You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Beyond Ego: The Truth About Money, Meaning & Bitcoin - Richard Byworth | Ep. 100

Starting point is 00:00:00 I had a young kid on my desk in Tokyo who was banging on about Bitcoin all the time. I kept thinking, why is he talking about this scam on the internet? I kept saying this to myself as I was reading the book. And eventually it got to the point where I got to the end of the book. I was like, I have to understand this. Another conversation with the board was, why would you target such low volatility for Bitcoiners? They're so used to volatility. And I had to explain, no, they're not used to volatility.

Starting point is 00:00:25 There's no volatility in Bitcoin. There's zero volatility in Bitcoin. one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin, there's zero volatility. I think that it's a necessary thing that Wall Street starts adopting Bitcoin. That's where all the capital sits today. For us to see $20, $30 million Bitcoin price, you're going to need serious amounts of capital. That will be the point where Bitcoin flips everything and everyone wants to denominate in Bitcoin. And that only happens if you see traditional capital start to unlock into the Bitcoin system. The large proportion of people in finance don't understand even the basics of financial products. They don't

Starting point is 00:01:03 want to look stupid. They don't want to look like they shouldn't be there. So they don't ask the question. And so they live on ego. Just follow the alignment of your values with Bitcoin and align everything with Bitcoin. And it just has a way of working itself out and making your life better generally. today's a special one this is episode 100 of you're the voice 100 conversations about truth freedom and sovereignty and the future of money and i couldn't have done this without you so to everyone who's listened shared supported or joined this fearless journey thank you from the bottom of my heart. And what a guest to celebrate with. My guest today is Richard

Starting point is 00:02:01 Byworth. Richard is a seasoned investor and former CEO of Diginex, where he led the first ever Nasdaq listing of a Bitcoin exchange company. With over two decades bridging investment banking and digital assets, he's been right at the forefront of institutional Bitcoin adoption. Today is the managing partner of Seize Capital, board member at Relay and advisor to Blockstream. And he also hosts the Seize the Future podcast, exploring how finance, technology and freedom come together. Now, as I do, I hijacked his studio to record this episode. So what you're going to see is recorded in Richard's studio in Switzerland. Richard is one of those rare voices who blends deep financial experience with conscious thinking and long-term

Starting point is 00:02:49 vision, exactly the kind of guest I love having on my show. In our conversation, we discussed ego and humility in finance, intuition in decision-making, and the rise of Bitcoin treasury companies, and also why Richard believes Bitcoin itself is a benevolent gift, a source of hope for humanity. Don't forget to like, comment, share, and subscribe. It helps You're the Voice break through shadow banning and censorship, and it helps us keep growing. So thank you and enjoy the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of You're the Voice. I don't even know the name of the town we're in.

Starting point is 00:03:33 I normally say from, which town is it? We're in Fefecon. Fefecon? Exactly. Oh my God. Okay, from Fefecon, Switzerland. And I'm here with Richard Byworth. Hi, Richard. Hey, Efra. Great to be here.

Starting point is 00:03:49 Yeah, so good to have you here. Well, so good to have you in your office. Thanks for hosting me. This is awesome. So as I always do, being a digital nomad now, I hijack people's studios. So I now hijacked yours. You got the Seize Capital Studio. There you go. So Seize the Future. There you go. I love the name Seize the Future. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:04:12 it's a really good brand thanks so thanks for accepting my invitation to be on my pod and uh we met for the first time i think it was the first time in prague a few it wasn't well but but it was because that's when we probably met because then we started talking and then i said oh my god oh my god where have you been you're so cool we need to do this and so here we are um and i've been following your podcast, Seize, and I would really love to have a conversation with you that touches both on Bitcoin finance, but also a little bit beyond on why this matters to you and maybe the connection to the more spiritual side of things, which we had a little bit of a conversation about.

Starting point is 00:05:02 So I want to start with your move from finance, traditional finance to Bitcoin. So you were early in bridging traditional finance with Bitcoin. What was the moment you realized that the legacy system was broken? Oh, I realized it was broken way before I understood Bitcoin. 2008 was my wake up call. And I remember sitting in Tokyo with the guy on my team sat next to me saying he was going to go down to Citibank to draw out all his cash because he was worried about Citibank collapsing I mean that was the level of fear that was in the financial system if you were at the sort of the

Starting point is 00:05:45 forefront of of this space I mean I was a little bit ridiculing of him at the time I remember and then of course the system was saved by printing all that money and that for me was the moment where um i realized that the money was you know forever going to be corrupted uh inflated and debased and um i started buying gold yeah you too yeah exactly uh i started buying gold because i thought to myself well you know i just just was at the point of having kids i was like well how on earth am i going to store my wealth for them when you know and i was constantly trying to play this game of what fiat currency was the best was it swiss francs was it dollars was it pounds because i was a little bit like you i was i was not in my home country um i was living in hong kong at the

Starting point is 00:06:45 time and uh yeah it it was just a constant challenge of thinking about where do i put my cash to maintain my purchasing power right so i started buying gold um and then i'd actually dismissed bitcoin as early as 2010 um i had a young kid on my desk in tokyo who was banging on about bitcoin all the time i went over for a business trip and there he was just talking about bitcoin i'm like man just just shut up and sell some derivatives to our clients um and uh yeah i told him it was a scam because i assumed it was because it was something on the internet and you know i'd grown up certainly without the internet and you know the biggest question always was you know if you put your credit card details into the internet you were surely going to get your

Starting point is 00:07:38 money stolen and so anything involving money on the internet in my mind was likely to be a scam yeah so that that was sort of my first vision of bitcoin in 2010 which was very early to be and then i read the book sapiens by eval harari in in 2017 beginning of so i'd had my kids you know as as you know when you have kids you don't get to read books that's a luxury oh yeah that suddenly just disappears and um i went skiing to the club med in uh hokkaido where you could literally drop your kids off in their pajamas to the ski school yeah and not see them again until 5 p.m so i started reading the book and this was the first book i'd read in seven years and uh he had some interesting ideas and a lot of ideas sort of talking about technology melding with the

Starting point is 00:08:35 future and and what the future might look like and i agreed with a lot of the concepts which were frankly chilling in many areas and he but he kept talking about bitcoin and blockchain and like what i kept thinking why is he talking about this scam on the internet i kept saying this to myself as i was reading the book and eventually it got to the point where i got to the end of the book i was like i have to understand this so i read the white paper didn't understand a word of it found it very challenging to understand if someone had just sat me down and said listen there's only 21 million of these things but it was 2017 and you know this was not something that was focused on yeah then i would have got a white paper is the first thing you do is very challenging yeah it

Starting point is 00:09:23 was like i was what is this yeah and uh so yeah it took me quite a lot of time to get through it um and and get um back then again there wasn't so much education as there is today it's not so easily accessible it took me until the end of 2018 to to get to the point of saying to myself i don't have enough bitcoin and that that was the wake-up moment it was october 2018 i remember it very clearly okay and if i take you back to 2008 when you started noticing how broken the system is working in finance even before that like having your background did you not know that the fiat system is operating in that way was that your introduction into hold on there is something wrong in the design of this system

Starting point is 00:10:19 so when you get into finance you immediately specialize okay right and so you will end up and my immediate specialization was a product called convertible bonds right and um you know you don't you don't spend your time thinking about debt money printing the central banks like you're focused on pricing this very complex derivative product and the various inputs to it that will change the pricing you know you don't question the base assumptions you're not sitting there questioning it in the same way that most people don't question why on earth are you using paper as money right people don't ask ask these questions and i would say that you know the large proportion of people in finance don't understand even the basics of financial products right and

Starting point is 00:11:12 this all comes back to and i talk about ego a lot when i talk about bitcoin because i throughout my career i was not a finance guy i was i studied french at university so throughout my career from the very beginning I was always having to ask questions because I didn't understand anything I didn't know anything about the theory of all these products and everything so for me the learning was very practical but then the difference is in traditional finance is you see people that have learned purely from textbooks oh they understand what a derivative is I've got to check my notes I know what that is but they haven't really ever practically used it or practically understood it and said wait hang on a minute why would an investor buy this or why

Starting point is 00:11:59 would investors sell this right so they're they have a very good theoretical understanding but that's not practically based and i think that this is a large problem with a lot of the financial system is is people don't understand it from a practical point of view there's a lot of theory and you know i think that makes sense oh yeah okay yeah i seem to remember studying this in college right and so you don't have the practical implementation and i think that i was very fortunate that i always was having to question stuff and you know even when i became very senior in investment banking i would still ask perceptibly stupid questions i didn't care because i was like well and i would always tell the grads the stupid question is the one you don't ask because you're

Starting point is 00:12:49 going to get made to look stupid later if you don't understand what this is. So I always encourage people to ask questions, no matter how stupid they might seem. And I think that served me quite well. You're the Voice is brought to you by Trezor, the original Bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of self-custody for crypto assets since 2013, empowering individuals with an open source device, enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins. I find my Trezor super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family. Enjoy my 5% discount on Trezor product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code FLAT. Self-custody is powerful, but what if someone forces you to unlock your wallet?

Starting point is 00:13:37 Bitcoin settles instantly and that freedom can also be a risk. BitVault is the first Bitcoin wallet built to protect against both physical attacks and digital hacks it creates a banking grade vault on chain with two of three multi-sig time delay transactions two hours to 15 days giving you space to react trustless recovery after one year works with trusted hardware wallets open source and built with one focus beyond keys protecting humans only 42 lifetime subscriptions are available at $199 forever. Head over to bitvolt.sv to sign up and use code AFLAT for 10% off. And that relates to what you said about ego, that in order to, if you're a finance person, then in order for you to really understand this new system that exists now,

Starting point is 00:14:36 you have to question your base assumptions on the existing one. And if you don't lower your ego to say oh maybe i was wrong or maybe i was manipulated or maybe i didn't understand or maybe i didn't understand yeah and i i think this is key because actually the majority of people in finance don't understand the large majority of what's happening but they don't want to look stupid they don't want to look like they shouldn't be there so they don't ask the question right and so they live on ego right of course i'm supposed to be here of course i'm smart of course I'm supposed to earn five million dollars a year right right right of course I am I'm super smart and wouldn't it be great if people just came out and said you know what I want to unlearn and

Starting point is 00:15:21 relearn can you sit with me and explain something to me that I may not know people appreciate that kind of humbleness so much and they will give you the time of day absolutely to teach you yeah yeah so I agree with you it's an ego test on the most part well the whole thing is yeah like the whole system is built on ego okay right like if I'm a managing director at Goldman Sachs I cannot ask a question of an associate about a product that he sits in that I don't sit in I just can't like it's it's inconceivable that I would ask that question and when we say ego I think we don't just mean the pride of it but also the survival yeah like your ego is what really protects you right it's a survival mechanism and so you know that if you follow and comply with what everyone

Starting point is 00:16:16 else is doing and saying then you'll be better off less risk more guaranteed income and acceptance etc so it's not just the pride side of it but it leads to an insecurity absolutely because you know deep down that you don't know yeah yeah absolutely it's so true well isn't it a great exploration to start then yeah lowering your guard and say i'm ready to learn something new exactly okay so that leads me really perfectly to the next question so how much of your life or career decisions were driven by intuition or gut feeling versus rational analysis great question um i've had three points in my career which were turning points okay and every time i made the decision like i'm gonna quit or i'm gonna do something different i always did the

Starting point is 00:17:20 same thing I wrote the letter of resignation I put it in my desk yeah and I sat on it thinking about it okay for two days three days and every single time it altered the course of what I was going to do rather than if I'd handed over that letter but I would always act upon it but not not actually give the letter if you understand what I mean so I'd yes I'd say okay it's got to a point where I'm ready to resign yep these are the things that I need to change or this is what I'm going to go and do I always had a plan about what I was going to go and do next and every time my manager at the time there were different managers taught me out of it and allowed me to see a different path and we then created that different path forward which ended

Starting point is 00:18:22 up being a huge pivot in my career amazing so yeah i think um that i can't remember exactly your question now but the question is was it intuition that led you to take certain decisions or more like a logical analysis of yeah so i think intuition intuition our intuition is guided by data points that we don't necessarily perceive immediately and i think that what i did with this was allow it to sit and allow my broad data points to be open to whatever the route i'd chosen was and see how that sat and then confide in my direct manager that this was the route I was about to take and um and yeah it allowed me to to really sort of guide my career and also seek mentorship which I think is really important I think uh everybody you know when you're a young

Starting point is 00:19:25 person in any industry you don't necessarily know what you're doing i think more and more people are short-term minded and they can't necessarily see that if they haven't progressed in two years that that doesn't necessarily mean that they're not going to progress in 40 years right so i think um yeah the the intuition is is formed by data points and so i didn't quite know that i was going to stay i was pretty convinced i was going to leave but i ended up staying in in each changing the course changing the course completely yeah which takes us back to even if you know life is kind of pre-written and decided by us by fate we always have free will and choice and we can always change the script yeah right based on the agency that we exercise and our intuition so and you

Starting point is 00:20:21 mentioned that three things were turning points in your life so was that one of them like the no sorry three three three turning points in my career okay yeah so each time each time it was like that it was like that okay yeah got it that's a very good uh tactic to take to like write your letter yeah and then let it sit there and think about what actually doesn't work for you because it resonates with everything within you yeah right you're like i'm writing this letter you're putting it down you're putting your intention down yeah you know you talk about spirituality yes you can get to that but i think that once you put it down in that way it allows you to see it in a different angle a different a different viewpoint and so yeah that that informs you even more deeply as

Starting point is 00:21:10 to whether or not this is aligned with what you want yep or it's away from what you want i love it Okay, what were the key obstacles and breakthroughs you experienced trying to bring Bitcoin to institutional clients, which you work with? Yeah. We're back to Bitcoin. Yeah. One of the things I did at Seeds Capital was launch a Bitcoin denominated fund. and i started the process with the board so getting the board approval uh in october of 2024 and we had a big fight it was a big fight because i said look you know we need to make sure if we're

Starting point is 00:21:56 if we've got a bitcoin product we need to speak bitcoin we need to be true to bitcoin and i want to send a message that we will keep all the bitcoin that we earn from this product on the balance sheet of seas capital oh that speculation oh what are you doing you know this is not what we do you know and so we had a big fight risky about it in october yeah too risky and um it was quite funny because i'd said the time of the price was 70 000 and i'd made a base case for 2025 that the average price would be around worst case a hundred thousand and i went what is this base case like how can you have a base case that's 50 above the market price i was like yeah but it's obvious that's where we're going you know global liquidity it's very

Starting point is 00:22:48 clear where we are in the cycle and um yeah it was just everything that i was saying was just becoming more and more discrediting of of myself in their eyes and uh so we agreed to disagree conceptually and that what we would do is have a discussion a few months after the fund had launched about keeping the bitcoin on the balance sheet okay i had a very again i was very clear in my mind that for me it was all or nothing and that would be the thing that decided my particular path here and um so anyway i said you know let's let's let's just go ahead and and launch the fund so we launched the fund in march now this is a fund that is designed to be very low volatility risk um targeting five to ten percent return in bitcoin which for your average investor in

Starting point is 00:23:44 tradfi that's an awful return like it's very low return yes right but for bitcoin is huge right absolutely huge and i remember another conversation with the board was why would you target such low volatility for bitcoiners they're so used to volatility and i had to explain no they're not used to volatility there's no volatility in bitcoin there's zero volatility in bitcoin one bitcoin equals one bitcoin there's zero volatility that's right and um so anyway again this was a another very long yeah it depends on your lens right it's your lens that or that So we ended up having, again, this, they said, OK, fine. If that's what you want to do, that's what you want to do.

Starting point is 00:24:31 And that's what you think is the right product. So anyway, launched the product with a volatility of less than two, targeting 5% to 10% return. OK. Very nice profile. and we had so much demand from Bitcoiners for this product that it ended up being the biggest fund launch in the history of the SEIZE group. Oh, wow.

Starting point is 00:24:53 Which is a 30-year group which has had asset management businesses all through its life. SEIZE Capital is a relatively new arm but SEIZE Asset Management has existed since inception. So we're the largest fund launch in the history. How did they react? Exactly. So I got a call from the chairman of the overall group, Eric Seas.

Starting point is 00:25:15 Richard. Can you come to my office? That's pretty much what happened. He said, I don't understand what's happening here. Can you explain to me why? Who are all those people? Who are all these people with so much money and giving you all this money? So I tried to explain and, you know, I mean, Eric is an amazing man

Starting point is 00:25:39 and a visionary and we've spent a lot of time talking about bitcoin and he's trying extremely hard to get his head around it but it's taken some time yeah he said to me look we've come to a point where i need you to come and explain to the board of the c's group so up one from c's capital i want you to explain to the c's group board so on that board there's like 12 board members all 70 year old plus uh board members from ubs black rock uh swiss quote like serious people serious credentials in traditional finance and so what was amazing was because the context of this being the biggest fun launch in the history of the group they were all like curious completely curious wanted to understand and so i had the most receptive group i could have possibly imagined going in i was like

Starting point is 00:26:40 you got their attention yeah it got their attention so i think you know and you know i've talked about this a lot since just going out and doing stuff and pushing the boundaries with bitcoin and aligning everything you do with bitcoin actually leads to a lot of a lot more people just looking at you and going wow he's or she is very committed to this and very focused on this and clearly a you know maybe not the most intelligent person but someone who has some level of talent is really focused on this and they just get attracted by it and at some point yeah so i i say to people i say just follow the alignment of your values with bitcoin and align everything with bitcoin and it just has a way of working itself out and making your life better generally and

Starting point is 00:27:37 that's something that you know jeff booth is is often talking about and i've been friends with jeff for a few years and he'd been saying this to me from the beginning of my time at c's capital and it just kept resonating through this process that um that yeah you just have to align yourself with bitcoin yeah put your money where your mouth is yeah that's how i called the episode i did with jeff at the time was that's the person he is yeah and that's exactly what you're doing and and it's working yeah so since then till now did they become more understanding of it are they more appreciative of what's happening have they been more curious themselves to like investigate this more i'm sure not everyone is the same but yeah look they did agree um in the we had a board

Starting point is 00:28:33 meeting about a month ago where we finalized that all the bitcoin we earned from the fund would be kept right on the balance sheet great and they did finally agree to that so i was very happy about that that's a big change right yeah and prior to that agreement i'd sent them an email with a load of videos that i feel i mean as i said earlier there wasn't a lot of educational material available today there's so much so much so i sent them an email with about nine different videos and podcasts just about eight hours of listening as opposed to sailors suggested thousand hours this is just a hundred hours start with a hundred yeah yeah then a thousand but i think um yeah that that was very helpful for them to just get get there um but you

Starting point is 00:29:25 you know you're always going to get resistance and uh you just got to keep pushing forward as you do with everything you do yeah i want to introduce you to abundant minds because they take a very different approach to bitcoin mining most people buy bitcoin but the smart ones mine it straight into self-custody. With Abundant Minds, you can do it without giving up your privacy. Abundant Minds was founded by Bo and Christine Marie Turner, a couple who lost more than half a million dollars to providers making empty promises. Instead of walking away, they built a company that raises the industry standard and puts client first. And that's why I like them. With Abundant Minds, you own your machines. They never touch your Bitcoin, never skim a revenue

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Starting point is 00:31:38 and without wasting years of research visit expatmoney.com and leave your details for a follow-up all right today you talk and focus a lot on bitcoin treasury companies simon gorevich from metaplanet had two parts uh interview with you actually two separate interviews which i had watch, which were very good. And I've seen you also speak about the topic in different conferences. Do you believe this is what will push us to the next level of Bitcoin adoption? And why is this phenomenon interesting? Well, I think your question is spot on. I think I often say that Bitcoin treasury companies are the release valve of the traditional financial system, that has been pushed to a level of mispricing by fiat money printing. 80% or

Starting point is 00:32:37 thereabouts of money printing goes into the financial markets. So if you're an equity portfolio manager right now trying to outperform the S&P, if you don't have Apple in your portfolio priced at a ridiculous growth multiple of 30, 35 times for a company that's not growing, then you are likely to underperform the s&p index so you have to buy a company that doesn't make sense from a valuation basis and i'm not just talking about apple i'm single many there's many and mag 7 almost entirely are completely mispriced right and so you would never buy them on a normal valuation basis if you were a value investor looking at trying to outperform the s&p but you have no choice because the passive flows are just so massive and they're being driven by the money

Starting point is 00:33:30 printing right so more and more money just being driven into financial markets through the money printing right same for the bond market right who would lend the japanese money for 40 years at two and a half three percent the american no one no one in their right mind because you'd be devalued through your face i mean you just lose so much money in terms of purchasing power so why is this happening this is happening because pension funds have to have a 40 split into bonds generally and so that props up the bond market and this money that keeps just flowing into these institutional investors again from the money printer is propping up bond markets to levels that they should never naturally be at right if all of this gets sucked out then we get

Starting point is 00:34:28 a proper pricing of assets that the equities can become investable again bonds can become investable again and what's doing that well everybody needs bitcoin in their portfolio right you need to have the one asset that is going to keep producing a kegger of somewhere around 40 percent so the majority of these equity portfolio managers can't go out and buy a bitcoin etf but they can buy a japanese hotel group or they can buy a business intelligence solutions group in the u.s pardon my ignorance they can't buy an etf because they're not allowed it's like generally their mandate wouldn't allow them to buy an etf you're an active manager you shouldn't be buying an etf you should be buying stocks okay right so you know if you have to admit to your investors that you

Starting point is 00:35:14 need an etf then why am i paying you fees if you're just going and paying etfs okay i can just buy the etf myself got it yeah so there's this whole optics game sure that goes alongside it right so active managers in equities need bitcoin treasury companies because they need the performance of bitcoin right so you're gonna just see that little release valve of a one percent allocation two percent allocation slowly growing hissing yeah as the equity markets release yeah that pent-up valuation support that you've seen through the money printing same with the bond market sailors actively attacking the bond market now with the preference shares yes right he's paying orders of magnitude above what you can get in normal yields in the bond market so of course

Starting point is 00:36:07 it's attracting a lot of capital. I think he's raised somewhere around seven or eight billion dollars in preference shares already. But that market is hundreds of trillions. Right. It's massive. So there's that. And then there's, of course, the volatility. If you think about what money printing does to volatility, every time there's a disaster, they print money to support the markets. That's muting volatility. But Bitcoin is very, very volatile. And, you know, we're losing volatility now but generally options traders convertible bond managers they need volatility for them volatility is vitality yes and it means that you know micro strategy or strategy is net is able to issue zero coupon bonds because his volatility is so high but he just drops the

Starting point is 00:36:57 implied volatility on the pricing of these bonds gets a zero coupon so for him that's another avenue it's another capital pool that's being tapped and so all across the financial markets every capital pool is slowly hissing but it's going to become a flood i think that we're just at the beginning of this you know you've seen a lot of bitcoin treasury companies pop up a lot of them aren't real a lot of them aren't real bitcoiners a lot of them don't even understand bitcoin um and do you think they're not going to be able to play out the playbook it's just you know they they're not the people you should be giving your money to right you know sailor has shown us his commitment he's shown us he's absolutely resolute simon the same you know

Starting point is 00:37:42 those two companies from my opinion they're the gold standard in the bitcoin treasury space and we're seeing who's going to shake out in the rest there's been a lot of these new bitcoin treasury companies that come up yeah i do urge everybody to proceed with caution right you know the the mantra in traditional finance is diversify right i don't believe that's a sensible strategy okay owning 10 to 20 bitcoin treasury companies and hoping for the best they're all very different and so paying attention to the fact whether or not these real bitcoin is behind them that they understand the need to be aggressive in terms of their acquisition of bitcoin and constantly creating bitcoin yield very important their ability to tap different capital pools

Starting point is 00:38:29 like Sailor has done through financial engineering in the same way that Simon does with put underwriting is very important as well. Many of these people running these companies have no financial engineering experience. So again, there's some real pitfalls that can potentially be trodden in by investors. So I would just really urge people to proceed with caution.

Starting point is 00:38:52 The blue chips are MicroStrategy and MetaPlanet. And as I say, there will be another tier that comes along. But yeah, people should definitely proceed with caution. But definitely proceed. Look, I think it's a phenomenon that's going to continue. I think that, as I pointed out, this is a release valve for the traditional financial markets.

Starting point is 00:39:15 You asked the question about adoption. I think that it's a necessary thing that Wall Street starts adopting Bitcoin. That's where all the capital sits today. for us to see 20 30 million dollar bitcoin price you're going to need serious amounts of capital to come into bitcoin and that will be the point where bitcoin flips everything and everyone wants to denominate in bitcoin and that only happens if you see traditional capital start to unlock into the bitcoin system i had spoken to preston pish a few days ago about that topic as well and

Starting point is 00:39:52 And I'd asked him whether he was predicting that that will happen with traditional finance. That is the way that traditional finance is going to get into Bitcoin and that that will be the next step that will open mass adoption of Bitcoin. And he said that he actually did not see that that is what it's going to look like. Did you see it coming? Did you think that that's how we're going to roll to the next? The Bitcoin treasuries? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:40:19 No, I didn't. No? I definitely didn't. Were you surprised? that that's the way when say initiated the strategy i was running a pension for for a uk family and i wanted to put an allocation into bitcoin and the uk pension system didn't allow you to touch any bitcoin etfs or etns and so as soon as he announced that i said okay great like and i put a decent allocation of the pension into into micro strategy but for me it was more like

Starting point is 00:40:49 obviously yeah logically people will want bitcoin on the balance sheet i didn't see the phenomena right going great i don't think sailor did either i mean you'll if you listen carefully to what sailor does he sort of happened dude he didn't i interviewed him a year ago a year ago june 2024 and i asked him that question i asked him are you being approached by other ceos of other companies wanting to do the same what you're doing and he said one or two here and there but not really he did think or hope that that will come but it wasn't there yet it was a year ago yeah i remember i was in nashville in july 24 and i remember seeing similar scientific metaplanet and microstrategy on stage and i remember saying to myself i think probably

Starting point is 00:41:41 there'll be seven to ten of these companies at next year's bitcoin conference yep and here we are in one year it's insane yeah okay got it thank you for sharing um how do you personally value bitcoin today an investment a monetary asset or something else uh well it's all of those things and uh it is hope uh for people i mean you and i just discussed earlier allocations in percentages of net wealth to bitcoin i remember having a discussion with someone who is a bitcoiner but then questioning my personal allocation like it was a very large percentage allocation to bitcoin and me saying well i don't want to live in a world that doesn't have bitcoin so if bitcoin fails i'm okay to have that level of exposure because frankly

Starting point is 00:42:50 the world that is a world without bitcoin is is very concerning it's very troubling So I would say Bitcoin is hope. It gives hope to me. It makes me very positive about the outlook to the world. You and I, in separate discussions, have talked about, you know, all the very concerning things that are happening in the world. And my podcast, like yours, addresses many of them. And so I end up talking about them a lot.

Starting point is 00:43:21 But if there wasn't Bitcoin, then I would not have the level of optimism that I have about the world. Yeah. Because for me, the answer to a lot of the problems is defunding fiat. And the way you defund fiat is to migrate to Bitcoin. And so, yeah, it's a lot more than just an investment in an asset and a portfolio allocation. Absolutely. And for you, defunding fiat would be, could possibly be having bitcoin as the reserve asset and then fiat on top of it or like not having fiat at all um i don't know how that is going to play out you know you've in argentina you've got you've got president malay trying to kill the peso at the moment and focus entirely

Starting point is 00:44:14 on u.s dollar right and the debate that they're having is about you know whether or not you want to have two forms of money because people will spend the peso but hoard the u.s dollar and the same thing is which they're what they're doing with stable coins anyway sorry which is what they're doing with stable coins anyway in argentina like they're they're buying usdt and like converting their pesos into usdt oh yeah i mean everyone in argentina wants dollars. And if they understand Bitcoin, they want Bitcoin even more. My point is, I don't know, and Argentina is a good sort of experiment for this with US dollar versus peso, is to how this is all going to play out. Because you've got a hard money or a harder money in the US dollar

Starting point is 00:45:03 than the peso, which is just a garbage money. And so you think about Bitcoin in that context and how that's going to transition. I think more and more you're going to have governments want to have Bitcoin in their central banks or on their treasury balance sheet or in their sovereign wealth funds. But I don't necessarily know how we're going to see all of it transition eventually to an entire Bitcoin standard.

Starting point is 00:45:32 It would make a lot of sense that you have one global money, right? It's ridiculous that you have to change euros or Turkish lira or whatever it is when you're traveling to a foreign exchange industry it's just nonsense isn't it so I think um eventually you will have some level of transition we're seeing it I mean you've just spent a lot of time in Lugano you can spend bitcoin pretty much anywhere yeah they're pretty much anywhere yeah um so I think um it's not clear to me how we see that transition away from fiat. But more and more people need to be storing value in Bitcoin and eventually spending Bitcoin. I think there's a lot of debate about spending Bitcoin, which means

Starting point is 00:46:18 moving to that medium of exchange is more of a challenge because right now we're at the point where Bitcoin's growth is so exponential and will continue that spending it doesn't make so much sense. So we're in that sort of store of value phase of monetary adoption. I have a policy personally where I try to spend Bitcoin. And whenever I spend Bitcoin, I have a double replace methodology. So if I spend $100 in Bitcoin, I have to buy $200 of Bitcoin. So that incentivizes me to spend bitcoin but um yeah i i do it because i want to help with propagation of the economy um but uh yeah i'm not i'm not sure how we see that transition happen fair enough yeah it's hard to predict what it's going to look like um

Starting point is 00:47:16 are you seeing more people in traditional finance today starting to understand the implications of monetary debasement and if so is that translating into action or are they simply paying attention to what public companies like treasury companies in bitcoin are doing and that's how you think they'll be attracted is it through monetary debasement attention or through treasury company's attention uh it's um i i think that wealthy people have got the joke that the basement is a problem for a long time that's why you see family offices have 40 percent of their portfolio in real estate right um so wealthy families hold so much real estate and real estate has been seen as the store of value and the thing that obviously is also generating income because wealthy people

Starting point is 00:48:18 like to have income they like to be fully invested but they like to have income from those investments so they can fully allocate their capital because non-working capital is is losing money they get that joke so the problem for many of them with bitcoin is that it doesn't produce a yield it doesn't produce a return so for them it's a bit like gold and that's why gold is only you know anywhere from one to ten percent of of portfolios for people um but i think that slowly people are understanding bitcoin a bit more and so it is starting to find its way into portfolios you've got fidelity and blackrock now adding it to their um multi-strat portfolios yeah um so i think that is now guiding um wealthy investors in terms of thinking about bitcoins and allocation

Starting point is 00:49:15 you've got pension fund adoption through the etfs so it's slowly happening i think debasement has been understood intuitively not necessarily directly uh for some time and that if you're sitting in cash you're wasting your money right so yeah i think we're getting to a point where institutions allocators capital waking up i think the fact that capital group which is a very famous uh equity allocator is invested in both strategy and meta planet is a real wake up for people about bitcoin treasury companies i think that will lead to much further adoption of bitcoin treasury company um equity and therefore other products relating to it yeah and in that sense for all those waiting for ngu for number go up they'll be happy yeah we're gonna see bitcoin continue to

Starting point is 00:50:15 rise yeah look it it's i i think we are out of the four-year cycle phase now um bitcoin's being adopted so aggressively by nation states and you've got pakistan you've got saudi arabia abu dhabi as well as el salvador bhutan all these countries so you don't think we're going to see any other four-year cycles anymore this is going to change trajectory i think the halving will continue to impact liquidity okay um even though it's sort of a less and less significant in terms you know yeah significant number it's still half yes supply yeah right and so i think you are going to end up with with that being some sort of jerk yes reaction for for the pricing but i don't think you're going to see the same 50 to 80 percent drawdown that we used to see right in previous

Starting point is 00:51:10 cycles i mean we've just had it um witness where you know 80 000 bitcoin impacted the price by two and a half percent tiny and it really looked like galaxy messed up that execution you know they smashed the market and it was really badly dealt with and the market absorbed it and now we're back up to the same levels and if this would have happened three five years ago that would have completely turned things for people okay yeah for the market okay um i'm shifting gears a little bit so you've been successful in both finance and bitcoin what have those experiences taught you about what actually matters in life i think low ego is is very important we've talked about this already um i always give advice to grads

Starting point is 00:52:09 you know starting out you know you need to look at your day you need to be conscious about what happened in your day you need to take time and stock of your day and review what went well what went badly what would you change how would you change it how would you change that interaction with the chairman or the managing director or whatever for the better yeah I think conscious recalibration is the way to grow. I think that's a hack for anyone in any industry. It doesn't matter if it's finance, Bitcoin or anything else. I think that's a growth tactic that I've used throughout my career.

Starting point is 00:52:54 And I think, again, it requires a bit of humility to say I was wrong. I did that badly. um yeah so i would say those those are the sort of without beating yourself down yeah but with the intention of learning something from it everyone makes mistakes yeah right everyone's capable of irrational behavior we're emotional humans at the end of the day and not getting too caught up in that or being cognizant that you did get caught up in that um is is also a growth mechanism right it sounds like you know you're doing a lot of introspecting and and that is something that is not common for either people to do or to admit that they're doing especially

Starting point is 00:53:43 not men from my experience which i think is very unusual and very cool to see because i think that is a massive tool for growth for personal growth yeah no it it served me well um i when i was younger i was a very ambitious very aggressive very driven young man and uh yeah it it really helped calm me down and helped me recalibrate um also I I was very lucky to start to manage people very early and that requires a big mindset shift because management doesn't come naturally to humans like it's you've really got to be very empathetic you've really got to care about people that you might not even like right and you've got to again be humble and willing to hear things that you might not like it's like being a parent right management right of people is like being a parent

Starting point is 00:54:52 because generally people will behave like children in in any environment and so I remember I was made a manager very very early and I was a bit concerned about it I suddenly had a very big team yeah and so I read every book I could find on management right and obviously it was pre-kids so I was able to do so but uh yeah I I really studied and I remember it was funny I had a a guy who he was my age but he worked for me on my team and he said he said what have you been doing like have you been reading books or something like he felt like you're yeah he was like you've really changed like it's it's quite impressive and uh i said yeah actually i have and i i showed him all the books and uh so he then started reading them as well that is awesome but

Starting point is 00:55:50 yeah it was quite funny because we were we were competitors yeah and he I ended up then later hiring him and so we still had that competitive sort of dynamic um but he in in fairness to him he recognized he's like yeah you've really stepped it up a level like what have you done and so it was it was that again being willing to say I don't know anything about this i've got to try and learn i'm learning on the spot treading water sort of feet running under the desk like a newscaster i totally agree with that being also a manager for many many years of many people i think that the thing that this and tell me if you think that that's right or wrong the thing that distinguishes good managers from bad managers is first of all the coercion and

Starting point is 00:56:47 you know being aggressive towards people versus finding a communication that actually works but also when you are managing someone what you are basically doing if you're doing if you're a good manager is you're putting yourself aside it's not about you at the moment it's about them how can you help them how can you progress them how can you help them achieve their goals but also their full potential without even them knowing what their full potential is or how they can get there and once you are really selfless in that sense and it's all about them it makes you a terrific manager yeah right management is about service it's about how can i help you become excellent at what you do and yeah that that was a big realization i got that from the many books i

Starting point is 00:57:42 read right it's in the books you say it's in the books well i haven't read them but well you clearly uh worked it out anyway i exercised yeah exactly you you practically did it i was theoretically exactly yes but um yeah no that's absolutely spot on you are a servant to your people yeah help them perform to the highest level and then they're so grateful and then they love working with you and then you get other people calling you up saying do you have any open positions i want to work with you i heard you're a really good manager yeah it's funny you know i mean i find that people aren't that grateful actually you know when you really try and help someone people can especially in finance maybe it's fine right okay like people are you

Starting point is 00:58:30 know there's a certain type that it attracts i'm not your typical type that works in finance right i often used to confuse the hr managers they were like what are you doing here you're not the typecast yeah but it's uh you know people are high ego they're you know very go go go go go i'm the best yes you know so they kind of they might see how you've helped them but then they don't want to necessarily admit that later you know absolutely back to ego So, OK, I'm going to skip a few just so I can get to my beautiful batch of short questions in the end. But I do have to ask you whether you think Bitcoin is a spiritual tool and why? That's not a short question.

Starting point is 00:59:27 No, no, no. Before I get to the short batch. um yeah look i i have got to the point of believing that bitcoin was a benevolent gift from a higher power um that sounds pretty wacky to your average uh person i'm sure um but it's too perfect and you know the whole game theory and how it's playing out we're seeing this it it just i believe that it creates a benevolent mindset as well because you become much more comfortable much more confident in your own stability and security which you know working hard and you know securing wealth yeah is part of if your wealth is melting away from you constantly and you're in this panic which currency should i hedge myself in all of this

Starting point is 01:00:25 like i was back in the day in traditional finance then you can't worry too much about other people you're trying to survive right and i do believe that bitcoin whether or not it was whether or not i'm right about that it does lead people down the path of benevolence and wanting to help other people and being much more long-term mindset so if you were going to create a tool for the benefit of humankind then you would fix the money and it did all the technology existed but the way that it was brought together the way that satoshi knew to disappear and every other crypto founder post has been some sort of personality behind their crypto project but satoshi the very first one knew that he had to be or she had to be completely anonymous i really feel it was a gift

Starting point is 01:01:25 it was a gift to humanity whether that's from someone in the cia who saw what was happening and just realized he had to save the world or she or it was a higher power that came and said you know humanity's at a turning point like you said before yeah we need to do something we need to help humanity and i do believe that that's a very high possibility me too thank you i'm not the only one here um okay so here here's the batch of my short fireside questions one book that permanently shifted your world view it was sapiens was it was it it really was it it got me to the point of exploring bitcoin discovering bitcoin it made me realize a lot about the world that i was

Starting point is 01:02:26 concerned about that i didn't entirely understand okay and it's made me think a lot more about the consequences of technology well i think then i owe you valno thank you even though i don't appreciate his work very much but okay meditation fasting breath work do you practice any i try to do meditation i struggle with it but i definitely see the benefits breath work i've done very uh very surprising uh work that breath work is um and fasting yeah i I mean, I've done it. I actually had a Legionnaire's disease in 2017 and another rare form of pneumonia. Okay.

Starting point is 01:03:13 And the only thing that finally got me over it was fasting for three days. Which, in other words, is my body doing its own thing without intervention of anything. Wow. Yeah. Incredible. Thank you for sharing. okay one lesson from traditional finance that still serves you today is it the low ego or um i'd say it's uh work ethic work ethic yeah you i mean it was it was my lesson from traditional

Starting point is 01:03:49 finance that i had to understand every aspect of what i was dealing with and so you know i'm always very hands-on in terms of trying to understand something proof of work right um and so i tend to go deep on things and uh it's served me pretty well lovely what's one thing you believe five years ago that you no longer do you believed five years ago that you no longer do today well you know we talked about this earlier but covid when i first heard about it i was concerned by it i was living in hong kong there were dead people on the street on the tv yeah right and i believe that this was a very concerning thing yeah it took me about three months to realize that that's pretty fast this was all a complete farce and no one was dying

Starting point is 01:04:47 and uh yeah so got it thank you what do you hope people remember you for oh i um i do feel a responsibility to educate people about bitcoin okay and help them see the light that is hope and optimism about the future okay and then my last question is what gives you hope but you just said that perfectly perfect awesome thank you so much Richard you shared yourself so generously and I appreciate that it was lovely spending time with you and thanks for having me hijack your studio you're more than welcome come again okay I will thank you cheers thanks for being with us please take a minute to give this episode a like a comment and subscribe or follow. And please share it with your friends so they can also get value and choose to take

Starting point is 01:05:43 some positive action in their lives. Till next time.

You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Beyond Ego: The Truth About Money, Meaning & Bitcoin - Richard Byworth | Ep. 100

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