The Pomp Podcast - Bitcoin Falls While Government Shutdown Looms

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

Anthony and John Pompliano discuss why bitcoin's price is not going up faster, what is going on with gold, how Wall Street is embracing crypto public equities, how we fix economic data, and should we be worried about the government shutdown?======================Check out my NEW show for daily bite-sized breakdowns of the biggest stories in finance, technology, and politics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://pompdesk.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠======================Bitlayer is taking Bitcoin beyond just a store of value. For the first time, you can put your Bitcoin to work, earning yield while staying true to its core principles of security and decentralization. Bitlayer is making Bitcoin DeFi a reality. Learn more at https://x.com/BitlayerLabs======================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/======================Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro0:22 - What’s happening with bitcoin’s price?4:45 - How should investors be thinking about Bitcoin?9:16 - Bitcoin related public companies15:35 - Regulation in crypto19:52 - Potential government shutdown27:56 - Government data is wrong34:03 - Government using private market data

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What's going on, guys? Today, we got a great episode with John Pompliano. In this conversation, we talk about why is Bitcoin's price not going up faster? What's going on with gold? How are crypto public equities being received by Wall Street? What's going on with the government shutdown? Is it going to happen? Should you be worried? And then we also talk a little bit about economic data, why it's so bad and how we could fix it. All that and much more in this conversation with John Pompliano. All right, John, what we got? All right. What's going on with Bitcoin's price. Not going higher. That's the first thing. Look, I think that people are very worried about Bitcoin's price because it's not so much just about what is Bitcoin's price doing. They're

worried about the relative performance because they see stocks going higher. They see gold going higher. They see the interest rate cuts happening. They hear about government spending, all of these things that are occurring in the economy and in financial markets. And they're saying, wait a minute, this Bitcoin thing is supposed to be higher. It's not. Now, what is it? A lead course? so not so fast. Let me explain this real quick. If you go back to November of last year, November 1st, Bitcoin was $69,000. Today, it is $112,000, $115,000, depending on the day. That's pretty good performance in less than one year. But if you go back even further to January of 2024, when ETFs got approved, Bitcoin was around $40,000. So Bitcoin has appreciated almost 300%

in 18 months, and people are disappointed. Now, if you go and you look at why is Bitcoin not going up more rapidly, well, I think there's two things that are driving this. The first is that Bitcoin actually tends to be in cases where gold runs, lags by 100 days or so. If you remember earlier this year, I took my victory lap online because in May, I said, give us till the end of June or early July, Bitcoin's going to run. How did I know? Because gold had peaked in April-ish time frame, if I remember correctly. So 100 days later, Bitcoin takes off. Bang, bang. Here we go. Higher prices. Gold right now is surging. It's actually up 15% since February or I'm sorry, August 22nd, when Powell did his little speech at Jackson Hole. And so I believe that Bitcoin is going to run. I

think it's going to take off in October. It'll run into November and somewhere November, December, people will be very happy. So that's one component is it's in relationship to gold. The second thing, though, that people don't like to talk about, they don't like to admit, there is a fracturing of demand related to Bitcoin. If you are going and buying spot Bitcoin, $1 going in goes to $1 of Bitcoin. Duh. If you are going and you're buying the ETF, they track perfectly. $1 of Bitcoin goes into $1 of Bitcoin spot exposure, right? $1 into the ETF, $1 Bitcoin exposure. If you are buying a public stock that is trading at a two times premium to NAV, there's a very strong argument that your $1 of buying power actually turns into 50 cents of demand for Bitcoin. Well, what happens if the premium is 400%? Your $1 of demand turns into 25 cents of demand in Bitcoin. So that fracturing is definitely taking some of the energy that normally would go dollar for dollar into Bitcoin. But I don't think that's all bad, right? But I do

think that it is having an impact. And then, of course, those public companies, a lot of people still don't understand a lot of the investors are hedged. And so they're going long a dollar of the stock. They're shorting spot Bitcoin. They're locking in premium exposure. And therefore, even though there's a dollar of demand that's going to buy Bitcoin, supposedly, there's a dollar short. And so there's neutral exposure to the Bitcoin market. And now they're just playing a premium game. And so what I tell people is Bitcoin has graduated from 101 level. We're now sophomores in college. We're going to 201, which means you got to start understanding derivatives. You got to start understanding public capital markets optionality. You got

to start understanding converts. You got to start understanding preferreds, right? All these different vehicles and mechanisms, that's now part of the Bitcoin world. Bitcoin has taught me a lot of stuff throughout my life. It has taught me about different areas. It's taught me about different types of people. It's taught me about economics, about geopolitics, about psychology, about society, all these different things. Bitcoin is now going to help people get an explicit and excellent education in public markets, which I think is good for people in general. I think it's ultimately a net positive for Bitcoin. But there's a learning curve here that people have to start to get up to speed very quickly on to understand how do some of

these instruments, how do some of these capital markets tools actually impact Bitcoin? Again, net positive long-term, but don't expect it to simply be $1 of demand for a treasury company is $1 of demand for Bitcoin. Yeah. When you think about Bitcoin and gold relationship, people love to cherry pick the dates. And obviously Bitcoin has ran for the last 10 years, 10 plus years. 15. Most investors don't care about the derivatives. Most like retail investors, they don't care about any of that stuff. They just want to invest into something knowing, hey, look, maybe this is, you know, digital sound money and it's going to go up over time. should people be caring about derivatives? Should people be caring about all this stuff,

given that most investors just want to make a little bit of money and they don't even have the time to look at all that stuff? Well, the question is, what is your time horizon? What are you trying to do, right? Bitcoin is this amazing thing where it's a decentralized digital asset that is many different things to many different people. So there are some people who will buy Bitcoin and they will walk across a border and their use of Bitcoin has nothing to do with value. It has everything to do with censorship resistance or Caesarship resistance. Great. That's what it is for those people. There's a lot of people, the people who I tend to really enjoy talking with, who use Bitcoin as a savings technology.

The US dollar exchange price doesn't matter to them. All they're doing is they're trying to continue to save more and more Bitcoin over time. They may try to get to a 10th of a Bitcoin or a full Bitcoin or two Bitcoin or whatever it is, but they're trying to save more and more. No different than maybe 50 years ago, somebody was trying to save more money in their bank account, right? So that savings technology, again, you don't care about derivatives, you don't care about all this stuff, because you're just simply looking at how many Bitcoin do I own? Or what percentage of a Bitcoin do I own? And how do I stack up more and more of that over time, then there are what I would consider more of the financial traders, the financial analyst, the kind of investment class,

if you will, some of them are sophisticated, some of them are not right, you get full distribution. But those people really care about that stuff because what they're actually trying to do is they're trying to figure out, should I buy spot Bitcoin or should I buy something else that is going to go up more than Bitcoin? And frankly, they tend to be a little bit more mercenary in nature, right? They don't care so much about the story of Bitcoin, but they care about is where the capital flows. Where's extra demand going to come from? Where's demand going to come from on a relative basis compared to altcoins that I could buy or public stocks that I could buy, right? That analysis is through an investment and capital allocation lens that is

very different than I believe in Bitcoin. I believe fiat currencies are going to be debased. I'm going to just save in Bitcoin and I want to get my family into a better position, right? So you have an asset that is different things to different people. And I think the people who care about the derivatives and the really exotic kind of financial instruments, they're looking at this through a completely different lens. And they're also the people who are most likely to come into the office one morning, buy, and then the next morning sell. And it's because price moved or some external economic event occurred. They're more short-term oriented. They're more trading oriented than the person who says, when I convert fiat into Bitcoin and I save it,

it doesn't come back out. That's a whole different mindset. It's much more long-term oriented. And the truth is, I actually think that those people will probably outperform over a long period of time because they're not trading in and out of these assets. They're simply just buying a great asset, holding it for a long time. Timeless investing principle from Mr. Buffett. today's episode is brought to you by simple mining have you ever been interested in mining bitcoin as a miner myself i've been using simple mining for the past few months and the experience has been nothing short of seamless i mine with the pool of my choice and the bitcoin is sent directly to my wallet simple mining which is based in cedar falls iowa offers a premium white glove

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With Simple Mining, they make it simple. A lot of ways to get exposure to Bitcoin, as you mentioned. Obviously, there is, you could just go buy Bitcoin. But a lot of people are kind of allocating to different areas of Bitcoin, I would call it, or different areas of crypto in general. The exchanges, Coinbase, for example, the Bitcoin treasury companies. Like, there's a bunch of different avenues that people can get exposure to. How do you think about each avenue?

Well, let's talk about maybe these public stocks that are related to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. But put aside for a second the treasury companies, right? Because I think that's a whole different beast to analyze. If you look today, there's an increasing number of companies that are in the public market, which I think is very exciting for people. You have the miners, which is an analysis of power generation, infrastructure, mining capacity, efficiency, cost, et cetera, and now artificial intelligence and data centers and what you're able to do there, right?

It's like that alone, I mean, there are analysts who that's all they focus on is just the miners, right? And how do these businesses look relative to each other, their capital allocation decisions, their long-term performance, et cetera. Then you have things like exchanges, right? Obviously, Coinbase is out there and been public for a while. We, at one of the funds that I managed, were an investor in the private market. We've held a lot of the shares, continue to hold today. And that company has obviously done very well.

We're very excited about it. There's companies like Robinhood, which kind of came at it from a different angle. They were more kind of stocks and public equities. Now they've added crypto. They're pushing into prediction markets and things like that. You are seeing companies like Fold, right, that have kind of Bitcoin related or Bitcoin native financial products that are in the market. And then you also have companies like Backed and Bullish, which maybe are a little bit more institutional type products. Bullish is an exchange that is really trying to service the institutional world more so than the B2C world. You've got companies like Circle now that have gone public. Now people say that's not Bitcoin related. I think that stable coins and Bitcoin are like brothers. right you know uh people want to switch back and forth between dollars and bitcoin and so having the stable coin actually leads to more demand for bitcoin and that's why i think you see tether as an example uh being they are bitcoiners who have a stable coin company right um they take a lot of the profits of tether they put it in bitcoin on their private uh balance sheet right um not the

reserves but their actual balance sheet so i think that uh stable coins and bitcoin are together and then you have companies like uh figure right you know again i i was an investor there in the in private market and um figure i think is really unique in that they took a lot of the same ideas around decentralization and um how do you digitize assets and uh create automation on these transactions and rip out cost and time and things like that um figure uh i don't know the latest data but uh at one point they were the third largest heloc originator in the united states they're probably up there still you know top three or something um and so i just think that now investors are saying to themselves, wait a second, it used to be I could buy Bitcoin,

I could invest in private startups that were either Bitcoin or crypto related. And then I could obviously buy altcoins, right? That was kind of my three ways to play this space with some variation. The public market is becoming pretty robust, right? Even if you look at companies that maybe started outside of the US, you see DeFi Technologies, which I've been involved in, social strategies, which I've been involved in, right? Those companies came to the United States, right? They were able to cross list onto NASDAQ. If you look at, you know, HUD 8 and American Bitcoin, right? Like these businesses are all going through, I mean, how many did I just, I don't know, I've named, you know, 15, 20 companies, right? Those businesses are becoming

more prevalent. The other thing that is happening is you are seeing businesses that have kind of dabbled with uh cryptocurrencies over time in the private market you have companies like stripe in uh public market you have companies like sofi right these businesses are all trying to figure out like what's our strategy how is the investment community going to receive what we're doing and then how are our customers going to receive what we're doing right can we solve a problem for them and so what i think is going to play out here is actually nothing to do with bitcoin and crypto It is simply the finance industry is going through an upgrade. And I would argue that one of the largest Bitcoin companies in public markets is BlackRock.

Hear me again. One of the largest Bitcoin companies in public markets is BlackRock. Why? Their most profitable product internally is their Bitcoin ETF. Why do people not think that they're a Bitcoin company? People say, oh, it's because they have all this other stuff. Okay. Well, they seem to be leaning in on the Bitcoin thing, right? That's the type of stuff that I think you're going to start to see is you're going to see the traditional world and

this Bitcoin crypto world, they're going to meet in the middle. Sometimes it'll be in the private market. Sometimes it'll be in the public market. Sometimes it may be in the tokenized market, right? These are all the things that people are trying to figure out. And so as an investor, what you have to start to navigate is I have a portfolio that I want to allocate. Most people I know who are into Bitcoin, Bitcoin is the hurdle rate. So they say, I'm going to go, I'm going to buy Bitcoin. The only reason why I'm going to buy anything

other than Bitcoin is because it either provides me cashflow or it can outperform Bitcoin potentially. That's hard to do. Bitcoin has done very well. And so I think this is the challenge now. And what I expect to happen is as younger people start to rise up in positions of power and influence

in the media, in these research organizations and these investment firms, these financial institutions, et cetera, you're gonna see a lot more capital going towards this like digital world. And these companies are gonna continue to dominate on a global scale. I think it's very good for the industry,

but I also think that there's gonna be a lot of opportunity for investors, right? And to me, that might be one of the most interesting things is seeing IPO market open, more IPOs now than over the last four years. You're just seeing an assault of all these companies going public. There's a lot more that are trying to do SPACs

and IPOs and, you know, Gemini has filed, like all these different stuff. You're only going to see this continue. And I think that that's good for public markets. I think it's good for investors. And I think it's good for the industry. When you think about the public companies that are related to crypto, I think a big part of it has been friction and regulation in the industry. So obviously, like, think about Coinbase and Robinhood, for example. A lot of Robinhood's revenue comes from crypto, right? Now they're dabbling in the prediction markets and all this other stuff and trying to grow, but they're worth two times what Coinbase is. And one of the things that I think is a big driver of that is just ease of use and ease of signup, right? Coinbase,

you have to go through all this KYC and stuff. Robinhood, you can get signed up very, very simply. How much of this is like as friction and as regulation kind of gets clarity and friction comes down as like participants enter, how much does that change all the public companies? Well, let's just go through some of the regulatory stuff that's happened recently, right? Obviously, you've got the Genius Act. Now you've got this clarity stuff. You have the SEC and CFTC recently held a joint meeting together, basically said they want to collaborate on this stuff. I believe I saw a headline that said the SEC chair, Paul Atkins, came out and said crypto

is the number one priority right now, trying to figure that out. There's this project, Crypto, that they came out with that talks a lot about bringing capital markets on chain, right? Like that is 180 degree difference than the last administration, right? And so naturally, follow the incentive. if the regulators are saying we want to encourage activity here there will be activity there right if they are saying we are going to deregulate that is going to spur economic activity it's going to spur investment it's going to spur company creation it's going to spur jobs it's

going to spur tax revenue right all these different things and so um you can try to outsmart folks in terms of like how this all plays out or you can just you know i tell my kids turn your ears on just listen they're telling you what what their incentive is they're telling you what they want people to do guess what people are going to do it and so this entire industry is going to explode public and private markets because the regulators are now saying we understand it it's important we want to encourage it we want to protect it game on and that doesn't mean that bad actors won't get punished right if they do bad things or break the law or whatever it just means though that you're not going to have a bunch of unnecessary uh kind of regulatory

burden that in hindsight wasn't stopping the bad actors anyways, right? So why don't you just encourage the good actors to go and build and then use the tools that have always been available to go find the bad actors, right? And I think that, you know, these digital asset treasuries, there's been some headlines about there are some scrutiny slash investigations into potential insider trading around the rto structures i don't know if that happened or not right guess what like that is an entire uh regulatory body that's their job and they've done a pretty good job from what i understand uh over the years throughout everything when cannabis became popular people were doing crazy stuff if you remember back when the blockchain was big in like 2017 2018 there

was companies market oh my god well like that's just like in the primary like in the public market there was companies who were just like changing their name and be like, we're a blockchain company now. 500% increase, right? People are doing that with AI now too. AI. Look, this is a story as old as time, right? So I think that it's less about specific to this industry. It's just every one of these data points we're talking about to me is a maturation of the industry. A maturation of the industry means you're de-risking it. If you de-risk it, it means the largest pools of capital can now put their money in. But because it has been de-risked, there is a lower return going forward because you get paid for the risk that you take. But

if you want to go from $2.5 trillion Bitcoin market cap to $10 trillion, you need large pools of capital. Retail doesn't have enough money to push it there, right? And so you have to de-risk it. You have to mature it. You have to be okay with a slightly lower return than you would have got when you bought in 2015 and people thought the government might shut it down. I don't think anyone thinks that Bitcoin is going to get shut down by the government now. And so it's been de-risked, and therefore, it is kind of a green light for all these institutions. And I think that's why you see so many public companies, you see so many financial institutions, you now see countries, etc., all starting to participate in different ways, is because they say, oh, the water is warm. We can go in now. Speaking of getting shut down, the government might get shut down tonight. What are your thoughts around the government getting shut down or the possibility of it happening? I have a lot of thoughts. I think that the government shutdown threats are very performative. I think that we need less one side versus the other. And I wish that there was a lot more conversation, constructive conversation, collaboration, etc.

I think that there are certain people in both parties that want to do that, and then there's certain people in both parties who think that they are being served up a media opportunity, and they're going to go and make ridiculous, wild demands. Now, what I think might be the single most important part of this whole thing is that some of the people who are advocating for certain things are the exact people that 20 years ago were advocating for the exact opposite thing. and not in a scenario where I used to believe X, I received new information, so I'm intelligent because I changed my mind with the new information. These people are saying, I used to believe X, but that is no longer politically valuable

to me to believe that. And therefore, I am now going to switch around and have a completely different viewpoint on this issue because now it is politically valuable for me to have that. So I think that one of the things that we should do is we should put term limits in place. And I believe that that would significantly reduce some of the craziest, most extreme kind of fanatics is that the only way that you serve a very long time in politics, like some of these career politicians, is you become an expert navigator of bureaucracy. You become excellent at building consensus.

You become excellent at fundraising. You become excellent at manipulating the media for your efforts, et cetera. There are some positives to that. You want people who have long-term orientation that can work together to actually get solutions to problems and say, hey, look, we know we're going to work together for the next 20 years. I'm going to look out for you to help you get your bill done now

because I'm going to try to get a bill done later this year and I'm going to need your support on that, right? Some horse trading that goes on. Okay, like there's a greasing of getting these things done. At the same time, I'm not going to name names, but just look at who's in the media on a day-to-day basis. these people are kings and queens of bureaucracy like they understand how to use the system and so what they essentially are doing is they are holding the american people and government workers

at like they are holding them hostage to simply make wild demands to score political points in media call it out for what it is right i think it's also a uh a little bit of like as long as i don't mess up i won't get fired right so you're trying to protect yourself but also uh you're not thinking as like most jobs are incentivized to get work done now right what can you do over the next week month year that's going to actually impact this organization yourself whatever uh and a lot of those people in those positions that's not their main goal their main goal is how do i not get fired how do i you know stay here for another 10 years here here's uh an interesting thing nobody likes to talk about when the government shuts down which has happened in

the past um there are some areas where you immediately can see that there is uh change there's a lot of areas you could leave the government shut down for a year and no one would notice right so go to an example if you shut the government down and let's say um there's a government service where you had an appointment you were going to go in and you were going to go see them and get um whether it's a visa license so whatever right if the government shut down obviously you can tell that that was shut down right um you feel it immediately uh there are certain social services or health care services things like that right government shuts down if those things get turned off immediately there is a feedback loop but there's

a heck of a lot of things that we probably don't actually need that when the government shuts down nobody notices and so in a weird way uh it exposes what is uh crucial for the government to do and what is not but i never see anyone taking any action about the things that are identified that are not crucial right it's kind of like do you know what zero-based budgeting is um zero-based budgeting is basically, let's say you buy a company and the company is losing money and you say, oh God, we got to like turn this thing around. One of the best ways to do it is say, we're not going to look at your budget that you already have set. We're going to start from scratch. What money do we need to run this business? And you start from zero and you build

it up and people have to make an argument for every single line item of the new budget, right? Versus the marketing team saying, well, you know, last year we got $20 million. And so this year we're going to get $20 million. Well, like, hold on, where'd the $20 million go? They feel like you're taking something from them. Versus when you started at zero, now it feels like they got to go advocate for something, right? They got to receive something, got to earn something, right? So it's a little bit different. Zero-based budgeting is very effective in certain situations in business. The government doesn't do that, right? But if the government did do that, you'd see a lot of the waste, et cetera, all go away. Now, the other thing that I think is really

important here is I always laugh at the finance people. When I hear the government's going to shutdown, I immediately know three things. One, it's going to get turned back on. I promise they're not going to leave the government shut down for very long, right? Sure. Could they do it for two to four weeks? Absolutely. But I think the longest government shutdown ever is like 35 days. Is it long? Yeah. But relative basis, it's not that long, right? My guess is that they're either going to strike a deal at midnight or they're going to do it, you know, 48, 72 hours later, whatever. Fine. That's first. Second, I know that there's a lot of people who are going to yell and screaming about this. They're yelling and screaming about it. And they have no understanding

whatsoever of what is the pain that the average American who is reliant on government services going to feel. There's real people there. There's real stuff there. So shutting down the government is very irresponsible. People shouldn't do it. But I also understand the argument that, well, if the other side is making outlandish and ridiculous demands, at some point, you got to draw a line and say, we're not going to agree to that. Right? And so how do you, it's a negotiation happens in business happens here right part of being a good negotiator is also being willing to walk away is being willing to say no is to get up from the table so there's it's a complex situation right everyone wants it to be black and white should you shut down the government should

you not it's more complex than that but the third thing is uh i always know that the finance people they're going to yell and scream and say oh my god the economic data is not going to get reported the government shut down we're not going to get the jobs report that's stuff they're going to yell. You see it online right now. They're already yelling at scrimmage. If the government shuts down, we're not going to get the jobs data. Good job. Data is wrong. Anyways, this episode is brought to you by BitLayer. BitLayer is taking Bitcoin beyond just a store of value. For the first time, you can put your Bitcoin to work, earning yield while staying true to its core principles of security and decentralization. BitLayer is making Bitcoin DeFi a reality.

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What are we doing? Put your pencils down. Just everyone stop. What are we even talking about? Whoever's doing that should be fired. Just stop. Not getting the job data actually may be better for investors than getting the job data. It's like going to-

They always rise it down though, the job data. Well, here's the thing. imagine if you went to the stock market, right? And they said, all right, we're going to flash up what the share price is, right? On a given stock. And you'd done all your work, right? You knew what the revenues were, what all this stuff was, whatever. And you had an opinion and you said to yourself, all right, if the stock price is above a certain thing, I'm not buying this, it's too expensive. But if stock price is below a certain price, I'm buying it, right? Okay. They flash it up use cheap buy and then they come back to you a month later and say oh by the way remember when

we told you that it was 20 a share just kidding it was really a hundred you're like yo i want to return right like here's my receipt give me my give me my money back it's crazy right that's what happens with the job data is a bunch of people are going to make a trillions of dollars are going to change hands in stocks bonds gold uh bitcoin and crypto real estate all this stuff based on these job numbers. And then they revise it on average by 60%. That's crazy. Is there a penalty for companies

that falsely report earnings? Of course. Yeah. Well, if you intentionally do it. No, but like, you know, if any company in the world, any like tech company, if you go out and you say,

hey, we made a billion dollars last quarter, you revise that data later on and you only made, you know, 300 million. Big difference. Should we have something like that in the government where it is if you continuously like we know these problems exist and we've bunched march people bunch of smart people here in america like how is this not fixed by now well because no one wants to fire them and the president united states did fire the bls person now i tweeted when it happened

i said this is the right decision i just wish that it was done at a different time in a different way so it doesn't look political right but if you objectively look at it like the data is so bad the data collection is horrible. The methodology is laughable. If you were in college and you were given an assignment, you came back and said, this is how I'm going to do it. They should give you F. It's a joke. Imagine if I said to you, hey, in 2025, I said to you, I want you to go find what is the month over month change in home prices in America. And you responded to me, I'm your professor you're a student you said I got a great idea why don't we just call a bunch of people and ask them what they think their house is worth your teacher would be like you're a moron

like you are literally dumb what are you talking about right but that's what they do like how crazy is that so what you have to do is you have to take these like very complex things that are hidden behind all this like not like just who sigh everyone calm down what are you doing and then just dumb it down, put it into a teacher-student relationship. It's one of the greatest frameworks that you can use. If a teacher gave an assignment and said, how do you measure the month-over-month or year-over-year change of home prices in America? If your answer was, I'm going to call people and ask them what they think their house is worth, you'd get an F. There's not a professor in America be like, that's a great idea. That's the best idea I've ever heard. So why is it that

we're okay with the economic data doing it. It's crazy. Go back to this whole idea of BLS. It's not just the data collection. It's also that they go from being mathematicians and maybe even economists to now they become market predictors and sociologists. So they'll say things like,

well, obviously if the price is higher on egg whites, people will just change and they'll start to buy regular eggs. Like it's called substitution. change the basket of goods what what are you talking about there are certain things that i buy if the price goes up i just pay more i'm not switching to a different brand i'm not switching to a different thing right here i don't like doing free ads for people but uh do you know a halo ice cream h-a-l-o ice cream hello top yeah halo top ice cream right uh i like it

Tastes good and it's much healthier for you than regular ice cream. You're welcome. Right? No free ads. But if all of a sudden they increase their prices by 50%, I'm still going to buy it. Now, again, we're talking about an item that, I don't know, five, six bucks, right? Maybe it's $10, whatever it is. But if all of a sudden it went from, let's say, $6 to $9, are there some people who say,

oh, I'm going to abstain or I'm going to buy something else? Sure. but most people are like, no, I'm not buying it because it's the cheapest thing. I'm buying it because it's way healthier than the substitute. They don't take that into account. And so again, you want to be a sociologist, great, but get out of the economic data.

Measure what is inflation, right? Not what is inflation for some random person that I don't know that I can't measure. What is the inflation? If you increase the price of the ice cream by 50%, shouldn't the inflation input be a 50% increase in the price of ice cream for that specific brand? Obviously.

But instead what they'll say is, oh, you're going to stop buying Halo and this other one only went up 6%. And so it's not a 50% increase, it's only a 6% increase. No, it's not how it works, but that's how their data works. So you just go through all this stuff time and time again. It's all dumb.

It doesn't make any sense. I've been tempted so many times to put together either a nonprofit or a for-profit. I actually don't know which one's better and just go say, we're going to build a better one. Don't come, don't complain, compete. Well, people have done this, right? Like shelter is a massive part of CPI. I think it's 30%. And there's multiple both private and public companies that have better data

than the government collects today. Why do they not just use that data? I think that they look at some of it. You know, one of my favorite things Powell's ever done, like I actually think Powell's a good, a good guy, like in, in terms of, I think that if you went and you sat down with them, like you would, it'd be fun to talk to him right i like that actually would be like a dream interview for me is to sit down with jerome powell and say look man i'm not here to uh critique his sister i want to learn from you like i i think he's a legit guy do i think the feds made a lot of mistakes

absolutely but i can separate the feds actions the structure the fact that they're looking at bad data like there's a bunch of those issues with also like i i just i kind of like powell right like i think he's like a a cool dude that would be fun to hang out with um i wish that he cut interest rates whatever but like it's still you'd be a cool guy right uh maybe over a beer i'd be hey man you know let's get let's get the rate down um but i i think that you can kind of have both uh things that hold me your pain when you start to look at um how these guys operate though i i just think they will slip up from time to time so powell one time said uh the unofficial inflation rate why is the fed reserve chairman acknowledging an unofficial rate right and it

was kind of like a slip up um besant was asked by the all-in podcast guys uh do you believe the economic data and his first word was no and then he kind of caught himself and he like polished the answer and he still said no but he said it in like a much more eloquent way right so like i don't think that they are as oblivious to this stuff as people would like to, you know, kind of project onto them. But again, you're operating within a system. So like, it's like go to any corporate America job and walk in and say to someone, wow, your computers are really slow. Like, yeah, we know, but like that's the system we have. Right? Like, like they're not idiots. They understand. If they're being intellectually honest, like they know what's wrong with their

product or this or that but like there are constraints now some of the best companies in the world they smash that bureaucracy they empower people to make change whatever the government like of course they don't do that stuff right um and so i just think that yeah you got to kind of watch it all play out that's fine bitcoin's going to go up gold's going to go up stocks are going to go up um i think that investors on the internet are at a huge advantage compared to traditional investors um because they have concentration limits they have rebalancing they have to get money back to their LPs, all these issues. And I think the economic data is atrocious at best. I actually think it's almost comical at this point how bad it is. And I think that the Fed

is structurally put in a position where they're always going to be behind the curve, because looking at backwards data, I think that there's been a politicalization of certain things, whether it's the government shutdown or the economic data. But I actually think that there's more people on both sides that agree than disagree um and uh it's always funny to me that people will say something like yeah we know the fed's behind but uh you know the president shouldn't pressure him well like uh what are you doing right if you know that they're behind shouldn't you be advocating as well like are we trying to do the right thing or are we trying to do the popular thing and i think that is where um the good politicians they know the answer might be to do the popular thing

not the right thing um but do you want to be a good politician or you want to be a good american um is a uh it's a question i think that's worth asking love that all right thank you that's it for today guys see you guys next week