Unchained - Jim Bianco on Why 0% Interest Rates and Money Printing Are Gone for Good - Ep. 881

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

Subscribe to the new Bits + Bips channels! 📺 YouTube  🎧 Podcast → Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Fountain 🐦 X / Twitter  Has the Fed entered a new era? In this episode of Unchained, macro strategist Jim Bianco of Bianco Research lays out why the current economic cycle is fundamentally different from what came before. He explains the implications of sticky inflation, why 0% interest rates and money printing may be relics of the past, and how the COVID-era economy created lasting structural shifts. Bianco also gives his candid take on how retail investors have changed markets, why the payments system is still stuck in the 1950s, and how stablecoins and tokenized assets could fix that—if regulators allow it. He breaks down the threats facing major players like Coinbase and Robinhood, and shares a bold theory on what really happened during the GameStop short squeeze. Bianco also assesses what could happen if the Fed is politicized — and whether Chair Powell is likely to be replaced. Thank you to our sponsors! Bitwise Ledn Mantle Guest: Jim Bianco, President and Macro Strategist at Bianco Research, L.L.C. Timestamps: 🎬 0:00 Intro 📉 3:36 Why Jim called the latest economic revisions “extraordinary” 🔥11:56 Whether we’ve entered a post-COVID “new normal” of sticky inflation 👔 18:14 Could Trump really fire Powell — and what would that mean for the Fed? 📉 23:36 What happens to markets if Trump pushes through aggressive rate cuts 🛍️ 29:45 How retail investors flipped the power dynamic on Wall Street 💳 26:04 Why Jim says outdated payment rails are holding back stablecoins 🧩 46:17 Jim’s bold theory on how the GameStop halt was really about saving Schwab 🚫 50:12 Why he’s skeptical of the SEC’s “Project Crypto” ⚔️ 57:17 Why Coinbase and Robinhood are bracing for a new wave of challengers ⚠️ 59:28 What could happen to crypto treasury companies in a bear market 🏛️1:01:43 What’s still broken in tokenized stocks — and how to fix it Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think we're in a different cycle. Money printing, you probably will never see again in your lifetime. Zero interest rates, you will probably never see again in your lifetime. You yield curve control, you will probably never see again in your lifetime. Those are artifacts of the previous cycle. Hey, all, in today's episode, macro expert Jim Bianco, unpacked a series of major shifts taking place across the U.S. economy, monetary policy, and crypto. We started with the significant downward revisions to recent U.S. job growth data, something Jim believes most analysts are misinterpreting.

He gave a great explanation as to why these numbers don't necessarily signal a weakening economy. From there, we zoomed out. Jim argued we've entered a new economic regime, one where interest rates stays structurally higher, inflation is stickier, and the old playbook of zero rates and quantitative easing is off the table. He warns that money printing, as we know it, might never come back in our lifetimes. which I have a feeling most of you aren't going to love. We also talk about crypto and the future of financial infrastructure. Jim Lee's at a vision for a real-time, low-cost payment system, powered by stable coins, which sounded awesome and like streaming defy or Dow payments. But he says the U.S. regulatory landscape is a huge barrier to innovation,

which isn't the best news, but I have to give him credit that does seem like it's likely. He's also skeptical of tokenized stocks and crypto-treasury companies calling them leveraged plays that may not survive the next bear market. Finally, Jim discusses the growing speculation that Fed Chair Jerome Powell could be replaced and what that would mean for markets. Spoiler, it could get messy. Stick around. Jim doesn't hold back. Mantle is pioneering blockchain for banking of revolutionary new category at the intersection of Tradfai and Web 3. Follow Mantle underscore official to learn more. Hands up, everyone.

We've got exciting news. Bits and Bips, our Macro Meets Crypto Show, is officially spinning off into its own podcast feed, YouTube channel, and X account. If you've been enjoying the deep dives into interest rates, monetary policy, and how they intersect with the crypto markets, make sure to follow bits and bips wherever you get your podcasts on YouTube and on X. You'll find the links to YouTube, X, and other podcast platforms in the show notes.

If you're watching this, there's a QR code on screen. We'll be posting here for a few more weeks, but starting in September, Bits and Bips will launch on its own feed. For now, we will publish longer clips from the show on those accounts. Remember, go to the show notes now and subscribe to Bits and Bips. That's Bits, plus sign Bips spelled BIPS on YouTube X and wherever you get your podcasts. Crypto moves fast. It's why BitWise launched the weekly CIO memo. a jargon-free summary of what's moving crypto markets written by one of the best in the business,

CIO Matt Hogan. Get up to speed in five minutes or less. Check it out at bitwiseinvestments.com slash CIO memo. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. Lutton is a leading platform for Bitcoin-backed loans, offering a secure and transparent way to unlock liquidity without selling your Bitcoin. issuing loans since 2018 and earning over 1,000 trust pilot reviews. Learn more at leaden.io. Welcome, Jim. Thanks for everyone. So we recently had a really interesting payroll report. It came in well below forecasts. And then on top of that, there were downward revisions for previous months that showed, you know, overall, actually, the average gain over the past three months was only about 35,000.

I wondered for your reaction on that and what that means about where we are in this market. Well, I got a couple of reactions about it. You're right. The big story in the payroll report was those downward revisions to May and June. May went from 133,000 jobs created to 19. June went from 147,000 jobs to be created to 14. as a net decline at 258,000 jobs. That's the second largest two-month revision we've seen in 43 years. The only other one that was larger was when we lost 20 million jobs in the month that the COVID shut down in the economy in April 2020, which is explainable. This one is a little bit less explainable.

So it's extraordinary what the number showed. I got two reactions for you on them. neither one of them are an economic reaction that the economy slowing we're going to recession i i don't think that's the case at all i think that there's two problems with this with this report one all economic data is based on surveys they poll a bunch of cups a bunch of companies in this case they have a universe of 120 000 companies they usually get about 50 000 of those companies to report to them details about their sir about their hiring and from that they construct the report. The number, the response rate, the number of people that are responding to their surveys,

10 years ago was 80%. Today, it's 40%. It's like political polls. It's like everything else. Survey monkey has ruined the world. Let's just start with that. It's become too easy for everybody to do a survey. So there's thousands of them. So everybody ignores them. Also, if you will, the political polls of 2016, 2020, 2024, getting the elections wrong have poisoned the well. Whenever anybody hears survey or poll, they think, oh, it's biased, it's wrong, it's crap. And so it's held in disrespect. I think that the Commerce Department, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who Trump just fired the head of on Friday, they need to sit down and start to say, look, we've got to stop using surveys.

They don't know how. It's like asking somebody how to disconnect their foot. They don't know how to do it because that's the only way they've known how to do these surveys. Now, there is ways you could do it. You can ask the IRS to give you withholding data. You can ask the states to give you unemployment insurance claims data and stuff. So the first problem I think is that the reliance on these surveys with lower response rates is a problem. And that's not going to get better.

You know, Americans aren't going to change their mind next year and start answering surveys. And please survey monkey, send me another one to fill out. No, that's not going to happen. So they're going to have to start to realize that this is only going to continue to get worse. Now, probably the more important issue, which I should have led with, is what's causing this slowdown in jobs? And it isn't necessarily that the economy is slowing. When you're talking about payroll reports and you're talking about unemployment, you're talking about 160 million people that have jobs in the United States, 164 million, to be exact, according to the payroll report. big, huge parts of the population. In other words, what you're really measuring in large part is the

population growth of the country. And over the last four years, the population growth of the country has had epic changes because of immigration. First, under the Biden administration, we were very last let everybody in. Three million people strode into the country legally and illegally in 2013. Trump just tweeted out yesterday for the third month in a row. May, June, July, May and June is when we had the big down where we were divisions. And this is why I'm leading to zero immigration in the country. What does that mean? Well, we have low birth rates in this country and we've always had for a long time.

The population growth of the country is practically near zero, I think, right now. And I think we're even overstating it when we say it's practically near zero because there's some evidence from remittances from the bank of Mexico and some evidence from bus rides in Los Angeles that, you know, immigrants, bus rights in Los Angeles have collapsed. The number of people that ride the buses have collapsed because all the undocumented workers are hiding. They're not going to work. Your remittances back to Mexico, according to the Bank of Mexico, have nosedived in the last

couple of months and so have payrolls. If you're not having a population that is growing, you only need to create maybe 10,000 jobs, 15,000 jobs a month in order to meet population growth. I got that number from the American Enterprise Institute is actually estimated that it could be as low by next year as zero. Any number above zero is fine. We're okay when it comes to higher. We're just not used to that.

We need to reset our expectations. We think, and this is where I'm really afraid we're about to have a big mistake, We look at 14, 19, 73, 35,000 jobs a month and go, oh my God, the Fed's got to cut rates. We have to stimulate the economy, shoot it with steroids to get us back to 100,000 jobs. Well, if you want 100,000 jobs open the border and J-Powl can't open the border. So short of that, the only other way you're going to get 100,000 jobs, my last thought on this, is there's another statistic called the labor participation rate. That's everybody between 18 and 64 years old.

What percentage of them have a job? About 62% of that population has a job. Who the other 38? They're students, military, retired before 64, disabled, you know, have elected for whatever reason to not be in the workforce like a homemaker or something like that. All right, that's who you got to get back into the job force in order to get back to 100,000 jobs. If you're not having a population growing and having natural. new college graduates and new people entering the country all the time that are looking for jobs.

How do you do that? Pay them more money. Pay them more money to come back into the workforce. Pay the undocumented workers more money to take the risk to get back on the LA bus. That's wage inflation. So I have a feeling what the Fed's going to do and what the market is demanding is we've got low payroll reports. We have to do something. Cut rates.

Make it worse. Make it worse by creating inflation, but you're not going to create any more jobs. And that's what my biggest fear is right now. It's interesting way. I'm sorry, just to understand, you said that was your fear, but it also seemed like that was something you were advocating. So I'm a little bit confused. No, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. You're right. I said it. I worded it poorly. Let me say that again. The rest of Wall Street is advocating that the Fed in response to these payroll reports cut interest rates. The market, the Fed Fund Futures market,

right before the payroll report on Friday, was giving about a 40% chance the Fed was going to cut rates in September. Now it's giving it a 90% chance, all based on those revisions to the report. And what the reaction in Wall Street is, they don't know anything about the population growth. They still think normal is 100,000 jobs a month. So when they see 35,000, they think we need to stimulate the economy to get back to 100. And I'm saying the only way you're going to get back to 100 is raising wages to drag people not in a workforce back into the workforce. That's wage inflation.

And so the demand that the Fed do something about this low payroll report is not going to fix the payroll problem because the Fed cannot open the border and bring the population growth back up. what they will wind up doing is creating more inflation, making it worse. Right. So this goes back to some other comments I've heard you say on the recent podcast where you talked about how you don't feel interest rates will return to this 2% rate that was kind of like known pre-COVID. You talked about how you feel like that we're in this post-COVID world. You gave some examples like, you know, one of them being the increase in remote work. But I was just curious, like how would you characterize this new post-COVID

world, like as part of this reduction in immigration part of that? Or like, you know, what do you think this new normal is or will be? So every time you have a recession or a financial crisis, and we had both in 2020, the economy changes. And this one changed. And it's a very different economy. What's changed about it? Well, I'll give you three things. One is remote work. prior to COVID, about 5% of the workforce was working remotely.

In other words, remote is you get paid to do your job away from a central location, whether it is an office, a site, a school, or a hospital, you know, you paid to do your job somewhere else. 5% of the workforce.

Pre-COVID, today it's about 27% of the workforce. And about half the jobs in the United States cannot be remote. You can't be remote. as a construction worker, a policeman, a surgeon, a waitress. So that means that half the people that can, half the people in this country that can be remote are remote right now. That's a huge tectotic change in the labor market right now. It's a, in other words, labor economists that, you know, and I always criticize Paul about this too,

when Paul says we see broad evidence of the economy normalizing what's abnormal about it, Jay. We see broad evidence of the economy's returning to, returning to pre-pandemic level. levels. What I'm arguing about the financial crisis and recession has changed the economy is that's a previous cycle. We're not going back there. Whatever you thought the economy was in 2019, we're not going to go back to that. Now I said it's changed. Don't confuse that with saying I said it was dystopian. Change sometimes it can be better. It can be different. I think it's different now. It's not necessarily worse. So that's the first one. The second one is de-globalization, highlighted by tariffs. All of a sudden, you know, international cooperation is out the window.

there's actually a new word that's kind of come into the into the lexicon and that is segmentation that we're segmenting the global economy now as opposed to globalizing the global economy. And the third one is definitely, you know, attitudes about immigration. And that has changed the population trends within countries, not the global population trend, but within countries. That has definitely changed the population trends. So when you add all of those up, I think we're in a different cycle. I'm speaking to a largely crypto crowd.

I know that the crypto guys like this. So let me put this in perspective. Money printing, you probably will never see again in your lifetime. Zero interest rates, you will probably never see again in your lifetime. You yield curve control, you will probably never see again in your lifetime. Those are artifacts of the previous cycle. This cycle is going to be more about frictions, stickier inflation, We've got inflation that is average since 20, 4%.

It's now down into the high twos, but I think this is a cyclical low in inflation. And we've got interest rates in the four, I'm talking about the 30 year now, in the four and a half to five percent range. That's normal. I think that's where they should be. But we've got people like the president screaming and yelling that that 5 percent interest rates are a disaster. And we need to fire Jay Paul and we need to close. put interest rates and to bring those rates down immediately. He's thinking it's 2010 to 2019 when interest rates was zero for most of that period.

And the 10-year note was at 2%. That we're in a completely different cycle because in that cycle, we didn't have all of these things like we had globalization. We didn't have remote work. We didn't have the concerns that we had about globalization. And we had persistently low inflation during that period. That was the period, the era, or if I want to put it a different way, from 2000 to 2020, I think that era was really about deflation.

That's over. We're now in an era of inflation. We could be in an era of high inflation. We could be an era of lower inflation, but we're not in an era of no inflation. That was the 2020 or maybe 97, actually, to be more specific, the Asian financial crisis to COVID. That deflation period is over. we're now in some low grade to medium grade to high grade levels of inflation. And that means you're going to have to have higher interest rates along the way.

So, you know, it sounds like the comments that you made about how we will not see a massive money printing again in our life seems. Like, obviously, that's probably triggering to crypto people. But, you know, you mentioned this issue about how President Trump wants to try to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell. do you think he will? And if he does, who do you think would be good in that position? Who do you think he'll put in that position? Yeah, I'd be interested here all your thoughts on that. Yeah, just real quick on that last point about being triggering to crypto people about no more money printing. We've been doing quantitative tightening for two years. We've been doing the opposite of money printing. We've been contracting the balance sheet. That was a different era. All I'm trying to say is that was a different era. If you look through the arc of history in monetary policy and economics, I can show you 5,000 years until about 2000 that money printing was only a thing that was done by fringe countries that ended badly. Then it was done by the main powerful countries for a couple of years, and now it's over. And so is negative interest rates.

I think it'll be a thousand years before we see negative interest rates again. Because in order to get negative interest rates again, you're going to have to get rid of inflation. And that's why I think that that era is. In fact, we've got 5,000 years of history of interest rates going back to 3,000 D.C. And the only time we've ever seen negative interest rates in those 5,000 years was last was 2010 to 2020. And that's why I think that was a unique period in history that won't be repeated. Now, to your question about Paul, I would, you know, I know Polly Markets got the probability that Trump fires Powell at about 15%.

And the thinking is, well, he doesn't really want to fire Paul. He just needs him there to be his punching bag to basically just call him every dirty name in the book and blame him for everything under the sun. I'll put the odds of 45 that he'll fire Paul. Now, I picked that number specifically because it's less than 50 right now. But it's a lot closer to being a reality than I think the market is facing because I think Trump will pull the trigger. I think it's going to come down as far as firing Paul to his Jackson Hole speech at the end of August. Does he give his speech and say, we're going to cut rates? He won't fire him.

Does he give a speech and say, we're not going to cut rates? I think he might move to fire him at that point. And so that's a real possibility. Now, who's you going to replace him with? Well, the last week was very interesting. Arianna Coogler, who's a Fed governor, missed the Fed meeting on Wednesday. There was only 11 voters. The Fed said she was attending to a personal matter.

And then two days later, Friday, she resigned. So she didn't say what the personal matter is or why she was resigning. But if you ask me, that sounds like a health problem. I hope it isn't. I hope it that there's some other explanation for it. But she missed a meeting and then she resigned two days later. She's done on Friday. Trump has said that in the coming days, maybe by the end of the week,

he might name who's going to fill her spot. Now remember, it requires Senate confirmation. But more importantly, that's the only Fed seat that's going to be available for the next two years. In order to be the Fed chairman, you also have to be a governor. So whoever he wants to be the chairman, he'll have to appoint to that empty governor seat as a governor. They'll get approved as a governor. and then redominate them as chairman and then they'll have to go through approval all over again. So by the end of the week, maybe in the next week, if Trump is true with his incoming day's statement,

we should know he's going to appoint to that seat. We should know who's going to replace Jay Paul. Furthermore, that person could be on the board before the September 17th FOMC meeting if the Senate moves fast enough to approve them. and that would give Trump another vote to cut interest rates. And that would cement this idea that Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, pushed last year called the Shadow Fed. His argument was you can't get rid of Powell, although technically you can. But I'll talk about that.

You can't get rid of Powell. So appoint his successor early. Tell everybody that this is their successor. And then everybody will say, well, I don't want to listen to the guy who's leaving. he's not as important as the person who's going to take over, and they will become a more important voice than Jay Powell, so-called shadow Fed. Now, quickly about how can Trump fire Powell?

He can't fire him. The legal terms are for the job of Federal Reserve Chairman is not at will. At will is a job like the Treasury Secretary's at will. The President of the United States can fire the Treasury Secretary for any reason or no reason just because he wants to. Doesn't need to explain. for cause is the job of the Federal Reserve Chairman. Now, for cause has never been adjudicated, but it's understood to not mean, I disagree with

you on monetary policy, but understood to mean something like malfeasance, illegal activity, immoral activity, or something like that that is untowardly and we don't want somebody that does that to be the head of the Fed. So he could fire him for cause. Okay, what's the four cause thing, the renovation of the building? Now, I'll just, I'll be, I've said this before another podcast, I'll say with you. My name ends in aval and I live in Chicago. I have family members who work in the construction business, and I have family members that work

in government projects, government construction projects. Let me just say this bluntly. Every government project that's ever been done, construction project that's ever been done, is being done or will ever be done, is 100% of them have fraud and abuse and illegal activities in them. They all do. It's the process of the government doing anything. We elect to ignore it. Now, the Fed has got a $3 billion renovation on its buildings going on. If you want to put an inspector in there and look hard enough, you're going to find some unseemly and stuff that you're going to be afraid to look at. And it's all approved by the Federal Reserve Chairman. Yes, it was

in the board, but it was all approved by the Federal Reserve Chairman. So there's your four caught right there. It'll be something along the lines with the Fed building. So if he wants to fire him, if he wants to look that hard, he can't. Now, it's 45%. But I also think if Paul gives that Jackson Hull speech and says, I'm not cutting rates in September, you know, all bets are off then at that point. And so you said earlier that, you know, you feel like cutting interest, cutting the interest rate would not be a good idea. But basically, if Trump has its way, then that would likely happen. So what do you think the impact of that would be?

Look to last year and look to the, look to Europe. What happened? You know, Trump likes to say that the ECBs cut rates 10 times in our guy, he hasn't moved once. Well, actually he did. He cut rates in September, November, and December of last year. What did the 10-year yield do the day before he cut rates at the September meeting a year ago, September 18th was the meeting, 10-year yield was if 3.6. percent. By January of this year, it went from three, six, in four months to four point eight five.

It went up 125 basis points, so one and a quarter percent. Why did the rates go up when the Fed was cutting rates? I like to argue that the market is basically looking at Fed policy, and when the Fed decides to do something, cut rates, raise rates, hold steady. If the market agrees, with the Fed that that's the right policy, then longer-term interest rates will generally do the same thing. They're cutting the fall. If they're hiking, they'll hike. If the market agrees and thinks it's a mistake to cut rates, you're just going to stimulate an economy that doesn't need it. You're going to risk having more inflation. It will reject it. It rejected it by having long rates go up. Europe, as Trump said, they've cut rates 10 times. Yeah, well, if Trump would look at the

10-year German government Bund or the 10-year French Oat. Those yields today are higher, higher today than they were before the first of those 10 cuts. Not by much, maybe 10 or 15 basis points, but they have not gone down, if you want to say it in those words. They haven't gone down an inch, even though they've cut rates 10 times. Why? Markets rejecting the policy. It's not what it wants. So if Trump gets what he wants and he forces through all these rate cuts, if the market decides it is not the thing we want, I think long term yields go straight up and put pressure on all financial markets at that point.

That's the risk that we face. It is not axiomatic. Oh, he cuts rates. Mortgages fall. They didn't last year. Mortgages shot straight up to 7.5% last year when he cut rates. It doesn't necessarily have to be the case. only if the rate cuts, the market agrees, it's the proper policy to do.

All right. So in a moment, we're going to talk about stable coins and some of the, you know, things that are happening in that land. But first, a quick word from the sponsors to make this show possible. Mantle leads the establishment of blockchain for banking as the next frontier. YouR is the access layer that transforms Mantle Network into a purpose-built vertical platform, the blockchain for banking, that enables financial services on-chain. UR unifies and vertically aligns Mantles focus on payments, trading, and assets. MI4, METH Protocol, Functions FBTC, supported by developer grants, ecosystem incentives, and the industry-leading distribution platform through the UR app, Reward Station, and By-Bit launch pool.

All economic activity within UR will be captured by Mantle Network to further drive value to token holders and establish its significance in blockchain for banking. Follow Mantle underscore official to learn more. Hands up, everyone. We've got exciting news. Bits and Bips, our Macro Meets Crypto Show, is officially spinning off into its own podcast feed, YouTube channel, and X account. If you've been enjoying the deep dives into interest rates, monetary policy, and how they intersect with the crypto markets, make sure to follow bits and Bips wherever you get your podcasts on YouTube and on X. You'll find the links to YouTube, X, and other podcast platforms in the show notes.

If you're watching this, there's a QR code on screen. We'll be posting here for a few more weeks, but starting in September, Bits and Bips will launch on its own feed. For now, we will publish longer clips from the show on those accounts. Remember, go to the show notes now and subscribe to Bits and Bips. That's Bits, plus sign Bips, spelled BIPS, on YouTube X and wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Matt Hogan, CIO of Crypto Asset Manager BitWise. Look, crypto can be confusing. There's so much noise and the space changes so quickly.

That's why, every week, I write a five-minute memo on the biggest stories impacting crypto. In plain English. Why is Bitcoin up or down? What are people missing? Where should investors look next? Get the lowdown every week. Sign up to get the weekly CIO memo delivered straight to your inbox. Go to Bitwiseinvestments.com slash CIO memo.

That's Bitwiseinvestments.com slash CIO memo. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. Wish you could access cash without selling your Bitcoin? Leden makes that possible. The global leader in Bitcoin-backed lending, Lennon has issued over $9 billion in loans since 2018 and never lost a single Satoshi of client assets. Why is a Lennon loan different?

With custody loans, collateral is not lent out to generate interest. No credit checks, funds in less than 12 hours, no monthly payments. Repay whenever you want, with zero penalties. And proof of reserves reports verified by a top accounting firm are published every six months. Leden gives Bitcoin holders a secure, transparent way to unlock liquidity without selling. Learn more at ledden.io. That's LEDN.io. to my conversation with Jim. So let's now turn to the Genius Act, which you mentioned earlier. You know, here we are, we're just in this really interesting time because I'm sure you saw in the crypto community before the Circle IPO, there were a lot of prominent people in crypto who kind of

discounted it saying, you know, Circles profits would number be as good as they are at this moment in time because interest rates and they expected would come down. They talked about how Circle is giving more than half of its profits to Coinbase. And then, you know, obviously things didn't quite turn out that way. So I was just curious, like, you know, why you thought that happened. But then, you know, we can shift a little bit more broadly to the Genius Act. But actually, yeah, let's start with Circle. You know, I'll argue to you that it's part of a bigger thing that's going on in the marketplace. You know, today as we're recording, we've got, we've recovered about 80% of Friday's loss in the S&P 500, by the dip work together. Who's the big dominant player in the stock market today?

It's a retail investor. It is not a hedge fund. It is not a pension manager. It is a, it is an individual person who's directing their own account times millions, probably on a Reddit subthread, getting some ideas and where they should be going. And we've got memes and we've got the meme stock mania going all over again. I think that Circle is a perfect view. for that type of retail investor to really just pile into it. It might not be Krispy Kremes or GoPro or some of these other, you know, meme stocks that are going completely ballistic right now, but it's kind of at the next level there. And I think that what you're seeing with Circle and some of these other ones is that meme stockification because of the dominance of retail investors,

especially the crypto crowd, which loves it and they've piled into it. But I agree with you, though, the fundamentals of it, you know, they're not terrible, but they're not necessarily, you know, as great as everybody makes it out to be. Let's now talk about this. The Genius Act, you know, like we're at this moment in a time where we can clearly see so many banks, fintechs, crypto companies are all sort of converging in the same space. And, you know, ahead of the Genius Act, there was this concern by the banking lobby that stable coins could affect deposits and thus hurt the ability of banks to lend. And so supposedly that's one of the reasons that stable coin issuers were banned from paying interest to consumers. However, you've probably seen some of

the different announcements that have come out. It looks like there are companies that are coming up with creative ways to issue yield on stable coins, but it's through partners. You know, it's not directly the issuers. So I was just wondering, you know, what you thought about stable coins in terms of whether or not they are a threat to bank deposits and how this competition that we're seeing between banks, fintech, stable coin issuers, stable coin partners, even the likes of, you know, Walmart and Amazon. Like, how do you feel like this will play out in the stable coin space? There's a couple of things about the Genius Act that I really like.

Just so everybody knows, I'm kind of ambivalent about the Genius Act. I think it's better that we have it than we don't have it. I think we're kind of overselling it a little bit. But the one part of the Genius Act that I do think is really good as that they're going to make a push and allow for the regulations to allow payment rails to develop a little bit more. I've used this example before and I use it again. Personally, the car I own, I got a, you know, when I take it back to the dealer and I get my oil changed, I buy parts for it and stuff like that.

I got an email from them a couple of weeks ago. Said that if you want to do anything like service or buying parts, get your oil change, and you pay with a credit card, they're going to charge me 3% extra. So I got to pay the credit card fee. If I want to pay with Venmo or Zell, they won't charge me that. So, you know, and you're seeing more and more of that, that companies are pushing back against these credit card fees. Now that 3% fee is interesting because somewhere in my computer,

I've got a little image. Western Union invented the Money Telegram in 1871. Got an image from back then. $300 of a money telegram, $9 of fees, $309 total invoice. 150 years ago, if you wanted to send somebody $300, cost you 3%. 150 years ago, they had to put $300 of coins and paper currencies

in a saddlebag and ride it to you on a horse. If I go pay $300 to buy a part from my car from my dealer, in order for me to send him $300, somebody's got to pay 3%. In 150 years, there has been no improvement in the payment rails. That is probably one of the more backward things. I actually think it's one of the more constricting things in the economy itself. We should have real-time payments that can handle a billion payments a second. They should be instantaneous. They should be subpenny. So if you want to pay a third of a cent or something like that, and they should be free. We don't have to,

We don't get charged for sending emails. We don't get charged for sending texts. And we send hundreds of millions of them every second around the world. Money payments should be the same way. So they're pushing on that and they're starting to argue that maybe stable coins could be on the leading edge of that. Now, the problem with Tradfai is that they're kind of bastardizing these terms, stable coins. I mean, I've heard prominent people on Wall Street say, yes, we're all five stable coins. J.P. Morgan will have a stable coin.

Citibank will have a stable coin. As you imagine Walmart might have a stable coin. I'm like, those aren't stable coins. Those are trad-five payment rails is what they are. In fact, one even one probably even said to me, yeah, maybe even the Fed will have a stable coin. No, that's a CBDC. You know, a stable coin is on a crypto network. It is not something that's run by JP Morgan servers or run by the Federal Reserve

or the Treasury Department servers. Those are just more of the same. So I'm not sure that they understand what these things are supposed to be. The other thing I would say is that they said that, you know, there's $200 billion of stable coins and they think in 10 years it's going to be $2 trillion. And they're implying that payments are going to be a major part of stable coins. Well, we've got to fix the payment rails in order for that to happen. They have to be instantaneous.

They have to be free. And they have to be sub penny. I'll talk about the payment rails in a second. But there is a way you can get stable. stable coins from $200 billion to $2 trillion, 10x the price of crypto. So instead of it be $120,000 just around the number on Bitcoin, if it goes to $1.2 million, excuse me, that's 10x. If it goes to $1.2 million, instead of needing $120,000 to buy one Bitcoin, you'll need $1.2 million.

That's how you wind up getting from $200,000 to $2 trillion. Well, if that's what they think, if they actually think that the price, of crypto is going to 10x, didn't say you think the price of crypto is going to 10x. But they're actually 90% of stable coins on crypto networks are used for trading. They're not used for payments. Payments that the rails have to be fixed in a way. Now, what am I envisioning just so people understand? In 2025, in the digital economy we live in, the way we pay for stuff is all 1950s.

It's all screwed up. Your payment, your paycheck, my paycheck. paycheck, we should get paid not every Friday or once a month or whatever your payroll processor is. You should be paid every minute. You should be paid every second, a constant inflow into your account. Your monthly rent, your monthly mortgage shouldn't be due at the end of the month. It should be every second money comes out of your account that you get paid. You should not have to pay a monthly fee for Netflix or anything. There should be no such thing as a monthly fee. If I want to connect to the New York Times or in the Netflix and I, you know, I'll connect my wallet. And if I want to buy,

if I want to read some article, I'll click on it and it'll take three cents out of my wallet, right? Immediately and I can read the article. Or if I'm on Netflix, I don't have an account. I connect my wallet. Hey, this looks like an interesting movie. I start playing it. And they take a penny and a half a minute or a penny or some, some section of it a second. It an meter just keeps running on very small numbers until I'm done. And when I stop and then they stop paying the two. That's the way we should be paying for everything. Stable coins have a way to get there, but we have to fix the payment rails. We're so far away from doing any of that.

The whole idea of a monthly fee and your mortgages do it at the end of the month and you get paid on every Friday, we didn't develop that 80 years ago and we haven't changed anything. We have the technology for it. We had the technology to send a billion emails a second for free. We could do the same thing with money, but we're just not ready to do it because it's so regulated. and it's such a moneymaker for Treadfi. That's why you said that Treadfi killed the idea that stable coins can pay interest. Sure, there's innovative ways around it.

But at best, all you're going to wind up doing is making a stable coin equal to a money market fund. A money market fund has a $1 price, never changes. Stablecoin is a $1 dollar price, never changes. Money fund is backed one for one for every dollar in a money market, for every dollar, a dollar I put in, it owns a dollar of assets, usually treasuries. Stablecoin's back for one for one. Money market passes through interest. Stablecoin does not.

If there's innovative ways to get interest, you could have gotten those plus 4% on all those treasuries that they owned. So I think that's going to really retard the use of stable coins. Why would I leave? Why would I take my money out of a 4% investment and put it into a 0% investment? Because I want to buy crypto. That's why 90% of it is. use for crypto. I'm not going to use it for payments because that money that sits around for payments

doesn't earn me any interest. And TradFi, it does. So once we fix the payment rails, I think this could change, but I'm afraid that people are going to say, look at JPMorgan. They developed a stable coin. I'm like, that's not a stable coin. It's, you know, it's run on JPMorgan server. It's a tradfai product. So we've had this other thing about we don't really know what the product is. Yeah, although also JP and we'll be doing their deposit token, which is, um, even a different animal. I did want to ask, they just... Again, it's not a crypto. It's not a crypto that they're not a crypto that they're trying to pretend it is. Yeah. Well, I did want to ask also just about how, you know, we're seeing like,

so Coinbase, you know, obviously they have, they're offering for, I think, 0.1% on USTC held on their platform. We're seeing that stripe is, you know, they just acquired, or not just, but several months ago they acquired Bridge, which does like, you know, APIs and they make it easier to integrate stable coins. You know, we're seeing pretty much just like all these other players are coming in. So do you feel like certain categories will be more advantaged over others when it comes to winning this race? Or do you feel like, you know, that just there's going to be just a huge proliferation or, yeah, how do you think the stable coin kind of competition? Yeah, I think there's going to be a huge proliferation.

For most people in the developed world, let's talk about, you know, U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, most people don't feel like they don't believe that the payment system is broken. That whole idea about getting paid every second day, they have a hard time understanding that. And even a way, and if they do get that and understand what I'm talking about, they still don't think it's a problem. I don't see that they see that the payment system that crypto is going to push down on everybody that, you know, whether or not Stripe has bridge or any of that other stuff is going to make them want to take their money out of their, you know, Chase account and put it into a different account. Some, you know, some crypto traders will do it, but they're a rounding error. It's not going to be a big, it's going to be a big adoption. Unless you can offer something different, like I said, to me, that something different would be, if you, you actually had a high-speed free payment rail where you said, we could do away with every

monthly subscription ever and everything is a la carte pricing is what I basically argued. Every website, you just go to it, you connect your wallet, you don't even have to give me your name. And if you want to read a New York Times article or Netflix or buy something, they'll just take the money out of your account or run a meter if it's something like Netflix until you're done with it. And that way, and that's how you wind up paying for because all of us pay hundreds of dollars in subscriptions we never use.

and we kind of get we kind of get rid of that pricing altogether. The rest of the world desperately needs a payment system that works. And you've got billions of people in Southern Asia, in Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East, that you could see that type of system coming. But most crypto bros don't think about that. They think about it, how does it impact people in a coffee house in San Francisco? But they don't think about the people. in the rest of the world. That's the true track that I think we're going to have to see with

payments. I would think that payments are going to be a big thing. Let me give you one quick anecdote about payments. In Kenya, the mobile phone companies called safari.com, they developed many years ago a program maybe 20 years ago called M Pesa. You pay your mobile phone bill and you can overpay your bill and have a credit balance in your mobile phone. And you can text it to another mobile phone on their network. Keep in mind that even in the least developed countries in the world, 80% of the population has a mobile phone. It's not uncommon to see people that live in huts with dirt floors and in the middle of town as a Honda generator that charges 100 mobile phones every night. So everybody's got one, no matter how poor they are. That the World Bank

did a study of the dozens and dozens of programs done in Africa to help alleviate property. and they said the M-Pesa program of allowing people to text money, even if it's 50 cents or 50 shillings, because they use shillings, 50 shillings to pay for a bus ride has lifted more people out of poverty out of Kenya than anybody else. That's how important payments can be. It's reduced crime. If somebody in a poor town wants to go to the other town to buy a cow, and that's an example they used, they don't have to carry a bag of money and get robbed anymore. They just have a, they could just send it on their phone. when they've agreed to it. So these are things that are hugely important to the, you know, the human condition.

It would make things better to fix the payment system. And so I do think that it's very important. And crypto can play a big role in that. Hopefully they can. But TradFi is going to also try and play a role in that as well, too. And yes, they're scared of it. And that's why they won't allow stable coins to pay interest because they don't want people to look for the crypto rails to fix it. they want to create the rails to fix it so that they can control it and regulate it and everything else.

This is so interesting because I'm realizing that, yeah, the way banks money make money is that they kind of keep money secure. And then when you're ready to use it, you know, then you have to use it through them. But you're right. If payments are more streaming and fluid and there's just like more money moving constantly, like it's sort of like what happened during the GameStop thing with the Robin Hood regulation where, They had to, I forget it was like they needed a post some amount of collateral. And so for that reason, like they had to tie up a certain amount of capital. And then I don't remember all the details on it, but it's just like once everything becomes so much more frictionless, then it's just easier for people to be earning. And it's like people at every level of society.

And so therefore, in a way, it's almost like the importance of banks almost gets smaller. It does. It does. And in terms of the payment system fixing, you'll have to. 24-7-365 trad-fi trading. You know, it would never stop. And you would have those things. By the way, what happened during GameStop, and I'll be blunt about it.

What happened during GameStop is there was a short squeeze and the price was going to go to infinity. And that's happened or very close to happen. Look at Volkswagen in about 2009 and look at what the price of Volkswagen did. Let me be blunt about it. It was going to basically squeeze Schwab. Schwab might not have survived. So in order to save Schwab, they killed everybody that was playing in GameStop by halting trading and allowing the system to rebalance itself.

Sorry, but this thing about how, so I don't remember what it's called, but basically like Robin Hood needed to put up some capital, but they only had a certain amount. And in order. Robin Hood needed to post, they needed to come up with shares of, they needed to come up with shares of GameStop. They, that's what they didn't. And they couldn't, there was, there wasn't the short, the short was bigger than the flowed outstanding. So you could never meet. You could never satisfy that situation when you get into that type of imbalance in the market. And then the market. And so that's why the regulation kicked in that cost. Well, well, that's why the price was on its way to infinity. Because I needed to buy more shares than then physically existed. And I needed to do that at any price of, is what it was happening. It happened with Volkswagen in 2009, and it's happened in other examples. And so what they did was they shut down the trading and rebalance the system in order to alleviate that concern. But for the individual investors that were playing in that game and were on the right side of that trade, long of long, game stop, and it was on its way to infinity,

they cut them off. It was, they decided that they could not let this. my opinion, Schwab, go out of business. They were afraid of the systemic failures that that would have caused. So somebody had to die. And it wasn't going to be Schwab. It was going to be all the, it was going to be all the mean stock traders are going to have to die. You would alleviate that system with a real-time system, you know, than the system that we have now. Go ahead.

Yeah, it was the shorting that went on. The shorting that went on in their company exceeded the float. By the way, that's why we invented the, that happened in the 1920s quite a bit. bit. And that's why we actually invented the SEC to prevent those kind of things from happening. But the SEC allowed it to happen again in this situation. Okay. That's super interesting. I know it's confusing. I know it's confusing. It's kind of four years ago. But it was a naked shorting is what it was. They were shorting shares that they, because the price was going up way above the fundamentals. And they were shorting shares without actually acquiring those shares, borrowing

those shares. And so the short was larger than the float outstanding. One that has. happens, then you get into real kind of interesting things that go on with stock price because it completely detaches from reality at that point. Okay. Interesting. You can't do that. By the way, you can't do that in crypto. You can't do that with Bitcoin or any of the DFI platforms. They won't allow naked shorting. It's not, it's built into the smart contracts that it's not allowed in any way like that. Because if they did allow it, you would be, you would allowed the short to create outstanding.

You know, Bitcoin would break its 21 million hard cap. It could go to infinity. Because shorts could just create it into infinity. So it's not allowed in crypto. So that's, you know, the system won't allow it. But unfortunately, it is allowed in the Tradfai system.

Right. Basically, like, Defi has something built into it to prevent an existential crisis. Right. Essentially. Yeah. So, I don't know if you saw or heard about SEC Chair Paul Atkins' speech last week, the Project Crypto speech. One of the more interesting aspects was how he said that regulators needed to come up with a way for there to be kind of an everything app or a super app.

So I'm just going to read a quote. He said, securities intermediaries should be able to offer a broad range of products and services under one roof with a single license. A broker-dealer with an alternative trading system should be able to offer trading in non-security crypto assets, alongside crypto asset securities, traditional securities, and other services like crypto assets staking and lending without requiring 50 plus state licenses or multiple federal licenses. And, you know, I wondered just what you thought of that future and who you thought, like, might be best positioned to capitalize on it or build such an app.

The cynic in me says that that's a nice future that I'd love to see, but it's not going to happen. there's too many vested interests about the 50 state regulators, whether it's insurance regulators, the 50 state securities regulators, the SEC, the FDIC, the OCC, the CFTC, MOUIC, all of them involved, and that they're not going to give up their power. It would be nice if I could have an account where I could add trade futures and I could trade stocks and I could trade crypto and I could lend or stake, all on the same platform. The reason you can't do it now is regulations prevent that from happening, not technology. It's not a technology problem. It's a regulatory structure problem. And as much as I would like to think that that's going to happen,

I also thought that Doge was going to make a difference too. And then when the Leviathan, the bureaucratic state got involved and saw that their vested interests were at risk, you know, they ran Elon out of town. So I think Eccinson's got a good idea, and I really hope something happens along those lines. I'm just not holding my breath. I mean, that's, you know, that that's the reality that we live in right now. Wow. Okay. So, all right. So you feel like just just because the SEC creates some guidance or proposals around it, like that doesn't mean that they'll be able to. You know, go to Sacramento just to pick one and go ask the, uh, uh, uh, the, uh, uh, head of, you know, California securities regulator, the California insurance regulator.

Okay, Paul Atkins gave the speech that you guys are going to be packing up shopping going away, right? Because we're just going to do away with all these regulations. We're going to do away with your office. We're going to do away with all that stuff so that we can allow this kind of efficient platforming of, you know, the one, the everything out. Nope. They're not going anywhere.

And that's, that's kind of where the, like I said, the same thing was happening with Doge when they came in and proposed cuts. And everybody said, no, yeah, you're right. We do wasteful stupid stuff, but we're not going to stop doing wasteful stupid stuff. And Elon left town. You know, and a lot of those people that do wasteful stupid stuff didn't leave town. So you just basically think like, I mean, you probably heard so Coinbase's future plans are to create and everything exchange that, you know, sounds very similar to what Atkins described there. Like already the base app is, you know, going to have like all the assets.

that are listed on Dex's on base. They're obviously creating all these creator coins, which are, you know, and they want to do tokenized stocks. So you feel like just regulation is just going to kill all of this. Right. Now, to be clear, what Coinbase is talking about is to everything up in the crypto universe, that thing I could see happening. But if you're talking about it then bringing all and then bringing everything from

Transfi, whether you're talking about stocks, or you're talking about your brokerage account, your bank account, your insurance, your insurance policies, you know, whether it's even your, you know, that you could be sitting there on, on your app and you could be trading stocks over here and you could be staking your crypto over here and you could be setting up a new auto insurance policy over there, all in the same app, all in the same screen. Yeah, is it technically possible? You could do it.

But the regulatory hurdles, that's why, going back to what I said earlier, Why has it been 3% since we were writing money to you on a saddlebag 150 years ago and 3% today? The regulatory hurdles have prevented any kind of a competition from getting rid of that fee. The regulatory hurdles are going to be the biggest problem. But yes, Coinbase or anything, they could create an everything app in the crypto universe. But then to drag in everything when it comes, when it drags in when it comes to TradFi. Remember, Tradfai is more than just a brokerage account. It's your brokerage account. It's your bank account. It's your payment rails, whether it's a Venmo's

stripe or a Zelle or something like that. It's credit cards. It's lending. It's insurance. It might be wills, trust in estates. All that stuff. Could, you know, an ICI program over there, I need to put together a trust or an estate or a will. Hell, trust in estates and wills are regulatory biocracies anyway because the government has certain arguments on what happens to your money after you die. They shouldn't have any, but that's why we have trusts in the states. So I, you know, what he's arguing is we got to get rid of all of these bureaucracies in order to have this everything app. I'd like to think that that's going to happen. But it's going to, the reality is if you go to Chase right now, everything's a different app, right? You can log on your brokerage account app.

You can log on your commodity account app. You can log onto this app. log under that app, but they're all different apps. Probably all have different organs, too. But it's not going to be that one everything app unless the bureaucracy allows it. And I just don't see them to be it. I hate to be a Debbie Downer on this. But we've seen the way, you know, I'll quote Reagan, right? Nothing, nothing that God is, nothing that man has ever created has eternal life more than a government program or a government agency.

And that's why I just don't see these eternal life programs ever willingly die. And so they're going to continue to live forever. All right. Well, so in, but in that space of, you know, things that are built on crypto rails, it looks like Robin Hood and Coinbase are kind of converging in, you know, how they're competing. And I wonder, you know, I mean, by the way, just to give, but just so you understand my thought, that's because in the crypto space, it's considered one entity. It isn't that we're going to have a regulator for crypto defy and a regulator for crypto trading

and a regulator for crypto staking, and a regulator for crypto lending, and a regulator for crypto insurance. That's what we've done to TradFi. But we haven't done that to crypto and Defi, and that's why it's all one space, and it can have an Everything app, which is what we can't have in Tradfai.

Yeah. Well, between those two companies, like how would you analyze who you think might kind of emerge as more of a winner, or winner is maybe not even the right word, but just like, you know, even if they're sort of splitting market share, like, who do you see as like emerging as more dominant in one area or another? That's a good question.

To be honest with you, I haven't analyzed those companies well enough to say which one I prefer over the other. But I will say that what they are both going to get is they are both going to get a lot of competition. And their competition is not going to come from the Bonances of the world or the Gemini's of the world, which are already exist and are doing the same thing. It's going to come from JPMorgan. It's going to come from Black Rock.

It's going to come from Goldman Sachs. They're going to try and create a version of Coinbase and create a version of Circle and try to out-coinbase and out-circle, coinbase and circle. So there's going to be a lot of competition coming, especially the other act, the Clarity Act. We haven't yet discussed the Clarity Act. Why do you think they were able to pass the Genius Act, which was about stable coins? But the Clarity Act is about streamlining regulation. and that stalled in Congress.

Because that's going a lot of oxes right there. And they don't like the idea. Yes, yes, I'm bureaucratic. And yes, I'm slow. And yes, I make the world worse. But I live here and I exist and I don't want to go away. And here's some campaign donations, Mr. Senator. You're going to put to keep me in existence.

That's the way the world works. And that's really what we've got going right now. So we need the Clarity Act to pass first and see what it says. as far as allowing the streamlining, but they can't get the Clarity Act. It's stuck in committee right now and they can't get it going anywhere. Now maybe when they come back in September, they can.

But until then, I just don't see this. Like I said, I want and everything up. I love it seeing everything up. It's just that hurdle is not technology. The hurdle is, that's what I'm trying to say. Yeah. It is not technology. Just like the hurdle for payment for ill fixes

is never been technology. It's always been, bureaucracy and regulation. Same thing here. Let's switch topics and talk about the crypto treasury trend. We obviously in this midst of what a lot of people I think is shaping up to be a bubble. You know, at the moment, like the top 100 companies that own Bitcoin own $110 billion worth roughly.

Obviously there were these slana treasury companies that launched now. There's a whole bunch of ether ones who are launching. What do you think about this trend? And like what do you think crypto treasury companies are good for? Is there a FARC coin treasury yet? I'm just waiting to see if we're going to go the whole nine years. Are Trump Treasury yet? They're basically levered. They're levered.

They're ways to buy crypto in a levered way because what does the company do? Take, you know, the big one, you know, strategy now, not micro strategy, strategy. What is Saylor doing? He's borrowing in the bond market convertible. He's borrowing money to buy Bitcoin. He's buying it on a levered basis. So when people are bullish and they think that the price is going to go up and they want to acquire it on leverage, these crypto treasury companies are allowing you the leverage to, you know,

to buy it up. Tom Lee's, I forgot the name of his company now, but, you know, is doing it with Heath. Bitmine. Yeah, bit mine. Yes, that's right. It's a levered play. And levered plays are always popular in bull markets and they're deadly and bare markets. Go look at what strategy did in the downturn from, you know, 22 and to 23 or early 24. And you could see how deadly that they can be. So it's part of, yes, it's part of the euphoria, the FOMO that we've got in the market right now to acquire, you know, to acquire crypto. In fact, some people have even argued, you know, why are you wasting your time even buying crypto? You should buy these because they're levered.

Because where do they get that $110 billion to buy those coins in the first place? They borrowed it. And that's a form of leverage. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, a lot of these companies did. Micro Strategy, it's just, it's becoming a smaller portion of what they're purchasing. But it's still levered. It's still levered. I mean, yes. Okay, last question. Here we are, we're in the verge of what looks like to be a tokenized stock trend. You know, obviously Robin Hood and and Cracken kind of already started.

Coinbase has said that they also want to play in this space. Like, how do you think about that? You know, we would have potentially this issue where the tokenized stock, you know, especially like on nights and weekends, we'll have, will diverge from the price of the actual stock. And I just wondered, like, what do you think, you know, could be the implications of having, of having that kind of situation? So let's go back to the game stock argument for starters.

So let's use an example, Apple. There's, Apple has so many billions of shares outstanding. I didn't, I don't know it off the top of my head. Apple is in charge of the float of Apple. How many Apple shares are out there? No one else can create an Apple share other than Apple. And what you have to be careful of, this is kind of what happened with GameStop too,

is that if somebody wants to tokenize Apple stock and everybody shows up to buy a tokenized version of it, a billion dollars, just to use a simple number, they have to immediately take that billion dollars and buy a billion dollars of Apple stock and kind of hold it in a smart contractor or some kind of treasury backing those real world assets one for one like a stable coin if you do that then the arbitrage should be fairly straightforward and the price should not diverge a whole lot away from the um the price should not diverge a whole lot away from the Tradfine New York Stock Exchange price, if you want to put it in those terms.

The other thing you got to be careful of is we completely forget this. What is an Apple share? It's a voting right. It is in part ownership of the company. Now, Apple's for trillions of dollars, but maybe smaller companies will object to it, and some of them have. I don't want my shares going out into a tokenized asset and being held in a trust. I have to have every year or every quarter the board to propose proxies that I need to have passed by the shareholders and I need a certain percentage of their shareholders to pass proxies

because it represents ownership in running the company. Who votes those shares? How are their shares forward? What if they're not voted? Does that give you a problem? Because some proxies have forms that you need certain amounts to have to pass and the like. These are logistical issues that I have not heard. being resolved.

If the answer is, we're just going to create something called Apple and go ahead and buy it, and we'll just pretend that it's Apple, but it's not backed by anything. Those are the bucket shops of the 1920s. They did exactly the same thing. You'd go to a brokerage house. You'd say you bought Radio Corporation of America, but there was never any share. It was just some fictitious number that you were playing up and down. And then when the crash came, you realized you owned nothing.

You own nothing. So they have to kind of resolve these kind of issues. And these are big issues to resolve, especially when it comes to voting rights with a lot of these companies. Now, can they be resolved? Sure, they can be. I just haven't heard how they're going to resolve them and who's going to vote these shares and the like. So I think what they'll probably do is they'll start with ETFs like the S&P 500 and stuff. And even those are shares.

And even those have proxies that need the shareholders to vote on to agree, management, changes, structure changes, and everything else. Those come up with those as well, too. And they're going to need them to vote, and we're going to have to figure out how that works as well. All right, Jim. Well, it has been fantastic talking to you as always. Thank you so much for joining Unchained. Thank you.

I enjoyed it. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Matt Peltjard, Vonier Ranovich, Pamma Jumdar, and Marka Curia. Thanks for listening.