This is the very common pitfall in the Bitcoin community is that you over accumulate.
And what I mean by over accumulation is not good, right?
Over accumulation in Bitcoiners minds is like, I have more Bitcoin.
Everything's going to be awesome. Bitcoin's inevitable.
It's going to a million dollars. I'm going to be fine. I'm going to retire.
I'm going to flip off my boss. Everything's going to be cool.
No, what actually happens with over accumulation is that you've now
levered up and now you don't have cash flow to pay for things.
And you're usually selling at the worst possible time.
So over accumulation generally leads to less Bitcoin that people have in their pockets,
rather than more Bitcoin. I do think it's inevitable.
I think where people get tripped up is when, right?
So inevitable could be in 200 years, right?
Inevitable could be next week.
Inevitable could be like in three years from now, right?
There's such a wide array of when this thing could happen.
I do think it's inevitable, right?
Because it's a better money than anything else that's out there, right?
And so people are going to gravitate to the best money that there is.
And so people are already gravitating to the best money that there is.
These things take time, right?
If we really think Bitcoin is inevitable and it hasn't happened today,
then how can you be late, right?
Like it's one of those things where it's like, of course you're early
because it's not like it hasn't actually happened yet.
So you're still early.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 885-314 and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today, my guest is Morgan Rashard.
Morgan is a financial planner.
She's also a hardcore Bitcoiner and has been advising her clients to save in Bitcoin for years.
Let's just say she is not your average financial advisor.
I think this conversation is going to be really helpful for new Bitcoiners
but also for well-seasoned Bitcoiners alike.
Because it has a ton of practical advice on things you can do now and in the future
to make sure you and your family are set up for life and for the generations to come.
We dug deep into a bunch of topics including Bitcoin volatility and how to manage it,
common mistakes, seasoned Bitcoiners and new Bitcoiners make,
how to make sure you do not get liquidated, keeping fiat emergency funds,
why counter-intuitively you can end up having less Bitcoin in the long run
if you're all in on Bitcoin right now,
risk tolerance and ability raising kids and inheritance planning,
how to maximize your Bitcoin savings,
how to build generational wealth and keep it,
how to orange pill your wife and a whole lot more.
Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast
where you're listening and make sure to check out the show on YouTube or Rumble as well.
Just search at Walker America.
And if you find this show valuable, consider giving value back
by giving it a zap on Noster or a boost on Fountain.
You can find me on Noster at primal.net slash Walker
and this podcast at primal.net slash TIT coin.
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Morgan Rashard.
Okay. Morgan. Welcome. Thanks so much for coming on here.
Stoke to talk to you. Same here. Thanks for having me on.
It's a perfect day to do it, I think.
We've got Bitcoin last I checked. It was like 86 or $87,000,
which I think if you'd told me, like when I was,
I only got into Bitcoin in like 2020, 2021, like it hasn't been that long.
But if you told me then that we'd be crashing down to these levels,
I think I would think you were touched in the head or something.
But this is the reality that we're living with now
and people are still freaking out about it.
But how are you doing? How are you managing all of this Bitcoin volatility that we see?
Yeah, I love that question.
So I feel like people are very impatient in the Bitcoin community
is one of the things that I tend to notice.
And then actually people get very patient.
So what happens is that we have some kind of run up that happens,
right? And everyone gets really, really excited and they think it's like,
D, run up, it's the end of the dollar, Bitcoin's going to be the next global reserve currency.
This is what's happening. It's going to go up 5000%.
It's in the bag. And then if that doesn't happen, all of a sudden,
all the impatience, all the anxiety about it, everything about how I thought I was retiring
this time or I was never going to have to work again or I was going to work by choice or whatever,
or we were going to put a new wing on our home or whatever people want to do,
all that gets thrown in the trash and people are down the dumps.
And it's like, no, we just had a 10% correction. It's okay, guys. It's going to be okay.
And so I see this timing and timing and both on Twitter and also sometimes on my clients even,
people can get really impatient or people can live in the future.
So they're kind of waiting for this big run up to happen because people have all their price
targets. Some people have that 250 number in mind or they've got 500,000 in mind or a lot of people
have million dollars a coin, we're going to moon. And it's like, well, it's inevitable.
We're already living in this world where we're at a million dollars a coin because of course,
that's going to happen. So I don't need to change my spending habits. I don't need to change really
anything about what I'm doing because I'm already living in Bitcoin world where it's a million dollars
a coin. And so this impatience sort of sets in. And then the second you see Bitcoin crashing
to these $85,000, $86,000 numbers, even though they're insane relative to where we were five years
ago, people are kind of, you get antsy. And so I would say that it's okay, Bitcoiners.
You just got to wait it out. Let's use that long time preference, that low time preference that
we all say that we have and be thinking a little bit more long term and not be so worried about
these little blips that happen in the market. And if anything, if you're saving properly and
you're doing all the things that you can do, things like this are an opportunity rather than a
stressor. I mean, amen to that. It's one of those things where I think especially speaking from
my own experience, I haven't been, basically, this is a first kind of full cycle for me going
through this experience. And so like, you know, I remember when Bitcoin was crashing down to like 16K
in 2022. And that was like, honestly, like that was hard, because I'd been buying all the way up
to the top. But at the same time, I was like, you, I had to shift my mindset and be like, okay,
I have a huge opportunity now. I didn't think I was going to be able to buy Bitcoin this cheap
anymore. Wow. Okay, let me try and scrimp and save and, you know, make some sacrifices now. So that,
you know, once, once things start running back up again, I don't feel that like, oh, no, I missed
out. It's like, I can go into that confidently saying like, yep, I saved as much as I could. I
cut here and there to try and stack more sats. But it's still tough when you see, you know, you see
those fiat numbers. And I think it's interesting too, because a lot of Bitcoiners, I'll lump myself
in there with this too. I try to think in Bitcoin terms, right? Like, am I increasing my, my Bitcoin
stack? Not just, is the, you know, fiat number going up? Because that's a terrible measuring
stick. But am I increasing the amount of Bitcoin day over day that I own through my DCAs? Or,
you know, if I feel a little feisty and do a smash by, but we still are so drawn to that fiat
number. And I think it's fascinating. It's like, can we just not break ourselves out of this fiat
mindset? Or is it, is it just natural? Maybe? Yeah, I mean, we're immersed in it, right? I mean,
it's thousands and thousands of years of dealing with different types of currencies,
and so forth, right? At different regimes of who uses what currency over time. Like, it's
ingrained in our mindset. Obviously, fiat is like a newer version of all of these things that we've
had throughout history. But like, you don't really, you can't kind of remove somebody from their
environment so easily, even though like, I do feel like it's, if we do remove ourselves from that
environment, if we are thinking about things from Bitcoin terms, rather than from fiat terms,
then a lot of things actually change. And you're not thinking so much about all the fiat rewards
that you can get as a result of holding your Bitcoin, but more about, okay, this is the Bitcoin
stack that I have, and how can I preserve it? And what's the, like, how can I be the best steward
of this stack, rather than like trying to think, okay, if I, you know, now that rules have all
changed, and I'm going to spend my Bitcoin, I can spend, you know, 8%, 12%, 15% a year,
because Bitcoin returns are wild, they're crazy. And then you end up with like, you know, a sliver
of a coin that you're leaving to the next generation. So I mean, it's, it's, I think it always comes
back to what people's goals are, and about what they're trying to accomplish for sure. And that's
why like personal finance exists. It's like this little micro world within this macro world where
people can focus on what they can control. People can, can think about what their environment is,
who's important to them, what they want to accomplish in this life, and how money ties
into that. And then use Bitcoin to help them do those things. I mean, that's, I like the idea of
there's a part of your life that you can control and the part that you can't, you know, it's the,
it's a very stoic way of looking at it, like focus on the things that are within your control,
and everything else, like, there's nothing you can do about it. You can, you can look at it,
you can be aware of it. But there's no point in stressing over it, because there's literally
nothing you're going to change. Why not focus on what you actually do have control over, what is
within your sphere of influence, rather than bemoaning all the things that are completely
outside of that, you know, outside of your own control. And okay, I have, I have so many things
I want to get into with you today. But before I get too deep and forget, can you just give us a
quick kind of intro of who are you, how did you get here today, and what kind of informs this
perspective that you have on, on Bitcoin on personal finance, what brought you here?
Yeah, sure. So I have been working in finance since 2008. I got my first job actually as a
coffee girl on the floor of the American Stock Exchange. And that's literally what I did. I got,
I got guys who screamed in a pit coffee. And, and I memorized their coffee order because they
literally ordered the same thing, like every day, like every day. And they were like, oh, she's like
a little smart, you know, like maybe we should promote her. And so I got promoted, you know,
and I started for the series seven, and I worked there for a while, I worked there for a couple
years. And, you know, and I don't mean this to offend anybody in any way. Women in general are
nurturing people, like that's just who we are by our nature. And that's who I am, certainly. And so
I just found that trading equity options in a pit with a bunch of screaming men wasn't really what
my life's purpose was supposed to be. And I didn't really feel like I had a life's purpose, to be
honest. And it didn't feel like a, like I was using those nurturing aspects of my soul. And so I left
and took a job in wealth management. I worked for two large wire houses. I was at Merrill Lynch for
a while, and then I was at, I was at UBS. And then I, in the midst of all this took lots of
financial exams, did all the things that I, you know, was supposed to do, and then started my own
firm with the hopes of being like, you know, at the time, Pierre and I were already dating, Pierre
Rechards, my husband. And my hope was basically that I would start this business, we would get
married, we would have kids, and my business would be well established. Before I had children's,
that it wasn't so wild trying to start a business and also have children. It turns out that any
time you start a business, it's wild. It doesn't, doesn't actually matter. And also when you have
children, it's wild. So like, it really also doesn't matter, like I probably could have done all those
things at the same time. That's kind of how I ended up where I am now, where my, I moved closer and
closer to what I like consider to be really a nurturing profession. So like, I think when people
think of financial advisors and financial planning, they don't think of, you know, people who are
nurturing, they think of like these stodgy men and sooths who are trying to sell them garbage,
which there are a lot of those out there. So that's fair that that's what people think of.
That's not how I think of it. I think of personal finance as being like a way for me to help people
achieve what they want to achieve in life and bring out the best in them. Just like how I would do
anything in my life. I want to, I want to help others. And so, and I, and I like money, you know,
who doesn't, and I'm a curious person, maybe nosy, someone would say. I love looking through
pay stubs and seeing what kind of insurance people have, you know, like I find that stuff really
kind of fascinating. And so that's how I ended up being a financial planner. My firm is now 11
years old. In the midst of that, though, I met Pierre and I had already heard about Bitcoin
prior to meeting Pierre. I'm a liberal, I always been a libertarian. My dad's a Ron Paul supporter.
Like I kind of, we grew up, you know, voting for Ross Perot, like that kind of thing. So I was
always kind of weird. It's not that odd that I would end up thinking Bitcoin was interesting.
So when Pierre brought it up, I found it interesting. Like I was like, Oh yeah, I remember
reading about that thing. And so it, it didn't totally click for me, though, I'll be honest.
It took me a few years to like really be like, Okay, actually, yeah, like I get what this is.
I think this is going to be really important. And I think I need to start advising clients on it.
And at the time there was like, no, there was no like, no guidance, no anything like you didn't,
you're like, I don't know what I could be doing. My compliance consultant was like, absolutely not.
Like if somebody brings it up, maybe you could say something about it. If somebody asks you,
but do not bring it up. I'm like, Okay, I felt kind of shackled, you know, because
I mean, we've been in Bitcoin, like Pierre's been in since 2012, I want to say. And I,
I've known about like, I've been around since 2013 now. So it was really hard starting my business
in 2014 and being like, can't tell people about Bitcoin. Okay, what are we going to talk about?
So people started asking no in 2016, which is kind of fascinating. I had a couple of clients
interested in it and got clients involved holding their own coins and actually storing it properly.
And then in 2017 with that run up, there were a lot more questions in 2018, people definitely
were interested. And then after that, I was just like, you know, I'm just going to start bringing
it up. Like, I felt like I'd waited long enough, like there wasn't any more guidance. And I'm like,
you know what, I'm just going to start talking to people about it. So like technically, I've been
advising on it since 2016, but I would say 2018 is when I actually started like, really talking
to people about it. And by 2020, I was like, look, if you don't have it in your portfolio,
like we're making you have it. And so anyone who we couldn't get to like basically own their
own like basically buy Bitcoin outright, we started using GBTC for them just so they had some kind
of exposure. We had pushback, like there were clients who were like, I don't want this in my
portfolio. Like, why are you trying to put like, you know, drug money in my portfolio? Like,
are you nuts? Like, I'm starting to rethink your life choices type of a thing, you know? And so
for some people, like we sold because like I couldn't convince them. And for most people,
though, they held on. So with the exception of two clients, we were able to get really everyone
holding something. And then from then on, we were like, just in this place of, okay, well,
you have some GBTC, like how can we get you Bitcoin outright? And now I would say majority of my
clients, they own that they have their own keys. I actually at this point don't have sort of regular
clients coming in, I have like Bitcoiners coming in who are like, we need financial planning,
we like I got as far as I can get. And now like this is significant wealth, I'm not exactly sure
what to do with it. I need some help here. And we're navigating like more complex like complicated
financial planning problems at this point, which it's a dream. Like this is exactly what I always
hoped that I would have would be working with like amazing families who have similar mindsets who
really just want to do the right thing. I mean, I think that's so cool that, well, let me start
off with this. I think financial planners, financial advisors, get a really bad rap. Because,
especially within the Bitcoin world, like how many stories probably you've probably heard more than I
have about Bitcoiners who went to their financial planner and you know, brought up Bitcoin, and
basically got fed the standard line of, well, that's a Ponzi scheme. It's too volatile. We wouldn't
recommend it. You know, or if they're part of some larger structure, like we actually don't,
our policy is not to advise on that, we would advise against it. Like this is what you hear time and
time again. And then contrast that with you. You're coming at this and saying, no, I was telling my
clients, you need to have this in your portfolio. And I'm assuming that those clients, all but those
two are pretty darn happy that they have had it in their portfolio over the past five, six, seven
years. As they've seen, I mean, I assume it's become a much larger part of their portfolio,
even if they didn't increase their stack size, just because of the price appreciation. So it's like,
this is, I mean, how do you see it all a shift in the financial planning industry at large,
where it's starting to be a tide change, that this is becoming more, you know,
now that the Larry Finks of the world are putting their stamp of approval on it,
are more financial advisors and planners willing to actually say, oh yeah, you should actually have
a 2% allocation or whatever, or is it still kind of like a taboo subject within your industry?
It's a little of both, I'll be honest. I think it depends what firm you work for, what your world,
like what the advisors worldview is. Like, I was sort of surprised by this. I assume that, you know,
financial advisors who are millennials like me, who start their own firms, because we're like,
we don't like what's going on in this industry. We want to do our own thing. We're going to make
the world a better place. And they go out and they start their own firms. And then they're like,
and now we're going to be a bogeyhead, and we're not going to change from that. I've looked at
the evidence over the last 100 plus years, and it just says buy the S&P 500 and a diversified
other countries or whatever based on a market cap weighted thing, and add a little bit of bonds
if you need it. And you just hold that for a really long period of time. And I'll show you
all the periods over the last 70 years or whatever, where the market went down, but it recovers.
Don't worry. And you'll just, you know, you'll get a long term return of 7% in real terms or whatever
it is. And there's a lot of those out there. And they just refuse to hear evidence otherwise,
that this time it actually is different. And the reason why is because they've been pitched all
of this propaganda about why it's never been different. And so, unfortunately, it's, you know,
it's like a bell curve, like there isn't anything, right? There's going to be people who are going
to be on one side of it who are like, you know, don't trust anything, don't trust the system,
start your own firm, put your tinfoil hat on, you know, I mean, like, I'm a little crazy, right?
Like, that's how I'm here. And so, I'll be honest, right? Like, you have to be a little wild to,
like, go out there and do this. And then there's going to be on the other side who are just,
they're going to be anti-Bitcoin no matter what, because, because like, you know, they are entrenched
in the fiat system. They don't really understand what money is, they're not willing to learn what
it is. And they're just staunchly opposed. And then there's going to be all the people in the
middle who are like, what, you know, it kind of depends where I get my news from, whatever it is,
right? And that's kind of, I see what's going on in the industry. The unfortunate thing also that's
been going on in the industry, like anything else is that these, you know, cryptocurrency people
with their, you know, S coins and whatever, they want to, you know, they have more capital
slushing around because they pre-mined or whatever it is, and they can tell a different story
to these financial advisors who love a good story and who are now, you know, interested in the,
how, you know, the next wave of technology, because we already missed the Bitcoin wave
and Bitcoin's obsolete, quote unquote. And so therefore, you know, we need to have,
I don't know, whatever coin it is. I mean, Trump coin or whatever, you know, I don't know, meme coin,
just Bitcoin. Yeah, insert any number of the millions that are out there now. It's insane.
Yeah. And so our financial advisor coin, like this sounds great. So, you know, it's going to
change the world. And so I feel like there's, there's a mix going on for sure. It's not being aided
by the fact that there are very few Bitcoin financial advisors out there and the one, like
there aren't a lot of us, we're as vocal as we can be, but I would say we're probably more vocal
in Bitcoin communities just because like, we're looking to get clients, we're looking to help
clients who actually want our help and need our help. We're not necessarily looking to change the
industry. That said, though, like I'm speaking at AI CPA, which is a conference first for CPAs
in June of this year with another financial planner who is a Bitcoin or as well. And so like,
some of the, some things are changing, right? Like people are more interested in the topic and
they want to hear about it, but they're not as educated as you would hope that they would be at
this point, given that Bitcoin's been around for as long as it has been. And also that like, it
really has been rubber stamped. Like you said, by all these people like BlackRock, it has a giant
ETF, right? It's never been easier to help somebody allocate, even though, you know, obviously,
we'd rather them hold their own coins. But I mean, financial advisors aren't really going to do that,
right? We need to be sort of reasonable about what our expectations for them are as well. So
I do think things are changing. I think that things go slower than everyone in the Bitcoin
community hopes. I mean, I think that is definitely always the case, kind of back to where we started
with just the low time preference versus high time preference. I mean, this is a slight digression,
but I think I'm curious of your opinion. Do you think that quote, Bitcoin is inevitable?
Like, do you see this as an inevitability? Whether we want to get into what hyper-Bitcoinization
means, however you take this question, do you think Bitcoin is inevitable?
I do actually. I do think it's inevitable. I think where people get tripped up is when,
right? So inevitable could be in 200 years, right? Inevitable could be next week. Inevitable could
be like, you know, in three years from now, right? There's such a wide array of when this thing could
happen. I do think it's inevitable, right? Because what it's a better money than anything else that's
out there, right? And so people are going to gravitate to the best money that there is. And
so people are already gravitating to the best money that there is. These things take time,
these processes take time. There's human emotions involved in all of these. This is why we have
these crazy cycles where all of a sudden people are, you know, they're foam hoeing in, they're
even leveraging up, and then, you know, people are getting called out, and then, you know,
it cascades down and so forth, and people are out, and then people come back in, right? There's
all of that that's going to go on. I think that often people looked at like the institutional
investor to be like rational, but they're also just a bunch of human beings as well, right? And so
they're not making perfect decisions all the time. And so the inevitability of Bitcoin,
if we're, you know, relying on these people to make perfect decisions, like I think that it's
short-sighted of Bitcoiners to assume that everybody will make a perfect decision all the
time very quickly, and that this will move in the direction that Bitcoiners hope it's going to move
very quickly. That said, though, I've been called pessimistic and bearish as a result of that. And,
you know, that's probably fair. Like I think that I do tend to think things are actually going to
take longer than they actually do. And if you had asked me, you know, in 2013, if Bitcoin would be at
100K in 2025, I would have probably laughed at that because I would have thought that, no, there's
no way. That's silly. And Pierre and I even argued about this early on in our relationship because
I was like, if you really think that, then like, why aren't you just leveraging up like crazy?
Like it doesn't make sense why you're not doing it. And why you don't do that, right? Because
it's irrational to think that like your thesis is going to play out really quickly, right? And so,
but no, I mean, I do think that over time, people will come in and people will stay, right? People
come in, some people leave, there's a base layer of people that stay even though like whatever's
going on the price. And this continues to go on and adoption will continue. And then at some point,
there will be more than let's say El Salvador using Bitcoin, right? There are going to be other
governments that adopt it, theoretically our government, I mean, is going to adopt it, there
are states already saying that they're going to have a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Like I see this
I see this headed where, you know, you probably can do some de minimis spending in Bitcoin without
actually having to pay taxes on it, right? That would be like kind of the first place where people
would be like, oh, maybe we can start using this. Right? Yeah. And so like as like as rules and
regulations change as more people get involved, then yeah, like this, the strain's already left
the station and just I don't know how long it's going to take to get to the next one.
It continues to blow my mind that there are Bitcoiners out there who are not yet on Noester.
Seriously, what are you doing? Just like you shouldn't need to ask permission to use your money,
you shouldn't need to ask permission to speak freely or have control of your own account. But
that is exactly what you are doing. If you are still trusting centralized social media platforms,
you may have seen several high profile Bitcoiners and friends of mine like Lawrence LaParde and
Lyn Alden more recently, get their X accounts hacked and then struggle to work with X support
to get those accounts back. Where did they go to give people updates? They went to Noester.
On Noester, you can't be censored, you can't be banned and you can't be
de-boosted for saying words that Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk don't like. And honestly, the vibes
are just better on Noester. Plus, Noester has Bitcoin payments built in. So when you post a meme,
a spicy hot take or just a photo of your steak, people will zap you Bitcoin to show you they
like it and find your content valuable. And if you are a content creator, you can start monetizing
your work immediately on Noester, unlike on X, YouTube or literally any other centralized platform
where you have to hit engagement thresholds and then KYC yourself. You can find me on Noester by
going to primal.net slash Walker. And you can find this podcast on Noester at primal.net slash
TIT coin. Primal also has a built in Bitcoin wallet. So you can literally get zapped by people
for your posts, then go use those sats to buy a coffee or do whatever you want, all from the same
app, search for Primal in the app store, go to primal.net, or choose any of the hundreds of other
Noester apps that are out there because you can freely switch between any of them anytime you want.
So come join the largest Bitcoin circular economy in the world and start zapping sats on Noester.
I think that that's fair. We're really bad at predicting things, I think.
Like humans, we like to think we're good at it and especially those that like to draw lines on
charts and everything and think you know where it's going and when it's going there. And most of the
time you're wrong. And if you're right, you probably just got a little lucky because it's funny to me
to see Bitcoiners think they know exactly where the market is going to go when those same Bitcoiners
will also tell you that the market as the Austrian school would tell you is made up of
infinite subjective choices happening all the time and nobody can possibly predict it. But
by the way, I know exactly where it's going, but just in this case of Bitcoin, it's like, no, you
don't. You have no idea what's going to happen. You may know broadly where you think it's going
directionally. Like I think it's going up and to the right in fiat terms. And I think fiat is going
down in Bitcoin terms. What it does in the short term, I have no idea. But people like to,
it's, what do they say, a TA is like astrology for men, which is, I always love that. I think
it's, I think that's a fair critique of a lot of TA that is out there. But one other thing I
wanted to kind of like, before we even dive deeper still is Bitcoin versus crypto. Like,
do you have clients, you've had a lot of Bitcoin clients, obviously, for a while, have you had
some of them start to come in and ask you about these different altcoins to say, oh, my friend
told me about insert, I don't even want to name them, insert X altcoin. Is this something I should
get into? How do you talk to your clients about that if and when they do ask? What do you,
how do you kind of set the stage for them to show the difference?
Yeah, I want to give credit to my clients for credit as do most of my clients do not.
They don't, which is amazing. The clients who do have very small positions relative to their Bitcoin
position. And so it's one of those things where it's like, I'm 99% Bitcoin Morgan, like, stop
bothering me. You know, like, I just want to hold this other thing. Like, who you don't even care,
like you're not involved, you know, it's like, okay, okay, all right, okay, you know, it's,
it's the people that have more than that, who I've also seen when they talk to me. I, maybe it's
like the vibe I give off or what, but like, it's almost like, I'm sorry, I have these, like, what
should I do with it? You know, it's kind of a weird thing that I have these, like, what should I do
with them? Like, you should sell those. And they're like, well, you know, should I straddle, tax
here? Then we're talking about strategy, like, how are we getting rid of these things? So for
instance, like, I have one client who came in like, had a large position in something else,
right? It was not appropriate given their situation. And the reason why it's not appropriate to have
large positions in these, you know, other currencies is because these other currencies
are wildly unpredictable, generally don't deliver on what they say they're going to deliver on.
They're usually pump it up schemes at best. Sometimes they're outright Ponzi schemes, at worst.
And a lot of the times, like, you know, the creator of the coin will delay, delay, delay,
delay, right? And nothing will ever come to fruition. So to have a large portion of your
net worth in something like this, like as a prudent financial advisor, right, I just see this as like,
it just, it doesn't make sense when a person is like, I want to retire, I want to start a business,
I want to fund my kids college, I want to, you know, make sure that my ill parents get their
medical care, you're like, and you want to hold this coin, why, you know what I mean? Like,
after you hear all this person, these, like their goals, it doesn't align with what they're, what's
actually in their portfolio. So it's a very easy decision when you explain it like that, rather
than like, I think that you made bad decisions. And I think that the coin you chose is retarded,
right? Like, that's not how we have the conversation, right? Then what we say is like,
this is what you have going on your life, these are the things that you say are important to you,
and these are the assets that match that, right? And therefore, holding this in the large proportion
that you have doesn't make sense. And when you frame it like that, right, then yeah, the client's
like, Oh, you're right, of course, okay, how do we figure this out? And so for like this one client
where she had a large position, right, we're just selling in two different tax years, right, that
way, like, we're not going to poise this huge burden on her just because she came in, she came in
towards the end of the year, it wasn't a big difference to sell some in November and sell
some in January, right? And it splits up the taxes and there are ways to manage these kinds of things
without like, you know, just making somebody feel bad about the decisions that we make, we all make
mistakes, right? And so I just feel like if we can navigate that in a way that helps somebody
actually make the right decision, that that's going to lead to the best outcome.
Yeah, the more antagonistic approach may seem more fun and instantly gratifying, but probably
that's not the most constructive way to go about it. So I'm curious because I think a lot of Bitcoiners
right now, regardless of, you know, if you got in like, you know, earlier, like, you know,
yourself, Pierre, a lot of Bitcoiners, you've kind of gotten used to these market cycles a little bit
as much as anyone can, I guess, because I think we all still struggle to like, fully grasp what's
happening with Bitcoin at any given time. It's like, we okay, we know that it's immutable, right?
We know there's 21 million. Yeah. But it's still just kind of almost this alien technology that
like, we just are trying to wrap our heads around the full implications. But for folks that are even
newer, like we're minting new Bitcoiners every day, right? You're getting new Bitcoiners in 2025.
What kind of advice do you have for people who are maybe just starting out on this journey,
who are looking at this and saying, okay, you know, hopefully they're not messing around with
altcoins, you know, we've, I think you gave a pretty good rationale for why that's not a good idea. But,
you know, how, how should they start thinking about this? How should they start structuring
their lives around? I don't want to say around Bitcoin, but I should say incorporating Bitcoin
accumulation into the structure of their lives. How do you go about that when you're just starting
and you feel like maybe even still, even with a big nice tasty, you know, dip today,
you still feel like I think as a lot of people do, you've missed the boat.
Yeah. I love that question. I think it does tie into us talking about inevitability because,
right, if, if we really think Bitcoin is inevitable and it hasn't happened today,
then how can you be late? Right? Like, it's one of those things where it's like, of course,
you're early because it's not like it hasn't actually happened yet. So you're still early.
But you know, that doesn't sometimes help people when they're starting out on their journeys,
because right, you're still like a little bit timid about it. You're not sure how much Bitcoin
you should own. You're not all in, right? Like you're not a seasoned Bitcoiner who's like,
I'm 100% Bitcoin. And no matter what, you know, that Rochard lady tells me on Twitter that I
should have a fiat emergency fund. I think that she's off her rocker and I'm just going to not
only own 100% Bitcoin, but also, you know, borrow my credit card to own Bitcoin, right? I've seen
these cases. So, like, I think that you can, you can enter this kind of environment with
a little bit of rationality, right? And a little bit of reason, and also looking at your own situation.
And like we were talking about finances deeply personal, right? That's what's kind of amazing
about this, like this small part of finance. You know, there's all that other finance that,
you know, that we can't control, right? But there's this one part of finance that you can
control and it's your personal finances. And they're not a science, they're an art. And the
reason why is because every person is going to have different things that are important to them.
They're going to have, they're going to have kids or they're not going to have kids. They're
going to have aging parents or like they've maybe they've already lost their parents, right?
Maybe they're in a retirement portion of their life or maybe they're just starting out, right?
Whoever you are on whatever spectrum, like from old, young, new, not new, right? Like,
everyone's going to have their own story that they want to tell and things that they want to achieve.
And all of these things generally require money, right? Because we live in a society that's,
thank God, not communist. And we're where we need to trade value for value, right? In which case,
money weaves into every aspect of somebody's life. And so it always starts with starting with what you
actually want to accomplish, rather than Bitcoin is the next best thing, you know, and I need to be
100% in Bitcoin, because like, what else am I going to buy? You know, like, I feel like I hear
that a lot without people actually being like, what do I want? What do I need? What would make my
life most fulfilling? What would help my spouse, my kids, my parents, whoever, right? Whoever's
important to me in my life. How can I help my community, right? Like, all of these things are
going to tie into how much Bitcoin is actually appropriate for somebody to hold. And for some
people, yeah, that might just be 100%, right? Like, I don't know. There are people out there
where they come in and I'm like, yeah, okay, sure, whatever, that's fine for your situation.
And there are other people where they come in and I'm like, well, you're literally about to go
start a business. Do you think it's a good idea to have zero cash? Like, and just hope for the best,
right? And in which case, like, on a day like today, right, if a person's already started a
business, they ran out of cash, and now, you know, they could have sold at 100K and had extra cash
lying around to actually run their business. Now they're selling at a 15% haircut, right? And so
I think that people really need to take all of their personal aspects in like, keep all of that
in mind when they're actually going out and buying Bitcoin. And that'll also help with managing the
volatility, right? Because if you have very long term goals, nothing is coming up on the
short term horizon, then yeah, you can stack pretty aggressively because you don't have any short
term needs that need to be met. If your income is meeting that, then you're not using, and you're
not using your assets to live on, then yeah, you're fine, good, go for it, right? But if that's not
your situation, then yeah, you need to be a little bit more prudent about how you manage
what you're stacking there. And so that you don't end up in situations where volatility drives
your financial plan. I mean, yeah, especially not Bitcoin's fiat volatility, which is
that'd be a pretty wild ride for any financial plan. I'm curious because just you mentioned
like people kind of levering up on credit, you mentioned a fiat emergency fund. Can you talk
about that, expand on that a little bit more and maybe just what other kind of bits of advice you'd
give or maybe a better way to put it is common pitfalls that you see, like where people get into
a situation that's not ideal, even though they're stacking in the hardest money that's ever existed,
but you still find yourself in a rough position because maybe there are a few steps that you
could have taken that you chose not to. Yeah, I love that question. So I think, Mike, for most
people right there, if they're buying Bitcoin, it's because they're in an accumulation stage in
their life. So let's focus on those people rather than the people who are like in the retirement
spending. If you're in an accumulation space, the first thing you need to do to be able to accumulate
anything is to have more money coming in than what's going out. And I know it sounds so basic.
It's like, how could I possibly need to tell you that you have income coming in and you have expenses
and then what's left over is what you can accumulate. But yet, time and time again,
for whatever reason, it's very difficult for people to see that they need to worry about not
only what's coming in, but also what's going out before they start buying Bitcoin. And so what I
often see happen, this is a very common pitfall in the Bitcoin community, is that you over accumulate.
And what I mean by over accumulation is not good, right? Over accumulation in Bitcoiners minds is
like, I have more Bitcoin, everything's going to be awesome. Bitcoin's inevitable. It's going to a
million dollars, I'm going to be fine. I'm going to retire. I'm going to flip off my boss. Everything's
going to be cool. No, what actually happens with over accumulation is that you've narrowed
it up and now you don't have cash flow to pay for things and you're usually selling at the worst
possible time. So over accumulation generally leads to less Bitcoin that people have in their
pockets rather than more Bitcoin. And so yeah, there's going to be people, of course, that somehow
get the timing right by the grace of God. And they're able to, you know, for whatever reason,
lever up and get in at the right time and get out at the right time and they end up with more than
they otherwise would have. That's a very small percentage of people. That's like less than one
percent of people, they get the timing right because it's not just the timing on the way in
that you have to get right. It's also the timing on the way out that you have to get right. And
people are notoriously bad at both. So it's like you have to have both right in order to do it.
And so I tell this to people all the time is like create a cash surplus, right? And once you have
that cash surplus, if you don't need that money for other things, then yeah, go buy Bitcoin. But
if you also don't have any kind of emergency reserve, then you might also end up in this situation
where, you know, all of a sudden your hot water heater, flood your house, right? And insurance
only covers a portion of it or whatever it is. You have to replace the hot water heater, right?
And you have to replace all this stuff and you weren't expecting $15,000 and now you're selling
your Bitcoin at the worst possible time, right? I just, I feel like people don't really think of
these things. And what they think is like, oh, I'll just borrow against my Bitcoin. And it's like,
okay, but now you have to go like in the midst of an emergency, go find a lender,
probably give them your private keys because the lenders where you don't have to give them
or your private keys are mostly businesses that are taking business loans at this point.
So like that lending market's not really that mature yet, so I wouldn't rely on it. Or they're
like, I'm just going to put it on my credit card. And now you've got, right, the situation where
you've got credit card debt and you have over accumulation of Bitcoin, quote unquote, and
you have no cash and you're now paying off, you know, a credit card loan at 30% or more or whatever
it is, especially in this interest rate environment. And so I just, I feel like we, you know, one small
thing, like little mistakes, they start to add up and you end, you can end up in a really,
really bad situation if you don't stop yourself early. I think, I mean, that's, it's great advice
because I'm pretty sure that myself included and probably everybody who will listen to this has
probably been in the situation where, you know, like the, the dip keeps, like you, you get to a
point where you, you don't even have the fiat to keep buying the dip. Like you, you're like, shoot,
like I, I somehow, the dip keeps dipping and I, but like I, I'm, I'm not a fiat, like I'm, you know,
there's no more I can allocate. Like I have, you know, other bills that I need to pay in things,
like that's okay. I guess I'm not, I'm getting halfway down this dip, but I don't get the tastiest
part of the bottom, which is like, and then you're kind of kicking yourself. Like why, why did I do
that? You try to zoom out and think, well, okay, again, to your point, you know, Bitcoin's inevitable.
Like if I just wait, you know, long enough, I'll be good, you know, I'll get back in the black,
fiat's going to zero anyway. Like I'm going to change my unit of account to Bitcoin.
But still you would rather, you know, anyone would rather accumulate more Bitcoin than accumulate
less Bitcoin. And I think what you said about over accumulating actually the more likely
situation there being ending up with less Bitcoin than with more is kind of fascinating and maybe
a little bit counterintuitive on its face, but it, it makes perfect sense. It's like when,
if you're going to get forced liquidated basically, and I'm not talking like a margin call or something,
I'm not talking about that. I'm saying like, if you are forced to liquidate part of your stack for
an emergency because shit happens when it rains at pores, it all tends to come at once. And it
also tends to come around the time that Bitcoin just happens to be taking a dump, right? And so,
you know, it's like all of this, this confluence of things comes together. And now all of a sudden
you're in a forced liquidation scenario, which you don't want to be, if you're going to sell some
of your Bitcoin, you want that to be on your terms on your timeline. And, you know, it's,
it's not a very desirable situation to kind of have your, you know, to be backed into a corner,
basically. It's, so yeah, I appreciate that advice a lot. And I'm curious also, so, you know,
you mentioned emergency stashes. Do you have just like getting into nitty gritty a little bit?
Do you have like a percentage of people's, how do you do that? Do you do it like a percentage of
their net worth? Do you do it as just like, okay, this is a generally good number for most people,
if you're, you know, have a young family, if you own a house, things like that, how do you, how do
you even go about deciding like, okay, because I'm sure there are people wondering like, okay,
how much dirty fiat do I actually need to keep on hand for it to be prudent?
Yeah, for sure. So there's a lot of things that actually play into emergency fund. I mean,
you can make it really simple. I can just say, I want to have three to six months worth of cash.
Right. That's what most financial advisors are going to tell you. I think, if anything, you could
be a little more aggressive with your emergency fund by like cherry picking what you actually need
to put in your emergency fund. I like to do this for Bitcoiners because Bitcoiners don't like to
hold fiat. And so like, if you don't want to take the standard three to six months advice, fine,
okay, do you own a house? Right. If you do own a house, then like, is it an old house? Is it a
new house? Like, you probably need to have some sort of reserve of generally one to 3% of the home
purchase in emergency funds for when things come up. That's generally what I recommend for a newer
house. We're usually airing more on the 1% side for an older house on the 3% side of like the total
home value. We look at how, like how stable is somebody's income, right? If somebody has like
a very stable income, they've been working for, you know, a same company for a really long time,
they're really well respected, they're high up in there, they're always going to get their regular
paycheck, right? It's very unlikely that they're laid off. That person doesn't need six months
worth of emergency reserve as much as maybe somebody who's freelancing, right? You should
probably air more on the six month side. And so you can maybe air more on like one month's worth of
expenses plus the home, plus, you know, maybe if you have some old cars, you might want to have some
extra cash lying around if you need to have things fixed, right? I think that you could sort of look
line by line about what would be appropriate or what wouldn't be. In general though, also like,
are you the kind of person who if you lost your job, you can kind of take all the fat out of your
budget really easily. If so, you can have less in your, like less in your emergency money. If you're
not the kind of person where like, you go to the grocery store, you never look at a price, right?
Your kids ask for markers, you always buy them for them, right? Like, you know, I'm using silly
examples, but it's like, if you just literally never think about it, then yeah, you should probably
air on having more months worth of expenses rather than just drilling down into what's fixed.
In my budget that I can't change and putting that aside. And so I think that you can get kind of more
specific if you want to, or you could just kind of blanket say, okay, three to six months is probably
enough. If my income stable three is fine. If it's not six, it's probably a better number.
Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. A lot of it comes down to like peace of mind too, right? Like,
the situation that no Bitcoiner wants to find themselves in is again, in a forced liquidation
situation. Like you've been working so hard, you've been trying to stack sats and stay humble,
you know, while you're doing it, and here you are getting forced to go out and sell some because,
you know, life happens and things happen and it's unexpected and you cannot predict the future.
So it's like, okay, as much as none of us want to hold on to dirty fiat, like, okay, there,
it does still have its uses in taking care of some, especially, you know, short-term unexpected
problems. Yeah, for sure. And having that dirty fiat around, right, is going to be enable you to
have a better and safer Bitcoin stack, right? At the end of the day, like if you have this
emergency fund, which yeah, if you'd put that emergency fund into Bitcoin into 2020, right,
like, okay, your emergency fund would be something, right? Okay, fine. I get that. I have an emergency
fund. I've done the numbers, right? It hurts. I totally understand that said though, right,
when I've actually needed that money, it's been there for me. And, you know, God knows we've had
our fair share of emergencies over the last five years, right, that we've been able to dip into it,
replenish it and we're still stacking and everything's fine, right? And so, at the end of
the day, not had to sell anything, right? And that's what we're going for here, is that you allocate
appropriately, you don't have to sell, and that it actually is what it's supposed to be, which is a
long-term savings technology. If you're, you know, if you're overallocating, it's not a long-term
savings technology for you at that point, because you're pulling money out of it in a short-term way,
using it to fund short-term expenses, short-term things that are happening. Everyone has
uncertainty in their lives, right? And it's what plays into people's risk tolerance. And so, people
who are more willing to have like a lot of Bitcoin, right, and very little emergency fund, generally
have a higher risk tolerance, because they're willing to, you know, take a risk that these
uncertainties aren't going to happen to them. But at the end of the day, right, like, and I don't
know if you're religious, but like, you know, it's up to God, right, whether or not these things
actually play out. And so, you can have a year where, you know, maybe one really bad thing happens,
right, and that's it, and everything's fine. Or, you know, or maybe it's not fine, because it's one
really bad thing. Or you have a bunch of really little bad things, right, that happen to you,
and you're just constantly taking from your emergency fund, because I didn't expect this,
and I didn't expect that, and I didn't expect this, all right. And so, I don't know what's
going to happen to anyone at any given period of time, right? Like, I wish I had a crystal ball.
I would like do so many amazing things in this world, if I knew what the future was going to be,
right? But that's not who anybody is, right? And so, the only thing that we can do is plan
for things that are going to be unexpected to happen and have, you know, appropriate resources
set aside for that. I think your point about risk tolerance is in the fact that everybody's
profile for that is different, is so important. Because, like, if, like, I am married, have been
for a while, we have our first child now. Even, you know, if I look back, like, if I was a,
I mean, I wish I started stacking when I was a single man, so that I could, you know, have brought
more of that in, but okay, you know, hindsight's always 2020, right? But my point is, my risk
tolerance as a single guy was far, far higher than as a married man. And now, I mean, exponentially
higher than now that I have a kid. Because that, like, that just completely changes the paradigm
in a, like, a way that I don't think anybody understands until they're in it. And then you're
in it and you're like, wow, okay, light switches on, ripped out of the wall, never turning off.
This is how I proceed now. I have a whole different view of time preference, I've honestly found,
like, I'm really, it's not just theoretical thinking about, like, leaving something to the
future generations. It's like, no, he's sitting right there. That's, that's the future, like,
he's here. Like, I'm seeing him grow. This is not theoretical anymore. This is very real.
Yeah. And I'm curious, because I know I've got people of kind of all ages, shockingly, like, from
zoomers to, like, boomers, I don't know if I have anyone from the greatest generation who listens
to this show, but quite a wide range. But the majority of the people that do are in typically
the, like, 30 to 45 year old range. So I think a lot of these people do have kids, or at least
are in the process of starting a family or thinking about starting a family want kids.
I would love if you could speak a little bit specifically to the parents or to the hopeful
parents, the parents that are going to be coming soon about how, again, because that's a
different risk profile. It's a different level of risk tolerance. It's a different type of planning.
What kind of advice do you have for those parents or soon to be parents in terms of
setting not just, it's not just about setting yourself up. It's about setting your kids up,
making sure that you have real long term stability. How does Bitcoin factor into that? And how do you
sort of walk through those situations with people? Yeah, there's so many facets to your question.
I apologize for that. No, no, it's totally fine. I want to start with actually what risk
tolerance is, because we sort of delved into it. But risk tolerance actually has made up of
like a bunch of different things. So people normally, when they think of risk tolerance,
they think of like, I'm willing to go bungee jumping. I'm willing to bet it all on black,
right? That would be really high willingness to take risk. Whereas somebody who's like,
I stuff all my cash in the mattress, that's low willingness to take risk. There's also the ability
to take risk, which is I think where you're touching on here with parenting, right? So prior to you
becoming a parent or prior to even being married, right, you had a much higher risk tolerance because
your ability to take risk was higher. And that's because you were single, you didn't have a wife
to worry about, you didn't have a child to take care of. You probably weren't so concerned, let's
say if you lost your job, like you probably could eat whatever was out there, you know, you can have
peanuts for dinner for five nights and not worry, right? Like, I don't know what you would eat,
but I'm just probably meat or something. But I'm just sorry.
Peanuts are good though. I do enjoy peanuts. Yeah.
Just thinking of a cheap food of meat is not one of them. And so you know what I mean? Like,
you can adjust your behaviors a little bit better while you're looking to go find another job.
Whereas when you've got a wife and children, right, you can't necessarily do that, right? I don't
know how interested Carla will be in you coming home and saying, okay, I don't have any income,
not willing to sell my Bitcoin. So like, we're just going to feed everybody peanuts for the next
three weeks until I can find income. And I think that she'd probably like, think it was a joke,
you know? And so right, like ability is more than that though, right? It's like, it's your family
situation. It's also like how stable your income is, which we sort of touched on what your net
worth is, right? Somebody with a really high net worth, right? Elon Musk can take a lot more risk
than like, you know, somebody who is in credit card debt. Just because like, it doesn't really
matter if he puts a million dollars in Bitcoin, right? It's like, it's not, it's such an insignificant
portion of his net worth. He probably wouldn't even notice that he did that, right? And so I think
that that's why also people are like, go Elon, try to buy, you know, try to orange fill Elon to get
him to do it so he can move the market. So yeah, so there's this willingness and ability and they
kind of play in together, right? And people always look at willingness and they don't like to look
at ability. And then when ability kind of strikes them in the face, because it's unavoidable, like,
I have a wife and a child that are staring at me, like my ability has obviously changed, right?
Now all of a sudden you're like, well, what is my, you know, what is my risk tolerance? Like,
what is risk tolerance at all? Like, what's happened? You know, I've like my whole life,
my worldview has changed, right? You know, and so we kind of have almost like an existential crisis
when these kinds of things like they don't match up anymore, right? And so I actually, I like to air
more on the side of ability, which is really hard for people because people with either really high
or really low willingness, they don't like to look at ability. And actually, especially people
with low willingness, people with low willingness are like, I don't want to do that. Like, everything
in my body is telling me that's the wrong thing to do. My intuition is saying, stop, why are you
putting me in risky stuff? You know? And you're like, but literally like, you pay your bills every
single month, you're saving 30% of your income, right? Like, you have not basically not a financial
care of the world, but you're literally like stuffing cash somewhere. Like, why are you doing
that? You know, like, we can make a 12 month emergency reserve that'll make you feel better.
And then we can stack 100%. You know what I mean? Like there are situations where, like, and it's so
hard for somebody with low willingness to move. I think it's also really high for somebody with
high willingness to end up like being confronted with the fact that they actually have lower ability
than their willingness is. And so again, it always comes back to like, what your goals are, who's in
your family, what you're trying to accomplish. And at the end of the day, if that means that like,
you sacrifice Kager, as people like to say, I feel like I hear this Kager thing thrown around all
the time, they're like, what portfolio should I have so that I have the same Kager as Bitcoin?
And it's like, no, like, you're thinking about this all wrong. Like, what portfolio should you
have that matches who you are as a person? Like, that's the portfolio that you should have. And
that's the portfolio that's going to help you sleep at night. That's the portfolio that's going
to make sure that like your children have food on the table, that your wife doesn't have to eat
peanuts every single day that like you can actually pay for the hot water heater when something
happens to it, right? Like, that's the portfolio that you need to have. And yeah, maybe that does
mean that you own a little more dirty fiat than you wanted to own. But like, if you all sleep
well at night, and everyone's well provided for them, that's the right portfolio to have.
Yeah, I think that's genuinely like, you can't, what's this thing like, you can't put a price on
peace of mind. And like granted, if you're getting into Bitcoin, especially if you got in early,
like you certainly sacrificed a lot of peace of mind. And you turned out to be right, right? You
turned out to be like extremely as right as you can be about this thing. If you went really all in
early on this, I always think about, you know, American hodl, you know, it's the story about him,
you know, riding his moped around all the, you know, it's a great story. But it's also impressive
because like, he also had the, he talked about this with his wife, he didn't just go and do this,
like he, he talked through it with her. Like, they, you know, this was a, he said, this is what I
think we need to do. Got the buy-in. You know, what do you have done it anyway? Maybe. But the
point is, at least he did get that buy-in. And he turned out to be extremely, extremely right,
that all that cutting, all that kind of, you know, maybe difficulty in the short term led to a much
greater outcome in the long term. But for a lot of people getting in now, I also feel like the
the, the current, let's say, monetary situation in the world, like though it feels like things are
starting to break a little bit, the cracks are starting to show. I think a lot of people feel
more heightened uncertainty now than they did, you know, maybe have certainly before COVID,
maybe even during COVID. Like that was kind of this, I think, like, breaking point for people
where I mean, we printed ungodly amounts of money, like just insane. And, and a lot of stuff broke
and kind of got patched over. And that's what fiat is really good at, right, is kind of kicking
that can down the road, we'll just print more money to solve the next thing. But the problem is,
each bubble gets bigger. Each time you don't have that painful return to reality, that reversion to
the mean, it's going to be worse the next time. And then the next time when you kick the can down
the road again to the future generations, which is just honestly, I think, so immoral and rather
despicable that this is, you know, this is what people are doing to our money. It's mortgaging
our children's future so they can have a, you know, a cushy present. That's maybe something we
can get into after because I just find it abhorrent ultimately. But you had a really great
post recently tweet post on X that was how to make your child a millionaire. And I'll just read it
because I liked this one a lot. And it was how to make your child a millionaire. One, at birth,
invest $1,000 in Bitcoin. Two, by age 21, they'll still have a million sats. You can leave it alone
in cold storage. By age 50, the dollar will collapse. This is how generational wealth is built.
I thought this was a brilliant tweet. Can you can you unpack this a little bit more? Like,
because I think this was a little tongue in cheek. Yeah, you know, but it's also,
I think, very good advice. So where is the tongue in cheek part of this? Where is the kind of serious
like, no, you should actually do this. Yeah. Okay. So this tweet started because I see financial
advisors post these things all the time where they're like, you know, but like when your child is
born, buy a thousand dollars worth of the S&P 500, invest $100 every single month into the S&P 500,
you know, and then your child, by the time they're 50, they'll be, you know, they'll have two million
dollars or whatever it is. And you're like, okay, okay, sure. You know, assuming that for whatever
reason, you put it in an actual like trust for that child and you didn't actually use it for
anything for that child over that period of time. And you were like, I only want you to have this
for, you know, your, when you're retired, I guess that sure, that makes sense. So that's kind of
where the tweet came from. And so yeah, in some ways it is tongue in cheek and also like the
dollar collapsing in 50 years. I mean, like, I don't know, it could be 50 years, it could be 200
years, it could be tomorrow. It's really hard to know. So especially with everything going on,
you know, I don't really know. And so, but at the end of the day, right, if we're thinking about
things in Bitcoin terms, then, well, when I posted it, if you bought a thousand dollars worth of
Bitcoin, you got 0.01 Bitcoin, right, which is a million saps. And so if you want to make your
child a millionaire, quote unquote, right, if they have a million saps, then they're a millionaire,
and they're a millionaire, whether no matter what the price of Bitcoin is, and no matter what the
dollar does. And so like, and I think that, right, we can talk about all this planning and fiat
terms because we live in this fiat world, right, and that's why we need this fiat reserve, and
that's why we need to make sure that we can put food on our table for the next generation. But at
the end of the day, right, the amount of Bitcoin that we have is the value that matters. That's why
we're all doing this work, right, because eventually we all want to live in this Bitcoin world, and
whether or not you and me get to live in that Bitcoin world, or our children get to live in that,
or their children get to live in that, right, like, your best guess is as good as mine, right. I don't
really know when that's going to be. But the whole point is that we're moving the ball forward,
and that we're focusing on the Bitcoin stack that we have, and not everything else that's going on
in the fiat world. I think it's honestly, it's a very nice balance that you're able to kind of
make here between, okay, yes, acknowledge the usefulness of fiat, especially when covering
unexpected things that come up, but try to think about the long term in Bitcoin. And so if I'm kind
of reading the way you break this down, it's really Bitcoin is that long term view. But yes,
we're still in a fiat world, you're still going to need some fiat, you don't want to have to
scramble and sell your long term futures value storage for some short term unexpected problem.
Is that kind of how you break it down? Like, okay, this is the high time preference fiat that I'm
going to be needing for now. This is the low time preference Bitcoin that I am going to do
everything I can not to touch. Yeah, I really like how you broke that down. I definitely, that's
how I work and how I do financial planning is like we think about what short term and what's
long term, and we try to just optimize based on that and what we think is going to happen. We
don't know everything. And that's why you do end up with these fiat reserves. We also might have
expected short term expenses that would come up in which case you would still need fiat for those
expected short term expenses. And so the asset allocation, which I hate using that term because
Bitcoin is savings, but it is technically, it's a currency allocation, I guess, between fiat versus
Bitcoin, right? It's going to matter based on what you have going on. But also, I know people who
they're like, well, I want to do everything in Bitcoin because I'm a Bitcoiner. So I'm just going
to do everything in Bitcoin. And you're like, okay, but now you've created an extreme accounting
burden on yourself, and you're really annoying the crap out of your account. And if you have one,
and if you don't have one, then you're probably misfiling something because,
like, if you don't have a second eye on these things, and you're doing a lot of Bitcoin
transactions because you're going in and out of Bitcoin to fiat or worse, you're not actually keeping
track of all of this stuff, but the IRS is because everybody gets our data all the time.
And so now you're just like, it kind of reminds me of, and I hate to use this as an example,
but the bit buy thing that just happened, buy bit, sorry. I'm like, kind of an out of space about that.
Like, okay, so in buy bit, right? They have this crazy hack where people weren't checking,
they weren't checking the address because you can't check the address on the device to be
able to move it or whatever. And so it's like, it's so complicated that we can't even get an
address on the device anymore. And so we were making all these mistakes, and now we're just
going to send a bunch of money to North Korea. It's like, okay, you can do that in your Bitcoin
life. Obviously, it's not that bad, right? We're not like, hopefully. But you can over complicate
your life and you can make it as hard as you want it to be, or you can under complicate your life,
and you can just say, you know what, I just have to use fiat right now because I live in a fiat
world. Unfortunately, this is the world I live in, right? I'm doing everything I can by stacking and
maybe having a thing like the Bitcoin podcast where I get the word out and I'm orange-pilling
my nephew or whatever it is, right? So that I can live in this Bitcoin world that I don't currently
live in, right? There are other things that you could do besides over complicating your accounting
life. Yeah, now it's definitely true. And again, I think this is one of those things where I admire
people who are very much trying to fully live on a Bitcoin standard, like not using fiat,
you know, buying, you know, using things like BitRefill or things like that when they need to do
something in the fiat world. I think it's also a lot maybe easier to do when you don't have kids yet,
just because from, I am still a very new father, like it's only been a little over a year. And I
find that the amount of time that I have and the amount of additional complexity I am willing to add
into my life, they're both very small in terms of how much more I want to add in there. And so it's
like, you know, and again, to everyone, you know, to each their own, do whatever you want to do. I
try to very much use Bitcoin as my unit of account from a high level in terms of that's how I'm
thinking about, you know, if you get to a switch when you're a Bitcoiner, where you're no longer
looking at something as the price tag is in fiat, like, and it's just that's the price tag, it's
how many dollars does it cost? It's like, you're automatically doing that, you know, rough conversion
your brain to say, this is how much Bitcoin I am not buying when I decide to buy whatever this may
be, maybe it's a necessity, maybe it's a frivolity, whatever it might be. But you're doing that, you
know, that mental calculation just without even thinking about it. And I think it's a good way
to approach things because you start to realize that you can cut a lot of fat out of your life.
And so that's one thing we haven't touched on yet that I know you've been very vocal about. And I
think is useful for people is, okay, you know, as you mentioned before, it's not just money coming
in, it's the money going out, you also need to think about. And so how do you talk to clients?
How do you talk to people in general about just trying to minimize the money going out? Like,
and how can you, you know, because you don't need to live in a cardboard box, you don't need to
eat ramen noodles every night, you don't need to make every sacrifice you can just to stack
more sets like you want to live. So how do you balance still living a good life, especially if
you have a family and making sure that you provide a good life for that family, with still
maximizing the accumulation of this beautiful finite money that is called Bitcoin?
Yeah, I love how you put that because I get this question from people all the time where they're
like, how do I optimize everything in my financial life? I'm like, well, you buy a tiny home, you
buy my school, you eat ramen, like, you don't have kids, like, is that the life you want to live?
They're like, no, no, no, but like, how do I optimize? I'm like, I just told you how to optimize
your financial life. So yeah, no, it's obviously it's a balance, right? Like anything, it's going
to depend on like what's going to be important to one family versus another, right? If one family is
like, you know what, we're a really religious family, we think it's really important that our
kids get religious instruction, right? And therefore, we're willing to spend for our four kids,
you know, 80 grand a year on private school, right? Like some people are going to make that
commitment, other people are going to look at them like, are you crazy 80 grand a year on
private school? Like, what are you insane? Like, what, like, how, why, where are you doing it?
You know, so, and I think that like, right, each are going to make their choices. The problem is
when people are like, I'm going to pay for private school, I'm going to have a nice house, I'm going
to have a pool in my backyard, I'm going to have really nice cars and not only I'm going to have a
nice car, but my wife needs to have a nice car too, right? And like the list goes on and on and on,
they're like, well, I deserve it, I work really hard and I make a lot of money and then all the
money's gone, right? And so like, I feel like people need to have priorities about what's
important to them, right? And I think really easy actually for people to make those priorities.
But the problem is that acting on those priorities in the moment is really, really difficult,
right? Because like, let's say you really like cars, right? But like you and your wife talked
about it and it really is more important to send them to private school, right? And so you've talked
about it, but then you know, your car breaks, and you go to the, you go to the store or the shop,
I don't know, you call it the lot, like, and you go and you look and you're like, well, that BMW
looks amazing, right? Like I would love to have that car. And then for whatever reason, somehow
you're driving off the lot with it, right? And now you've committed to very expensive private
school and also an extremely expensive car that is probably, you know, what most people pay for
their mortgage, right? So I feel like people need to prioritize and it's really, really hard for them
because like, if school is important, maybe car is not. If school is important, then maybe house is
not. If house is important, then school is not, right? If car is important, then maybe school
and house are not, right? Or maybe no pool, or maybe like, if organic food is really important,
then like, maybe activities for your children aren't as important, right? Like dollar for dollar,
you have to make these decisions all the time. But what happens is that, like, you can think about
this, but then acting on it is really hard to do. And so I, the best advice that I have for people,
like, is generally that they need to think in the mindset of somebody who's a saver. It's like how,
and I, it's not like, you know, shouting affirmations into the mirror or whatever. It kind of sounds a
little bit like that. But like, there are people who are savers, right? Just by definition, like,
the way that they operate, they just like, they look at prices, they're very conscious, right?
They're not just like, randomly spending money on stuff. Like, these people are generally very
successful at saving money. And in fact, they're generally so successful at saving money that
they have trouble spending money later. And they usually end up with estates, which then their
third generation completely spends to smithereens, right? Because they didn't actually pass the
value of saving on. And so there's, that's like a whole other conversation. But then there's the
other side, there's the spenders, right? Who like, no matter what they do, it's like, the money just
slips through their fingers, they accumulate so much in their home, they're constantly complaining,
and I'm guilty of this, of like, complaining about all this stuff in our house. But like,
we're still buying more stuff. And I'm like, but why am I buying, you know, like, I have like,
all this stuff to clean, I'm spending all this money on this stuff that I'm yelling about that I
need to clean, right? And so like, I'm not saying I'm a saint here, and then I'm like this over saver
here, but like, and everyone's got their things, right? And so, but like, again, the priorities,
right, if you're the kind of person you know, you're a spender, like you need to think like,
how can I make myself into more of a saver? And it's not going to happen overnight, but it's going
to be making like better decisions every single day, like evaluating, do I really need the name
brand catch up or versus like the not, you know, like, I don't know, I'm just giving you examples
here, but like people can make little decisions, which will ultimately snowball into becoming
bigger decisions. And I feel like financial advisors get a lot of flak for this, right? It's
like the coffee conversation where people are like, Oh, you know, stop buying your coffee out and
make it at home. And like, yeah, it's stupid, right? You save 1000 bucks a year, whatever.
But it's, it's not that you're saving $1000. It's that you're consciously making a decision to do
something differently. And that when you change your behavior, you might change your behavior in
other places too. I think that that's what's often lost. It's not the $1000 that you're going to save
on that coffee, right? Or the fact that you're going to be spending a lot more time cleaning the
coffee pot at home, right? It's, it's that you're willing to do something differently. And if your
situation is not such where you feel like you're saving enough or you're accumulating enough or
whatever it is, then something needs to change and you need to look deep and hard and find out
what that thing is and what will be the easiest thing to change first so that you can make future
changes that are harder later. Yeah, I think that's great advice. I'm curious, are there any,
are there any like specific just for you personally specific, let's say sacrifices or cuts that you
made that like you thought you maybe weren't going to be able to live without. And then it's like,
oh, actually this was okay. Like, is there, is there something in your own lives where you,
you know, made one of those cuts? Maybe it wasn't popular at the time, but it ended up,
you know, okay, we're better now for it. Like it didn't actually matter as much as I thought it did.
Yeah, we have absolute garbage cars. I'm the first person to tell anybody that. I mean,
we literally drive two hunks of junk. I mean, like, I actually had to push our car up a hill,
like with our kids. Oh my God, it's an actual hunk of junk, you know, and so
I've gotten a lot of complaints from my family about how the fact that we need a new car on both
sides, both my side and Peer side about the fact that we're still driving this like little literal
garbage on the road. It's safe enough though that our kids can be in it. It's like, I'm not concerned
about the safety, so please don't call CPS. But yeah, so like things like that, we bought a smaller
house that we otherwise should like would have and should have for our family size. I think that
that these are like in my mind, making the major changes, I think is easier for somebody like me
than going to the grocery store and worrying about every single line item. Like I didn't
want to have to do that. And so we bought we bought less house than we can afford. We bought
like, I mean, our cars are, yeah, like there's nothing else to really say about them. I am also,
I try to be mindful about like, like kids clothing, like I feel like you can, I've got three kids and
like, they're amazing and they're so cute. And you want to dress them in like all the things, you
know, I'm like, especially as a woman, I'm like, I want to buy like cute dresses for my daughters.
And like, we should match, we should get magic headbands. But like, we don't because because we
take all the hand me done for my sister, it's like stuff like that, where you're like, they're
going to stain it anyways, you know, for their everyday clothes, like if you need a nice outfit
for something fine, but like, for the most part, we try to keep that stuff under control so that
like, I don't have to worry about the other things because I actually am the kind of person
where when I go to the grocery store, I absolutely hate looking at prices. I do not want to do that.
I want to buy what my family will eat. That's healthy that, you know, is not poisoning them.
And I'm not going to worry that it's $2 more than the other thing, like I'm just not going to do that.
And so, but again, these are personal sacrifices that we made in order to have that. It wasn't
like, okay, I'm going to buy a million and a half dollar house. And I'm also going to,
you know, not worry at the grocery store. And now I'm going to go into debt.
Yeah. And on the kid's clothing piece, the other point about that is they just grow out of them so
fast. Oh, it's absurd. It's like, okay, well, that that fit for two days. And our little guy is
really growing fast too. So he's, yeah, there was a lot of clothes that just they, they just never
fit him. And we were like, well, great, glad we glad we got these. That's a guess we need to have
another one just so we can get some use out of them. Hopefully the next one's smaller, like
fingers crossed. What happens to is like, you're in the wrong seasons because I was like, oh, well,
you know, I've got two girls. So like, certainly she'll wear all the things that my other one
wore. And it's like, nope, she was born in May and my first daughter was born in January. And
seasons just don't match. Eventually they will, right? Like, we're, we're headed there. But yeah,
it's, it's kind of funny how it is. And like the shoes thing just kills me because like,
their feet grow so fast, but you also don't want them to have deformed feet. So you're like,
I feel like I have to spend money on like nice shoes for them so that their feet are fine
and that they go walk appropriately. And they also don't wear them a lot because they take them
off and run around outside, but they need to be like looking like civilized children in public
sometimes. So they need to, you know, it's a hard, it's hard. I'm a big, like no shoe maximalist.
And it appears that a couple of times we've tried to put shoes on our son, he just like,
he just rips them right off. And I'm like, good, good, you keep ripping off those shoes. Like,
we'll get you a pair of real loose fitting leather moccasins that will, you know, allow your feet
not to get too crunched in there. But I digress into, into shoe, shoe theory. But, you know,
one of the things that I wanted to come back to, because you mentioned just like the generational
side, you know, that third generation, what's the old adage? It's like the first generation earns it,
this, the second one, you know, a spent in the third one, like, I don't know sets on fire or
something. I'm not saying it correctly, but something to that effect, like you build up this
generational wealth in one generation, usually the next generation maybe maintains it or,
but doesn't really grow it, they probably start spending it. And then it's like the third generation,
kind of, you know, for lack of a better expression, like pisses it away. And, and, and, and especially
if there's like a, you know, a family business or something involved there, that's typically how
these things tend to go. There's a reason there's stereotypes for them. I feel like a lot of
Bitcoiners run the risk of getting into that type of situation, because all the work they're doing
now, they're trying to build this generational wealth, right? They're thinking about their,
their children, their grandchildren, maybe they're thinking about their great, great, great grandchildren,
they're thinking they're going to build this, this dynasty, right? But once you leave this earth,
you don't have any control over that again. So, you know, do you talk to clients about kind of that
long, long term planning, like especially if you are building up this generational Bitcoin wealth,
if, you know, the dollar does collapse in 50 years and wow, those, you know, you are really a,
you're a sat millionaire and that's all people care about with those thousand sats that you got.
How do you think about that long, long term, that kind of estate planning, that real generational
transfer type of planning? Yeah, I love this question. I want to start this question. I want
to talk about generational planning for sure, but I want to give people like a quick snippet,
since, you know, most people listening to this probably don't have multi-generational wealth yet,
even though they probably will if they are stacking appropriately and doing everything they need to do.
But in the meantime, you do need an estate plan, right? You need something, especially if kids,
like have a guardianship on file, make sure that like legally everyone knows who's going to take
your child should something happen to you and your wife, right? Like these are kind of basic
planning, making sure you have some sort of trust for the benefit of minor children, where if you
die, there's a testimony trust that's created for the benefit of that child, you pick a trustee who
you know can actually like be good with money, which for a lot of families, that's hard. And then
like provide for that child, put stipulations into the trust of what actually can be like what the
money can be used for. All of these things are going to help. Like if God forbid something happens
in the short term, where both you and your spouse, something happens, right? And it's the worst possible
outcome that at least your children are provided for. I feel like time and time again, this is a
huge mistake that Bitcoiners make because they're like, dollars going to collapse. Don't care about
the legal system. Wife knows where the hardware wallet is, whatever, it's outside the purview
of the government. It doesn't matter. Like she'll just take the hardware wallet and everything will
be fine. My kids don't even have social security numbers and you're like, oh my gosh, like what is
happening here? You know, like get your kids. So like do basic planning, right? Like there's a reason
why these things exist. And we don't have to throw the bathwater out like the baby out with the
bathwater, right? As they say, right? Not all of the bathwater is bad, right? Some of it is very,
you know, soapy and terrible and has like your gunk all over it, right? But some of it is actually
there like to wash the baby originally, right? And so let's keep those things. And estate planning
is one of those things. I would say doing basic estate planning to start will at least get you
a relationship with an attorney so that if you are stacking now, this attorney knows you and now
this attorney can be the person that you talk to when, you know, your stack all of a sudden goes
from a million dollars to 10 million dollars, right? Maybe you don't have an estate planning
problem at that point because estate tax limits and things are super high. But now from 10 million
to 40 million, right? Like all of a sudden the numbers are starting to get in territory where
you're like, gosh, like I really don't. And is the dollar going to collapse at this point? Right?
I don't know, right? In the meantime, do planning where planning is due? All estate planning aside,
that's actually not the thing that determines whether or not the third generation is going to
spend all of your money. So the thing that determines that is, are you able to effectively
communicate your values to the next generation and effectively communicate them so well that your
children effectively communicate that to their children and effectively communicate that to
their children and so forth? That's how multi-generational wealth exists. These families that have big
names that we know about, they, we know about their names because that was done, not because they
put these crazy trust stipulations and they doled out tiny amounts of income to their children to
preserve wealth over time. I think that the average person thinks that, like that these trust fund
babies, that's what they live on or whatever and that they have some sort of income and some do,
right? But that's not how you're going to end up with the child who is then able to communicate
values to the next generation, right? That's how you end up with a child who remains a child for
their whole life. And as you know, as a parent, that's the last thing you want for your child,
right? The last thing you want for your child is that when you're gone, they are incapable of
doing anything. And so some of the problems with trust planning is that if the parent is so more
concerned about the money than the child, then, right, you're not going to effectively communicate
the values to the child. You're going to effectively communicate the stipulations to the trust.
And that's not effective. It's effective for the first generation. It's not effective for the
second, the third, the fourth and so forth, right? I'm sorry. This, I, you can, the first generation
ever. Yeah, I got you. Yeah. And so there are ways to do that, right? Like at the beginning, what you
want to do is you want to just create resilience in your child, right? You don't want to do everything
for your child, even though like I'm guilty of this, obviously, like I want my kids to leave the house
so we can get somewhere on time, right? Am I going to put their shoes on? Yeah. Right. If we don't
have, if we don't have anywhere to be, can they sit there putting their shoes on for 30 minutes?
Yeah, we're going to miss outside time. I love outside time as much as the next guy, right?
Like I'm going to be a little upset and annoyed and probably feeling impatient. But at the end of
the day, right? Did they get their shoes and socks on? Right? These are sort of things that,
I know it sounds silly that you think like, oh, well, this person's going to be a financier because,
you know, mom at age three had them put their own shoes on. But it starts there, right? It starts with
giving them basic responsibilities around the house, making sure that they set the table. They
clear the table. They put their clothing in the hamper, right? Like they actually have to clean
up their toys and put them in the right bins, not just shove them behind the couch or under a bed,
right? Like these are things that give your kids actual skills. Prioritize, maybe if they go to
school right and they come home with homework, maybe prioritize some of the house things over
the homework, right? Because like school at the end of the day, like don't let school get in the
way of your children's education, right? Even if you're home, if you're homeschooling or if you're
not, right? Like it could really get in the way of teaching your kids basic life skills. They're
not going to learn anything about money in school, like hands down, they're just not like, they're
not going to learn anything about how to do laundry. They're not going to learn how to cook
an egg, right? They're not going to learn any of these things. So if you want your children to
have basic skills and be able to survive in an environment without you where they're not calling
you all the time being like, my kid has a fever. What medication do I give them? My child stubbed
their toe. What do I do? My door and my car won't open, right? Like you don't want that, right? You
want your kid to actually be able to do the things that they need to do. And so I feel like this is
often lost because we're like, you know, as parents, we have a lot of responsibilities and we're
constantly running around trying to do the right thing for our children. So this is not me making
fun of parents by any stretch of the imagination. And also I'm guilty of some of these things. So
I'm not saying that I'm perfect by any regard in any of this stuff. But I also like, it's kind of
the same thing with Bitcoin. Like, do you have a long term focus on your children or a short
term focus, right? Sometimes you're going to have a short term focus because you need to get your
child somewhere. And therefore, whatever you need to do to get your child to that place is what you're
going to do, right? And then every other time, right, maybe we can have a little longer term
focus on like, what's important, like a resilient child, like a well adjusted child, a child who
can deal with, you know, a wide range of emotions, a child who like has some street smarts, right,
who isn't just book smart, who like can use their intuition to sort of to gauge what's going on in
the world. A child who's helpful, right, doesn't only think about themselves, but who thinks about
other people. And like, that's really hard for children, right? I mean, it's really hard for
basically anybody until they become a parent to think about anything beside themselves. So like,
I think, like teaching children to be kind to others and to look for kindness that they can do
in different places, right? These are all going to create somebody who has values. And then,
as they're getting older, if you couple on top of that, like we have family meetings where we
talk about our family values, where we discuss maybe budgets for things, right? You don't have to
like reveal to your kids your net worth and all your Bitcoin and what you're spending on everything
will think break, but maybe you can reveal something small, like this is the family's
entertainment budget. How should we spend it? This is what like we have, you know, we have the
opportunity to go on a vacation this year. Like we have this amount of money that we can spend.
We were thinking about these two places, right? Like maybe narrow it down so your kids not like,
you know, some crazy place out there, right? Which do you think would be better? Or like,
you already picked the place, maybe they can help pick some of the activities within like the
structure of a budget, right? So that they're thinking like, you know, resources aren't infinite
in here. And I think that this is especially hard for parents who actually do have the infinite
resources, right? Like if you're in a position where you've been stacking Bitcoin for a really
long time, and now you really do have all the money to spend, and you can just, you know, do
whatever, right? It doesn't mean you should because if you do that with your kids, they're not
actually going to learn anything. They're going to grow up like that term, the silver spoon in
their mouth, right? Like, and we have so many examples of this through history. Like I think
particularly like the Persian empire comes to mind because it's like they were scrappy, right?
And then like they established themselves and then they were just totally decadent and ridiculous
to the point where like, you know, they became basically irrelevant, right? And so like, that's
not what people want for their families at the end of the day. You don't want to be scrappy and then
they're irrelevant, right? Like you want to make a difference. That's why we're here. We're here to
make the world a better place. So like figure out how you can do that and pass that on to the next
generation. Amen. It's really like trying to, at a local family level, trying to break out of the
cycle of, you know, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard
times. Like you kind of want to see if you can, okay, maybe we won't stop that for all of society,
but can we stop that in our own family unit in this locus of our own control that we actually have
some say over what happens? Like how can we instill those values that you create, you know,
another generation of strong men and women? Like that's, that's the, that's the goal, right? And
hopefully teach them well enough and help them to learn well enough that they are inquisitive and
have the same desire to do that for their own offspring down the line. I think that's honestly
like it's really great advice and especially the part about not trying not to do everything for your
kids because I now get the temptation, right? And our little guy is just kind of walking now.
You know, he's not, he's babbling a lot, not really speaking yet, but I'm like,
once he, once he starts really being able to ask for things like, okay, then, then,
then you really got to be kind of careful with how you deal with that, right? You know,
can't give him everything because then they'll think that they can get everything without
working for it. And it's like, that's the, I think that's going to be the trap that is easy to fall
into for a lot of Bitcoiners is like, the kids won't necessarily know how much you sacrificed,
how hard you worked, you know, the different choices that you made to be able to give them
the life that you're giving them and that they are accustomed to, unless you show them and
continue to embody that. And I think that's the, then, you know, that's the rub right there.
Yeah, for sure. And like to add one more thing about being a parent, like, of course,
you're going to do everything better than your child, you know, like you're an adult and they're
a tiny human. Like, yeah, it's way easier for you to just do it, right? Like the reason why I bake
with my kids is not because they're actually going to help me. I, of course, I call them mommy's
little helper and it's so good. I couldn't make this cake without you, right? Like, no, I could have
made this cake 10 hundred years ago if I didn't have you here, right? Like, that's not why we do
it together. We did. And also it's going to taste better if I do it on my own, right? Because I'm
actually going to measure properly. It's not why we do it though, right? You do it so you can give
them skills and that they can eventually do it as well as you can. And it's the same thing with
finances. And I feel like a lot of people, because they feel uneasy about their own financial skills,
right? They're like, well, how can I possibly teach that to the next generation? And it's like,
okay, if you're feeling uneasy, like, find some time, I know it's limited when you are a parent,
but find some time to build some confidence to figure out like how you can, like how you can
embody that so that your child understands that. Because if you feel unconfident about it,
children sense that. And they're of course going to feel that lack of confidence as well.
Yeah. Well said. I want to switch gears a tiny bit. Because I wanted, I think this is a,
the way that you break things down, I think is really helpful for for Bitcoiners. I think it's
also extremely helpful for people who are coming into, you know, maybe they've just started looking
at Bitcoin because the Larry thinks the world has started talking about it. They're starting to think,
maybe this is something I've been ignoring for years, because the mainstream media kept telling
me it was dead again and again, and it's a Ponzi scheme and all these other things. Now I'm starting
to pay attention to it. Or, or maybe I'm still on the fence about it. But, you know, we've addressed
a lot kind of the, the Bitcoiners in the room, let's say, and I know a lot of your clients are
now coming in as Bitcoiners, but, you know, not all of your clients were always that way.
So how do you talk to people, whether they be clients, you know, friends, family, whatever it
may be, people in general, who are not yet, there's still no coiners, or I should say they're
pre-coiners. Pre-coiners is a more inclusive term, perhaps. It's there, you know, they're not no
coiners, they're just, they're just pre-coiners. They're not there yet. How do you talk to people
about really the, what Bitcoin kind of means to you, what it can, you know, mean for the family,
for the individual? How do you actually start with that when somebody is coming with all of this
let's say intellectual baggage from the fiat world, all these misconceptions, thanks in no small part
to the media, how do you begin to show them like this is something that needs to be a foundational
part of how you set your life up going forward? Yeah, that's a really great question. Well,
it does start with whether or not that person has an open mind, because as we know, if somebody's
mind is closed off, it doesn't matter what you say to them, you can throw a hundred million
facts at them, you can show them proof, you could literally bring evidence of all certain kinds,
right? And if people don't want to hear it, they will make up whatever story in their mind
to tell them that you are not correct. And so what I say when people ask me about that with
in regards to orange pilling, I always say that if somebody has their mind closed,
you're wasting your time, like just move on, because the only thing that's going to happen
from that is you're going to shout into a void, you're going to get angry, and you're going to
leave not having changed anyone's mind and also feeling kind of sorry for yourself that you
spent your time that way, right? Even if you don't admit that. And so, and I've been there, right?
Like, I've actually done that, right? And that's how I've come to the conclusion that somebody
with their mind closed don't even bother. Somebody with their mind open, though, is a completely
different story, right? And so from there, you have to gauge, okay, what is this person's level
of understanding of just the monetary system, right? Is it nothing in which case, like, we kind
of have to start with the basics of what is money and why we use it and why, you know, why it became
something that was part of, let's say, governments helping people use money, right? And so forth,
versus like individuals having their own money, border versus, right, coins and so forth. Do you
need to go that far back for some people? Or could you just, you know, kind of start with where we
are of like, Hey, we live in an age where governments are leading you out of your money, it's very
obvious you go to the store, you have to pay $10 for eggs, right? I feel like it's actually a lot
easier of a story right now of like, just go to the store, didn't you used to spend $100 and now
you spend $200 on the same thing that box of pasta you bought has three quarters less than it used
to have in it, right? Like, you know, I mean, just things like that where it's like, it's obvious to
people like something is going on, like you said earlier, that there was a shift after all this
money was printed during COVID. And so I feel like a lot more people's minds are open as a result of
that and that you can actually engage in like real conversation with somebody. And at least having
them understand why they would want to have long term savings and what long term savings is because
we've never had anything like long term savings before versus just having short term savings
and investments. Because people think that investment is synonymous with long term savings,
and it simply is not investments are exactly what they sound, right? You're either buying a bond or
stock, right? Or some sort of alternative investment that packages up bonds and stocks in a different
way with some sort of derivative element to it. And you're taking a risk, not only in, let's say,
the company, but also the type of instrument that it is, right? So if it's a stock, you're taking
a risk that the money that you're giving to this company, right, that they're not only going to
grow their revenues and that they're going to make sure that their expenses don't get too bloated,
and that they're going to like have net income and they're not going to dilute your stock out,
right? There's all sorts of things. And that you also have counterparty risk because you store it
at a custodian, right? There's all these extra things that happen when you're an investment
instrument versus just owning money. And people don't think about that because they don't think
about any of those things, right? They just said, oh, somebody said buy the S&P 500. So that's my
savings account, right? And people also don't think about this in terms of their money, right?
Because the second we store our money in the bank, right, all of a sudden we also have a whole
slew of risks because the bank is lending our money out, right? And like, our money's not really
our money anymore. It's actually receivable and it might not actually be there if they said made
too many bad loans, right? There's a whole other thing. And so again, like, you have to gauge
the amount of information that you could throw at somebody when you're having these conversations
to help them get on their way. And for some people, right, like a little bit of information is going
to be enough for them to be like, you know, I'm going to go home and buy a little bit of Bitcoin.
And that's generally where it starts. Like, I feel like people sometimes feel defeated because
they're like, well, I said all of this and then they didn't, you know, transfer 100% of their wealth
in the bank. It's like, no, no, no, like, they need time, like, let them just go and buy some and see
how it works and feel good about it. And then like generally the price, like, especially when the
price goes up, people are like, oh, I should have bought more of that, right? Like people are very
affected by the price. I think it's the other thing. Telling people in a bear market to buy Bitcoin,
even though it is the right time for people to buy Bitcoin is actually like, it's counterintuitive,
but it's usually the wrong time to tell people to buy Bitcoin, even though, like from a fiduciary
standpoint, it's the right time. So that's my long way of telling you that I guess it depends.
Yeah, no, it's, it's, I agree with you. And it's, it's something where I think Bitcoiners,
again, seem to have some short term memory loss because it's easy for us to forget. And I'll
include myself in this. I try to lead with empathy with people when I'm talking to them, because
they're people that I care about. And I'm, why am I telling them about Bitcoin? Because I believe
it is something that is going to help them and help them have a better life. Like that, that's
why I'm not trying to, I'm not selling them an altcoin, you know, no, I'm just telling them to
save in Bitcoin. But we often forget that like, we were all in that place at one point, ever, you
know, nobody except Satoshi, like nobody was there right from the start, right? You got into it at
some point, either because you maybe you, maybe you listen to a podcast, maybe you talk to a friend,
maybe you saw somebody on Bitcoin Twitter, doesn't matter, but you didn't go most, maybe I shouldn't
say, I should say the vast majority of people did not go all in gung-ho balls to the wall from the
instant that they heard about Bitcoin. If you did amazing, congratulations, you are a unicorn.
Most of us did not. And so it's, it's important to remember that. I think when we're having these
conversations with people, especially loved ones, because you don't want there to somehow, you know,
to, to sour the mood, to have there be bad blood. You also don't want to avoid a small conflict,
just for the sake of avoiding conflict, when you know this is something that can really help them.
So it's like, it's kind of trying to balance that thing like, hey, I love you. You know,
I'm not a complete idiot. This is the thing that I really care about. Let's talk about this. And
one of the things I always do is just like, what questions do you have? Like what don't, what's
difficult to understand about this? Because you often find that they ask really just kind of like
a lot of very boiler point questions that basically any Bitcoin or who has spent a little bit of time
researching can answer pretty comfortably. But if you try to just pound them with all the information,
you know, well, let's go back to the song dynasty. And, and for, you know, it's like that doesn't
always go over super well. Like you have to, you know, let them talk a little bit more, let them
work through some of their own problems. But, you know, we're at this point where, yeah, Bitcoin has
dipped today, but it's still at a, you know, what seems like a ridiculously high number for a lot of
people. That's a lot of money. But it's like, you know, you can still get, well, now to your earlier
example from your, your tweet, you can get over a thousand sat over over a million sets, excuse me,
for a thousand bucks. So like, wow, you can, you can be over a sat millionaire now with a pretty
decent price tag. So that's a, that's a good thing. Yeah, definitely. I think I couldn't agree with
you more. I think especially with loved ones, and I particularly what comes to mind is when
spouses don't agree. Like I get, you know, I get people reaching out to me all the time being like,
well, how do I, how, like, how do I get my wife to think about this the way you do? You know, and
it's like, okay, at first of all, you shouldn't compare your wife to me at all, right? Like,
at all. Second of all, like, how are you communicating with your wife? And then, you know,
you hear the whole thing, well, I like, you know, basically beat her over the head with Bitcoin
every single night. And you're like, do you think that that's like, if somebody did that to you,
it's something that you didn't want to hear about, like, whatever it is, you know, just like pick a
topic that your wife talks about quite a lot that you hate, you know, and then she every day was like,
you know, like the curtains, I need to change the curtains, I need to change the curtains,
and you're just like, I want to, I never want to change the curtains. In fact, I'm going to rip
them down and we're never going to have like, I'm like, that's what people are going to, that's
what people do when you like berate them. So like, would you have a conversation, you know, with somebody,
like, if you're married to this person, you obviously love them, you're obviously on the same
team as them, like, you want to do it, like you want to spend your life together, like, that's why
you got married, right? If that's not how you feel, then maybe you shouldn't have made that decision,
right? And now you have other things that you need to work out. But presumably, right, you're
married because you love each other and you want to have a life together for a long period of time.
And so, like, again, like Bitcoin is a long term asset, like, there's not a rush, like,
you can take your time talking, like, and listening to your wife's concerns, and hearing her questions.
You don't have to like beat her into, and I use that like, obviously.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Do not actually hurt your wife in any way.
Yeah, please. But you know, like, you can, you can have real conversations with your spouse and
hear what is, why they don't want to do it, right? Because at the end of the day, right, like,
think, she'll thank me later is what I hear a lot. And I don't know, maybe she won't, right?
Like, maybe she'll just be so miserable, even though you have a lot of wealth, like, sometimes
money's not everything. Right. And I feel like we get lost in that in the Bitcoin world because
we're like, we want to stack as much as possible because we know what we own and we want to have
as much as we can because we're going to be couldrillionaires, we're going to do whatever we want,
you know, and we're never going to have to worry about money again. But it's like, is that really
what your life is all about? Like, you know, like, how much money do people really need?
You know, does everybody need to have a private jet to feel happy? Or like, are we in this weird
fiat mindset where we just need more and more and more and more and more? And we think that that's
actually what's going to make us happy when really at the end of the day, what really does
make us happy is connections with others. And, you know, like meaningful things, helping others,
changing the world, like speaking about truths, right? These are all things that people can
actually connect on and feel good about and feel like their life is being lived with meaning and
purpose, not just, you know, I own all the things and I could take a trip whenever I want. And,
you know, my wife will thank me later. Amen to that. And I think I would echo that that that's
something that Bitcoiners, especially where it's like, you know, you don't need to,
it's like right now, I just won't own anything. I won't allow myself to have any enjoyment in life
because I'm just stacking as hard as I can. And I'm, you know, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna delay
the gratification forever. And then once I get there, I'm gonna do something or I'm gonna buy all
the, I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I'm gonna do something. And it's like, people forget that,
like, when it comes down to it, nobody actually wants money. Like, you don't want money. You want
what money gets you, right? It's like, you want what you can exchange that money for, whether
that be, you know, the more freedom over your time, whether that be more freedom over where you live,
more freedom in how you, you know, interact with your family, whatever it may be, you want what
money can afford you. But you don't actually want the money, like the money is a tool. And I think
people get kind of lost in the lost in translation a little bit there, sometimes between that,
you know, digital monetary world of Bitcoin and the real world of like, the point of your life is
not to accumulate as much money as possible. The point of your life is to live it. And as you said,
build connections and, you know, take care of your loved ones and make amazing memories and do things
that bring you joy and that bring value to the world, hopefully money is a tool to help you do
that. But it's not the end all be all in and of itself. And I think people, it's very easy to get
lost in that, but it's something that I think I'm glad you brought it up because it's, it bears
repeating again and again for people like it's okay to live your life. And in fact, that's what
you should be doing. And if you can do that, you know, in a way that's not less stressful, because
you have yourself and your family set up well, great, you should strive for that. But like,
don't sacrifice your life at the expense of just blind accumulation, if that makes sense.
Totally. I couldn't agree more. There's a saying and I don't, I wish I could remember who said it,
it's not mine. So I don't want to take credit that money makes you more of who you are.
And it's, I think that people often think, well, when I have X amount of dollars or X amount of
Bitcoin, I'm going to be, you know, I'm going to finally be who I'm supposed to be because
I'll have the money to do all the things that I want to do. And that's generally not what people
see, right? Like if like what we were talking about earlier, those values aren't there. If like,
the, you haven't quite figured out what gives your life meaning and purpose. If you haven't
really, you know, made those connections with your family or started a family or whatever,
you're right, like whatever will actually make your life what it's supposed to be.
You haven't done all those things and then you get extremely wealthy. You're just going to be more
of the person that you already were, or already are, right? And so like, we, we need to focus on how
we can grow as human beings, right? Not just how we can grow our Bitcoin stack, because like,
otherwise what does it like, what are we doing this all for? Right? It's all like the whole reason
why we're here is for personal growth. And the only person that you can change is yourself, right?
And if you spend time changing yourself, and I don't mean it in the way of like, you know,
the Eat, Pray, Love, like way of like, me, me, me, everything's about me, right? I don't mean it like
that. I mean like personal growth so that you can go and bring the best of you to the world,
right? Not so that like you can personally grow and, you know, do yoga and think about yourself
all day, right? That's, that's not what I mean here. And in fact, if that's what you're doing,
and then you get more money, you're only going to do more of that, right? And so, and that's fine,
if that's the life you want to live, fine. But I don't think like, I wouldn't call that a meaningful
life. And I don't think that even a person who did that would call that a meaningful life. And
there's thousands and thousands of stories of people on their deathbed. And when people ask
them what they regret, it's never that they spent more time working on themselves, like their whole
life could be more about me, me, me, me, me. It's never that they wish that they had made more money.
It's never that they wish they took more meetings at work, right? It's always,
I should have spent more time with my spouse. I should have spent more time with my kids.
I should have made like saved more so that I could have been a stay at home,
grandparent, right? Like you hear all of these stories are like, you know, I always wanted
to help my community in this way or another, but instead I, you know, I didn't. And so,
like the things that are important, we often set aside because of the things that are shiny.
And like we can, we can stop this now, right? The way we stop this is we think about our lives
and we think about what's actually important to us. And we think about, okay, what would we regret,
right? If we were in that situation. And I actually, one of the life planning questions that I really
like, it's one of my favorite things to ask clients. We do these life planning sessions and
they take place over three different meetings. And in the second meeting, I think the most profound
question is imagine like you had five to 10 years left to live. You got this, you know,
horrible news from your doctor, you have this terminal illness, and you would have five to
10 years left to live. Like you go home from that and you think, how like, how can I change my life?
What would I do differently? How like, what, what would change? And clients answer, right? And they
take a lot of time to answer these things. And then we discuss it. And then like we use that
really as a jumping off point for how we can make changes in their financial plan. And the reason I
like this question is not because people are going to die in five to 10 years, some people are obviously.
But because every time period in your life is basically that, right? Like you have five to 10
years with young kids, right? You have five to 10 years when they're adolescent kids, you have
five to 10 years when they're in their college age and they're getting married and they're doing
those things, right? Like you have five to 10 years at the beginning of your working career,
you have another five to 10 years where you're starting to, right? There's all sorts of these
five to 10 year periods of time where this is happening to right now. You don't have a terminal
illness, but that five to 10 year period is going to end because that's just a phase in your life
and that's how it is. So how are you going to make the most of the next five to 10 years,
which is long-term thinking, right? Like we have a hard time thinking beyond maybe six months,
right? For most people. And so even though five to 10 years is not like the 40 year plan,
this is not multi-generational wealth though, but you can make significant changes in your life
if you think about, okay, how can I really prioritize what's important in the next five to
10 years so that like I'm doing what I need to be doing here? I honestly love that question
and the framing of it. I think that's, it makes me want to go hang out with my kid right now.
And I think that's like, that's a really beautiful way to phrase that. And I don't know if we can
top that after this. And I've already kept you quite a long time, Morgan, but I just want to
thank you. This was really enjoyable. I think people are going to get a ton of value out of this.
Where do you want to send people if they're, you know, let's say that they're interested in
bringing on a Bitcoin financial planner like yourself, where can they find you? Where can
they get more information? Let them know where to go. Yeah, I wanted to thank you as well,
Walker. This is really, I had a great time as well. And I really felt like we had enough time to
actually deeply discuss things or sometimes podcast can be rushed. So thank you for that.
I hate rushing. So, and I knew that you were going to have a lot to dig into and I was excited for
it. So thank you for that. You can find me at Twitter. I'm at Morgan with an E, Roshard. My
parents spilled my name wrong. I know. You can also find my financial planning firm, which is
Origin Wealth Advisors. It's originwa.com. I also do Bitcoin consulting at moneyowners.com.
And Pierre and I have a podcast. It's called Bitcoin for Advisors. We try to get those out monthly.
We actually, we just recorded one, but I don't know if we released it. So that's his job. So if
you want to send hate mail, send it that way. And yeah, if I'm not the right fit, there's other
Bitcoin financial advisors out there. We have the Bitcoin Financial Advisors Network. I'm one of,
I think, eight on there. So, you know, if it's, I'm no offense, I just want people to get the
help they need. So please, like, if you think like, okay, if she's a little nuts, but like,
maybe somebody else on there can actually help me, please go there. We'd rather you get the
help than nothing at all. So yeah. That's, that's awesome. And really, I want to thank you for
coming on here. I think that this kind of, this, these kind of discussions are really important
because it's really easy for people to get. And that's where their attention goes, usually, is to
the NGU, Moon Boy, Hopium price talks. And it's like, that's all well and good. But that doesn't
actually help you change anything about how your life is going. And that's why I, you know,
a lot of that is, and I'm drawn into it as well. It's, it's always, you know, enjoyable. It's,
you know, intoxicating to get that hit of Hopium, right? But these are the conversations, I think,
that are really valuable for people because I hope that somebody, you know, listening to this,
either talks to you or, you know, decides to make some small changes in their life and realizes that
those small changes snowball and it can lead to something a lot better. So I want to thank you
again more. And this was a blast having you. We'll have to do this again, because I, I know I have
more questions. So, and I'm sure you're the person to answer them. I'd be happy to come on again.
Thanks so much. And yeah, like you, I hope that even if nobody becomes a client or anything like
that, that's definitely not why I go on these things. If anybody makes one change, I'd be like,
thank God, I did it. I did something good. So if you do make a change as a result of this podcast,
be sure to let me know in six months. I, I, I'm going to remind people to hit you up. But
thank you so much. Now, I think we'll both probably go and spend some time with our families. So
cheers to you best of your family and thanks again for your time. You too.
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