actually that were guaranteed they were backed basically by one of the bond insurance companies. And it happened to be the bond insurance company that had the strongest balance sheet. I think Toby Carlisle put on this exact same trade.

Starting point is 00:41:18 He talked about it on our show. What was then the other? Really? Yeah. Love it. Yeah. And it was a great trade. Because it was like, my recollection is like five and a half or six percent yield, triple tax exempt, right? No local tax, no state tax, no federal tax. So, you know, on a pre-tax basis, that's like buying a bond that's, you know, depending on your tax rate, you know, yielding 8 or 9 percent. Pretty juicy. So that was a great investment for us, but man, we had some pushback, you know, because the headlines were relentless.

Starting point is 00:41:49 Puerto Rico's going down. This thing's insolvent. Government's going to have to step in. Bond holders are going to get torched, all this stuff. So similar dynamic with Bitcoin, the good news is, well, there's been two ways to mitigate that. One is, you know, if you bought it and it went up, that always helps. It always helps to be staring at a gain on the quarterly report rather than a loss. Amazing how that works.

Starting point is 00:42:12 And the narrative has shifted, obviously. I mean, it has been a dramatic shift in my estimation between even June of last year when Bitcoin was still, I don't want to say toxic waste, but let's just say kind of smelly from the perspective of the client. And now that it's been bought and many smart, well-known. regular way finance people and investors, had said they're long or bullish, that has changed the narrative significantly. So now in 2021, I do actually think we're in a position where you have to explain not having a position, at least if your client has heard of Bitcoin, which is probably most at this point. And that was not true six months ago. Let's take a quick break

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Starting point is 00:46:10 can be found in the income funds prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right, back to the show. Talk to us about position size. So the NASDAs, so the NASDAZE For me, the NASDAQ is the benchmark to beat if you're pretty much investing anywhere. That for me is the thing that you really got to be able to outperform to say you're really beating the market these days. And so 43% last year is just nuts. I forget who, what famous investor just produced something like 14% returns last year. And I was beating them up on.

Starting point is 00:46:44 I think it was Paul Singer of LA. Yeah, it was Singer. It was Singer. 14%. And I'm saying, well, I mean, that's a significant. I mean, it's nearly a 30% underperformance of the NASDAQ. And so if you would plug in one or two percent of your portfolio into Bitcoin, and you would have that 14% return, what would that have bumped you up to last year?

Starting point is 00:47:08 Oh, yeah. Well, so what? So Bitcoin started the year at like 7K, if I remember. Yeah. And then we ended it, where do we end it? Like high 20s or something? Yeah, I think high 20s. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:20 So maybe it was like 4X. Yeah. So, yeah, you made, if you had a 1% position, then you added 300 basis points to your, to your portfolio. Is that right? Yeah. So if you had a 200 or a 2% position, then you added, you know, 600 base points or six total percentage points to the portfolio, which is pretty significant.

Starting point is 00:47:38 And getting to the sizing, because we didn't talk about that with your last question, which was, yeah, sizing is the thing, right? This is a fallacy that I encounter over and over. People say, oh, there's certain assets that are uninvestable. No. actually, there's no such thing as an uninvestable asset. There's only portfolio sizing. Now, as a practical matter, most extremely risky investments don't trade in public markets.

Starting point is 00:48:01 So you can't buy, you can't put 0.04% of your portfolio and VC bet A or risky tech bed B. But with a publicly traded asset like Bitcoin, you can size it as you wish. And so, yes, you know, 1%, 2% of the portfolio, kind of a no-brainer, in my opinion. You know, when you get into double-digit percentages, then the client better be really comfortable and they better really understand the volatility involved here. But that's kind of the, those are kind of the things that I think about. I quickly did the number. So if you had a 2% in Bitcoin position last year and your normal performance on the rest

Starting point is 00:48:43 of your portfolio for the other 98% was 14%. If you had Bitcoin in there for 2%, you would have had a 21% return. But if Bitcoin, let's say Bitcoin went down by 50%, you would have moved from a 14% return to a 13% return. So it's a pretty aggressive difference to the performance and very asymmetrical. I think the number is on an annual basis since Bitcoin has been openly traded. What is it, Andy? Like 200% a year on average?

Starting point is 00:49:15 Yeah, it's in the 200% range. I believe that's right. Amazing. I mean, I mean, and granted, you know, in all fairness, as we know, the the log scale graph is downward sloping over time. So were the percentage gains higher in the earlier years? Yes, they were, you know. So maybe you're averaging whatever four or five hundred percent a year in the early years. And so in the more recent years, it's only been, you know, one to 200 percent. But that's still pretty good. How do you think about when a person comes to you and says, how much exposure of this should I have? I'm sure you're looking at their age and their risk tolerance and those kind of things.

Starting point is 00:49:56 But how would you respond and how would you categorize that type of people that you would respond to? So you might be surprised about the demographics or the age or, you know, how close to you to retirement. And here's why. Take the extremes. So when we talk about quote unquote risk in the portfolio, we talk about, we talk about about your normal basket of assets, generally speaking, you've got your stocks, your equities on one end, and then you've got your low risk bonds, your fixed income on the other end. And there's various other assets classes mixed in, but that's kind of the, those are the main buckets, as you know.

Starting point is 00:50:29 So what does a sizable or significant Bitcoin position mean to a risky client? Well, it means they want to swing for the fences. They want to make that 300% return in a year or more, potentially. So they want an allocation. But now you talk about it. about the low risk portfolio, which is very skewed to bonds, and what is the kryptonite for a bond portfolio? Well, that's inflation and higher interest rates. It's inflation that causes the central bank to raise interest rates potentially. And so if you have a bond portfolio and we finally get significant inflation, then your purchasing power gets torpedoed. And you better hold some hard money assets. I use the term hard money assets for a portfolio.

Starting point is 00:51:15 And historically, that's been gold and monetary metals. But as we know, Bitcoin has characteristics that are more favorable even than gold. And so, yeah, you better hold Bitcoin basically at either end of the risk spectrum there. And so I can make a pretty strong case that everyone ought to have an allocation. And it tends to be beyond, say, a couple percentage points in the portfolio, which is effectively hedge. then it's more, I'd say, the folks that have a little bit higher risk tolerance and really understand it and really don't care that much about the volatility, which is a smaller subset. It's those guys that go with a larger allocation where a larger allocation to Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:51:56 tends to make sense, in my experience. So what's the number? Let's put it this way. I have a very few clients who are double-digit percentage exposure, but for the vast majority, we're talking, you know, two to three percent, basically. Yeah, but I mean, based on the numbers we were talking earlier, that's going to have a profound impact on your portfolio, even if you have a small percentage of your portfolio in it. It really will have a profound impact if Bitcoin starts to demonetize other risk assets.

Starting point is 00:52:28 If we get to that point, right, where people stop viewing Apple as a store of value and buying it for 40 times earnings and start to think that, oh, actually, maybe I should park it in this other internet native store of value asset. And that is the scenario where actually Bitcoin potentially takes a bite out of the NASDAQ. You were talking about the triple Q a minute ago, takes a market share bite out of the NASDAQ accrues to Bitcoin. Will that happen soon? I don't know, but it could happen in a period of years. We'll see. All right. So, Andy, anytime we're in a big bull market with Bitcoin, there's a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, otherwise known as fud. What is some fud you're hearing right now

Starting point is 00:53:18 that you just want to take a jackhammer to? I'll tell you what I want to get past is the tether fud. Blow up tether. Tether, please blow up. Everybody go redeem your tethers. By the way, I've never held tether myself, not even first. a nanosecond have ever held a single tether. You know, let's all redeem our tethers. Let's see if it's really backed and let's just get this thing behind us. Let's get it over with.

Starting point is 00:53:44 I'm so tired of it. I think that, you know, I think the notion that, the hypothesis that tether is a major reason for the Bitcoin price going up in the long run seems tenuous, seems unlikely. And I think that fear among investors, institutional and retail, this overhang basically that comes from the existence of tether. I think if we removed it, in the long run, actually, Bitcoin might potentially be better off. And I do sort of get tired of spending time thinking and talking about it. Well, there's so many other stable coins out there. Most of the exchanges are standing up their own stable coins, but you're still seeing

Starting point is 00:54:28 tether being widely used, which suggests to me that the exchanges that are using, tether in addition to maybe their own stable coin, they don't have a concern or else they'd be redeeming them, right? Yeah, you have to say, that's right, you have to say that, and in fairness, it's more the offshore exchanges, right, rather than the onshore ones, rather than the U.S.-based ones or the western ones, where tether is prevalent. And some of those guys are relatively fly-by-night operations, I guess, although frankly, some of the smaller exchanges have dropped out over time.

Starting point is 00:55:02 Some of them have gotten hacked. Some of them have disappeared or, I don't know, exit scammed. Others have been acquired. And so, yeah, I think the field, the remaining field of sizable offshore exchanges probably want to stay in business and they probably have some idea of the counterparty they're dealing with. And yeah, I don't think that they want to, I think they're smart enough to not risk their long-term business by taking counterparty risk and risk.

Starting point is 00:55:32 to their enterprises of, you know, this thing going, effectively going poof. So look, I'm not saying that tether is fully backed. I don't really know. I don't really have much idea of, of, how many dollars are backing the $25 billion worth of notional tether. But I don't think it's a very significant probability that it will be a big long-term risk to Bitcoin. So talk to us about risks, because everyone, anything, time I ask for questions. Everyone wants to hear. How could you be wrong? What are the things you're concerned about? What are the things to look for? Yeah. Well, I think on Twitter, when you asked what questions to talk about tonight, one of the questions that was mentioned,

Starting point is 00:56:16 I don't remember who it was, was basically what would change your thesis? What would cause you to sell? What would cause you to sell Bitcoin? And, you know, there's a couple things that come to mind. One is the system stops cranking out blocks regularly, right? It stops working. Okay, well, if it doesn't stop working, what else would cause me to not want to own it? I guess government rectitude, right? Balancing budgets, not printing so much money. Even then, I still think that Bitcoin has a long-term value proposition, but maybe it'll take longer to realize. So those are kind of the two scenarios. Basically, if the thing stops working, or if the competition for money or monetary assets gets stiffer. Other than that, it's sort of hard to come up with ideas for, you know, for why to

Starting point is 00:57:03 sell it when it looks so severely undervalued still. How about if, and I don't think this is going to be the case, but there's a lot of people that'll say Ethereum or some other coin starts, the market cap starts really making a run at Bitcoin. How would you respond or how would you think about something like that? Yeah, I remember the old flippinging narrative from 2017, right? Ether's going to flip and going to overtake the coin. Yeah, it's, how would I respond to that? If the question is like, what do you do or what do you talk about if the market cap gap starts closing,

Starting point is 00:57:37 I think for me it would have to overtake it for a significant period of time for me to be at all concerned about it. And it would also have to be based on facts and circumstances. In other words, as long as Ether is planning to change out their consensus. mechanism, exactly, their consensus algorithm. You know, until they actually successfully do that, it's really hard for me to see how on a risk-adjusted basis, it has a chance of overtaking Bitcoin. Really hard to see.

Starting point is 00:58:08 And then that doesn't even account for the fact that, you know, the blockchain is bloated and, you know, it's all run on infura and there's, you know, still clear leadership and all that stuff that make it not decentralized compared to Bitcoin. I guess that if, I don't know, if there was like a major change in. demand. If, like, for some reason, Michael Saylor was like, nope, I was wrong. Ethereum's the thing. You know, in governments, you know, started buying it instead of Bitcoin, then maybe I'd scratch my head and say, what did I miss here? But, yeah, it's, it's hard to, it's hard to see that playing out.

Starting point is 00:58:43 What are your thoughts on Plan B's Stock the Flow model? And he has two models. He has the cross, the cross asset model as well, the Stock to Flow cross asset model. What are your thoughts on those? It's been a while since I did my statistics work back in college and then even since the CFA program. I've seen the arguments about how, well, basically how you don't have true randomness in the variables and the correlation and that basically the correlation framework is invalid. So I'm aware of the critique of the mathematical critique.

Starting point is 00:59:20 My friend Corey Clipson has been all over that. And I think the math, you know, I suspect he's right about the math, if the assumption is that, you know, if he's right about the assumption about the randomness among the two variables. So on the other hand, I have to say that stock to flow is a concept seems to be logical. The model may be wrong, but the concept seems right. I can even go so far as to say that it's not bullish enough in the sense that if I know that the stock to flow of gold and Bitcoin are about the same now, then I struggle, I struggle to come up with a reason why Bitcoin isn't worth as much as gold or more. And the argument is, well, it takes time. You know, you've got to change minds and gold holders have to be shaken out of their positions over time in Bitcoin. But, yeah, if you're looking for the, you know, the strong view on S2F or S2F or not, you know, I'm probably going to punt. I think it's interesting.

Starting point is 01:00:20 I think it could have a self-fulfilling dynamic. in the sense that if enough people believe it to be true and if the numbers keep following the pattern and the expectations, there could be a self-fulfilling element to it. So that's one way to think about it. But yeah, I don't have a strong view. So Andy, Fold is really kind of hitting it hard on Twitter just with the user community, not with advertising or anything like that. They're offering Bitcoin rewards on any type of transaction.

Starting point is 01:00:52 So you're using your Fiat money. You get paid your paycheck. You go and spend it with a regular Visa debit card. You go to Target. You go to Walmart. And after the transaction, you're getting Bitcoin rewards. What are your thoughts? Where is this going?

Starting point is 01:01:08 Is this just the tip of the iceberg on what's to come? What are your thoughts? You love to see it. Yeah, well, in the full team. Those guys are great. They have a great product. And it's one of the ways. into Bitcoin adoption.

Starting point is 01:01:23 There's all these angles. You can make it easier to buy Bitcoin outright, such as through Square Cash. You can figure out ways to give people rewards, credit cards or debit cards. And yeah, the idea that Fold had about finding ways to direct traffic at vendors and then get rewarded by the vendors and shovel Bitcoin into the... pockets of users is great. I mean, it's a great way to accumulate sort of automatically over time. Also kind of reminds me of the, you know, the, I can forget, there were a couple of debit cards or credit cards where, I guess it was debit cards where, you know, you buy something and they

Starting point is 01:02:09 basically round off and give you sort of free money. But here the free money is the good money. It's not the crappy Fiat money. It's Bitcoin. It's the hard money. So I love it. I was listening to an interview with him recently, and he was talking about how when people want to redeem their rewards, these are on-chain transactions whenever he clears their accounts and sends it to whatever wallet they've got. And he was talking about how the fees associated with all those payments that he's got to make when people want to clear out their rewards wallet was getting so high that it was going to force his adoption into lightning.

Starting point is 01:02:46 And I just found that really fascinating to show and demonstrate how vendors like him, companies like him, are going to have to be forced into something like Lightning in order to conduct their transactions. So my question really is around Lightning. Where do you see other areas where the incentive structure is going to be in place for them to adopt it? I mean, the clear case is just smaller payments. It's micropayments. And that's been on people's minds, I think, for years now. I would like to see, and I do think there's a good chance that we'll see a whole dynamic

Starting point is 01:03:23 where anyone creating content, whether it's podcasts, whether it's articles, whether it's, you know, videos, whatever, TikTok type of stuff will be able to get paid, be able to get tipped via lightning. Wow. And where, yeah, and where it just becomes, it just becomes normal, basically. If you're a content creator on the internet, you have your, uh, your lightning wallet. you have your lightning set up, you can accept payment in that regard. And the pools, you know, the liquidity providers that are basically greasing the rails and balancing the channels and

Starting point is 01:03:58 lightning in the overall system are going to make that potentially possible. And I like the, you know, the angle you described for Will and Fold and him sort of quote unquote getting sort of forced onto the second layer. That's all good. That's all good for Bitcoin. It's indicative of high demand on the base layer. And that's a healthy thing. That's a healthy proposition. It indicates that the base layer is in rude health when there's so much demand that basically lower value transactions get pushed up onto the second layer. I want to talk about the TikTok comment real fast because people are going to laugh. I have no clue how TikTok works. I just know that there's these young kids, they're taking videos and stuff of themselves. And then they're making

Starting point is 01:04:43 money through doing this? Like they get tipped, like you said. Do you know how it works, Andy? Are we just too? Oh, no. I'm just, you know, yeah, no, we're, I don't have a TikTok account. The only, my only access to TikTok is, is people on Twitter, obviously, sometimes, you know, forward their TikTok videos. But do they get paid? Do you know? I don't honestly, no. I do, I have, I have read about in parts of Asia. You ought to know, weren't you, uh, I was thinking of, you know, Korea, because Korea has been so smart phone savvy for so many years. Yeah. And they've had high bandwidth for a long time.

Starting point is 01:05:20 Were you stationed there? I was, I lived in Korea for two years. Yeah, yeah. So I had heard that, you know, performers in Korea were actually getting paid in real time. And I don't know via what app. I'm not aware that it was via lightning or anything crypto-based. But I had heard that that was the thing already in Korea, but don't quote me on it. Yeah, I think they're compensated.

Starting point is 01:05:43 and I might be dead wrong about this, but I think they're compensated by likes and basically other people interacting with their account. They get some type of compensation for that, where no other, you know, you definitely don't have that with Twitter or anything. So if you're talking about micropayments, instantaneous micro payments, that seems like that would be kind of the platform or a platform like that that it'll evolve into. Totally. I mean, why can't you have streaming money? We have streaming voice and streaming video, why can't we send very small payments in real time? I mean, it doesn't seem like there's a technical limit to this. And I'm optimistic that lightning will be the thing

Starting point is 01:06:27 that actually brings it to the masses. We'll see. It's totally crazy. Andy, you've got a killer book. So killer, you've got 90 reviews and a perfect five-star ranking, which, I mean, I'm just going to tell you, I have some books that I published, they don't have a perfect five-star ranking. You're very kind. I want to say, by the way, before we talk about that, over the weekend, I hadn't been aware of it prior, but I heard about your book, Diary of a West Point Cadet, and I ordered it, and I read it. Oh, no way.

Starting point is 01:06:58 And it was awesome. It was chock full of hilarious stories with life lessons. Did you actually laugh out loud? Did it not take you that far? I laughed. I laughed about your friend Mitch, who got away with murder until he didn't. And then ultimately did. That's a great story. And if you knew him, let me tell you. If you knew Mitch Rosnick, you just would not believe. There's a lot more stories about Mitch that are not told in that book when we went to flight school. And okay, yeah, I remember what story I told in the book. So

Starting point is 01:07:31 Mitch was an all-American pistol shooter. And wow, let me tell you, there's some stories of us in Alabama, during flight school out in his backyard, shooting a lot of different guns through the years. Oh, my God. Yeah, I can only imagine that the PG-rated stories that made it through the editing process. They were edited down. They were definitely edited down.

Starting point is 01:07:54 All right, back to your book. I appreciate that, by the way. No, no, no. So anyway, it was a real easy read, and it was a pleasure. So people should check it out. But why buy Bitcoin, yeah, is the book. and it's an investment thesis, and it is also, in my opinion, pretty digestible. And yeah, look,

Starting point is 01:08:12 I shill it relentlessly, but people have been giving it good feedback. And it was both the thing that I felt I had to write for my clients and for my family and for my friends. And as long as I was going to write it, I was going to put it out there for the benefit of people who are trying to get their head around Bitcoin. And I guess the unique aspect is I bring some Speaking of stories, I have a few stories from my time on Wall Street, which are relevant to the overall financial system that are buried in there. And they're a little bit different than the stories about your friend Mitch, but hopefully some entertainment value as well. So we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Andy, awesome having you on the show. We definitely

Starting point is 01:08:58 need to do it again sometime in the future. And thanks for coming on. Preston, man, it was a pleasure. Always happy to do. do it. Look forward to doing it in the future. And yeah, I guess one final thing, if anybody wants to follow me on Twitter, hit me up on Edstrom. Andrew. Hey, so thanks for everybody listening into the show. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe to the show on whatever podcast app you're using. We really appreciate that. And if you have time, leave us a review. So thanks for joining us this week. And we'll catch you next Wednesday. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to Millennial and

Starting point is 01:09:35 Investing by the Investors Podcast Network and learn how to achieve financial independence. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision consult a professional, this show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC011: Bitcoin & Traditional Finance w/ Andy Edstrom (Bitcoin Podcast)

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