← The Bitcoin Treasuries Podcast with Tim Kotzman
The Bitcoin Treasuries Podcast with Tim Kotzman
Bitcoin, Retirement, & Crypto Education with Chris Kline of Bitcoin IRA
01:01:49
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the Bitcoin Treasuries podcast. I'm Tim Kotsman. I'm here with Chris Klein of Bitcoin Ira. Chris, great to have you in the studio.
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B
I know, it's great to see you in person. We've done this a few times over. Zooms. Your tie looks even better in person.
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A
Thank you. And you're taller in person because I can't tell how tall anyone is when they're just sitting in a chair.
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B
It's always a surprise sometimes. Right? Sometimes people are really small and then you're like, wow, you. Maybe you should just lift your chair up a little bit.
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A
Yeah, yeah. There's a bunch of guys walking around the conference this week that are, you know, six foot plus plus tall.
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B
And you didn't anticipate that?
- [00:30]
A
No, not at all. What's been your experience and the highlights for you of the conference so far here in.
- [00:37]
B
Yeah, you know. Well, I pointed it out on my panel yesterday with Pomp, that I was looking around the room and I know the first day was VIP day, but then I looked today and I haven't seen a hoodie, which to me is a real. I don't know if I would say it's a sign of maturity, but I definitely. I started feeling this last year in Vegas at the Vegas conference where there was. It felt more like a FinTech and TradFi conference. Has. Has met a crypto conference. There was still, especially the bitcoin one, which is very retail. There was still, you know, the NFT artwork and people in hoodies and those things. But then the guys that wear like the masks because they think they're satoshi, you know, the anonymous mask.
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A
Right.
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B
You don't see any of that stuff here in New York for sure. You know, probably two key takeaways other than the hoodies, was I really enjoyed the overall narrative of calmness, perseverance and resilience that I'm seeing, you know, right now. If you ask anybody on mainstream media and all of our. Our OGs, Sailor Fong, all of them, Parker, are going on. I'm going to be on a couple of shows next week and I know it's going to be. Well, how does it feel that it's tanking again? You know, they love to, like, bask in the ambiance of a failed bitcoin. It's dead again. So that's one story that you hear if you're tuning into cnbc, Fox, Yahoo, those places. But when you're sitting in that conference, the confidence, calmness, the hey, we've been through this before. We're kind of like, I think we're resolved. We feel a little bit more like you know, in Braveheart it's like hold mentality because this happens every 18 months, right? This isn't something new. We, we, we go through more recession style events than mainstream economy ever does. And there's no panic selling. There's and I see this parallel a lot as my, my business because they retirement long term capital mentality. So that, that's one thing which I really like because you know, I wish we could take that and, and put it out there into the world better. You know, I know they're live streaming the event but there's two narratives happening right now that the sky is falling and everything's going to be okay. And I've obviously I'm on the school of everything's going to be fine. This is, this is, this is, this is the life of bitcoin. And then the other was, you know, there's really touching stories from Russell Kuhn and Natalie Brunel on their panel today with, with pomp about he asked their narratives of why they got into it and Russell's was really strong. Cause he, he calmly, he's almost, I think he's like the Dalai Lama of bitcoin. He's just got this calm aura about him. And he walked through. You know, for everybody that puts a football helmet on, only 1% even play at high school level. And then from there only 1% play at collegiate level. And then it's 1% that get to the NFL elite level. And so you're giving your blood, sweat and tears to constantly have to make that 1%. 1%, 1%. And then once you get to the league trag. Tragically, tragically 70% of football players are broke but within a couple years of their retirement of their career because football careers are getting shorter and shorter and shorter. It sounds like a lot of money, but it's not for all for 30 years. You know, you're only, you're kind of condensing the timetable. And he said I'm just not going to be a statistic and I wanted to do something different. And the last thing you want to do after all that hard work. But just like anybody, an entrepreneur, a business owner, the last thing you want to do is put it all into money that's debasing it at a velocity that's not going to last much longer. So I just, that really hit home. And then Natalie right afterwards topped on with her, her family's experience leaving after trying for a decade to leave a communist controlled country and you know, the transport ability of grabbing, having bitcoin and being able to take it with you anywhere that they wouldn't had to restart their whole lives with two suitcases and nothing. And then to get rug pulled. In the 08 crisis, which I was, my parents are, my mom was a banker and my dad was a contractor in Denver. And so that oh 8 crisis, I remember I was into college and it was like I had to make decisions on where I was going to school differently because it wasn't. We, we didn't make enough money to pay for anything, but we also didn't make not enough money to get any federal grants or anything. We're right squeeze right there in the middle. And so I got into schools like Princeton otherwise. But I ended up at the University of Colorado Boulder because residency and cost effectiveness. Now hindsight, I thought it was the end of the world. But really four years later I'm like, oh man, I'm glad I didn't spend that much money for school. You know, you get the degree, you get out. And I actually walked out with very minimal student loan payments as a result of it. And so just, you know, taking those, those to heart. I think there's so many of those narratives of why people are looking at bitcoin and it really drives this. I mean I'm a big believer that bitcoin is the people's currency. And I've been saying that since 2018. And I think that's going to come more and more true as the world will look a lot differently in three years. You know, the essence of like the 80s, 90s, 2000s. I think we're shortening that timetable to mid decade shifts. You know, we're just where we were in 2020 versus where we are today and where we're going to be in 2030. It's happening so much faster, so much faster. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and I'm. And I've got a daughter that's 12 now that I feel like I need to slow time down a little bit. What about you? What do you see?
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A
Actually I might as well just ask the question. You mentioned hoodies at more of the larger bitcoin conferences. Very retail driven. But then I didn't recognize a lot of the people in the room today. So like who is in the room at this very corporate, institutional, Wall street focused conference? Like I saw a few people that I recognized from treasury companies, service providers, individual investors, but like, are they, are they Wall street people? There's a lot of suits and ties.
- [06:13]
B
I feel like more Wall street people and new converts from TradFi that are now seeing the writing on the wall. Because we've got. Well, first we get the ETFs rolling and then you get, you got the Clarity act coming. And so just like Kevin O' Leary said, there's 7 trillion. He thinks there's a trillion dollars waiting to line up to enter this market after we get through the Clarity act and some other bumps in the road as far as regulation and, and with the new Fed chair coming in, like this is going to springboard more capital into this space. And I think they all, I mean, the one pattern I noticed from most of them when I talked to them was everybody's got an angle at the financialization of Bitcoin as an asset. So whether it's yields, wrapping it covered calls, borrowing against it and getting cash, like everybody's got their mechanism they're trying to bring into the marketplace. And I think that's going to be the trend that we see for the next couple of months, probably 18 months, is there's going to be some winners and losers in that makes me a little nervous. If you live through 2022, 2023, everybody had a lending product and there was a lot of rehypothecation going on and there was some bad actors and we saw what happened with Terra Luna, then FTX Alameda, because those things can cascade and it doesn't take a big player doing it. It can take a couple of little players. Little dominoes can knock over a bigger thing. So with the market pulling back, a pullback like this and a lot of financialization in the market makes me a little nervous because if you, I mean, we, we tasted it already. What, in November, I think I, I was on Pop show and we talked about how leverage is a. Is a dangerous drug because it feels good until it doesn't. Right. And these pullbacks, it'll be interesting to see how will each of these scenarios fare with these new mechanisms everybody's trying to place into the financialization.
- [07:53]
A
Does what happened today make you nervous or is it too soon to tell when a company that's doing, I believe, lending is limiting liquidity, limiting withdrawals.
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B
That's usually a sign. You know, they say there's smoke, there's fire. That's where it started back in 22 is small groups were limiting or the, the timetable was getting longer to exit. You know, I think GBTC went through it a Little bit. Almost everybody took a hit during that time. That's usually, I mean, it depends on what are the terms. You know, there are some financial assets like staking with Ethereum has its natural timetable. There's nobody artificially making that. That's just. We saw that with the 1.6 billion units that got drop dropped in and went from six minutes to exit staking and Ethereum to 60 days and it's just now starting to curb down. That to me is that's just natural. Like people run towards the exit sometimes. But we didn't see that there was a big drop and then nobody freaked out and panicked. They're like, all right, I guess I'll just have to unstake if I really want to. But you know that there's one. And then you have to wonder how are they correlated with each other? Right. So where's the exposure land? Where does it end up? Who ends up with that hot potato, Hot potato, empty bag.
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A
I also think it's interesting and maybe there's not enough data points or maybe you can't tell you're in the middle of the tornado when you're in the middle of it. But I mean you saw that headline today and bitcoin still just kind of rolling around in the 60s, so it doesn't even seem like headlines are causing, you know, anyone to really be like, oh, that's it.
- [09:25]
B
Well, everybody was selling my bitcoin, everybody was trying to figure out what happened. And I've had so many conversations where we were, we just. That big fall off that day was a bloodbath, right? It was bloodbath everywhere. Gold and silver cooled off, stocks pulled back a little bit. Oil took a big hit that day. I mean the only two things up on that day were the dollar and uranium. As I was watching the charts and the dollar always wins because where's. When people liquidate, where do they put it? They, there's a demand for dollars. Uranium was just a weird one. I don't know what was going on there.
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A
I thought you were going to say people put all their money in uranium when certain things happened. Yeah, yeah.
- [09:56]
B
I don't know. I think it was just one of those random ones. You know, sometimes you look at the charts and it's like there's blood, blood, blood. And all of a sudden like XRP is up like five pennies and you're like, okay, is that a leading indicator? Something's changing. This is, you know, pomp. I think said it best at the opening comments was if anybody in this Room thinks you're an expert and there are some OG like experts in this space. None of us are experts anymore. The whole game is constantly. The tectonic plates are shifting underneath us consistently. And I think when you're going to find with this financialization is I think the lesson has been learned that if it's too good to be true, it's probably not so remember what some of those yields they were paying out and 22, 23, 18% annually on some of this stuff and you just knew something bad was happening on the backside for that to take place. I do see a much more conservative, modest approach where people aren't blood thirst for, oh, I need 6 to 7% yield or I need to annualize at 25, like just keeping pace, a little bit above inflation they're happy with. Because it's important to remember most of these financialization products are paying you back in Ethereum or paying you back in Bitcoin. Your rewards are coming back as the asset that you're. And so people like that, because they're not. Now it's just stacking more sats in the coin that I know when I see through the trees and into the future, I know we'll be back at 126. We'll hammer our way to 150. There'll be some FOMO that gets us to. We'll touch 200 and then guess what, we'll have another 50% pullback and everybody will say, oh my God, Bitcoin's dead. And I think what they say we kind of touch with the last cycles highs or I don't want to say the word cycle, but last, the last highs. So 60, 65 seem to be kind of that place. But you know, there's just as easy of a chance that something could go wrong and pull us into the 50s or 40s. Like that can happen. You just. But people aren't. I mean, you know, what's that? Home alone. You know, when he all of a sudden he has that confidence and he goes outside, he's like, I'm not afraid anymore. I think that people that have been in this space.
- [11:51]
A
And then he runs back in the house.
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B
The guy, the guy that does the shoveling of the ice, he sees him and we can all say, I mean, be strong. But yeah, of course, man, I have my moments too. I've been in this space for a long time and, and I've actually DCA every day. I truly. But I will increase my DCA amounts when I see where there's a Dip. Like this time last year, April, I was here in New York, then I had a tour in Atlanta, then I was flying home and I was. Jet lag was killing me on the West Coast. I couldn't sleep. So I woke up and it was like we had pulled back to like 46 or 44,000 again. Everybody's like, oh my God, bitcoin's falling apart. And I was like, man, I'm just buying. Like, you just. There's. I saw a really good Instagram video where the guy's like, you know what's crazy is when you see news and doesn't matter what the financial instrument is, Bitcoin, gold, silver, when it is tanking, there are thousands and thousands of people going, oh, I'm glad I didn't buy that shit. And then there's those brains that go, I'm ready to buy more of it. And there's a different psychology, and I think it's a conviction that you have that this is. I mean, I can stack more bitcoin today on Macy's red tag sale and I'm going to do it. And yeah, maybe, maybe it goes a little bit lower. I'll buy some more there. I mean, I'm just. You're. I think when people dca, they really take the emotion out of it. And I was. And I'm curious, with the treasury groups that you work with, are they just jumping all in with their allotments or are they doing the strategies that they would do with any other financial tool out there? One.
- [13:12]
A
I don't know.
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B
They don't disclose. Right.
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A
Well, I mean, the public disclosures, it seems like most of them. It appears that most of them, you know, went public, did their IPO and bought a bunch of bitcoin.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And the fact that we only see at least what I'm seeing, four or five companies continuing to buy bitcoin on a regular basis in this market environment tells me that the other ones are just kind of sitting there.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And not. Not able to do.
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B
Which is probably why they're looking for financialization on these products now, too, because they've got the bitcoin sitting there and that's a reality. It's not a tool that creates yield. It's not a. It's an asset that. It's a. It's a hedge. It's a store value. It's not necessarily a financialization tool. But I think there's some cool stuff they're going to put on top of it. I talked with a lot of people this Conference. Everybody's got a unique idea to it and at some point the winner will come through. There's going to be something that. Okay, I like that, but it's not going to, it's not going to come from the expected places. Some of the stuff I heard that Coinbase is cooking up made me a little nervous. I was my general counsel and he's like, man. So they're kind of passing the liability and third party counterparty risk a little bit too much for the style of Coinbase. Um, Bitco is doing some pretty cool stuff. Belshi was on there. I think he's got, he's, he's always been super safe. That guy was, you know, he was one of the early guys in Google Chrome, which made change the Internet security forever. So he's like the most safest guy. I always joke, like from Armageddon where you know, you got guys just sitting around thinking things up. I always say to Mike, I'm like, you guys got just guys sitting around thinking about security risk, don't you? Like what's the next security risk? And those. Yeah, that's what you need. That's why we've always worked our. We're up to $12 billion in assets and we secure exclusively our retirements with Bitco. It's just, I mean I sleep really well at night knowing that clients nest eggs are sitting behind the best technology that the game has to offer.
- [14:55]
A
Today I'm so intrigued because I don't think we've talked about this. Where did you grow up? Oh yeah, what, what's your background? And then how did you trip and fall over Bitcoin or did it happen differently from that?
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B
I think everybody trips at some point into it. I don't think it's a progressive, like get your toe, you just dive in. Right.
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A
It's not a college course.
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B
Yeah, but it will be. Yeah, it should start to be at least. So I grew up in Aurora, Colorado, so Easter east of Denver. My mom and dad and a sister and went to college in Northern or in University of Colorado Boulder. There I studied international finance leadership. And what was the other one? I got out of high school with like 3:30 credits because of AP's and IB and Eschel Baculette. So I was, I was like already almost a year done with college. And so I went to the dean and said, hey, I'm going to be here for four years. But I really like to walk out with two degrees and they're like, you're going to have to do like 20 credit hours a semester, I'm like, that's fine. I can do that. And then once I got through that, academics, I was like, valedictorian. So I was like, all academics. All academics. And then got to college. And I realized, you know, and it's true. And tale as old as time is that you're who you know is even sometimes more important than what you know. And so I tried to. I joined a fraternity, joined the leadership in that, joined the student union. We had. The University of Colorado has, like, one of the biggest student unions. Has like a 30. Back then it had like a $36 million budget. And this was 2002, 2003, so probably even bigger now with inflation. And. And then at one time, we figured out that the student body population was so apathetic, only, like 2% of the student body was actually voting for these elections. And so we. We ran a stack of Greek and athletes, and we got the College Republicans, which is rare because Boulder is a very liberal town. The College Republicans, which is one of the largest student groups, the Greeks and all the athletes to vote. And we took the whole slate, like, we had every position. And that freaked out the administration because they were kind of used to people doing their bidding, you know, yeah, okay, you're a sovereign, independent student union, but you'll do whatever we say kind of thing. And we were more like, we're going to do things differently. We're going to change things up. And then graduated right at the financial crisis. So 2007, had friends that were literally starting internships at Lehman Brothers and fired days later. Like, they didn't even move into their desk yet. And then it imploded. So I had that happening. And I. So I tried a different route. And I was like, you know what? I've always been interested in politics. I've ran for a lot of positions. I've won a lot of elections. Maybe I'd like this. So I joined the call Raddens for McCain campaign and did finance, but mostly, which is a fancy way of saying fundraising. Everybody says, are you in finance or operations? And I was in the finance side. My specialty was the tier. Tier ones. So when. When Senator Palin and when Mayor Palin and Senator McCain would come to town, I would. All the tier one donors would come in, and then the husbands would go have brandy and cigars with Mr. McCain or Senator McCain. And I would take all the housewives and have cosmos with them at another bar and get them to write another check for the party. I was like, you're investing in the Party. You're investing in me. This. I'm the future of the party. So that's my. That's why my Twitter handle is at Senator Klein, because I really wanted to be a senator someday. I got through that one cycle. And there's two things that just drove me nuts. First was if you lose, you don't have a job, like literally by 7:30. And Obama just wrecked us. I mean, that was. There was no keeping up. Obama ran an amazing campaign. He had the grassroots level, he had the financing, he had the buzz, he had the. The Obama girl, the songs. I mean, there was no chance. And the writing was on the wall. And so I was already putting my resume out, trying to. And then the other one was the. In inner politics, the games that people play, the dirty. It just wasn't my flavor. And. And I really hate career politicians. I think Americans are starting to get to that point, realizing this career. You know, our founding fathers designed it as you were a statesman after you had success. So they had their farms and they had their estates, and they were lawyers like John Adams or soldiers and generals like Washington. You did your. Your duty as a. As a. In the capitalist society. And then you were a Stevens. You took all that experience and you applied it later. I wish we had more of that happening. And I'm not going to go back and be a senator. I've already decided that someday when I'm done with bitcoin, I'm going to go be a. A teacher. I want to be an A.P. u.S. History teacher.
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A
Okay, so that's.
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B
But that's the forward. So let's pull back a little bit.
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A
So then how long until Pomp runs for mayor of New York? How many. Well, I mean, how many cycles? How many years?
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B
We'll see. I mean, I. I come here five times a year, four to five times a year. And I got to tell you, the. The snow removal is a problem. People vote with that. The trash removal is a problem, people vote with that. And I know it's a rough winter, but this. What you can look back at New York's history. This will ruin even the best Mariel people. If the trash isn't out and the snow's not out, people that really upsets New Yorkers. And so we just need like a.
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A
Reel of Pomp out there with a shovel.
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B
Yeah, I think so. Maybe he just needs to go out there on. On the corner of 53rd and Lex here and just. You get him a snow snowblower and just let him roam around with his suit on and his tie and yeah, no, I mean he would be an amazing can. Like I have so much respect for the guy and the years he did in the military and everything. He would be great and so move on from the politics and obviously the economy is in the shambles. Nobody hiring in finance or anything. So started working in a startup out of Loveland was really. The guy was trying to build a Shutterfly that was American made products with high end presentations. So photos really helping people make better photos, print better photos, present them in better ways and like really. And we made some amazing stuff. We really. I mean he had a great entrepreneur of mine. We got a little analysis paralysis. You know that some businesses just like seek perfection of the product and then they have no money left for marketing or sales to get the product out there. But I learned so much. You mean the guy was big A big eight public accounting ran big properties. Huge properties in Chicago. So just having a mentor to like my first breath into entrepreneurship and understanding the backbone of business and learning how to read a piano. Like a lot of it's crazy the things you don't even learn in business school. Like they. They make sure you learn some things but the stuff that really matters for some reason maybe I wasn't there that day. I don't know. And so then I. My mom passed, who was a baker. She passed a cancer when she was 46. I was 24, 25 at the time.
- [21:12]
A
That's wild. My dad passed away at 46.
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B
Oh really? Yeah, yeah, it's. And it's weird and I've always struggled to this day. I mean obviously you. You were probably young like me. I mean not too young, but like, you know those formal years you think about, oh, she won't dance with me on my wedding night. She won't. She never got to meet my daughter.
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A
I was 21.
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B
Yeah, so. Yeah, you were right there. It's. That's. And so it really shocked. Shook me up a little bit and actually got divorced from when I married my high school sweetheart because I wanted to dance with my mom on my wedding night was a big reason why I did. And you get clouded when I mean watching somebody slowly die that you love your. And it's your mom, you know, it's your dad. Like it's important. And so then it ended up my dad, my mom passed away and within about nine months I was divorced. And I know you were joking about you're looking for the second wife. So we've all been through that. And you change a lot from 22 to 27, you become a whole different person. And so I'm sitting there in the basement in Aurora with my buddy that's going off to, he's going to go to private pilot school. He was going to learn how to be a pilot for private jets. So he's headed off to Texas and I'm like, what am I going to do? I've been rooming with him. I don't want to stay here. I feel like I'm stuck in a rut. So we put a map up on the wall and we started throwing darts at it. And we kept hitting New York, we kept hitting San Francisco. And eventually I decided I was afraid of New York. Like this is an intimidating city, especially for a Colorado middle America kid, right? So I ended up saying, okay, I'm going to go to San Francisco and I got a job, well, kind of a job there, but I didn't have a place to live. And I just said, you know, I'm just going to do this. I'm not, it's not going to be perfect. So I sold all my worldly possessions. I got a one way ticket and a suitcase and I had two suitcases. And then I'm at my dad's house like two days before my flight out and I was like, I don't, I don't want to carry these two suitcases. So I consolidated down to one suitcase. Like I will make it work. And I, and I got to saw some uncles in Palm Springs and then took this astro van bus into Los Angeles, met with some old fraternity buddies for New Year's and serendipitously met my now business partners. I think you may have met Camilla yesterday. He was at the show and Johannes and, and they brought me into their offices. We were talking through things. It started as like, let's just have a quick interview. And eight hours later we were, we had lunch, we had dinner and they were like, we really think we could do something great together. And they were in marketing and other things and other verticals and they were doing marketing for other self directed groups that were doing like llc, real estate, precious metals, vc, private, all kinds of things inside of retirement vehicles. And they're like, we think we can build a better product than some of these guys and we'd rather not just get a piece of the marketing bill. We'd rather just vertically integrate the whole thing. But we need an operator. Can you, do you think you can do this and help build us? You know, we'll have, we'll give you marketing support. We'll Help you. We'll, we'll put some capital together. We. And, and I was like, okay, let's, let's give it a run. And I actually lived. And once I made a decision, I was like, well, I'm not going to get a lease or roots. Like, these guys fired me in like two weeks. I mean, they didn't even ask me if I had a college degree. I'm like, I'm just running, you know, sometimes you just go with the motions and see where the world takes you. And so I found around the corner, this was the 101405 Sherman Oaks. And I found a really bad motel around the corner. It was, you know, there's like motel 8, motel 6. It was like motel negative 4. And I lived in that hotel motel for a year while I helped build the first business with them. And nobody knew, didn't tell anybody. I just walked over every day, like in the suit and a tie, got up and walked out of my really shanty motel and walked around the corner. But it made it easy to work seven days a week, 18 hour days, because what, what else was I going to do? And that really, you know, when you're young, that's when you can do that and it impresses people and they see that vigor. And so we, we had some successes with real estate, ira. Some private, private placement stuff, some precious metal stuff. Precious metals were kind of on their way down, kind of the peaked in 2012 and this. And then Camilo came to my office and I didn't even have office and I still had a cube. And he goes, do you think, have you heard of this bitcoin stuff? I'm like, no. And he's like, I think there's something here. Been hearing about it. He's a YPO guy. He keeps, you know, good entrepreneurs, keep an ear to the ground and those things. He goes, this is 2012. This was 2015. 2015, 2015. So right around when Pomp jumped in too. I think he had mentioned that today and he said, go take a look. See if this is something we can put into this investment vehicle that we use for all these other IRA assets. So I went down the rabbit hole and fell in love. Probably about halfway through the white paper when I saw the having concept and the diminishing rate of currency development and that fixed supply. Because to me, as a student of history and a lover of economics and growing up from 85 to now and watching how my parents could fill a grocery cart with 20 bucks, going through the Great Recession of the Financial crisis and basically just getting beat up as a. As a generation for years and years and years. It was like, this makes sense to me because I understood Nixon shock currency debasement. And I was like, this is. This is cool. I know it's crazy and it's zeros and ones and there's all this other stuff to it, but if that core principle survives, so we cut it down and it gets harder and harder to make more bitcoin, and there's only going to be so many that we won't even live to see. Maybe, maybe my daughter, she'll be like 90, almost 100, if she makes it that long to see the last bitcoin be mined. That to me was. That was like, okay, I'm in. And not only was it to make a business and grow it, but, you know, it's like that. You put it out there and you're like a tree falls in the wood and nobody's there to hear it. Did something happen? And we started, you know, we bought the Bitcoin IRA domain. I remember at the time, we paid like $400 for the domain, and it was like the most I've ever paid for a domain, because you're used to the GoDaddy.99 or whatever. But there was. There was like an auction, somebody else, and we had to bid up to 400. I was like, I don't know. Do we really? And I'm now looking back and like, yeah, $12 billion later. I think we're doing pretty good. And that was a good investment. And then we would do press releases because, you know, the Reddit crowd. Back then, it was the Reddit crowd, the smaller Twitter crowd, or I guess it was Twitter back then, not X. And press release is really strong. We put out a press release, and I still haven't framed. Was like, bitcoin IRA does world's first bitcoin IRA and Ed Moy was a friend of ours from Precious Metals Day. He was the former director of the United States Mint. And so he said. I called him, I said, hey, we're doing some revolutionary over here. Would you like to be a part of it? And he was like, yeah, that's cool. And I was like, wow, Ed's like this old guy that ran the. For George W. Ran the Mint, arguably created the most amount of paper money because that was during the financial crisis. Now, I know the Fed decides, but the mint has to create it. So he was print. He was the guy pressing print once to put bitcoin inside of his. So he was the first client. I think his entry point was, like, somewhere in, like, 150 to $200. And it just was like this early founder Trickle. We'd do a press release and we'd get. And then I think a couple of the big OG names brought us up on their channels, and we didn't even know. I'd walk in one day and all the guys pop out of their cubicles. There's like eight of us. They're like, chris, there's a problem. And I was like, what's up? They're like, the phone hasn't stopped ringing for two hours, and we have, like, 80 voicemails. And I'm like, that's not a problem. We just need more people. We need to handle this. And that was really. We were in that entrepreneurial state where we had found something special. This was 2016. And if you think that was a Couple hundred, then 17 happened. We launched Ethereum. We added in XRP, BCH, LTC, and then we had that big run at the end of 17. And we were the only players in the game at the time. We were the only guys were showing people how to use tax deferment and tax advantage settings to invest in Bitcoin. And these were my engineers, NASA scientists, IBM retirees. Like, these were. These guys were pushing us. But every step of the way, we're like, oh, 2018. Okay, we need a 20. We need a 24. Seven trader. Oh, we need this. Oh, we need this. And we literally already had jumped off the cliff, and we're just building pieces of the plane and hoping for a landing. All the meanwhile not realizing the cycles of this thing because, you know, you have that great run. You're like, oh, my God, this is amazing. And then, boom. I mean that if you want to talk about a hit, was it January of 18, 20,000 to 6,000. A matter of like 12 days. And I remember Camille came into my this time. They gave me an office by then because we were doing well. He's like, so, was it over? I was like, what do you mean? He said, what, did everybody just sell and walk away? I was like, no, that was the crazy part, because you would any other financial asset. The believers early on were just. And they're still. I mean, I think Ed and some of our top, like ones rocket Ron from NASA, he. We call. He's. He calls himself number 11. He actually has a jersey that's number 11. You have Ed that works with you. He was in the first 100. These guys were convicted and just are still huddling through all the. And they just keep aggregating, aggregating and always pushing for, hey, I think Ron was asking me, do you. Are you going to put Harmony one in? And I'm always like, oh, Ron, what's the new pet project? But he's led me through to some really cool stuff we've done over the years. So that's kind of my walk into crypto, which I think is similar to a lot of. Other than maybe the crazy motel and the one way taking in all that weird stuff. But, like, that's how most people stumbled into this, was reading it and appreciating what it was.
- [29:43]
A
Was there any moment when you were building the business in the early days where someone almost got through with some sort of FUD or negativity, and they're like, what are you guys doing? Like, seriously, what are you doing? Or were you just, like, running so fast? And everybody that was a part of the project was a believer that. That never really penetrated the circle of bitcoin or whatever you want to call it, the force field.
- [30:12]
B
But it was uncomfortableness. So in order to do this, you had to have an exchange wallet and a regulated, qualified custody. Right. And this was before any of that. I mean, there was exchanges. Bitco was just bringing the multisig to the game. And so we had partnered with them early, got to meet Mike early, and they're the guys that created the first multi sig and found a way to configure it for a custody solution. Early on, we were probably his, like, test case, his beta for where he's grown from here. But there was a custodian we were using out of Kentucky for all of our other business known as Kingdom Trust. And they were very like, I could have launched probably four or five months earlier, but they were kind of dragging their feet saying, well, our regulators aren't really going to like this and you got to answer to them. And. And I just kept, you know, pushing and pushing. And then one day I finally was like, camille, I'm going to. I'm going to. You might have to fire me after this, but I'm going for forgiveness, not permission. I've waited long enough. And then I called Beau over at Kenny. I said, guess what? We made a bitcoin ira. I've. The funds are at your account. The product has been procured. It's in the wallet. Here's all the paperwork that I've been giving you and showing you for. It's done. We did it. And then you go forward six Months and the epic year that we had, everybody was like, we're kind of glad we listened to that guy. But then it became. We actually have probably have a Harvard Business study about. Because we were working with Kingdom and then just happens, you know, as businesses grow, then Kingdom wanted more fees and they also wanted. There were competitors that were coming in saying, hey, we want what Bitcoin Ira has. And the good news is they were being respectful and saying, well, these guys created it and we can't do that to them. But over time, there was cracks and stuff, so we ended up actually breaking up with them. And because we got regulated with our own Custodian Digital Trust, NV FID. And so there was this like big breakup in 19. And then just a couple years ago, 20, 21, we acquired them. So now we did an M and A together. So, I mean, we. We dated, we got married, we got divorced, and then we got back together. And it's. And a lot of the same guys I worked with all the way back in 2016, 17 are beau and others are still on the board, the presidents of the trust, whatever it might be. And it's just, it's. We always laugh about it. It's like there's. Remember that time crazy Chris asked us to do this crazy thing and look at where we are now. And that's just how I feel with the whole space too. You know, I was on my panel yesterday or my fireside with Palm yesterday. I said, you know, it parallels nicely for me because Izzy was 2, my daughter was 2 when we launched the business. She's now 12. And just to see a decade as a business where we've come a space from a bunch of guys in hoodies in Miami at a conference to what we saw today in this audience, like the tradfi guys are here and gals are here to stay, and they're trying to find ways to. I think you could take it one of two ways. Are they trying to take us over? Are they trying to make us better? And I think. I think it's make us better, but we have to work together to get to that next level. But, you know, that's where you get these swings too. I mean, you have the amount of money that's in ETFs now and unfortunately not rehypothecated. And it's one to one, and I hope it stays that way. Is, you know, it's. There's only still 21 billion Bitcoin. Right. No matter how you financialize the leverage or whatever you might do in A Treasury instance, there's still only 21 million. And as long as we stay there, there will be other, I think, projects that may blur those lines a little bit, you know, to try to get there. But I think there's revolutions coming everywhere. I think xrp, xlm, some of these others can really change the game of digital banking. I think that if we want to get back to true privacy on the Internet and our browsing and our data, Ethereum, Solana, some of these others could do. And I think a group like what Link's up to is going to have to bring us all together at some point, because there's all these different chains. And the convergence of AI and crypto is a future that I think we're going to see come to fruition really fast, like faster than any of the other ones. It'll start with. We already kind of see where it's making people better traders, but it'll start also moving into where people are. Hardware is communicating to itself through AI software and making things more efficient, and there has to be compensation between those agents right, at some point. So it's just to me, you know, price is one thing, innovation is the other thing that really gets me excited about these kinds of things. And to hear what some of the folks are up to, the resilience they have, the permanence in their mentality. And if we just get clarity past the Senate, I think there's a whole bunch of people ready to innovate a lot of things. Because let's not forget how much stuff got backlogged when the government shut down in November. Right? Backlogged on ETFs, ETPs, M. And as all these approvals, there's still a backlog. And if we can just get that out of the way, let the innovators innovate, We're. There's a lot. I mean, I'm like the dumbest guy in these rooms and I had a pretty cool idea and there's some amazing things. I sit and I just listen to these projects they're putting together. I'm like, yes, I really hope you succeed, because that'll change the world.
- [34:50]
A
What's the craziest thing that AI could do in relation to crypto? Because admittedly, I don't know a lot about anything outside of Bitcoin. Could AI or AI agents kind of say, hey, this is how some of these chains could work together or merge or not, and here's how you should do it.
- [35:06]
B
Help define survival of the fittest a little bit. And those things I think also, I mean it will be, you know, they say there's the market efficiencies happen over time, right? Like the, you shake a table and then things land where they're supposed to. The most efficient places. I think I will accelerate that for some of these. So I hope that what we can start doing is, you know, one of the things that our, our industry still gets kind of negative about is when you see pump and dumps, you see the rug poles, you see the celebrities making tokens that are bs. And that's not just celebrities. A lot of people do like 12 year old kids are doing it and then they're, they're on YouTube, live stream streaming and going thanks for the bands. And then they sell everything and it just drops that there, there should be a way to use AI to validate legitimacy of projects. Because I think some of these projects, what they do is they'll get me, you and two other guys in a room and they'll just exchange all day. Basically create fake volume so that when it's on coin market cap and people are looking at it, they're like, oh well look, 24 hour volume is really great. It's like eight dudes just trading or people just trading with each other. And there should be ways to validate that. And AI, I don't think we can do that fast enough as just humans and regulation and rules. But I think AI has a purity to just say that's legit, that's BS yellow light. I don't know for sure. But need, need more data kind of thing and get better at that. And maybe there's that badge, that AI badge of approval that can come out where this has been AI certified. I mean there's still this harmony between human and AI and human and robot, you know, One of the things I'm proud of@bitcoin, Ira is in 10 years we've never given up the analog. Retirement's not like a one size fits all strategy. People do Roth seps, simples, more sophisticated accounts. Some of the uber wealthy do some things and they have funds coming from different places and they have different strategies. And so we have real crypto, real people where when you sign up, you talk and meet your VP of retirement Solutions. They do a web conference, they learn everything about you, they show you everything about our portfolio and our platform and give you a chance to really build a relationship. So I mean like Rock and Ron, he texts me all the time. He's the 11th client, Ed. We, we know each other really well that there's a relationship there that I think people will probably be more apt to be thirsty for as more robots come out. Right. We were talking before we jumped on here is like, will we reverse the captcha? Right now we're asking robots if they're humans when they try to fill out a form. Will there be a day where we have to validate we're a human when we're doing a show like this, or we're putting content out, or when we're an agent on a voice or wherever that, hey, people may want and maybe even pay a premium to have an experience with a human versus some kind of agent that's out there. Just like these conferences, you know, they're. They fell off during COVID Right. Because nobody was going anywhere and they kind of have a hard time. But now I see, I see more value getting into these shows and doing these types of things and engaging with people at a different level than I've been ever before. I remember, I mean, I was like, I'm an extrovert, introvert. So you put me in a room or put me on a mic or one on one like this. I love it. You put me on a stage with 20,000 people, I love it. You put me in a room with 12 strangers, I lose my mind. My anxiety gets crazy. I'm like, just built weird. I get really nervous. Yeah. Because I'm not a small talk guy. I like to just get into and get in the meat and potatoes. When there's so many people now you've got to worry, is this person going to like what I have to say? And is like. It just gets. The dynamics get weird and is it.
- [38:22]
A
Small talks or is it the politics of a smaller group?
- [38:24]
B
A little bit. That too. You know, like holidays are always interesting, Right. Thanksgiving dinner after. After Uncle Jim has six or seven glasses of wine. You never know what's gonna happen. Yeah, it was funny. I went to the pomp. Had a kickoff event on that Tuesday night or Monday night. It was a wine tasting and there was like 25 people there. And I was joking with Caroline.
- [38:42]
A
I was like, so that's like your nightmare.
- [38:43]
B
Oh, yeah. I was like, this is my nightmare. She goes, how is that possible? You have so much energy and so much. I'm like, yeah, but I, I. Because I. I can't see them on the other side, you know, like whoever's watching right now might be shaking their heads and being like, this guy's sucks. Maybe I turned it off already, but I don't know that. So, like, I Can just keep going and tell my story and share things. But it was the. About the third. Everybody was really quiet, and he was like, does anybody have any questions? No. No questions or whatever. It was kind of rigid and feeling each other out. And then by the third glass of tasting, everybody's having a blast. People are moving chairs, talking, laughing. It was like, all you got to do is get to get a couple of sips of wine and anybody. And the whole thing changes.
- [39:20]
A
Yeah. What do you think about, like, the need for education versus, you were saying maybe like the AI badges and maybe the analog to that is almost what sailor laid out, like for regulation, like digital currency, digital capital. Like a token. If someone just knows it's a token for fun, whatever that term is, then like, but you need education with it, so you're not looking at fake volumes going, oh, this is good. And I don't know if it's.
- [39:49]
B
I think you have to certify their education too. That's probably one sailor miss. Because, you know, you can go on ig and I mean, I love. I'm a big holder. I always have to disclose this. I'm a big holder of XRP. I hold all 85 coins we have. So I'm not a maxi. I am heavy Bitcoin, heavy Ethereum, but that's just because they've been around longer in my career to stack up more of them. But there's not a coin I don't love that's on our platform. Okay. I won't say that there might be a couple that I'm just, you know, some of the memes people ask for, like Pepe and Sheba and stuff. Like, I get there's some culture, cultural community, utility there, possible application utility. But it is just a meme stock at the end of the day. But you have to validate the education too. Because if you go out and like just on Instagram or Meta and even sometimes Twitter some, There's some really great content out there. You put some stuff out there that's awesome. Natalie Brunel Pomp. The Cardone Brothers. You know, there's some really great. And I'm. I'm probably been a guest on most of those shows. I did almost 200 podcasts last year. And I only put my name next to people that I say, hey, they're putting good stuff out. But then there's guys, and I don't even know if what they're doing, if they're just shilling it because it's buzz and it gets them followers and it Gets them what they need for their, for their metrics as a influencer. But there's misrepresentations about things like xrp. There's misrepresentations about zcash. There's misre. I mean like the people will put information that's slanted to give an advantage one way or the other that may not. So we have to validate the education piece to it as well. You know, when I see people, family and friends over the holidays and they're like, I'm buying XRP because it's the next Bitcoin. And I think, I mean you would agree, I don't think we're going to see a world where there's a hundred thousand dollar xrp. It doesn't match the utility. Yes, it's fractionalized in what it can do. Five, ten dollars, maybe, maybe a little bit of run. But it also has to fit its purpose. Right. And that's not just xrp. I see that almost there's always some kind of misinformation or I guess slanted information in one direction or the other. And when people go down that algorithm and they're, they're just like right now with the Epstein files, you, you watch one Epstein file video for longer than like 30 seconds and then the next six are people analyzing that Epstein created Bitcoin. And oh, did you see this? And, and so there's so much content out there that, validating the content as is this entertainment or is this educational? And, and what's its source and what's its validity? I know they're trying to do that. You know, Grox got it out there on X. There's been a lot of, of false information stuff before Elon bought Twitter and changed everything. The community notes, somebody's got to control that. That's actually not biased at all too. That's the hard part. You know, when, when there's something that's negative about Trump and the Democrats don't want to take it down, and when there's something negative about Democrats, Trump's doesn't want to take it down and that both, both sides are, are guilty of this. There's, there's so much, you know, with the things happening with ICE around the country and protests and things like that, there's skew on everything. And that scares me as just a member of humanity, a member of American society in particular. Natalie said it really well today. She says, I think that the economic disparity and not so much the rich and the poor and the income gap, but that Game is somewhat rigged. You know, I look back at friends and family and if I didn't jump and make that decision to get on that one way ticket with a suitcase and sell all my worldly possessions and live in that motel and roll those dice over and over again as an entrepreneur, I don't know if I would be anywhere near thinking about retirement at 41, like I'd still be terrified. And I know there's thousands and millions of people that are terrified about how am I going to, am I going to outlast my money? When can, when should I start? Am I a blue collar guy? Is my job getting replaced? We've got a deflationary. I think it never stops. First we have inflation, then we have deflation, then we have this like it's just we're getting beat up constantly.
- [43:38]
A
I leaned over to Ed and I said Ed, you hear a pomp just said this was yesterday morning. I said five or six years we're not going to have to work anymore.
- [43:45]
B
Yeah. What are we going to do? We're going to try to figure all.
- [43:47]
A
This stuff out now. But don't worry, right.
- [43:50]
B
You won't have to work. But what are we going to do? I always say it's all going to be over. I guess because you think of that movie Idiocracy. I think it is where they just watch TV all day and they absorb and consume media all day and everything else is taken care of by machines. I personally am working with a group out of Denver. Growing up, going back to my roots a little bit. I grew up in construction, my dad was a contractor so I worked every single field as a kid. Like once I could have a job, it's like 12 back then I was a plumber, then I was an electrician, then I was a framer, then I was a roofer, then I was and. But I never got to do the cool stuff. I just cleaned up like I was the boss's son that would clean up the job site. I learned some things but that's. There's a lot of capital going there and I put some. I'm start building a startup. Not really startup. We've got some great contracts and early in a couple inside investors, some good capital money coming with me for an H Vac and fire safety business out there that's got. They'll walk into profitability pretty quickly. And that to me I'm like I'm actually excited about it because we're going back to blue collar. I never thought like you run from it, you're like, you know, my mom said you're not going to be a fourth generation contractor because my grandfather was, my great grandfather was, my father was. She was like, you're going to go to school and you're gonna do something different. Okay. But now if she was still around, I'd be like, hey mom, look what happened. I mean, I'm not picking up the picks and shovels and doing the work. I would probably hurt myself. I try to do anything the house and I mess something up and I wouldn't. But getting back there's this revival of blue collar and I think it's, that's. And the way that the grip that Pop was talking about, there's only, this is the only thing that differentiates us from the machines for now. And they will figure out how to make the touch and all the things that they can do. So it's kind of scary to think about where will we be? And everybody is replaceable. We're replaceable. Every, every tool out there is replaceable. And so what I think smart companies are doing right now is leaning in and have been leaning in for at least a year now. We@bitcoin, IRA and our overall entire entity enterprise have a requirement for every department, every quarter has to have an AI initiative that is completed. So whether it's Voice for automation for this code we have, we have something cool the tech team's doing. I didn't know this existed until last month. It's AI police for the, for the AIs. So they actually there's a police department of AI robots that are monitoring that the AIs are doing what they're supposed to be doing and verifying and following your checklist for building code and backing up code and those types of things. I thought it was pretty cool. I was like, wow, they have their own police. That's, that's pretty neat.
- [46:15]
A
I didn't even know that.
- [46:16]
B
Which is crazy because, you know, Paul was talking about why software companies are struggling with valuation now is it's actually become the easiest job to do because of those things. And I think there's other ones that are coming like that. So differentiating ourselves is using the machine to your advantage. And I still think that human element is going to be critical and that loyalty is going to be critical over time to your consumers, to your employers, to your employees. It's. I hope it shifts us for better. Like, you know, Natalie was talking about this morning. I just hope it makes us better as society over time. Time. That's a lot.
- [46:45]
A
What do people Miss or misunderstand or the most common questions when someone is calling you up, maybe not you individually, but and saying, hey, I have this question or I think this about my retirement or about bitcoin, Ira. And you're like, well, let me just take you on a journey here.
- [47:06]
B
Yeah, I think a couple of things, product alone, just bitcoin. One of the things that always drives me crazy and I don't know what we're doing wrong as a entire ecosystem and of this as crypto overall is I can't afford one bitcoin. It's too like, I always hear that and I don't. Why did we miss teaching people the fractionalization, the satoshis, like, where did we go wrong there? Because for some reason that's, I felt like that should be, you know, when we're kids we learn quarters, pennies, dimes, nickels, like it's part of our math. Right. We're not like, for some reason we're not getting across the message that you can stack a satoshi and for a couple books and you can keep stacking them until they get to the next one. Maybe it's just humans are not high wired. We're hardwired for commas, not decimals. Right. And maybe that's, maybe that's the, where it's going to be like a critical mass transition. That's overall, when it comes to retirements, I think, I think people, I think the biggest misnomer is that, oh man, just I don't even know how I'm going to retire. I just don't have a chance, you.
- [48:03]
A
Know, which is like complete overwhelm.
- [48:05]
B
And you know, Americans have a tendency that when something seems overwhelmed and overwhelming and they, and they're behind on it, they just kind of brush it under the rug and they're like, oh, I'll deal with that later. Because it's painful. It's painful to deal with. But you know, getting off zero is critical every year. And the deadline's coming up April 15th, so we're just a couple months from there. You have a deadline for last year to put, if you're under 57,500 over $58,000. The government gives this to you. It expires at that Moment in Time, April 15. You can't do it for last year. And you can lower your tax bill. You can put in long term savings, you can put it tax deferred, which is great because if I buy a bunch of, say I'm in love with one of the meme coins or Some salon or whatever. And then I swap it into digital gold or I swap it into bitcoin or whatever. Every one of those moments in trades outside of an IRA is a day, is a moment you have to ante up the bill to Uncle Sam as a capital gain. If, if it was a gain which most people trade for gains unless they're harvesting losses. And that is a tool that now you can do, trade all day long, go crazy and never have to. That's, that's how you can define generational wealth. Because you're not having to lose 20, 30% of your purchasing power on every trade that you do. And a lot of people don't realize when they do it and then they don't put it to the side and then maybe the next project they invest in doesn't do so well. And now they've got a tax bill, but the asset that they flipped over into didn't do well. So now it's like I owe more than I have. None of that exists in IRA's, which is beautiful. It really gives you liberty. I hear a lot of people that are like, well, my exit price is this on this coin. But I, but I have to make the decision between short term and long term capital gains timetables. And that really impacts the. Because in bitcoin it could be a day right where it's 67 today. Who knows, we could wake up tomorrow. I mean, I literally, the first thing I don't know about you, I check the bitcoin price. This is the first thing I do every morning before I check my pulse or my blood pressure. It's the first. And then I know what kind of day I'm going to have. But it's like, and I've been doing that for a decade and probably where all these gray hairs come from. So I think that not using the tools to your advantage and then, and you know, I think also people just, they get overwhelmed with. Oh, you know, I just, it's, it's just I hear all the time, well, I just don't like, what was it? The bartender, a barber I had a couple of days ago. She goes, she's like, I just can't play with that risky stuff. And I just want to sometimes shake them because it's like I've lived since 85 through so many haircuts. My family, our fathers did all the haircuts they went through with. I mean, all these boom and bust, boom and bust, boom and bus. It's like everything's risky. Housing is risky, land you've done some land stuff. That's risky. Stocks are risky. Heck, even just living $100,000 in a bank account that's making next to no interest and watching it debase from the US Government printing, these are all risky things. But for some reason there's that mentality that, oh, bitcoin's just risky and it doesn't make sense. Why would I put that in my retirement? My mouth has been, I like to put my riskiest assets in my retirement because I have the longest timetable to maturation. I'm not doing bitcoin for next month or next year. I'm doing it for two, three, four decades from now. And, and to me, and if past that, we even have older clients, a lot of older clients. 75% of our clients were born before 1976. So we actually skew much older than people would anticipate that are now handing it down and inherited IRAs to the next generation. That that timetable is so much longer. I mean, never touched my bitcoin. Like Pop says, I'm just gonna give it to my kids. These, these are cool tools that are available for you to pass generational wealth in a tax advantage setting. And when you're doing it for 40 years, anybody will look at the chart, look at the last decade. Yeah, it's weird right now, but you know, if you look back, I think Natalie said it today and most people know it's a dollar. So we're about 16,000% increase in 10 years. Where are we going to be in 10 years from now? I promise you the CNBC is going to say we're dead 20 more times, but it's not going to be true.
- [51:46]
A
All of that reminds me of when you were on stage talking about grandparents having bitcoin and surprising the kids.
- [51:53]
B
Right.
- [51:53]
A
And the kids having those conversations where you're not just liquidating it to cash. You're like, let's be really thoughtful about this. Can you talk about that a little bit? The age range is just like the entire gamut.
- [52:06]
B
Yeah, it's really is. We have Gen Z's and I guess they consider my daughter Jenny Gen Alpha. I think she or she's an Alpha. I think. I don't know. I don't know what the categories are. They call me a millennial, but I feel like I'm The Lost Generation. 85 was a cool. We didn't have the Internet. We grew up as like young kids and then we grew into it. You know, my kindergarten class or first grade class was the first time we had those Mac Computers, the color ones, right? And like we had Oregon Trail. You know, we live through this transition. I just don't feel like a millennial, like in that. In that sense. But we have from those, you know, we've kids, people set up minor custodial accounts for their kids and put it aside. Izzy has had earned income for years. She did some commercials when she was younger. And then she's on the payroll for me. So she, every year she gets to put her. She gets her payroll. So I think it's like 15 or $16,000. You can pay your kid tax free, which helps you lower your tax bill. And they have an ability to make income. So I take 7, 500, put it in a Roth, I take the other 7, 500, and she pays her her share of her private school. And that way keeps her accountable. You know, when she doesn't want to go to school or something, it's like. Or her grades are bad. It's like, dude, this is your money. Like, it helps that accountability factor. So you have all that and then you have. We have clients that have now passed away. We've been doing this for a decade. And they were in their 60s or early 70s, and they passed away. And then the kids find out because they set up. This is the cool part, right? You get set up beneficiaries so they don't have to go find a ledger or a seed phrase somewhere or actually throw it away or not know you have a coinbase account. It's really nice to build that legacy component to it. So they have. They find out, oh, my God, Grandpa had Bitcoin. Now anybody that's worked in financial services even for a few years knows that 99% of the time when somebody, when grandpa dies, mom dies, whatever, it's a fire sell, right? Like, they just want to sell the house, sell the portfolio and the stocks. They don't even care what's in there. They just want the cash. Break it apart evenly or however it's supposed to be. Give me my cash, and I'm probably going to go waste it. Because that's like. I mean, it just happens, right? And these folks find out grandpa had Bitcoin. No way. How can we put this? How's it kept safe? How can we move it into inherited Roth iras for us? How can I add more to it? There's a much more general enthusiasm around it, and it's a nice surprise for those folks. And that, you know, I think that's something where you could see that with gold and silver, you know, Always Grandpa's. I don't know a grandpa out there that didn't have a couple of gold bars and coins in his safe at home. And. And then as he gets older, you know, they kind of go through that. Hey, hey, hey, grandson, come in here, you, you hold on to this and keep it safe. You know, I've given some, I have rolls of silver eagles that on Christmas I'll give out to all my little nieces and nephews. But this year I was like, man, I don't know, I might get the half ouncers or like the quarter ouncers because it used to be like 25, 30 bucks. It was like, that's a good little gift to give rather than a gift card for Roblox or something. But now it was like 100 bucks this year. I was like, I don't know, man. So I made him do chores to get him. I was like, hey, I got these cardboard boxes out here, I need you to go take care of that. And I'd give him the token or, or there was one that was. He's really struggling to focus and finish a task. So I gave him a Lego, a tough Lego and I said, if you finish this tonight before Santa Claus comes, I'll give you one of these. And like, so like just a little this. I'm a weird uncle. I'm a fun uncle, but I'm a weird uncle.
- [55:07]
A
Can you cover some of the vehicles or structures that ultra high net worths take advantage of with you?
- [55:12]
B
Yeah, that's. And that's pretty popular in our space and probably might be with your audience. So, you know, there's the traditional IRA, the Roth IRA, the annual contribution 7,5008000 and then there's the SEP, self employed IRA and that's more popular because everybody's got a side gig now or a side business and you can do up to, I think it's like now 60,000, roughly 60,000 you can contribute, which is great because if your company made or if you made $200,000 in income and you can drop $25,000 off at the top, top of the line. That's going to help with your taxes over the year. But some of the ultra or uber wealthy are looking for. Okay, well, 60,000 is not that much for me. Right. I mean if you're, if you're really making money and the tool that's become really popular for them is called a solo K, it's got another word as an indie K. And basically between, if you're married, you can have your business can have two employees, it's you and your wife. And each of you can put it totals up to almost over $150,000 that you can take off of your taxable income, drop into a tax deferred setting. And those have become really popular because that's a big hit. You know, if you're, if you, even if you're at a million dollars, you're dropping 15% down in your income, which is really helpful. That's a big. And it's not some kind of expense that you're burning money, it's an investment. And you get all the same details as just tax deferred. So you can trade all day and do things. You can make yield and interest and staking and not have those things. And you have the same distribution rules. And it's every year you can do that too. So within you have three good years you could put, you could catch up really and have about a half a million dollars sitting there in your, in your retirement account, which that would have taken a dedication for 20 years in the incremental. Roth and traditionals and a lot of people. This is the nature of the beast. I wasn't thinking about Roth Iras when I was 20. I know you weren't. I had a teacher, a Spanish teacher, Ms. Gunkel, that actually one day we walk into Spanish class in high school and she's got, it's normally Spanish stuff and she's got compounding interest and Roth IRAs and traditional authorities. And we had a lesson about that. I don't know if that just like stuck in the back of my head because I somehow ended up in this career in this. But, but that was probably the only touch I ever had all the way from high school through college until I actually got into the retirement game to understand these things. It's just boring and people don't like to educate themselves on it. So Solo KS are really popular. And then there's also Simple IRAs. So if you run a small business of 8 to 12 people and you maybe not want to go to total source or ADP and pay for a full fledged 401k, you can set up a simple IRA for those employees of the company in a self directed fashion so that they can get access to alternatives like, like bitcoin, other crypto, precious metals, real estate, land, those kinds of cool things. We even have, you know, the sky's the limit with investments. We have a guy that does John Deere tractors. So he buys John Deere tractors. He lives in Kentucky and he buys them with his IRA leases them out and then makes that passive income and depreciation as a value add to his retirement strategy. So you can do. There's guys that actually have barrels of oil sitting at depositories that they bottom up when. Remember when oil went negative in 2020, they were actually. They were paying you to take oil. They were at Houston boys. They had access to it. So they put it in and they paid for it with their retirement account. It's really wild the things you can do outside of stocks, bonds, traditional kinds of things or ETFs and things like that.
- [58:29]
A
What are you guys doing right now at Bitcoin IRA that people should be aware of and where can people kind of reach out to learn more about constantly innovating.
- [58:37]
B
We're constantly innovating. We've got. We just last year did limit orders, conditional trades staking on five different tokens like Ethereum, Cardano, Polkadot. We've got some really good cool stuff cooking up that will make it easy for people to choose. You know, hardest part about having 85 coins is you got to educate yourself on 85 coins. Right. And or you just stick to the basics. But people want access to some AI stuff and they want some access to the memes and they're not putting all of it in there, but they want to and they want to make it so that it can rebalance. We've been working really that's coming out in. In two or three weeks. So I'll be sure to pop in with you and once it's live and share it with you. And then we've got some cool stuff we're doing with tokenization of assets. We are also our Overall business is retired.com, which is our mentality is freedom starts here. There's a retirement crisis in America. 50% of Americans are not participating in retirement plans. And those that have been successful are still worried whether it's inflation, deflation or economic shifts. Can I make it is will my money outlast me because we're living longer and things are getting more expensive or jobs. I mean there'll be deflation like Palm's talking about, but I still feel like people are gonna buy 12 eggs that want the cage free brown eggs. Right. Like there's things that won't change. There's that lifestyle creep that comes in and they'll just keep doing it even if there's a cheaper option. Inelasticity of goods is not as strong as it once was like in the depression era. So I say all that to Say, here's the cool part. We have vps retirement solutions that are they talk a little slower than me and they'll spend a lot more time with you. And they've been doing this. All of my guys and gals have been with me the whole decade. So. Which is crazy. When you're talking about account executives and people helping open accounts and onboarding folks, usually there's a little bit more turn to the Everybody started in 2016 with me. Everybody's still with me in 2026, which is cool. So they've done this time thousands of times for folks. So you can go to bitcoiniray.com it's a mobile app, too. You can also call 877-I- memorized it 877-936-7175 and talk to a real person during business hours in a matter of 90 to 120 seconds. That's our goal always. And start exploring the options. And right now, two things I'd say make sure that you mentioned that you found us on your show with Tim and the. And. And the Pomp conference and everything, because I know a lot of folks are watching around the buzz around that because we have some cool specials we've got. If you do your contribution or open and fund your account before March 15, this is like incentive to do it early. You get up to $2,000 in rewards. If you do it by April 15, the tax deadline, you get up to a thousand dollars in rewards. And no matter what day you do it, you're going to get some nice swag. This is my favorite one, our vest. It's the midtown outfit, as I call it. This is like the standard Midtown outfit you see out there. We've got hoodies in case you see because they're out there. Quarter zips if you've got a kid on the way. I think I have a couple of hodl onesies in my hotel that I brought for Pomp for his twins. So there's all kinds of cool stuff out there. So yeah, call or go online and get started. Date. So much education, so many podcasts like this and details and stuff. We really try. Our goal is to help more Americans retire. And it starts with offering turnkey solutions to things that they never knew were possible.
- [61:44]
A
Chris Klein, thanks for stopping by. Thanks for having me. Super. Appreciate the time.
- [61:48]
B
Absolutely. Thanks, buddy.