Good afternoon, everyone. This is Therese Byars speaking, and I'm the Corporate Secretary of FRMO Corp. Thank you for joining us on this call. The statements made on this call apply only as of today. The information on this call should not be construed to be a recommendation to purchase or sell any particular security or investment fund. The opinions referenced on this call today are not intended to be a forecast of future events or a guarantee of future results. It should not be assumed that any of the security transactions referenced today have been or will prove to be profitable, or that future investment decisions will be profitable or will equal or exceed the past performance of the investments. For additional information, you may visit the FRMO Corp website at www.frmocorp.com. Today's discussion will be led by Murray Stahl, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Steven Bregman, President and Chief Financial Officer. They will review key points related to the fiscal 2024 Q3 earnings. And now I'll turn the discussion over to Mr. Stahl. Okay, thank you, Therese, and thank you everybody for joining us. I'll just start off, just make a couple of highlight points that are financials, which I think you'll find interesting, and then I'm going to answer some questions I always get, but I never get them in real time online. I only, I only get them as I encounter people and they ask them, and it's too bad because the answer only goes to one person. I really think I should share it with everyone. So that's what I'm gonna do. So as far as financial statements go, I believe I'm not mistaken, that our shareholders' equity attributable to the company of $219.4 million is the highest we've ever had. And our total assets, which is total liabilities and shareholder equity, of $388 million. I think that's about as high as we ever had. So it's getting to be big sums of money. But what it... these financial statements don't do is, they don't show you detail behind them. So an important detail, and I'll get to some questions about that detail momentarily. An important detail is that we're actually building a crypto business, and we're on the way to becoming a crypto operating company. So the components that, the components of that are, we now own 1,655,000 shares of Winland. And I think that's something like 35% of the shares. We keep filing 10b5-1 plans, and we have one on right now, which is in a quiet period, and I think May first it recommences. So Winland is now largely a crypto miner. We also have a smaller investment in Consensus Mining. Consensus Mining, if everything goes right in a few months, is actually gonna have a listing. And that's also a crypto mining company. We also, if you look at our balance sheet, you'll see about $1.3 million of digital mining assets, so we actually mine for ourselves. And put it all together, it would not be a small cryptocurrency mining company if it weren't diffused into three different pockets. And but the three elements are, generally speaking, getting bigger gradually. We also have, as you can see from our cryptocurrency holding summary, we have a fair amount of cryptocurrency holdings, either directly or indirectly, some in ETFs and some directly. So I'll just speak about what we've been doing in these things and what we've not been doing in these things. So the crypto has been, I dare say, pretty successful. So one question which I get, and it'll require a little bit of a lengthy answer, is the balance sheet cash, which is $38.8 million. Why do you need, as people frequently ask, but never on this call, why do you need $38 million of cash? It seems to be always around that amount. Why not take the bulk of that and put it into Bitcoin? And that requires a little bit of explanation. We don't want to be a Bitcoin holding company. We want to be a cryptocurrency mining company. And that's an important distinction. Let's start with this. If we were to put the $38 million into one of the various ETFs that have been approved since the last of these meetings, this is what happens to, in the long run, to a cryptocurrency ETF. Cryptocurrency produces no interest, no dividends. The fees are small, but they're fees. So the fees can only be paid by selling a little bit of crypto. So what happened is, even though the fund gets a lot of money, the fund always trades at net asset value. The number of crypto coins per share or per unit, if you prefer, is always gonna go down.... A salient distinction, but not the only distinction, with the cryptocurrency mining company is if you do it right, the crypto per share is going up. So you're producing crypto, and that has some very interesting performance aspects as well. So it's theoretically possible in a year, cryptocurrency can actually go down by 20%, but you might have mined 10% more coins. If those are indeed the numbers, you are in equilibrium. So crypto has a different risk reward pattern than your typical ETF. But the more salient point is, of course, that you're gonna be producing more crypto. You're organically growing your asset value, your net asset value. So if you can continue to organically grow your net asset value, and you do it with regularity, you're likely to trade at a premium to book value or a premium net asset value, which is a lot better than just trading at a net asset value level. So it's a very different outcome for shareholders. Another aspect which you might find interesting, Winland and Consensus Mining don't merely mine Bitcoin. Winland and Consensus Mining are mining Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash. And also, anyone who mines Litecoin is also mining Dogecoin. Why is anyone who mines Litecoin mining Dogecoin? Because Litecoin is a merge-mined coin, and as a merge-mined coin, for the same electricity, you're mining two coins instead of one. So you could, for example, take the Dogecoin, which is what we've chosen to do, pay all the expenses of mining, and keep the Litecoin. And it's very profitable. But the profit of mining is not the only dimension of that, which means daily operational profit. The idea is, it's theoretically possible, and before I say it, let me just point out that I'm probably the only person who even believes this. The lesser coins, in my humble opinion, have potentially more upside than Bitcoin, which I think has a lot of upside. The reason it might have more upside is because the size of the other networks are very small. So, for example, the Bitcoin network is now over 600 exahash. An exahash, by the way, is one followed by 18 zeros. So it's a big number. In ordinary parlance, you'd say quintillion. Litecoin, as an example, has, in round numbers, a one petahash network hash rate. So one petahash is 1/600,000, meaning that the Bitcoin network is 600,000 times the size of Litecoin network, which explains why Bitcoin has a much bigger market capitalization. But if you could get the hash rate to go from one petahash to two petahash, which is a rounding error in Bitcoin, could double the size of the network and probably double the value of network. Bitcoin Cash has an aggregate network hash rate of about 2.5 Exahash, so it's less than 0.5% the size of the Bitcoin network. It's theoretically possible for, in a whole host of scenarios, for processing power to move from Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash. And it has happened, although on a small scale, over the last year or two. That small scale, which most people ignore, would indicate, and it's happened, that Bitcoin Cash actually significantly outperformed Bitcoin over last year, as an example. It's possible that Bitcoin Cash, which doesn't have a use case right now, might find a use case. Anyway, the network is sufficiently small, although still secure, you could make a case for it, and you can make an excellent performance case for it. So we have that. Now, if you're going to build a mining business, you have to build it gradually and slowly. The temptation is, you have a lot of cash, as they say to me, in any event, why not put it to work? Well, here's why not put it to work: because you have to assume that every three or four years, your mining equipment is going to be obsolete. Now, the estimated useful life of the equipment is actually less than three years, so a lot of it's gonna wear out. But if it doesn't wear out, in our case, we've been very lucky, it hasn't worn out. Every four years is a halving. So the common feature behind Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin is a halving every four years. Now, halving means that every four years, your block reward is cut in half. That's why they call it a halving. But your cost of mining remains the same. So costs remain the same, your revenue is cut by 50%. What business could endure that every four years? So what you need to be in position to do is, you need to be able to replace your entire network, no less every four years, and sometimes even more frequently than that. Now, the other side of that is, when you replace your network, the equipment you replace your network with is much, much more efficient in its electric power usage and actually in its durability. So you're buying, every dollar you spend for equipment buys more processing power.... Or put another way, the cost of one terahash of processing power is constantly falling. So for the same amount of money that you had bought a Bitcoin miner eight years ago, today you could probably buy 12, maybe even 14, and they're much better. So if you invest a lot of money in one iteration, you have no way of knowing when there's gonna be a technological breakthrough, all you, all you know is that in short order, there will be. So you'll have no capital reserve to replace your equipment. And you see, that's actually what's going on in a lot of the mining companies right now. Capital was raised, capital was invested. We're in Bitcoin, three days away from the halving. At the current price of Bitcoin, most iterations of equipment are not going to be profitable. Now, maybe the next three days, the price of Bitcoin goes up, and remedy is that. But assuming it's not, those machines are gonna have to be turned off. So if you placed orders to be delivered over many future months... By the way, when you do that, there's actually a natural futures curve in equipment purchases. So if you order equipment for August delivery, August 2024, it's actually meaningfully cheaper than if you order equipment for May 2024 delivery, and you get a much better deal on it. So you always wanna be in that position. So what's gonna happen is, if the scenario proves to be true that the leading equipment generations of the last three or four years are going to be made effectively obsolete and inoperable by the halving, the modern generation equipment is gonna take over. So let's just say there's a halving. Your revenue is cut in half. Bitcoin price is unchanged, but if half the machines are turned off, the people you are competing with for the block reward, some of them melt away, and in a simplistic instance, you'll get twice as much block reward measured in coins as you were getting before, even though the actual block reward itself is less, meaning you'll get proportionately less than actually less. So what'll happen is, you will be in equilibrium. You may even be in a improved profit, profit position. So you dare not invest a lot of money any one time, 'cause if you do that, you've lost all your strategic flexibility. Now, the negative thing from a shareholder point of view is, it takes a long time to build a cryptocurrency business in that way. But I think if you were to compare, you can't see Consensus yet because it's publicly traded, but you can see Winland. So you at least have a window on how things work in a gradualistic cryptocurrency mining effort. I dare say it's actually been very, very successful. So I think our holdings are roughly 35% of Winland. May first, I believe, is the day of the activation of new 10b5-1 plan, and we're gonna continue with our policy. So I dare say in crypto, we're ready for just about any conceivable scenario. So we're staying away from bold moves. All that notwithstanding, we still buy modest amounts of crypto, and were we ever to attain the majority interest in Winland, we would have to consolidate that, and it would improve our crypto holdings. I believe in our, in our cryptocurrency holdings review, which I have in front of me, I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, Therese, we're not, we're not specifically disclosing Winland or Consensus—our share of Winland and Consensus cash. Is that correct, or am I not correct as far as that goes? I think that's correct, Murray. Okay, good. All right, so let's just go to another topic which has been thrilling, to say the least, is Texas Pacific Land Corp. You might observe that we actually bought more shares of Texas Pacific. There was a dispute and it's resolved, for better or real, but at the end of the day, there are incredibly few companies in the world, maybe even none. I only hesitate to say that because I don't know every company in the world, but there are very few companies in the world that have the quality of TPL in any business, and especially in commodities. So let me just point out a couple of aspects of that. Most businesses, they'll trade at a certain price earnings ratio, and in a certain sense, it's a little bit of illusion. Why is it a little bit of illusion? I'm making up a number here, but if you bought a business at 12 times earnings. Yes, it's 12 times earnings, and it's GAAP earnings, but it's not as if you can take the entirety of the earnings if you wish to, and disperse it to shareholders. You can't do that. So different companies have different ratios, but in the end of the day, you have to reinvest a goodly portion, and in many cases, more than a goodly portion of the earnings, to maintain the resiliency of the business. Now, all you have to do is look at the financial statements at TPL. You'll see the capital expenditures are de minimis. So the earnings, at least in principle, are available to be used for shareholders. In theory, they can buy back stock. In theory, they can make acquisitions, but they're acquisitions that are in with a view to growing the business, or they can just be paid out in the form of dividends. Very, very few companies have that faculty. Also, the longevity of the business, because what is the business? It's oil royalties, it's land, which is easements on land, and it's water, both source water and produced water. And land is forever. Water is forever. There are no other businesses that have those characteristics. So even commodity-based businesses. So let's make two points. The first point is just regular business. Most businesses either provide a service or make a product. And how many businesses, even the best, can say they're unchanged after many years? The business changes. Competitors arise, the product becomes obsolete, maybe more capital be invested to maintain the edge. I think historically, very few companies have maintained the edge over the course of decades. In these kind of businesses, you really don't have to. Now let's turn to commodity companies. Commodity companies, you might, you might not be aware of this, but most commodities have negative real rates of return. So for example, you couldn't do this in reality, but you could certainly do it theoretically. Let's say you measured wheat. I just wrote something, it's being published, but one of the facts I put in the paper was the price of wheat in 1866, 1867, Department of Agriculture, United States Department of Agriculture, actually maintains records of prices in a planting season because that's the relevant statistic from their point of view. Right after the Civil War, the price of wheat was $2.06 a bushel. On the eve of the First World War, the price was considerably less than $1. So people naively say that investing in commodities long periods of time, they're inflation beneficiaries, but they're not. Now, I could go to the lowest price recorded in the last 100+ years of wheat, which is 1932, 1933, planting year, where the wheat price actually declined, I think $0.38 a bushel. Now, can you imagine looking at wheat prices in 1932 or 1933 and seeing a price of $0.38 a bushel? And there are people who were alive in 1932, 1933, they actually had to—were old enough to have lived through the Civil War. There were even people who actually fought in the Civil War, and they're thinking about inflation. What might have been their thinking about inflation? Even today, the price of wheat is maybe $5.50 a bushel. So what is the actual rate of return? It's a fraction of the rate of inflation for that time period. Now, what are the reasons it's a fraction of inflation? I can give you statistics on all the commodities. I won't do it because you'll find it boring, but I think you should, you should, look these things up for yourself. So what do producers of commodities. Remember, these are the capital-intensive commodity companies. What is their number one mission? To A, produce more of the substances, which of course, increases supply, and much, much more importantly, B. What is B? Reduce the cost of extraction of that commodity, whether it's a gold company, a copper company, whatever. In most instances, they don't really reduce the cost of producing commodity in nominal terms, but they do succeed in reducing it in real terms. So the cost of extraction is usually going down in real terms, and wheat is an example of that. Then the price is not going to advance at a rate commensurate with inflation. Now, you couldn't, in reality, have bought wheat in 1866, 1867 planting year and kept it because a lot of commodities just don't have an unlimited life. Matter of fact, most commodities don't have an unlimited life. So even oil, I guess you could say, it has a limited life only if it's in the ground. You have to use it if it comes to the surface, because the cost of storing it, imagine if they could store oil from 1866, 1867 to now, what was the point? The cost of storage basically overwhelmed what the cost of production was. You're not going to make money. So most commodities have negative real rates of return. Land is an exception. Land has a positive real rate of return. The other big exception is water. Water has a positive rate of return of time because you wouldn't call it storage, but land is land. It's not really being stored in the conventional sense of the word, but it's not going anywhere. Water is the same thing. It's underground, and unless you bring it to the surface, it doesn't get used at all. But if you do bring it to the surface, it has a natural refresh rate. And that's why in the world of inflation beneficiaries or inflation protection, if you prefer.... That's why it's so important. That's why we're so enthusiastic about it, and we look forward to owning it for a long period of time to come. So again, an overview of what we're doing. I asked myself a couple of questions that I never seem to get in the real world, which is this forum, but I hope you found it interesting. But now let's go to the real world. I'm sure you have questions which have been pre-submitted. I don't know what they are, and I'd be delighted to answer whatever anyone would like to pose to me. If you will accommodate that, Therese, I'll be glad to answer any questions. It's my pleasure. The first question begins: Thanks for all your work and congratulations on the Scott's Liquid Gold transaction. I had a quick Miami International Holdings accounting question. Could you help me understand the change in the MIH direct account balance from the Q1 of 2024 at $4.7 million to the Q2 of 2024 at 7 million? And there's more. I understand the investment is held at cost, but I see based on the top five holdings documents, that FRMO's shares of MIH increased from $1.821 in Q1 2024 to 1.824 million in the Q2 of 2024. Even if we conservatively assume all of these, all of that increase in MIH is directly attributable to FRMO's balance sheet versus South LaSalle, the incremental purchase price seems very high versus the $7-ish share valuation given to MIH a few years ago. Was the change in the MIH direct balance due to a contribution from FRMO into MIH? And if so, why? If it was due to direct purchases, can you help me understand where my math above is erroneous, if at all? Well- Judy actually provided some more information. Judy Ellen. Okay, good. Um- Good. Would you like me to read that? Please. Always welcome it. She's the fund controller, and there is... This is what she said: There is no difference in the number of MIH shares held directly by FRMO and Fromex from Q1 to Q2. South LaSalle Partners, LP, did purchase almost 500,000 additional shares in November 2023. And while FRMO's investment in South LaSalle went down about 2% by the end of the Q2, due to additional inflows in South LaSalle by outside investors, it still amounts to an extra 3,000 shares owned indirectly. You can see this in the top five files from August 31, 2023, and November 30, 2023. Further, the MIH shares are not held at cost. We've been marking them monthly. The price we used for August 31, 2023, was $7.18 per share, and for November 30, 2023, we used $10.66. At year-end, we used $10.30 with the help of an outside valuation firm, and we'll continue to use that pricing through March 31, 2024, when we'll get a new valuation from the outside valuation firm. That's it from Judy. Okay. So basically, I'll add a little color to that. So the funds, South LaSalle, which we're invested in, had the opportunity every now and then, somebody, don't forget, MIAX is a private company, and people are waiting for an IPO, and every now and then, someone takes position. The IPO has not yet happened. Therefore, the IPO will never happen. I don't necessarily agree with that, but such is the position, and the people who actually believe that will offer shares up from time to time at preposterously low prices. So we would be remiss in our duty if we didn't buy them. And the fund raised some money, and we participated in that. But basically, the bulk of the change in value is the increase in value. Now, why is there? Where, how does that value get determined? There's two components to it. First component is we have an independent valuation assessed to it, where just it's compared to publicly traded exchanges. And it's very conservative in my view, but such it is. And then the second component of it is, every now and then, the company does a private placement, and that is not at the $7 price. So that gets taken into account in the valuation. That's how we arrived at. So it's actually a pretty good investment for us. I don't know what the value, what the price we're using. Don't forget, a lot of our shares came from the merger between Minneapolis Grain Exchange, which we were a very big holder of, into MIAX, and a lot of them came from the merger between the Stock Exchange into MIAX, and we were big holders of both of those companies. So I don't remember what valuation we were using way back in the day, but it was considerably beneath the current valuation. And all you really have to do, even though I know it's a private company, but if you go on the MIAX website, you look at the volume, you can see how robust the growth has been and a lot of valuation.... even though it's not precise, you can get a real sense of how much advances by changes in volume. Because volume is the most important, dynamic of an exchange. So I hope that addresses that. Other questions? Yes. Some of the commentary on the issue of non-controlling interest confuses me and seems a bit contradictory. Perhaps Murray could comment on his thoughts as to how best to value the company, particularly with respect to the net asset value of about $4 a share without non-controlling and about $8 including non-controlling. I'm trying to value the company from my point of view, and in particular, what I would get as a public shareholder if FRMO were dissolved as of November 30, 2023, with the proceeds being exactly what is on the balance sheet. If I'm interpreting yours and Murray's comment, comments correctly, I, as a public shareholder, would get $4.69, not the 8. Do you agree? If so, that reconciles Murray's comment that the stock is selling for more than book, i.e., $7 plus versus $4.69, or about 160% of book value for the public shareholders. Thanks for humoring my efforts at clarity. Okay, so for clarity purposes, you should never, I repeat, never include the equity that's not retrievable to shareholders. So what you would get if we decide to liquidate the company, you're getting the equity attributed to shareholders, $219 million, divided by number of shares outstanding. That's your number. That's what you're getting. The other number doesn't belong to the company. We need, however, to consolidate. The reason we need to consolidate, those are accounting rules. There are two funds that have a lot of outside capital. One is HK Hard Assets 1, whereas HK Hard Assets 2, the total assets are a not small number. I think they gravitate... They change every day, but they gravitate to around $200 million or thereabouts. Of the $200 million, only about a quarter of that, and you can see it in the notes, I think it's note one. May not be a quarter, maybe 22%, belongs to Horizon Kinetics, but that would be in our shareholders' equity. So $4 and change is the right book value. The reason we trade at a premium to book value is we're building a real cryptocurrency business. And I personally think, and it's just subjective, so take it for what it's worth, I'm also biased. It's not a fair valuation in a negative sense. It should be greater because take any of the cryptocurrency mining companies that exist, which are many, publicly traded, and I think arguably, ours is a lot better, a lot more stable, and has much, much less risk to it. I would argue it's even been more successful. That's measurable in terms of our growth in crypto, how much we produce and how much we retain. The fact that we don't need outside capital, which the other companies appear to do. Why we trade at a much lower price to book, I don't think it's fair, but it is what it is, and there you have it. Next question. I recently became aware of FRMO, bought a starter position, and I'm trying to understand the details of the business as time permits. If possible, I would love to get a better understanding of the history of the business and some of the current business nuances. Thank you. Okay, so historically, it really was created by Horizon, not the Horizon Kinetics. So there was a Horizon Asset Management or Kinetics Asset Management. The same shareholders controlled both groups, but they were separate companies. One was largely management of money for wealthy individuals, largely. The other, management of money in a mutual fund context. And we started that way because we thought that if one business failed, the other business could go on. So we had two separate companies that ran parallel until in somewhere around 2011, I think it was, those businesses merged and became one, Horizon Kinetics. In roughly the year 2000, Horizon had accumulated a certain amount of capital, and we didn't need it in the business, but we did want to invest it. So the purpose was to find some vehicle where we could be publicly traded, because we thought the permanent capital model is a lot better model for investing money than the transitory capital model, which is mutual funds. One of the problems with the transitory capital model is not even the flows. Money comes, money coming in, money goes. It comes at the worst possible times. When you get it, you always get it after a big increase in net asset value, and then because markets go up and markets go down, if it goes down, you end up losing the money when you actually want to buy things. So it was basically a vehicle for investing our own money and perhaps raising some permanent capital opportunistically, if we had the ability to do it. We actually did at one point a private placement and raised a few million dollars of assets. Not a lot, just to see if we could do it, and that's the way it was. But then we accumulated so much capital, we didn't want to merely be an investing company. We obviously thought we would buy a business, and we'd run a business. And we looked at various things, and everything we looked at, we either didn't like it because it's too time-consuming to run, or it's too expensive, or it didn't have a long enough life for us, and or we just didn't have the expertise to do it. It was eight years ago that we thought about cryptocurrency, and we made a small investment, and the idea was to learn more about the business and see if it could be a viable business. Essentially, I'm summarizing here, but that's basically how it happened. The next step in our evolution is to make a much bigger operating company out of crypto. One of the interesting things about crypto is you don't need a lot of people in the business, and one of the reasons we didn't really want to be involved in the conventional businesses, it involved a tremendous amount of people management. It would be detracted from our attention to other matters. Might not even have had time to do it properly. That's, in brief, the history. What's next, Steve? Well, Steven here. I would just add, for Dr. Fink, it's not for me to assign anybody homework, but I thought that was an excellent strategic summation. But if somebody were to want a little more flavor and a sense of the developing strategic shifts over time, the various letters, the annual FRMO letters, which are on the website, can give you a lot more interesting, if you're into that kind of thing, detail and nuance. So it's, if that's your line of country, it's worth taking a look at. Thank you, Steve. Next, any updates on the Horizon Kinetics merger with Scott's Liquid Gold that Murray can share? And also, what impact will HK becoming a public company affect FRMO and the price of its shares, in your opinion? When the dust clears, how many shares and what percent of the shares will HK have and be held by FRMO? What percent of the float in shares... Yeah, it's a lot of questions. Okay. Do you want the last part? You might as well. Okay. What percent of the public float in shares of the new HK stock would be, and what percent of the outstanding will that be? Okay, so let me just give you some background that you don't know. One of the reasons... There are many reasons for doing this transaction. One of the reasons doing this transaction are that one of the founding shareholders of Horizon, small shareholder, but nevertheless, a shareholder, passed away. So the heirs have no desire to own shares in a private company, so there's only two ways to solve that. The first way is to buy the shares from them, and the second way is come public. Now, buying the shares from them is problematic because although we can certainly give anyone complete and full disclosure about what the company owns and what its prospects are, et cetera, the valuation assigned to any business is subjective. So we might assign a valuation of X, and someone else might assign a valuation of Y. It's a natural conflict. We really didn't want to do that. So we decided the best thing to do is disclose everything to the world, just come public, and if you own shares, you can either sell it or you can buy the shares. Now, the float. Horizon's a private company, so none of those shares in the public domain will be in the public domain on day one. The only shares in the public domain are Scott's Liquid Gold, which is about 2% of the shares. So now, but you know, there are going to be some selling shareholders. I personally am not among them, but look, no one's here forever, and some of the people are getting older, and it's only natural I might want some liquidity. So I can't give you a number other than the 2% number, because in round numbers, that's what Scott's Liquid Gold is gonna own. That's the float. And I suspect there's going to be some other float, but I can't know the number. I just don't know it, so I can't share it. There's a lot of documentation, and dude, this is a reverse merger, so there's a lot of documentation that's put together. As preparation for doing it, we actually hired a CFO with public company experience because there's a mountain of work that needs to be done to complete this transaction. And it took a certain amount of time just to find and then hire the CFO with company experience. So we're thinking maybe July, transaction will be consummated. I don't know that. It's just what I'm told. You know, in a merger of this type, no matter how many things you do, there's always seems to be one more thing to do. So I don't know if that deadline will be met. I think it's going to be met. It looks good right now, but you never really know. Now, how will it affect the FRMO financial statements? It's going to affect the FRMO financial statements. Why is it going to affect that? Because, I'm gonna use the number 2%. It's not the exact number, but Scott's Liquid Gold has a market capitalization. So I mean, if, if it ends up being 2%, again, it's not exact. I'm just using this for illustrative purposes. You got to get the exact number. I'm sure if you called Horizon, you can find somebody who will give you the exact number. But let's say the number is 2%. So I... They told me the exact number, but I just don't remember how many decimal points it is. But you should get it to the, to X decimal points. You take the Scott's Liquid Gold market capitalization. Let's say we're 2% for ease of computation. So the Scottsdale Gold market capitalization is X. You divide by 0.02 or 2%. That will give you market capitalization for the entire thing. FRMO is gonna own a little bit less than 5%. Again, I don't know the exact number, but in the footnotes of the FRMO report, you can find the number. I just don't memorize numbers like that. But in any event, if you now take Scottsdale Gold, the market capitalization, divide by 0.02 and multiply by 0.0483 or something, or maybe it's 0.049. I don't know, some number like that. So if you did that, you would come up with the value, the carrying value that FRMO should have if they marked Horizon to market, which we don't do. And you should do that, and if you do it, you'll see that the balance sheet values will change, and it'll, it'll be material. So I could probably do the number in my head and give it to you, but I've told you methodologically how to do it. So you should do that, and now you'll know the answers to the questions you're posing. Okay. What is the intrinsic book value per share if you adjust for deferred taxes, the fair value of the private businesses, the fair value of the public businesses, and the fair value of the crypto holdings? Well, the crypto we mark to market, the public businesses we mark to market. The private businesses, those would be examples of MIAX and the Canadian Securities Exchange. They're not market valuations. They're just valuations, conservative as they are, given by a third party. Horizon is that way. I just told you how to do the valuation. I don't know what the IPO value is going to be. We'll just have to find out. So I can't even though I have my suspicion of what it is, but I don't think it would be proper to comment on, other than it's gonna be a number, obviously. But in the Horizon case, you'll see it's gonna be higher. So it's a higher number. You know, in the case of MIAX, you see what the value is. It's obviously gonna be less important arithmetically. That's obvious from the financial statement than Horizon is going to be. And then there's the crypto businesses. So we don't know what the business of Consensus Mining is gonna be, but we don't own a lot of shares yet. So that's something to consider, but I don't think the change is gonna be material. I just think that cryptocurrency mining businesses that are well managed, which I believe this is, trade or should trade at big premiums than asset value. And they all do, even though not all of them are particularly well managed. So that's about as far as I can go with giving you what the valuation would be. It has become increasingly frustrating watching the world of crypto assets explode to the upside, yet the share price of FRMO Corp has not moved an inch. The last time Bitcoin made a run to $60,000 per coin, the share price of FRMO was trading above $14 per share. Now, Bitcoin is at $70,000, and FRMO has not participated at all. What can be done to make sure shareholders are rewarded for their patience? The investments you have made for this company have been fantastic, but ultimately the company will be judged by its share price, not the book value. So do you consider stock buybacks, dividends, a name change, an uplisting to try and increase the value? Well, go ahead and finish your view. I maybe interrupt you. No, no. That's it. It's on a different topic, the next part. Okay. Okay. Well, anyway, I believe it's going to get its valuation. None of those things are a problem in FRMO in terms of valuation. The problem is, everybody who owns FRMO pretty much likes FRMO, so nobody really wants to sell their FRMO. So it's very hard for a new shareholder of substance to get shares. And therefore, you could uplist, you could do all sorts of things. You could change the name, you could buy back shares. If you buy back shares, all you're really gonna do is make it less liquid. That's not gonna help. It's probably gonna hurt. So if you really want to get the valuation, it's gonna have to be more liquid, and it's gonna be more liquid because the same dynamic of Horizon in terms of shareholders needing liquidity, it's gonna happen in FRMO. Matter of fact, to a very small extent, it's already happened. So in the fullness of time, that'll, the liquidity problem will solve itself, and we're gonna get the valuation we want. If it doesn't happen, the next logical thing to do is do an equity carve-out. So maybe when we're finally, if we ever get to a position where we consolidate crypto and people can see it, that might do it. If we have the right liquidity, then if it doesn't do it, we can do a carve-out, meaning we do an offering through a subsidiary. Let's say it's crypto subsidiary, make that public so people can see the value of crypto, because right now there is no individual line item where you could summarize all the crypto. So how do you value Horizons? I mean, not Horizons, FRMO's crypto efforts. There's no line item for that. And that's what we're trying to solve. So in the fullest of time, I don't think the fullest time is gonna be long. We're gonna get to all that stuff. Okay. This question is a little off topic of FRMO. He said, "I know Murray really likes the oil royalty trust positions. One of his larger positions is Permian Basin Trust. It has been hit hard so far this year, trading down 50% in the last year. Would you comment on why this is and if you still like this company? Yeah. Well, I like the company, and there is a dispute. So you might recall when there was a Horizon TPL dispute, although the company performed splendidly, it's up and down by 50% when there was a dispute. And Permian Basin Trust, there's a dispute. It's not the same dispute as we had with TPL. The operator is accused by a shareholder, not by the trustee, although on behalf of the shareholder, he is accused by a trustee of having too many capital charges that were not legitimate. So the issue is, how much cash flow, how much dividend should Permian Basin have? That's gonna have to be resolved by the court system. And so what happened in Permian Basin Trust is kind of the same as what happened in TPL with, I will say this, the salient distinction. So I dare say this, the In TPL, you might not believe this, but yes, we had our dispute. Obviously, it was in court. But if you were sitting there in the board meeting, you'd be amazed at how remarkably cordial the proceedings really were. And the reason was, is because, yeah, we had disputes. It wasn't a monetary dispute, but more to the point, we agreed on over 99% of the issues. So this is not that kind of dispute, and it's gonna be resolved anyway. So it's gonna have to be clarified, and it'll get clarified in due course. So either some shareholders are right and the company just put in too many capital charges or they're wrong. But we're gonna get the right number. We're gonna find out. So I personally wouldn't worry about it very much. Just like during the dispute, you couldn't see it. You know, it's my perspective, of course, but everybody is working together, I would say, pretty productively. Might have had our, you know, our odd moment when we expressed disagreement on a certain topic that we all know what that was. But other than that, it was pretty pleasant being there. That you wouldn't imagine that was the case, but it really was. This is maybe gonna be a little more profound in the case of Permian Basin Trust, but it'll resolve itself in due course. So I don't not worried about it whatsoever. And we were buying more shares of Texas Pacific, as anyone can see from our filings during the controversy, and we're buying more shares of Permian Basin Trust in the place where it needs to be bought. My question for both Mr. Stahl and Mr. Bregman is: What is one thing each of you believe FRMO shareholders either don't understand or appreciate about FRMO? All right, so I'll do first. I don't think the evolution of FRMO to an operating company is appreciated because it's taken so long, necessarily so, as I indicated earlier, but that's the only thing I would say that's important. I'll let Steve, you can give your appraisal. Well, there are actually many, and I think they, they mirror the differences between the management and because of the management, the structural and strategic philosophy and implementation of FRMO Corp versus the typical operating company, which is what investors are accustomed to, because why, why shouldn't they be accustomed to it? So, I'll name a couple even. So for instance, cash. So there's an awful lot of cash, effectively cash and marketable securities on the FRMO balance sheet. And, I'm sure pretty much everyone on the call, anybody who follows small, value-oriented companies, realizes that a business doesn't get any kind of valuation multiple on cash, even though in a sense, cash is the most basic valuable thing you can own during difficult times or the times when they it can be an opportunity. In fact, sometimes companies sell at a discount to their cash, or the cash is discounted on the balance sheet in terms of its public market value. And yet- ... There's this, odd thing that happens that, you can have a company that on the last day of a certain month, owns a bunch of cash on its balance sheet, and on the first day of the next month, that cash has been invested in something, some asset. Doesn't matter what you call it. Call it a, you know, a big office building, or some real estate property or something else, or a different company. And all of a sudden, people will apply some multiple, maybe a big multiple, of that cash that's now in the form of, the new asset that's been, that's been purchased. That can happen overnight. As Murray's already described, there are more elements of businesses within Horizon Kinetics and FRMO Corp that are on their way to becoming public, and you get the highest multiple for any business in the public markets. Horizon Kinetics will have its some form of public valuation, and that will get us more eyeballs, and legitimacy and so forth and so on. I might mention it's interesting that the questions we're getting today for this particular conference call; there are many more participants in it than we've had before. New names I don't recognize, and the breadth of questions are greater. If that's any kind of indicator of the earliest dawn, the early light of additional interest between Scott's Liquid Gold and some of the other businesses that are pending relative to the public markets, then we're heading in the right direction as far as valuation goes. Okay. I have been told that nodes, N-O-D-E-S, have more control over the Bitcoin blockchain than miners. Is that true? Does FRMO or any associated companies like Horizon Kinetics or TMSB, have or run nodes? Could they explain the difference, please? Okay. To begin with, we don't run any nodes. Nobody has control over the blockchain. No miner has control over blockchain. No node has control over a blockchain. The miners provide a service of validation and transactions. Nodes are just aggregations of miners. It enables miners to communicate with one another. That's it. There's nothing mystical about it. The whole idea behind Bitcoin is it's decentralized. Nobody's supposed to have control over it, because every time somebody gets control over a monetary system, you see what happens. It gets abused. But it's very hard for people to think about that because it's totally outside of their experience. So let's use this as an example. We, living today in our lifetime, we don't know anything other than the central bank system of fiat money. We never experienced anything else. Now, you could say we in FRMO, we experienced something else, but very few people experience something like that. They look at the price of Bitcoin, and even that is the wrong way of looking at life. You see, they're looking at Bitcoin as if it's some kind of stock. It's quoted, Bitcoin is trading at X, but that's not true. Bitcoin is not an asset in that sense. Its value is relative to the fiat currency. You'll say, "Well, Bitcoin went up so much% over the course of its life." Not true. It's a dollar lost value in relation to Bitcoin. If we were to price it that way, so instead of Bitcoin going up X%, if someone said the dollar lost X% in relation to Bitcoin, people would say, "My God, my dollars are losing value in relation to Bitcoin." Everybody would then try to buy Bitcoin. They just think it's a stock, so they don't really know what it is yet. So no one has control over the blockchain. There's not gonna be any shortage of Bitcoin, no matter how high it goes, because, and I'm gonna confuse people by saying it, but it's nothing other than the truth, and maybe you can ask a follow-up question and I'll clarify it. If there ever was such a thing as a shortage of Bitcoin, you can always fork the Bitcoin network. Anybody can do it. I could do it myself if I wanted to. I could change the properties of Bitcoin. I could make them the same. I could tweak it. I could do whatever I want to do, it has been forked, and people are gonna use the fork, and are not gonna use the fork. So nobody is controlling of anything in Bitcoin. That's the virtue of it, because nobody can game the system. Nobody has the power to, to manipulate interest rates. Nobody has the power to manipulate the money supply. The issuance goes in accordance with a predetermined protocol, and that's the way the system works. So it's really very simple. Would you... Here are some questions. Their insight- What are your insights on mining Bitcoin rather than directly purchasing Bitcoin, as well as Bitcoin Cash, would be appreciated. It goes on.... FRMO has pursued a Bitcoin mining strategy for several years. On prior conference, conference calls, you have listed the many challenges that Bitcoin miner, miners face, i.e., periodic reduction of block rewards, obsolescence of rigs, increasing hash rate, electricity costs, et cetera, and the needed skills to navigate these challenges. It appears to me that the returns from buying Bitcoin to U.S. dollars have outperformed purchasing the publicly listed miners for most time periods. FRMO has $38,822,891 in cash and cash equivalents as on February twenty-ninth, 2024. Why does it not dollar cost average purchasing Bitcoin as part of its cash management strategy, since the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar is being diminished by inflation? And there's a couple more, but I, I think I'll stop there. Okay, let's answer this first. Let's just answer this one, then we'll get the other ones. Because it would be a cardinal error. Because the purpose of the money is not to, to protect against debasement. You might say it's being debased by inflation. You might be right about that, but in the world of cryptocurrency mining equipment, the purchasing power of dollar is going up. So it's there as an insurance policy. If the publicly traded miners get in trouble, as might happen, maybe we could buy a certain asset that's really cheap, that we want. So put it this way, you don't get a return on insurance. Insurance protects you against certain contingencies that you hope will never happen. Usually, they don't happen. So is that a bad use of capital, if you spend money on insurance? I would look at it this way: It's there to provide for certain contingencies. There will be opportunities at some point, we might use some or all of that cash. We might not. Depends on what happens. But the purpose is not to maximize the return that way, because you're never going to maximize return that way. If we're fully invested, it's not a portfolio, it's a corporation, and it's got to have a certain organic rate of return. So in a corporation, lots of corporations trade at big premiums of book value, and they have cash. In a portfolio, you really don't want to have any cash other than transactional balances. But it's not a portfolio. It's a living, breathing, growing corporation. It's just not apparent to people that it is. And that answers, incidentally, a question that was posed before: Why doesn't it have a higher valuation? Well, because the question is, is it a portfolio? Is it an operating company? If this is a portfolio, so we did that, and we took the cash, and we put it all into Bitcoin, let's say, or maybe we left a few dollars, I guarantee you, that, my personal opinion, we trade at a lower, not higher valuation. Because there's no obvious we gave away our optionality. Can't do that and expect to trade at premiums and asset value. So I think that addresses that. I hope that addresses that. So why don't you read the rest of it. Also, it appears that MicroStrategy's practice of issuing convertible debt at low interest rates has worked well for the company and the purchases of its debt. Have you considered doing something similar? No, I have not considered doing something similar, and I don't have any intention of doing anything similar. That policy is not without its risks. See, you never know what's going to happen to a cryptocurrency. The whole project could still fail. It's possible. So if it fails, the last thing you want to do is have debt against your major asset, which is crypto. So debt and crypto do not mix very well, and the stock exchanges are littered with the casualties of companies that decided to use debt capital to finance cryptocurrency purchases. This particular case, it's been successful, but many people tried that strategy, and I won't list the names, but they're in the public domain. Didn't work out that well. Could have worked out well, it just didn't. Remember, when you take on debt, debt has to be paid on time and you lose your strategic flexibility. So just a risk I don't feel like taking. I don't think we need to. So we haven't. So what's the next question? Okay, the next part of that one. On prior conference calls, you have mentioned that Bitcoin Cash could potentially appreciate much more than Bitcoin due to its similar monetary policy but lower cost per coin. As of February 29, 2024, 6.71 Bitcoin Cash are held by FRMO and 0.33 Bitcoin Cash are held indirectly. This amount is around $2,200. So I'm curious as to why it has not been invested—why it has not invested a larger de minimis amount into this coin, given its potential appreciation. Well, because you don't need to, basically. If it works, you only have a small number of shares. You can buy it instantly. Before I even go on, I'm gonna might point out. The amount, let's say Bitcoin Cash, held directly-held indirectly to private, to public and private companies is 62,017, held directly 2,382. And those are Bitcoin Cash investment trusts, and we have some Bitcoin Cash shares, Bitcoin Cash coins itself. The numbers were read correctly, 6.74, 0.33, respectively. Those numbers are gonna change and go up. As of February 29, we hadn't yet mined a lot of Bitcoin Cash in Winland. And given our holdings in Winland, I think in due course, you're gonna see a lot more Bitcoin Cash. So what I think is, so basically, if it goes up, it's going up by a staggering amount. So you don't need a lot. All you need to have is enough to make an impression. So you looked at the cost basis of GBTC, Grayscale Bitcoin Investment Trust. You can't see it in this, but we made a small investment. Now, it's a tremendous value. You don't need a big investment. You have to have just enough investment that if it works, you're gonna make a favorable impression upon the net asset value, and if it doesn't work, you're gonna live to fight another day. That's the philosophy. So, what's the next question? Okay, given FRMO and Horizon Kinetics' thesis of investing in under-invested hard assets, why have investments in coal-related equities been avoided? More specifically, what are your thoughts on the investment merits of the asset light coal-related partnership, Natural Resource Partners, NRP? Okay, we haven't invested anything in coal, and there's only one reason for that. I don't think coal is going away. However, usage of coal in the United States, it is declining. But more importantly than that, the government is extremely hostile to coal. So we just don't want to invest in a business that the government is really hostile towards, and as far as I can tell, they're gonna be even more hostile towards. So we have other things to do with our money. I don't think they're gonna be able to maintain coal in the United States in the foreseeable future, maybe not ever. And by the way, according to the International Energy Agency, globally, 2023 was the record year for coal consumption globally, worldwide. So, but it's a fight that we just don't want to be part of. That's the only reason for not investing it. Looking at the latest reports from Winland Holdings, they mined 56 Bitcoin in 2021, 71 Bitcoin in 2022, and only an additional net of 75 Bitcoin in 2023, due to selling of units in that year. Given management's past comments on the benefits of an operating Bitcoin miner, that banks its Bitcoin earnings and accrues that to its balance sheet versus spot ETFs that must ultimately sell portions of their holdings, why did Winland, which is effectively run by Horizon Kinetics, sell the majority of the Bitcoin it mined in 2023, which ultimately resulted in realized losses on sales of Bitcoin, per Winland's most recent annual report, note 17? How should investors think about the rate of accumulation of Bitcoin at Winland? Well, there was. The rate of accumulation reduced because the equipment was starting to get old, and the only way you can remedy that is machines went out offline, and you got to pay the electric bill. The electric bill is big. So, and we need money to buy new machines. We've got to replace the equipment cycle. So the major asset we have is that. So money has to come from somewhere. So we're going through an equipment cycle. We managed to grow the number of coins. It just doesn't grow at a historical rate because. And we're still going through an equipment cycle. And I think you'll see in the next couple of months, you'll see we navigated successfully. We didn't issue shares. Well, actually, we did issue shares to FRMO, but it certainly wasn't a big amount. So just going gradually- In what? and we're just increasing our Bitcoin holdings. And also, don't forget, another factor is we moved machines from Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash, so we, we have less machines working on Bitcoin. And another factor is, in our replacement equipment, we had mined Litecoin before. We spent some money on buying Litecoin equipment, which we could have bought Bitcoin equipment to keep the rate as high as it was before. But Litecoin is more profitable. They wanted to diversify. In the past, management has mentioned that one of the main benefits of an asset like hard asset company, is the ability to invest countercyclically versus the wider industry that the asset-light hard asset company may be a part of. Perhaps I'm mistaken on this, but FRMO did not appear to make significant investments during the 2020 COVID market shocks or in the 2022 crypto winter, despite the company's strong balance sheet. In 2020, management commented in a quarterly meeting that they did not see any opportunities to buy a whole operating business, yet Winland appears to be the target for that purpose and has been in FRMO's portfolio since around 2015. Why didn't FRMO use its large cash balance in the depths of the 2022 crypto winter to finish buying out a majority stake in Winland? It does not appear as if doing so would have been a mutually exclusive or contradictory decision to FRMO's stepwise strategy in buying new mining equipment. What kind of event would spur management into using the cash balance of the company, if not a global economic shutdown or a 2008 moment in the crypto industry? It should have seemed that buying up the rest of a targeted 51% stake in Winland would have been only a small portion of FRMO's cash balance during the recent crypto winter. That's the- Well- End of that question. The most recent crypto winter was about the fact that other people were buying, were issuing shares, and just right before the crypto winter. Of course, crypto winter is a lot of companies issued shares and bought a lot of cryptocurrency mining equipment. That equipment appreciated in value sixfold, meaning the price at which you could have bought a machine right before the crypto winter, and then on the eve of the crypto winter, the price of the machine went up, I think, from $2,000 to the leading models in, to $12,000. At one point, it even got to $14,000. So yeah, it was going down because the machines were being marked down. So to buy the machines during the crypto winter would be to take the machines at a distance, obsolescence, but we'd have to value the shares with the machines at their then market values. Shares that we knew in a couple of years, well, machines we knew in a couple of years are gonna be worthless, and we're gonna pay $12,000 a machine? I don't think so. So we didn't do it. Given the small relative scale of Winland versus FRMO, what is management's goal in rolling FRMO into Winland as an operating business versus doing crypto mining at FRMO itself at a scale commensurate with FRMO's size? Winland presently makes up around 2% of FRMO's assets, total assets. How would this ever be of material value to FRMO? Well, I'll give you two answers, Seth. First answer is, there are other shareholders in Winland that don't want to sell their shares in exchange for FRMO shares. So we don't control everything. That's number one. And, I guess you could say, in addition, you say it's 2%. If you go back to the beginning, the first report that FRMO issued to the public, I don't remember the number. There's a small amount of capital on the balance sheet. It's really small. And someone asked me almost the identical question, it was just this. They asked, "Look at the capital. It's so small, how could it ever grow anything material?" Well, look at what the capital is today and look what the capital is then, and you have the answer to the question. You can't judge it by the percent weight it is right now, because if that was true, then we didn't, we weren't selling shares to the public. They'd have argued, "You don't have enough capital at the beginning. It was really a very small amount of money. You should raise more capital, so you have money to work with." People raised that point, and we didn't regard it as the right approach, and we didn't do it. I think we're very happy we didn't right now. That was $10,000, if I recall properly, and 0 cents. Something like that. It was something like that. Now, $10,000 is a rounding error. When I say a rounding error, I really mean a rounding error, meaning that if it didn't happen, if there were a dispute about $10,000, it's not considered to be in a general company, a company with our assets, $10,000 dispute is not even considered legally to be material. There was a day when $10,000 was all our capital. When they tell you, when you meet with the accountants, they tell you a $10,000 discrepancy, if you were to find one, we consider to be immaterial. It's actually crazy when you think about it. I know that's the truth, but we don't have $10,000 discrepancies. But we did, and we think about, "Yeah, it was $10,000 in the beginning. How could it not be material?" But it isn't, because those are the laws everybody has to abide by. Okay, so what's next, Therese? She's still there. Are you there? Hello? If not, Murray, I can read the question. Oh, okay. So, uh- You read it. In the absence of Therese until she returns. Okay. How does management think about the lack of clawbacks of Bitcoin Cash in the case of fraud and how that hinders adoption? By this, I don't mean the Bitcoin blockchain being hacked, but rather the much more frequent occurrences of people having their Bitcoin seed phrases, addresses, private keys, and subsequently their Bitcoin Cash itself stolen from them by tricking them into thinking they are a legitimate entity. Hacking the user's personal computer, some other form of trickery, or just happening to see them entering their seed phrase on a wallet over their shoulder at a coffee shop... When it comes to adoption, despite over 10 years of development, Bitcoin appears to leave little room for error and no consumer protections, which makes it hard to imagine how mainstream Bitcoin adoption would work. Asked another way, suppose one of the U.S. Federal Reserve banks all wanted to publicly hold Bitcoin and asked Horizon Kinetics to advise on how that Bitcoin should be received, stored, secured, possibly transferred at later times. How would you advise the banks? How would you advise a household? With a lack of clawbacks, every storage mechanism and smart contract is just a bug, a bounty reward, waiting for someone to discover the code, exploit, or social engineering that breaks it. Okay, so that's a good question. So let's just reverse it, though, to answer it. In order to protect the consumers, as suggested, you would have to have Bitcoin, some enforcement agency, to be able to claw it back. You would have to centralize it. So, because some people would argue, was it a legitimate payment or was it a fraud? And somebody have to determine that. So you basically create a central authority that has the ability to make the rules and enforce them. You've now destroyed Bitcoin. So the way it works in the real world of decentralization is, you have to be careful with your coins. So if you're going to sit in Starbucks, as is suggested in the question, and someone's looking over your shoulder, if they're really looking over your shoulder and they steal your money, I hate to be cruel about it. Well, so you're tough luck. Yes? I'm sorry, the call was dropped on my end. I don't know where I was in this long question. That's okay. You've just raised the question, and we'll get to that. I was in the middle of answering the question. Okay. So the last thing you want to do is create a centralized authority in Bitcoin. Yes, the seed words get stolen. Yes, the private keys get stolen. People are careless in just a myriad of ways, and I hate to be cruel about it. It's tough luck, because the alternative, you're back to centralized authority, and now you're giving enormous power to the real rascals. You don't want that. So if you don't want to take the chance, you have two options. You can either be very, very careful with your coins, or you can be sloppy with your coins, and you're gonna have to accept the consequences. But I, for one, I think I speak for virtually everybody in the Bitcoin community; no one's gonna go for creating a protection. So let's say the United States government imposed a rule saying, "Okay, we're now gonna take charge of the system." Well, you know what happened? They would fork Bitcoin, and if they couldn't fork Bitcoin, they'd fork Bitcoin Cash, or if they couldn't do anything, they just... because everybody knows what protocol is, it'd be a problem. And by the way, the amount of loss of coins through this can be mitigated by just using a reputable custodian like Coinbase. You don't have to do any of that stuff on your own. So the market will figure out solutions. If you really want security, there are market solutions. The government is not one of those solutions. The worst, it's the worst possible solution. So anyway, if the government tried to impose it, Bitcoin would be forked, or the protocol would just be rewritten or copied. See, nobody knows what the hacking mechanism, the anti-hacking mechanisms are at the big banks. No one knows how many times they get hacked. All we know is they carry a lot of insurance that it happens a hell of a lot more frequently than it ever does in Bitcoin. So if you're worried about it, take your coins, move them to a place like Coinbase or Fidelity, and now it's their problem, and they'll deal with it. So that's the market is the solution, not the government, in my opinion. Could management provide insights into the rationale that could be used for valuation of Texas Pacific Land Trust or L and Corp's Land Holdings, particularly in light of questions around the viability of ongoing and future developments? The surface land seems mostly raw and barren and has limited development potential. Specifically, I have concerns regarding the nominal lease rates, such as the cheap per acre, per month lease costs for cattle operations and the environmental challenges associated with the region, including limited water resources and sparse population density. How does TPL justify the perceived value creation potential of its extensive land portfolio under these considerations? Okay, so it's not my job to speak for TPL, so I'm going to answer the question the following way. I'm just going to talk about land in general. So a TPL acre, a neighboring rancher's acre, they're pretty much the same. So let's talk about the land in the region. So one of the things that no one ever talks about is they think land's going to be developed because they're going to bring in vast populations of people and build schools and hospitals and all sorts of other things. Not too many acres is that going to happen. So right now, the Permian Basin produces 8+ million barrels of oil a day. Okay? Built by fracking. So you pump water and some proppants, which are chemicals, into the land, and out comes oil and gas. In addition to oil and gas, what comes out of the ground, for every barrel of water you pump down there, it's roughly five barrels of oil, what's called, but five barrels of water, which is called produced water, comes up. What are you gonna do with it? You got to put it somewhere. You can't transport it very far. It's too expensive because water is heavy. You can make some effort to recycle it, and it's done in some cases, but it's a lot of water and it's very expensive. So what they do with it is, they dispose of it by pumping it back into the ground. Now, to give you an idea of the magnitude of the problem, let's say a barrel of oil. Many people know what a barrel of oil is. A barrel of oil or a barrel itself, a barrel of water. It's 42 gallons. No one knows what a barrel looks like. 42 gallons. Everybody knows what a gallon looks like. So you take 8 million barrels x 42 million, 42 barrels per each barrel of oil, multiplied by... Am I doing this right? Yeah, it's 42. So it's 8 million barrels of oil, 42 gallons in a barrel. So now that's 336 million per day, x 5. That's 1.68 billion, to B, gallons of water that have to be disposed of each and every day. So the value of the land is what's under the land. And the-- there's only a finite amount of land that can be used for that purpose, and we're going to run out of land one day. So the price for injection of produced water keeps going up. Used to be, a couple of years ago, $0.01 a barrel. Now it might be six cents a barrel. And 50 cents or even $1 a barrel one day is readily conceivable. So if you start figuring in how much, let's say, let's say an acre of land, and let's say for a year. I'm making up numbers just to give you, show you how huge. These aren't real numbers. So let's say you could pump 60,000 barrels of water into the ground every day for a finite period of time. Well, 60,000 barrels of water is, in terms of gallons, 2.5 million gallons a day. So if you're getting, let's say, $0.01, well, let's say you're getting 10 cents, so that'd be $6,000 a day. So you could do it for 365 days. Maybe you'll do it longer. So that's $2.19 million with no expense associated with it. Just giving somebody the right to put water on your property underground. So let's do it again. It's 60,000 barrels a day, if that's what the number was, $0.10 a barrel. That's $6,000 a day times 365 days. At $2.19 million, you can only do it for a year. The acre of land, this has no, you know, meaningful assets on it. That acre of land, maybe you could buy it for $500. That's what it's valued at. But if only for a year, you get $2.19 million, and you still have the acre. The surface land is still there. Next thing, easements. Eventually, you're going to run out of land and go further out. Well, you can't put any more water on that acre, but you got to bring the water somewhere else, and somebody has to have a pipeline that traverses your land, and you get a lease on that. So the acres, you say it's worth $500 an acre. Well, what do you think they're going to charge somebody for right of way? You think it's $500 a year? Even if it was, that's a 100% return on capital. But what if it was $10,000 a year? What if you had 400,000 acres and all you got was an easement, $10,000 a year? Well, it's 400,000 acres of Class B land, $10,000 a year. That's not even $1,000 a month. So you know what that is? That's $4 billion, with a B, cash flow with no expenses against it. This is after the produced water. So I think those figures, and there, I could do other kind of figures. I think those figures speak for themselves. People don't know about them because we're—the produced water problem only became a big deal a couple of years ago, and the numbers have not gotten to the size and the price to dispose the barrels have not gotten to a level where it's a problem, but it's rapidly going in that direction. So that's the value proposition, among other things, I would say. In past commentaries, management has talked about how low interest rates are essentially anomalous. Why would higher for longer interest rates and harder access to money be good for securities, exchanges, equities and futures trading volumes, which are by and large traded on margin? That's not really relevant to trading. What's relevant to trading is that somebody has to have the securities, and either they like the risk they have or they don't like the risk they have. Don't like the risk they have, they have to transact. The value is always trading and changing, and they have position size limits, so they have to adjust them. So whatever interest rates are, there's plenty of room for trading. So if interest rates are higher, well, when the interest rates were low, what do you need bond futures for? To, if they're not gonna raise interest rates, you don't need bond futures. They are gonna raise interest rates, now you need bond futures because you have to protect against losses. So every scenario you can possibly imagine in the world of securities, high interest rates, low interest rates, and everything in between is an opportunity to trade, and the trading keeps going up and up and up. But there's more, transactions that could be done by the same amount of equipment. That's the story of the changes. It's really very simple. What are management's thoughts on growing use of NGLs in U.S. feeding refineries in place of crude and how this affects TPL? Also, what is the mix of TPL's crude versus natural gas production? Okay, so first of all, in TPL. So TPL, there are three things. There's oil, conventional oil, conventional natural gas, and NGLs. NGLs are natural gas liquids. Natural gas is what's called dry gas. Natural gas liquids is wet gas. So a lot of times you can either liquefy it, which means lowering temperature, or sometimes it comes out of the ground wet, so already liquefied. So just to define the terms. So if you look at, on a barrel equivalent basis, so you can convert all these things on a BTU basis, natural gas, natural gas liquids, oil, of course, to barrel of oil equivalents. You'll see in a TPL financial statements, they state their production in barrel oil equivalents, and people think that all they do is produce oil. But really, there's a lot of natural gas liquids and a lot of natural gas. So what's happening is, I introduce a new, new term here. It's called the gas cut. So in the beginning, many years ago, the gas cut was low. Oil is, as it trades at a higher price than natural gas. So natural gas is a very low price on a barrel of oil equivalent. So what's happening is we're running out of high oil cut places to drill, going to lower oil cut. So it's gonna be harder and harder to get oil, and as a consequence, we have to use more and more natural gas and more and more natural gas liquids, which all things being equal, should lift the price. But TPL, because, you know, capital expenditures just have these oil royalties, it's gonna go on for a very, very long time. In my opinion, into the next century, and even then, a lot of the oil will still be in the ground, and with better technology, it can be captured. So I think it's some of the best property on the planet. How might the emergence of abundant natural hydrogen reserves impact the viability of investing in traditional hydrocarbon-based energy sources? Overall, what are management's thoughts on natural hydrogen as an energy source, and how do you reason about its likely effects on FRMO's oil investments? I don't worry about it. It's... If it happens at all, it's in the vast distant future, and what's gonna happen is it's really a question of volume. So could you produce hydrogen? Sure. Could you power a motor vehicle by hydrogen? Sure. The question is: how much volume are you gonna put into a vehicle? And you're gonna have a more extensive storage network. You have a more extensive pipeline network. Do you really want that? And so the issue with oil is we built the pipelines when there really wasn't an impediment to building pipelines. Land was cheap. Now you want to build pipelines for hydrogen? Well, you got the same problem as building high-speed rail. Great idea, but you're gonna have to take over land by eminent domain, and it's gonna cost a lot of money, and that'll be added into the cost of converting to a hydrogen economy. It's so expensive, not because it's so difficult to design hydrogen fuels. You can't get the infrastructure built. Just like if you want to save on motor vehicles, it's a great idea to have more mass transit, have high-speed rail or just rail. Okay. Wouldn't it be a great idea to build a railroad from San Francisco to San Diego? The federal government appropriated $60 billion for that purpose, and nothing got built. The reason nothing got built is because you first have to appropriate land to get the right of way, and you gotta pay market, even get a government order that the owner has to sell. You would be looking to build a high-speed rail from San Francisco to San Diego. You're talking about $3 trillion. No one's doing it. You'd never recover your investment. That. Those are the impediments. It's the infrastructure necessary, which is never discussed... So I don't worry about stuff like that. Incidentally, while we're on the subject, if I can add something to my remarks. Same problem with solar, same problem with wind. You have to put the solar panels over a vast area. Okay, so it's gonna have to be in this remote area. You're gonna find cheap land. Now you have to build transmission towers and transmission lines to get the energy produced, ignoring the intermittency of it, from where it's produced to where you need it, which is where people live, in the cities. Okay, try getting that right away. Windmills, same thing. Try getting that right away. And I've never seen in the popular press any articles talk about that. And by the by, you're not even gonna save an oil production year because it's the same concept as making solar panels. So how do you get the silicon to put in the solar panel? You have to get quartz, and you have to smelt it to change it from silicon dioxide, which is what quartz is, to pure silicon. So you have to raise the temperature to something like 2,300 degrees centigrade. So what do you do? You end up, you end up burning a lot of coal to accommodate that. So you put some solar panels up and never count that in China, they're burning coal to make the solar panels, which is why the electronic goods are made in China, because there you can do it. So are you really saving the environment? I think not. Give you another example, which I just wrote about. Silver. You want solar panels, you gotta have silver. That's what goes in a solar panel. I think it's something like 32g of silver in a solar panel, something like that. Well, but you can't expand silver production, because to expand silver production, you have to expand gold production, because that's where silver is. It's co-located with gold. So but there are environmental restrictions on doing more mining because it damages the environment. So on one hand, you need the silver to save the environment, but you can't produce the silver because it damages the environment. So that's why we don't... One of the many reasons we don't have a lot of solar panels, and apart from the intermittency problem. You can't get the silver and you can't get the right of way for the transmission line without spending unimaginable amounts of money. So we are where we are, so I don't really worry about stuff like that. A last question. There appears to be a small reporting difference in FRMO's held Bitcoin between the most recent quarterly report and the less formal FRMO exposure to crypto February 29, 2024 document that was also recently published onto the company website. The fiscal year 2024 Q3 report shows that FRMO held 158 units of Bitcoin as of February 29, 2024. While the FRMO exposure to crypto as of that date document reports 155.69 directly held units of Bitcoin as of the same date. This may seem like an insignificant discrepancy, this difference, but I'm asking regardless, if only to get a better understanding of how the company is reporting or measuring these figures. Could management explain what accounts for this difference? Okay, I can't explain what accounts for the difference. The reason is I don't personally calculate number, but, Therese, I believe you're in charge of the people who calculate number, so maybe you can explain the difference. Thank you for that confidence. I don't feel that my accounting skills are strong enough to account for that difference, and I didn't... So I think it has to do- Wait. Why don't you, let's just dig in, and since we don't have the information right now, rather than just expand, comment extemporaneously, why don't we actually have someone look into that discrepancy? Yes. The people who actually calculate the number. Yes. And get a report back, and rather than speculate on what the differential might be. Obviously, I don't calculate these figures personally, and I don't think anybody would want me to calculate the figures, number one. And number two, if I did calculate the figures, I'd be in an awful lot of trouble because I'm not supposed to calculate figures like that, because I am a conflicted person. So don't let me calculate figures like that. I have to rely on other people, and other people, just like myself, we're not perfect and there's something wrong. We just don't know what it is, so we'll have to figure it out. I'm sure that I think this, the answer is simple, and I believe it's been asked before, so I will get the answer and slip it into the transcript when we- Great. - before we publish it. Okay? Okay. Okay, perfect. So that, that was the last question. So we are at the end of this conference. I don't, I don't think it was, Therese. Unless you skipped it deliberately, I don't think you did. No, not today. There was a question which has a certain interesting flavor to it. This is the last one. Does Winland CEO, Matthew Houk, a Horizon Kinetics employee, own his stake in the company for himself or beneficially for Horizon Kinetics? In either case c ould management give us some color as to how Mr. Houk-- I mean, I'm, I'm gonna insert my own phraseology. Exactly how did Mr. Hauck come to own such a large stake in Winland? Okay. Well, to begin with, he bought the shares for himself. And when he bought them, FRMO had no interest in buying any shares in Winland, because Winland was originally, and still is, to a small degree, a sensor company. Basically, makes sensors. They measure temperature, humidity, air pressure, air quality, things like that. It's a nice little business, but it's a very competitive business, and it's very hard to develop new sensors. It's a limited market if you're gonna go up against the giants, and it's a small company. So I just noticed it some years after he acquired it, and I thought that Winland would be suitable for FRMO. So I approached him, and were there any shares available for sale other than the few hundred shares that trade every day in the stock market? And there were some shares available for sale. Trouble is, one of the, one of the blocks got away from me. Somebody else bought it. I have no idea who it was, and I was able to buy a block from a pre-existing shareholder. He's held the shares since the beginning, so- I'm sorry. That was his first, as I understand, his first entrepreneurial foray. And he and one or two other people did what they'd read about ever since they were young, which is they found what they thought was an undervalued company with a lot of cash and thought they could improve it. And they went and got themselves on the board. And at the time, I believe I remember a conversation. Matt came into my office and asked me if I would be upset if he, be a problem if he engaged in such an activity, and maybe it might take some of his time. And I think Murray was aware of that, too, and we just said, "No, good. Go. By all means. We- Yeah. We're delighted. We're delighted that you want to get engaged and use your, Right. Use your skills and test yourself. Yeah. So as I recall, it was a couple years before it caught my attention. So any other questions from anyone? Those were the last ones. Okay. In that case, it just remains me to thank everybody for listening to us and participating, and it's a very thorough and rigorous questioning, which we definitely enjoy. And of course, we're gonna reprise this in about 90 days. And if in the interim, you think of anything that didn't occur to you to ask right now, please contact us. We'll get you an answer. So until about 90 days, we'll see you again, and I'll just sign off right now, and thanks so much for joining the call. This ends the conference call. Bye. You may now... Oh, Steve, did you have something? No, I just said goodbye. Okay. Okay, you may now disconnect. Okay. Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye.