You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 87: Pierre and Morgen Rochard - Upgrading Finance with Bitcoin

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Our guests today are Pierre and Morgen Rochard, co-hosts of the “Bitcoin for Advisors” podcast and leading advocates for integrating Bitcoin into long-term financial planning. In this episode, Pierre shares how Austrian economics and open-source philosophy led him to Bitcoin in 2012, and how his new venture, “The Bitcoin Bond Company”, aims to unlock institutional credit markets using sound money. Morgen reflects on her background in traditional finance and explains how she helps individuals match long-term goals with long-term assets like Bitcoin. We discuss the cultural clash between fiat excess and Bitcoin values, the growing trend of corporate treasury adoption, and the risks of financialization without education. Pierre and Morgen break down the freedoms enabled by Bitcoin, and caution against over-leveraging and chasing returns. Above all, this is a conversation about financial sovereignty, purposeful planning, and bridging old systems with a better monetary future.► This episode is part of the "Bitcoin Vegas 2025 Special" in collaboration with Ben Samocha, Founder of Israel’s CryptoJungle and Crypto Talks podcast.► If you got value, please like, comment, share, follow  and support my work. Thank you!-- SPONSORS & AFFILIATES --►► Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn ►► Get 10% off on Augmented NAC, with the code YCXKQDK2 via this link: https://store.augmentednac.com/?via=efrat (Note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD)►► Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - code EFRAT for 10% off: https://efenigson.gumroad.com/l/desmet_efrat ►► Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat ►► Join me in any of these upcoming events: https://www.efrat.blog/p/upcoming-events -- LINKS –Morgen’s Twitter: https://x.com/MorgenRochard Pierre’s Twitter: https://x.com/BitcoinPierre Bitcoin for Advisors Podcast: https://bit.ly/40gk46q Efrat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efenigsonEfrat's Telegram: https://t.me/efenigsonBen's Twitter: https://x.com/bensamocha Ben's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-samocha/ Watch/listen on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoiceSupport Efrat's work: ⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/efenigson   ⁠Support Efrat with Bitcoin: https://geyser.fund/project/efenigson-- CHAPTERS –00:00 Coming Up…01:10 Introducing Pierre & Morgen Rochard02:30 Reflections on Vegas & The Bitcoin Conference05:30 Wall Street, Nation States & Individual Adoption06:48 From a Doomer Mindset to A Constructive Transition10:20 Discovering Bitcoin: Their Personal Journeys & Austrian Economics14:30 What Makes Bitcoin Special?17:35 How Bitcoin enables rational decision-making19:20 Bitcoin Bond Company Explained: Bridging Traditional Finance27:00 Spiritual Foundations for Honest Money28:45 Biggest Risks and Rewards for Bitcoin33:45 Financial Education & Financial Planning36:35 Ripple/XRP Lobbying & Misinformation Campaigns41:30 Ripple Funding $5m for Anti-Climate Anti-Bitcoin Campaign  44:10 Bitcoin Treasury Companies: The Trend49:40 How to Build a Bitcoin-Aware Portfolio54:00 Most Memorable Research at Riot59:50 Finding Hope in God, Family & Community

fiat currency we're cheating people all the time all the time right and so like if we have a money where we can't cheat that's like a bringing a piece of god down to earth absolutely i think that people fear that bitcoin's becoming too financialized too institutionalized and co-opted by the system but i really see it as the opposite a lot of pension funds in the united states are underfunded and they're not meeting the return goals that they need to actually pay for people's retirements when you have a known monetary policy a known supply where the unit of account is stable right you can actually make decisions some people think it's beanie babies and tulips and so they think it's going to go to zero and they're entitled to that opinion but they shouldn't

be the decision makers saying to everyone else in the market here's the way it is and you're not allowed to disagree with us they had conviction on the fact that we had to do the right thing which which was to pursue the truth and to push back on this government overreach and to protect the Bitcoin mining industry from a fake emergency. Hello and welcome from Bitcoin Vegas 2025. I'm Efrat with You're The Voice. And I'm Ben from CryptoTalks. And we're here today at a collaboration. We're going to interview a series of guests here in

Vegas, and we'll introduce each one of them for you, and then we'll roll with the episodes. The episodes are going to be released on both Your The Voice and CrippleTalk, so make sure you're subscribed to both. Our next guests are Pierre and Morgan Richard. Pierre Richard is a longtime Bitcoin advocate, investor and developer, and is the CEO of the Bitcoin Bond Company. He discovered Bitcoin in 2012 and co-founded the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute in 2014. He is known for his outspoken Bitcoin maximalism, technical contributions to the ecosystem, and much more.

Morgan Rochard is a financial planner, a chartered financial analyst, and the founder of Origin Wealth Advisors. She focuses on long-term financial planning and Bitcoin-focused investment strategies. Morgan co-hosts the Bitcoin for Advisors podcast alongside Pierre, where they help financial professionals understand Bitcoin's role in wealth management. Pierre and Morgan Rochard, thank you so much for being here with us. Thanks for having us. Yeah, we're excited to be here.

I'm excited to have you guys. I've been following your work for a while, and I really appreciate what you do in this space. I haven't been in this space for so long, but your work is definitely prominent. I want to start with a question about where we're at geographically, physically. We're in Vegas, Sin City, as it's called, where we walk around those aisles and we see all those people tapping the pokey machines or whatever other gambling vehicle that exists here and kind of exerting their energy in this peak fiat mode. And here we are hosting a Bitcoin conference in Vegas. What do you make of this contrast? What does it make you feel?

What do you think about what you're seeing? And when you reflect it back to the state of humanity today or the state of the monetary system today? Well, we've got to be a light where there's darkness, right? So I think that, yeah, the It's a Horizon is strong in this city. But it's also, it has a lot of beauty as well, right? And so and a lot of good friends have flown in from all over the world. And it's really, I think, very important for Bitcoin, this digital electronic cash system that is a very decentralized community to have opportunities like this to come together to see that there's really humans on the other side and that we're all really passionate about this movement.

Yeah, definitely. To piggyback on that, I mean, it's it's hard to see the stark contrast. um and also to recognize that the that the place that we're in is like kind of built on the backs of people who have lost so much by coming here and it's like such an amazing place when you look around i mean there's deep beauty here as well um the hotel is beautiful they've set up all these you know different places where you can just feel like you're in a different area right i mean we were walking around the little venetian uh garden area last night and they have the canal and everything you just like you can't even believe that this much could be built um but also like

when you have that side by side with like a new monetary system the hope that brings um that like things would change that people can value their money in a way where maybe they wouldn't want it to sit at a place like this and just gamble it away right maybe they would want to have um some long-term savings and see this as like some entertainment that they have a small budget for rather than it being like them gambling because they have to get yeah because they're trying to escape this fiat life so um i don't know i i wonder like what the future of places like this will be right maybe it'll be a better future where it could just be like a nice place where people go where it's not so um sinful and overrun by you know just negative negative forces and so forth

um and where it could be somewhere where um all this beauty can be something everyone can really take in and maybe it could even be a family place who knows absolutely beautiful so we were filming this in the last day of the conference and uh i wanted to know what are your key takeaways so far 35 000 people came here many big names uh share with us what's your thoughts yeah i think uh it's interesting to see that the addition of wall street and of nation states i think doesn't take away from the individual growth right so there's still lots of individuals who are new adopters learning about Bitcoin for the first time and jumping in. And so I think that people fear that Bitcoin's becoming too financialized, too institutionalized and co-opted by the system.

But I really see it as the opposite, that basically there's a Greek myth of the ship of Theseus, which is a philosophical question of if you replace every piece on a boat piece by piece, is at the same boat afterwards um and i really see us uh essentially taking every piece of the fiat system and little bit by bit we're replacing it with bitcoin uh to to upgrade the system to fix the system rather than to destroy or to like cause problems so um i think that that's uh in stark contrast to what i thought about before i learned about bitcoin i was very much into gold and silver And I thought that the dollar was going to collapse and that it would cause, you know, then people would adopt gold because of that kind of doomer mindset. Peter Schiff, is that you?

Yeah, exactly. But with Bitcoin, it's not the Titanic. It's like we're upgrading to a nicer cruise ship and we want to build bridges and meet people where they're at. Because at the end of the day, Bitcoin's architecture, the decentralization, that cannot be co-opted. And just by the nature of being open source and permissionless, it is for everyone, including banks, insurance companies, corporations like Strategy or even the U.S. government's strategic Bitcoin reserve. And it doesn't change the fact that normal individual plebs can also go buy $20 worth of Bitcoin and put it on their hardware wallet. Yeah, I think that wasn't so clear when we first got into Bitcoin, what you're saying. I think that, in all honesty, at least my thought on it at first was that, like, really, we were going to light the system on fire, you know, and I actually wasn't really that excited about that acronym. I mean, I have, I've been in traditional finance for many years. I've been running my financial planning practice now for 11 years. But prior to that, like, I was an equity options trader, I worked for large banks, like, I was really steeped in traditional finance. And so it's not that like I had allegiance to that, you know, but it also like to know

that there were so many people that were going to be affected by this new money, that's a better money, that's a harder money, that's what people should be using, but that it could really mean that people really do blow up. Like that was really hard for me, especially because like in my work, like I strive to help people do better, right? That's why I'm in this. I'm not doing this so that like we light the world on fire and then start new, right? That's not like, that's not my role.

I don't think that's my role. really think that's anyone's role in the world right and so it's really nice to see that that's actually not what's occurring right um and that doomsday is doesn't seem like it's actually gonna plan out right and so i actually obviously i don't know the future right that could still unfortunately you know hopefully not be the case um but it does seem like through the way that we're transitioning and through how the technology is evolving and how like things are just evolving in general in the community that like you're saying we're kind of replacing things bit by bit rather than it just being like we're lighting the whole system on fire and starting over

And in fact, there's a lot of parts of the system that we should keep. And I think that's kind of lost where, like, especially in Bitcoin, our mentality, we tend to be a lot of all or nothing type people. And that's kind of like has gotten us really far. But also we need to recognize that, like, there's an overlap and actually that middle of the Venn diagram is a really good place. And we should keep some of those things and just incorporate them into the Bitcoin world and leave all like the rotten fiat stuff behind. beautiful 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 five percent discount on Trezor product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code FLAT. You answered a little bit of my next question, which is what drew you into Bitcoin? But Pierre, what about you? What originally drew you into Bitcoin? Yeah, so I got very interested in monetary economics and the Austrian School of Economics. In particular, what interested me was the question of the business cycle. Why does the economy have these booms and busts? And I really thought the explanations I got in school about animal spirits was very odd. To me, human nature doesn't fundamentally change every eight years where suddenly everybody's fearful instead of

being greedy. And that there was an underlying cause, which was the monetary system behind it. And so when I learned about the perils of central banks and fractional reserve banking and how that can destabilize the macro economy and how that if we switch to a system that had a sound money that had 100 reserve banking that we could avoid the business cycle entirely and just have an economy that's growing based on people's productivity and we're not constantly vacillating in a boom and bust mania um so then when and i i also at the same time was learning about open source software. So I was installing Linux on computers. I was listening to Richard Stallman explain the philosophy of freedom behind free software. And that appealed to me a lot as well.

But I never thought those two things would cross paths. I thought it was like physical gold and silver over here and then Linux and all of these other flourishing ecosystems over here. But that all changed at the end of 2012 when my friends brought up Bitcoin and how there's only to be 21 million bitcoin and it's open source software and i thought wow this is yeah much better than gold and silver it's electronic it's 24 7 global you can send transactions on the internet and it's scarcer than gold is uh you know they're constantly mining more gold the higher the price of gold goes the more gold they go mine with bitcoin that gets cut in half every four years no matter what um and so to me it was immediately obvious that this was going to gain an adoption

and that it was a more positive vision of the future than the uh other way of thinking about sound money of you know waiting for collapse yeah my story is not not i don't not not similar actually i feel like um in all honesty like when i look back at it now like hashem put me in this body in this time in this place for a reason uh with the family that i have my parents were bros perot voters you know in like the 90s like they were never really the type to just sort of do what everyone else was doing um i think that they would kind of laugh if they heard that because they do think of themselves as kind of a normal family but we really weren't um and that like you know i read ayn rand um in high school and in college and i took a lot of econ courses and then

And then I got introduced to Mises and Rothbard and just like went down that rabbit hole. And that's what really brought me here. And I remember actually learning about Bitcoin was like two dollars, something like that. But I just couldn't figure out how to buy it with my traditional finance background and actually made it such that like it made me more nervous. It was like wire money to Japan. It wasn't really your own account. It was like this whole Mt. Gox thing. It didn't make any sense. And I just I didn't feel comfortable being like, you know, a young woman in New York going on a street corner buying Bitcoin. Like that seemed like a like unsafe thing I should be doing.

So I just kind of forgot about it. I was like, OK, whatever, you know, I'll just keep doing my thing. And then we met. And of course, Pierre on his on the first date was like very romantic. Yeah. Talking about Bitcoin. Really? But the reality is that like the only reason we're even together is because of that journey that I had.

I mean, if I had not spent so much time learning Rothbard, I wouldn't have been quoting Rothbard in my dating profile. That is so awesome! And he literally searched for Rothbard, and he found one woman. So, yeah. That is amazing. There's only one soulmate out there, yeah. There you go.

There's no such thing as coincidence. Of course. And here we are, married almost 10 years. Beautiful story. That is so beautiful. Definitely beautiful. So you already started answering basically the next question, which is what makes Bitcoin the best savings technology and the most useful money technology out there? So other than the scarcity and the halving and what we just mentioned in the open source, are there any other things you'd like to mention as important characteristics of Bitcoin that people should be aware of?

Yeah, the first word that comes to mind is freedom. So, and I really see Bitcoin's pillars as three different freedoms. One is the freedom to receive money. So you can generate an address and you don't need anyone's permission to open an account. You don't need a physical address. You don't need a social security number or driver's license. So that permissionless nature of just receiving it. And then you have the freedom to hold it and you can hold it as long as you want or as

short as you want. and you're not getting diluted out of your money like you have with fiat, where inflation is just eating away at the value. In fact, we have the opposite of like the longer you hold the Bitcoin, the more it increases in value. But if you want to go spend it right away, you have the freedom to do that as well. And so that's the third freedom is to spend. And I think the Lightning Network has come a long way. And so when we think about the dual use of Bitcoin, in my mind is the savings technology of holding and then the payments technology of sending and receiving and that we want both to be clearly superior to all the alternatives um and i think we've

achieved that with open source and now it's just a matter of network effects so on the saving side it's the liquidity network effects of how deep and broad is the bitcoin market how many bitcoin ATMs are there? How many Bitcoin exchanges are there? Bitcoin ETFs, Bitcoin futures, all of these financial products. To me, that all adds to the liquidity of Bitcoin, improving it as a savings technology. And then on the payment side, I think we have a lot of work to do to build out the payments infrastructure. Because when we look at the history of cards, for example, it really goes back to the 1950s. And it's not until the internet came along And you could point to perhaps 2010 that you finally had cards become the dominant payment technology, at least in the United States.

And so I think the payment side is going to take longer. It's going to take many decades, but we'll get there. And it's just it is better technology. It just doesn't have the motivating factor of, hey, I like number go up technology, right? of people are motivated to learn about bitcoin because they want to make money off of it and sometimes it's perverse of like get rich quick which is not going to end well but other times it's more rational of i i need to have a long-term savings goal and so bitcoin solves an immediate problem whereas i have a credit card so i can spend money that that's not a problem for a lot

of people absolutely and then also like from a medium of exchange store value and unit account perspective I mean it's I have business owners in my practice right who have to make decisions about what they're going to do and they don't know what interest rates are going to be like they don't know like what inflation expectations are going to be especially right now like we're using all these different assumptions and building out these models of like this is you know base case worst case best case you know and it's very difficult for them to make business decisions right it's really difficult for individuals to make just decisions in general right there are a lot of people out there that are terrified of investing because of what's going on in the fiat

system um and so just them also the banks themselves when jerome powell says on the one day we will not increase interest rates and then six months later he goes yeah so it's just like you're they're you're paralyzed right you can't make good decisions whereas when you have a known monetary policy a known supply where the unit of account is stable right you can actually make decisions and right we're obviously not in this bitcoin world where we can do that now but like it i could see like that vision in the future where it could be a lot easier to just operate your business because it's a known quantity right they're not changing the measure all the time um and also like for like you were saying with the payments for it to take it's probably going

to take a long time because like you have to have something be a good store value in order for it to be a medium of exchange um if you have something that's a you know a terrible medium exchange like nobody wants chucky cheese coin right like you're not going to accept that as payment unless it's like in that, you know, in Chucky Chase itself, because it doesn't mean anything, right? It's not it's not actually a store of value. So Bitcoin is obviously proving itself as a store of value and therefore will be able to be used as a medium of exchange like easily because people will want to hold it. Absolutely.

I love it. Can you share a bit of info with us about the Bitcoin bond company? Yeah, absolutely. So when we look at what has happened over the past year, one is that the ETFs finally got approved because of litigation against the SEC. But now we have a new SEC as well. So here in the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission is the regulator for financial markets. And they, under Gary Gensler, were very anti-Bitcoin in general. And so they were not approving the ETFs. Now, this new administration has put in place Chairman Paul Atkins, who he wants innovation as long as it is responsible.

Right. So making sure that all of these financial instruments are fully transparent so that investors have all the information they need to make an informed decision. So he's now merit neutral. And I think that's really important because there's a lot of different perspectives on Bitcoin. right so some people think it's beanie babies and tulips and so they think it's going to go to zero and they're entitled to that opinion but they shouldn't be the decision makers saying to everyone else in the market here's the way it is and you're not allowed to disagree with us and so um the the second part is that there are lots of institutional investors who um have a mandate to invest in credit. So ever since 2008 and Dodd-Frank, the banks have actually been very limited in their ability to extend credit to the economy. And so we've seen a proliferation of

credit funds that are called private credit funds that are providing financing to small and medium businesses and large business, larger and larger businesses as well. And they actually are reaching a point where they have provided as much credit as the economy needs currently. And so they're seeing some limitations in terms of their ability to grow their businesses. And on the other hand, when we look at Bitcoin's market cap of $2 trillion, it's actually very underserved from a credit perspective. So Bitcoin is very under leveraged compared to every other asset class in the world. And so part of it was the regulatory constraints, but the other part of it was the level of education. So for the Bitcoin bond company, what I want to do is provide credit

wrappers around Bitcoin so that these institutional investors who are looking for new forms of collateral that can potentially outperform real estate or corporates or sovereigns, that they actually have the ability to access Bitcoin through a credit wrapper because they can't go buy a commodity. That's just not within their mandate. And then also providing a risk transfer within that, because there are credit funds that are more conservative, which might be, for example, for insurance companies or endowments or pensions, where they're ruled by a committee. So an investment committee has to come together and everybody has to agree to the investment. And sometimes it can be challenging where you might have one or two Bitcoiners on the investment

committee, but they need to persuade three other stakeholders that might have a very different view on Bitcoin, right? And so they need to have products that are less risky than spot Bitcoin, less volatile. And on the other hand, there's, for example, global macro hedge funds that want to go leverage long Bitcoin in a way that is very institutional. So using the custodians they're comfortable with, using the trustees they're comfortable with, and not going on an offshore exchange or using exotic derivatives, right? They want something that is tried and true. And so developing structured financial products for those two different demographics so that on both ends, they're able to access Bitcoin and ultimately meet the expectations of the investors

in those funds. Because when we look at, for example, teachers and firemen that are putting money into their pension fund for retirement, a lot of pension funds in the United States are underfunded and they're not meeting the return goals that they need to actually pay for people's retirements. And so on the insurance side, likewise, we've seen natural disasters like the the fires in California or hurricanes in Florida, where you really do need to have an asset base that has growth in it. If the assets backing these liabilities are not growing sufficiently, then we're going to have a lot of problems going forward. And so it's very important for those portfolios to be able to integrate Bitcoin. And as Bitcoiners, for us to help them on the education

side and meet them where they're at right because it's not going to work to go in there and say hey you need to set up a hardware wallet and multi-sig and you know you need to go on an exchange and and uh so no treasure maps yeah some government official can go find the hardware wallet when it's the time they they need the the products and the governance framework around it that fits their their worldview so what's the status now with the company is it already up and running so i announced it a couple months ago congratulations thank you uh to to plant the flag and start that education process so we're still very early but uh on one hand you know things happen quickly in bitcoin but in the world of institutional finance you know it's a long process

of developing relationships and developing the education period of feeling like your freedom and future are fading away do you live in a country with growing inflation crazy housing prices, weird culture, and a chaotic economy? You're not alone, and my friend Mikel Thorpe and his team at Expat Money can help. Mikel is the world's leading expat consultant on a mission to free you from broken systems. He's been an expat for 25 years, lived in nine different countries, and has helped hundreds of people with second residencies and passports, offshore banking, international investing, and many other essential tools. If you're serious about protecting your wealth and your family, it's not enough to hope things will get better. You need a plan B in

another country. The team at ExpatMoney can help you build it legally, safely, and without wasting years of research. Visit expatmoney.com slash eflat and leave your details for a follow-up. In a world hypnotized and sleepwalking towards totalitarian control and digital enforcement, Awakened voices rise to inspire change and radiate hope. In December 2024, I had the honor of hosting Professor Matthias Desmet at a conference I produced called New Totalitarian Order. This masterclass is now recorded and available to watch. The conference explores the psychology behind global mass processes, offering a behind-the-scenes look at science, economics, and human potential. It addresses challenging global agendas, mass formation, transhumanism, consciousness, societal change, and the path to transformation.

Click the link in the show notes to access three and a half hours of exclusive presentations, in-depth content, and my fireside chat with Professor Desmet. Use my code AFRAT for 10% off. I hope you find great value in it. when it comes to israel obviously the financial institutions are way way way behind so uh yeah a lot of work to be done we sometimes lose hope but um no let's be optimistic it's actually there's uh interesting torah sources for it like bitcoin is like rooted in torah so like for instance in vaikra like they're about the weights and measures like that you're you're not supposed to cheat people uh right like fiat currency we're cheating people all the time all

the time all right and so like if we have a money where we can't cheat like that's like a bringing a piece of god down to earth right there's like there's talmudic sources about this about like the last coin leaving the purse and that's when mashiach comes like we couldn't figure out for so many years what does the last coin mean like leaving the purse does it mean we're all poor does it mean we're all rich like what does it mean and like now there are rabbis coming out being like no like maybe it's maybe it's bitcoin like maybe that's what it means we're not actually transacting in like in in sense anymore right we're transacting in something else that's that's different and so it's uh those are just two reference points so there's many more you know

where you're just thinking about okay like if we really are going to fix the world and change the world and bring people together like this is such a great way to do it speaking of mission and why we're born to this world and the way we are and who we are and all that so just an anecdote that my surname, Fennigson. Fennig is a coin in Germany. It's like the old coin, which is penny, the smallest coin. And son is son. So it's like son of the coin. It's like a poor boy. But I received that surname and my whole lineage of family, they weren't very rich, they were quite poor. And I think it's quite interesting that here I am like circling back to a technology or something that could be a way out of poverty for many people right yeah for sure

which is why uh educating them now is super crucial and uh letting the people do it first hopefully before governments hopefully before institutions before the fiat money printer understands that it needs to print money to buy again yeah yeah um what do you see as the biggest risks that bitcoin faces this today today and in the coming years that's your question um so i actually might have a contrarian answer which is that uh to me the the biggest risk is actually the the lack of adoption right so um and those who don't understand bitcoin and decide to even make financial bets against Bitcoin. There's been two examples of this recently. One was Jim Chanos came out and said that he was going to short strategy because he thought it was

overvalued relative to Bitcoin. And another story was MetaPlanet, a Bitcoin treasury company out of Japan that had the most shorts on it of any stock in Japan. And then they created essentially a mini financial crisis because they were trying to cover their shorts and it caused Metaplanet to become the most traded stock in Japan. And so I think that there's a lot of people in traditional finance who, if they really stick to their idea that Bitcoin is going to go to zero and they start using other people's money to bet against Bitcoin and blow themselves up doing that, that's actually a huge risk for the people's money that went into that. But also, I think for the optics of, are they going to try to rile people up against Bitcoin, right? Run news articles

against Bitcoin to try to push the Bitcoin price down as they try to short it. And so I think that the adoption of Bitcoin in traditional finance can be positive, where like, for example, Michael sailor. He's done a lot of Bitcoin education in talking about why his company is doing what it is. But it's also that risk of there's going to be more FUD as short sellers and people who want to like tear down Bitcoin, try to like, like the Financial Times put out like a 20 minute video. And the journalist was saying, oh, I have scarcity of teeth. So my, you know, that's the same thing is bitcoin so british yeah i don't know how persuasive that is but i expect more of it is i think what's what's gonna happen yeah i think on an individual level there's some risk as well

um that's not necessarily your question but like there's a lot of new financialization now that's coming out with bitcoin and so one of the like because this number go up technology right that ngu aspect of it brings a lot of people in some of the people that are in though like maybe they don't have the full education on what they're holding. Like maybe they really are only here because of NGU. Right. And so because of that, right, there's a lot of shiny objects around right now that people don't necessarily understand, but they're seeing that that's appreciating more than Bitcoin is. So maybe like this is not the thing I need to hold anymore. Maybe now I'm going to go after some of these other shiny objects and so forth. And so I think that people really

need to reevaluate what's important to them in their life and why they're holding money to begin with and whether or not these investments that they're going to make are actually worthwhile trading their bitcoin for i'm not saying that like it doesn't make sense to make investments like of course like i'm a financial planner like i help people make investments right um but what i'm saying is that people shouldn't like walk in with their eyes closed when they're doing this and they have to make rational decisions about how they're going to allocate their capital and decide whether or not they're going to trade their currency allocation for an investment allocation and and what percentage does that make sense um and i'm seeing it i mean the stuff i'm seeing on

x of what people are doing i mean it's mind-boggling where you're like they're you know You know, they're leveraging against their borrowing against their Bitcoin to go buy all these different financial products. And, you know, they're paying an interest rate and they're leveraged up. And it's like it's it's crazy to me that you would want to do that. Right. Like that you would want to put yourself under that kind of stress and strain simply because you think you can outperform a little bit. And the reality is, is that when people over allocate in such a way, they tend to be they tend to have less later. Yeah. And it goes to the fact that, you know, we've been talking about long term, the value of Bitcoin increases. short and medium term we can't look past the fact that it is very volatile and so uh that can be

exciting on the way up but on the way down it's really important that uh if if you want to hold your bitcoin and say one bitcoin equals one bitcoin you have to be in a position to do that financially where you can just sleep at night and not worry about the bear market and just dollar cost average and add more to your stack instead of panic selling because you are underwater on your loans and you're getting margin calls and you're panicking yeah yeah i think if i may about what you said in terms of uh um individuals and the risk they're taking it's uh it's much bigger than bitcoin right so it's uh it's a education about money to begin with and it's uh the system itself that uh except essentially led people to realize that the only way that they can escape

the rat race of inflation is by gambling and then they when they even know about bitcoin they want to find the next bit they want to understand how they can beat 50 annual average return as no financial knowledge at all and that's the the real problem here that also uh is is the The reason why my brand is crypto, right, so that I can accommodate them and I can give them the tools early stage and to understand better how to operate and how to, yeah, take risks, no problem, try and make more, but at least do it with a very small percentage of your worth so that you don't make those mistakes. And also just to add to your comment, I mean, people, there's statistics about this.

people will spend on average two to three weeks researching things about a vacation they're going to take. They go to work all day, they come home and they spend several hours after work planning all this stuff, finding the right hotel, finding the airline, right? Finding the tour guide, finding all the things. Then they won't take five minutes

to plan their financial life. Tell me about it. You know, it's like if people just took that energy and put it somewhere, somewhere more productive. I mean, I don't want to like, you know, i'm not i think it's great that people take vacations right obviously like when you work really hard like you you need to recharge and so forth or people have pastimes right where uh where they spend many hours learning baseball statistics but they'll spend five minutes doing

financial planning you know it's like your mind is like ready to do these things um so like don't discount your ability to do them i guess what i'm saying is like if you have the ability to research something that's important to you make your finance like your financial life important to you and then like go for it because i mean at the end of the day right like as a financial planner we we're like we're led by the client right i can't live a client's life i can give them recommendations based on like what they tell me but i don't and at the end know exactly what they need to do right they know in their heart and and so like you need to think about what's important to you how you want to live your life how you want to spend your time um and then what that

means from a monetary perspective of like how you're going to actually hold the savings that you've created um or worse for some people is that they don't even spend time trying to create that savings right they're just using it um whatever it is that this like hobby are important and so at the very start you need to like spend that time creating the savings then spend some time thinking about what you're going to do with that savings right and then and lead that meaningful life that we all want to live absolutely amen okay going back for a second to what pierre said about shorting bitcoin so not long ago you were leading a very good fight and i was right behind you rooting and also giving you some ammunition when XRP was shorting Bitcoin up there in the White

House or trying to anyway, trying to really go against Bitcoin as a strategic reserve, right? They were lobbying for that. And you were kind of stop everything, stop the world. I want everyone to know what's going on here. Can you share a little bit about that? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. It was so funny. I loved it, by the way. I've known about Ripple almost as long as I've known about Bitcoin. Unfortunately. Unfortunately, yes.

Is that where you started? Oh, no, I didn't start at that point. We've been around for so long that we know about all these stuff. In that first group of people when I was in college that was learning about Bitcoin, one of them became an XRP guy and said he would constantly be talking about XRP. This is like back in 2013, 2014. Is he still? I believe so. I haven't checked it. I haven't kept up with them. You know, we don't chat. But so my I think that what I don't like about Ripple and XRP is basically that they created this money out of thin air and allocated it all to themselves and then drip it out.

Right. And so with Bitcoin, the Bitcoin mining process is half of it is processing transactions. The other half is the issuance of new Bitcoin. And so the issuance of new Bitcoin being added to the ledger has always been permissionless that anybody can participate in the mining process. And by virtue of that, it's very competitive so that there's no monopoly profits from the issuance of the currency, which in monetary economics is called seniorage. and is actually, from my perspective, an immoral form of profit in the economy because it's based on the fact that you have a legal monopoly on this instead of having a competitive process for it. And it goes with what you said about the Torah.

Yeah, absolutely. And so they created XRP out of thin air. They won't let anyone else create XRP, right? And they gave themselves it all. And then they have paid for marketing to manipulate people into thinking that Ripple has these special relationships with institutions that is going to lead to XRP being the future world reserve currency. Right. And but that's all smoke and mirrors. They also invented beautiful terms like the quantum financial system and all these. they invented that but they use it very nicely yeah they're piggybacking on this story bullshit

stories that all these freedom fighters are quoting everywhere that ripple is the future of money is going to be abundant everyone's going to have it we're all going to be rich the banks are going to work for us like all these things related to the xrp army yeah and so unfortunately they've been brainwashed by this marketing um the reality is that uh Ripple and XRP are seen as charlatans by the institutions and that they are really not only have they been dishonest in their marketing of XRP, they've also been dishonest in their criticisms of Bitcoin, because in order to raise XRP up, they've gone at tearing down Bitcoin by saying when there was a lot of Bitcoin mining happening in China, they were saying Bitcoin is controlled by the Chinese. It's a Chinese currency. We can't have that here in the U.S. And so that was false because even if there's a lot of mining happening somewhere in the world, that doesn't mean that it's controlled by that part of the world.

And in fact, what we saw in 2017 is that a lot of the Chinese miners were pushed into supporting a hard fork on Bitcoin to double the block size limit. And they almost did it. And then they backed out of it because they realized that they wouldn't be able to push it through because they don't control Bitcoin. Bitcoin is controlled by this decentralized layer of nodes. And so then we saw the Chinese government ban Bitcoin mining and a lot of Bitcoin mining came to the United States. And so it's the fact that Ripple tried to push this narrative was very dishonest. And then after the mining came to the United States, they immediately pivoted to their narrative to Greenpeace. Yes. There's too much carbon emissions coming from Bitcoin mining.

And they gave five million dollars to Greenpeace, to AstroTurf and to pretend that they cared about this. When the reality is that all those carbon emissions, they're coming from power plants, whether it's coal or natural gas power plants. But electricity can be generated with sources that don't emit CO2, like nuclear, wind, solar, hydro. There's no reason to say we can't have any kind of electricity consumption because maybe it'll come from coal or natural gas. And those coal and natural gas power plants, for that matter, are already regulated by the EPA here in the United States. So it's not like they're doing whatever they want. But they got the New York Times to write an article that went out and said that these carbon emissions are coming from Bitcoin miners. They even took a picture of the facility and changed the color of the sky to make it look hazy, like somehow there was pollution in the area.

Which, yeah, was complete nonsense. You know, it's like beautiful Texas blue skies, and they had to alter the image to drive their narrative forward. Also, CO2 in the air doesn't make it look like that, so I'm not sure whether... Yeah, yeah. As a marketeer, I'm embarrassed about this case study, but it's like a financial planner being embarrassed about fiat. There's nothing we can do to control the bad of humanity. Well, but there is what we can do is push back, right? And so what we did when I was at Riot, we recorded a funny parody video of me measuring the carbon emissions at the facility.

I remember that one. Great, Rudy. Thank you. And we were, thanks to the Bitcoin community that rallied behind us, we were able to ratio the New York Times and get more views. Yeah. And it antagonized the environmentalists because they were saying, no, we're not talking about your direct carbon emissions. We're talking about your indirect carbon emissions that are coming from somewhere else. And we're like, yeah, that's exactly our point.

It's coming from somewhere else. So write an article about that somewhere else, right? And it enraged them. But in marketing, there's a really important phrase of, if you're explaining, you're losing. And so you always want to have the upper hand in terms of saying, no, Bitcoin mining has zero carbon emissions. And then it's on them to explain why they've got this crazy theory about double counting carbon accounting. Cool. Yeah. So the next question was about strategy, right? Yes. Micro strategy.

So you predicted strategies or micro strategies at the beginning of Bitcoin's play. How do you see the trend of this crazy trend that's happening right now in the last few months? We have Nakamoto and Gabe Stump and CEP and like the Cantor. We lost count. Yeah. And we assume it's only the beginning. How do you see it going? So first at a high level, there's going to be booms and busts here.

Right. So I think that it's we can predict that some of the companies will be very conservative and responsible. So I would point to the fact that strategy in the previous bear market, they traded below the multiple of their actual Bitcoin holdings. So their MNAV was less than one X. And so today their MNAV is, I believe, around two X. And so I think that it goes to show that Mr. Saylor and his taking on the risk of this leverage, he does it in a way that is relatively conservative when you look at how much collateral does he have relative to the amount of debt he takes and also the terms of that debt, that it's long-term debt that is in the form of convertible bonds that don't have these high cash coupon payments. And so then there's going to be competitors that come in that are going to want to be more aggressive, take on more risk. Some of them actually might do well, but it's going to depend on the Bitcoin volatility, right? And so we know that historically Bitcoin has had drawdowns of as much as 90%. And so I think that they have to have an approach that really takes into account these stress tests,

make sure that if there is a bear market, that their financial model won't break such that they have to sell their Bitcoin. Saylor did not have to sell his Bitcoin in the previous bear market. So it's really about developing a strategy so that you have permanent capital on the balance sheet and that you're not just leveraging up to acquire lots of Bitcoin and then capitulating at the bottom the bear market and selling lots of Bitcoin at the worst time, right? And so we have to be cautious. I also think that the fact that it has grown so much over the past six months reflects an economic reality, which is that there are lots of equity market investors who not only want to have exposure to Bitcoin in the form of, for example, the ETPs, the ETFs like BlackRock's

It has been the most successful ETF launch in the history of ETF products. And so clearly there's equity market interest in spot Bitcoin financial exposure. There's also, I think, interest in leveraged long Bitcoin exposure through these equities. And so these leveraged Bitcoin equities, I think, are going to, they have access to financial instruments that normal retail investors don't have access to. And so, you know, as an individual, you can't go issue a convertible bond, right? And so I think that because of the economies of scale, they are able to get better terms on their debt than retail investors are able to, you know, if they just have Bitcoin in cold storage. And so, but they still have to keep in mind the risks, right? So greater leverage means higher potential return, but also higher potential risk.

And so I hope that, you know, people are reading the 10Ks, reading the 10Qs, making very informed financial decisions if they are choosing to be involved in that. And if that is not something they're interested in doing, I hope that they stick to spot Bitcoin and cold storage and that they don't buy products that they don't understand. I also think it's a good segue, though, for companies who maybe wouldn't become Bitcoin treasury companies where they're issuing debt to go buy Bitcoin. But for companies where like maybe they're issuing, they're distributing a dividend or they're thinking about a share buyback or other strategies because they don't necessarily have something to do with their cash. Right now, they have another alternative where they could just put Bitcoin on the balance sheet for the company. They don't even have to lever up to do it. Some of them just have a lot of cash. Right.

And that could be a way of increasing shareholder value until they're able to use that long term savings to be able to go do the project that is finally coming around that will actually increase shareholder value. So I think like from that perspective, like it'll be interesting to see like what also happens in that route, like as these Bitcoin treasury companies become like more, more profitable and on on in in front of people that also other companies who may be able more conservative strategy will just consider it as something that they do. And companies like fundamentally what they're trying to do is have a higher return on invested capital than a their cost of capital. And so right now we're in a stage where there's lots of possible disruption from AI, from tariffs, from any number of other factors that create uncertainty where companies don't know how to invest currently or the opportunities they have for investment are just very low return. And that's where they need to look at alternatives like Bitcoin. So I think that that's going to continue to drive corporate adoption on the balance sheet side. And that leads me really well to my next question to you, Morgan. More for the individuals, how should people be managing their wealth, taking Bitcoin into account when building their investment portfolio?

at least for main types of audiences, like young people or, I don't know, the mid-level or even people who are retiring. Yeah, definitely. So there's this concept called asset liability matching, and it's a really fancy way of saying what short-term should be matched with short-term assets, like short-term expenses. So for instance, like your emergency reserve, right? In case, God forbid, something happens, you want to make sure that you have some money, so that you can pay medical bills

or replace a hot water heater or you got afraid to lose your job or somebody gets sick, right? You have the ability to pay for things. Then there's also just better short-term goals that people have that are not like these uncertainties that are like, we want to have a baby and we want to have some extra cash around for that.

We want to buy a home. We want to start a business, right? These are like the lighter side of why you would want to have extra cash around. And so these are short-term expenses that are coming down on the horizon and you want to match a short-term asset with that short-term expense.

But on the longer term side, right? Things like retirement, paying for college for young children, right? It's a long time horizon. Being able to provide for maybe aging family members, right? Maybe they're younger now, but like maybe you need that money in 10, 15, 20 years. So there are ways to sort of match like that long-term need with a long-term asset. And so what we do in our practice is we help people decide what's short-term for them, what's long-term, what they want to prioritize on the short-term, and then what is a priority also on the long-term. And then we match their currency allocation with that. In addition to that, then you have to think about, okay, do I want a currency

allocation or do I also want an investment allocation? And so when I use currency allocation, I'm literally saying, do you want to hold like fiat cash and Bitcoin? Because like that makes sense for your situation. Or do you want to hold like fiat cash for the short-term bucket? Do you want to hold Bitcoin for some of the long-term bucket and other assets, right? This is all going to be very dependent on who the person is, what their experience with Bitcoin is, what their experience with other financial markets are, what their risk tolerance is, right? There's a lot that's going to play into how they decide what their long-term strategic goals are and how they're going to fund them wonderful but everyone should have an exposure at this point right

it's really for everyone i actually um i had well it's israeli tv so i guess it's fine um i well he's this mine's international okay so i am i had uh what's called the cfp it's a certified financial planner designation um i've recently let that one go um i have a like on my website i cater to bitcoin clients um and i'm also part of a directory of other bitcoin financial planners there's like five of us you know we're all in there together uh where people can just you know they can type into s like with seo they can type in bitcoin financial advisor or planner and we come up um so the cfp found us through that and um they sent us all letters um just being like we we're opening an informal inquiry so not an investigation nothing bad just an inquiry just

see what you're doing you know not nefarious don't worry about it but it was they had an interview with me and they held my feet to the fire um because they were like this can't possibly be for everyone um but the reality is is that it is for everyone right there's a position size that makes sense for everyone and so when we're in this interview they're giving me all these different you know like this scenario that scenario this person they're making up people and the one that really got me which i laughed about they were like well there's a guy he's 65 and he's about to retire surely he shouldn't have any bitcoin and i was like is he gonna drop dead in this scenario is he gonna live like how much like you know like actuarial assumptions have him living at least 85

you know like he has a long time and he should have some bitcoin and the guy thought about it he's like yeah okay okay that's fair you know bitcoin's only 16 years old so yeah he's got 20 years to live like it's going yeah it's like why wouldn't you have that so anyways it all ended up being fine whatever but i just was like i don't want to deal with this anymore i'm gonna let this one go but um but all to say that like there really is a place for this in everyone's portfolio even if you're living paycheck to paycheck right you can find a way save a dollar a week right you can't like get one less piece of gum you know like right figure out a way to just have something you know it's divisible right you can buy a fraction of a bitcoin there's no reason to

think that you need to save up a hundred thousand dollars before you exactly yeah awesome uh so we're coming close to the end but we have two more questions uh pierre this one is for you you spent many years in riot that right and uh you were the head of research what is your most memorable research and uh your key takeaways from working there yes uh my most memorable research aside from the video that we already discussed um uh so uh elizabeth warren senator warren she had the department of energy uh put out a mandatory survey for bitcoin miners and that as part of this survey they wanted to collect the information of who is selling electricity to us who are our electricity providers so that then she would be able to

give that information to activists to get those contracts cancelled through activism pressure. Are you serious? Yeah. So when the news came out, my first instinct is, you know, as a BitCorner, I want to find the source code, right? I want to find what is the primary material that is driving this as it works its way through the bureaucracy of the federal government. So I find the Office of Management and Budget that had to approve this survey before it went out and their explanation for why they're doing this, their official explanation. And I noticed that they were skipping a step, which is public notice and comment, where before a survey goes out, you actually publish the survey and you ask for feedback from the public so that they can improve the survey and take into account that feedback. And then if they don't take into account the feedback, they have to explain why they're not.

And that's a really important check and balance on the administrative state to prevent the bureaucracy from growing out of control. They skipped it. And the reason they cited was that there was an emergency. Which was what? What was the emergency? The emergency was that the Bitcoin price was going up. and that as the bitcoin price goes up we're going to use so much electricity that it's going to crash the grid um which yes i had the same reaction when i read that i started laughing

pure comedy yeah and and so i go to our team and you know because as a researcher that's my role is to go dig into the details not just read the news article but like let's go find this the source and understand what it is. And so I go to our legal team and they're getting ready to fill out the survey. And I'm like, wait, well, let's pursue litigation here because this is, there is no emergency and we can prove that in court. And so Riot, to its credit, the management team, you know, it's very hard to go and sue the government from a corporate perspective that you're suing your regulator you know you're creating antagonism you don't want to like get in trouble with the government we have patrick long sitting here yeah a couple of days ago talking

about that yeah uh and to their credit they were i think they had conviction on the fact that we had to do the right thing which was uh to to pursue the truth and to push back on this government overreach uh and to to protect the bitcoin mining industry from a fake emergency um and we partnered with the Texas Blockchain Council, Lee Bratcher there, who has just done so much tremendous work for Bitcoin advocacy in Texas. And we led the charge of going to federal court in Waco. I drove up one day and we, in our legal brief, as you know, in the lawsuit, we found ERCOT, who is the grid regulator in Texas. And we found a quote in there from their CEO that was essentially saying that, you know, Bitcoin mining does not present a unique threat to the grid as a load and that

it is being properly integrated by ERCOT into the grid. And because the reality is that if they were right, if there was an emergency here, that would mean that ERCOT had failed, that they were actually Because their mandate is they are the electricity reliability corporation of Texas. And so their sole mandate is the reliability of the grid. And if Bitcoin mining is a threat to that, then their process of integrating Bitcoin mining into the grid had failed. And it had not, obviously. And ERCOT has actually been a tremendous partner in terms of being technology neutral and allowing Bitcoin miners to integrate with the grid responsibly. uh and instead of just saying no right um which other jurisdictions have really like

had that approach so um urquhart has actually a very good governance framework around their uh market for electricity and so we included that in our lawsuit uh and the judge immediately sided with us a hundred percent and gave the government a restraining order and told them they had to destroy all the data they had received uh and that they needed to start over without an emergency, have public notice and comment, and pay our attorney fees too, which was kind of like really twisting the knife because they don't usually do that, I found out. But here the judge really found it egregious that the executive branch had allowed a senator to politicize their activities, which really should be focused on developing energy resources

here in the United States. Not going on political witch hunts of scapegoating a particular industry. So that was my second favorite piece of research after the video. I love it. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Okay, we reached the end with my favorite question. So where do you draw hope from, both of you? I'll let Martin start. Our family. Yeah, I mean, we have a beautiful family. Thank God. uh we've got three young kids um we have an amazing marriage we're blessed like with a great family uh extended family as well um it's uh it's really inspiring that like that we can not be in

this rat race for sure and that we like we have the ability to like work obviously and create purpose and meaning through what we do and how we can help the world but also spend that really important time investing in our in our children and our family um and really also um from from god from hashem i mean i draw a lot i have a lot of amuna um i've not always been a torah scholar and i'm by no means a torah scholar but i spent a lot of time um learning and reading and there's there's it's an endless like i feel like bitcoin to me felt like you know like a rabbit hole that you go down like torah to me is like it's a lifetime i mean you can and you can still not know everything um and um i draw a lot of hope on the fact that i don't have to run it all right

like god is protecting me god is with me um i can have that relationship with him and that i can rely on him and like and that's really meaningful to me and that's just something i hope that we pass on to our children that they also have that deep imuna and that they um that they grow with that and they grow in their relationship with him because ultimately like that's the whole reason why we're here right we're here to like to make change to make the world a better place but also to have that connection with him and have like you know have our lives be more than just um you know like we're here on earth and we make money and then we die right like it's more than that right we were like elevating this the material world uh and so i really deeply feel that in all the work

that i do um and i get a lot of hope also out of just making sure that our kids are like that as well so i'll agree with everything maureen just said uh and just to say something different in you. I'll say that in addition to family and God, there's the Bitcoin community that when we come to a conference like this, I get to see people I haven't seen in many years, meet people who have been here for a decade and advocating for Bitcoin and educating about it. And they're still doing it because they're passionate about it. And so to me, it's like a family reunion of sorts, but it's also meeting people who have just started on their Bitcoin journey and are really excited about it. And, you know, it reminds me of how I was 10 years ago. So, you know, it's really great to

see that the movement is not only like growing, but also retaining this deep bench of talent of OGs that have been advocating for Bitcoin for so long, and that I just see this continuing for decade after decade, and it's just going to grow bigger and bigger. Absolutely. Beautiful. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much. You guys are very inspirational. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. 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 some positive action in their lives. Till next time.