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- [00:00]
Jackson
The idea right in 1776 is we, we didn't want a king. We don't want taxation without representation. We don't want a better king. We just don't want a king. Right. You know, I would make the real case that bitcoin is the ultimate no kings protest. Because the money printer really is the king. The money printer wears the crown. The money printer controls both political parties. And so I think there's nothing more American than bitcoin in the sense of we're getting back to the ideals of the country, we're getting back to freedom, we're getting back to control of our own money.
- [00:36]
Brian
What you're telling me is that music
- [00:39]
Jackson
is about to stop and we're going
- [00:40]
Brian
to be left holding the biggest bag
- [00:42]
Jackson
of odorous excrement ever assembled in the
- [00:46]
Brian
history of duck business.
- [00:49]
Jackson
1974-1987-9297-2000, whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves.
- [00:59]
Brian
I say when we sell.
- [01:02]
Michael
Hey, okay.
- [01:03]
Brian
I say when we sell.
- [01:08]
Jackson
Another week of the last trade. Michael and Brian, good to see you both. How's the week going so far?
- [01:16]
Brian
It's going 58k, gang. Here we are, just like we all predicted.
- [01:22]
Jackson
I didn't predict it. I don't think any of us predicted it.
- [01:26]
Michael
I definitely didn't predict it.
- [01:28]
Brian
It was a joke.
- [01:29]
Michael
Didn't see this one coming.
- [01:31]
Jackson
Yeah, it's a little tough out there, but we'll persevere. We'll get through it. It's a humiliation ritual right now being all in on bitcoin. We're going to talk about some things that are happening outside of the bitcoin space. But I think the best place to start today would just be to take a look at what the flows look like in the ETF complex. Because some of the listeners may remember we've had some conversations this year, actually. We had Eric Balchunas on the podcast, James Seifert, Mark Yusko. We've had a number of people that pay quite a bit attention to what is going on in the traditional finance landscape, how it relates to bitcoin, what the uptake in interest has been in these bitcoin products, namely the ETFs, the treasury companies, etc. And when we spoke with Eric and James actually a couple months back, we were kind of impressed, at least I was impressed with the fact that a lot of these investors in the ETFs were holding strong. But now you're starting to see a lot of capitulation this Bloomberg headline says that crypto's institutional buyers retreat in double blow to Bitcoin. So I actually don't think that this is an institutional story. I do think that this is mostly a retail story at this point. But you can see here that we are on track for record monthly outflows. This is actually the last day of the month here, recording on June 30th. We're looking at about 4 billion in outflows. If you're on the chart, if you're on video here, you can see that there have been a few negative months in the past over the past two years. Of the over two years now, the Bitcoin ETFs being live, but most of the months have been very strong in terms of inflows. And there really have only been two other months which would look like to be November of 2025 and then January, February of 2025 in terms of strong outflows previously. And so I think this is a testament, Brian, to what we've talked about on recent episodes where people are doing the exact opposite of what you should be doing right now, because we're going to talk about Bitcoin breaking through the 200 week moving average. And typically that's a great time to be accumulating bitcoin, especially if you don't have a position or size that you wanted to or even if you have spare cash ready to allocate. Historically there's been a good time to buy, but what we're actually seeing is the opposite. And it reminds me of what Yusuko said a couple of weeks ago, where investors are the only people that run away from sales. So I'm curious if you guys have any initial reactions to this data because it is quite bleak. But I think it is a tremendous opportunity for those who are able to remain convicted and have a 3, 5, 10 year thesis on Bitcoin.
- [03:57]
Brian
Yeah, I mean, I.
- [04:00]
Jackson
Sorry.
- [04:01]
Brian
I think when we talked about sort of the ETFs when they initially went live like I guess over two years ago now, there was this thought or this perception that perhaps if these are more institutional allocators, whether it be pension funds, endowments, et cetera, that they may have a longer term horizon on the asset. They may have, you know, at least a 10 year view so that, you know, presumably they'd be able to see through some volatility and not succumb to, you know, some of the sort of mental hurdles of dealing with such a volatile asset. But I think, Jackson, to your point, what we've realized over the past couple years is like most of the inflows to these products have been what you would consider a more retail investor. They are people in their brokerage accounts who are just allocating to get bitcoin exposure through their brokerage as opposed to, you know, true institutional allocators who, who, who I still would think would have that more constructive long term view. And you see some of that with the 13F filings that we sometimes cover on the show. But I would say that that's still a minority percentage of what these flows actually represent. So if you're looking at this data, I think it's probably not too surprising just given how poor sentiment is right now that you'd see some of this capitulation even at the ETF level, because these are predominantly, you know, retail flow. So in that sense it's not overly surprising, but. Sorry, Mike, I cut you off. Go ahead.
- [05:32]
Michael
No, the only thing I was going to add is I do think there's sentiment driven flow, but I think we. I always personally discounted a little bit of the AI rotation from like a programmatic perspective because if you look at that, that's like the deepest downtrend of outflows. I think a portion of that was when you put bitcoin in these buckets that are either more speculative, higher tech, whatever you want to call it, that I do think capital rotated out of there via traditional. I don't call it pure algorithmic, but if you have some modeling via BlackRock or whatever portfolio management tools they're using, I think that's a component of where we started this. And then maybe as that momentum goes, you can see just natural people with weaker hands. But I do think there's something to that notion of the AI rotation trade. Now where we're at here and like where a bottom is. No idea. Because the thing that's been coming to top of mind is when you look at. I think river had a viral post that went out about. I think it was meant to be bullish and I took it as bearish where it showed how we're only 55% in this retracement. And if you look on average every retrace gets a little shallower. But I think even if you're looking at this trajectory, it would put us down into like the high 40s or low 40s, high 30s. And that gets it to about a 70 to 80%. Yeah, right here. Because that doesn't really add up, you know, 53%. If you look at that, you're you're going down about roughly, I think on average about 6% every cycle. And so if you, you know, take that to its progression, then it would be roughly a 70%, 71% drawdown, which I think puts you around 39, $40,000. I'm not saying that's where we get there, but that's how I interpreted this. Not as especially with the price kind of bleeding out like it is. If you saw this maybe two months ago or six months ago, I'd be like, oh, we're in a different paradigm. But it doesn't feel like that right now.
- [07:31]
Jackson
Yeah, I think this data is really supportive of a DCAS just remaining pretty much just having a position, allocating weekly, daily, monthly, however you want to set it up and setting it and forgetting it. There was historically you could buy the top in bitcoin and you could still have pretty strong returns over 3, 5, 10 year time horizons. But that's really no longer the case, at least with how it's been trading the past five years because you had the peak in 2021 of 69 and then the peak in 2025, 126. And so if anything, this is supportive of people having to do the hard thing, which is sit on your hands, buy when there's blood on the streets. Brian, you like to mention that and also buy when things are deeply, deeply hated. I don't think that the rotation, I don't think the sale is a institutional Bitcoin etf. So you already made that point. It's retail. And then I do think that this is just a, this is just a dynamic of human psychology. So I actually will pull up this chart to just contrast what's been happening with bitcoin and in the stock or sorry, in the chip space. So you can see here, there's a chart of Intel, Micron, Nvidia and Broadcom and their performance for year to date. So since December 31st of 2025. But you can see here that the inflection point was really in the second quarter. And you have these companies up 200% for two of them and up about 100% for another one of them. And so I always go back to the idea that a bitcoin is just a tough asset to hold long term. And it's tough if you don't have conviction because the volatility is something that most investors are not used to. And then people just like to chase. I mean this is an institutional and a retail dynamic. At the end of the day, institutions are people and People chase performance. And so when you have something that's performing very poorly, which is bitcoin currently, it's not surprising to me that we would see the largest outflow on a monthly basis in over two years from Bitcoin ETFs, the same quarter when some of these individual companies have performed 200%. So this is really just a. This is a chase phenomenon. This is a retail and institutional phenomenon in the sense that people, at the end of the day are just going to chase performance. And I would make the case that you should do the exact opposite of that. I mean, if you were ahead of the trade here, like back in April, well, then good for you. But now, do you really want to be buying something that's up 200% in three months? I don't know if that's the best idea.
- [09:52]
Michael
It's actually a really good last component to that. About like a. I don't necessarily know if we're going to see. You know, just think about digital assets in general. Everything's kind of plateaued with this kind of like AI rotation. And until something happens here, and I want to call it bubble popping, because I don't think that needs to happen, but like, that momentum gets sucked out, we're probably going to be in this trend. But on a different note, exactly what you said of like 6:12, 18 months ago, if you were cycling into DRAM and whatever other second, third or effects that we're going to, you know, RIP because of AI, that was the time. Now isn't. And I feel very confident that. I don't know if it's 18 months longer or shorter, but we are going to be in this exact same spot when it comes to bitcoin. Probably do the last. But in bitcoin, where it's going to be the thing. And I think it's the other side of this AI trade. Everyone talks about it when bitcoin was ripping. It's like bitcoin AI, whether it's mining capital. The thing that really hammers home is like, when you listen to Elon or a lot of these people that are AGI pilled and they talk about, well, they like, forget about money and coordinate economic activity and they just assume, like, UBI and we're all not going to have to, like, do anything with capital. And that's just not how societies work. And the only other side of how I can think about that is if you have scarcity and people understand scarcity and they're all chasing that. And it's not dollars, right? Because the dollars everyone has already shown and I've been going further down this rabbit hole but we've been talking about this on final settlement, Brian, about like the numbers don't add up the amount of capex. It's like the dollar doesn't matter anymore because they're chasing this other thing. And on the other side of that other thing, I don't even know if they know it but the metric will be this finite unit that they can chase. And so again it may sound like cope. I don't, I don't believe it to be cope. I think 2436, whenever it gets on the other side of this and abundance is apparent, people are going to still coordinate and then mark their wins and losses on the metaphorical scoreboard and that's going to be denominated in BTC units and we're going to see that exact same fervor and then it'll probably rotate again afterwards because I don't think you just get this hyper victimization. But Tim Jackson's last point. This is the time when you start allocating and legging in because nobody's talking about that. You never want to be in when everyone's calling for, you know, the top or like that we're, you know, going to be ripping forever.
- [12:15]
Brian
Yeah, it's a really good point because like you, I'm not, I'm not going to try to call the top on equities or you know, these semiconductor names or anything related to this AI build out because I think it can probably persist longer than we imagine. But if you think about what potentially would cause a hiccup there, it relates to scarcity in the sense that if there's not enough materials, if there's not enough components, if there's not enough energy to support this entire build out, then that's where the ROI on all this capex starts to break down. And so I don't know when that happens. But you know, if you take these companies and these entrepreneurs at their word, like at some point you're going to hit that wall at least if you know, even just focus on something like energy. And so that I think the second order effect of that is predominantly inflation, right? Like the price of energy is going to go way up if in order to meet these capex hurdles and meet their return on investment sort of targets, they're going to have to pay up for whatever they need, whether it's energy, materials, commodities, etc. And so I think that that could be, that could prompt what you're describing around Sort of like the other side of this and people realizing like, oh, you actually do need a finite, quasi energy backed form of money to actually store value in this new world. So, yeah, I mean, I could see that playing out, but again, I don't know. I don't know the timeline on it, to be honest.
- [13:46]
Jackson
What you guys are describing is the exact problem with where things sit today because most people are not going to know the timing or when to be in and out of different trades and how to invest in individual equity companies. And so this really underscores why saving is such an important idea and why bitcoin as the money that has the hardest properties is a great savings technology. And you could argue the best savings technology. And you could also make the case why, you know, people who just allocate to their 401k every paycheck into equities or God forbid, bonds, but if you're allocating to something with just set it and forget it mindset, you typically end up doing pretty well because you're just saving at the end of the day. And so I wouldn't necessarily advocate for people to be saving in the S&P 500, especially for people generally, you know, millennials, Gen Z, you have a long time ahead of you. I think that bitcoin is going to benefit from demographics shifting over the very long term. But for the people that just index into spy or Q. Q. Q. They've done very well. And at the end of the day, what are they trying to do? They're trying to save up enough capital so that in a future state they can retire, they cannot outlive their retirement, they can do things with their family, they can go on trips, they can eat food, pay for a mortgage, rent, etc. And so I think the challenge with all of this is people tend not to be great investors. And I think Mark Yusuke actually pointed out that the accounts of Fidelity that perform the best are those that are just inactive, people aren't touching them at all, or people who pass away. And then there's a process of getting access to those accounts for those beneficiaries or those heirs. And so this really just solidifies the fact that people should just have the set of their forget it mindset. And look, I don't really know what to make of all this rotation, but I also don't necessarily buy the story that this capital is just one day going to wake up and rotate back into bitcoin. I think that bitcoin is going to work its way through this process that Historically has done every about four years. And then after we work through the bear market and the really poor sentiment, which is a good time to buy if you have the capital to do so, eventually you're going to start to see more institutional interest. You're going to see RIAs starting to have more conversations. A lot of this, remember, is client driven, right? So I would imagine that there is probably a 90% less amount of people asking their financial advisors about bitcoin today than it was a year ago. And so that is all going to be reflexive in the sense that as the price starts to come back, it doesn't necessarily need to have a catalyst to start going from 60 to 70 to 80 to 90. Those are when people start to have those conversations again. I do think that there probably needs to be some sort of catalyst to get bitcoin really back in the momentum trade. I mean that's why it works so well. Was in 2020, right? Like there was a, there was a major catalyst in the context of bitcoin having those scarce properties.
- [16:39]
Brian
I don't, I don't fully disagree but the way I think about it is like oftentimes the proverbial catalyst is named in retrospect. And a lot of times if you look at past bear markets or even just price declines, like what gets, what gets you to the other side is literally just some amount of seller exhaustion, the price creeping back up and people coming to the realization and grappling with that this thing is not dying and then that that itself is sort of self fulfilling and like, well if it's not dying then it's probably going up further and it's going to make a new all time high at some point. So like I think that that process plays out and then people ascribe the narrative or the, you know, the catalyst in hindsight to what was really just like a, a natural process of finding an equilibrium. Sellers being exhausted, climbing back up and then people realizing like, oh yeah, like it's not dead again.
- [17:38]
Jackson
I think we lost Brian.
- [17:39]
Michael
He took off for July 4th a little early.
- [17:42]
Jackson
Well, hope he rejoins the call. But yeah, I think Brian got excited about the 200 week moving average and wanted to buy some bitcoin. You know, people may not know, but you can actually buy bitcoin. You can earn, you can get cash back. You of course have multi institution custody, inheritance. And so Brian, if you're out there, if you're listening and other listeners who want to take advantage. Michael, what did we say? Book a consultation. Should they speak with One of us.
- [18:06]
Michael
Yeah, we offered a lot. So if you're not ready yet, just book a consultation. Escape the permanent under class. If you're ready, you can actually use the code TLT and we're going to have some new promotions and Jackson, I think he's going to be sending you some premium swag as well as a handwritten note with some of his insights.
- [18:24]
Jackson
Yeah, if you. So if you do sign up, use the code tlt. I will actually ship you some on ramp swag and I will write you a personalized handwritten note. But if you need to speak with us first, just book a consultation. There's a link in the description below.
- [18:36]
Michael
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think this is also really paints the picture on why there's no path or easy way to understand Bitcoin outside of just like what Jackson's referring to as this dca. Until you gain enough confidence and conviction to weigh in and size. Because when the price does what it does, you don't puke it out like there's no other way to do it, frankly, because you can ape in at the top and then you'll just be sick to your stomach right now because you didn't fully understand it. And I used to not feel like financial advisors produce the most value, but now I'm starting to recognize there is a huge aspect to it and it's just human nature. Right. And it's the same thing with dca. It allows you to have the human nature to manage it, to take a percentage of your portfolio. We didn't talk about it here and I don't know if Jackson, you're aware, but Franklin Templeton like two weeks ago rolled out an institutional product that took equity dividends and they put 5% of that into BTC. Right. Because you think about an institution, unless you get in lets you think about the asset favorably. So you can mitigate your remove that bias and then you can execute in or go in and then when you feel confident, I think that that carries the weight because the math doesn't work anymore in the sense of you can go into these index funds but they won't outpace inflation. So now you're just trapped in like what do you do? I know we're going to talk about it at some point, but this is like basically why stretch also doesn't make any sense because if you have to manage that we talked about in the simpler trade, you can earn with on ramp on your capital in the DCN or you can go anywhere else and park it in treasuries. But the point is that the person that has to understand where that yield is coming from has to understand Bitcoin. And so if you're going to go into something that's tied to bitcoin, like stretching, these preferreds are tied to the btc. Well, how can somebody get comfortable with that? Because it effectively moves with Bitcoin. If Bitcoin goes down 30%, 20%, 50%, stretches, moving SATA is moving. And then so why would anybody go into that? That was the whole fundamental premise. People going into those products are effectively people that understand Bitcoin but are trying to mitigate the volatility. And you cannot mitigate the volatility. Volatility is your friend, but you have to understand it. And so I think this is just basically the underscoring of you cannot cut corners on try to understand Bitcoin and manage it or you'll just lose your shirt.
- [20:54]
Jackson
Yeah. And to your point about financial advisors, right, they are really uniquely positioned A they're supposed to have a comprehensive look at someone's financial life and they're meeting with their clients regularly, at least on an annual basis, if not more frequently, reviewing what are your goals, what risk tolerance do you have, how do you want to think about meeting those goals and what timeframe? And so when you're working with an advisor, a lot of what that work looks like is trying to help your clients not make emotional decisions. Right. And so bitcoin is an incredibly emotional asset because the volatility is so high. And so you could make the case that if an advisor really understood bitcoin and there are some of them out there, although not too many, they would be making the same case that they would an advisor would in an equity portfolio where you don't want to be selling or you don't want to be panicking in March of 2020 when the S&P 500 goes down 20% in like a week or two. And so the same thing with bitcoin applies as it would with any asset that's going to trade the volatility. And so, yeah, I mean underscores DCA underscores buying 200 week moving average. When we're breaking through it, that's typically a really good time to buy. And it also underscores the fact that that chart from river shows that you probably don't want to be buying the top as much like bitcoin. It's again, we don't want to get into trading or you know, most people are not good traders. But if you're buying at 69 in November, then you're working through a very deep bear market and you're waiting a long time to recoup that initial investment, and then you're only getting from 69 to 126. So most people would be better off just not doing that and just sitting on their hands getting something set up. Set it and forget it. Now, I think we should talk about Stretch. I know that you guys covered it a bit earlier this week on Final Settlement, but I think it would be good just to revisit here in a couple of minutes what the latest news was there. I'm going to pull up this post from Parker Lewis where he talks about strategy raising. Let me make this a little bit bigger. So strategy raised 1.15 billion last week in common equity at an exchange rate of 61,000 per bitcoin. Parker says buyers of stock could have bought 18,900 bitcoin, but instead bought zero, only to subordinate themselves behind 22 billion in liabilities, plus paid a premium to do it. So I'm curious what you guys made of earlier this week, the Stretch news. Again, we don't need to rehash all the points there, but I do think it's worth calling out. And then I also did see this post from Saylor this morning on the Stretch. Stretch now increasing the dividend to 12% from 11 and a half percent, and dividends are paid twice a month. I did notice that that didn't really move the price at all today in Stretch. It did have a bit of a recovery yesterday based on the, you know, new guidance or the new framework that Saylor announced. But then again, incrementally moving the rate from 11 and a half to 12% really didn't bring in that many more incremental buyers. And I think that there is a little bit of an erosion of confidence or trust in this product because at least anecdotally from people that I've spoken to, a lot of people kind of had this perception that, you know, they didn't really dig deep into it. They kind of took Sailor at face value that this is going to be a stable instrument, it's going to be paying a very attractive coupon. And there were also recent remarks from Saylor and Prague where he's like, you get none of the downside, right, but you get the upside. And so I think a lot of people just didn't do their due diligence. They bought something that they thought was going to be stable. They thought it was going to be money market like, and instead they may be down 20% on that principal position and they are getting the, you know, they are getting the dividend paid out. But then again, do you really want to be in something where, you know, if you're putting your emergency fund in there to get generate some income in the short term or maybe you're anticipating to make another purchase, but you need the cash readily available, you don't necessarily want to be in a product that could have a 20% or even last week it was down about 30%. So I'm curious what you guys make of the more recent news from strategy.
- [24:58]
Brian
Yeah, I mean a few things. So raising the dividend was one part of a sort of five point plan that Saylor tweeted out on Monday morning. The other elements were basically being willing or setting up a program to repurchase some of the preferreds or even repurchase mstr and then also the creation of a bitcoin monetization program. So basically being willing to sell up TO I think 1.25 billion of Bitcoin if needed. Right. Like that's sort of. They have their USD cash reserve, which again, what Parker's tweet was referring to is they again diluted common shareholders to raise cash. So they added to the cash balance and then they sort of quartered off a portion of the bitcoin reserve to say if we needed to sort of top up the USD reserve again, we would sell that bitcoin. I mean, with all of this, like, maybe, you know, my takeaway is maybe they've bought themselves some time. It's funny to me though that like a week ago the sailor proponents were basically saying he didn't need to do anything and then he releases this five point plan to try to sort of quell markets, get these things back towards par. And then there was another just funny tweet that someone resurfaced. So Saylor in 2021 tweeted, Companies that repurchase their stock with cash weaken their business. Those that buy back stock with debt actually impoverish their business. So this, you know, all this is to say like, and I said this on final settlement earlier this week, but like the strategy's changed. Like they're stacking USD, they're being willing to sell the bitcoin because they have these debt obligations through all these preferreds. You know, in my mind, like he's lost the plot a little bit. Like the, the strategies change and he's now having to adapt and be willing to sell Bitcoin if he needs to because he has these products that he's trying to service. And like we said last week, like the core problem is that those preferreds are at odds with common shareholders. If you know, the M Nav, which again, like, he's moved the metrics around, he's changed how they're calculated. The sharp ratio doesn't make any sense. Like these things are now at odds with each other. And so now I view these moves from this week as basically just, you know, buying himself some more time and hoping the bitcoin price recovers, which frankly, like, it might work out. Like, if bitcoin recovers within the next, you know, six to 12 months, he could probably keep this thing going. So it might work. But again, like, you know, it popped kind of yesterday or stretch kind of pops yesterday. I think it's like flat today. If they start falling again, like, well, well, what's he going to do then? Like what, what's the next reaction? It's probably involves, you know, using that amount of bitcoin that's quartered off to sell at some point and then where does that lead? Like, so there is a reflexive dynamic to all of this because if he becomes an actual seller of a billion dollars of bitcoin, you know, that hurts the entire capital structure in various ways.
- [28:08]
Jackson
Yeah.
- [28:09]
Michael
I mean, based on all that and everything that's out there, if you want paper bitcoin, you should go buy paper bitcoin.
- [28:16]
Jackson
Okay, how about some signal or noise? I know we got to do it a little bit of a tighter rip this week. So this one was interesting. I'm going to pull it up here in a second. News on X Money. X Money is reportingly launching with 6% yield, up to 10 million in FDIC insurance and unlimited 3% cash back in a physical Visa metal card. I'm curious what you guys think. Michael, you probably have a lot of thoughts, just because I know you're. You sit closest to just paying attention to new financial rails and taking a keen interest in what's happening and how tech is reshaping, you know, these different types of payment platforms, different types of money platforms. You know, my initial take is, I would say it's signal in the sense that we're going to see a more competitive landscape for people competing for your dollars, which I think is inherently a good thing. I have a Chase checking account. I hold very little in it and I get zero percent on anything that's held in there. And so a 6% yield on dollars that are sitting Idle for me is more attractive than 0% on on ramp. You can earn up to 5%. I know river has the, I think 3.3% in Bitcoin back. So there's definitely a landscape that's becoming more competitive. I think this is of course a good thing for the consumer. One thing that I think is a little bit, you know, gives me a little bit of pause with a platform like X rolling out financial products like this is. It's just, it's very close to potentially being able to financially censor people for what they say online at least there's like a little bit of separation between X or another platform that you may have certain takes that are unfavorable with a current regime and typically your bank account. And then of course bitcoin sits furthest away from that. And that's the best asset to hold in that context in terms of censorship. But I don't necessarily love the idea of having a sizable amount of cash on a platform that I also say things that, you know, maybe are not always popular or maybe could get me into trouble in the future. And so I don't love the idea that that is a potential threat vector to me. But I'm curious if that's a paranoid take by me and I'm also curious just more generally what you guys make of this news.
- [30:36]
Michael
Yeah, I mean going backwards, I think it's a, it's not a paranoid take. I think it's the reality that we've lived in. It's partially how I ended up in this business is when you think about leaving your bitcoin on an Exchange, there's like 10 different reasons why you wouldn't. And one of them is they could just not like you the next day and tell you it's not yours anymore in the same way with your capital. I think to your point, it's a little bit separate. There's some checks and balance on your social life versus financial life. But regardless, that's where this is going. The Everything app, we've seen this in China. We know, you know, tbd, if Elon's white or black hat. Black hat. But when you look at Xai Twitter, you know they're going to be rolling out a mobile phone. Like this is just a vertically integrated life. And then so yeah, I do think that's warranted and I think that's why long term, when you think about putting bitcoin and then more quasi sovereign or fault tolerant solutions on if you're sweeping a lot of your capital into BTC or That's the dominant form of money. There's not a single throat to choke there. When we talk about multi institution in the future related to this I think it's probably going to hit. I think Twitter has you know good or X has a good brand. We've seen like Cash app. I think X is a more higher tier.
- [31:56]
Brian
Right.
- [31:56]
Michael
If Cash app is working or the underserved X is more the affluent kind of like tech. When you think about you know, Tradfire, Fintwit or whatever they call it the things that I would call out because I just looked into this one year because I hadn't been able to find the article. The 10 million is pretty standard when you look at like 2 and a half anything that's above 250 what a depository firm is splitting it across a bunch of institutions to get up to that $10 million mark. X is not a bank so they're sitting in between a lot of the financial service firms. And then ultimately whenever you see something above the fed funds rate you should always be questioning like where the hell is the yield coming from. I think that's obviously one of the common things that most people get trapped in these other like stretch is like 12% is, is astronomical and you should always be questioning when you get to double digit percentages. What I was able to discern is the 6% is effectively. And that's the thing you should. You're going to park dollars there, find out where the dollars are sitting. If they're saying they're sitting in treasuries and then they're subsidizing the rest. Well at least that lets you know your risk profile. I do think that there are a lot of depository institutions like banks that are parking clients capital in some of the buy now Payne buy now, pay later schemes and those are. You should be careful there because that's just a higher risk you know product and you know TBD because of FDIC like what that ends up. But I do think there's risks that'll come into the service. But yeah, that's my take. I think it'll. It's going to make sense. I mean you're probably going to get so many more like value. When you think about if you have a card, you have this everything app, you're probably gonna get AI thrown into it.
- [33:35]
Gavin Newsom
There's.
- [33:36]
Michael
It's probably longer term gonna be a success.
- [33:41]
Brian
Yeah, a few things. I mean this is. It's interesting to see in the sense that you know I forget how many years ago but Whenever Elon bought Twitter like this was what he talked about. He talked about the Everything app. That's why he changed the name in, in part that's why he changed the name to X because he wanted to be this sort of broader thing. So it's interesting to see him actually follow through on this with the launch of X Money And Jackson, I think you make a good point about the competitive landscape. I think that's why this is some amount of signal because you're going to see more and more stuff like this. The I guess where I come out on it is like I'm interested to see how much like net new adoption of like someone actually moving their, their, you know, their external bank account or their, you know, the remainder of their financial lives to X Money. Where I see this like actually gaining steam and traction is a little bit more niche but it's like someone who does a lot of posting on X and is, is getting those I, I, I don't know how the payouts work but I guess monthly payouts from X for you know, some amount of engagement or likes or whatever because then it's basically, you know, you're receiving that money monthly, it never has to leave. You could earn 6% on it and then you can actually spend from that balance is my understanding. So I think this makes a ton of sense for someone who's like a heavy, heavy user of X and is, you know, generating some income already from the platform to just keep that in the platform and be able to spend from it. I think that makes a ton of sense I guess where I, I'm interested to see if there's a lot of uptake is like someone net new who's not like a prolific X poster and like moving their financial life to x
- [35:20]
Michael
money 11 well, I mean that's a fair point. I think you probably are going to be on X, but there's a lot of capital when you think about the people on X. Yeah, the, the one caveat I would say because this would probably make me think about it us as a group listeners and then definitely the market is A stablecoins and the movement of capital B crypto in general and then C if you're able to integrate XAI in any kind of financial tool that you would leverage from like accounting and taxes because accounting and tax is basically a commodity now with AI and so if you have that right now, a lot of people have to connect their external bank accounts to somewhere else to do all of that when it shouldn't really necessarily have to happen but the banks are so slow to integrate that. And then the other deal is this is the angle of onramp and other firms that are native is that we can just move much faster and incentivize to move much faster to bring in net new products than a traditional bank. And so that's where I could see them actually bringing in some real size is if they're able to front run traditional financial institutions with like innovative products.
- [36:32]
Brian
Well yeah, and that reminds me of another point I wanted to make about this is like back when the acquisition happened and he talked about the concept of X Money. I think a lot of people in the bitcoin space that was kind of right as NOSTR was taking off and this concept of zapping comments and micropayments became a thing. And I think that there was a lot of calls for like well if you're going to do this like integrate bitcoin or I mean at the very least integrate stablecoins. You could have some sort of micropayment type of social graph effectively where you know a like isn't free anymore. It costs a SAT or you know, a few sats. So there's some tangible value to someone's like or engagement. And I think that's something that you know, if you're comparing sort of social networks. I know NOSTR is still extremely niche right now and has some UX issues still. But like that is an interesting component of it that you know, Twitter currently doesn't have. And so that's something I as this evolves.
- [37:32]
Michael
But, but I think that's a feature, not a bug for them. I mean if you think about like, like if you just think about the whole stretch MSTR deal and like the amount of people in your mentions in there, some of these things are not like those aren't just real people. There's I mean you know, the notion of like yeah, owning narratives and like I think that's a reason why they would never put value to be discernible in that is because there's real influence, it's gleam from bots and all this
- [38:03]
Brian
stuff that yeah, I mean they might not do it for that reason but in an ideal world like you'd have two versions of a. Like you have like the free like and you have a zap that's like worth a few sats.
- [38:15]
Michael
So that's Noster next, right?
- [38:17]
Brian
Yeah, he should take the, he should take the best thing that exists on Noster. Like the rest of Noster still needs a lot of work but take the one Thing that's actually novel and interesting and apply it to X money.
- [38:30]
Jackson
All right, how about this one, Michael? I think this is what you flagged. One of the things you flagged for this week. Signal or noise? You're up. Ford rehires human engineers after AI fails to match quality checks.
- [38:44]
Michael
I don't think there's a lot to talk about here. I mean, the one that I thought of and you had shared it last, as we should cover before, is just like the craziness going on in New York and California. Because I think that underpins a lot of this. This I just put up because I thought it was interesting. You know, Ford rehired 300 people. It makes complete sense that they're. They're cars. So you need to have actual human element in between. I actually think this is funny because this is like the counter to where this is going in the sense that, like, the technology hasn't diffused into the mainstream yet, whether it's implementation, individuals, and so you can't get rid of people, especially when you're developing cars. But it's probably more of a symptom of, again, implementation versus the actual technology. And so they can rehire these people. But I think this is. It's. It's just legacy firms, man. Like, they're very bureaucratic. They're always going to be slow to implement in the correct way. But I think, like, the funny part is we'll look back in 12 or 24 months and they'll be like, we hired 300 people and we just laid off 30,000 people. Once they. Once they figure it out, you know.
- [39:50]
Jackson
Yeah. As of right now, I would not want to be driving in a vehicle where Claude is doing the quality checks because, you know, even though you ask, don't make any mistakes, you know that there are some mistakes and we find them all the time. So, yeah, I don't know. I think this. This is signal in the sense that. I think it supports the fact that this will take a longer time to play out than a lot of what people say online. If you go online, depending on what the news is of the day or the week, a lot of people are just talking about AI is going to be replacing everyone in, you know, call it three to five years. But fact of the matter is, a lot of those jobs will be replaced. But I think that it's going to take on. It's going to take a longer time to do so, and I think there's going to be a lot of learnings along the way. There's Going to be plenty of examples like this. But probably for every example like this, there's going to be several headlines about large company lays off 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 employees.
- [40:44]
Michael
Yeah, one, one just quick thing to add you reminded me of is if you're listening to this and you're already paying attention a lot of this, you're so far ahead. Because my wife works for like a payments tech company and they just, she showed me the email they got about Claude. They're like just rolling it out. But if you saw this past week it was like Deutsche Bank, Goldman, like four other financial service firms like cut off access because of the data. Right. So like they already had it for 12. Because if you're on the edge of financial services, you're trying to, you know, beat the market. And so point is that like there's just so much time, especially here to get ahead of it, to learn the competencies, develop your own business, whatever it is, before the rest of the market. It like diffuses into everyone else. So there's just a lot of opportunity. It's easy to like doom. But it's in the same way with bitcoin. Like it's sitting at $58,000. We talked about how it's an incident, excellent time to buy, especially looking back. We talked about it, I think last week sitting at 120k. I just would have never thought we'd get another opportunity to buy bitcoin if you didn't have your allocation right now.
- [41:48]
Jackson
All right, we're going to get to the newsome stuff in in just a second. Brian, I'm going to give you the discretion to choose between either gold in the family office portfolio or do you want to talk about interest, expense? If you are one of the few people who still have conviction in bitcoin, you still believe in it as a long term store of value, a better savings, technology, freedom, money. I want to speak with you, if you want to speak with me, of course. But if you want to have a conversation, book some time using the link below. Love to chat with you, hear more about your background, how you got interested in bitcoin and if nothing more, just make another connection in the space. It's always fun. It's probably my favorite part of the job. I do like doing the podcast for the most part. I mean, you know, got to deal with Michael, but other than that I really enjoy it and the only thing I enjoy more is getting to speak with people, listen to the show. So book some time, let's catch up, have a conversation There's a link below to do it. And if you actually want to sign up for on ramp as well, you're more than welcome to use the code tlt. I'm going to ship you merch personally. I'm going to write you a handwritten note and then you're going to get access to everything from brokerage, dca, earn, custody, inheritance, insurance, you name it. There's more that I can name. Forget more things than we actually do. So yeah, book some time. We'd love to catch up and hope you enjoy the rest of the show.
- [43:09]
Brian
Gold. I mean the interesting expense story is our friend Roberto put some good numbers around it. It's insane. It's, you know, this is a sovereign debt crisis playing out in real time. There's no palatable solution. We're thinking about raising rates instead of cutting them that can't persist for much longer. But let's go to the gold piece because I liked this chart from in gold we trust the incremental guys. They put out some fantastic research. Their, their huge, you know, multi hundred page report came out about a month ago I think. And this is just saying, you know, kind of what we talked about maybe a month or two ago around like just the underallocation from a institutional level around gold and precious metals. Jackson, you and I have discussed this at length. Like it, you know, even 10 years ago it was even less than 2% I would say. And so the interesting data point here is that over 80% of whatever this survey was, over 80% call gold sensible. And so I think we see similar parallels to the bitcoin and crypto space where you'll see these surveys from time to time that say I'll ballpark it like 60% or so of allocators or high net worth folks or institutions are thinking about increasing their exposure to bitcoin or crypto. And then you look at the allocation and it's like less than 1% if that. And so this is just sort of a. All this is to say is this stuff takes time basically. And these under allocations exist even in the gold space. When people recognize that there's a need for sound money, whether they call it sound money or not, they recognize that gold has outperformed equities over the past 25 years. People are starting to wake up to this. And so you're starting to see a more favorable view towards something like gold. And I think that the knock on effects of that is it eventually transcends to people recognizing bitcoin. But we're just Very early in these stages. Even for something like gold that's been around for thousands of years.
- [45:07]
Michael
The one thing I'll add is this actually adds to the insanity and how preposterous it was. And I'll take personal ownership to think that gold wouldn't take a place in this over this new monetary regime over the next hundred years, 10 to 100 years. Because everyone here and then listening knows somebody and we talk to them all the time. Whether it's like a board of a bank that somebody wants to buy a bank to insert bitcoin backed lending and that board making millions of dollars, they don't want to rock the boat in the same way a family office or a real estate investor has a net worth or they're managing capital and they cannot take a potential loss of zero. Because whether it's Quantum Sailor or whatever else, you still look at bitcoin as a speculative asset versus gold is not necessarily speculative. It's just like do I really want the return profile of a commodity versus some other type of equity instrument? And so that's just the rational way how this is going to evolve. And then people maybe want to go outside their risk profile and allocate something to btc, but it was always going to work this way. And it was kind of crazy for us to believe that gold wouldn't be a position as people are moving outside of traditional assets.
- [46:14]
Brian
Yeah. By the way, is 30% off its highs too. It's back under 4k which is pretty wild.
- [46:21]
Michael
It's interesting to Jackson's point. It's interesting because nobody owns gold except for it's the reserve currency of the world that sits above Treasuries and nobody owns gold. Which is also the aspect of like how you know you're onto something on the bitcoin side is because it's not talked about. It's not like part of the zeitgeist or the atmosphere of instruments even though it's performed relatively well over the past 50 years. So that tells you everything you need to know about like how long this will take and also why you can't get your information from traditional sources because they're incentivized not to tell you that. And the same way they're incentivized to tell you to go buy paper Bitcoin. So if you want to go. And so like we're just, we'll do that Lane. But after all that, if you want to go buy the paper stuff, go do it.
- [47:03]
Brian
Yeah, the incentives are key too. Even on the gold thing or you could apply it to Bitcoin. It's like the reason sort of tradfi sophisticated allocators and investment professionals historically have been underweight and don't think about it and don't necessarily pitch it to their clients is because it's hard to fee on it. You can create structured products around it, but you know, if someone deeply understands the asset, you probably just want to unspot and so it's hard to basically make money on it. Whereas if you have an equity fund, you can charge, you know, 2% on it. If you have a private equity fund, you can charge 2 and 20. Like there's all these different ways to financialize and make money for this entire industry. And it's harder to apply that to commodity assets, basically, full stop.
- [47:48]
Michael
And Jackson's seen this. When you go talk to an ria, like is it in your platform? And if it's not, you just have a whole song and dance just to be able to get exposure to it.
- [47:59]
Jackson
For sure. Yeah. Nobody owns gold or bitcoin, so that'll change over time. All right, how about this one? Gavin Newsome, he says it's time for a national billionaires tax and a new social contract. 10% of Americans own 2/3 of the wealth. Wages have stagnated. The cost of living has skyrocketed. He sounds like a bitcoiner. That part right there. The system is fundamentally broken. The federal tax code, a corporate code and inheritance code were written for a different set of Americans. It's time for an economic reset. Let's listen to this clip real quick.
- [48:36]
Gavin Newsom
It's time for a national billionaires tax and a new social contract. Think about this. Just 10% of people, 10% of people in this country own 2/3 of the wealth. A 30 year old, for the first time in American history is not doing better than his or her parents. That's a five alarm fire. American wages have stood still and the costs across the spectrum, cost of living have skyrocketed. The system is fundamentally broken. The federal tax code, the corporate tax code and the inheritance tax code seem to be written for a different set of Americans. It's time for an economic reset. A true minimum tax. A true minimum tax on billionaires that, well, ensures that we don't gotta listen
- [49:22]
Michael
to all this dude, the tax rate,
- [49:24]
Jackson
I want to like, we just listen to the end right here and in
- [49:27]
Gavin Newsom
plain sight over the course of decades and decades. But we can reverse it. We can reverse it together. It's time to democratize the American economy to save our democracy all Right.
- [49:40]
Jackson
Are we saving it?
- [49:42]
Michael
Gavin. Gavin's like my favorite kind of like, you know, just to watch the manners. And it's like watching a trainer if you can't look away. Brian, like what I'm curious of, because I, I can't. I'll. I'll butcher it. So I'm not going to try to recap. But what's going on New York with Mandami the best example or like what I listen to with the all in pod and it's just like we're referencing this new, like, political class that have like effectively like leashed on to the Democrats and then are trying to attempt to like subvert it. And it's this socialist wave. I. I'm not there because it's just like I've kind of gone so far black pill that it doesn't matter, but there's just something just to pay attention to because you're seeing more of this in the coast and it's going to come to a state near you or a large city near you, and it's. It's just a recipe for disaster.
- [50:37]
Brian
Yeah, I mean, I don't have a ton of info on it other than the way I look at it as like Mamdani being elected was basically the tip of the iceberg. Like, there's a. There is a groundswell of support for socialist ideals. And part of it is because of the way that Gavin Newsom is articulating the problem. And the proverbial solution is, oh yeah, we just, we just take your shit, we just seize your property. Like, it's completely insane like that that, you know, it's tough to watch. Like that's an evil clip. And yeah, I mean, I don't have much more to say other than like, it makes sense why this is happening. We, we know, like, like you said Jackson, like the first part of what he says is accurate. Like stuff is broken. But the solution isn't more taxes or to create sort of socialist programs. We know that that doesn't work empirically from, from history. And so the real solution is to fix the money, stop government spending, stop debasing the currency. But that's not palatable for politicians. What is now palatable is these socialist ideals. And it's become normalized. And I think that that's what I mean. When Mamdani being elected was the tip of the iceberg. Now it's become normalized that you can have these views and more people like that are going to get elected. Unfortunately.
- [51:59]
Jackson
Yeah, I would say it's. It's Incredibly insidious, because the data that he points to, or anyone in that camp would point to, would be the top 10% or the top 1%. Let's remember that the bottom 90% have pretty much been obliterated over the past several decades or century by debasement and the. The structural rot of the currency. And so what I find particularly insidious is like, all right, the state's already done away with 90% of the population. Now let's focus our aims on the top 10%, the top 1% that have been able to maneuver in the system to their advantage. Let's take their property as well, and let's get it all into the confines of the state. And we're going to be rich, you're going to be poor. That's really the permanent underclasses. If this, if these policies were enacted, then everyone's permanent underclass. So that's the most insidious part about it, is like, there have been some people who have been able to benefit from the system. Doesn't mean, like, you're ultra wealthy, 0.1% or 1%. There's people in the top 10% who I think have done well, but now it's like, all right, let's go after these people who got their nod as well, who benefited from this because they're like the, you know, they're the remaining bastion who haven't been overtaken by the state.
- [53:10]
Brian
The other thing, though is like, you know, let's play it out. Let's, you know, let's seize people's property. Like, okay, what are you going to do with the capital? Like, we already know what they do. Like, with all the fraud that has been uncovered over the past several years, the waste, fraud, abuse. Like, we know that they can't handle the capital allocation side of things. So why would we say, oh, yeah, just take more of our shit, they're going to waste it. And they, you know, very conveniently leave out all of that money that's wasted historically as part of the problem.
- [53:42]
Michael
Yeah, I mean, the 3D is like, it's all by design, so you can seize the means of production. Or these nice, like California. When you think about just how beautiful, like, all the different advantages you would want for people to leave and then leave you the scraps to clean up. I don't think that Austin or Texas are a mean for this, but, you know, I'm just waiting for the guys to come and join. I don't know if you saw this. I had retweeted it this Is his, his. His Travis Kalanick's new office?
- [54:19]
Brian
We're getting jets.
- [54:19]
Michael
I don't know. I don't know if it's gonna. I don't know if he's gonna show up. But that's, that's the new office that they built right on the. The water for the Adams deal. So whenever the guys are ready for. To come down to Texas, I'm not saying that we will be immune for it forever, but at least it's gonna slow.
- [54:39]
Brian
It's.
- [54:39]
Michael
It's slowed down a bit.
- [54:41]
Brian
Yeah.
- [54:42]
Jackson
I mean, that lakefront office definitely beats my office setup I got here. So that's definitely enticing. All right, let's round it out. We got the fourth. We have Independence Day this week. Big week, America. 250. Let's do a quick around the horn. We did it last year. Let's go quick around the horn. What's your 1776? What's your patriotic take? What's your July 4th take? Michael, you're first.
- [55:10]
Michael
I mean, all I got is you want to. You want to own your wealth, your money. So you got to hold. Be closest to it that people can't control. Like we talked about, after everything we've said here, if bitcoin and freedom don't like ring true, it doesn't make sense why you wouldn't want paper version, then you should just buy the paper stuff.
- [55:28]
Jackson
Wow. It had. It could have been anything. It had to be about paper. Bitcoin.
- [55:34]
Brian
Yeah. I mean, well, basically, can you think
- [55:35]
Michael
of anything less American than paper bitcoin?
- [55:39]
Jackson
I could and I'll let Brian go first.
- [55:44]
Brian
What I was going to say is, you know, 250. It's a nice reminder to actually get back to some of the founders ideals because I think, you know, unfortunately over the past 250 years, we've strayed materially from what the founders put in place, particularly as it relates to money. Jackson, I think you may have mentioned this last year, but in the Constitution, in the very early days of this country, money was supposed to be backed by gold or silver, and we lost that along the way. And I wanted to pull a quote from Thomas Jefferson. He said in 1816 in a letter to John Taylor, I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale. And so he's basically describing fiscal dominance around 200 years before we had a term for it. But what he's describing is like funding what you want to spend today with debt that someone else in the future who's not even born yet is going to be on the hook to pay. And that's really been the story of the past 100 years or so, is just selling out future generations to spend today and debasing the currency. And you know, frankly, that the. Whether it was Jefferson or a lot of the other forefathers, like, they, they knew this could be a problem and they tried to prevent it. And we've. We've strayed materially away from that. So it's a nice reminder. And let's try to get back to that.
- [57:28]
Jackson
You guys know what happened when you know what the consequences were for currency debasement back in the 1700s.
- [57:34]
Brian
Right?
- [57:35]
Jackson
So we've let people get a little. Get. Get away with a little too much. But yeah, my, my take would be. So we obviously are all well aware of the no kings protest. The IDEA Right, in 1776 is we, we didn't want a king. We don't want taxation without representation. We don't want a better king. We just don't want a king.
- [57:55]
Brian
Right.
- [57:55]
Jackson
And so now you have this, you have this political protest behind the no kings rally. You know, put that aside for a second. You know, people think that Trump is a king. Whatever. You know, I would make the real case that bitcoin is the ultimate no kings protest because the. To your point, Brian, the money printer really is the king. The money printer wears the crown. The money printer controls both political parties. And so I think there's nothing more American than bitcoin in the sense of we're getting back to the ideals of the country, we're getting back to freedom, we're getting back to control of our own money. And so we have to remember that we talk about bitcoin's price quite a bit. It's important to. In the context of people wanting to preserve their purchasing power. And it can be a little bit easy sometimes to get distracted with what's going on. Bitcoin's down 50%. But Bitcoin really is the no kings protest. Because until you can remove the state from the money printer, until you can remove their privilege of just creating new money, then we are going to continue to deteriorate as a country. We're going to continue to see people like Gavin Newsom who want to sell you on a future where you will not own anything. You will be serfdom, class, but you just won't know it yet. And so it's kind of ironic that people like him have a lot of. You know, they make a lot of similar points that people in the bitcoin space would make. But of course, any politician, whether Democrat or Republican, is not incentivized to speak the truth. And they may not even understand the truth, quite frankly, a lot of them. So bitcoin's no kings protest america250 hope everyone who's listening has a great Independence Day. If you're American, July 4th. Enjoy it and we'll see you back here next week.
- [59:45]
Brian
Don't eat the bugs thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show Notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that On Ramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.