Bitcoin for Family Offices: Why No Position Is Now a Position | Richard C. Wilson x Eric Runge

0:03Hello everybody, Richard Wilson here at the Family Office Club. I have with me here today Eric Runge, who is an active member of our club. You might have seen him as one of the more active participants at one of our workshops or boot camps or summits. Probably more than anyone else I can think of. He's really focused on Bitcoin and strategies around that, institutional frameworks, how family offices can think about it. He's a published author in the space. And also more than most people in our club, he actually takes big action on what we know works with family offices and has worked for us in building family office clubs.

0:43So it's always great to see him at our events and have him as part of the community. And this is a topic that comes up often. In fact, just last week, we had a$1.5 billion trust company on a call asking who in our community specializes in this exact area. And we're making a connection between that trust company and Eric in real time right now because it is so relevant. So welcome here to the podcast, Eric. Appreciate you being here. Thank you, Richard. Pleasure to be here. Awesome. So why don't you introduce yourself just a little bit about your background, what you do at Veritas Bitcoin Strategies.

1:18and kind of what makes that unique. Yeah, thank you. So I'm a third generation Oregonian and I've been in the financial planning business for 21 years, sort of the retail side for, I don't know, 17, 18 years, opened an RIA and then ultimately transitioned that over to a Bitcoin focused, Bitcoin central RIA. We offer other strategies and things, but really at some point I realized all I really want to do is talk about Bitcoin with people. It's my passion, the monetary thesis behind it, the cultural implications. There's just so much to talk about. And it's such an interesting asset that you can just you can talk about it for years and never repeat yourself.

2:02Right. Totally. Totally agree. You know, a lot of family offices have zero Bitcoin right now, but compared to three to four or five years ago, it comes up very often. So if somebody does have zero Bitcoin still, you argue that that's actually not a neutral take on the space. I've heard you say something like that at our events before. So what do you mean by that? Yeah, it's like 10 years ago, you could ignore Bitcoin and you would reasonably have been neutral. But given what Bitcoin was designed to do, which was to be a competing asset with basically the whole world's history of monetary assets, the U.S.

2:48dollar, gold, fiat currency, Bitcoin was introduced alongside of that as something to compete with that asset class. And so given how much adoption has come along and you have companies like Fidelity saying that no position is a position essentially, or pension funds are going to actually need to have a written justification for why they don't have Bitcoin. Now, that's not to say that everybody should own Bitcoin, but it's to say that, hey, if this asset is coming into its own as an asset that does need to be considered because of its risk return profile, whatever allocation is less relevant than the fact that we don't just sort of ignore it.

3:32And it's getting to the point where there just is not any neutrality left. No position becomes a position. Sure. Sure. And what in terms of looking around at peer family offices, how do you think that that is changing the outlook on Bitcoin? Because like a growing percentage of family offices have allocated, but some of those who have the most formalized family offices might be more conservative, while some new forms of wealth or new wealth creation, maybe or maybe not, they have a formal family office and they've invested in Bitcoin. I mean, how do you say that playing into the conversations that you have with people in the industry?

4:07Yeah, what I see is encouraging because even though the amount of families that own Bitcoin is still relatively very small, we're like really early to the game, as it were. The percentage rate at which that is trending and increasing is very, very encouraging. Even when I started coming to Family Office Club events a year and a half ago, like nobody was talking about it except maybe one guy who I can think of. now it's more of an open part of the conversation. I think families would do well, given that families' number one concern is to preserve assets. They don't want to lose it. They'd rather not lose it than double it.

4:50That can be a hindrance when we're discussing a new category of thought and a new asset class like Bitcoin, because Bitcoin won't just come by way of consensus. If by the time consensus hits, it'll be too late. We're skating to the puck after everybody already hit it. That's not to say that would be a horrible decision, but Bitcoin is the type of asset that requires its own study. And you have to stand in your own understanding of what it is and what you understand it to be and be willing, in my experience, to be the only guy in the room who's willing to say that, sort of be wrong, as it were, when everybody else disagrees with you.

5:26Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. The psychological challenge of realizing that sometimes some investments you do, which others will look at as risky, maybe the best investments you do and some investments you do, which others think are so safe because everyone's doing it, by that definition may hold a lot of risk because like everyone's doing it. So those Airbnb properties are like propped up in value or whatever it is, right? It's like, it's a really challenging psychological thing for a lot of even sophisticated dedicated centimillionaires get their arms around. And like, I guess related to that, like, how are your clients categorizing Bitcoin?

6:04Like what type of an asset class are they putting this in or grouping it with? And how do you see that playing out? My hope is that by the time they become my clients, that I have helped them to understand what Bitcoin is such that they categorize it properly. But that remains a challenge. It's mostly when I'm speaking to just regular folks, family offices. People tend to think of it in one of a small handful of ways, either an equity or like an emerging tech product or just a cryptocurrency. You could write a book about all three of those, but I think it's a category mistake to think of it. And this is the problem is if there's no clean category to fit Bitcoin into, the human mind seems to be built, myself included, we'll just put it into what seems the most familiar and what is the best fit.

6:56But the problem with that is that we end up sort of mischaracterizing the asset or misunderstanding it, even if we're only slightly misreading it. Like, for example, if we're thinking of Bitcoin as an emerging tech product, then the natural question is to say, well, then what's the next best Bitcoin that comes along? And so there's a presupposition embedded within the question that is wrong to begin with. The question is not what's the next best Bitcoin. The question is, is Bitcoin doing the job that it was designed to do? So like, for example, there have been other competitors to Bitcoin, like Bitcoin Cash, for example.

7:36And ultimately, and they were trying to make an improvement on Bitcoin itself. Ultimately, the market, all the holders of Bitcoin who voted with their feet, voted not to put their assets into Bitcoin Cash, and it basically collapsed. And so it's a question of like, what is the new asset improving upon? Is that something that does need improvement? Or is that proposed solution actually more problematic? And the only way to figure that out is that the market eventually figures it out. Bitcoin is ultimately a very, very free market asset. Right, right. Got it. But, you know, one thing that bugs me about the Bitcoin space is all of these like non-Bitcoin holding ETFs.

8:21And it just bugs me because it's like all these people are quote unquote getting in on Bitcoin. But it's really like not holding direct Bitcoin. It's tracking the price of Bitcoin. And if it wasn't for that annoyance, it's like I know the price of Bitcoin would be higher because like all this demand has been like captured but not really put into Bitcoin. so that just might be just a annoying fact of how wall street structured their products and nothing we can do about it i still think long term it's a hedge against the inevitability of inflation and falling value of u.s dollar and other currencies etc uh would you disagree with anything i just said or any comment on that because it kind of is what it is on some level in my mind but you think about this like all day long all the time and talk to folks about this Yeah, it's a really good question because from a purist point of view, and I'm definitely a purist and even an ideologue on it.

9:11Yeah, on-chain Bitcoin, owning actual real true Bitcoin really is the purest position. And it's the only way to participate in an alternative system. Because it's not denominated in US dollars. It's denominated in Bitcoin at the end of the day. Right. But this is like where the rubber meets the road for me. is that I still think that holding an ETF can be good in terms of overall broader adoption of Bitcoin, even if people are thinking of it like a trading asset and they're selling it and buying it, which I disagree with. But the fact that the ETF has to then go out and buy more Bitcoin means that the supply is sucked up and supply and demand economics kicking all the time.

9:57So I think it can still be good for broader adoption of Bitcoin. But I just try to educate people on, hey, when you hold that ETF, you need to understand it's not bad that you do it. In my view, you just need to know what you are and aren't holding. You're holding a dollar denominated asset versus the sort of real thing. But we sell ETF Bitcoin portfolios as well because we're trying to beat market demand. Right, right. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, sometimes I mentioned our events, you know, So like basically inflation is basic, like the printing of government money is a hidden tax that most people don't realize.

10:31And it's taxing the poor the most because they don't own assets. And so their assets don't rise in value when inflation happens. They just make less money while eggs and milk cost more. So it is the opposite of, you know, staged up taxation on the ultra wealthy, the printing of money. ironically the people who usually want to raise taxes also want to print the most money but when you do both it ends up harming the poor way more because there's all these loopholes to avoid taxes for wealthy business folks that can afford those advisors but the poor just gets slammed by inflation and they might not get slammed by the taxation but there's no way to jimmy rig your way around the inflation really for the poor because they usually don't have a meaningful allocation to something like Bitcoin or like other assets.

11:26That's not so much a question, just something that kind of breaks my brain a little bit of just kind of like how obvious that is now after running this investor club for 20 years, that that is just seemingly a fact on planet Earth. And does that that plays into a little bit why you like Bitcoin or any comments on what I said? Yes, it really does. It does at a really deep level because I don't love Bitcoin just because of the asset itself. But because of the deep cultural impacts that the fiat system has on the poorest and call it the least advantaged among us. I hate a system where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, not because I hate the rich, but because I want everybody to have equal opportunity to rise up.

12:09And I think Bitcoin does allow for that for the poorest among us. But a few years back, I was here in Oregon. We have a gas tax and it's printed right on the gas pump. And I can't remember what it was, 18 cents a gallon. And I just got to thinking about that going, if I'm making 20 ,000 a year, 18 cents a gallon is a much bigger percentage of my income than if I'm making 120 ,000. And so that one tax hammers the poor way worse than it hammers the rich. And I thought that's really unjust. And so I don't like the injustice, the injustice of the fiat system. And that's why I actually think Bitcoin is an impact investment in that way.

12:49That's not what impact generally tends to mean. But because Bitcoin empowers people who are really poor, I just that's why I see it. I see it helping people rise up. right yeah for sure interesting um that's that's like one of those topics that could be like the whole topic of the the whole podcast interview so yeah absolutely if you if you ever go to what wtf happened in 1971.com it shows a whole series of unrelated graphs that show what happened in 1971 and one of the things that really hit my attention two of them was the divergence between black-white income equality changed dramatically after 71 when Nixon took us off the gold standard.

13:32And then single parents with children in poverty, those numbers started to rise dramatically after we left the gold standard. And I started to realize, man, this has a lot of implications for our culture. So yeah. Right. Yeah, for sure. For sure. It does. Super interesting stuff and and things I think, you know, I want to educate my kids on and have them be aware of such things and be thinking about such things from an early age for many reasons. So, OK, I got a couple more questions I wanted to get through here before I run out of time. So if somebody is looking to really hold Bitcoin for generations, do you suggest that they really kind of look for like a trigger price to get in or out or a certain type of return?

14:19Or since you're kind of like, you know, thinking about Bitcoin all the time and you mentioned earlier, you don't recommend like buying and selling unless you're like a trader from Wall Street and that's how you made your money perhaps or something and you're as good at that for some percentage of your allocation. Are you just saying like buy it and just never sell it and it's that simple? Or how do you think about it? Yeah, and as an RIA, I need to be careful in making a blanket recommendation to listeners. So none of this is advice to somebody that, hey, you should or shouldn't do this. But from a thesis point of view, I think Bitcoin is best purchased at today's price.

14:57And if today somebody listening to this podcast 10 years, I would purchase it at today's price. That's not because I'm trying to get the best price, but it's because once I understand the characteristics and nature of this asset and that it is designed to be a sort of competing asset with the monetary system that the world has only known for the past 5 ,000 to 6 ,000 years, it becomes something that, yeah, you want to hold on to and pass to your kids for the next several generations. And I should elaborate a little bit on that. So all currencies in the past and stores of value have been able to some degree to be manipulated.

15:44manipulated. So if an island, a particular island, use seashells as their currency and islands have in the past, and then a sailor comes in and he's found a supply of those seashells from another another island, he can double the currency and bankrupt the island. That in some way or another has been the problem of money for the past five to six thousand years. So when we see Bitcoin as an absolute fixed supply asset designed to counter those effects, it's not about what the price of Bitcoin in dollars or yen or euros is today. It's about, is this asset valuable for what it's designed to do? I want to buy it.

16:24And for me personally, I want to buy as much as I can, because what I think that the thing is and what it's trying to do. Right. Got it. Makes sense. And then there's many use cases or reasons for owning Bitcoin as an allocation, I would think. So like what do your clients focus on or what do you think is the number one justification or use case for Bitcoin? How do you view that when you sit down with somebody for a short meeting? Well, it's kind of like there's no single justification in terms of a use case to own Bitcoin. Bitcoin as a treasury asset, like what Michael Saylor and Strategy do, like any single individual use case can be written off as sort of idiosyncratic.

17:11But when we look at the broad trend line and the adoption line of it, and we take all of those cases together, I think the case becomes more compelling. But we do need to break down each of the individual use cases to see, hey, is this actually legitimate? So one case is payment rails. A family office a couple of months ago mentioned, yeah, I studied Bitcoin, but it's and it was supposed to be this great currency, but that's failed. So, you know, dismiss. And so I got to thinking about that. And I thought, so I did even more study and I realized, okay, so Bitcoin is a 16 year old asset. No currency in the history of the world has ever gotten up and running in 16 years.

17:53The US dollar took like a hundred years to get up and going. And then as I continued researching it, I realized, so do you know the payment app Square? Yep. Okay. There's like 4 million merchants, I think nationwide on Square. Jack Dorsey, who runs Block that owns Square, just rolled out, I think it was May of this year, that by default, all merchants can accept Square or all merchants who have Square can accept Bitcoin as payment. Wow. So the payment rails are currently being built. Now, the significant thing about that is somebody who pays in Bitcoin helps the merchant because it bypasses the bank fees.

18:32And bank fees can eat up margins for an already thin margin business. So that's one use case for it. Another use case is a store of value. I think it depends on what every individual family finds compelling. But what I try to do is paint the broad picture of what is this thing? What is it designed to do? And oh, by the way, how is it being implemented in real time in human history? And that's where you get the use case justification. Right. Yeah, totally. Interesting. So what about when someone does decide to invest in Bitcoin? Like what are the, I guess, structural decisions that they would actually determine?

19:12And like what what structural decision frameworks or like forks in the road are there that are most important for them to know up front? yeah it's i think if like if i were advising a family on they want to do this i would say let's go slow and be careful um so we need to write the thesis first or maybe do our study first let's start with 10 hours of study let's push it to 100 and i would i would just hold their hand through that and help them do the study because i've done it and i know what's important but write the thesis first. Talk about our IPS, what our risk tolerance is. Sizing, we need to think about that, is based on what you're protecting against, not necessarily on what other families own, for example.

19:58Then we want to, and so just a step-by-step process, then we want to think about the vehicle. Do we want to own an ETF or do we want to own on-chain, downside risk-protected ETFs, or maybe a mix? We have to sort of determine that. Then we need to think about, are we going to buy this through Coinbase, Binance, non-KYC cold storage? Are we going to buy it off a guy in the street? All these are options. Then we need to talk. So you can see where I'm getting at is you just need to give it the same weight that we do any other purchase decision, run it through the estate attorney, make sure that our trust documents are set.

20:32Those are all the really important decisions. And then find the unknown unknowns, which that's hard because we can't see the back of our head. But that's where, you know, you need a Bitcoin advisor. It's an asset class that does not, it rewards study and it punishes whatever the opposite of study is. Sure, yeah, interesting. Yeah, I think it's, if you look online, I would encourage anyone to look at statistics online of out of everyone who's ever invested in Bitcoin or everyone who holds Bitcoin from best estimates, how many of those people hold even one Bitcoin? you know what percentage of folks hold five bitcoins um and that's super interesting to look at i think i'll be surprised by looking at the answers most people have a small sliver of one and the most important thing i think for people to realize is that the supply is limited so i'm not here to sell anyone bitcoin like i have some but like i'm not an affiliate of erics i don't get a commission.

21:34I don't get a kickback. I don't believe he's a sponsor at any of our events coming up. He is an active member of the club. But there's no incentive here to pump Bitcoin by me, except for someone could say, oh, you hold a little bit, Richard. So of course you want to pump it. But to me, it's just a fascinating area, fascinating topic. And some people get scared by the risk of it, but there's risk in not investing in Bitcoin, which is why it's not a neutral decision and taking risk does not automatically make you money but most of the time to make money beyond the rate of treasuries you need to take some amount of step into uncertainty or have some courage or have some exposure to some future dynamic in the world but a predicted dynamic is that dollars will go down in value it's like you guaranteed lose money if you keep your money in dollars.

22:27And so that's just like a super interesting central premise of the whole space to me that I always come back to. Anything that I should have asked you that's like super interesting or that comes up in these types of interviews that you do or is like a major point in your book that we didn't touch on that you'd want to cover now in this interview before we finish up? I think maybe just one from a sociological point of view is that I think Bitcoin is the type of asset that forces you to stand on your own two feet. I wrote a book called The Cost of Consensus. It's a short novella about a man who is a second gen FO.

23:05He inherited his father's money, but he didn't inherit his father's ability to firmly make a decision even when there's no consensus. And the story is about can he overcome that or not? I think Bitcoin stands in high relief as the type of asset. It won't baby you. There's a difference between being babied and an advisor like me who wants to hold somebody's hand and help them understand what they don't. But Bitcoin in and of itself, it's a grown up asset in the sense like, for example, if you lose your Bitcoin because it was stored badly, your Bitcoin is gone. There's no FDIC insurance. Now that might you're talking about you got to take some risk.

23:46That's a big, scary risk for a lot of people. But the point is, is that it's an asset that we sort of have to grow into is the way that at least it happened for me. I had to start thinking differently. And so I think it just didn't even studying Bitcoin. You learn to think differently when you own it. It helps you to think differently. And you sort of grow into a better, more mature understanding of free market economics, which I think that's very, very useful for the world. Well, thank you, Eric. I agree with all those points there. 100 percent. Great points. and I think that as you mentioned earlier you could talk all day about this and I think that that I could easily as well but I want to keep this nice conversation yeah I want to keep a nice short and sweet for the busiest of our members and investors though and you know if you're an RIA and you're helping your clients try to figure out how to allocate to bitcoin Eric has his RIA in place as well he's from Oregon where I grew up so nicer than the average business person to deal with as well based on that.

24:45And I've gotten to know him pretty well. So I think you'll find him as a helpful expert in the space. What's the name of your book, Eric? And what's the best place for people to find you on LinkedIn or your email address or website, just so it's easy to make a connection after this interview? Yeah, thank you. My book, well, I have two of them. Bitcoin in the Family Office is my first book. My second one is called The Cost of Consensus. You can find them for free at my website, which is familyofficebitcoin.com. So those are free PDF versions of that book. Awesome. Both of those books. Great. And what's the best email address if someone just wants to reach out directly or mobile, whatever you prefer for them to get in touch with you?

25:28Yeah. My email is eric, E-R-I-C at veritaswealth.net. So Veritas, the Latin word for truth, and then wealth.net. That's probably the best way to get me. awesome and I look forward to seeing you at our New York boot camp coming up in just a couple weeks and quite likely I would guess at our Silicon Valley summit and the family office super summit later this year and just so folks know who have never come to our events in person we do a couple dozen in-person mastermind size events like 50 to 75 folks and then we're doing four to five large summits a year, which are 200 to 650 people each, one to three days each.

26:10And all of our events are like 10 a.m. until four or five p.m. So they're easy to come in and out of in Dallas, New York City, Fort Lauderdale, and Los Angeles. And if you liked what Eric had to say, please reach out to him via email there to make a connection. And you'll probably see him at one of our live events. So anything else you want to add, Eric, before we sign off? No, looking forward to the New York event. And I love your events. They're always a lot of fun and high energy. Awesome. See you soon. Thank you for being here. Thanks, Richard.

27:02Family Offices. You can learn more about us and our membership options at familyoffices.com. We have 30 in-person events planned in 2026 and another dozen events this year. Please go to familyoffices.com to learn more.