The Pomp Podcast - Bitcoin Drops 40% - Should We Be Worried? | Anthony & John Pompliano

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Anthony and John Pompliano break down the chaos inside today’s markets — from Bitcoin’s pullback to what’s really happening with the ETFs. We dig into why Vanguard suddenly capitulated, how a Trump-appointed Fed chair could reshape the entire macro landscape, and why political goggles are destroying people’s ability to think clearly about money. Plus, we unpack Michael and Susan Dell’s massive $6.25 billion donation to jump-start investing accounts for 25 million American kids — and what it means for the next generation of wealth-building.======================Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join.======================Bitwise is one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto asset managers, with more than $15 billion in client assets across an expanding suite of investment solutions—including the world’s largest crypto index fund—plus products spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto equities. In addition to managing assets, Bitwise helps investors stay informed about the fast-moving crypto market. Every week, CIO Matt Hougan breaks down what’s happening in crypto in five minutes or less. Read the latest at https://experts.bitwiseinvestments.com/cio-memos. Certain Bitwise investment products may be subject to the extreme risks associated with investing in crypto assets. Visit https://bitwiseinvestments.com/disclosures to learn more.======================Timestamps: 0:00 – Intro1:29 – Bitcoin’s price drop & volatility10:12 – ETF vs spot bitcoin & leverage warnings16:40 – Vanguard + institutions opening access to Bitcoin ETFs21:39 – Trump’s Fed pick & Jerome Powell legacy25:56 – Political goggles: data, bias & media narratives33:45 – Doctors using ChatGPT & the future of expertise36:38 – Michael & Susan Dell’s $6.25B Invest America

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. At Desjardins Insurance, we put the care in taking care of business. Your business to be exact.

Our agents take the time to understand your company so you get the right coverage at the right price. Whether you rent out your building, represent a condo corporation, or own a cleaning company, we make insurance easy to understand so you can focus on the big stuff. Like your small business. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Desjardins.com slash business coverage. 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. 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. What's going

on guys today we got a great episode with john pompliano in this conversation we talk about bitcoin's price going down what's going on with the etfs why vanguard is all of a sudden capitulating and giving access to people how i'm thinking about the fed chairman pick from president trump if we should actually be worried about what's going on in financial markets how political goggles are removing all critical thinking from financial markets and how you can avoid that and then we finish up with michael dell and susan dell's recent donation of 6.25 billion to help fund 25 million american children an account where they can start investing at an early age all that and more in this conversation with john pompliano all right john was first

topic bitcoin's price that's what everyone wants to know where we go from here it's around 90 000 it's in the toilet it's in the toilet people are upset that's fine just call what it is one of the things about the bitcoin community is we are amazing at marketing when the price is going up people get on twitter i'm one of them there's a lot of people the memes are amazing all the excitement, the enthusiasm, the FOMO. We go on television. We got the articles being written. Everyone is like, this thing's going one way. One of the problems is that usually when the price starts going down, everyone's like, well, you know, they start trying to explain it away or like, oh, it's just a slight dip. It'll be back, you know, whatever. That's normal because you're

a bag holder. But I do think that the best investors that I've ever met, one of the most impressive feats or traits that they have is that they are incredibly intellectually honest. and many times what they're able to do is they're able to hold an opinion very strongly, get new information and switch around and have the exact opposing view very quickly. So if you look at, there's great traders, great hedge fund managers, great investors,

the ability to change your mind. Now, the beauty of Bitcoin right now is the price is down. That's fine, just say it, price is down. No problem, thing's volatile. Volatility is part of the features of Bitcoin. It's not a bug, you need volatility. So you need things, if they go up a lot, they're gonna go down a lot.

And over time, you wanna see them continue to move upwards, but you need that volatility back and forth. So Bitcoin is volatile. Actually, volatility has increased a little bit over the last couple of weeks. That's a good thing for Bitcoin. Now, that volatility has worked against people who are long the asset. Okay, that doesn't feel good. Went from 126 all the way down to 80,000, almost a 40% drawdown. Now we're sitting around 90K. Okay, guess what? We've seen this happen many, many times. There is something like, if you go back and you look, during the global financial crisis, stocks drew down 50%. Global financial crisis they made movies about this thing they wrote about it they're still talking

about the global financial crisis like the great depression it was bad in the crypto market specifically with bitcoin bitcoin has experienced the equivalent of a global financial crisis every year or i'm sorry every 18 months for a decade so for a decade bitcoin has gone through a global financial crisis every 18 months that's crazy people they got strong hands right they're not shaken out by volatility. If this is the bear market only goes down 40%, Bitcoin will be celebrated. There's 80%, right? So I think that's kind of one big thing. The second thing is maybe the more important part is that Bitcoin going down actually is happening while stocks are going up and gold has been going up. So if you look at these charts where they put like global liquidity,

gold and Bitcoin, everything was tracking was high correlation until about Q3 this year, Sometime in July and August, all of a sudden, Bitcoin broke from the pack. Global liquidity and gold continued in the same trend, and Bitcoin broke off and started going down. Again, you want to be intellectually honest? Bitcoin, over the last 12 months, is performing worse than U.S. Treasuries. That's not a fun fact, right? That don't make people feel good. I don't like U.S. Treasuries.

I've been saying that for a long time. I think that they are created in a way, especially with the national debt continuing to go up, where they're only going to go down over time. If you look at TLT, TLT is down 42% over the last five years. It's down 1.25% in the last year. Okay, that means that if you buy bonds and you hold them, you're probably going to lose money. Now, if you go and look at Bitcoin, Bitcoin is down 10% over the last 12 months.

So Bitcoin is doing worse than treasuries. When you put it that way, that's taking those marketing skills that everyone has on Bitcoin on the way up, and now we start talking about it when it's going on the way down. But again, if you're a Bitcoiner, you understand the asset,

and Bitcoin's price goes down, the Bitcoiners I know, they're excited because I get to buy more Bitcoin at a lower price. Everyone loves when it goes up, but people like to get a lower entry price. And so if you are still long-term convicted, if you are not shaken out by the volatility,

if you were not undisciplined because you went and got a bunch of leverage or a forced seller or anything like that, and you are continuing to acquire more Bitcoin and you're able to get it at a lower price, then those people are excited. And so again, nobody likes when the price goes down, but I do think that there's a nuanced conversation

around that. Now, in comparison, the stock market right now is somewhere between one to 2% off its all time high. And there's people who think that, you know, AI bubble has popped, the world is ending, stocks are going down, everything's overvalued, all this craziness. I don't think anything's going on. And so, again, the more you hear the critics, the more you hear the people who are critiquing, the more that you hear people who are calling bubble, the more that Michael Burry's out there tweeting up a storm about whatever nonsense he's saying, the less likely it is that there's a bubble, right? Remember what I said to you back in April, the more everyone is telling you the world's going to end, the less I'm convinced because if everyone thinks the bad

thing's going to happen, there's consensus around some bad negative event. That's probably not going to happen. You probably have a surprise to the upside. Usually you get the negative recessionary periods or the negative market panic kind of big crashes when nobody thinks it's going to happen. Good times are rolling, baby. Everything is going up and to the right. And that's when you get surprised at the downside. And the surprise is part of the pain. Here, everyone's screaming about Bitcoin's going to 50K. Everyone's screaming about the stock market bubble, right? Again, I don't know what's going to happen. But what I do know is that the more that everyone has consensus that something's going to happen, the less likely it probably is actually going to

happen in my experience in financial markets. And so it's the surprise factor that's worth paying attention to. Now, the answer could be Bitcoin's not going down a lot more. It's not going up a lot more. It's going to go sideways for a while. I don't know. Could happen. If you look at the last two weeks of the year, kind of December 12th to 15th through the end of the year, usually pretty good, both for stocks and for Bitcoin. And so I think there's people who are looking for that Santa rally, the chase into the end of the year. I don't know if I would pin my investment strategy on what's going to happen in the next 28 days or whatever it is. But I do think that people should be very intellectually honest. Bitcoin was up a lot at some point this year. It

has now come down. It's now down 10% over the last year. At the same time, if you go back to November 1st, it was at $69,000. It's now trading at 90. So it's up from November 1st last year. All these time lines that you pick, you can kind of manipulate the data to tell you good, positive, negative stories. If you look at the annual compound growth rate of Bitcoin over the last three years, 72%. If I told you that you could have bought an asset three years ago and it was going to go up 72% compound annual growth rate, and by the way, people are going to be pissed about it, you'd be like, what? That's crazy. But we're down 10%, right? And so again, it all comes into their psychology, then there's the math. And what I see with Bitcoin is I see adoption

increasing. I see the network being stronger than ever. I see it being more valuable than ever. I I see more and more companies adopting the Bitcoin network or holding Bitcoin or doing something with Bitcoin. I see nation-state adoption. I see the regulatory environment in the United States becoming more of a tailwind than a headwind. I see people internationally starting to talk about Bitcoin, use Bitcoin, adopt Bitcoin,

both at the nation-state and citizen level. All of these signs are good for the structural health and long-term prospects of Bitcoin. You're going to get volatility along the way, right? Doesn't make it easier when you're feeling it, just I wouldn't be worried. narrative is one thing but reality is another the asset being down 40 is a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people of course look if the first time you bought bitcoin was at 126 you're like i hate

this thing right if you were buying bitcoin at a thousand dollars you're like 126 90 you know again like i like 126 better than like 90 but i'm up 90x how mad could i really be right so again it goes back to it's all about this perspective the problem is when you get into these like Especially in the blow-off tops, 2021, if I remember the data correctly, at some point in 2021, 50% of people who held Bitcoin in the United States had come in in 2020 and 2021. So half of the market. Now, again, it's really hard to measure that stuff, how accurate, whatever. Just directionally, a lot of people, the first time that they adopted Bitcoin was in 2020 and 2021. Guess what? When it went down, they were like, I didn't know that this thing could go from $65,000 to 16. People had been around or like, man, I was hoping that wasn't going to happen. But like I lived through this before. So I do think that it's not just the narrative, but it's also what is the perspective that somebody has.

And so to your point, yeah, down 40%, that really hurts for a subset of people. There's other people who don't like it, but they're in a much better position and their cost basis is lower. And, you know, they're kind of like, hey, it's part of the game. One subset of people are ETF holders. The ETFs and the tourist leaks, especially the leveraged ETFs, have not performed well in this environment. How should an investor navigate the differences between holding spot versus the ETF and also the leveraged ETFs, right? There's a bunch of these different products. There's a famous quote that I'm going to paraphrase. Basically, the three things a man should avoid in life is booze, women, and leverage. Those can be the demise of any man. And so, guess what? Booze, I can't help you with. Women, I can't help you with. But leverage, I can talk about. And when it comes to leverage, just be careful. Understand what it is.

For the average person, you should avoid leverage at all costs, right? Now people are, oh, well, what about a credit card? I'm talking about like in your investment portfolio, trying to get high degree of leverage that usually does not end well. Yes, you will be able to find the one-off story of some guy who's some amazing trader or some guy who was able to, you know, make some bet that was probably more luck than skill and he used leverage and it worked, whatever. it's a different thing between levering up 5x on an etf than using leverage on a real estate

that's got cash flow that you know has some degree of like rational leverage again avoid bad things you can use good things where it's appropriate it's kind of like food people always say you know eat less well like no you can eat more just eat more good food and eat less bad food, right? That's the whole idea. Same thing here is there are certain things you use in your life, a credit card, a mortgage, all that kind of stuff. Nobody's run around being like, don't have a mortgage, right? And if they do, they probably are just being ridiculous. And so instead it's like, hey, this is understood to be a thing that people can manage correctly. The banks don't go in and require some crazy amount of interest or all these things that

could blow people up, but a 5X levered ETF on an asset that's got 50, 60, 80 vol, a 5X or 3X levered ETF on a corporation that holds an asset that's got 50, 60, 80% vol, right? Those are different things, man. That's hard to kind of wrap your head around. Now, with that said, what I find very interesting is that's the negative side, right? So people will always be able to find uh in a casino someone's always offering a game that's rigged right and it could be rigged mathematically like just the house wins because the math is in their favor or it could be rigged in some other manner but in a casino you usually also can find games where people can go and participate and they don't have the promise of really crazy you know put a dollar and win a

million, but put a dollar in, win 25 cents, right? The whole idea of you should be getting paid for the risk that you take. That's true in investing. That's true in pretty much everything in your life. So if you think about ETFs, buying the Bitcoin ETF is very similar to buying Bitcoin, right? Now I will argue that you actually have less risk because you're not taking custody risk and a number of other things. And so your return is going to be slightly lower than what Bitcoin's going to provide because there's a fee associated. It's a very small fee, usually 20, 25 basis points, right? But you're taking less risk than the person who goes and buys spot Bitcoin. So you should expect a little bit of fee drag, right? Now, what I do find interesting is there's a lot

of these financial organizations that are all of a sudden starting to say to themselves, we can't stop our clients from buying this. We may lose clients over this. They may actually not want to have their assets here or use our product if we do not allow them to buy this stuff. And so Invesco, I think is a big one. Vanguard, right? Some of these folks who either were slower or who were taking a rational, hey, we're going to evaluate this, see if this is right for our clients, all the way to some of these guys were like, nah, we're not ever going to let our clients do this. This doesn't fit our style. Now they're all like, we have to let them, right? Imagine if they were like, Nvidia, nah, we're not going to let anyone buy Nvidia. People would

expect, what dude? Like, what do you mean I can't buy a stock? It's on stock exchange. Same thing here. It's like, now you're going to pick and choose which ETF people can buy. That's not the world we live in today. The internet has busted down that monopoly on paternalistic oversight and like, oh, you know what I should do with my money. People said, just give me all the options. Let me do what I want to do. And I'll live and die with the consequences. So I think that seeing the vanguards and all these guys start to now give access to these ETFs is less about they're like changing their mind. And it's much more a story about just like the voice of the people will eventually be heard. And my guess is someone internally, there's a piece of data, there was

some sort of information, something happened where they were like, we have to do this because that's what the customer wants. And that's why you see change. It almost never is like, oh, I just woke up today. I didn't like it yesterday, but I like it now. All of a sudden I'm convinced. It's usually customer driven, which is exactly how it should be. Today's episode is brought to you by Zappo Bank. Are you a Bitcoiner looking for yield, security, and liquidity? Zappo Bank is a fully licensed private bank and a virtual asset service provider. They're regulated in Gibraltar, and they've built one of the most trusted vaults for bitcoin custody since 2013 and now they offer so much more security's just a start with zappo bank your bitcoin can grow every single day members

earn 3.6 apy on usd deposits and 0.5 apy on bitcoin balances up to two bitcoin and they've got interest paid daily in bitcoin that's pretty cool you can also spend worldwide with their premium debit card earning up to one percent cash back in bitcoin and no foreign exchange fees and when you need liquidity, you can borrow against your Bitcoin up to $1 million instantly with no hidden fees and no early repayment penalties. That means that you can access cash without selling your Bitcoin. And if you ever need help, you can talk to a real person to Zappos expert team is available 24 seven to answer your questions. Pomp podcast listeners, that's you who sign up as new users will receive $150 off their first year of membership. Just a heads up

This special promotion for Pomp listeners runs until the end of December, so go get it while it's hot. Go straight to Zappobank.com slash Pomp to start the application. That discount will be applied to your account after registration. That's X-A-P-O-Bank.com slash Pomp. Promotion until the end of December. Go to Zappobank.com slash Pomp today. First mover advantage is a real thing in a lot of different industries, especially when you're building. When you think about Vanguard,

well, when I think about Vanguard, I think, hey, we're not looking to acquire more customers. We just don't want to lose the customers we have. And we don't want to lose their assets, right? Most people have a Vanguard account that I know because it's their retirement account, right? They don't actually use it as like a brokerage itself. Do you agree with now these companies

that haven't moved yet, Vanguard just did it, right? Allowing access to the ETFs. Is it more of a, hey, we don't want to lose customers and we don't want to lose assets on our platform? Or is it, hey, we need to attract the younger generation, the younger investor to actually use these products and services? I think that they're trying to do both, right? Is you don't want the melting ice cube to melt any faster.

So you want to keep the customers that you have as your customer base has increased in age. Obviously, some of them is fact of life. They start to pass away. Their assets get passed down. They may get taken off the platform, all that kind of stuff. Also, there's competition now, right? It used to be that, hey, once you kind of had it, it was very sticky asset.

It's still pretty sticky, but there are now tools in the market that do things that you don't do, right? And so you've got the competitive pressure, but also you need to grow. And so how do you grow? Well, one thing is stop losing the customers you got, but also two is go get new customers. And what a lot of these people are trying to figure out is if we are going to lose some of our existing customers, can we go find net new younger people to replace them? So if we lose one, can we go find two?

That'd be one, you know, plus one in growth. well that's very hard to do when you have a product that it's got a lot of technical debt it's built for a different generation it is very different in terms of the value proposition you know one of the things that i see a lot of times in uh in kind of finance and crypto etc is people will be like um you know we have a phone number well guess what that's really really valuable to some people it's usually not that valuable to an 18 year old the 18 year old is not choosing which product they go to because there's a phone number right but guess who is 45 50 55 60 year old right they like that and so i think that's the difference here is it's kind of

some of the features are targeted at certain demographics versus like again i'm sure there is somebody who's watching this who's 65 years old and they're like all over the prediction markets that's not normal right like in terms of the average user of these prediction markets is much younger so if you go and you put prediction markets that's the stocks and crypto guess what what? You're going to get more young people, right? You're not offering a phone number because that's not what they want. So I think it's all about like the product design and the market positioning and all this stuff is, um, you know, people are fighting over who gets to own the relationship with the customer. Call me old. I like the customer service number. Yeah. I mean,

look again, if you have a problem, then you're like, Oh, I love the fact that there's a number there. Of course. Right. It's like the airlines, people are like, Oh, use the app. Do like, no, no, no. If I got a problem, I want to talk to somebody. Right. Cause guess what? The person sometimes can do things that you can't do in the app. But I'm not picking which airline I have based on who answers the phone fastest. It's like a nice to have. I'm not picking which brokerage I use based on do they have a phone number or do they not. Again, it's a nice to have. I don't mind that they have it. I like it when I need it. But I'm actually going to pick based on these other parameters. And so I just think that that's part of the equation here. If you were to start a

brokerage from scratch and say, hey, we want to go and we want to compete in the marketplace. What's our box, right? How are we different? Where do we need to be the same? What's our positioning? Who's our target demographic? What's our fee schedule, our business model? All these questions, these people are all trying to go through and figure out. I think most people pick brokerages based off fees. Fees is definitely a big one. I mean, Robinhood is probably the quintessential example of they came to the market and said, no fee stock trading, obviously a pretty valuable value proposition. But I think that, you know, look, fees are a function of if I'm paying a fee, what am I getting in return? Right? So again, I think Robinhood really proved out this

premise that people just wanted to access the market and pay low fees. Okay, that's one type of user. Private banks, they don't have low fees, right? But they're providing a heck of a lot of other things to their clients that those people are looking for. So again, you can have no fees and have a really big business, you can have really high fees and have a big business as well. It's just, you're cutting up the market into different segments.

And look, Bitcoin is unique in that Bitcoin really serves all of these people, right? There are 15-year-old kids who get some money for their birthday and they go and they buy some Bitcoin. There's 90-year-olds who are gonna, you know, chew your ear off about the fact that every government fails

and the currency is, you know, bogus and they've got gold, now they got some Bitcoin, right? And everything in between. There's some people who are going to hold self custody. There's some people are going to put it on an exchange. Some people who are going to put it in the ETF. The beauty is, uh, Bitcoin is what you want it to be, right? What, what you want to use it for. It's up to you. Okay. Let's switch gears a little bit.

Trump supposedly picked a fed chairman, got a new guy, new girl, whoever, um, whomever. What do you think's going on? You think he's has someone picked? He said that he's, he's has selected, uh, who the person is going to be, but he's not going to tell anyone. Um, that's not surprising. I think most people expected him to make the pick before the end of the year. I actually think most people expect him to announce it before the end of the year. We'll see if that happens. Um, a couple of things, one, whoever the person is, uh, who I do think that is probably, um, uh, Kevin Hassett, um, are just, they're going to implement Trump's policies, right? No different than when other Fed presidents or Fed chairmen have been selected.

The current president is putting someone there who they think is good. Well, guess what? The person that they think is good is somebody who sees the world similar to them, is probably on board with their economic policies, is probably going to follow a similar path to what they're doing on the administration side. So nothing new there. I do think that people underestimate this whole shadow Fed phenomenon. so once they announce who the new fed chairman is going to be jerome powell is still a fed chairman but he kind of has like a guy who people are like okay this is what jerome said and like do you agree is that really going to be the policy in six months right what do you think

oh he's saying he's not going to cut rates are you going to cut rates so now all of a sudden you get this like almost like mom and dad you know kids like goes to dad hey can i do this no goes to mom dad said if you said yes then i could do it right same thing here and so i think that um that'll play out and then third thing is like the market is just telling them that they have to cut rates we have to get to uh a much much tighter or i'm sorry a much uh kind of easier monetary policy right and they have to end quantitative tightening and they can fight it they can say they're not going to do it whatever if you remember they said if we don't have the government data then it's not a guarantee we're going to cut in december odds went down to like 40 now the odds

are back to like 70 that are going to cut in december i think they're going to cut in december i think they should do 50 basis points i think they're only going to do 25 um you know and uh i think that trump enjoys the like i know a secret and i'm not telling you right it it uh creates speculation and the media is running wild with it who's he gonna pick who's you think jerome powell right now will make a decision for december based off legacy no no because um i don't think anyone's gonna remember what he does in december right like for better or worse powell is going to have two reputations the right is gonna say jerome powell helped create sky-high inflation of over nine percent and he was uh he then jacked up interest rates

and caused banks to go under, and then he was too slow to bring them back down. He created immense financial pain for Americans. People on the left are going to say, Jerome Powell was faced with a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. He was able to navigate it. He was able to get inflation back down by raising rates, and then he was prudent in his ability to manage interest rates. Guess what? Where those two extreme viewpoints overlap, put a little Venn diagram together, the middle of the Venn diagram, that's where the truth is. Did he oversee the inflation? Yes. Did he say that inflation was transitory and he was wrong in that? Yes. Did he hike up interest rates at the fastest pace in history and help to put multiple banks out of

business? Absolutely. Did he have to hike interest rates? Yeah, he did. Right. Remember 2021? Shit was fun. A little out of control. Right. And inflation was like, it was obvious it was gonna be a problem. Right. He had to get under control. Okay. Has he been too slow to bring interest rates down? Absolutely. But we'd have a way better critique of him if he wasn't bringing down rates at all. Right. So it's kind of like, at least he's heading in the right direction. So again, you're never going to please both sides, but I think that's ultimately going to be his legacy is as many things in society, it's just like, what side of the political realm are you on? Right. And that's going to determine how people think about him. And I don't know if there's

anything he can do to change that. It's the political goggles. It's political goggles, but it's also like in a weird way. If you think about so much of society today, right, I'll give you a couple of examples. Michigan Consumer Survey. People love when I talk about this right because they're just like yeah it's bias okay they used to ask 50 democrats 50 republicans fine now they ask 65 to 70 democrats and 30 35 republicans okay well guess what happens all of a sudden the democrats who think that inflation is going to be over five percent they start to skew the sentiment down because they think that the economy's got horrible trump's in an idiot and blah blah blah stuff the republicans by the way they're just in the other direction

They think inflation is going to be 1.5 percent. Right. And they think that the you know, everything is going to the moon and all that kind of stuff. Again, the truth is probably somewhere in between. Right. So if you survey too many of one group versus the other, you're going to get skewed results. OK, politics. If you go and you look at Pete Hegseth, Department of War, this whole like a double tap thing in the Caribbean. Right. Just so we're clear, there's terrorists that are bringing drugs that are going to kill Americans. so what i just explained to somebody the other day if they had rpgs on the boat and they shot them and killed these people regardless of what the one shot two shot five shot ten shot a lot of people would just be like yeah man you can't bring rpgs to the united states right if they were bringing uh roadside bombs on their little dinghy to the united states people

but you can't really bring those into the United States, but drugs, not that bad. Come on. You know, good, good, good, uh, hardworking people out there, right? Like for some reason, it's just like, no, like, what do you think those drugs are doing? Those drugs are killing people. Right. So I think that's the first thing is immediately there is whether you're on the left or the right, like the thing that they're doing, is it wrong or not? Right now, the second thing is, um, And I've been very clear about this. I have been in situations where I've gotten the firsthand view as to how the world actually works outside of the business and finance world, outside of the United States of America, in any sort of war-torn or kind of violent environment. there's only one language that everyone understands and it is violence and people don't like that people don't want to hear about it people don't want to think that their country

or people they know etc are involved in that stuff but there's this famous quote uh that i'll i'll paraphrase that says um america is free because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf in the dark of night right that is ultimately why we are free is because there are men and women, but mostly men, who put on a uniform, they get a gun, they put a flag on their shoulder, and they go and they do stuff you don't want to hear about. And you may not like it. You may not want to understand it. It's real nice to just live your life and pretend like that stuff doesn't happen. But guess what? It happens. And it happens all around the world, even when the United States isn't involved. Some other man is putting on his uniform, grabbing his gun, putting

his flag on his shoulder and he's trying to go do bad stuff to bad people and so i think that when you look at this whole situation now all of a sudden it comes down to this idea of like depending on which side of the political aisle you're on how do you view that you know situation it's hegseth wrong oh well you don't like him because he was a fox news commentator other people they love him because he was fox news commentator right all this kind of stuff then if you go and you take a look at even black friday right even black friday what the heck how did that get politicized? Black Friday, there's a bunch of people running around who want to be pro-economy who tend to be on the right side of the political spectrum. And they're saying

Black Friday sales smashed all records. Look at how amazing this is. $11.8 billion spent on Black Friday just online. Set the record. The economy is booming. People on the left are like, oh, not so fast. Lee Corso, not so fast. Buy now, pay later. A lot of people are using that. A lot of this is being financed. A lot of this has issues. So that's where you start to get this back and forth, right? Of like, who's right, who's wrong. It's all about politics. And so I just think that if you want to be intellectually honest, you have to be able to identify what are people on the left's argument? What are people on the right's argument? What are people who are independent's argument? And then formulate your own. But I get very, very nervous whenever I see people start

saying, I'm just going to regurgitate any party's talking points. And I think COVID was a great example of this. And it's probably why a lot of people got pushed towards Bitcoin was they just kept hearing, especially the mainstream media, but they just kept hearing people repeat the state talking points. And when they started thinking to themselves, they were just like, this doesn't make sense. And the people who were independently thinking started to say, wait a second, maybe I need to take the same idea of critical thought and apply it to many aspects of my life. And I think that a lot of our economy today, our society, through those political lens or goggles, as you called them, intersect with the people who are independent and critical thinking. Doesn't mean

they're always right, right? That you can independently think the wrong thing, but at least you're going through the process. And so if you bring it back to financial markets, AI bubble. It's easy to be, oh, stock prices are up a lot, it's AI bubble. But if you hear people who think a little bit more critically, they say, well, what's the multiple? Historically, what's the multiple been how is it that nvidia's got a lower multiple than walmart but you're calling it a bubble right or costco or what you mean like that you go through and so you start to like think a little bit more in depth and be more thoughtful that to me is where ultimately uh like returns are driven from but also just the ability to to navigate the world right um

and maybe the last thing i'll say on this is uh when i i first was having a child uh i remember sitting down with Paulina, my wife, and one of the things we sat down, we just said, if we can only teach our child one thing, what is that one thing we want to teach them? And we talked about a lot of different traits and different skills and all this stuff.

Ultimately, it's just be a good decision maker because it applies to everything in your life, professionally, personally, all this kind of stuff. Well, how do you become a good decision maker? You got to be able to ingest a lot of information, synthesize it, and then act on it, right? That's ultimately what an investor does.

Are you a good decision maker or are you not? Can you put on the Republican goggles, take them off, put on the Democrat goggles, take them off, put on the independent goggles, take them off, and then to say, you know what? I'm going to put on my own goggles. Here's how I see what's going on, and here's what I'm going to do about it. That to me is where all this is going. And so whether it's Vanguard, whether it's Bitcoin or anything else, that's how I think the world is going to kind of develop. is it's only going to get more and more fractured in this manner hi i'm matt hogan cio of crypto asset manager bitwise look crypto can be confusing there's so much noise and the space changes so

quickly that's why every week i write a five minute memo on the biggest stories impacting crypto in plain english why is bitcoin up or down what are people missing where should investors look next. Get the lowdown every week. Sign up to get the weekly CIO memo delivered straight to your inbox. Go to bitwiseinvestments.com slash CIO memo. That's bitwiseinvestments.com slash CIO memo. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. I love that. There are so many experts that are just like my way or the highway. And I've always thought about it where you could ask nine different doctors and you'll get 10 different answers on advice on what to do or what your problem is uh so i love that and just as much

information as possible and then go ahead and make your it goes back to um have you seen these viral videos where doctors are using chat gpt like uh when they're talking to the patients like some patient will be like uh doing like undercover video they'll be filming right and they'll just be like yo no way my doc's really on chat gpt right now like damn i'm screwed right and to me I'm like, well, hold on a second here. If my doctor is willing to go and do research and use superhuman intelligence to think through a problem, I like that. That actually makes me feel better, right? Because guess what I do when I'm trying to figure something out? I go and I Google it or I look it up on an AI model or something, right? I try to go find more information. I read

a book. I'm trying to understand it. So it kind of comes back to, again, do you believe a world where everyone that is external has all the answers? The media is always right. They just know the truth, right? The experts, they're right. They have expertise, like Elsa. Or do you go through the world looking and saying, I want to hear everyone's opinion, but I'm also going to question everything. That is a much harder thing to do. It's not as fun. Like, could you imagine going home from work every day at five o'clock, shutting your computer, not worrying about what happens. Emails, no one bothers you, whatever, till nine o'clock the next day. Turn on the TV. Looks like Pete Hegseth. Yeah, he's a bad guy. Go all of a sudden, get the newspaper.

Remember, economists say tariffs are inflationary, right? And you just go about your day. That would be a way easier life. You wouldn't have to question a single thing. You wouldn't spend a single brain cell having to critically think. But you probably would end up in a world where you're not in a good spot. And so I think that's really the whole thing. It's just like, are you willing to do the hard intellectual work of critically thinking?

Or are you going to, Bitcoin went down 40%. must mean it's going to go down 90%. I should sell it. Or are you the type of investor who says, Bitcoin is down 40%. If I liked it at 126, let me go look at the fundamentals. If the fundamentals are better, but the price is lower,

it means that it actually is better priced. Maybe I should actually be buying it versus selling it. Again, but maybe if I go and I look and the fundamentals are worse and the price is lower, then maybe that's a bad sign. Like that's the type of thing of just critical thinking. Just if people can do that,

I think they'll be in a much better spot. I like that. Let's end on this last topic. All right. Fun one. Michael Dell and his wife going to invest $6.25 billion in Invest America. Invest, donate, whatever.

I like invest. I think that it's an investment in the future of America. Yeah, I mean, people will, it is a donation. It's a philanthropic element to it, but it is an investment in 25 million children. That's amazing. Listen, you want to know my biggest takeaway from this?

One, Brad Gerstner ain't going to get nearly as much credit as he deserves. the fact that he has been able to push this thing forward from an idea to now it is uh law this invest america act where uh kids who are born after whatever i think january 1st 2025 um you know we got got a couple of those uh they're gonna get an account with thousand bucks in it or whatever like i like that idea i think that's great um but now michael dell saying well wait a second what about all the kids who are still young but don't meet the deadline so what they're doing is for 25 million kids they're gonna give them 250 bucks each a private citizen it's gonna

give them 250 250 dollars each 6.25 billion total um and what i find most interesting direct investment in kids this isn't i'm gonna give it to the school and the school is gonna go buy computers and the computers may make it their way to the kid turns to 80 million yeah this isn't uh this isn't uh let's send money to some foreign country and uh all of a sudden the president's the richest guy in the country this is not let's send money to a non-profit that only 40 of the money goes to the cause this is not let's send it to an ngo where there's fraud and somehow it ends up funding terrorist organization you know internationally and stuff this is i'm going to take the money i'm going to put it directly into the account for 25 million children

in america and the way i understand the program is they're going to have an app on their phone that they can look at they can open they can see how much money they got and then anyone in their life, parents, teachers, friends, neighbors, whatever, can put more money into the account. All of a sudden, guess what? Kids should be asking for money for the birthday, for bar mitzvah, for confirmation, for whatever they got going on, graduation, everything. Give me money in my investment account. Imagine a world where that's what kids were saying. not give me the latest, you know, video game, not give me the latest, you know, whatever crazy thing. Instead, it was just, I need more money in my investment account so I can continue compounding

my wealth for the future. If you meet a young kid who's doing that, man, this is what I'm talking about. Hey, it's not always the most fun answer, but give me the gift that keeps on giving. Correct. Yeah. Look, the thing I do believe is you have to give people hope. And that's really these accounts in my opinion are yes the money and the compounds and all that kind of stuff but these kids now have a hope of a brighter future they feel like that the system is helping them and i think that we underestimate because it's not very quantitative how do you actually measure the impact of hope and when kids have hope usually maybe get up a little bit earlier take school a little bit more seriously right they start to

understand the world they start to be a little bit more ambitious that there is a path but if you're like look no matter what i do i'm screwed i'm gonna go eat junk food sleep in school i don't even know how to where that is right you know just i'm out yeah we'll see all right awesome that's all i got for you all right thanks talk next week