The Pomp Podcast - Did Jerome Powell Lie to Congress? The Fed’s Palace, Politics & Rate Cuts | Anthony & John Pompliano

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

Anthony Pompliano and John Pompliano break down the growing pressure on the Federal Reserve — from Jerome Powell’s battle with inflation to how shifting monetary policy is reshaping markets in real time. We dig into what this moment means for Bitcoin, investor sentiment, the broader macro backdrop, and the NYC token controversy surrounding Eric Adams.======================This podcast is sponsored by Abra.com. Abra is the secure way to access crypto and crypto based yield and loan products through a separately managed account structure.Learn more at http://www.abra.com.=======================Figure – Enter to win $25k USDC with Democratized Prime while earning ~9% APY! They also have the lowest industry interest rates at 8.91% with 12 month terms! Take out a Bitcoin Backed Loan today and buy more Bitcoin. Check out Figure! Figure Lending LLC dba Figure. Equal Opportunity Lender. NMLS 1717824. Terms and conditions apply.=======================0:00 – Intro1:12 — Jerome Powell controversy14:50 – Will the Fed cut rates? Inflation outlook18:13 – Claude Code, AI automation, & why inflation is falling25:22 – Bitcoin vs the Fed & geopolitics31:22 – Why younger generations care less about bitcoin35:15 – Eric Adams & the NYC token controversy38:17 – Advice for investors who lost money

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Get deep insights on real-time market topics that may impact your investment portfolio. Listen to Fidelity Connects on Spotify today and power your next move tomorrow. 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 conversation with John Pompliano. In this conversation, we talk about what's going on with Jerome Powell. He's in hot water, inflation, monetary policy, how it's impacting the market, what's going on with Bitcoin. And then we talk a little bit about the NYC token and what Eric Adams got himself into as well. All that and more in this conversation with John Pompliano. All right, John, what's the first topic?

All right, Jerome Powell seems to be the guy, talk of the town right now, Fed chairman. He's out later this year. Who do you think is going to be the next Fed chair? All right, before we get to who the next Fed chair, let's talk about Jerome Powell for a second. So there's a couple of things that I'm thinking. One, horrible look for both sides

that there's any sort of tit for tat. You want to have your executive branch, you want your Fed, your Treasury, all these people, you want to have the sense that they're all on the same page. They're working together collaboratively and they're trying to figure out solutions to problems. That's not what we have. But that's part of the beauty of democracy and the capitalistic system and the checks and balances that we have is that you can have some people who think one thing, other people who think another thing, and we kind of grind forward to get

to the end result. So when I see that Jerome Powell is being investigated, my first thing is, One, it's an investigation, not a charge. So what I understand by Googling around a lot and seeing what some people are talking about online is that most investigations go nowhere. It's just people asking questions. The second thing is that the attorney general, this Janine Pirro, I think is how you say her name,

she came out and she said, listen, we started asking them questions. There was no investigation. There was no anything. We were just asking for some information. They ignored us. They stiff-armed us. They said, we're not even going to acknowledge

the fact you exist. And so in order for us to get the information, We then had to make an official investigation because now we have certain things where we can subpoena and do all this kind of stuff, et cetera. So that's an important detail that it sounds like the attorney general didn't want to have an investigation, but now they're claiming they had to because the Fed wasn't responding. Why weren't they responding? I don't know, but that's an important detail.

Third, this whole thing is being politicized by the Fed. The whole thing. You're telling me, let me get this right. On Friday, subpoenas go out. They don't say anything about it on Friday. They don't say anything about it on Saturday. They don't say nothing about a Sunday morning, Sunday early afternoon, Sunday during football.

They wait, and in my opinion, they probably leaked the story to the New York Times, and Jerome Powell, he dropped a freaking influencer video online like he's got an OnlyFans account. This dude was locked and loaded with a video. There is nobody at the Federal Reserve who is able to read the New York Times report, write a script, record a video with Jerome Powell, edit it and publish it within minutes of the New

York Times report coming out. So what that tells you is they knew the report was coming and they were prepared. Now, why did they do it Sunday afternoon or Sunday when they did it Sunday afternoon, late afternoon, right before futures opened? Why would they do that? Could they possibly have leaked it and released the video intentionally to manipulate the market lower to then cause pain in the market because they know Trump cares about the stock market? I don't know. I'm just trying to figure it out like everybody else.

But that seems like suspect timing to me. So now if you flip around the other side, horrible look for the Department of Justice to be going after the Fed chairman after the president and the administration has been advocating for lower rates. Now, that was my thought process Sunday night, Monday morning.

Two things have changed. One is that we got the information about the attorney general trying to get answers to questions, not being able to get it, and basically coming out and saying, hey, I didn't seek approval from my bosses, from the administration, from the president, any of that stuff. Now, is that true? I don't know. We can only go off of what we're being told publicly.

But if that is true, that's a pretty important data point that they were just trying to get information in private without an investigation, and you weren't talking to them. Okay. The second thing, this is the red flag. This is this. Remember when when when, you know, the virus was spreading around in December or March of 2020? You remember when there was all these public narratives and over the years you can go, I got receipts online. It's the beauty of doing this every single day. And I said, this feels fishy. This story feels fishy. And I'm going to go out on a limb and I'm going to say that over the last couple of days,

the odds that Jerome Powell misled Congress, in my mind, have increased. Doesn't mean that he for sure did it. But let's say that previously I thought the odds maybe were like 20%. I might be at 50-50 now. Why? As soon as the information came out that there was an investigation, you saw people from the Fed, the Treasury, etc., all come out and say, this is wrong. they don't know what is being investigated they don't know the specifics of the details they don't actually know did he mislead congress or not they all just come out and immediately try to take a moral high ground and say oh you should this is this is wrong blah blah whatever well if you think about it from a first principle standpoint did he mislead congress that seems

like a pretty important detail that no one's actually asking again i don't know but from what i've seen online there's really simple stuff like he was asked supposedly during the testimony and i haven't had time to go watch the entire testimony but supposedly there's this clip of him being asked are there uh rooftop terraces and he says no not in the current version and then it turns out that the plans that are filed have rooftop terraces right so again like how severe is that it well if it's one data point right and he just like misspoke okay if there's multiple times where he did it and he's trying to downplay the lavishness the castle being built for kings with three billion dollars of money then that's a different thing was he trying to

mislead was it intentional was it a misbe I mean there's a lot of details here but the reason why I come back to is did he mislead congress is a pretty important point or a question that I don't hear a lot of people talking about mislead and lie are you know two different extremes right now for a limited time everyone's part of the buick team even you buick's employee pricing for you event is on now get a purchase credit of up to 3 168 on a 2026 buick envision surround yourself with signature buick refinement from an available massaging driver's seat to an expansive panoramic moonroof and a stunning ultra wide 30 inch diagonal screen don't miss buick's employee Pricing for You event. Visit buick.ca for more details. If you pull a muscle, all of a sudden

you realize how often you use that muscle. So the bladder is exactly like that. When it's working well, we don't think about it. But when it's not working properly, you're getting up at night or in the cases of many men, you may have some leakage. If this is something that's affecting your quality of life, there are really good solutions these days. Depend makes the garden the shield the shield would be if you have some leakage on occasion if you have heavier leakage you could use the guard again i i don't envy the people who are gonna have to figure this out i have the amazing ability and enjoyment of being a monday morning quarterback on this i get to watch what happens and then i get to talk about it so i'm not trying to uh position myself as an expert

of the law i'm not trying to say that i understand the difference between misleading and lying according to how the courts will look at it or the Department of Justice. I'm not even saying that if I was Jerome Powell in this situation, what I would have done, would I have responded? I don't know. There's too many details we don't know yet. But what I do know, you remember Hunter Biden's laptop? 51 intelligence officers all came out and said, it's not real. And it turns out they actually knew it was real. how many of the people who came out in unified support looked at the details because if they looked at the details and they think that there's a problem and they're doing

this to try to like shoo it away that's amazing that's a scandal that is something that would be an american scandal just like hunter biden's laptop was now if you go and you look and you say, hey, this is a big nothing burger, which it 100% could be. I don't know. If it is a nothing burger and they're all coming out and they didn't go look at the facts to say, hey, this isn't true, even though they'll be right on the outcome, the process is still wrong, right? So what we have to do is we have to get to a society where people are not so quick to rush to judgment and say, hey, 100%, this is how it should be. And the reason why my red flag or my suspiciousness is increasing is because, what do I always say? You know something is closer to the truth

when dissent is outlawed. People are going to be so mad at me because I am willing to say, I don't know the answer, but I think it's probably an important question to get an answer to, did he mislead Congress? That is not allowed to be talked about. You're supposed to come out and say, the Federal Reserve is an independent organization and there should be no lawfare, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I don't know.

Is it lawfare or did he mislead Congress? What was the process? Are we going to come out later and find that the Attorney General actually has emails with the administration or find out there weren't? We don't know. And so as soon as I see the consensus reached

and dissent being outlawed, I just, again, I start being real attentive. Something's going on here. And my guess is that there's a hint of truth on both sides, is that obviously the administration wants lower interest rates. Obviously, anyone that works in the administration or is an appointee, et cetera, they all know the president's position on this guy and the Fed and all this kind of stuff, right? But I'm starting to think, and I may spend time this weekend and go look, I'm starting to think maybe he misled Congress. And again, if you look at the pictures, why does the Federal Reserve need a building that looks like it is built for kings? Because guess what? If I worked at a company and we were atrocious in our performance,

You don't get to build that. The Fed has destroyed the purchasing power of tens, if not hundreds of millions of Americans. Inflation was 9%, and they looked us dead square in the face with their dead cat eyes and told us inflation is transitory. These guys have lost their minds. They're not good at their jobs. They've been horrific for the American economy. They have destroyed people's financial lives. They, as Scott Besson would call are the engine of inequality. And they're rewarding themselves with a palace. That seems wrong. And so that ultimately is, I think, what this is all going to come down to is you are going to have the populist movement of people saying, this is crazy. Look what these

people are doing. You're going to have the political and the law enforcement side coming at this. And if you're Jerome Powell, you're going to politicize the whole thing. And you're going to not want to debate the facts you just want to keep saying it's political it's political it's political leave us alone you shouldn't be allowed to investigate it's like a narrative he wants to drive narrative versus looking at the facts well it goes back to the response could have been this is crazy watch the testimony i didn't say a single thing that was inaccurate or misleading i didn't hear him say that i actually didn't hear him again i'll have to go back and watch the whole video again but from my recollection i don't think that he said a single

time i didn't lie i didn't mislead congress i did there was no denial it was just uh oh this is political because they don't like uh interest rates there's no denial but sounds like no apology either of course he's not saying he did it doj's investigating him right going two sides to the coin you either did it or you didn't so that's the question can we get an answer does he believe that he misled congress that's my point right it's like everything else to me is the show everything else is the entertainment the drama the soap opera all is nonsense if we go back to and we look at the only thing that is going to matter ultimately in this whole thing did he mislead congress or did he not if you had a zero in we want answers to one question if he didn't do

it it's a nothing burger it will not matter right and frankly i think that the trump administration will look bad if he didn't do it and there's all this hoopla and all this kind of stuff whatever right um there's reports coming out that besant is really upset that this is happening because he thinks it's bad for markets but whatever so like i think even within the trump administration there are different factions or thought processes and some people you know probably love this some people hate this all that kind of stuff again it goes back to everything is pretty much noise except for, did he do it or did he not? It's going to be very clear

because it's recorded testimony. It's not like, oh, did he meet with this person, but we don't have a record. That stuff's hard. This is pretty straightforward. He got asked a bunch of questions on the record in front of Congress. He answered them.

Somebody right now is going through all of those questions and answers and saying he lied or he didn't lie. He misled or he didn't mislead. Let's wait a week or two. We're going to get the answer. Today's episode is brought to you by Abra, the secure way to grow crypto wealth. Abra offers individuals and institutions end-to-end crypto wealth management solutions, including custody, trading, yield, and crypto-backed loans through a unique separately managed account structure where title is retained by the client.

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Find out more at Abra.com and tell them Pomp sent you. I like that. I think the one thing above the noise that people probably care about is our rates going down. Clearly, that's what Trump, what Nick, their whole team, their administration cares about. You think we're going to get rate cuts coming in the next few months? Well, they have to cut rates because inflation keeps going down. So if you look at CPI numbers came in 2.7% right at estimates. Core inflation, so removing food and energy, that came in at 2.6. Estimate was 2.7.

So call this kind of like a flat to slightly down report compared to the estimate. In a world where we were promised high inflation, empty shelves, and the next Great Depression because of tariffs, having inflation come in at 2.7% two months in a row, and last – in November numbers, everyone was like, whoo, it's chilly. It's cold out here, right? Well, that's not what we were told. And so then you calculate for – the Fed has no clue what inflation is. That's what people don't want to admit. the federal reserve has no clue at inflation why i'll give you three reasons the collection of data is highly highly highly flawed we are still in 2026 we are calling people on the phone

who own a home and we are saying yo george how much you think you could rent your house for george doesn't know shit about renting his house and he throws out a number and we do that for a couple thousand people, bam, that's our owner's equivalent rent. That's crazy. We are sending people into a grocery store with a physical tablet to punch in the numbers. I don't know about you, but if I go and I send you, who's a very smart, good looking, strong, amazing person into the grocery store with a tablet and I say, you got 30 items, make sure you find the right item. So it's not Campbell's chicken noodle soup. It's Campbell's chicken noodle soup, low sodium you know no beans and then you got to input the correct price and you get it 30 40 50

times you think you might make an error you would think there's guardrails though for that right they're sending people in with physical tablets these people don't know how to spell guardrails maybe they could just contact the grocery store so welcome to truflation so that's data collection methodology wise people don't know this fact 40 of the inputs to the cpi calculation right now the federal reserve is openly saying we're guessing they are saying we don't have hard data we are guessing estimating they call it so four out of every 10 inputs into the calculation they're making it up now again they'll say oh we're guessing because we are educated maybe you guys were pretty bad at guessing inflation and guessing money printing and

guessing everything else but that's a problem so you have data collections wrong methodology is wrong and then my favorite thing you're looking backwards you ain't looking forwards so you're trying to report what is december's numbers well don't you think by january things have changed yeah duh we're having more and more deflation think about how crazy this is And they're reporting on inflation when Claude Code didn't really exist. It wasn't popular yet. Claude Code is probably one of the biggest drivers of a deflationary force into the U.S. economy. Explain that.

Claude Code is the ability for anyone, whether you're technical or not, to go to Claude Anthropics model. You can just Google Claude Code. You can describe in natural language, so English. I want to build an app that does this with these properties, looks like this, has this functionality, sends me an email every day at 8 a.m., blah, blah, blah, whatever. Can you build this? It will write the code for you. A great example of Claude code is Claude just came out with something called Claude Cowork.

Claude Cowork is basically Claude code for non-technical things. So for example, there was a demo that they put out where, you know how people on their desktop a lot of times have like all the screenshots and all this like crazy stuff scattered everywhere? you can simply give it access to your computer and you can say organize my desktop for me and it will go and it'll understand your file system it'll understand all the different photos pictures documents etc it'll go organize it takes seconds so what would have taken hours is now compressed to seconds that's deflationary right you can say hey i want to hire someone can

you go in can you identify people that i want to hire can you uh like the role can you write the job description can you go and find 50 people who potentially could be this could you write custom emails and LinkedIn messages for every single one of them. And can you then keep track of who responds and who doesn't? Go do that. How long would that take? Hours, right? We have one of our teams internally. On Friday, we started something. Today, we're recording this on Tuesday. On Friday, we started with something. And they were saying to me, it's taking too long for us to service one of the clients. I said, okay, well, let's take that client. We made a list of every single thing they do for the client. And then we have somebody who we, me, him, and

that team went item by item, and we started automating things. We believe, based on what we're able to measure, we have shrunk the amount of time that the team needs to spend with that client by 50%. It took us three, four days. We believe by the end of one whole week, so from Friday to Friday, we are going to have shrunk the amount of time that the team needs to spend on this one client by 90%. I gave them the task, tall task, but I gave them the task. I want them to get the amount of time they spent on that client down to one hour or less a week. That's deflationary. We don't have to go hire a lot more people. You're compressing the amount of work that the human needs to do because you're automating the rest. We're not doing less work.

It's just we're outsourcing it to the software now. So you bring it back to the inflation number. Well, Truflation is saying it's at 1.7%. I believe that's much closer than 2.7% is. And you have these deflationary forces coming. They better cut rates. I think interest rates should be somewhere around 2.5% right now. 100 basis points lower. Well, you think that Powell is going to be real excited about cutting rates

now that he's got the DOJ investigating him? It's human nature, man. I can't be the person who sits here and says, oh, Powell, be the bigger man. Turn the cheek. You know, don't let it affect your decision making. I wish he probably wishes it's human nature somebody is coming at you come on let's not lie let's not pretend like you know he's a robot of course he probably doesn't like Trump

he may not have he may have been agnostic before probably not but let's just say he was agnostic before after the last six months they're just getting pummeled in the media every day you think he's like oh shucks that guy he's a good guy you think that there's not a little bit of bias at the Federal Reserve every single time that they're getting attacked? Again, I'm not in the room. No one's allowed in the room because they claim that they don't have to

let the public see what they're talking about. Transparency would be a little too much. That'd be crazy. And so when you see that, you're just like, look, man, this is a crazy world. So inflation's coming down. I do think interest rates will come down because they need to spur economic activity.

I think AI will be a big tailwind. I think that the whole Powell situation, he's going to be out in may anyways they're going to announce probably this month uh who the next fed chairman will be i don't want to speculate on who i think it's going to be i think there's two uh major candidates that everyone's talking about it'll probably be one of those two candidates um if you pull a muscle all of a sudden you realize how often you use that muscle so the bladder is exactly like that when it's working well we don't think about it but when it's not working properly you're getting up at night or in the cases of many men you may have some leakage

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Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud ERP for any size business. And guess what? Stocks are going to keep going up. Bitcoin's going to keep going up. Gold, nickel, copper, silver, all that's going to keep going up. Real estate's going to keep going up

because as Lynn Alden says, nothing stops this train. The soap opera is fun. It's great for us. We get to talk about it. did he lie or did he not if he didn't lie okay let's move on right by the way what are we doing if he didn't lie right why their investigation all this kind of stuff again very important data point if somebody asks for information you don't give it you kind of you know you had a choice to

make right you can answer their questions or they can open up an investigation and force you to give them the information there's a lot more to the story than i think the headlines you know can cover and so i i'm just watching i don't know the answer and that's okay like saying i don't know is perfectly fine because i do not know did he lie or did he not but the answer to that question is going to determine ultimately how everyone views this entire situation i actually don't see a uh i see why jerome would not like trump and the administration for coming in and trying to direct something that's supposed to be independent right um they're not independent they're supposed they're supposed to be this whole thing about them being independent stop it by the way it's

not Powell. It's not, uh, Janet Yellen. It's not, it's never been independent. They are full of shit. And the reason why they're full of shit is because you have people who look at their political donations. It's pretty one-sided. Two is they are overseen by Congress. It's like me saying, uh, it's like the media likes to do this sometimes, right? They'll be like, uh, oh yeah. This person is independent. But they report to the media organization. Well, like, if that's your boss, how are you independent? They have oversight on you.

You can play this like, oh, we're independent, whatever. No, you're not. How come Joe Biden can call Jerome Powell into his office like he's the principal? Say, hey, get this inflation thing down, right? Like, that's the game that's getting played here. And so, like, again, it's not a Republican or Democrat thing. I just think the Fed's never been independent. because it's a person as the chairman,

12 people who go and make these decisions. There's human nature, there's bias, there's all this kind of stuff. And so the media used to say that they were unbiased. I think it is pretty well understood now the most successful media companies say we have bias and here it is. I actually think the feds should just come out

and say, we have bias, here it is, and this is how we're going to move forward. And then people would trust them more than this whole like, we're independent. We don't succumb to human nature. We're, you know, we're insulated from all of that. Like, bro, you just dropped a OnlyFans video talking about how things got politicized,

which by nature is you politicizing the thing. And so I think that we are just headed to a world where, do you want to know what the most disciplined monetary policy in the world has been over the last 15 years? Bitcoin. You see Bitcoin involved in this? Satoshi involved in any of this? No.

Satoshi, like Babe Ruth, stood up at the home plate, called his or her shot, So this is what monetary policy is going to be for centuries. Never wavered. Never. Just keeps doing exactly what it said it was going to do. Today's episode is brought to you by Figure. Looking for the best way to unlock your crypto's liquidity?

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more Bitcoin, Figure makes it a straightforward and transparent process. Visit their app or click the link in the description below to take out a crypto-backed loan with Figure today. When you think about Bitcoin, obviously, I'm glad you brought it up. It's sitting around $92,000, $93,000 right now. We're actually up a little bit from the end of or from the start of the year this year. How important is that like price action now versus like it's a mature asset, right? It's not, I wouldn't call it as mature as some other markets that have been around longer, but it's definitely moving in that direction.

How important is that price action versus call it the technology and like the payment rails that Bitcoin lets people access? well there's two different worlds in the investment world uh 85 to 95k don't matter for bitcoin it's all the same it's a range over a hundred media can come flying back wow bitcoin you know it's going back up it's over 100k it's six figures but whatever there's a psychological milestone at 100k um in terms of usage you know people always be like oh nobody uses it to buy coffee you know jack dorsey does my general thought process is bitcoin does the one thing that it's supposed to do which is over long periods of time it protects your purchasing power

now what i do find interesting is like uh as there's more uh stability in the world because like people kind of forget this right think of all of the wars that broke out all the conflicts the u.s again put all the politics stuff aside for a second the last administration took a very different approach than this administration right objectively one is peace through strength they want to be very uh kind of high posture uh you know somewhat more like uh alpha male now again whether you like them don't like them whatever like it is very clear that they are taking a you know kind of strength position i think that the last administration in a nice way you could describe they were trying to be more diplomats than strong arms in the maybe not

so nice way you could say they were a little weaker right however you want to describe it But there's a definite difference in their policies and kind of their posturing. The world is responding to the current administration's posture in a different way than they responded to the last one. And so when that happens, you then start to say to yourself, okay, there actually seems to be a little bit more order in the world. If you think about this, the U.S. has, I'll put in air quotes, engaged in two conflicts under Trump in the first year. Iran and Venezuela. Like the shortest conflicts of all time. I think Venezuela was like two hours.

Iran, I think we were in and out in like 30 minutes. We dropped the bomb down a freaking air conditioning vent. Like, we're the goats. Like, you know, like in baseball, like a baseball prospect, they say a five-tool prospect, right? And they're like, you know, he could hit, he could catch, he could run, he could, you know, all this stuff, right? what other military in the world could drop a bomb down the air conditioning vent

and also send 20 dudes in the dark of night to tap you on the shoulder while you're sleeping put a black bag over you and your wife's head and get you out of the country and not lose a single person or machine that's range we got the technology and we got bad bad dudes so again now did you see all these stories about like people releasing political prisoners and you know iran uprising like oh yeah there's a lot of uh second order effects people start saying wait a minute you mean trump just like picked up the phone and next thing you know he's got you know maduro in sitting at uh mdc in new york city in a jumpsuit maybe those political prisoners i had i don't want to have those the people yo trump he's wild maybe if we start rising up he'll come get

The American, you know, the American military will come and help or whatever. Right. Again, I forget the person for a second, just the posturing. It changes the world. Right. In different ways. In that world, there's actually more macro stability because there's kind of like a world police to a degree. Right. There's like somebody who's willing to enforce their view of the world, whether other people agree with it or not. bitcoin as a chaos hedge becomes maybe people aren't rushing to it because like well there's a little bit less chaos in the world right whereas if you go back to the last administration russia ukraine israel hamas like these things where you're just like dude it kind of feels like the world's on fire a little bit right and again it's not a perfect analogy but i do think that that's playing into some of the bitcoin stuff and then also like ai is a huge part of the story it's just like AI has become, you know, the shiny thing. And, you know, I was talking recently to our team.

You know, one of the things that's really interesting to me, how many 18-year-old Bitcoiners do you know? I'm a little bit older, so I'll hang out with a lot of 18-year-olds in general. But most of the like 18 to 22-year-olds, they're not into Bitcoin that I know. It's really call it the like late 20s to like maybe late 40s. They're like millennial generation.

They're super into it. And my theory is that they psychologically were scarred by the global financial crisis, but they didn't have enough assets to really be hurt by it. So they saw what was happening to their parents, their friends' parents, maybe their grandparents, etc. But they were kind of just out of school, in school, or, you know, kind of going into college. those people are super into bitcoin but those people also were coming into you know their kind of wealth creation or their earning years at a time when bitcoin was still pretty low in price and people thought there was a lot of asymmetry bitcoin at called 100k if you're 18 years old you're like what's gonna do and so i think that those people who are looking for significant gain that are 18 years old, or like maybe Bitcoin isn't the like super asymmetric,

you know, 10,000% upside type asset. Maybe I can do it by vibe coding some app or I can do it by, you know, buying Nvidia or whatever. And again, I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but I do think that that's part of this of like, it is very peculiar to me that I don't see a lot of 18 year old Bitcoiners. They're out there,

but not nearly like the 30 to 40, you know, year old cohort. If you go down the street and you talk to 10 guys between the ages of 30 and 40, I don't know, four or five of them probably into Bitcoin, right? Or like at least they're like sympathetic to it, right? 18 year olds, maybe one, two. That's a pretty big drop off. Well, that asymmetry was probably the big driver for people, right?

Like people are here to make money in Bitcoin. there's uh there's no doubt about it whether you have a company in bitcoin uh or you just own tokens itself um but it's interesting to see kind of now we're shifting back towards the younger generation is like oh hey if this isn't gonna you know give me a hockey stick what will in my portfolio you know what i always tell people who tell me uh that um personal economic gain has nothing to do with their interest in bitcoin like people are like oh i'm here for the you know all this stuff i say by the way you sovereign freedom most of the people i know in bitcoin actually really believe the potential positive impacts of Bitcoin on the world. They believe,

just like I do, that it really can protect purchasing power. And if people save in Bitcoin, it's much better than dollar. They believe all that stuff. Maybe the sides that come with the main course is like they're going to make money as well economically. I don't think that people should hide that. It's part of the story, right? It's actually one of the main marketing messages that have gotten people into Bitcoin over the years. um but when people tell me no it has no impact whatsoever i say well why are you hoarding all that bitcoin why don't you use it to further bitcoin why don't you spend it you know go and you just give all your bitcoin to the developers then that would have a bigger impact than you

holding it right i have yet to have a taker on that one everyone's like uh right so again it goes back to like it's just extremism is usually not where the truth is found right and so i think that um i own more bitcoin today than i did at the start of 2025 right and i hope to end 2026 owning more bitcoin than i started it with how many bitcoin was that again zero and so i just think that we need to uh have patience you know charlie munger one of my favorite quotes the big money's not in the buying or selling it's in the waiting just chill all right we got like two minutes here so uh i want to touch on one story that broke this morning uh that seems to be pretty in the news i would say uh eric adams launched the nyc token something about fighting

uh anti-semitism anti-american ism um what are your thoughts on this token apparently he rugged it maybe he took some took all the liquidity out what's going on listen i got to know eric adams had dinner with him a couple times when he was running for re-election um what i got to say to Eric Adams is the funniest man in New York City, first of all. Second of all, thank you for what you did for this city. You got crime down. You did a lot of good things. Third, I don't think Eric Adams knows how to spell crypto. And fourth is, Eric, stop listening to the people who are trying to make money off of you. That's it, right? I don't think that Eric could explain in great detail what's going on with this token. I don't think Eric knows anything about liquidity.

I don't think Eric rug pulled anything. I think that Eric heard this is anti, uh, going against, uh, uh, Semitism, right. Uh, anti-Semitism and, uh, it's going against anti-American things. It's good for Jewish people is good for Americans. It's good for that. He's like that aligns with my values. Right. And somebody explained to him that if you get involved here, no different than they would say, if you get involved with this nonprofit, right, they're going to get more money. They can going further the cause and he knows that when he talks about crypto online people like it so he said crypto plus causes i believe in i'm in nyc oh perfect name right go i think 48 hours 72 hours later he's like damn damn they got developers he's thinking in his head

i used to think my haters became my waiters at my table of success he's like but my haters became our worst nightmare at the table of embarrassment and so now he's like oh shit right um it wasn't in the grand scheme of things it was like two or three million bucks yeah it's a lot of money but i mean there's projects you have billions tens of billions of dollars right so you know relative uh i think that the crypto industry we know as soon as you see it you're like geez here we go right um i think that eric is uh is a good dude i think that he again he did a great job for new york city um my advice to him is uh stop launching coins well new york city eric adams i saw new york had the lowest number of shootings on record last year what happened when

you think you put a cop in as the mayor you think that he cares of course he does yeah like a career police officer right he said listen man we're gonna get public safety going that was you you want to hear what i told him he should have done during the election well i told him he should have put on every single subway uh stop the new york city police uh badge on like a sticker his face and just the words eric adams keeps you safe because that's what he did he brought crime down in the city that's one of the main things that people care about all right i got one question for you what would you say to people who invested in the nyc token what would be your advice or your comments don't forget the feeling don't forget the feeling that you have right now

because that is probably a better lesson to not gamble to not speculate to not uh do that type of stuff than you'll ever get in a classroom from a friend a parent a book any of that stuff people uh i don't think know this story but uh when i was in college i'd gone uh i got pulled out to go to the military. I came back, had a little bit of change in my pocket. I started trading and, uh, foreign currency trading. No way. I never told you the story. Forex trading in the dorm room. Yeah. To be honest, you, you want to know the numbers? Yeah. I took 9k, ran up to $72,000 in a semester trading during class. And then, you know what I did? I went to a, uh, like a job over the summer and I thought I was fucking Soros. So you ever heard of pump gave back like

majority of the profits making trades on my phone at the job. Guess what though? I learned, I learned about foreign currencies. I learned about the market. I learned about taking risk, right? I learned what not to do, right? All of a sudden it was probably, it was better than anything I learned in school. So again, you know, I've been there. I literally have gone through that situation. Just remember the feeling, take the lessons, move on. Cause you ain't going to get it back. Awesome. I appreciate you. All right, guys. Thanks.