The Pomp Podcast - #1447 Anthony Pompliano & Phil Rosen | Will Bitcoin Crush Everything In 2025?!

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Phil Rosen, the Co-Founder of Opening Bell Daily, and Anthony Pompliano, Author of ‘How To Live An Extraordinary Life’ and CEO of Professional Capital Management, discuss bitcoin’s historical November performance, the narrative in markets around Donald Trump, why this generation loves risk & volatility, and predictions of assets that could outperform bitcoin in 2025.  ======================= Ledger has been trusted for 10 years to secure 20% of the world’s digital assets. Their latest devices, Ledger Stax and Ledger Flex, feature secure touchscreens for safer, easier crypto management. This Black Friday, upgrade to Ledger Flex and get $70 in Bitcoin or save up to 40% on select wallets and accessories. Deals valid through December 5th. Visit https://ledgerpomp.com/ today! ======================= Meanwhile is the world’s first licensed and regulated life insurance company built for the Bitcoin economy. Protect your loved ones with sound money built to manage life’s uncertainty and a broken financial system. Their BTC-denominated Whole Life Insurance policies allow HODLers to pass more BTC on to their loved ones and a tax-advantaged way to access BTC for liquidity during their lifetime. Visit their website at https://meanwhile.bm/ to join the waitlist for a policy and to learn more. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's up, guys? Today, I've got an amazing episode with Phil Rosen. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Opening Bell Daily. In this conversation, I break down a bunch

of ideas that are unique you will not find anywhere else. These are ideas that I've never shared with anyone ever before, but you're going to get the first look. Phil and I talk about Bitcoin, how it crushed everything in November of 2024. We then ask the question, what is going to outperform Bitcoin in 2025, or will it be the actual best asset? We then get into Trump, all the policies, why Bitcoin is going up. And we even started talking a little bit as to why this generation loves risk, volatility so much, and whether risk has been removed from markets. This conversation is going to make you think more critically. It's going to teach you a bunch of things that you've never heard anywhere else before. And it is going to make you question

whether I'm right or wrong on a number of subjects. So let me know in the comments on that as well. Here's my conversation with Phil Rosen. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by Ledger. Ledger is 10 years old and they are the most trusted name in crypto security. With over 7 million users and 20% of the world's digital

assets secured, Ledger continues to lead the way in protecting your crypto and digital ownership. Now, their latest devices, Ledger Stacks and Ledger Flex, feature the world's first secure touchscreens. They make managing your assets easier and safer than ever. They're really cool and they're easy to use. Plus, the new Ledger Security Key app offers a secure alternative to traditional passwords, which enhances your digital security. Now, Black Friday's coming up, and everyone's looking for a good deal, and Ledger's got you covered. You can upgrade to Ledger Flex and get $70 in Bitcoin,

or you can save up to 40% on select Ledger Nano wallets and accessories. This offer is valid through December 5th, so go hurry up while supplies last. Now, don't wait. Go visit ledgerpomp.com. That's right. We got a custom URL. Meanwhile, LedgerPomp.com will take you to the exact page you need to go so that you can go ahead and get a great deal. LedgerPomp.com. Put it in your memory and go visit it today. LedgerPomp.com.

Today's episode is brought to you by Meanwhile. Meanwhile is the world's first licensed and regulated life insurance company built for the Bitcoin economy. Operating on the Bitcoin standard, they do everything in Bitcoin. You pay in Bitcoin. They pay claims to your family in Bitcoin. You take out policy loans entirely in Bitcoin when you need liquidity. Meanwhile, Bitcoin life insurance has redefined what it means to hodl. Protect your family from life's uncertainty and a broken financial system.

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We just saw Bitcoin's second best month of the year. It gained 39% in November, and that was just behind the 45% it saw in February, which is when the ETFs launched. And we right now are riding the Trump White House, the launch of the ETF options, and a lot of Trump's cabinet nominees are pro-crypto. So how much of this momentum do you think is sustainable? Are you not entertained, right? If you think about what's happening right now, sideways summer is over, Bitcoin starts to go up.

Weeks ago, months ago, you and I talked about this. Sideways summer lulls people to sleep, and then you get the explosion. People can't psychologically wrap their head around the fact that Bitcoin was $69,000 on November 1st. Now, at the beginning of December, it's almost at $100,000. What happened in the month of November is that Trump won, people realized that there was going to be pro-crypto policy, and then there's a reflexive nature to Bitcoin. And the more that it coiled all summer long, remember when it was just trading and trading and trading in that range? It's coiling, it's coiling, it's coiling. It's like a spring. Let that baby loose. And here we go. Now, what I do think is interesting

is it's coiling again right now because it's been trading between $95,000 and $99,000 for like a week and a half. And so the longer we stay in this range, it's coiling and coiling and coiling. And when that spring gets loose over $100K, this thing's going to fly. And so ultimately, what you really saw was investors said it's time to invest. Trump was a part of it. Pro-crypto policy was a part of it. The price going up and the marketing that comes with that was a part of it, right? Seeing that there was now other nation states interested in buying Bitcoin, seeing micro

strategy buying Bitcoin, seeing some of the miners say, we're not going to sell the Bitcoin. We're going to buy more of it. seeing micro strategy kind of fast followers or copycats pop up around the world. That's part of it. But all these data points line up and investors are sitting there saying, you know what? I better buy some of this. And they start to invest a little bit more buyers and sellers, finite asset band price goes up, price goes up. More people are interested. They start allocating capital goes up faster. We're now getting into territory where we've seen 10% days in Bitcoin. We're not talking about a hundred billion dollar market cap coin. We're talking about something that's

almost two trillion dollars. It's crazy, but I don't think it's anything yet. Just wait to see what happens in 2025. So what's crazy about how well Bitcoin did in November in the last week, there was actually almost half a billion dollars of outflows from Bitcoin ETF. So digital asset products. I guess how much of this great news for Bitcoin, can we overprice it in? Is that even something to consider? Bitcoin is underpriced. It's undervalued today. Why is that? Because if I said to you, what is the value of the strongest computer network in the world? And you said to me $2 trillion, I would kick you in the shins. I would tell you, stop it. The strongest computer network in the world is worth $2 trillion. There's individual companies that are worth

more than that. This is crazy. It's obviously still undervalued. Now, what is it worth? Nobody knows. Should it be worth 5 trillion, 10 trillion, 20 trillion? I don't know. Somebody smarter than me will figure that out. Really, the market's going to figure it out. But $2 trillion is too low. On top of that, if I said to you, gold is a 17 or $18 trillion asset. We have invented something that is more portable, more divisible. It's cheaper. It's faster. It's more secure.

No one can confiscate it from you. Anyone can buy it. You don't need to physically store it. All these things. And it's only worth about 15% of gold. You'd say, stop it. Kick somebody in the shins again. You'd say, no, it's obviously going to be worth at least gold.

And so that's a pretty big gap. There's a lot of room for Bitcoin to close on gold. And so I just think that any way you slice the macro picture of Bitcoin, it is undervalued today. Now, the hard part for people to wrap their head around is that people don't think of the macro value. They think of the micro, the day-to-day, the week-to-week, the month-to-month, and they say to themselves, well, it was at 100, then it went to 90, then it went to 98.

Oh my God, is this the big crash? Did we top out? Is it going to go to 50? Is it going to go to 60? Who cares? it's going way higher over the next decade. And it's because ultimately the value of this network is not currently being exhibited in the price.

And so in the short run, you have this very weird dynamic, the voting machine, as Warren Buffett would like to call it, but over the long run, you get a weighing machine. And so what we are going to end up finding out is that Bitcoin today was undervalued compared to what the market thinks it's actually worth in the future.

The beauty of Bitcoin is that they ain't creating more of it. So a lot of stock, what ends up happening is you have 100 million shares and it's trading at a dollar. Okay. And then all of a sudden the market cap goes up because they created a bunch more shares. So it's dilutive, but they're also creating more market cap. Now, of course, there's a lot of nuance in terms of could it make the share price go down, all that kind of stuff.

But in general, there's a lot of things that you can do with a public stock that you can't do with Bitcoin to manipulate that market cap. Bitcoin is a very simple supply demand game. If there's more demand for a finite supply, the price goes up. If the price goes up, the market cap goes up. And what we are watching right now is that there are pools of capital that previously did not own Bitcoin that are now saying, I need to own Bitcoin. And they're going and they're buying Bitcoin. When they buy Bitcoin, the price goes up. When the price goes up, more large pools of capital say, oh, when this was a $200 billion market cap, I laughed at it. Get this little nonsense out of here. These

kids on the internet, right? They're trying to kick me in the shins. Get out of here. But now it's $2 trillion. I might need to buy some of that. I can actually put $20 billion into that. No problem. There's a publicly traded company that's literally done that. And so when you see that, you start to say to yourself, Bitcoin gets less risky the higher the market cap goes. Very few assets in the world that occurs.

And so then ultimately begs this question of who's next? What are the big pools of capital? When the first big insurance company comes out and says, we have decided to allocate $2 billion to Bitcoin, every other insurance company is going to say, well, we should think about it. I recently listened to a podcast episode with Mark Rowan, one of the co-founders of Apollo, and he also started an insurance company. He's not a big crypto fan, right? He kind of plays the game of like, I'm not really interested in that stuff. I don't know anything about it. Bitcoin's interested in him.

And I'm willing to bet that insurance company is going to hold Bitcoin at some point in the future. So will every insurance company. I was just recently talking to somebody who's a very well-known Wall Street researcher. They're currently telling clients 60-30-10. Sounds a lot like 60-40. 60% stocks, 30% gold, 10% Bitcoin. I don't hear bonds in there. i don't own any bonds i'm not interested in that it's a losing asset tlt is down like 30 percent

over the last five or six years so we started to think of this you're like wait a minute hold on a second is bitcoin going to replace bonds that sounds crazy but then you look at micro strategy a lot of bond investors seem to be trying to get exposure to bitcoin is that the canary in the coal mine because if so bitcoin's undervalued given enough long you know long enough time frame it's going much much higher how long is it gonna take i don't know but i just think that a 40 performance in november obviously catches a lot of people with some you know kind of attention it's up 150 in the last year it's up 130 year to date give or take and so a bulk of that came in November, right? A big portion of it. What's December going to do

December during the year of a having tends to be pretty good. If you go back to 2020, when Bitcoin broke 20 K every day, it was adding a thousand dollars. I remember December 25th hit 25,000 on December 26th at 26,000. You're like, yo, we are in a simulation. This is crazy. December 30th, $30,000. You're like, literally stop playing with us like this. But think about going up $1,000 a day with an asset that's only $20,000, $25,000 in price. From a percentage standpoint, it's pretty healthy doing it every day. When this thing moves, as we saw in November, it can really move. And so there's people now like, oh, we're going to break $100,000 by the end of the year. Like, huh, you're real courageous,

right? You're basically predicting a $3,000 move in an asset that's worth $100,000. So that's not very impressive. But now I'm starting to see people say, well, what if it's 120 by the end of the year? Again, I don't know what it's going to do. I'm not predicting anything. I'm out of that game. But if this thing hits 120 by the end of 2024, you're going to have every single dude on Wall Street getting a phone call from somebody saying, what the hell?

Why don't we have exposure? And guess what you do on Wall Street? You listen to your clients. If they say they want something, you want the fees. You want the AUM, right? you want all that. So you go and you buy it. And when they start buying, price goes up, market cap goes up, becomes less risky, more people buy it, more clients call, and here we go. So something that's interesting as a journalist and a reporter, I get a lot of pitches about

covering different parts of the market, different stories, interviewing executives, and that follows the market. So when people want to talk about Bitcoin, that usually happens when bitcoin is going up and then when bitcoin is going down people don't want to talk about bitcoin um this is the most pitches inbound i've gotten ever in the last several years and everyone just wants to come on uh do an interview talk about where they think the price is going to go um fools yeah well maybe um no fools how do you predict how you predict an asset like this well it's easy for them to do an interview because they just say it's going to go up of course yeah but but that's actually the best answer it's just like it's going to go up over time

which is a bad answer but but it's the best of the bad answers right uh but once you start trying to pick prices and stuff it's really hard because there's not cash flow there's not all these different components to it um but i'm willing to make a bet with you that whatever the number of pitches are you're getting right now i think that we're going to be able to 5x that before the end of 2025. Because Bitcoin historically has had these blow off tops. So right now we're 40% a month, right? Like, hey, here we go. But usually the market doesn't top out until you get kind of eight to 16 months after the halving. We're starting to get there, kind of end of Q1, beginning of Q2, maybe into Q3, somewhere in that range, right? Kind of that nine month period.

Man, when the price starts going up, $5,000, $10,000 a day. The pitches will flow in. You may get, I really believe this. You may get more pitches in a day than you're getting in a week right now. Because everyone is saying this is the talk of the town. It's just, you don't see this very often. NVIDIA is another example. That thing went parabolic.

Every single person, all of a sudden, we're like NVIDIA. We're not like NVIDIA. We did this. We did that. We're a customer of NVIDIA. We are an investor in NVIDIA. Our founder one time worked at NVIDIA. My brother's cousin's mother's girlfriend used to work at NVIDIA.

It's crazy. But everyone wants to be part of the story. I think something interesting, too, is that the story has never been this compelling. And that's part of the, I think a lot of this is political as well, because you have the first ever pro-crypto White House, and you have Gary Gensler of the SEC leaving. And that makes Bitcoin, you know, that pretty much gives Bitcoin every green light imaginable. And I'm getting, I'm having a harder and harder time finding the risk. So what do you see as like, okay, this is the thing that could derail Bitcoin? I don't think anything is a fatal risk, right?

The whole beauty of decentralization is that you have such a degree of risk mitigation that you are basically solving for. It's not going to go to zero. Now, that is not unique just to Bitcoin. I also think that there's a lot of crypto networks that in general, you have bag holders. So it's kind of like, you know, use this as an example. In a public company, if you have a bad company, eventually they declare bankruptcy. The shareholders don't do that.

The executives do. And they're like, it's over. and somebody's there to wave the finish flag, right? And say, it's done. There is no such thing of that in the crypto world. So there are people still today holding some random altcoin from eight, 10 years ago that just went to zero,

but it never actually went to the price of zero. You probably can go somewhere and trade it for 0.0001 cent because there's somebody out there that still holds it. and so think of this as like thriving or failing a lot of these networks will fail but people will still hold the token and so again what is the risk it's not actually fatal what you're looking for is what are the risks that the price is going to go down that people will stop using it etc right and so i think on that front um some of the biggest risk to price are some of the strongest narratives today something happens to micro strategy

What is seen as a shrink today can very quickly become a big weakness because there's concentration of trust. There's concentration of enthusiasm. And so when you take that away, you get the opposite effect, right? I also think that there's a lot of questions right now in terms of risks about some of these public companies that are beginning to get more interested. Tesla, we've seen in the past, they sold some of their Bitcoin. Bitcoin went down. Right. So not just a micro strategy, but the miners or other companies that hold, they all start to sell, obviously seen as a risk to price. I think that there is still, although getting smaller, a chance that you could get some sort of regulatory action where everyone understands Bitcoin is through the threshold of is it a security?

It's not a security. It's not a security. But if the United States really, really, really, really, really needs Bitcoin, it really looks like those ETFs that you got there. Wouldn't it be nice if that Bitcoin became ours? A micro strategy that Bitcoin you got there. Wouldn't that be nice if that became ours? With like the signing of a pen, the United States could own millions of coins. i think the etfs now have 1.1 million sailors got 400 000 the us has already got 200k that's 1.6 million right there i'm not saying this is going to happen i think that it is a very very

very very small near zero percentage chance but still there's risk right and so in a weird way if bitcoin became so highly successful that every country around the world wanted it well we always think in the western world terms and let's say that you've got the faith that the united states government's not going to do that do you think there's another government somewhere in the world that's going to do that hell yeah right so again we always talk in terms of the united states but then people say oh us isn't going to do that okay i can rattle off a laundry list of other countries that people will think have a high probability of doing that and so you get into this game of like okay well if some random country no one can point out on a map does it

it, who cares? Bitcoin doesn't care. Price doesn't care, whatever. But there's some countries that if they did it outside the United States, people would care, right? We saw China as an example, kicking out all the miners in 2021. Again, they affected the hash rate, but that had a pretty profound impact. Bitcoin went down 50%. So it depends on what the countries are, what they're doing, all the nuance, whatever, but there's risk to price. And the last thing that I would say is um bitcoin in bull markets is a race between the influx of speculators being converted to long-term holders so price goes up speculators show up price goes up speculators show up most people buy bitcoin for the first time because they think they're going to get rich fine that's how

economics works how free markets work it's how personal incentives work at some point they get converted from i'm gonna get rich i'm here to speculate to i'm a hardcore long-term bitcoin holder no matter what you tell me i'm not selling some process that happens there let's say that that process is six months i think maybe that's a fair kind of average takes six months or so maybe 12. if the bull market lasts in 2025 anyone who buys after march of 2025 will still be speculating at the top of the bull market they haven't had time to become a hard hardcore holder yet so as that price turns over starts to fall some portion of those people sell they're not convinced yet of bitcoin they're speculating and so what you actually want to

see is if you could ideally draw it up you'd want tons of new people to show up before the bull market but that's not how price works so at one point in 2021 50 of bitcoiners had shown up in 2020 and 2021. 50 of all holders were new in that bull market in the up phase they never lived through a down phase a good portion of those people are still around today not all of them some of them washed out some of them sold that obviously helped you know draw all the price down. But you have to also try to figure out how do you go from speculator to long-term holder? How do you compress that timeframe? There's more information available today. There's podcasts, there's blogs, newsletters, TV coverage, friends are talking.

There's all these things that are helping, but it doesn't happen overnight. And so that is a risk is that you get such a rush of people towards the end, through a bull market that they're not long-term holders yet. And so when that price turns over, yeah, you sell. And so I always keep asking my friends, what do you think the financial advisors are going to do? You think that they're going to become like, you know, hardcore Bitcoin holders, some of them, but the majority of them are going to buy it. They're going to FOMO in, in Q2, 2025, after we're already at, you know, whatever price, because their clients are calling them being like, you moron, you told me not to buy this thing and all my friends are getting rich. They're going to say, fine, I'm wrong. Buy it.

It's going to peak. It's going to start to fall. And they can't wait. They're sitting around the fireplace at night, all night, smoking a cigar, waiting for this thing to turn over so they can call their clients and say, hey, I'm the professional. All right, guy, why don't you stick to making the money and I'll stick to investing the money? And they're going to sell it. And it's going to push the price. And so it's this weird dynamic of just like speculation is needed because it brings in capital, drives price, all that kind of stuff. But if they don't convert to long-term holders in enough time, you get the drawdowns. Yeah. I think it's interesting to think about how Bitcoin has become less risky,

even though the price has gone... As the price goes up, it gets less risky, which is unique to Bitcoin. But that risk appetite has really exploded in November, pretty much across the entire financial markets. The S&P 500 just had its best month of the year when Bitcoin had its second best month. And the Russell 2000, which is the small cap index, had an 11% gain in one month, which is unbelievable because that's a fairly risky corner of the market, which is typically not advisable to be piling into. what's your sense of the uh this sort of growing risk appetite how much of that is driven by let's say the the next Trump administration people think markets are going to go up or what's your read on

this there's a song I think by Mac Miller called Donald Trump yes and he talks about Donald Trump is rich and Donald Trump is basically the epitome of wealth that's what the American people have convince themselves of. Donald Trump is going to make the stock market go up. Donald Trump is going to make Bitcoin go up. Donald Trump is going to make the Russell 2000 go up. This man is here with his magic wand. He's going to wave the magic wand and asset prices are going to fly. I'm not waiting. I'm going to buy today and let Donald Trump be Donald Trump. Regardless of what the data says, which you and I have covered extensively, that the stock market goes up under every president, that actually the two best performing president stock markets in the last

50 years for Democrats. Right. All these different it doesn't matter. Narratives matter. And the narrative is that Donald Trump's going to make that stock market go up. Now, the beauty of that narrative is it's true. He is going to make the stock market go up. Right. He is going to make Bitcoin go up. I would argue Bitcoin did pretty good under Biden. Bitcoin did pretty good under Trump the first time. Bitcoin did pretty good under Obama. The stock market did excellent under Biden as well. It's not about the president. It's about the structure of the market. It's about the liquidity cycle. It's about the devaluation of the currency and the national debt and all these other kind of economic things. But it doesn't matter because nobody cares about facts, figures,

data, charts, and graphs. What they want is they want a face. And there's nobody greater in the world at taking that sentiment of all of that structural, smart, sophisticated analysis and saying, look at my hair, look at my dances, listen to the YMCA, and we're going higher. And he's figured it out. And so regardless of whether he's actually driving it or not, he's getting ascribed the benefit of being the guy. And what I find so fascinating is if you put a president in the White House who measures the economic health of America by the stock market, it's going higher. The guy is not going to let it go down. And so I actually think the bigger question is not, is the stock market going higher?

Is Bitcoin going higher? Of course, it's going higher. It's what is the ancillary damage that is going to be needed to be created in order to make that happen? Now, what's fascinating is that Doge, Department of Government Efficiency, they're saying we're going to slash all this spending, but we're also going to pop the stock market, we're going to pop Bitcoin, we're going to do all this stuff. Usually you would say if stock market goes up, it's because we're spending a lot.

It's because we're devaluing the currency. But what's fascinating to me is they're trying to do both. If they pull this off, just put them up there. I don't know whether four or five guys on Mount Rushmore, move some over, put the sixth one. We never had a president in my lifetime that's been able to drive asset prices, not add to the national debt, and cut spending. It's a trifecta. No one's been able to do it. The last time we had a balanced budget was in 2000.

And guess what happened? Stocks crashed in the dot-com bubble, right? And so when you look at this, you say to yourself, like, it's incredibly difficult to do this. The odds are stacked against them, right? There's a lot of campaign promises, all this bullshit, whatever. If you are a betting man or woman, you have to bet against them, right? In the sense of just the odds are against them. but if you said what do you need to do to pull this off you need somebody who can buck the system

okay you got trump you need somebody who has immense immense attention to detail and just chaotic management musk so you got trump and elon then you need an outsized number of the smartest people in the country to come work a la manhattan project to cut spending doge and then you need investors who don't look at data but listen to narratives retail and you start to line all of a sudden you say you know what this may work i don't know if it's gonna work i i'm along for the ride like everybody else but they got all the ingredients now we got to see is trump really a chef or not. You ever watch the chef shows and everyone starts with the same ingredients. Pretty good. But somebody's going to come out with a five-star meal, somebody's going to come

out with something you want to throw away. And so which one is Trump? We're going to find out. I think markets very much believe he's going to be great for the market because the amount of risk that investors are taking on is, you know, the leveraged ETF exposure is at an all-time high right now. And there was a consumer confidence survey that showed 56% of respondents expect stocks to go up in the next 12 months. And that's also a record high. To me, it seems like there are a lot of risks that investors have suddenly chosen to ignore. And I know the market is this all knowing thing that prices in everything but it does feel like from my perspective that risks are being very much shrugged off right now there's no risk anymore there's no risk

right and i'm not saying that's what the market's i'm telling you there's no risk because the federal reserve will bail you out the federal reserve and the occ and the various banking oversight committees and the politicians they bailed you out when the banks failed You think they're not going to bail you out when the stock market goes down? They've outlawed bear markets. We had a recession and they refused to call it a recession in 2022. There is no risk. And so I actually would argue the younger generation is smarter than the older generation.

Now, when I say there's no risk, it doesn't mean that there's no risk in the sense of the market can't go down. It just means that if you're a young person, it's going to recover fast enough where it doesn't matter. Do you remember the 2020 market crash? Did it matter? Nope. All you had to do was not sell.

And it was like, you just woke up one day, had a bad nightmare the night before, went to work, came home, forgot about it, bam, ready to rock and roll. Global pandemic locked you in your house. It literally didn't matter. There was a study done. And you know who sold in 2020? The bottom of the market, all boomers. Why were they selling?

They went through 2008, 2009. They remember it took years to recover. They were scared. They said, I'll take the 20% haircut. Just give me my money. Young people weren't selling. Young people were doing the opposite. Hmm, stocks are down.

Let me start buying. No sports on TV. Let me start gambling over here. This is a market. And so that's what I think ends up happening is 2022. Stocks crashed. Crypto crashed. Think about if you are a 25-year-old, you came out of school, 2020, 2021, maybe 2022. Let's say 2021. At the peak of the market, you came out of school, got your little first paycheck. What do I do with this? Let me invest

in the market okay what should i buy i don't know i don't got a big brain let me buy some stocks let me buy some bitcoin okay 2022 you just get punched in the face some stocks were down 80 90 percent i think that shopify was down something like 70 to 90 percent real companies were down looking like coins bitcoin was down 69 000 16 000. that sucks if you just held you're back to to all time highs. You pointed out recently the stock market hit 53 new all time highs this year. Nobody cares about 2022. And that's what young people realized is that the young people are actually better positioned to weather the storm of volatility than the older generation because they got crypto. They've seen this. You tell me one person in the stock market

that bought a stock, it rode up hundreds of percent, it dropped 80%, and then it went 5X from there, and they didn't sell. Some smart ass will tell me, I know my uncle did that, or my cousin. Okay, cool. What if I told you one out of every two Bitcoin in the market did that? 50% of the circulating supply hasn't moved in two years. It's crazy. what a large percentage of this industry so i wrote at 2021 i believe it was or maybe the

beginning of 2022 there's an investor who i'm not going to say was yelling and screaming about the market top the market top whatever and i said it don't matter this is the generation of volatility they have stronger hands than you do because when bitcoin went from eight thousand in the halving of 2020 to $69,000 along the way, drew down 30%, I think five or six times. That type of volatility, they didn't sell. And then it dropped to 80%. They still didn't sell. It went up 500%. They still didn't sell. Volatility doesn't scare them. They want the volatility. Half of them are sports gambling. The other half are buying whatever crazy AI coins. another half of them are buying meme coins and the last half of them are out here just speculating

on whatever stock names. And somebody will say that's four halves. That's the type of math that they can do is that it doesn't matter what the math is. They're just riding with vibes, but we live in an economy where actually that works. How do you explain an economy where there are people, there's somebody who works with us. Somebody that I know told me recently, they went from, call it $10,000 in their portfolio, to a quarter million dollars in two months. Outperformed every hedge fund on Wall Street. Now they're doing it with a much smaller amount of money, no risk, all the things, right? How many people know that person, heard that story, and just sat on their hands and said,

I ain't going to do nothing different. Come on. We're dealing with people in their 20s. They say, oh, you could do it. You're not that smart. I'm way smarter than you are. Let me get some shekels out of my pocket. Let me go see what I could do over here.

Let me cook. Give me two months. Let me come back and see what I could do. But that's what's happening. And so I just think that it's this crazy world where the Wall Street people are yelling and screaming, and they keep saying themselves over and over again, that's not normal. That's not normal. That's not normal.

Now, I literally, if I had to count, could probably, definitely with 50, maybe 100 people I know who have a similar story where they started with a little bit of money, they started investing, now it's a lot of money. And whatever that is, some people started with a couple hundred dollars, now it's worth tens of thousands of dollars. Some people started with $10,000, now it's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some people bought an asset, put 50 grand in, and now it's worth a million. But again, you say, that's not normal.

it is normal for this generation because they constantly see it everywhere they look and they start to allocate. And so the question becomes, if this is going to continue, when the market goes down, what will convince them to sell? I don't know. How do you convince someone to sell who didn't do any fundamental analysis? They just have been trained. Just hold it. Just wait. Shit's coming back. so the question that comes to my mind when you bring all of that up this massive risk appetite what breaks when suddenly the paradigm shifts maybe back to what it once was there's no going back there's no going back because the fed broke the market it already the paradigm did break

but there's no you like there's no doctor nobody shows up and puts the patient back together It's broken. We're in a new world. But the new world doesn't mean that you can't win, do well, et cetera, by using the old strategy. A value investor is simply somebody who goes, they buy something for less than it's worth. That's a good strategy. That will always be a good strategy.

It doesn't matter what the market is, right? Bill Miller, his forever was criticized. You're not a value investor anymore. You're buying Amazon. And Amazon is not a value investment. He's like, no, I'm buying something for less than it's worth. Of course, it's a value investment, right? So that strategy is not going away.

What it is introduced to the world, though, is this new thing and this new thing everyone is pointing at in that speculation. Now, what these kids are doing is they're allocating capital in a full risk on environment because they understand that there's a safety net now. So if I told you if you allocate and throughout history has been true, if you allocate to the stock market hold for 20 years,

It's never been lower 20 years later. Never. Every time it drops, you should buy more. Duh. So the safety net was a 20-year safety net. But what if I told you that now it's not 20 years? What if it's five years? With Bitcoin, if you buy and you hold it for four years,

never in history have you lost money. Compressing those timelines. The boomers had 20. The millennials had 10. Gen Z has four years buy and hold for four years. You're always up. If assets go down, you just wait. You're 25 years old before you hit 30.

You're back. You're bam. Let's roll. Just buy more. That is literally what is happening is that information is moving faster. Capital is moving faster. Timelines are getting compressed, but it all goes back to the dollar has got to get devalued. and these things are spreading

in a way that we've never seen before. Because historically, if a hedge fund manager bought a stock, there's three things you got to do to make money as a hedge fund manager. You got to buy a good stock. You got to go tell all your friends that they should buy the stock

after you've already put your position on. And then you got to sell the stock. But that is how these guys have made money forever. And if you ever listened to interviews with the greats or with a Joe Blow random hedge fund manager on a podcast no one listens to. They will all tell you the same thing. They got an idea from a friend, or they told their idea to a friend. But it's this whole game of like, hey, once I know, then I got to tell the world, right?

Get long and get loud. These things have been going around forever. Now what's happening is these kids are saying to themselves, I don't need to buy something and go tell my friends. I just buy the things where word of mouth is already spreading. and here we go bitcoin what financial asset has more word of mouth than bitcoin you don't need to tell your friends the world's already doing it for you just buy it right if you look nvidia benefit from this right was people were buying and they're going around

the world to ai is going to change the world ai is going to change the world whatever there's a very strong argument you've covered this very well nvidia went up because chat gbt right so like the word of mouth of chat gpt then convince people to go buy nvidia so we're now entering this world where people are allocating capital based on narratives but like is nvidia overvalued or undervalued if you went you asked all the nvidia shareholders what percentage you think could actually break down their opinion not even if they're right or not just could they explain how they think about it very few the smart wall street people sure they got it you know discounted cash flow models whatever nobody my my sense is that if timelines

are compressing so much that you can make a profit there's got to be that's probably tied to like the tiktok brain where everything has to be immediate and i i wonder there's probably uh going to be a lot less capital discipline over the years right because if everyone's used to turning profit so quickly on their investments, that probably shortens your, you know, your ability to stay in the market. Maybe that there's got to be some psychological downside here. So what's interesting, and I've been, I don't have a good way yet to fully flesh this out, but if you go talk to some of the best hedge fund managers in the world, they'll say to you, if I buy and it goes down, I sell it, right? Paul Tudor Jones, a number of people.

and the whole thing is just like, don't lose. Pretty simple. Buy something that goes down, sell it. Buy it, it goes up. Wait, right? Like whatever. That's pretty short-term oriented. That's like a day. Wall Street, over 50% of all options are now zero-day options. I buy something in the morning betting on what the price is going to be at the end of the day. This is not just a Gen Z thing. This is a pervasive thing across the economy. my hunch is people have been doing this forever it's just that now they got access to more information and they don't got to call a stockbroker so they can do it themselves and go press the buttons rather than call the guy to press the buttons and so what that does is it

increases the velocity the volume the frequency etc compresses time frames i would ask i had a doctor recently called me who i've worked with a long time been an investor for ours he um amazing man amazing world class at his job he owns some businesses like this guy's the real deal and uh he goes hey pop um bitcoin's looking pretty good so yeah he invested in a fun. We bought some Bitcoins up huge. You can make a lot of money. Cool. He says, you called me to let me do a victory lap? This is an awesome call. I said, yeah, it looks good so far. Let's see what happens. He goes, what do you think about micro strategy? I said, well, you know about micro strategy, right? I said, here's my thoughts, whatever. He goes, I made a lot of

money on options and micro strategy. I said, what did you say? I repeat that, right? It's like in movie where the you know the record scratches everyone turns and looks and uh he said yeah i made a lot of money in options trading micro strategy so i said hold on a second here a doctor outside of a major metro is trading options on micro strategy this guy's incredibly intelligent very successful everything if he's doing it what do you think everyone else is doing right like obviously they're doing the same shit. So you start to look at it and you say, oh, wait a second. This is something where if you remove risk from the market, even if you say, okay, not a hundred percent of risk,

90% of risk has been removed. People push out on the risk curve. And so what does Wall Street figure down? Wall Street's to blame for this too. They've just created better mousetraps, shiny toys, zero day options. Zero day options is incredible. Zero day options is something that Las Vegas wishes they created. But Wall Street figured it out. So you start to realize, like, wait a second here. We are just realizing

that risk equals return because risk has a safety net. So I have positioned or posed the question to some of my friends, some of my smartest friends. Name five investments you could buy today

that you'll lose money on over the next decade. forget about trying to make money try to lose money name five investments you can make very hard exercise oil i don't know gold it's going up bitcoin it's going up stocks in general going up bonds probably one but like there's like two or three like kind of no-brainer once you get past that it's kind of hard to pick number four and five and you get into like single name stocks. So if you look at them from asset class standpoint, it's very hard to pick, well, how could you lose money? Intentionally lose the money. So when you start to say that, you're like,

oh, wait a second here. Actually, people are just getting long or the smart ones because they realize that from a probability standpoint, asset prices are going up, not down, especially over 10 years. And that's just not how people have thought previously. Everyone has been very defensive, diversification uh i've got to be smart only buy stocks that are valued less but whatever that don't seem to be the world that we live in right now now maybe it changes but it's hard to see how that happens if we follow that line of thinking that stocks and asset prices will go up indefinitely that sounds maybe like a bad thing macro wise if the dollar isn't gonna get devalued indefinitely maybe but you need liquidity in a economy and so um that's

why they devalued the currency right is the two percent inflation will convince people like well is that true if nobody actually even knows what inflation is half of half of the economy just holds cash so well you're telling me only the the rich people you know are the ones who are spending the money. So there are some ramifications, but the counter argument to it is, well, the wealth effect. I mean, the S&P is up 27% this year. For every dollar invested, you got an extra quarter now. Okay. Where do you think that money's going? Some of it's going to stay in the market. Some of it's coming out. It's going to get spent.

Very few people I know sell stocks to save. Right? Wealth that is generated in the market either morphs and evolves into other investments, but it stays invested or it is taken out of the market and used for consumption. But how many people do you know that are selling their stocks to save money? There's the Warren Buffett's, whatever, but he's kind of like temporarily doing it because people think he thinks there's a market crash coming, whatever, but there's not that many. And so the wealth generation actually perpetuates higher prices because, hey, I bought the S&P,

it's up 27%. Okay. Well, you know what? That's a lot of S&P now. Let me sell a little bit of that. Let me go over here, buy this thing. And you know what? I already got the S&P. That seems to be doing pretty good. If it's going up 27% a year, like I don't need to buy something safe and sound, what's the, what is that, that NVIDIA thing? Let me go, I take a flyer. My doctor friend told me, you know, this other stuff, like you start to speculate more because you feel like your nest egg is doing better than you expected. So you got a little extra and there's a psychological.

So like the whole like behavioral economics of what happens when the market broke is fascinating to the point where how many hedge funds have waved the white flag and said, I'm not going to shorten single name stocks anymore. Like we are at war with an insurgency. People don't think about it this way, but the short sellers are like the big mechanized army showing up, they got their tanks there,

all their training, they got their beautiful uniforms on, all this stuff. We're the big guys, we're the pros. There's kids with red bandanas on the internet wrapped around their head who are literally just buying stuff and talking on Reddit, blowing up hedge funds.

And everyone just points to the GameStop thing. It's like, this happens all over the market to the point where literally hedge funds, by and large, are saying, we're not going to short single name stocks anymore. That's crazy. But is it because of the quote unquote insurgency, like the young kids, that whole story?

It's a good narrative. It did happen a couple of times anecdotally. It's more likely, though, because you're basically picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. You're shorting single names when they're devaluing a currency and pushing everything up. So, sure, you may be right every now and then, but how many different assets could you and I point to and be like, that company is a horrible company? Stock price is up. That crypto coin is worthless. No one uses it for anything.

It's up, though. And so it goes back to this idea of traditional stock investors think of two things when they buy. How high could it go? And how much could I lose? The younger generation is buying assets that inherently have no answer to how much can I lose? There's no downside protection. It is a 1X downside. A company has assets, cash flows, contracts, all this stuff.

There's liquidation value. And so all these super smart investors are like, oh, we buy the bonds. There's more hard assets underneath that could, if liquidated, we could recover 100% of our money. There's kids on the internet like, shut up, old guy. I'm buying a thing that literally is not tied to anything. It's imaginary internet money. But it's up 40% in November. Traditional guys will say, that's crazy.

You guys are idiots. Time will come. But they've been saying that for 15 years, right? And so it comes back to this idea of when risk gets degraded in a market and everything is structurally pushed up, should you actually be investing for what is the downside or should you be investing for how much can I make on the upside? And maybe the downside risk protection, which actually I do think a lot of the young people think about is to build a portfolio. And what they're essentially doing is they're becoming

venture type investors using liquid assets. And that's the part no one articulates, which is in a venture portfolio, you build a portfolio of assets. Majority of them go to zero, but the ones that work have an asymmetric payoff and the winners pay for the losers. Stock investors think of it the opposite way. They historically think of their batting average. I want to make 10 good bets and eke out a little bit on each one, 10, 20, 30%. But if you go talk to the Stan Druckenmillers, what did he learn from George Soros, et cetera? He'll say, it's not about how often you're right. It's about how much you make when you're right. Venture investing, power laws, asymmetry. And so the young people have taken that mentality

of venture investing and they're bringing it to the liquid markets. but that's actually how the best investors invest and that's why they are drastically outperforming these traditional investors and so you start to put all this together

and you're like, huh, maybe what's new is not actually new. It's just that they don't know how to articulate it, right?

Because they got a red bandana around their head and they're yelling and screaming about, you know, like take down the man but they actually are employing some of the same

investment strategies and tactics that, you know, the drugs, et cetera, in the world are. what is a non-crypto asset that you see outperforming bitcoin next year um i think there's a lot of assets i mean just use uh um in the month of november uh i believe

that marathon and hut eight both outperformed bitcoin so bitcoin was up like 40 i think both those are up like 70 75 percent again they're related right but public equities um i think micro strategy i performed as well um if i remember correctly so there's like public equities that are still related to the same industry i think that there are always special situation stuff um you know if you think about something like uh there are companies that or heavily misunderstood in the public markets. Like one of the things, so let me give some context. For the first 15 years of my career or so,

only focused on private market. Venture investing, then started to do some of the Bitcoin, you know, crypto stuff, whatever. But like generally private market, not public equities. In the last 18 to 24 months, I've become much more into the public markets. And so 24 months ago, I'm like, you know, probably like above average understanding of business and investing zero experience in the

public market i worked for a public company and how that was about as good as as close to the public markets as i got um i'm fascinated by how inefficient the public market is and you kind of know this because you see crypto right and like it's liquid market and whatever it's crazy how there's not more money made in the public markets because when you look at these public market companies like i don't know 25 of the companies just have no clue what they're doing in terms of explaining it to people but you dig under the hood and you're like dude this is a good business. This is a good product. Like what you just told me, understanding your business is not even remotely close to what your website says. Right. And so it goes back to this idea of

like, if you could wave a magic wand and clearly articulate what every company could do 25%, maybe more immediately get a stock boost. Right. And people just realize like, Oh, wait a second. The thing that I thought was there is not actually what I thought. It's better than that. And they allocate. So I think there's a lot of that stuff going on. The beauty is that the young people in the liquid crypto market, they know how to communicate on the internet better than these larger companies. They also have the benefit of like, they don't have legal up their ass. Right. And so, you know, I know public company CEOs who are like, dude, I want to say X and legal is like, no way. So there's some of that going on. So I think that that's a huge thing.

And going to your question about like, what's going to outperform Bitcoin? It begs the question of like, what is Bitcoin's return going to be? Right. And so if I had to guess what majority of if I pulled all my friends, I would say that the quote unquote price predictions for like highest point in twenty twenty five land somewhere between one fifty and two fifty. Some people think one fifty, some people two hundred one seventy five to twenty five, but somewhere in that range. So let's just take two hundred as kind of like, you know, some round number that that's like around the middle of those two. that's a double from here. So what you're really asking is like, what asset's going to go up more than double in 2025?

I think there's a lot of assets. I don't want to name individual stocks, but like, yeah, that's not as big of a hurdle as people think, right? The question is, what's your confidence level? Confidence level of Bitcoin going higher from here for hundreds of millions of people is very high, right? So like that skews people to allocate there.

And then the second question is how much money can you put into it? So if you go and you find, you know, a $50 million small cap public, like sure. But what are you going to do? You're going to put a million, 2 million bucks in max, right? And that's going to move the stock. With Bitcoin, you can put, I mean, unlimited money,

billions of dollars in. doesn't even blink, right? I mean, think about this. I think that MicroStrategy has announced they've bought something like $6 billion, $7 billion in the last like two and a half weeks and the price is down, right? So you're saying to yourself like,

all right, price performance, there's a ton of options. But I actually think that when you overlay price performance plus level of confidence, plus can you deploy a billion dollars into it? very, very small, right? Because you basically got to have something that doubles that you have high confidence in and that you can put a billion dollars in.

I mean, you know, hedge fund managers pay millions of dollars a year to go find those. They don't do a great job, but you know, they're trying. And I think it's not because of a lack of effort or intelligence. I think it's just like, again, you know, go look back the last 12 months. How many things more than doubled

that you could have put a billion dollars in? probably not that many. If you took the whole stock market, maybe we should even do this analysis. Look at the whole stock market, what went up more than 100%. And 12 months ago, you could have put a billion dollars in without it being material movement of the stock price. So it's just how many of those opportunities ever exist, not that many. Paul, thank you for your time. Thanks for doing this.