The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin's Biggest Bill Is in Trouble - Trump Has 20 Days to Save It

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

Trump is meeting with Republican senators today to push the CLARITY Act across the finish line, marking a pivotal moment for U.S. crypto regulation. We also discuss Nico Lechuga's new Bitcoin treasury company, Orange Juice, which is pioneering a new model for accumulating Bitcoin through operating businesses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bitcoin's biggest bill, the Clarity Act, may be in trouble with only about 20 days left to get it passed. It's getting so urgent that President Trump himself is meeting with senators today to discuss the non-discussed that he shall not discuss or mention ethics clause that everybody's been waiting to see. That's just one thing we're discussing today. I've got Nico Latruga here from ego death, but now from orange juice, to discuss exactly what they're building and. doing you guys don't want to miss this one even though it's about 30 minutes late let's go good morning everybody what is up i hope you're all having an absolutely stupendous day we were having some major uh glitches going on but we were able to get a stream back up and online so hope you guys are here i'm going to go on go ahead and bring on nico now good morning sir how are you

hopefully you can hear us you're muted you can't hear me i'm going to start talking about uh trump And we'll make sure that Nico could hear us. You can hear us before. Perfect. This aligns exactly with how I would anticipate it to go based on the morning. So, Nico, I'm going to pull you off. I'll watching if you give me a thumbs up and you can hear, you'll just let me know. Hopefully he can get that sorted.

Right now, the big story of the day is clearly this one. Trump to meet with senators over Clarity Act on Thursday. As I mentioned there in the intro, sentiment is clear that we only have about 20 days before the August recess to hopefully get the Clarity Act passed. For those who believe that that's still on the table, I think the odds are still strongly against it. But anything can happen. Just like I kind of joke, you know, you can have pocket aces and go all in in poker and you have a 95% chance of winning and then you can lose. Well, I think the people who are against the Clarity Act right now have pocket aces. But clearly it's become a big enough issue.

The ethics clause that I've been talking about this whole time that President Trump himself is going to meet with senators, as you can see here in this article. I have no idea if this will actually get done, but there is some optimism that they're going to present to him where it currently stands and what the path is to success for this bill over the next 20 days. And we will see if they can manage to get it done.

So that is the biggest story of the day. Hopefully, Nico, I think he signed off. He's signing back on. Hopefully he can hear. So I guess we will, you know, just keep kicking it until he appears. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me?

That's my life. Technical difficulties, right? Save me. My life. All right. So listen, there's a whatever. There's all this stuff. But I want to talk about what you guys.

are doing because I find it really incredible and you announced it yesterday. So here, I mean, I can bring up your tweet here. We're very advanced technology here. I can show your tweets. Building a business takes decades. Founders deserve more than one path when it's time to transition ownership. That's why for over a year, Jeff Booth. Yeah, all the names. Jeff and Lynn and Rubin and all, Adrian and everybody here is building orange juice. So you and I've been talking about this for a little while maybe just break it down. Obviously, people see the big names there and they get excited. Yeah. So you and I, like I hinted on this, the last time you and I were talking, I think, with the digital asset treasury companies. And one of the things that we were talking about was

that we particularly see is super compelling and with business in general. Like anybody that has any degree of business background, like businesses have to make money. And so from that standpoint, like we had started this. There was like a kernel of an idea about 18 months ago of what if you went after these businesses that already, they're good businesses, but they're at a point of stasis, right? They're not growing. So they're not really targets for private equity. They're completely uncorrelated with anything in the Bitcoin space. And generally, these are family-run businesses that have been held in the family for decades. They have good margins.

They're probably making like three to seven million dollars in EBDA. And they're not ready to fully transition, but they're looking for like the to offload some of the risk of their business. And so what does that look like? Well, in us like building this bridge for tomorrow, what we came up with was orange juice. So they, we acquire their businesses for part cash and part equity. you use the free cash flow from the businesses to buy Bitcoin, and you give the business owners like this bridge to tomorrow.

And eventually, after you've proved out the thesis and you have enough businesses under the belt, the intention is to take orangeys public. Yeah, so God forbid, we actually have businesses that make money and put it into Bitcoin. Exactly. Yeah. It's a novel idea.

Yeah, maybe just raising a bunch of money and then putting it all into Bitcoin in one day and then hoping for the best, maybe wasn't the best business model. Is that what you're daring to imply here? Because I might have been screaming that when it was happening. So we've had a few conversations with this. I think that one of the things that we believe in, like, everybody has their own take on this. And we'll see what happens within the market is that if you're taking on any type of leverage, any type of debt, like think about our own personal lives. Like if you buy a car, you buy a house and you're mortgaging that, you're taking out an interest loan. Like generally, there's some degree of credit institution that's checking you to make sure that you have the cash flow to service the debt that you've taken out. What we have seen in the market is that there's an incredible amount of leverage that's been taken out without cash flow able to service the debt. And so how we think about this and you look at the team that's here with an orange shoes is when we're building businesses, we think of risk vectors.

And then we think of like how those risk vectors potentially impact the business is chance of success. And if you've introduced a risk vector, in this case, leverage that you've taken out against the business without having cash flow able to service it, then you can impair your business. In this setting, like how this is designed by having uncorrelated businesses with good margins, sustainable cash flows, if you are taking at even a degree of leverage to buy business, Bitcoin and the only time you would ever do that is after you have the businesses and you have the cash flow, even if Bitcoin's price goes down, like we see a drop from 126 to where are we at, 65, 66 today. It doesn't matter because you have the cash flow to service the debt. In the same way, like when you buy a car and you drive it off the lot, if you're paying for it with financing and the price, the value of that car drops.

The day you drive it off the lot sometimes, right, depending on the car. But you have a job and you can, you can. you can service that. So you're not impaired. Why didn't treasury companies understand that when they were all launching en masse effectively leveraged and with zero plan for the future? And was that the reason that the market topped? Because I think it's a huge reason why the market topped,

because they all bought the top. Yeah. I think it's very, very hard to be inside of an industry. and we're like right now looking at this and the model that we've created, it can look simple. Like I would say that putting these simple pieces together is actually quite complex. But I think any time that anybody's inside an industry and you're not an outsider that's coming into it, the notion is that this is how a particular industry operates. So if you look at like historical treasury companies, I think that that was just like what the market was tolerating at that time period.

And they can't be like victims of saying that this is obvious or not obvious. But I think that the model that we have is differentiated from them. And we believe like it allows Orange Juice to just execute on its principles and be successful without having external market factors. Well, so we always sort of had the conversation that there were Bitcoin Treasury companies. And unfortunately, that was like one name brand for everything. But I don't think anybody ever argued. with the idea of using money from your business cash flow to put it onto your balance sheet in Bitcoin, right?

So they should have had a differentiation of Bitcoin balance sheet companies and Bitcoin Treasury companies, or at least some between like raising money to buy Bitcoin with no cash flow and people who already have a business and just want to save in Bitcoin rather than save in dollars or even save a percentage of those dollars in Bitcoin

for the same reason that all of us buy Bitcoin, like you said, and have jobs. It seems like you're just going all in on that side of it, right? Of course, and it also seems like you're a private equity. You're a private equity company first that's identifying good bit. You're not going to go buy crappy businesses just because they put Bitcoin on the ballot sheet. So you guys are private equity, you know, obviously specialists who are going to identify good companies and then use that cash flow to buy Bitcoin. You're 100% right.

I think the nuance, the nuance twist with the private equity is, that you've created a permanent capital vehicle. So instead of having a typical like fund structure where the life of it is ephemeral, you have this vehicle that has a liquid currency with it and you can almost trade in and trade out of it after you've established it. But you're exactly right. The goal with this is to provide a completely new model for private equity, the private equity type deals and to keep the treasury asset being Bitcoin with the free cash. That's it. So do you go in and actually operate these businesses? I mean, you kind of alluded to it before that obviously there's,

I don't know how much people know about private equity, right? But I mean, you can go from like full corporate rate or go and buy it, chop it up, whatever, to going in and operating it, or it can just be kind of an infusion of capital where you're backing the existing team. You know, I don't know if these are families who are trying to exit the business. They've been doing it forever or if they're just looking for more operating capital or, you know, support. So there's a great question. The biggest thing with the model is like you want to protect cash flow at all costs.

In that way, you want to be very, very sensitive to a business operator that's been in there and has the know-how of his particular industry, potentially for decades. And so what we're offering them is a path to transition if they want over time. But like ideally, what we're really saying to them is your business that's at this point of stasis. Like we're offering you a tax advantage way to exit that business, provide some diversification, liquidity. And if you continue to operate that business, like the equity that we give you should be worth multiples of that in the future. And you will be the beneficiary of that. So I know I'm answering your question without really answering your question. We're willing to take

either side of the Ford. As long as we're protecting the cash flow of the business. You know, like a guy I had a friend who was at Apollo for years. And you know, it would obviously go in. I remember he was, at one point he was the acting CEO of AMC movie theaters, but he worked at a pawn. They went in, they kicked everybody out, they put in their own management structure, and they improved the bigness. I think they did the same with like the Bundesliga in Germany or something, right? Obviously, that that's, so that's not really structurally what you're doing unless you had to. But you're going, finding a great business with a trusted person who knows exactly what they're doing and hyper, you know, giving them a bit of hyperdrive.

Yeah, we're giving them hyperdrive. We're giving them hyper drive. We're giving them access to like, There's a good comp in the market right now of like Bending Spoon. So Bending Spoon has this permanent capital acquisition vehicle. They just went public, incredibly bullish on the company and the operators from there. You're giving them, and one of the things that the CEO was talking about, and we'll do the same thing. If you are one of these like mom and pop shops or these businesses that's kind of around this $3 to $7 million, like EBIT a clip, you being able to get some of the level of the talent that we're going to have access to is not going to be there. You're not going to be able to get like a top tier AI person in there. You're not going to be

able to get a top tier like consultant in there, the other team. But we can. We can bring that in. We can help out the business. We can optimize it. And then we can give you tools like if the attention is to take orange juice public, you are going to have tools, opportunity that only billionaires with like publicly traded equity have. And suddenly we've like provided a bridge or a bridge and a vehicle for every other business owner to have that. So interesting. I didn't really think about the, technological nuance, right? If you're a family operator of a local business for 30 years, you're not probably thinking about how AI can make your business more efficient or make you more profit. Right? So you're, to some degree, you come in as a consultant to teach them that.

Do they need to believe deeply in Bitcoin to allow you to participate? This is a great question, Scott. So I believe that the first, this is just like my own personal opinion. I think that the first three acquisitions will have to believe in Bitcoin. I think they're going to, going to because this is a different model that we're going into. I think after acquisition three, I think what we end up happening, what ends up happening is what you were saying before of, we're going after Apollo, KKR, Blackstone. Like that's that's the, those are your like Mount Rushmore of private equity and hopefully we're providing a different model for for great businesses to be able to sell to. I think at that point, what you'll end up seeing is there's some some huge

benefits of the model from a return standpoint, from a diversification standpoint, from a tax standpoint for the business owners. I think by acquisition three, acquisition four, what ends up happening is that becomes very, very apparent in the model in the market. And we end up getting sellers that are saying like, hey, I probably didn't even understand this thing of Bitcoin, but like I'd like to consider this instead of traditional private equity. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. I had a conversation with a friend, I think it comes out Sunday, actually. My friend CJ at People's Reserve, and they're doing Bitcoin back mortgages and Bitcoin bonds and all these things. And I kind of asked him the same question. I said, do people have to be deep Bitcoiners or

believers? He was like, no, we actually now have people who realizes a better product and just buy Bitcoin to use the product. Knowing that that Bitcoin will get part of it, you know, one of their products is that the Bitcoin eventually gets sold off, but your mortgage gets paid off exceptionally early. Most Bitcoiners are terrified of like having their Bitcoin pulled off. But if you're someone who says, I'm getting a better rate by just buying $100,000 in Bitcoin, instead of doing a $100,000 mortgage, I'll just buy the Bitcoin and do it that way because it's pristine collateral, right? So I would imagine it's a long winded way of saying, I agree. I would assume that your success really comes when the Bitcoin side of it is abstracted away because you're a better private equity. That's exactly it. And you can just like

point to the numbers. You can point to the return, especially on the equity that you've given as consideration for the businesses that you've acquired in the same way if you're getting a lower mortgage rate you're getting a lower like car loan you've effectively just just given them a better mousetrap right and it becomes more apparent I think a lot of this like I can't remember if it's the last podcast and the podcast before that you and I talked about I think about this like when we invest from the ego that side and the technology in the space we try to not be dogmatic about like tech or about Bitcoin we think that the solution. that we're investing in should be so profound that you shouldn't have to understand what's going

on under the hood. It should be better than anything else that's in the market. And so in the same way with Orange Juice, the Bitcoin component, like you're saying, of the engine will be abstracted away. This is the return. This is the profile. This is your alternative to traditional private equity. This is your option. And because of that, like people will just engage with that is our thesis. So, fascinating. So do you have a, a fixed structure of exactly how much Bitcoin you'll buy versus earnings or to add to the balance sheet or is that also fluid? Like does everybody, do you go to them and say here, cash stock and you're going to put

25% of your cash flow in Bitcoin or is it, you know, is it on a scale of some sort? This is a phenomenal question. So you want a moderate degree of leverage on the on the big, sorry, the cash flow of the business. You run this optionality anytime you're buying businesses. So you have the option of buying additional businesses with the cash flow that you have from the businesses there. Or you have the optionality of providing a bit of leverage and buying Bitcoin with it. The intention is to utilize about 30% of the cash flow to leverage buy Bitcoin and provide like 70% excess for buying additional businesses or unleveraged buying Bitcoin.

Because you want to have the leverage ratio of the entire business be like extremely, extremely healthy. so that in all economic environments you're not becoming impaired. What ends up happening in the model is that Bitcoin ends up making, depending on the, a moderate amount of the balance sheet. It's probably 10 to 20%, but the businesses are the biggest economic driver in here. And your point, like how I like to think about it is, if you think of like Fasten the Fury is the first one, right? Like the engine is the businesses.

The gas is really the free cash flow from those businesses and that nitrous oxide tank. That just makes the car go a little bit faster and gives you a little bit of an edge to win the race is Bitcoin. That's like someone saying I want 10% of my money in Bitcoin, but not 100%. Right. And what it does in the sharp ratio and understanding that. You don't suffer too badly if it goes down, but you benefit massively if it continues to do what it's done in the past. And then the other part too is once you take it public, like you're no longer in this digital asset treasury company, right? Like we're a company that keeps part of the balance of the free cash flow and the treasury imbalance sheet in Bitcoin.

And we are an alternative to private equity. And that's it. Like I've been wondering already why nobody has done like a fund of funds for buying up all the treasury companies that are trading at a discount and impaired. That's obviously something completely different because you would have to put some sort of cash flow in business. on them. So it's kind of the opposite and probably a hell of a lot more work. But is there any, I mean, is there an opportunity where some of these businesses you invest in could actually invest in or buy treasury companies that are at a discount or impaired, you know, sort of a treasury company of treasury companies? So this is a really good question. I've heard like,

there whispers in the market that different activist investors are trying to consolidate Treasury companies trying to get them to issue out the assets that they have within them because of the impairment. We haven't seen any of that happen, I think, yet. It's way too premature for orange juice to even consider this. But I think once we're at scale, like, if there's an opportunity to buy Bitcoin with, like, cash flow that we have from the businesses that we've acquired, at 50 cents on the dollar, like, we're going to do it. Yeah, that's what I thought. I'm just wondering what happens to the existing. I think your model and models like it are the future of whatever will rise as the Phoenix from the ashes of the treasury company space. I just wonder what happens to the existing ones that are at this massive discount really have no way out. I mean, I guess they all have a way out, which is you wait for Bitcoin to go up above where you bought it. But that, you know, that's, you know, they always got to say, you know, hope is not. not strategy.

Yeah. It doesn't seem to be theirs. I think that this is the point of like just the differentiation of, of, our strategy across like all different disciplines of, the entire team at Orange Shoes, like how we've thought about this is reducing the amount of external miracles that have to happen for us to be successful. And if we do that properly,

then in all market conditions, we've built a ship for war. Bitcoin goes down. Doesn't matter. the market tanks doesn't matter like we're business buyers we have cash flow we're we've we've set this up properly in a way that we're looking for this to last and rival the biggest private equity funds in the world but we've thought about those risk vectors and um good i had a friend that was like a rocket engineer and he talked about like the the complexity of having uh multiple stages

firing right so like the the having one versus two it's almost like two external mirror that have to happen to like maintain like flight trajectory. In this, we've tried to reduce that complexity so that we just have to be amazing operators and buy the right businesses. Yeah. As I think about this more and I, so you know, I've talked privately, my audience actually knows like my friends at Arch Public have it's a different but similar. It's a fund where they, you know, basically buy cash flowing businesses, but it's a specific,

you know, it's a specific franchise and that money. Right. Anyways, similar idea. What I'm kind of thinking through here as you're talking is that this is actually a bare market business. You're one of the few people that's probably exceptionally well positioned while Bitcoin is trading here, what I would argue, near a bottom. This would be much worse if you did it and Bitcoin was a 126 and dropped to 50, right? But anyone you're convinced to participate in this now, if you believe that Bitcoin will rise out of this as it always has in the past, you're going to get a massive benefit from doing it now. and watching that Bitcoin go up instead of go down. You're 100%, Scott.

So the part of this, the biggest difficulty, I think initially, was getting that first slug of capital. Getting the company here. You guys did 40 million, right? Is that accurate? Yeah, exactly. So getting that first slug of capital, removing the externality of the capital that you need to operate from here.

And with that, we have enough to get exactly where we need to go. But you're right. as if the market is compressed, like, and we're buying businesses, those Bitcoin, the businesses, there's a compression on the multiple of them. If Bitcoin is compressed, that's great. Like, we're buying Bitcoin at what we perceive as a discount. And like you and I've talked about over and over again, it comes down to this time preference. And when you're dealing with debt, even if you have a personal long time preference, you have the time preference of the debt that has to be factored into. So what we've done is we've created a model that allows for a longer period of time to elapse and for Bitcoin's price to appreciate.

But it's not required. Okay. So quick, quick, quick, do you still have time? I'm sorry. I know that we like. Yeah. You talked about a percentage of the Bitcoin that you purchase, we call it 30% being with low leverage, basically put on it. The other 70% you'll either identify other businesses that you want to purchase or buy more spot Bitcoin. Right. Talk about what that leverage means in the context of your business so that people don't think it's like go on bitmax and 100 X long. Yeah. You should definitely not be doing that. So anytime, let's just talk about like credit in general. Anytime you're taking out debt or you utilizing credit to make a purchase, you want to have a healthy enough leverage ratio that if your cash flow, which is servicing that credit is in pay. that you are able to still service this debt.

So like, let's use an example, like just hard numbers. In this context, let's say we, you take out, you have a business that has free cash full of $10 million. Okay. In this, we would say, great, three million of that is earmarked for debt service on a Bitcoin buy. So let's say the debt service on that is $3 million. Great, we have excess free cash flow of $7.

million dollars, meaning if the business went down by 70% and we have all of these like screeners and comes down to the filtering heuristics to make sure we have bought a business that through multiple market cycles and is uncorrelated to anything we're seeing right now, that should not happen. But let's say it does, then we can still service the debt that we've taken out. That makes perfect sense. So what does it look like to actually buy Bitcoin with, you know, How do you do that?

What are the mechanics of it? Yeah, exactly. So two things happen. You end up buying a business and you analyze the free cash flow. So let's look at this example. So you're saying, okay, great, I have $10 million in free cash flow. You're going to put multiple turns of, so two to three turns of leverage on the free cash flow, meaning I'm going to buy $20 to $30 million in Bitcoin.

The debt service on that, let's just use round numbers. It'll probably be below this. But let's go on the first. The question being that you're borrowing from the bank, you have a 5% interest rate, whatever. And so whatever the monthly payment is, you make sure that cash flow easily covers. Exactly. So in this context, let's say you buy $20 million of Bitcoin that cost the capital is 10%. You have 10 million of free cash flow.

Two million of that is earmarked. That's servicing the debt on the Bitcoin. What do you think? What do you think of SDRC? I think like it's he's paying 12% cost of capital right Ceda is paying 13% cost of capital when we're talking about you know yeah so I think that it's interesting to offer individuals different fixed income products I think that you have to label those products with

the risk that they have and anytime you're getting a interest rate that's in excess of the treasury rate, like there's a reason why. And so there's risk that's priced into that. I think if that's disclosed, like us as market participants, you are entering into like any other investment at risk. And there's a tradeoff. And that's probably why you're getting the excess interest on it. My concern becomes when additional businesses have been built on top of it. And we see this in the ego desk side. And it is being utilized as the engine underneath those businesses.

And they are positioning it to market participants as risk-free. Yes. That was a very good way of saying maybe you shouldn't tell retirees that it's the money market account. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, I know they have lawyers.

So I don't think that they just like throw stuff at the wall and hope that it sticks. I can tell you, I've said it. Like last time I interviewed Saylor at Consensus, it was actually, I think they had their earnings call on Tuesday saying they were going to consider, you know, selling Bitcoin to inoculate the market. And I look at my schedule. I'm like, oh, we're talking Wednesday morning at 830. So like, you know, and I know that we had to actually submit the transcript to the SEC in advance of doing it. So it's not like they're not being monitored, right? Right.

heavily. It seems like maybe it would, I think a lot of people would say maybe it was irresponsible, but not like, in no way are they going to get in trouble for having done it. But I do think that they've learned that lesson moving forward and all of these products now. I think after trading so far below par, the market's never going to be confused to believe that they're risk-free anyways. I think the market did the job for the disclosures anyways. Yeah, I think I think that like it was a good lesson of like what happens with fixed income products when the market perceives that the interest rate on it is too low. Like it trades below par and that effectively becomes the excess interest that you're getting

for taking on that risk. So I guess before I let you go, so you've raised. You guys are done there. Are you, A, are you planning to raise again? B or is just you're going to do this fund and the goal is take it public? How can people participate or, you know? I would say like we may raise again. like you guys can reach out.

We actually have produce at orangejuice.com or you can go to orange juice.com. We were lucky enough to grab the handle for it. That's great to be. It was wild. Yeah. 39 million of the raise went to orange juice.com guys. I hate to know. Yeah.

Yeah. So way, way less than that. We got very lucky and some kid wanted to sell it. So yeah, reach out through the website. We're going to be building the team for this. like we're hiring a few different positions that are on there. They'll be just closed in the coming weeks. If you are a business owner, like that's the biggest thing.

If you're a business owner, private equity has a benefit for you. You haven't wanted to sell your business like. And you have between three and 10 million in EBITA, we'd love to have a conversation. If you'd like to draw it in like a high performing team, please reach out. We'd love to have a conversation. For anybody that has investor interests at a certain other point, if anything like opens up, please reach out. Awesome, man.

Well, thank you for suffering through the technical difficulties, the glitches, the first stream that didn't happen when we had to put up the second stream and the scheduling conflicts that we seem to have. We made it, though. And it's always a pleasure to talk to you, Scott. Thank you, Nico. I appreciate it.

Really looking forward to seeing what you guys do and build, and I think it's going to be extremely successful, man. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for your support. Right, guys. I'll see you at noon for the Daily Wolf. Today's video is sponsored by Securitize.

You've heard the word tokenization, putting assets like funds, bonds, treasuries, and stocks on-chain. Securitize is the regulated infrastructure the biggest names in finance build on. They're the tokenization partner for BlackRock's on-chain treasury fund Biddle, working with New York Stock Exchange, Van Eck, Hamilton Lane, and Apollo. SAC-regulated entities nearly nine years running. Most money still moves through slow, decades-old systems. Securitize puts the real asset on-chain itself, not a synthetic, a wrap-token,

standing in for it and regulated in the United States. It's the institutional grade bridge between traditional finance and crypto. They didn't just build it. They just proved it, listing their own stock on the New York Stock Exchange and simultaneously tokenizing it on chain on Solana and Avalanche. The first and only public company built entirely for this. Their mission, tokenize the world. Learn more at securitize.io.

This is a paid partnership, not investment advice.