Good morning, my crypto crusaders, and welcome back to a new week of the Blockchain Report. I'm Hank Hudson broadcasting live from San Francisco, California, the land of overpriced coffee and underpriced optimism. It's Monday, the day your caffeine hits harder than your portfolio, and the only thing green on your screen is the Starbucks logo. Now, before we cannonball into another week of market mayhem, mame coins, and billionaires pretending to be relatable, smash that subscribe button like you're front running a spot ETF approval. And of course, make sure to follow Rockom TV and yours truly and Hank at Rocksom TV. Because if you're still getting your investment advice from Tik Tok traders named Crypto Kyle, well, you deserve the rugpull that's coming your way. Now, today's episode, it's going to hit a little bit different. We're revisiting one of our favorite conversations with two absolute legends. We, of course, are talking about Max Kaiser and Stacy Herbert, the original Bitcoin power couple. You know, the ones who were calling out Wall Street corruption before it was cool and stacking SATs before your favorite influencer knew what a hard wallet was. So sit back, hydrate, and maybe light a candle for the fiat system, and let's get started with today's show. All right, welcome back to the Blockchain Report. Right now, we're going into today's deep dive, and we have a real treat for all of you out there, as today's guests are two people who spent decades turning the world of finance upside down. exposing corruption, calling out banksters, and making economics actually entertaining. Between them, they've built hit TV shows, launched early Bitcoin investment firms, and even advised world leaders on how to bring Bitcoin into national policy. They've been on trading floors, film sets, global stages, and now they're at the center of El Salvador's great Bitcoin experiment. Fierce advocates for freedom, sovereignty, and hyper bitcoinization. They've built their lives around tearing down fiat illusions and orange pilling the world. Let's give a big blockchain report. Welcome to the ones and only Max Kaiser and Stacy Hermer. Welcome guys. Thank you for joining us on the show. Our audience crowd there. >> You wouldn't know, but it's a massive audience here and they couldn't be more excited to have you both. How are you this morning? >> Doing super well. I'm so happy to be here. Um I saw your your desk at the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas. Uh I didn't have time to run over there, but I know Max joined you there. >> Oh, yeah. Roxom has always got the best uh presence in any conference. I always try to go over and see what you guys are up to. >> Oh, Max, you're making me blush. Not on camera. Come on. It's a live show here. Embarrassing me. You two are so interesting in this Bitcoin space. So, I'd like to just get into it. You both came from pretty different backgrounds. I mean, comedy, Wall Street, and finance for Max, film and television for Stacy before Bitcoin brought your paths together. For people who might not know your story already, can you just give us a quick version of your journeys and how they collided into this Bitcoin powered partnership? Stacy, I'd love to start with you. >> Uh, yeah. Well, I guess my journey started in Hollywood. I work while I was at UCLA, I started working for a a producer named Michael Phillips who made Taxi Driver, Close Encounters, The Sting, and uh he was at that time partners with Michael Douglas. And uh his wife, his ex-wife had just dropped a book that month that I started working for him called You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. And if you ever if you were there in Hollywood at that time, it was like a huge massive expose hit sort of thing. And um so I I was working in Hollywood and um studying uh back basically at UCLA script writing as well. uh and we used Aristotle's uh poetics and that comes into money because Aristotle also write that you know the all about money and uh the principles we understand about money are still relevant today. Um, but when I I ended up working on a few films and and TV shows in Hollywood and then I moved to London in uh it was like 1995 right when um literally the month that that Oasis Oasis Story Morning Glory landed and I I thought like why didn't I ever know about London? Why is it is this like I just assumed this was always like this and they didn't hadn't escaped out of London to the rest of the world. So um I worked at BBC and all sorts of fil uh you know you know telling stories right comedy as well there. >> Um and so when I went on vacation to the south of France and met Max >> and uh we fell instantly in love. But one thing he started, you know, he was always reading the Financial Times every single morning and he was telling me about his days of being a a financial a Wall Street stock broker. And again, so I'm only Hollywood. I'm working in Hollywood, working for the BBC, working on on scripts. And he was telling me these stories and I was like, "No way." Like, this is not true. How can any of this stuff exist? Because the bad guy doesn't win, right? the bad guy can't win. And uh and yet he was telling me these stories that the bad guys were winning. And so I started to read the Financial Times with him and I kept on always pointing to him going, "Oh my god, you told me this." He's like, "Yes, I told you we do that. This is like" And I was like, "How are they able to write it right out in the open of all this stuff going on and and yet nobody talks about it in the rest of the media?" So like we started making a podcast almost straight away in 2003 when we met and this was before RSS2 so it was not called podcasting yet. Um, and so we talked about this because I kept on saying that this we need to tell this story like people don't know this story of what's going on. And so we were telling that story uh in a podcast up until 2005 when Alazer English contacted us to tell this story to the world and we you know so we started to make fun content for Alazer about the financial world and then the financial collapse happened in 2008. So we were like we became instantly world famous for um getting it right for predicting it. But basically all we were just reading headlines of what was actually there in the financial world in the financial times in the Wall Street Journal but nobody had thought to make it accessible to the world like in a podcast sort of like uh normal format. We were the first to do that before podcasting really existed, right? So we made it more like uh chatty and talkative and fun. And of course, Max uh being a Wall Street broker and um a comedian was already like great on camera. >> Yeah, exactly. That's uh going back to the >> late 1970s, early 1980s. I was doing standup in New York and I was at New York University and taking on a lot of jobs, minimum wage jobs and jobs to to to support my comedy habit. And I ended up uh really just serendipitously at a brokerage firm. And I really decided or I really embraced I really discovered that this Wall Street was fascinating. And at that time was when the bull market was just starting on Wall Street. This was back in 1982, 1983. So I I just jumped into Wall Street. I just loved the whole atmosphere of it. and you get to work during the day instead of working nights when you're doing comedy. And I brought that kind of comedy to my selling uh which I did very well as a salesman on Wall Street just because I could get people on the phone, keep them on the phone and get them buying stuff. And then uh I kind of went into semi-retirement in 1990 and uh then I went to Los Angeles. I started a company there with my friend called the Hollywood Stock Exchange and that's when I started getting involved in digital digital currencies and digital securities during the dotcom era. Then I sold that company in 2001, moved back to the south of France and then met Stacy in 2003 and uh we were just immediately setting up um home together. you know, he's just like we were just like we were waiting to meet each other forever and then we finally met each other and we uh started to do content and the the interesting thing about the content was to take Stacy's kind of professional experience with the BBC and other kind of television formats and combine it with uh some more entertaining skills, you know, comedy skills, this type of thing and and come up with a blend that was um which which was just kind of its own um you know became its own brand if you will became its own style you know the Maxis Stacy style evolved over a few years into something very unique and very very watchable and and then when we went over to RT and started doing Kaiser Report there and then they dubbed it into Spanish. We were the number one show on RT English, number one show on RT Spanish. And um so we were being, you know, seen by millions of people every week. >> Of course, we started talking about Bitcoin. Stacy first mentioned Bitcoin on Kaiser Report in 2010 when it was 25 cents. >> Uh we then started covering it really more aggressively in 2011. It was at a dollar and of course we were the only ones covering Bitcoin on international television for years. And uh that's how we really got to be associated with Bitcoin because we were the only outlet public you know broadcast to global international television that was covering Bitcoin pretty extensively. We had all the early pioneers on Kaiser Report like Amir Taki was on several times. Uh he's a very Andreas Antonopoulos and all the early pioneers. Uh Adam Back I think was on early. >> Peter Todd. >> Peter Todd and um so that we kind of the show grew up alongside Bitcoin and and we you know just have been rolling with it since. >> Yeah. And remember by the way when we as he's describing you know making those first uh for the first few years of Bitcoin um there was no commentary there were no blogs there was no Bitcoin Twitter there was none none of that like there's Bitcoin talk but to really try to understand what this even was um so you know we were like it hadn't yet evolved to what it is today like it wasn't people we were all still feeling this giant elephant in the dark. You know, that sort of thing of like what is this thing? Is it a is it a mountain? Is it a tree? Is it a a stick? You know, um if you're feeling the tail, like you don't we it was hard to, you know, have the clarity then of what we have now. >> Yeah, I believe it. Your guys' story is so interesting, especially with Max's comedy background, you coming from a TV production background, meeting in France at a cafe. I'm going to be waiting for someone from Hollywood to come after your movie rights really soon because it looks like that is a story that needs to be told. And then becoming true pioneers of the Bitcoin space and then I want to kind of reel this back to the Kaiser report. Now back in 2009, long before Bitcoin was a household name. Looking back, do you feel like you were building the stage for Bitcoin before you ever even knew it existed? Because you two have just been so influential in bringing Bitcoin to the masses. I mean, it's incredible. So we first talked about it in 2010 um in December of 2010. So the price was 23 cents not 25 cents it's 10% difference there. So um no so we started talking about it then and we had already been on air as I had explained like for quite a few years and we were already like anti- bank fraud like the global banking fraud at that time there were like giant derivatives fraud and stuff like that and central banks we were anti-entral banks so um we had a lot of gold bugs in our audience and we went to a lot of gold conferences and things like that. We had talked to Peter Schiff many times by that point and uh so we knew all the gold bugs very well and we had a huge fan base for our show uh because we exposed all these banking crimes, the derivatives fraud, the high frequency trading fraud, uh the central bank bailout fraud, the you know the naked shorting of gold and silver, things like that. And then we covered Bitcoin and that first episode we mentioned it and we talked about it. We didn't go deep into it but then a bunch of Bitcoiners reached out to us because of that, right? Because of that episode and um I I later years later found out that Bitcoin talk like they were they were talking about that we covered Bitcoin on the show. So um once we uh interviewed John Matonis who was an early Bitcoiner about that like the for the first time ever we had huge negative reaction in the comments on YouTube to the episode and people called it a shitcoin uh Bitcoin more like shitcoin they said which is remarkable right like that now it's but people were so the gold bugs in our audience were so against Bitcoin >> that um it became more I did all the research for the headlines. I would look for headlines every week and so I was just like struck by the fact that they hated it so much and maybe I might have dismissed it like you like or maybe not been so curious to look into it after that because again like nobody was talking about it. It wasn't a thing in the world until like all of us like early adopters made it a thing. But at that time like the the negative reaction from the gold bugs made me look deeper and harder into it. And so when more and more Bitcoiners of those early Bitcoiners started reaching out to us um like Amiraki um who was like the only people don't know him today but at that time he was the one that would go on the BBC or any early uh you know news international news programs that would cover Bitcoin. uh he was the guy who made the first BIP. Um he he was pretty well known at that time. So um uh and that's a long story before he ran off to go fight ISIS and uh and and do some other stuff. But uh yeah, so we didn't really know like we were just living our our space, right? Like we were creating the space without realizing it. >> Yeah. Like Stacy was saying, you know, we were big into gold and silver because it's international and global money. And the show Kaiser Report is a global show. So you can't really talk about one region or another. You can't just talk about New York stocks because it broadcasts to the world. >> So the one form of money that is global is gold. So by kind of focusing on gold, you know, you have some a frame of reference for everybody in the world knows a little something about gold or has a little gold. And then you know we did a campaign in 2011 called crash JP Morgan by silver which was a very very viral campaign. Hundreds of people were posting videos of them and their gold stack. I'm sorry. Silver Stack and um you know this campaign kicked off right after the 2008 crisis and some of the mergers that went on in Wall Street and uh JP Morgan ended up buying or inheriting Beer Stern's silver short position and they were exposed. You know, if you if silver got to 50 or $60 an ounce, uh JP Morgan would have gone bankrupt. So, we were trying to flame the fire of this massive short squeeze to take JP Morgan down. And that was also when we began to look in more into Bitcoin be for its really subversive qualities to exist outside of this very very corrupt banking system. And uh so we dovetailed into Bitcoin u from that point. And as Stacy has said, the the reaction was quite negative because at that time the gold bugs and the libertarians that were primary audience really hated the idea of of Bitcoin. So it took about five or six years to get uh some traction in that in that camp and uh you know that's been great gaining every year. Now we're at another huge milestone with what's happening in Bitcoin around the world. And like I had mentioned by the way you know so we had uh started podcasting before it was called podcasting but this was also this cra uh uh crash JP buy silver crash JP Morgan. So the act of buying silver 1 ounce of silver that was all we were asking people you suggesting to people buy 1 ounce of silver and it was like $7 at that time. So buy an ounce, everybody at $7 and you'll crash JP Morgan because they had inherited from Bear Sterns that huge uh massive short position. So it made it to the front page of the Financial Times. JP Morgan was forced to respond to it. But this was the beginning of social media, the power of social media and alternative media. So we were being um we were on RT but we were being broadcast like most people were accessing us on YouTube and early Twitter. So like this is the the beginning of the power of of alternative media and social media like now you're used to it right but at that time this was like the beginning of that sort of uh punching through uh the the you know doing a financial news report. we were the first to do it. Um, nobody else had thought to do it. Bloomberg, CNBC, none of those had ever covered it in this way because it was like a gatekeeper, right? They they were gatekeeping this like the the propaganda or the marketing for these big banks. Um, and we broke through that and because of RT, because of um, you know, social media though as well and and alternative platforms like YouTube. >> Yeah. With markets um, Stock markets and financial media, there's a perception that they're impenetrable and the language is very opaque and the class war usually positions the stock market as owned by the ruling class and the plebs have to deal with the consequences. But having been on Wall Street for many years as I have been, I know that the markets are easily hacked. Um and we're seeing that uh with crash JP Morgan by silver was a you know you're hacking the markets. We did a a project called Karma Bank where we were trying to hack markets in the favor of activism and then Bitcoin came around and it's just another another hack really to subvert the worst tendencies of of markets and concentration of markets to uh decentralize and to um democratize u wealth and you know that's what Bitcoin represents and um so that's always been an interesting story because you have to Stacy's point about telling stories. You need a villain. You need a hero. You need a dramatic arc. And so, Bitcoin is really the hero and the bankers are the villains. And so, that's a story and that story is much more interesting than, let's say, James Kramer over at CNBC who simply like says, "Buy this stock." And he, you know, hits a tambourine or something and does something crazy. But there's no real story with James Kramer. It's just buy this, sell that. There's nothing really interesting with what he said. So, how do you turn that >> into exciting dramatic television is what we were able to do. >> Absolutely. And storytelling is what links us as individuals, right? And makes things easier for other people to understand, which is really a credit to your guys successes. You were able to bottle that and build this whole, you know, media empire with just the two of you, which is an incredible feat in and of itself. So, it makes me wonder when you were back in 2011 and you're starting to bring Bitcoin up more and more, what was it like or what were the challenges of trying to explain Bitcoin to TV producers back then when most people specifically I guess it sounds like a lot of them in your comment section at least initially thought it was magic internet money. How did you bridge that gap? >> Uh, so the audience was a lot different. Uh, it was very different back then. Okay. Right now, uh, Bitcoin, so Wall Street and it's talked about in in the Financial Times as in a positive way and CNBC in a positive way. Back then, it wasn't. Um, first of all, our producers, like we had uh, great producers and we worked with a guy named Richard Dove and then Paul Gibbs, they ran the BBC. Richard Dove had worked at Al Jazer and one of the comments he said to us like when we were making our Alazer films, we made like 10 for them and they were all very funny. uh uh like a subversive uh anarctic financial comedy short films like between the shortest was 12 minutes to 26 minutes were most of them and uh he said you know I I don't understand a word you're saying but the audience loves it so we're going to keep commissioning you to make these films because we don't know what you're saying and that was kind of the attitude that we always had with our producers um remember we were overseas at that time I think um you know in the US maybe if the producers didn't understand it these are very corporate very like shareholders demand uh you know profits and all these sort of things and and it's they're expected to you know uh take a certain line on um the goodness of of certain activities on Wall Street for example um so we were able to to broadcast globally there was a lot competition. Alazer English had set in a lot of competition in that English language uh global network. So we had like it was a window of opportunity that we happened to be right there at that time. I think that's kind of closed now internationally. I think it's a that the whole market is changing a little bit. It's definitely not anarchctic like it was back then and anything goes. um you know your the producers didn't necessarily completely understand English and they didn't know what we were saying. Uh we had a live show actually by the way a radio show in in Paris and they they didn't understand a word we were saying either the sensors there there is a lot of censorship in in France of like what you can say um and we actually received the funniest email this is uh explains like that time that period of time in uh 2011 we had a we had a a listener to our program send us an email saying like listening to our live show on Paris radio Paris FM and they were like this is the most amazing show on earth. Like how are you even allowed to say this because if you're the CIA then you. So we were like what the hell we're not we're just like broadcasting live and how are you able to get away with saying this? Um and then but our audience also at that time Bitcoin was very um linked to the internet freedom movement. There used to be like this big internet freedom John Perry Barlo, Wikileaks, uh the anti-OPA people act. There were like the this was like a movement that doesn't uh they're they're not overlapped anymore. There it was very aligned with that at that time. Remember like a lot of our content, a lot of the um Occupy Wall Street people were uh came from the internet freedom sort of uh activists uh what did they call them? the internet activists like there was a a name for that movement at that time but there was a kind of convergence of these different themes going on at that time that doesn't really exist anymore um but at that time there was and that that helped us with um you know the audience it was a very uh interesting mix that the content even at that time was uh it it wouldn't have the same relevance today people wouldn't be talking about Wikileaks in the same way as they were talking back in 2010 2011 or you know the Chaos Computer Club and things like that that were in existence back then and big culturally in the alt media space that aren't there anymore. >> Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point Stacy brought up. We knew the material worked because we had done it on radio in Paris Live Radio. We also had a show in London on Residence FM. >> Yes. >> For 10 years. And it was a show called The Truth About Markets. And when we did the first show of that show, the producer said, "I'm totally shocked because I thought the show would be about farmers markets and those types of markets and the stock markets." And so the truth about markets was essentially, you know, when you read these financial headlines and these financial publications, what's really going on, you know, kind of like how do how do brokers talk about markets? you know, you know, it's like u inside baseball or an insider view of how the people who sell this stuff every day on Wall Street or the city of London. How do they approach it? You know, what what's their how do they talk to each other? So, we kind of brought that to the four >> and and made it um like you're got a bird's eye view into, you know, what what the approach really is. And so, we knew the material worked. So the producers were um not really understanding what we were saying, but they knew that the audience reaction was really uh big because also the 2008 crisis was an enormous punch to the gut from millions of people around the world and they wanted to hear somebody not try to explain it in economic terms about why this happened. They wanted to someone to channel their anger. So a lot of my TV appearances at that time, you know, are characterized by me being angry and really shouting at people on television. But that was, you know, channeling that anger that when somebody got lost their house or they got wiped out because of the 2008 crisis. It's not because because it was an intentional crisis because the crisis was an engineer. It was a controlled demolition and they they have the right to be angry. So that was a message that people wanted to hear. And then the in Greece uh and and Iceland, Petroa, those economies went into freef fall and we became something like folk heroes in Greece and Iceland because we were speaking up uh for the communities who were being uh blown apart because in the financial world it's easy to use extremely uh jargonistic language and obuscation to hide what is essentially lararseny. Um it's also important to note like we had made before I Iceland was the first country to go under before Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks it was Iceland had collapsed and that was in 2008 and we made a film about Iceland in 2007 for Alazer and Max said it would blow. He said the entire economy would blow. But at that time, at that very same time that we said that, um, the BBC, all the UK, you u European media, everybody was talking about the miracle economy of Iceland and that Iceland would buy up all of the UK because they were buying up a lot of the high street at the time, but Max said it was going to blow. So we all of our content had uh we were the only ones, the only people in the world doing this. So when everything blew, that's when you see all these clips of Max on the BBC and Channel 4. They didn't have one single expert lined up like a um you know, an establishment expert to explain any of this stuff. Max was the only person that had predicted any of this stuff or who had talked about any of this stuff. So when um things like CDOS's and stuff like that were blowing up um and they didn't have any that you know maybe they were googling and looking for an expert who could talk about this and what went wrong like we were the only ones that had covered this and so we they had no choice but to come to us to ask to explain to you know the mainstream audience like what had happened and you know we were uh also covering Bitcoin so you'll see some early BBC was actually earlier than any US press in terms of covering Bitcoin because of us, right? Because Max was there on their show, >> right? So, uh, we were like the big short, you know, for Iceland and Greece before the big short, you know, hit the US. But, um, another dynamic which is, I think, key here is that we were in Paris and we created or a very strong relationship with the Associated Press. Yeah. who had a bureau in Paris and their kind of their main operations were in London. And so, um, I I I talked to the Associated Press and I said, "You have me up here every once or twice a week and I'm giving my sound bites for these international news shows. Why don't you just create your own show right here in the studio, half hour show, >> and sell it as content, you know, just it's it's an it's an unused space, you know, and just have me or us on there for half hour and sell that. >> And we were we at that point Max before we did Kaiser Report, we he called himself a financial war reporter. So AP like the guy who ran Paris AP had been a war reporter in Sievo, right? Like so he talks about being shot at and all these sort of things. So um like to them they're like they're all like rugged sort of like you know chain smoking like you know frontline sort of guys and they were just like our shouting and screaming and doing all that stuff that was just like >> you know that was all normal to them like so had we been in the US at that time I don't think we we we would have done what we had done because you had to have these sort of European sort of AP hardened like war reporter sort of people around us and the BBC like the same the Richard Dove and and Paul Gibbs were >> well the market had changed because Alazer English introduced a scrolling English-speaking news channel suddenly the first in the world outside of the BBC and what you would see in the United States >> and this set off a chain reaction in countries around the world that they launched 24-hour scrolling news channels and so we were in Paris and we were with Associated Press who knows all of these channels. And so then we started producing our show there and Associated Press essentially produced these shows like the Kaiser Report is produced by the Associated Press and then sold to RT and this was the pattern with all the other global outlets that have bought shows from Max and Stacy. They actually they're buying them from the Associated Press and uh we essentially worked for the Associated Press. So that gave us also a lot of cover going into with RT. You know, when we started working in RT in 2009, the co the cold war had ended and uh Putin was with Bush and then comparing toothpaste at Camp David like that there was a rip promol. There was complete, you know, um no no problems at all. And we we actually said at the time it was like this is going to be better than Al Jazzer because when we were working at Al Jazer there was like uh there was a memo the Downing Street memo that had leaked right when we were working there. We were in their launch week right our our program the content that we made for them was in their launch week of the English language channel. And then it also at that same week the Bush Blair uh the Downing Street memo came out where Bush and Blair had talked about bombing Alazer. We were like, it was stressful, right? We were like, "Oh my god, we're going to be bombed." And then when we started working for RG and said, we were like, "This is going to be easier because they're they're friends. >> They're friends." So, you know, and then during the course of our 13 years, you know, at RTF from 2009 to 2022, like every year, like that we began to become the Cold War, you know, was it was warming up and like every six months or every year we'd be talking to AP and say, "Are you sure you got this under control?" You know, like we don't want to be on the wrong side if this if the you know, war starts. So then finally in 2022 there was you know a a war did start. So we had to step back >> caused by Hillary Clinton. Everything was uh all down to her losing and refusing to accept it. >> Yeah. So um yeah. So that kind of brings us up to the present. So then Stacy really had this idea where after meeting the president uh of El Salvador, President Buchelli in 20 late 2021, we met him very impressed and they had made Bitcoin legal tender and then uh we came back and we thought well they'll probably just go down the path of shitcoins and Stacy was like you know what I'm not gonna I'm not I can't accept that. I can't accept it. You know this country deserves better. So she reached out and said, "Look, you've got to not do this and you can't do that. You've got to get this Bitcoin thing right." So they were like, "Wow, okay. Come on back." So we went back and we sat down with the president and uh we he invited us to essentially be policy adviserss on Bitcoin in El Salvador. We decided to create the Bitcoin office. Stacy's headed up the heads up the Bitcoin office. We started a Bitcoin strategic reserve again mostly through Stacy's efforts and we just passed the Bitcoin bank law which uh I must say hello hello >> did do we get lost >> no I hear you >> okay >> we suddenly >> yeah the Bitcoin bank lot which uh again was mo was primarily Stacy's effort so that's been really um the project for almost four years now and uh I I think we see the United States kind of following El Salvador, right? They want to do a strategic Bitcoin reserve and other stuff. >> Yeah. And and Stacy, as the director of El Salvador's National Bitcoin Office, you focused heavily on Bitcoin education, which all Bitcoiners will tell you is maybe the most important thing for adoption. We're seeing it time again. People don't believe in it. They do the work and then all of a sudden they orange pill themselves. How big of a difference has that focus on education made in shaping the next generation of talent in El Salvador? >> Uh well, it's my firm belief and I've I've posted this several times on Twitter is like or X whatever it's um it's education is our moat, right? Uh people naturally want the quick, easy, fast path to the top. Um >> I'm finally seeing what we look like on the screen. Like we had a a pop our screen popped different and now I can see I'm kind of out of shot. Well, um education is our moat. It's hard work. that's really difficult to do. And again, just like early Bitcoin, um there was no road map or template or like work that we could just, you know, take from somewhere else that had already been done. We had to build it from scratch by hand, >> right? >> And so we've been working on that for four years. Uh we have like even down to six-year-old children, seven-year-old children. Uh we now have a workbook for uh school book for six and sevenyear-old children, eight-year-old children. So second and third grade um completely done, introduced into the schools in El Salvador, the public schools in El Salvador. Uh we have um a Bitcoin diploma program for high school students. Uh but I I started the first thing I did was the Kubo Plus which is a Bitcoin and lightning devs program and um why I started that is uh four years ago with Jimmy Song he I you know so we let me roll back a little bit. So Max and I were in El Salvador and we were trying to find a way to help uh like how how to help El Salvador. And the first thing we did was well you know we were early VC investors in um uh you know in the Bitcoin space like Kraken we had invested in in like 2011 or 2012 and um so and we we we have a high tolerance for risk and we've been around for a long time and we could give back. let's let's start investing in startups here and bringing companies to El Salvador, bit bring Bitcoin companies to El Salvador. And you know, we always got asked like, well, how what's the talent pool like there? Like how many Bitcoin and Lightning devs do you have? And of course, there were um not that many. Uh and there were mostly foreigners living there. And I really believed and we had been talking about it on our podcast, Orange Pill podcast at that time all the time that um Bitcoin would cause a renaissance somewhere. And we had talked about it on Kaiser Report back in 2014 that uh you know perfect money uh could cause a renaissance. It did in Florence I believe. Um and I I believe that Bitcoin could cause a renaissance somewhere. So, I believed that something great would come for um El Salvador, that the economy would transform, that it would boom. And this was before the um the gang war, which did transform everything beyond anything that I expected at that time when we first arrived in El Salvador. um in such a positive way that um you know but from where we were at that time I was thinking that uh you know we need to train our Bitcoin and lightning devs and so I got Jimmy Song to come there and you know it was so much hard work because his program bit programming Bitcoin pro course it's very difficult to get in because he asks this one question and it's a you know it it shows how you think rather than your skills and um it We interviewed something like 150 students and we got seven in there. So I was a little bit like discouraged. I was thinking like this was going to be a difficult task. But we train those first seven students and uh Jimmy said to me like if if you can get 20 students trained up like I've just done for your students here in El Salvador, if you can get 20 more, then you're going to transform this economy. That's all it will take. And so it like then Jimmy was gone, you know, he has his own life and I was thinking, wow, I really have to do I I need 20 more students. So I started out thinking I need 20 more students. Um I met with this company called Fulgar who are huge uh investors in the Bitcoin and Lightning space. Uh they're a VC fund and uh they got on board and wanted to help um you know with building out Kubo Plus and so they were great partners and brought in Jakamo and we now have 500 students that we've trained in El Salvador. So uh you know it turned out to be better than I ever could have imagined and um yeah so we have this is our moat because I think you know countries are looking at Bitcoin and what they're only they're only looking at one thing right they're looking at just Bitcoin they're just looking at a strategic reserve they're just looking at it in that sort of way whereas what El Salvador has is so deep and so profound and so uh you know mindset it's all about the mindset and about um being bitcoiners like you have a population of bitcoiners there and a way that it t it just takes the time that it takes to train these hundreds of people to train um >> to you know to have that shift in mindset across the whole population of of what it means to be like sovereign and independent truly right. It's it's >> it's a it's a bit deeper than most people realize like it like a a lot of people still have just the fun of like number go up and that is fun. I you know one can't deny that but it's uh you know there this there's there's so much more in a like a deep renaissance like level that um that's where Al Salvador is and I think >> therefore it's going to be hard for any country to catch up because the because El Salvador has President Blly and he is a one in 500year type leader but the population as well. Not only do they support him, they support him uh because he is a great leader, but because he brought them freedom, not only with Bitcoin, but freedom from all that uh terror of the gangs, right? So, you have a population that is so optimistic and so like say 1960s America where they thought like we could land a man on the moon, we could do anything, right? like the future belongs to us after World War II, like everything is going to be American. So, we have that same sort of enthusiasm for their future and that optimism for their future um across the entire population that you just don't see anywhere else in the world. There's more of a like we're heading into the fourth turning and is getting horrible and uh like every man for himself where you don't have that in El Salvador. have a mindset of sovereignty and independence and good times coming, right? Strong men create good times. >> Yeah. Yeah. And and Max, it may I wonder from your perspective as someone as both of you are so integral in writing this new blueprint for El Salvador of how nations should start adopting Bitcoin into their monetary policies. How far away do you think we are from seeing other countries follow suit, specifically the United States? Are we still years away from that? Is it maybe a lot closer than you think or than we think? What are your thoughts? >> Well, having uh President Blly as president of Bitcoin country is helpful because he's the most popular leader in the region. He's the most popular leader in dozens of countries. When they ask them who's your favorite leader, they'll say President Blly. And President Blly of course is associated with Bitcoin. So that opens the doors. And um you know we recently met up with the folks in Panama and um they they are now uh moving toward what I call the axis of Bitcoin right Central American companies and countries that are coming in into Bitcoin. We had a meeting with the financial minister of Pakistan a few weeks ago with the president and the news came out shortly thereafter that they're now exploring Bitcoin strategic reserve. Um so every country in the world uh in every sovereign wealth fund in the world and sovereign wealth funds the biggest ones are the biggest part of a few of these countries. They're now exploring Bitcoin or investing in Bitcoin. >> So it it it is now uh finding its way into the sovereign level. So, Bitcoin is definitely embedded in the sovereign level and they are increasing their allocation just like Larry Frink I believe uh allocation went from 1% to 5% now he's talking 15% >> on portfolios so the hedge funds the managed money world they're out they're upping their allocations the sovereigns are getting involved sovereign wealth funds are getting involved so it's um it's already on the sovereign level it's already working its way in we believe we have a blueprint for that was developed in El Salvador. Uh the legal blueprint, the communications, how to how to manage it. Uh so that's something that we've talked to to Panama about like here are the steps we took to get to El Salvador level. You know, we think El Salvador is the first country out of the fourth turning in large part because you've got President Balli plus Bitcoin. So, you know, we we're already in the good times phase and other countries are entering the the bad times. Uh, in the United States, of course, they are very involved with Bitcoin thanks to the orange pilling efforts of Bitcoin magazine uh in the Trump administration and family. So, they are definitely on the Bitcoin board and um so they are obviously a big player. uh they're the probably the biggest of the G7 that's involved in Bitcoin and um you know I think you're going to see some news coming out of the M East. It makes perfect sense they've got all that energy they that they would want to also be in Bitcoin that you know we get some news still coming out from that region and uh so it's already it's already happening on the sovereign level. >> That's amazing. And when you two aren't orange pilling, you know, countries, you're also helping orange pill the world with your very appropriately named Orange Pill podcast that we touched on a little bit earlier, which has become an absolute hub for Bitcoiners worldwide. I would love to talk about that a little bit. And for those people that aren't yet familiar with it, Stacy, can you tell us a little bit about the vibe of the show and why you decided to create it in the first place? We created Orange Pill podcast during the lockdown, the global lockdown, right, for the for for the COVID pandemic. >> And um there were everybody had a lot of time on their hands suddenly. >> And it it was um it was a real turning point for everything, right? especially for Bitcoin because remember they turned off the global economy and that was like so everything around us is just a hologram like we don't need this economy we don't need jobs like we could just turn this off like what have we all been doing for all these decades like what is this right and remember Bitcoin uh crashed like from I don't know it was like 6,000 and then it crashed down to 3,000 um in that one day in March until thank God bit like shut down for a few hours and it stopped the whatever derivatives or leverage was unwinding >> and um >> it was uh it was a crazy time right and we needed to try to uh communicate with the world we we wanted to like talk to people and and and help people because I knew a lot of people might not be in the same position we were. And uh we had each other. We had a nice safe place. We had a lot of space. We had a lot of green uh and like fresh air and and sunshine and and uh so it was part concern for our audience already like um you know let's talk like we're here like let's have fun. Um and a way to fill some of the hours of the day that we suddenly had that we weren't doing other stuff. Um, but it it it was it was totally free form. It was uh unscripted. All of our stuff until that point had been mostly scripted except for um uh Resonance FM, the truth about markets. So, it was back to like where we started in terms of truth about markets riffing on on topics of the day and and things that were happening. Um and it was also at that moment. So when when when we realized like everything was a fabrication, like Bitcoin to me at that for in March of 2020 became way more serious to me than it had ever been. Like it was like magic internet money for a long time to me. And you know, I remember like giving away lots of money, Bitcoin, and spending Bitcoin and thinking like, hey, this is just like magic internet money. And I had spent like 14 bitcoin on an iPhone and I was like, "Oh my god, I can't believe Apple sent me an iPhone for these Bitcoin. This is crazy." Like um you know, so you know, I I was you know, had been just commenting and and uh you know, having fun with Bitcoin. And then when they shut down, they just not shut down, they turned off the global economy. It was a and in the United States, we were, you know, being pushed money like our banker was asking us like, "Oh, you should uh here take $2 million and you don't have to pay it back." And, you know, I was like, "Well, this seems like one of those Nigerian prince scams." Like, like what is going on? Like what? They were pushing it on us and then they sent us the um you know the application form or some form to take $2 million for free. You don't have to give it back. But the the front page was literally just a few words and the front page said by taking this you agree that if you didn't take this money you would go bankrupt and um and it's a felony if if that's not the case. So, I was like, "Well, then it's not free money because we wouldn't go bankrupt and like without this money." Um, I would love $2 million to buy $3,000 Bitcoin, right? But, uh, so we didn't take the the money, but I just thought like what like I felt like it was very aggressive being pushed all this free money that in fact you're going to be committing a felony now. Take it. Take it. And you're like, >> what? >> Like, this is weird. And so we were um it was very anarchctic and fun and we talked a lot a lot about what then would end up happening to us the next year which was we were talking about Renaissance. So we were talking a lot about a Renaissance 2.0 coming uh because of course these were the darkest of times right uh the Renaissance 1.0 you know, came out of the black plague um right after that. And so um we were we had already been talking about how perfect money could transform an economy, but now we also had like wow um this is a time this is like a global reset. They just turned off the last simulation and uh it's time to build a new simulation, right? like when when they turned off the money and they turned well they turned off the economy um it changed everything and we were there with the Orange Pill podcast to try to understand what it was. So it was very anarctic and fun and um it you know trying to make sense of the insanity all around us. Everybody went crazy. The whole thing was uh was still quite inexplicable of what actually happened. >> Yeah. Sure. remember they had the the truckers >> the truckers um >> uh in Canada, you know, they were being debanked and people were being debanked and that was a phrase that most Americans had never heard of. Even the Trump family got debanked and apparently that's what Orangefeld the Eric Trump and other Trump family members is that they see that when you are able to to cut somebody off from their bank, you know, you're you're controlling them. So um that was the use case for Bitcoin for uncensor uncensorable transactions. Um so that was uh you know gave some thrust to the Orange Pill podcast because it's part of what we've been saying for years now. And I mean that's one we've always had the wind at our backs because when we started talking about it we kind of nailed it the use case what it was good for very early and we just been been sailing on this for 15 years. like everything we've been saying for 15 years has been been true and and accurate and then and the need for it has been legitimate and the fragility of the existing system is now evident and it's breaking apart and now the need for Bitcoin has never been greater. uh and and so we're entering into another chapter which is uh going to see I think some pretty significant changes but uh you know we'll be we'll be here you know reporting on it. >> Yeah those times are really wild. You think about it it was kind of the perfect cocktail that was just waiting for someone like the two of you to take advantage of the situation. We had everybody stuck at home. We had the rise of Tik Tok. All of a sudden everybody gets all this stimulus money. We had the gamification of stock trading and and crypto trading via Robin Hood kind of exploding at that time and all these eyeballs are looking for somebody to look, you know, to tell them and give them answers and you two positioned yourself so smartly right in that perfect storm. And then you have Max, what I really love about you specifically, I love you both. you are such a showman and you two have done such a great job of marrying the ideas of financial information and entertainment into financial entertainment and you are so well known for some of your what some people might call outrageous predictions or hot takes. For instance, you've recently predicted that Bitcoin will reach $2.2 million by 2025, citing US debt and inflation. Now, when you make calls like that, what do you feel like you're seeing that a lot of other people still are missing at this point in time? >> Well, I didn't say 2025. I just said it's in play. You know, 2.2 million. Thank you for correcting me. >> Uh is is in play. I you know, I what what do um what you know the um it's easy to see where this is going and so it's doesn't seem like a stretch. You know, the the total addressable market is 400 trillion. that total address of all the the fiat money world it's literally a Ponzi scheme and you can't taper a Ponzi scheme and it's starting to unwind now there's a I believe of an effort that they believe in Washington and elsewhere they're going to keep this Ponzi scheme going I just don't I think we're at the endgame I think they're at the endame for both the central bank model and the nation state model after 300 years I think this is all coming apart and Bitcoin is will emerge as the global standard global reserve standard. And so that means and everything goes to zero against Bitcoin. So, you know, I think Michael Sailor has a $13 million per Bitcoin prediction out there. And I can see how you you can get there because you're talking about squeezing 400 trillion into 21 million units of Bitcoin, right? The price discovery >> tells you where the price is going and they can't make any more of it. So, it's not hard to come up with these numbers and we've been right. I mean, the first the only really important price prediction I ever made was in 2011 at the bit first Bitcoin conference in Prague when Bitcoin was a few dollars. And I said in this my speech to the conference that if this if this works as an asset class and captures 1% or more percent of global forex, then this is a $100,000 per coin asset. Okay, that's really the only important prediction I think that I made. Uh because obviously if you were riding it from a dollar to 100,000, you you got the lion share of of gains in this asset. And uh I to give credit uh it was also Rick Faulvin who started the Swedish Pirate Party uh who was also at the event who also did a presentation along these lines as well. So he he was really also um really seeing the potential of Bitcoin at that time as an asset class and being competitive in the global asset world where I know as a stock broker you have a fiduciary responsibility to at least consider these assets and if so if it pops up on your Bloomberg machine you know it's going to gain traction and the market's huge and the price is gonna going to go up that's it. Mhm. And you mentioned Michael Sailor and we I' we'd have to talk then about strategy and what's going on right now as they've certainly seem to be the leader in this new narrative that we've seen this year with the Bitcoin Treasury company. Stacy, I would love to know what's your take on that. Is that sustainable long term? Because not every company is strategy and has been buying since 2020 and we're seeing all of these new entrance into the space. As a Bitcoiner, I love to see it, but I wonder if you think that that is really sustainable for any company that wants to hop on board the Bitcoin Treasury train. >> Well, there's a few things. For me personally, I only look at Bitcoin as something that should be owned by the individual or the nation state >> at that level, you know, for sovereignty, for purposes of sovereignty. Um I I had mentioned at the top of this interview that uh you know I know the number go up thing is fun and things like that but I think um sovereignty is the most important issue and I think everybody out there should focus first on you know uh acquiring as much Bitcoin as they possibly can and and hold it own their own keys. Now, these Bitcoin uh treasury companies again. So, we were doing the OrangeP podcast. It was the lockdown of 2020 and uh we had just started our Orange Pill podcast and they had turned off the global economy and uh I think once they turned it back on uh apparently we were all replaced with AI of course um since then since 2020. But uh to me like what Michael Sailor did with strategy was uh Michael strat micro strategy at that time. It made perfect sense as he was describing it at that very time. What he said was that um the the cash on his balance sheet was a melting ice cube, right? And that made so much sense. Um, especially at that time because they were printing trillions of dollars and sending everybody free money, like enormous amounts of free money. We were being offered 2 million free money. So when at that time when he said, "Hey, this is a melting ice cube." You're like, "Yeah." Like I can't believe all the money we're being offered. It's crazy. Um, so cut to today and it's um I don't want to use this word necessarily. Okay, so like a cargo cult, right? What a cargo cult does is um if you've ever heard that term is after World War II, uh when the US military left this remote island in the Pacific um and they had a you know a US air force base there and they would bring in all the planes and u deliver all these goods and amazing goods and food and packages of stuff and like then the military US military left and the the local population still there were like well how do we get all that food in those boxes. So they took the, you know, the things for the planes and they started like just doing this and thinking like if they were going to direct a plane in that that's that's what brought the food. It was just that. So I think like there's an element of that of like they've stripped down um what Michael Sailor and strategy have done to just like doing that just the the the the magic bit the magic internet money sort of bit of like oh if we just do that and don't have an operating company and don't have like a melting ice cube on our balance sheet that we're trying to protect that it's then about something else. It's not exactly what Micro Strategy was doing. on the other hand as well like um if we're at an end of an era um in preWorld War II you had the same exact thing happened in Germany which was the speculative attack right um on the Reichkes mark. So anybody who was um doing the same thing of borrowing as much as possible in the collapsing currency and buying uh gold or assets at that time um it if you had access to the capital and you could acquire as much uh of reichs marks as possible um you it was very smart thing to do. So this is in danger, I would think, of triggering that sort of collapse of of this whole fiat system, not just the dollar, but that the dollar is the fiat system, right? That all the other currencies are just kind of like >> the altcoins of of that space of the fiat space. So I don't know the there's it's positive and negative. It's it's complicated. I think there is a sort of South Sea bubble like if you ever see the Hoggarth sort of uh artwork from the South Sea bubble era like like they they they would have signs out in the middle of the square in London and say like here invest in this this company uh we haven't decided what we're going to do yet in the South Sea area but uh we're going to do something like we don't know what our venture is but it'll be something just give us money. Uh there is an element of that but there is an element of a speculative attack which um makes perfect economic sense at this sort of moment if the you know fiat system is going to collapse um which it very well should do if you saw what happened in 2020. So uh it's complicated. I just focus personally on uh the message to our audience is that stack as many sats as you possibly can buy bitcoin not exposure to bitcoin and at the nation state level to um especially if if this whole fiat regime is going to shift and there will be a monetary reset and I think there has there's an ongoing monetary reset um and I I think it makes sense for a nation state to protect itself to stockpile uh Bitcoin to develop a strategic reserve. Um but yeah, it's it's it's uh that's the message is is buy Bitcoin, not exposure to Bitcoin for most people. >> Yeah, absolutely. Not your keys, not your coins. and Max in terms of the Bitcoin Treasury plays obviously with that narrative been going on the last, you know, year or so, we've seen it definitely help channel Bitcoin's message to the masses, right? But I worry if we see a bare market and we have companies that didn't buy in at an average coin of 73K like Strategy did, we could end up taking a big step backward. At the end of the day, do you think this corporate treasury play is going to be kind of a two steps forward, one step back for Bitcoin? Or if we do see a big bare market with a correction as a result of maybe the collapse of some of these, could this end up actually hurting Bitcoin's narrative in the short term? >> Well, you know, the primary use case of Bitcoin is separating money from state. So, when corporations are buying Bitcoin and you're buying shares in those corporations, you're reuniting money in state. So it's it's going backwards from the primary mission, right? The vector that it's on is to separate money from state. And it's as profound a change to society as separating the state from the church, right? That was an amazing leap forward for humanity in a lot of ways and gave us the enlightenment. And separating money from state, it sets the stage for something similar to happen to society, a huge leap forward of um self- sovereignty. And that would be selfhodling bitcoin. Um, on the corporate treasury front, you've got a lot of companies with a lot of cash who are buying a lot of Bitcoin. You know, the thing about Michael Sailor is that in back in 2020, he had $500 million on their balance sheet, and he could have done what every single CEO in America has been doing for 20 or 30 years, and that is to buy back his own stock. That that would boost earnings per share, which would make his stock options go higher, and he could make a lot of money that way. But he took the very bold step of trying something no one had tried before and done before. He put that $500 million into Bitcoin and he set in motion um something that has profoundly changed corporate finance. So the melting ice cube was addressed. He went from the problems with fiat money to Bitcoin. Then the next step was you know what I can actually go into the market and sell stock and I can sell bonds and I can use the proceeds to buy Bitcoin. So then we went into this idea of um dilution equals accretion because normally when a company sells stocks or bonds you're diluting the earnings per share and therefore the multiple would drop down and so would the price. So he's saying no no no actually dilution and with our company it's accretive because we're going to instantly buy Bitcoin and Bitcoin is going up forever. So that's the beginning of his uh at the market stock sales etc. And stock is looking good. It's getting a lot of attention. Then he goes into another phase which is these convertible prefers and other kinds of stock offerings that would appeal to different pockets of money. You know, some some are looking for volatility, some are looking for income. And he had the biggest IPO of 2025 so far with one of his spin-offs and that money is going into the balance sheet and he's buying Bitcoin. And I think that Michael Sailor is a one-off just like President Blly is a one-off. I think that these other companies that have come along that are trying to do what he's doing, they don't think they know what he's doing, but they think they know what they're doing and what he's doing, and they're not necessarily going to be successful at it. And and they've already said that if their stock price trades at a discount to their Bitcoin position, they're going to sell their Bitcoin and buy back their stock. So, it's going to unwind those positions where I don't think Michael Sailor and Strategy would ever do that. Um, but these new newer companies have already said they would do that. So, what what we have here is the makings of another blowoff top because you're going to have lots of companies all over the world engaging in the strategy, taking out debt, buying Bitcoin. You're going to see a a typical correction of 10 or 15% become a 30, 40, 50% correction because of the unwinding of all these corporate treasury companies. Could be the story of the next pullback. and Sailor himself has said Bitcoin will go from 220 or 250 back to 180 like he's already anticipating this >> and uh you know then the cycle will begin again this idea that we we will no longer we've broke free of the four-year cycle right we we've said that at the top of every four-year cycle that we've broke free from the four-year cycle and then we have a big drop draw down and people it's like oh why didn't I realize that nothing changes and everything is always a the history rhymes over over and over and over again. So, uh, as as a Bitcoiner, you know, I like to see the demand for Bitcoin. >> I think one more thing to add to this is the altcoin treasury companies. Uh, I'm saying the polite word for that, but I think uh those will be that's where the disaster will happen. The that is the um the liar loan of this of this cycle. That's they are the liar treasury companies essentially. It's um remember the the 2008 financial crisis was caused by liar loans underrite being at the foundation of these uh you know CDOS and these mortgage back securities that they had all these liar loans underlying the the asset which was being packaged with some treasuries to make it look better than it was. and sold to pension funds around the world. And um that so but at the very foundation of the whole thing were these liar loans. And that's the fact about the 5 million altcoins is basically they're liar coins, right? And if you're having that as your foundation for these uh packages of securities and and products being sold to Wall Street and to uh retail investors, um that's going to be where everything blows up in in my opinion. Um and there could be some contagion into the um Bitcoin Treasury uh area, I would suspect. again. But you know, uh this is just like this is the first interview I've done in in a long time and the these are just like some thoughts uh you know, everybody really has to do their own research on on this space and um you know there's plenty of research on Bitcoin and and you know holding your own Bitcoin and that's at the end of the day the the most important thing for you to uh go down that rabbit hole uh rather than worry about which company's going to crash first. Yeah, you've removed one of the charming aspects of Bitcoin is you don't have to follow the companies and all the risks that come with owning stock in a company. The management risk, the regulatory risk, the market risk itself, and there the competitive risk, these are risks that these companies deal with every day. And so on a riskadjusted basis, just owning Bitcoin, you don't have any of that risk. And you've got still a cager or kager rate of I think it's still like 50% or something very very high which is beating every money manager in history. It beats Warren Buffett by like two or 3x. So what what more could you possibly want? One one interesting side note which I I take as signal and it's very interesting is that gold mining companies are now putting a portion of their treasuries into Bitcoin. Right? So you see that Bitcoin is demonetizing gold. You see that gold ETFs are being sold off to buy Bitcoin ETFs. Gold mining companies are buying Bitcoin on their treasury uh books. So that a clear signal that gold is in the crosshairs. Gold will be demonetized and that puts you at 800,000 900,000 per Bitcoin because gold is now 20 21 trillion asset. So that that's the bull story right there. Uh corporate treasuries are bullish. They're buying a lot, but they're doing obviously Wall Street financial chicainery that we've been reporting on for 20 years. It always ends up blowing up uh every cycle and and then we'll see another blow up in this cycle. >> I actually Max brings up a good point there about the gold companies uh buying Bitcoin with their reserves is that's an interesting thing to me is the commodity companies, right? Because those are hard assets. So what are they doing with their melting ice cube, right? If they on mass start like the oil or energy companies and the gold or silver mining companies or the copper mining, if if those companies start holding their cash reserves in Bitcoin instead, uh that's a different sort of signal than the speculative attack sort of model that we're seeing at the moment. >> Yeah. And I it makes sense to me that they would want to keep their treasury, their cash holdings in Bitcoin. To me, it seems obvious and we've I think we've said that long ago about the oil companies or the oil countries like Abu Dhabi um that they should be holding gold uh Bitcoin instead. Uh so that will be an interesting move and and there are the first gold companies starting to do it but once you see the energy companies that's going to be the real um mind shift happening the mindset is uh shifting radically in the in the markets if if that happens. >> Yeah. Because right now people focus on cost of energy for mining Bitcoin. Yeah. But that haven't really groed this idea where energy companies will be buying Bitcoin in the open market like Aramco for example huge company hundreds of millions of dollars worth of they've got tons of cash and they are um now selling bits off in the public markets and they've got a lot of cash and if they said we're going to start buying Bitcoin aggressively that would trigger an avalanche of buy orders. That's so true. And it's interesting too, like you said with uh, you know, gold buying Bitcoin. It's almost kind of akin to like if Coca-Cola started buying Pepsi, it's almost admitting that this has its own advantages over what you currently have. So you want to talk about a signal, that's almost the signal. But when we're talking about gold, too, and that's kind of been Bitcoin's narrative for a long time, right? It's the digital gold. It's a digital store of value. But as we progress through this journey that is Bitcoin, we'll have plenty of people out there. For instance, Jack Dorsey's been on record of saying that in order for Bitcoin to truly reach its destiny, we need to be using it as a paymentto payment system. Do you agree that that is going to be a necessary step during Bitcoin's evolution, or will it always be able to live as just another harder store of value? all all all stores of value, all money starts off as a collectible and then it becomes a um store of value, then it becomes a medium of exchange, then it becomes a unit of account. So, we're in the process of the store of value story getting traction globally, and the medium of exchange story is also gaining traction. I also think um just having lived it and experienced it and observed it and regretted many things is like um like spending on Bitcoin back in 2010 or 11 or 12. Um is that uh it it seems like the design of Bitcoin is such that it is what it needs to be at that moment to get maximum um distribution. So, Bitcoin found us. We were one of the most widely distributed uh financial news programs in the world in a on a platform that was already attracting um contrarian thinkers, right? So, they weren't um orthodox thinkers who wanted to hear that how great the banks were and Wall Street and how the system would continue as is. it was already naturally our audience was already naturally like inclined to think something's wrong. What the heck is going on out there? So if we had the right audience um now Bitcoin at that time was so abundant and so easy to get and people probably have heard this, you know, uh this these sort of tweets go viral every once in a while that there used to be these faucets where you could get five Bitcoin for free. All you had to do was put in a bitcoin address and uh they they would send you five bitcoin. You know we we have I made lots of bitcoin that way and most gave it away to friends and family and you know it seemed so easy at that time. So like what is your what is the um what it does to your psychology is like oh I got five you know 15 free bitcoin this week from the faucet. So, uh, here friend, take here take 10 Bitcoin. I'll just get some more next time, uh, next week, you know. So, it it seemed easy and so you were distributing it easy. And of course, those that free Bitcoin came from Matiami. It came from Gavin Andre. They each had a faucet and they gave away 30,000 Bitcoin each. So, um I'm sure you know it doesn't feel good today to look back and think, "Wow, I gave away those 30,000 Bitcoin." But, um at that time, that was a psychology. It was like an evolutionary sort of tactic for Bitcoin because, >> right, >> had they kept it and had there only been like a thousand people in Bitcoin or 500 people in Bitcoin as there were back then, then it wouldn't be what it is today, right? So they had to spread it, they had to give it away, they had to it had to be distributed to Argentina which was a big early adopter because of their uh financial crisis. It had to be spread around the world as far as possible. So it does seem like almost by intelligent design, right, that it found um you know people giving it away who who who didn't realize that they were giving away such a valuable asset that they could never get again. Um it tricked >> like that's what evolution does, right? that these are evolutionary tactics that trick like a a you know a some sort of parasite to take your barnacles off the whale like you know they they they designed things to uh worked perfectly uh in a harmonious system and um survive and thrive the best and found us it found uh Kaiser report which was has the right audience to distribute it the most widely um and so right now Uh, you know, it it's telling people to stockpile as hard as possible. And I see why Jack Dorsey um you know, he he was at an event that we were at. He spoke at an event in South Carolina and um he mentioned that he first got involved in Bitcoin on October 31st, 2008. Um so that was like at the white paper was published and he read that he downloaded it that day. Um, so he's an early Bitcoiner who was around at that time when people were giving it away, spreading it wide. Um, and so when you see it now that nobody spends it, nobody invests it, nobody uh, you know, I could see why like where he's coming from, the context for where he is is that he was there, um, when people were spreading it around. and you know he does a lot of amazing work. His his his stack that he's developing for block is pretty impressive and um he he's very generous with his Bitcoin in and all sorts of uh programs in um develop in de in the developing world. And so uh I I think you know he has a lot of Bitcoin. So I I think probably it's him trying to encourage his uh you know other OGs and and whales to like you know keep on building and spreading the Bitcoin rather than hoarding it on these corporate treasury balance sheets. uh that's where uh you know where having been there in those early days I imagine this is where he's feeling um you know anxiety about this but um I just think Bitcoin is where it has to be. It's it it you know tricks us all all the time. So uh the I'm sure you know there there will be the same sort of feeling maybe one day of people saying I I I created a Bitcoin treasury company instead of doing this. I should have been doing this at that time. Right? So who knows where it will go from there. But I understand and I agree as well with Max that um maybe it needs to be a million dollars a coin or two million or we don't know until it gets there until when people start uh spending it but they have to be earning it. As long as we have a fiat currency, you know that that um Gresham's law would suggest that people are going to spend their shitty money instead, right? So, you're always going to have that problem is is now that people realize that Bitcoin is perfect money, but they have an imperfect money and a crappy money to spend, they're going to spend the one that's trash, right? Um, so you have to in Yeah, either the price has to be higher. Uh, people have to be earning more Bitcoin as a salary. um so that they don't even have the option of having fiat so to spend um to get rid of that psychology. It's all about psychology, right? Markets. >> Yeah. No, this the psychology element to it never ceases to amaze me. And like you know, like you said, we had people back in the day just giving it away. At least we're not calling them the pizza guy. He's got it worse than anybody now. Everybody knows who the pizza guy is. But in terms of in the future actually using it as a medium of exchange, Max, to your point earlier, what do you think is the biggest barrier right now for people doing that? Do we need better and simpler user interface? Maybe because I know my Mima is not going to be paying for anything, you know, with her cold wallet. What do you think is needs to change in order for Bitcoin to be adopted more as a medium of exchange as we move forward to the future? >> Oh, those payment systems are coming along every day. you know, QR codes, payment codes, they're always new ones all the time. So, it's definitely gaining traction on the payment side and um people um are just um going to take it at their own pace and uh generally adoption is driven by crisis and if we have another bank crisis then another huge wave of adoption will happen and also you have these circular economies. So in El Salvador in uh towns like Berlin and there's a couple of more where people are earning spending and saving in Bitcoin. So everything is Bitcoin and it's a circular economy and and so you already see those pockets happening in towns all over the world and so when they start to co-mingle and they start to merge into bigger and bigger regions and you go into a circular global Bitcoin planet. It's also the the businesses all these cafe. If I had a business and I were selling something, if I had a shop and I was selling something and you see these countries developing strategic Bitcoin reserves and you see uh all these the the best and brightest, the smartest people in the room uh you know creating uh Bitcoin treasury companies and you see this speculative attack and you see the largest financial institution in the world, the Black Rockck like has tens and tens of thousands of Bitcoin, hundreds of thousands. It's like, >> right, >> if I had a shop, I wouldn't price I wouldn't have like here, this is $20 or $20 worth of Bitcoin. I'd be like, okay, no, it's $20 or if you give me $15 worth of Bitcoin, I I I'll prefer Bitcoin. Like, they're the ones that are are should be driving this like because it doesn't make any sense for you if you have, you know, cash app. Okay, you could spend dollars or you could spend Bitcoin from your cash app, >> but >> if the if the shopkeeper is willing to take the same amount of of dollars worth as the Bitcoin, it's like, well, I'm going to keep the Bitcoin then because if if he's just if he's going to accept the dollars equally, I'll give him the dollars, okay? Like because that's the worst money compared to the Bitcoin. Mhm. >> So, if I were the shopkeeper, they haven't they they're the ones that haven't groed it. It's not the consumer that needs to be educated as those as those shopkeepers. Um, you know, when Bitcoin was 20,000 just a few years ago, if you had offered a 50% discount, you would still be way up, right? Like, they should have been like >> uh offering huge discounts to get as much Bitcoin as they possibly could. So, they didn't do that. like we were saying that at the time actually like people should be just offering discounts to get as much Bitcoin as they can on their balance sheet these companies. Um but they didn't uh but they'll you know maybe once the mad rush if there's like during the hyperbolic phase of this um or the par hyperbolic that's max during the parabolic phase of this of this of this bull market like uh then maybe you'll see companies uh you know shops saying instead of you know we'll take $5 for the coffee or like $2.50 worth of Bitcoin. >> Yeah, definitely. >> You make that such a good point. Go ahead, Max. >> No, that's it. I'm just agreeing with that. I think that, you know, the uh you know, when Jack Dorsey says that he's worried that people are not using it enough in transactions dayto day. >> Um I see his point, but I'm I'm not worried about it. >> Yeah. >> And and Stacy, you made such an interesting point that I guess I hadn't really thought of before. And but it's kind of the same story with Bitcoin. It's that early adopters, first movers tend to win in this space. So if I'm a business and I'm accepting Bitcoin, like you said, only a couple years ago and was at 20,000 and I'm offering a huge discount, I'm up whatever 6x that it's been since then, just about, for instance. I'm sure you know our good friend of the show, Isabella Santos, has the Bitcoin cafe in Islam Muharris, which is accepting Bitcoin. So there are people out there that are forward thinking and I got a feeling we're going to see her cafe all over the place in a couple of years after she's one of the first, you know, winners from adopting that. It brings me though to another question that has been kind of unique to this cycle and it is the seeming seeming absence of retail in what has seemingly been an institutionally dominant Bitcoin uh how do I put this phase right now. Max, I'd be curious from your perspective. Why do you think that is? Is it unit bias? Is retail feeling priced out and Bitcoin's need to get a certain price to where they feel like it's even worth it for them to buy in or they can't afford to wait any longer. Do you have any thoughts about why that's happening this cycle? >> Well, I bit is a retail product. >> Yeah, that's the most successful. >> I guess people aren't holding >> it's the most retail product is I bet when you say Larry Frink has 600,000 Bitcoin. No, he doesn't have 600,000 Bitcoin. the people who bought his ETFs combined 600,000. Yeah. So the retail participation is extremely high if you consider that you've got these um okay its exposure to Bitcoin right so that's a different question but as far as having Bitcoin on your in your life in your portfolio you've got huge retail interest with the the Bitcoin treasury companies with the ETFs and that's gone global so um you have a big big retail participation >> but there's almost zero on chain right there's There's >> everybody's buying paper Bitcoin. That is true. Um they're getting exposure to that and you don't see the retail participation via the exchanges like in 2017 or um maybe 2021. And so uh therefore you're not seeing that sort of uh altcoin thing either that uh you know they often follow Bitcoin up. So there was a a real distance between Bitcoin and um the other coins because of um you know the institutionalization of Bitcoin is what I I think you could call it the paperation of it. Um I I think uh there's a lot of participation as Max said in IBIT is a hugely successful and all the other ETFs. Um, but it it does show and I think probably Jack Dorsey is concerned about that is like um that there's a lot of education that still needs to be h happening about uh self-custody. I think people are afraid to self-custody. Um they don't want that responsibility of of of of figuring out how to do that, right? Or fear losing it. Um, so yeah, that's that's that's what is true is that there's massive retail participation. It's just that >> it would be good to actually know the numbers of when when they do that thing of like um how many uh how what percentage of the population of America has owns Bitcoin and they'll say like 14% uh like how many actually own Bitcoin and how many own exposure to Bitcoin. it I think is going to be an important number to look forward you know in the future is like h actually how hyper bitcoinized is this economy or not >> also you know there's a lot of bitcoin trapped you know we saw recently something like 70 or 80,000 bitcoin uh over there at galaxy was um transacted they suddenly wallets that people thought were lost are not lost they're actually back in play and a lot of these banks are going to offer the ability to put Bitcoin on deposit and use as collateral >> for uh your traditional finance account which would tied into a a uh credit card. So now, okay, let's say you've got 5 10 million in Bitcoin. It's in a wallet. You haven't touched it in years. um you activate it. You stick it in your Schwab account. It's now the it's now uh marginable and you're start you're trading Bitcoin treasury companies and you just use your MX card which is debitable on your Schwab account. You just engaged in a Bitcoin transaction essentially because you're that transaction was collateralized by your Bitcoin. So Bitcoin as a pristine asset will make its way into the banks and um a lot of Bitcoin is out there. It's a $2 trillion asset, but it's not it's not an asset that's fully monetized yet. There's a lot of paper Bitcoin, a lot of exposure to Bitcoin, but the Bitcoin itself is still in the shadows. And that's coming out of the shadows because the rails to the retail banking is are opening up. But like I said before, you're not separating money from state. You're reuniting money and state. So there's an issue with that as far as the use case for Bitcoin and what it ultimately means. And that's the message I would like not to get lost is that ultimately we would be better off if we all were self-s sovereign. But um you know that's still a message that is um being delivered you know and a lot of people are hearing it. >> Yeah. And so do you think then people retail is investing in things like IBIT for instance because it's easier they don't have to self custody or is maybe part of it you know if you look at strategies stock price since they started acquiring Bitcoin in 2020 I think it's up considerably more than what Bitcoin is itself during that same time period definitely a higher alpha do you think retail kind of tends to go for those seeming higher alpha plays I mean that's why we see people invest money at all these quote unquote shitcoins and stuff as well or is it do you think mainly people just don't want it to custody it because it is still a bit of an intimidating thing to a lot of people? >> No, people are just buying numbers on a screen. So, and they like those numbers and they see the number go up and they buy the ETF and they have no conviction. So, in a bull market they'll buy it and in a bare market they'll dump it. So, they're not conviction buyers. They're just adding liquidity to this big market. And meanwhile, the ETFs are buying a lot of Bitcoin. And I think one of them now has like forlike redemption of Bitcoin. So you can actually redeem your ETF for actual co uh >> only institutional, >> okay, institutional main chain Bitcoin. So that's like a kind of a step in the right direction. But I, you know, there the the idea of self hodling for these retail buyers and ETFs never crosses their mind. I think it's important also to uh note that um Black Rock is a good one to look at is uh they have the Bitcoin ETF and the Ethereum ETF and that you could see that the story of Bitcoin is easy. It's a it's a powerful story. There's no story for Ethereum. What is it? Why? Like there's no story for any of the other currencies, the coins out there. Um, you know, Black Rockck actually just recently said they're not going to offer a Solana or um one of the other coins. I don't know. Um, but they're not going to be or XRP. They're not going to be offering uh uh you know ETFs for any of those. They're going to stick with they're they're sticking with a Bitcoin one especially. But you could see the the volume there. uh you could see how that the work of removing how how ETFs removed the unit bias that you mentioned because there was a unit bias before and you saw that back in uh 2020 2021 when the last time Bitcoin went up is um the altcoins people were like I you know $60,000 Bitcoin I can't afford 60,000 but I could afford $3,000 Ethereum right so they went into the altcoins and and the ones even smaller, the ones uh $10 or $20. I could afford that. So, you saw that in the last round, but um the ETFs just destroy the unit bias because you just know it's like $50 whatever, like it's a $50 a unit there. and without that unit bias. So off the exchanges like it used to be the exchanges every single cycle before now was on the exchanges where the whole unit cost price existed. But on Wall Street where there's no unit price like that um Bitcoin just trounces the other coins in terms of the ETFs. So that's because it's the only one that has a story that makes sense. That is money. That is digital gold. That is digital treasury. Basically, it's it's money. It's sound money. It's a layer one money. However you want to put it, it's uh it's got a a story that is easy for people to understand. And you could see that with u remember the excitement of when the ETFs were first happening and you saw the commercials and how are they going to pitch this to retail, right? and the all of the the Bitcoin ETF uh commercials were powerful and easy and beautiful some of them, right? Um even Coinbase, right? Like so they they uh they're they keep on putting out these amazing Bitcoin commercials. >> They never do a commercial about XRP or any of the other tokens that they actually push if you sign up for them. like it's like pushing uh the other tokens because the exchanges make money on that, right? But they the the story the narrative is only in Bitcoin. So that's the only story that matters. >> Yeah, I was very interested to hear Tom Lee on CNBC talk about >> Ethereum and uh he's got a price target for Ethereum and he has no story for that though. He just it's like well it's going to grab a percentage of Bitcoin's move, right? So there's actually no it's it's it's a ter it's no pitch at all and and so now because it's unit price bias and and it's easy for people to say well it's at you know a lot less than a bitcoin it's going to catch up to Bitcoin. So it's it's CNBC playing their usual game of um shooting for the lowest common denominator of their audience. Right. They don't have a sophisticated audience and it's sad to see but that's how they make their bones. So have at it boys. Yeah. Yeah. And Cece, you mentioned some of those Coinbased commercials. The one that comes to mind is they have I think it's like a couple containers, like containers of like Bitcoin and then behind it there are bigger containers of dollars that have been like created during that same time. And it's so great to talk to you too about this because I haven't really heard anybody go into depth about the storytelling and how that makes the journey of Bitcoin more accessible and relatable to the masses which aside from the fact of being perfect money makes a lot of sense as to why it's resonating with more people than all of those other you know shitcoins combined. I mean Max you're even on record of saying that you think Bitcoin takes power away from people running the financial system. So, it makes me wonder, what do you think the biggest shift will be once Bitcoin really starts replacing that old system? What's your vision for the Bitcoin future look like? >> Well, self- sovereignty means that you don't need any of that infrastructure. You don't need any of those salesmen. You don't need any of that anymore. So, that would be a grelic, you know, of the past. It is just a change to a much different uh reality. And you mentioned the ads on TV for Bitcoin are becoming more sophisticated and more targeting the actual use case of Bitcoin in terms of its way to hedge against inflation. And then Coinbase put out this phenomenal ad that got banned in the UK which shows like a day a life in the day of a British person and it was absolute misery, a dystopian nightmare and the British people you know took umbrage at this and I think Offcom banned this advertisement from being shown in the UK and it was really surprising to me that they took that particular approach because after living in the UK it's amazing what you discover when you live there is that once you leave London and once once you leave Brighton the poverty rates are really extremely high. The average poverty rate in the in the north of England is much higher than let's say the worst county in Mississippi United States. There's abject poverty in the UK because of 300 years of central bank lar >> chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. >> Yeah, exactly. And um there's a good basis for that. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely, man. Well, I go ahead Stacey. >> Also um you know uh you actually I forgot what I was going to say about something about that, but you know the um Bitcoin the narrative is a narrative that has appealed to people since the beginning of time and it has an immaculate conception, right? And um the the the apostles and disciples uh you know spread the word on the the the the equivalent of the Roman roads. Like the Romans built those roads across their empire and the United States built the the roads of the internet. the the the you know the cables of the internet around their empire and uh the message of Bitcoin uh was transmitted over those uh those those roads the equivalent of the Roman roads and these are the American roads uh the American roads the highway system of the internet so um the superighway as they call it I think right and uh America's super highway uh the disciples of Satoshi like transmitted the message across the the global superighway. >> Yeah. You know, speaking of Jack Darcy, his new Bit Chat is is really cool because you don't need the internet to run the network, right? It's nodes on batteries on local area networks, right? And um so this is the answer. People always say, "What if the internet goes down? You don't need the internet to run Bitcoin." And so that's a great uh technology that I was happy to see. And it's cheap and it's and it's reliable. It's redundant and it's available and um it just you know it's actually the only property that can't be confiscated. If you have any other form of property it can be confiscated. Even if the internet goes down doesn't mean your Bitcoin disappears. I mean as long as you've got the network running on some form it's still everything is still there. The difficulty adjustment just you know makes the adjustment you know and we're still up and running and it's still behind impenetrable wall of encryption. It's the only non-confiscable, unconfiscatable, uncensorable form of property that you can avail yourself to at no cost. Right? This never before history has this existed. If you had gold, you need a vault. If you have a house, you need security. You know, you need security to to guard your property. But not so with Bitcoin. And this is one of the liberating factors in El Salvador. People realize this. And you know, uh they like the fact that they've got money that nobody can touch. It's theirs. It's growing in purchasing power and it gives them hope and that's why you have this emergence of the fourth turning in El Salvador is that there's a ground swell of hope and a lot of it comes from Bitcoin and of course the president is doing a fantastic job but you put those two together and it just adds up to to exit of the fourth turning and a beginning of good times >> indeed. And I got to tell you, we are so thankful to have two stewards of the Bitcoin ship like you two, you know, steering us toward that new direction of Bitcoin's future. You two have been there almost since the very beginning and you have probably orange pill more people than anyone in the world for my dollar. So, I want to thank you guys so much for all your efforts in the space and especially for taking so much time with us today. It was truly a treat for me and I'm sure our audience as well to get to learn more about you both and your opinions on the space and where we're going and heading. And I just got to say we were so glad to have you here on the Blockchain Report today and thank you so much for your time. Before I let you go though, I'm sure there's at least a couple people in our audience that haven't had the chance to listen to the Orange Pill podcast or some of your other endeavors that you have going on right now. What's the best place for people in our audience to check out what you two are up to today and going on into the future? Well, definitely follow me on Twitter. Max already has enough followers, so don't go follow him. Just follow me. I'm at x.com/stacyhervert. No. E and Stacy. S T A C Y H E R B R D. Uh I have way more impostors on Twitter than he does. So I I blame those imposters. I think people are following my impostors. >> Yeah. >> Um but and maybe Max Kaiser at Twitter. Uh we also have Orange Pill Pod, right? >> Yeah. We got a golf tournament January 8th through 10th in El Salvador. The pool party tickets are available. You don't need to play golf to have a lot of fun wearing the hat >> and you get to hang out with me >> at the pool and talk, you know, Bitcoin. And remember, everything that Michael Sailor says that sounds smart and intelligent, I said first. >> All right. I see I see why you're the the entertainer of the two. You're great. We really appreciate both of your time today. And really quick aside, Stacy, I actually got hit up by one of those imposters when we first started the show and I was like, "Oh, wow. Stacy has heard of us." And then she started asking me how my trades were going. And then I was like, "I better just take a step back from this one." But again, you two, thank you so much for your time today. It's been an absolute treat and we can't wait to talk to you both again in the near future. I hope you have a wonderful week. >> Oh, thanks. >> Thank you. It was fun to be here. Thanks so much. >> Pleasure was all ours. All right, we're taking a break. More blockchain report when we're back. >> Runs on Bitcoin. Introducing Roxom, the first ever exchange where Bitcoiners can trade treasury stocks entirely in BTC. Get exposure to top Bitcoin holding companies like Micro Strategy and Metanet priced in Bitcoin from the start. No fiat, no middlemen. This is what financial freedom looks like. Early access now live at roxom.com/treasuries. Built by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners. Hey you, you wish you could grab cash without selling your Bitcoin? Yeah, same. But hey, that's why Leen exists. They're the global leader in Bitcoin back loans. Over $9 billion issued since 2018 with a perfect record protecting client assets. Now, what makes Leen loans different? Well, with custody loans, your collateral stays put. They don't go DGEN and lend it out for yield. There's no credit checks. It funds in under six hours. No monthly payments. Repay anytime with zero penalties. And for transparency, grown-ups actually want proof of reserves reports every six months, verified by a top accounting firm. The bottom line is Ledin lets Bitcoin holders unlock liquidity without selling. Check it out at le.iosomtv. That's led.iosomtv. >> Security matters. Zapo Bank, the only way to bank your Bitcoin. >> Apply now at zapobank.com. >> All right, so you've heard of financial advisors before. Sure you have. We talk about them all the time. And you've probably heard about family offices before. We actually talked about those briefly today, too. But let me now introduce you to the hottest new trend in wealth management. Are you ready for it? It's psychics. Yeah, weird. According to the Wall Street Journal, billionaire Aerys Taylor Thompson lost more than $80 million in crypto after letting a celebrity psychic and her former best friend help with her portfolio. You see, during the 2021 bull run, her friend Ashley Richardson managed over $140 million in crypto across multiple wallets. That's right. She basically handed her fortune over to someone who thought horoscopes could outrade hedge funds. Okay. Then came the 2022 downturn. Now, Gitep Guidepost Solutions estimates that Thompson lost around $80 million thanks to more than $450,000 trades that Richardson executed without proper authorization. 450,000 trades. That's so many. Nothing says though financial prudence quite like half a million trades blessed by a crystal ball. So, we get it. Now, Richardson denies any wrongdoing here, saying she only acted on Thompson's instructions and never profited herself. Sure, she claims the risky trades were necessary to manage liquidity in thinly traded tokens because nothing screams sound strategy quite like yoloing liquidity management in micro cap coins. Of course, this all turned into lawsuits. Predictably, Thompson sued Richardson and Persistence, the blockchain behind the XPRT token. She had sunk $40 million into XPRT back in 2021 when it traded at around $1659. Today, what is it worth? 3 cents. That's an over 99% collapse for those of you doing the maths at home. The only thing that vanished faster was their friendship. Also pretty predictable. Thompson alleges Richardson cut a secret finder fee deal with persistence. Richardson counters suit for $10 million, claiming defamation because, you know, the only way to amend a broken trust like that is to sue your billionaire bestie. Good luck with that. Now, they've since settled with persistence, but the case against Richardson is still very much alive. So, I guess the moral of the story here is when it comes to crypto investing, maybe call an analyst before you end up calling a psychic. Are you interested in effortlessly growing your Bitcoin portfolio? Of course you are. I mean, I sure am. The Bitcoin credit card by Gemini earns you Bitcoin back on every purchase. Use it like any credit card. You can buy lunch, gas, or your weekly groceries. And you'll earn up to 4% back instantly in Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos straight to your account. All that with no annual fee. And right now, you can grab a $200 Bitcoin welcome bonus. It is the easiest way to start building your Bitcoin stack. Just go to gemini.com to learn more. All right, welcome back to the Blockchain Report. It's time to see what's going on in other parts of the world with our Blockchain Without Borders segment. So, let's get to it. Because once upon a time, Bitcoin treasuries were the weird kid at the corporate finance lunch table. But now, they're basically the prom king. Modeled after Strategy's obsession with turning balance sheets into Bitcoin vending machines, these companies are piling coins like hoarders on a Costco run. And Asia, which used to look politely interested from a distance, is suddenly going full cosplay. In just the first half of 2025, the number of public companies holding Bitcoin doubled from 70 to 134. That's over 244,000 BTC shoved into corporate vaults in just 6 months time. Now, eight Japanese companies alone have joined the craze, proving Japan doesn't just do anime sequels, it also does Bitcoin balance sheet sequels. Case in point, LIB work. Yeah, that's the Japanese construction company that builds houses, but is now also building a Bitcoin treasury of its own. Earlier last week, its board approved a 500 million yen purchase. That's roughly $3.5 million worth of Bitcoin in America dollars. Lib says it will buy gradually between September and December through a trusted exchange, all while calling Bitcoin digital gold. Because holding only cash, according to them, is like showing up to a knife fight with a balloon animal. But here's the kicker. Lib Work is also working on a 3D printerhouse NFT project. Yeah, they're turning architectural blueprints into NFTs, issuing ownership certificates tied to actual homes. So, if you thought NFTts were dead, Japan's construction industry is here to bring them back, one blockchain bungalow at a time. Hooray. Now, meanwhile, back at the macro level, the Trumps once again are involved with things as America bit American Bitcoin, a US minor backed by Donald Trump and Eric Trump is Donald Trump Jr., I should say, is sniffing around Japan and Hong Kong to build local strategy style treasury firms because apparently no global financial trend is complete without some Trump branding slapped onto the side. Liv works experiment is especially telling. It shows how Japanese companies are framing Bitcoin as a defensive hedge against inflation while still layering in innovation projects like NFT houses. Some firms like Metaplanet and Remix Point, well, they're doubling down. Others like Value Creation are tapping out completely. All of it highlights the bigger risk here. Asia's treasury boom could fuel the next legs of Bitcoin's price run. So, we'll stay tuned for that. Well, boys and girls, that is a wrap on today's episode of the Blockchain Report. I want to give a big thanks to Max Kaiser and Stacy Herbert for talking shop with us and for so long. They're the best. So, make sure to check them out on all their socials. You won't regret it. But until next time, as always, thank you for joining us here on the Blockchain Report. If you haven't already, make sure to like, follow, and subscribe to Roxom TV, Hank at Rocksom TV, and the Blockchain Port wherever you go to doomscroll. and we'll be back tomorrow, same time, same place with more Bitcoin bedum in crypto chaos. Until then, stay safe, stay informed, and always make sure to huddle on. See you tomorrow.