Digital Asset News hosts discuss Bitcoin DCA strategies, AI in the workplace, and Trump accounts for children
Rob and Jerry from Digital Asset News discuss Bitcoin investment strategies during what they describe as a bear market low point.
Digital Asset News hosts discuss Bitcoin DCA strategies, AI in the workplace, and Trump accounts for children
Rob and Jerry from Digital Asset News discuss Bitcoin investment strategies during what they describe as a bear market low point.
Summary
Rob and Jerry from Digital Asset News compare three Bitcoin dollar-cost averaging (DCA) strategies — dynamic DCA, regular weekly DCA, and daily DCA — using historical data starting from July 5, 2022, finding that all three strategies produced roughly equivalent returns of around 542–543% at the peak, with the simplest daily DCA requiring no active management. They argue that the current market moment mirrors the 2022 bear market low and represents an optimal entry window. The conversation broadens to cover a Gartner Research study of 350 executives at billion-dollar companies finding that replacing workers with AI yielded no financial gains over companies that retained their workforce — with 80% of surveyed leaders admitting to trimming staff to fund autonomous tech — and with the most successful firms using AI to amplify employees rather than replace them. Rob and Jerry also discuss Michael Dell and his wife Susan's pledge of $250 each (per person, to each qualifying child) to the first 25 million qualifying American children aged 10 and under living in zip codes with median incomes below $150,000 who sign up for Trump accounts; those accounts launch with a one-time $1,000 government seed contribution and are available to US citizens born between 2025 and 2028. The hosts also flag ongoing concerns about KuCoin after on-chain investigator Zach XBT reported a threat actor laundering approximately $5.5 million through KuCoin deposit addresses. The episode closes with a discussion of compounding interest, the increasing sophistication of crypto scams (including a reference to a previous interview with Hall of Famer Steve Wisniewski who lost funds to scammers), and personal investment philosophies including Jerry's Tesla-Bitcoin DCA strategy and speculation that SpaceX may eventually acquire Tesla.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Welcome and Fourth of July Context
Rob: Hello everybody. Welcome to the Sunday stream. Today we're just going to talk about how right now I think it is the brain-dead easy time for Bitcoin. But of course this isn't financial advice — with my friend Jerry from Costa Rica. This is just us talking. Jerry, how you doing?
Jerry: I'm doing well. Hello everyone. Hope you enjoyed your Fourth of July.
Rob: Yes. Hope you enjoyed your Fourth of July. Watched fireworks ad nauseam. Watch your dogs freak out as you try to calm them down because there's just so much going on. Yeah, that's pretty much Fourth of July. But let me tell you, today is a big day. I don't know if you're into soccer. I'm personally not. But everybody here is excited about Mexico, which is going to be playing pretty soon — I think in like another seven hours or so — and then tomorrow is America's time. So if you're into soccer, this is great. I personally am not, but we'll see how it goes.
What I'm into, and what me and Jerry are into, is this little thing called Bitcoin. And as time has gone on, we've seen a reduction in the ROI — the law of diminishing returns. But one of the good things we've talked about quite some time is that we also have the law of diminishing volatility. So right now, as a quick reminder — today is July 5th — and like we talked about yesterday, we're only 50% down from the all-time high. People say, "Well, that's kind of ridiculous, especially in cycle 5." But taking a peak back four years ago, July 5th, 2022, we were almost 70% down. And as a reminder, the lowest it went in the last cycle was 77%. So you were 8% away from the bottom. If that's the same thing with us — 50% down — maybe we go down another 4 or 5% and maybe that's it.
And what we're going to talk about today is the brain-dead time, which essentially is right now. Before we get to that, Jerry, give us some of your insights to the days of 2022 when you went through the last bear cycle. Does it feel the same way, or are there some differences? How is this all working out?
Comparing the 2022 Bear Market to Today
Jerry: It does feel — from an emotional standpoint, yes — it feels very different. The last big retraction that I felt dramatically in my portfolio was post-COVID, and it was easy to see that the contraction was directly related to the influx of actual currency created through all those stimulus programs — all the money that was just flooded into the markets from the COVID element. We still hadn't completely developed the Michael Sailors of the world, the BlackRock ETFs of the world, these institutional vehicles that we all felt would catapult us from a hobbyist market into an industrial asset class. That hadn't really formed yet.
And so here we are, some four years removed from 2022, and those things have all come true. We've seen the tax classification for Bitcoin go from constantly being marked down to its lowest price to actually being fair market value — that's huge. We have ETFs from BlackRock and all the others. Huge commercial and industrial adoption from the financial sector. More and more companies like Sailor adopting Bitcoin as a strategy. El Salvador doing it on a sovereign level. So the doors are open for all these catalysts that we had hoped for, and yet we're still in what we feel is a depressed market. The feeling is that way, although the fundamentals don't speak to it in that way. And I think that's what a lot of us are having a hard time coming to grips with — fundamentally we should be far better off than we were four years ago, just from the sheer dollars involved that are building and expanding and adopting this particular asset class.
Rob: And you know, these bear markets — it's like the same thing. We're like, "Why are we going down? Because it seems like there's some pretty good things going on in the background." There are macroeconomic factors, there are geopolitical factors. Going back to 2018, you essentially had futures — that was the big thing from the CBOE group — and that pretty much tanked Bitcoin as we went into the bear market. In 2022, we just had a massive year, and of course back then we saw that the markets, even the traditional markets, dumped in 2022. That kind of made sense. But now, here we are where everything's going in a straight skyrocket trajectory, especially with AI, energy, and infrastructure, but yet we're kind of laying flat.
I take a look at that and I'm like, that's a little bit different. But what's not different moving forward is these time frames and going into where I think we should be, which is right now — the brain-dead time.
Comparing DCA Strategies: Dynamic, Weekly, and Daily
Rob: So what I did was I took a look at going forward, and we're going to take a look at some of those AI bubbles in a bit and some macroeconomic factors — especially with people saying there's a recession coming. Sure, there's always a recession coming. But what I wanted to show you today was some strategy. This is taking a look at either dynamically DCAing — which, as a reminder, if we're dynamically DCAing, we're taking risk levels, using this off of Ben's website — or just regular DCAing.
The key idea for dynamically DCAing is that as the price of Bitcoin goes down, you increase those buys. I screwed this up last time. I did what was called micro DCAing, which is the dumbest thing I could have done. But now I've kind of learned my lesson. I'm like, okay, I'm going to start buying more, because on the trajectory of four years it's worked out pretty well over the last 12 years or so.
Before I do this, Jerry — what do you think, percentage-wise, does the best? Do you think it's dynamic DCAing, regular DCAing once a week, or regular DCAing every single day?
Jerry: If all three of the strategies had the exact same start date, all three strategies had exactly the same total financial contribution, and they all ended on a very specific date — if all those three things were the same between the three different strategies — I would say the latter would most likely be the best performing: the one where you purchase every day.
Rob: You know what's funny? You're right. And here's the proof. Check this out.
This is the brain-dead time. We are coming into the doldrums of the bear market. We feel it all around. So what I did was I said, okay, let's do a start date of July 5th, 2022 — four years ago — and then we end it at the end of the year, because we're just going to say, hey, this is the bear market, I don't want to buy anything else after this.
If you did that and you dynamically DCAed — as the price goes down you increased it — look at your return on investment at the peak. At the peak, you're up 542%. You spent $12,800 because it's only $100 a week. And what that would have been worth at the very top of October 6th, 2025 would have been $82,270. That's an increase of 542%. And that means you'd have to check the dynamic DCAing, make sure that you're in range, then increase the amount that you're buying or not depending on what it is. So that would be going from essentially July, August, September, October, November, December — five months, buying 25 to 28 weeks.
Now, if you wanted to go past that and say, "You know what, I want to stop on December 31st, 2023," it's actually pretty good — you're at 520%. So this one you're at 542% and you did the absolute best, and you stopped buying anything. But if you went to 2023, you'd be up 520%. So the question you have to ask yourself is this: if I stop on December 31st, 2026, and going into 2027, where can I get these types of gains of 520%? Is it in some other type of AI play? Maybe. Infrastructure? Possibly. Energy? Who knows? But that's what we have as far as going into 2023.
So buying for 54 weeks — now as you start to get into more of a bullish run, your return on investment goes down, but not too bad. If you start on July 5th, 2022 and stop on 2024, your profit and loss is almost 500% — 494%. Now if you go to 2025, you go down to 470%. But again, not too bad. You're dynamically DCAing $100 a week, but it has to be below the 0.5 risk level, which as we got into 2024 and 2025, it stops you. It's like, "Hey, genius, we're above that. We're at 0.6, 0.7, somewhere around there." So that's about it for dynamic DCAing.
What about just a regular DCA? Just brain dead. Just $100 a week. Guess what? You almost did — actually, you did just as good as the dynamic DCAing. It was 542% to 543%. You actually beat dynamic DCAing without even having to worry about all the different risk level factors. So right now would be that time, as opposed to four years ago.
Now let's take a look if you keep going into 2023 — it's 414%, then 285% for regular DCAing, and now we're down to 223%. Again, this is just regular DCAing, not paying attention. So on the first brain-dead year from 2022 — which is our 2026 — you actually beat out dynamic DCAing. But moving forward, that's when you need a little bit more guidance to say, "Hey, price is doing this, price is doing that."
Now, check this out. How about if you went instead of $100 a week, you just said, "F it — regular DCAing $100 a day." You did the exact same thing. You had 543% and at the very top you had $115,799 in value, and you invested $18,000. So the difference here is that yes, percentage-wise you're doing pretty good, but if you dump $100 a day and you stop on 2022 and you don't add anything else, that's where you're at. That's a pretty good time.
And like right now — and this is the thing, Jerry — the people that make it are the ones that do the most uncomfortable things. The ones that are essentially like, "You know, this didn't work out. This is a Ponzi scheme. This is awful." I heard the same thing in 2018. I heard the same thing in 2022. And I'm hearing the exact same things now. What are your thoughts on this?
Jerry: Well, it's always been synonymous that those who are going against the popular trend will either lose or gain the greatest degree. And as the momentum trade shifted from crypto into emerging tech like SpaceX, AI, compute — that was the easy rollover. And with that, a lot of liquidity was taken out of this market, created a ton of fear. And those who have fought against the fear and said, "If Bitcoin should be successful," will be the ones who are the greatest rewarded.
Rob: Exactly right. But the thing is, getting through that — that is the tough part. And that's why most people just don't make it.
Jerry: I'll be honest. I think the reason why most people don't make it is because they're following a trade. They're not understanding the market. I can tell you that I'm not in this for a percentage gain. I'm in this Bitcoin trade — specifically Bitcoin — because I understand monetary inflation. My conviction to Bitcoin isn't because of the Bitcoin white paper. It's because I understand monetary policy. I understand there's nothing going to stop that train. Inflation is going to be persistent. And as long as my currency is devaluing year over year, Bitcoin is the most logical recipient of that philosophy, that belief.
Not everybody understands it in that way. A lot of people invested into Bitcoin because they thought it was going to be a good investment. And over time, I believe it will be. But people who exit aren't exiting because of their conviction to understanding what Bitcoin is. It's because their conviction of a return on investment is changing — not the underlying reason for the investment to appreciate or contract.
Rob: Well, I mean, this is what it comes down to — money supply. If you're going to keep printing money, that's pretty much the big thing. You're debasing the currency.
Jerry: And I don't believe anything's going to stop that train.
Rob: Yeah.
Jerry: Except for total collapse.
Rob: Well, Michael Burry believes that's going to happen any day now. And he's actually called the last 226 recessions out of three. So that track record — you can't beat that.
Jerry: I don't know about the collapse any day part. And I'll tell you why. I don't think our system collapses until the confidence in the system collapses. And confidence in the system hasn't collapsed. People still very much are clamoring for and have a desire for US dollars. And as long as that is the case, then our system will stand.
Rob: Yeah. As long as that's the case.
And I will say, just jumping back here real quick for these $100-a-day DCAing numbers — if you did that just for this 2026 moving forward, DCAing every day is not as lucrative as you might think. If you did that for one year after the bear market, you're only at 400%, which isn't bad. Then 286%. If you DCA every day all the way through 2025, you're still up, but it's only 225%. So just be careful with what you do as far as DCA. People just say, "Oh, I'll just DCA forever." You can, but you run into troubles. And I know some people will say, "Well, what about Michael Sailor? He's done pretty good." He has, but look at what he's going through right now with Strategy and everything else. I think at some point you've got to stop. I appreciate him buying the top, but here we are.
Anyhow, just to summarize this real quick: dynamic DCAing for that first year — 542%. Regular DCAing — 543%. And regular DCAing $100 a day for the bear market that was 2022 and now 2026 — you're up 543.3%. So regular DCAing every day right now in this little brain-dead time is the time. But moving forward, the next year: dynamic DCAing 520%, regular DCAing 414%, regular DCAing 413%. So again, watch out how it goes. 2024: same thing — 285%, 286%. So just be careful with how you do it. I think right now you can't really mess it up too bad. Not financial advice, but just be careful as we get into the bull market.
Anyhow, Jerry, any quick thoughts on that before we go into the macro space?
Jerry: No, I think you did a great job of covering that. It was actually very informative.
Macroeconomic Factors and Recession Indicators
Rob: Trying to get this here — just real quick, the problem going back to 2022, like Jerry was talking about, and when I talked about in 2018, was the macroeconomics. I liked this little board here as far as the macro recession indicators: unemployment rate, job openings, job quits level, initial claims, and so on and so forth. We can see that it's not too bad. Now, people will say, "But Rob, unemployment rate — what are we at, 4.2%? That's pretty awful." But historically speaking, not the worst thing of all time. We don't have everybody employed and the unemployment rate at its super lowest. But if we take a look at all the different factors that are out there — GDP, imports of goods and services, production indices, and treasury spreads — you can see that right now we are somewhat what some would consider a little bit low for a recession.
The AI Bubble and Gartner Research Findings
Rob: And on top of that, there's this thing of an AI bubble — because AI is going to take everybody's jobs and everybody's going to be out of work and it's going to be the worst thing ever. And it's not. Shining Science actually brought out from Gartner Research — this is just a little summary; the actual study is linked in the description. And it's not just a Gartner study. There was one from MIT last year that found that AI is failing to generate meaningful revenue growth at the vast majority of companies that embrace it.
So what that means is what the Gartner study found: Gartner Research shows sacrificing human workers for AI investment is backfiring, yielding zero financial gains for major corporations. And it wasn't just, you know, some guy off the street. They actually interviewed 350 executives at billion-dollar companies — the big guys. Not like, "Hey, when someone's flipping pancakes over at Waffle House, how do you feel about AI doing that?" No. 350 executives, billion-dollar companies. Layoffs are not paying off. 80% of surveyed leaders admitted to trimming their staff to fund autonomous tech. Those who slashed headcount saw the exact same financial gains as companies that retained their workforce.
My theory was always this: every kind of industrial revolution or new technology always — for the majority — makes the people that are employed just be able to be that much more functional and be able to actually produce more by using the tools that have been generated. The ones that just leave it to the tools — it kind of just screws everything up. And I think we saw that with the computer. We saw that with the internet. Unless you have people around that really know what they're doing and are using human thought, it just doesn't work as well. I always thought the people that would keep their workforce would be just fine.
So, finishing up: the study highlights that the most successful companies aren't replacing workers but using AI to amplify them. Organizations that provide AI tools to boost employee efficiency rather than replace them are the ones seeing actual tangible benefits. However, implementing the strategy remains a hurdle, as prior research indicates over half of employees actively avoid using in-house AI tools. I don't blame them. If you came to me and said, "Hey, use this AI tool," you're like, "What? So you can bump me out? I'm not using that piece of trash. I'll do my own thing." But if they just said, "Hey, we want you to be more productive — use this type of AI tool and we're going to grow," it's a little bit different. Data suggests that treating AI as a collaborator rather than a replacement is the key to unlocking true economic potential.
Jerry, what do you see out there? Because you've got an AI company yourself. How do you see this?
Jerry: I look at this analogy very simply — no differently than the way the farmer used to plow with an ox. When he got the tractor, he still spent 10 hours a day plowing, but instead of only plowing 10 acres, he plowed 110 acres in that same day. And it's going to be a while before that farmer in the tractor plowing 110 acres is replaced by a Waymo disc and a Starlink connection and an AI system on the tractor plowing 240 acres in a 24-hour period. The tech isn't there yet.
So I wouldn't completely buy into any long-standing narrative that AI won't replace jobs or it will replace jobs. We can guarantee productivity increase because we've already been able to substantiate that. For instance, you, Rob, have been able to produce A, B, and C more using your Claude tools than you were prior — not to mention the kinds of things you're able to do. You've been able to increase your offerings in that period of time. I think it's going to be a lot more of that than one way or the other. We're going to see a lot of these little incremental changes. Some people will get vast productivity increases and some people will get minute productivity increases. And it's all going to be how they use the tools.
And do the tools fit the use case that they're trying to be applied to? I don't know if you've ever tried to stick a round peg in a square hole. Some people do try and they get frustrated. It's not until you find a round hole for that round peg that the fit happens and you're able to move forward.
Rob: Exactly. It's like me doing plumbing on my short channel. Just awful. Never did that again.
And people say, "Well, the jobs are going to get lost, they're going to be replaced." And it's true — like a typewriter repairman. That doesn't exist anymore. Most people don't even know what that is. And there was a great discussion — I need to link this in the description — one was from Heresy Financial, and he talked about ATMs and how ATM growth was the big new technological innovation. You weren't going to need a bank teller. You just go to the ATM, pull out your money, and that was it. And then what they saw was that as ATMs grew, tellers actually grew inside the bank. And then there was another example — Jerry, you remember these guys? Elevator operators.
Jerry: Oh yeah, the elevator operators. Absolutely.
Rob: Yeah. Those guys went away. So not every job is going to make it, that is for sure. But I think there's going to be more productivity moving out.
Compute Portal: Private AI for Law and Medicine
Rob: Now, Jerry talked about using AI and these types of things. Before we go on to this piece about Michael Dell giving away $250 to kids, Jerry, talk to us about Compute Portal. How does that work? Because that's your company for people who want to use AI in special situations.
Jerry: Sure. So real quick, Compute Portal is literally an aggregator for compute resources — no differently than Amazon is a marketplace aggregator for products to customers. So when you want a pair of Nikes, you can go to Amazon and see the very same Nike being presented by three or four different companies — maybe Nike Direct, maybe a mom-and-pop shoe store in Tulsa, who knows. And on that platform you can acquire those shoes, handle the payment, and everything happens on that platform. That's what Compute Portal does for companies that use compute: companies that are using GPU to run AI, companies that are using CPU and storage to run web two websites, all kinds of back-end infrastructure — all through one user account. So you have access to a whole myriad of suppliers on the back side with one customer interface, that marketplace, your user account. That's Compute Portal.
Rob: And do you guys do it like — we talked about this — with law firms and medical companies? How does that work? Because those companies can't use Claude and stuff like that, right?
Jerry: So we just had an interaction with a small law firm in Los Angeles, California. What they wanted was to be able to host in their office their own AI model with a layer on top that was specific to them. In other words, they would host an open-source model on a computer — no differently than one of the boxes you see behind me is running my own AI model in my home. And then there's a layer over the top of that which we built for them. You use a layer like that called Claude. You have a layer like that where you're interacting with an AI model somewhere through your user interface, which is your Claude app. We've built that app for them, and that app stores and houses all of their memory. So it remembers everything everybody did. It can recall instantly every conversation they've put into it. And so it's got a model that's been trained, it's got a context layer memory system application over the top of it, and it keeps it all in-house. Which means from a regulatory standpoint, no client information, no document is in a public cloud accessible to hackers. It's all within a firewall in their own internal intranet.
Rob: So that's a private LLM.
Jerry: It's literally a private cloud. Their own cloud, hosted with their own open-source model, with a context layer over the top — which is their way to interact with it, store all of the memory, all the applications that are being used, everything. And so you're going to see a lot more of that as AI infiltrates medical, legal, everything that requires high-level security. You're going to see more and more things hosted on premise.
Rob: Yeah. And everybody, when you're perusing the internet, you're going to see a lot more — once you start to take a look at private AI, you'll see a lot more of the reason and the rationale for it.
Michael Dell's $250 Gift and Trump Accounts for Children
Rob: But let's not go too much in the weeds. Let's talk about Michael Dell.
Jerry: What a bull.
Rob: Yeah, look at this. So Michael Dell — who is the chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, a multi-billion dollar company — states as such: "Today on America's 250th birthday, Susan and I are celebrating by giving $250 each to the first 25 million qualifying American children who sign up for their Trump accounts."
Before you start groaning and rolling your eyes, just wait. He says: "This makes every child a shareholder in the greatest prosperity-creating engine the world has ever known — American capitalism. We're giving the next generation a real stake in our economy and a path to the American dream: education, first home, starting a business, building lasting wealth. It unites us all in hope and optimism for every child's future."
Now, we talked about this yesterday about Trump accounts. Didn't go over too well. A lot of people despise Trump, which is fine. You don't have to sign up for it. It's for the kids. But this is from the White House release, and this is what it comes down to. Trump accounts will be available to every US citizen born between 2025 and 2028. So if you've got a new kid, you get to sign up for this for the kid. They get a thousand bucks — each Trump account will launch with a one-time $1,000 government seed contribution. Thank you to the Dells. Susan Ryan — an unprecedented gift. The first 25 million American children aged 10 and under, living in zip codes with median incomes below $150,000, will receive an additional $250. So no, this doesn't go to all the rich people. It goes to zip codes below $150,000.
I've got to tell you, I like what I see. That's pretty good. And if you're wondering, "Well, how does that work for kids two and over that were born in like 2024?" — it still works. Watch that video. There's a link in the description for how they're eligible for it. If you don't want to, you don't want to. That's fine. Just ignore it.
KuCoin Security Concerns
Rob: And lastly, I don't know what's going on with KuCoin, but first of all, don't sue me. And second of all, it seems like it has nothing more than a whole boatload of illicit activity. This is from Zach XBT — I'm part of his Telegram group, which is open, you can check it out. And he talks about how from July 23rd, 2026, a threat actor withdrew 3,200 ETH from Tornado in relation to two large private key compromised thefts. After $5.5 million was laundered via Circle CCTP bridge, funds were transferred to seven KuCoin deposit addresses on Arbitrum, and they were able to take those funds off. So KuCoin, I don't know what you're doing, but I'm sure they've reached out to you to freeze those accounts and you let that happen, as you did before. As we talked about, this is probably our fifth story on this one.
Q&A: Scams, Compounding Interest, and Investment Philosophy
Rob: Anyhow, let's get into Q&A. As you guys are coming up with questions — Jerry, what do you think about the scams in general?
Jerry: Scams are getting crazy good.
Rob: Crazy good. I mean, we just a couple of weeks back had what I would consider a very intelligent digital investor — my buddy Whiz, right? Steve.
Jerry: Right, an ex-football player who'd been investing since his college days in the '80s. So this is not a newbie in the world of interacting with investment accounts and understanding the assets he's investing in and how to protect them. He got fooled. And I'm seeing even in my own Twitter feed and my LinkedIn feeds, the sophistication of these scams is getting better and better. The emails that I'm getting are more and more compelling. It's like the scammers are learning to take the long game — develop a relationship with you, and then spring their trap months into the deal. It's just absolutely insane.
Rob: Yeah. And it's only getting worse with AI because they're learning more tactics and more techniques. And before you know it — like even me — I'll get an email and you wake up, check your phone, and you're like, "Oh, what? Coinbase security alert. What's going on?" And before you know it, you're kind of thinking about it, but then you're like, "Wait, this doesn't make any sense. This is from diddlydoo-wop@hotmail.com." You can kind of run into that.
And for all of you who are asking what Jerry was talking about — I'll link this in the description — this is when we had Steve Wisniewski, Hall of Famer from the Raiders, both in Los Angeles. And he told us — it was pretty tough to listen to, quite honestly. Because it's not just you losing your funds. Then you have to tell your wife, you've got to tell your kids, you've got to tell the people around you, "Hey, I lost everything." And it's something that no one should have to go through. So if you want a tough watch, I'll put that in the description.
I'll be honest — there's an element of today's show that I really think deserves to be highlighted in an even brighter light. And that is what Mr. Dell and his wife Susan have started with this basically first investment account for this group of children.
Jerry: I find it absolutely amazing how transformative the combination of time — when you have lots of it — and compounding interest can play a role. I just asked AI to do a quick model for me. A $1,000 one-time investment at birth into an S&P index that only tracks the S&P 500 — nothing extravagant, very low fee, less than 0.01% per year management fee. A 10.5% average compounding rate per year from birth to retirement at 62, doing nothing else. Just having that $1,000 investment at birth. At 62 years old — take a guess, Rob, how much dollar value that account would be worth when that child actually turns 62 and is going to officially reach retirement age.
Rob: I'd say somewhere between $500,000 and $5 million.
Jerry: You are incredibly accurate. $490,000 off of a $1,000 investment. And so if you wanted to scale that up into what we would consider generational wealth territory, at $100 a month DCA for the kids —
Rob: Exactly. It's transformative.
Jerry: You know what's doable? And here's the thing — most people who don't understand the power of compounding with time, using time as the lever, they always procrastinate. "Oh, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it later. I'll do it down the road. It doesn't make that big a difference." But the truth of the matter is it makes a huge difference.
Rob: Makes a huge difference.
Jerry: Time is the lever. So start that $10 a month account for your grandchild or your newborn child. Start it now. Don't waste time.
Rob: Don't waste — you know what, Jerry, what was the advice you got from your mom and dad when you were growing up for investment?
Jerry: My mom had a little neighborhood group of her friends and they were called the Valley of the Moon Investment Club.
Rob: No kidding.
Jerry: No kidding. And they would meet every Thursday. They had Robert's Rules of Order. They had a treasurer, a secretary, a president. And every neighbor, every person who was in this club would bring an investment idea and they would all talk about it. And every month they would put in their little $20 each, and the following month that $20 would be invested.
Rob: Oh, that's pretty cool.
Jerry: That's where I got exposure. And that's when at 12 years old I learned about compounding interest, because I went to my local Bank of America back then — that's where the Schwab guy was; Schwab didn't have offices back then, this is in the '80s — and started my dividend reinvestment account with PG&E stock. And he showed me the graph of how much my little $300 investment would be worth when I was ready to retire. I counted on that and always had that in my back pocket throughout my entire childhood and early adult life, remembering that experience, that I had something to look forward to.
And it was only later that I got the harsh reality that if you don't keep in contact with a brokerage, the state can claim your money. Matter of fact, every state in the country has laws to claim what they call unclaimed property. If I don't keep in contact with Schwab over the course of 12 months, then the state has a claim to that property.
Rob: They were trying the same thing with Bitcoin in California.
Jerry: Yeah, I can see it.
Rob: So my grandmother — she told me the best way to do it was two things: work for a company for 40 years and get a pension. That was the big thing. And the second thing was save all your money in a retirement account because it gives you sometimes 0.2%, maybe 0.5%. I was like, "Wow, 0.5%." So that was —
Jerry: Bonds.
Rob: Oh, bonds. Yeah, of course.
Jerry: It was the same mental process, but the bonds had a better interest return profile — sometimes 2%, 3%. My grandmother at one point from the '70s was getting bonds at 13, 14, and 15% interest.
Rob: Wow.
Jerry: That was the mother lode. She was flying high back then in those days.
Rob: 13% for doing nothing. I'll take that right now. That was — I don't know if you remember the Fed chair Volcker, but that was back in '78, '79, pre-Reagan administration.
Jerry: Oh, then Reagan came in and that changed the dynamics. It shifted the appreciation rate from those types of products to real estate. Thatcher and Reagan — we have Reagan and Thatcher to attribute massive real estate appreciation to. They really set the stage for that.
Rob: Pretty crazy. And you know, Ronald Reagan, governor of California.
Jerry: How far things have shifted, huh?
Audience Questions
Rob: Anyhow, the questions. Matano says, "I have 11,000 steps today so far." That's very difficult to do. Pretty good.
Matteo says, "DCA Bitcoin and hope for the best." That's pretty close. I don't think you can go wrong.
Jerry: Over time, over time.
Rob: And Jupiter says, "Jerry making the trip to Miami in November?" Jerry, we're going to be doing an Into the Cryptoverse seminar or conference, November 20th to the 22nd. You want to stop by?
Jerry: I'll tell you what — if I were to receive an actual official invitation, I might be able to get the company to send me.
Rob: I'll see what I can do. How about this one? Anybody planning a lump sum investment in October? Jerry, what are you doing with investments right now? Because if we follow the four-year cycle, that would be a pretty good time to do it. Are you doing that?
Jerry: I have not been stacking cash. I've been sticking to this Tesla-Bitcoin strategy — every month a portion goes to Tesla, every month a portion goes to Bitcoin. I think the minute you start trying to time the market — if I completely forgot my history it wouldn't be a big deal. But every time I start making plans to time the market, I am reminded of every single time I've tried to time the market in the past, I've gotten my ass handed to me. With the exception of one XRP move that I made based off of a Brad Garlinghouse tweet.
Rob: Was this before the SEC?
Jerry: This was — okay, so on December 3rd, Brad Garlinghouse typed a message on Twitter: "I've just received word that tomorrow Ripple will be receiving papers of a lawsuit from the SEC." And I needed no more information than that.
Rob: So you're like, "I'm in it for the tech — except for this point. I'm out of here."
Jerry: I'm in it for the tech next week.
Rob: And then when it became the entire news cycle on Twitter and XRP went —
Jerry: I went, "Oh my god, that was actually a really good move." But other than that one thing, I am horrible at timing the market for perfection. So I've just stopped trying.
Rob: Everybody's bad at it. You know what people are really bad at? The top. The bottoms — we haven't been too bad with hitting around the bottoms. I could buy those all day long. But the tops are very difficult because you're like, "If it did a 2x, why couldn't it do a 4x? And if it did a 4x, why not a 40x? And if it did a 40x, why not a 120x?" That's the mentality. And that's why I made those rules: take a little off the table, take some profits. Everything's a scam. Only things on exchanges. Don't use leverage — although it's not too bad to use like 2 or 3x — but take profits along the way because nobody ever went broke doing that.
How about this? OG says, "Are you or will you be investing in Hyperliquid?" Jerry, you got any of that?
Jerry: No. I'm sure there are going to be many good projects from today going forward. I'm sure there have been very many quality projects from the last two years. But over the last couple of years I've just decided what I have that I want to keep, I can stake, and I'll compound my holdings that way. But the only dollars from my income that go out to investment are going to Tesla and Bitcoin. That's it. Nothing else. Because nothing else to me has the underlying fundamentals of an ROI over time.
Rob: Do you think SpaceX and Tesla will be merging?
Jerry: I honestly do. And I'll tell you the mechanism in one sentence: I think SpaceX will buy Tesla.
Rob: Wow. Well, let's hope so, because that'd be SpaceX, that'd be xAI, and that would be Starlink. So I'll take that. Starlink, Optimus —
Jerry: Oh, and Optimus too.
Rob: Tesla, autonomous vehicle element, batteries, solar —
Jerry: And then obviously space travel.
Rob: Yeah, a little thing called space travel.
Let's see. Bison says, "The line between solicitation and scam is getting very thin. Meme reminds us about pig butchering scams."
Jerry: Very thin. And it's happening.
Rob: And Kelby says, "Hey, good news. Ben Cowen emailed me yesterday. What a nice guy." And of course, that's a scam.
And Meme reminds us: if they say something like, "If you did not initiate this transaction on your account, click this or call this number" — definitely do not click or call that number. Never click on a link in a text. You just go right to the source.
And then Matteo says, "My mom told me social security was going to retire us."
Jerry: My grandmother told me the same thing. My mother — it actually was true. My mother did live on her social security. I'm not eligible for another two years. If it's there, that's great. I hope it is. But I don't feel like it's guaranteed.
Rob: It never is.
Jerry: I just don't feel like it's guaranteed. My mother felt it was guaranteed. She really did. Rob, I'm telling you — if my mother had not had her social security, she would have had to be living with me. There was no plan B.
Rob: Jerry's futon. Nothing wrong with that. Or Jerry on the futon and mom gets the room, because she obviously brought you into the world.
Jerry: Exactly. I would have never heard the end of it.