The Pomp Podcast - Is Bitcoin Ready To Explode In Q4? | Anthony & John Pompliano

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

Anthony and John Pompliano discuss bitcoin, why gold has been doing so well, Strive buying Semler Scientific, bitcoin treasury companies, and can AI replace the Fed? ======================Check out my NEW show for daily bite-sized breakdowns of the biggest stories in finance, technology, and politics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://pompdesk.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠======================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/⁠======================BitcoinOS is bringing Bitcoin into a new era. For the first time, Bitcoiners can access real DeFi across the entire crypto ecosystem, powered by revolutionary zero-knowledge technology. No more trusting sketchy bridges or giving up security. BitcoinOS reunites all of crypto around the chain where it all began. Follow BitcoinOS on twitter @BTC_OS and Be early to Bitcoin again.======================Polkadot is a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain technology aimed at creating Web3. Created by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot empowers users to build decentralized applications with ease. Backed by industry leaders, making it a preferred choice for big names, Polkadot stands out as a leading choice for investors seeking a reliable, future-proof solution in the growing world of Web3 technology. Learn more at https://polkadot.com/.======================TimeStamps:0:00 – Intro1:23 – What is going on with bitcoin vs gold?15:08 – How to analyze bitcoin 4 year cycle18:55 – Strive buying Semler Scientific32:31 – Could AI replace the Fed?

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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 treat for you. And I get heated at the end of this episode. But in this conversation, my brother, John Pompliano, we talk about Bitcoin and gold. Why is gold doing so well? We talk about the recent news of Strive Asset Management acquiring similar scientific in one of these Bitcoin Treasury M&A deals. And then John asked me, can artificial intelligence replace the Federal Reserve? And I go off. I tell you exactly what I think, why I think it's possible and how I think

it's going to happen. So here's my latest conversation with John Pompliano. All right, Anthony, welcome. Let's start. Bitcoin and gold. Gold continue to rip all-time high. Bitcoin actually down a little bit over the last couple of weeks. What is going on and should we be concerned? Well, if you take time horizon, you say, okay, since the beginning of the year, gold's up 42%. I think this is the single best year of gold performance in my lifetime. It's pretty crazy how good gold is doing right now. So hats off to the gold holders. Obviously, they've been right. I think gold holders and Bitcoiners we're kind of brothers in arms in terms of our fight and plight against the debasement of

currency. But gold guys are doing fantastic, and I'm happy for them, right? Also, as we've talked about in many episodes over this year, is usually gold runs first, about 100 days later, Bitcoin runs next. And so the higher that gold pushes, the more that I expect Bitcoin to kind of whip upwards as well in the kind of last four months or so of this year. So I don't think that this story is over yet. I still think that there's a very good chance that Bitcoin will actually end up outperforming gold for this year, which I think is right now and maybe not a popular view, but we'll see. But if gold outperforms Bitcoin, then that's perfectly fine too, right? I don't think that these two assets are necessarily in kind of a zero-sum competition with each other.

I think that what you have seen is as Bitcoin has risen in popularity and in market cap, you also have seen gold become more popular as well. So those two things, I think, are actually kind of all boats rising together, which is very important. So that's first. Second is, why is gold going up? It's a very important question. Well, central banks are buying a lot of gold, right? And central banks right now are probably the last set of buyers on the planet that are not openly buying Bitcoin. So if you think about it from that perspective, you basically have retail, you have institutions, you even have public companies now buying Bitcoin. Many of them also buy gold, right?

Public companies, maybe a little bit less than financial institutions, funds, individuals, whatever. But for the most part, those three buckets of kind of allocators, they buy gold and they buy Bitcoin. There's a new report out from Deutsche Bank that talks about the fact they believe in central bank portfolios and balance sheets. By 2030, you're going to see gold and Bitcoin both there. So I think that if you are looking at kind of month to month or even, you know, one year

time frame, it looks like gold or Bitcoin can go higher than one or the other, mainly because you see both the macroeconomic environment, interest rates, and then the buyer set kind of changing what they're doing between those two assets. But over the next five or six years, I think that Bitcoin has a structural advantage in that there are still very large pools of capital who do not yet have exposure to this asset, but they will get that exposure. And when they do that, you have a lot of capital coming into a finite supply asset that should push the price up over time. And so I think everyone's just got to remember, like, you don't need to have very low time preference, or excuse me, very high time preference. There are too many people who are so worried about,

did Bitcoin go up or down today or this week or last month? Instead, think about Bitcoin over the last just year. Bitcoin in November of 2024, all the way back to the end of last year, was at $69,000. It is up almost 2x in less than a year, and Bitcoiners are complaining. That is unreal performance. And so when you look at that, you say to yourself, okay, hold on a second here. Yes, if you go back and you look at gold since the beginning of 2024, it's up a lot as well. It's up 42% just in 2025. But Bitcoin is up more than gold since the beginning of 2024.

And so you can play this manipulation game with data all day long and say, oh, okay, well, if we go back nine months, then gold's winning. If we go back 12 months, then Bitcoin's winning. If we go back 18 months, then Bitcoin's winning. At the end of the day, these two assets likely have a position in most people's portfolio is that they're going to own some gold, they're going to own some Bitcoin. Now, I do not own gold. I've been very adamant about it because in that corner, or maybe a dinner plate of my portfolio, I want max volatility and I want max risk taking, right? I'm not looking at something like Bitcoin as a, I hope it ekes out 8% a year, right? I can use other instruments in financial markets if that's what I was looking

for in a part of my portfolio. I can go and I can buy the S&P, I can buy, you know, these other various assets. If I want max volatility, max return, max kind of asymmetry, and max risk, then buying something like Bitcoin is obviously what I'll do. And so I think it just really comes down to like, what are you looking for? And, you know, Cantor Fitzgerald recently came out with this fund that I think is pretty interesting. They've got a Bitcoin gold fund. And their thought process is Bitcoin can drive financial returns on the upside. Gold can protect on the downside, right? There's less volatility to it. Gold is up 42% though. So, you know, in that case, gold and Bitcoin both do really well on the upside. And the thought process would be if

there was some sort of market downturn, gold would be able to weather that better than just Bitcoin alone. So I think you're going to start to see people play with these ideas of, okay, of two store value assets. They both benefit from currency to basement. They both benefit from cheaper capital in the market through lower interest rates and money printing. And so if that's the regime we're headed back towards, which that's what it looks like we're headed towards, then I think you're going to see both of these assets do well. And you can play this game of, in the short term, who outperforms who. But again, I think that there is a good chance. I don't know if I'd say there's a 100% chance, but more than a 50% chance that Bitcoin

still outperforms gold in 2025 it's just that gold runs first then kind of bitcoin catches up and let's see what happens we still got 25 of the year left so i don't think uh it's not over right and to your point about kind of trailing 100 days that would leave us that time to run in 2025. um i think bitcoiners are probably upset uh because one obviously when in doubt zoom out right so if it goes down today it may still be up over a month or a year um but i think that like people in the market just hear so much buying right michael say was buying all these treasury companies are buying um and the prices i don't think has moved as much as people want it could be up 100 and bitcoiners still won't be happy they go more more more um but as people start to allocate more from gold

or from gold to bitcoin to kind of these like risk on assets uh or risk off assets excuse me um where does like the price start to catch up for gold and bitcoin like do we need central banks to come in or can these treasury companies kind of support the market i think treasury companies in general are just one of many buyers in the market, right? Obviously, retail investors have been buying Bitcoin for 15 plus years. They've done a pretty good job of creating value there, right? Again, it is a finite supply asset. The more demand that comes in, the higher the price goes. Retail has a lot of money and they've plowed it into Bitcoin, especially young retail. And so that has driven the price over a decade and a half. Now you also have though institutions.

And one of the things that's really interesting to me is take BlackRock as an example. Nobody would describe BlackRock as a Bitcoin company. But BlackRock is a Bitcoin company. Why? The number one product in terms of profitability inside of BlackRock, from what I understand, is the Bitcoin ETF. Their most popular, most profitable product for BlackRock is a Bitcoin ETF. Doesn't that make them a Bitcoin company?

Right? If your biggest products are in the crypto industry, aren't you a crypto company? Right? And so if you say to yourself, okay, hold on a second here, then if you go and you look at a Robinhood, right, or any of the companies that have really embraced this stuff, if crypto was their biggest sector, which it is not on Robinhood, right, but if it was, I think a lot of people would be like, oh, that's a crypto company. So if in the fintech space and the innovation component of financial services, if you are labeled as a Bitcoin or crypto company because of the size of the revenue that is coming from crypto versus other things, why doesn't that apply to traditional Wall Street? And so it sounds weird to say BlackRock is a Bitcoin company, but they're a Bitcoin company,

right? That is the single most valuable product that they have in terms of profit. And so I think that you're starting to see the melding, and this is really important, is yes, will the central banks coming in be important? Of course. But BlackRock's sales team, they work for Bitcoin. They're out talking about the Bitcoin ETF, right? They're knocking on doors.

They're educating people. They're doing all this stuff. BlackRock doing that, nobody thinks of it that way. Bitwise, on the other hand, which I think many people would think of as the leading crypto specialist, what are they doing? They're out explaining to people, educating them, helping them better understand Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. And so I don't know how many employees Bitwise has now, but it's a lot, right? They do a fantastic job.

I've always said Bitwise is winning the ground game, right? They're knocking on doors. They're meeting with advisors. They're helping people understand this stuff, and they're getting them into these products. Okay, well, if BlackRock's doing the same thing, aren't both sales teams working for Bitcoin? Aren't they working for the crypto industry? so i think that's the stuff that people got to kind of start wrapping your head around it's like there's this blending that's happening where you can't say that one is a crypto company and one is

not crypto or bitcoin is just going to be a part of finance and you see this with the exchanges right you see robin hood added crypto kraken is adding u.s equities right coinbase has talked about potentially entering into tokenized uh stocks okay well honestly aren't the exchanges all just going to offer stocks, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, and prediction markets? Aren't they just going to be exchanges? Of course. So it all just becomes, I'm an exchange, right? Then if you go and you look at, let's say, custody, it used to be that there was Bitcoin and crypto custodians, and then there were banks, and those were two completely separate things. Well, now some of the crypto custodians, Anchorage, they have federally chartered

bank licenses. Look at Custodia, right? They're going and pushing further into Fedmaster accounts and things like that. Okay. But then also if you flip around and you look at the traditional legacy financial system, those players are all trying to get in the custody game. And so whether it's BNY Mellon, whether it's the, you know, kind of large banks, like all those groups, they want to be in the custody game too. And so what you're seeing again is a melding. We just custody our customers' assets. And so I think what people have to start to get very comfortable with is Bitcoin is not winning until we can stop describing things as a Bitcoin company, Bitcoin product. We need it to just be a company or a product. The Bitcoin part should be assumed.

Nobody says, oh, I have an account at Bank of America. It's a fiat bank account. No, it's just a bank account. Of course, dollars are there, right? That's where we've got to get to. And so I think we're getting closer. We're not there yet, but I think we're getting closer. When that starts to happen, what you're going to see is a lot of capital flow from these organizations, bigger percentage. And I think that you're going to start seeing this like assault of capital into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but Bitcoin in particular. And over time, the price will keep going up. 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

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it simple i think over the last year it really got bitcoin in general really got validity in the market like when you look at all these other institutions that are now talking to their clients about it. Two years ago, even, they were against it. They were like, oh, you will be fired if you mention this to a client if you're an advisor. So it's a really big shift on the sentiment part of things. Yeah, look, I think that the ETFs, in hindsight, at the time, I think we all felt like it was a big deal. It was important. But you remember Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, they don't get enough credit. I think they filed for the first Bitcoin ETF back in 2013. 2013, 2013, it took more than a decade for them as an industry player to eventually see a Bitcoin ETF

get approved, right? So we've been at this a long time, but I do think you're going to see a pre-ETF kind of history of Bitcoin and a post-ETF history of Bitcoin. Now, does that show up in the four-year cycle? Is the four-year cycle done or not? That is the question I'm spending the most amount of time thinking about right now, right? So I think a lot of people, if you have a podcast, if you write, if you tweet, if you talk, breathe on the internet, people are like, oh, obviously, you know, the answer is like, just like, tell me, I don't know. And that is what I'm trying to figure out, right? So like, if people out there, if you got an opinion, let me know. I'm trying to listen to as many people as I possibly can with the sole purpose of understanding

is the four-year cycle over or not? Because if the four-year cycle is over, there's a whole bunch of decisions and actions that people will make. If it's not over, you may act in a completely different way. Right. And so trying to understand the answer to that one question, I think that's the most important question right now in, from an investment perspective in this entire industry is the four-year cycle over or not. And, uh, the beauty is we're going to find out, right. Um, but it's really hard to know in advance. And so I think, uh, my smartest friends, that's what they're all talking about. And most of them do not have a strong opinion. Most of them have a hypothesis, but they are very cautious to say, this is going to happen,

which tells me that the question is even more important because nobody feels confident enough to kind of hang their hat and say, this is what's going to happen. The good news is we're going to find out. The bad news is if you have an opinion and you want to confirm that opinion, you will find something on the internet to provide evidence to confirm your opinion. Of course, of course. And, you know, look, I think that there's a lot of folks who they say to themselves, okay let's you know let's just walk through this scenario so for your cycle um if it is over right

and you think that it's not you may be tempted to sell your bitcoin in october or november of 2025 and i'll buy a lower 80 lower you know in a year well if it's not over then uh okay you look like a genius if the four-year cycle is over you look like a moron so it's a pretty you know kind of different outcomes here, pretty extreme outcomes. Now, what I also think is some of my smartest friends say, well, regardless of the answer to the question, what's the worst case scenario? If the four-year cycle is not over, then I simply continue to hold my Bitcoin, which I was going to do anyways. And I ride it back down to 80% and I hold, and it'll come back to a new all-time high in two or three years. And I'll still be holding my Bitcoin. If I don't have leverage, if I haven't

anything stupid whatever right then what's the problem if the four-year cycle is over and i continue to hold my bitcoin the price will keep going up so a lot of my smartest friends are like actually getting to the answer of that a simple way you just opt out of having to make a decision just i'm gonna hold my bitcoin for the rest of my life but no decision is a decision in investing of course um but i think it's what are you optimizing for right and you know again um i I was talking to a institutional investor the other day and they were asking me, you know, when you go to buy Bitcoin, whether it's with a company or yourself personally, like, how do you think through one-time purchase, you know, dollar cost average, market signals, all that stuff. I said, look, you know, I've been doing this long enough and I've seen enough data. Timing the market is more important than timing the market.

So just getting exposure to Bitcoin historically has been more important because in many years, it's like six to eight days out of the year drive a bulk of the return. So if you weren't in the market those six to eight days, you missed out on most of the return. So I do think that there is this element of, as an investor, you can try to be too smart. You can try to optimize too much, try to time market. You can try to think about all stuff. Or you just say, listen, Bitcoin is this amazing asset.

i have long-term belief in it i'm going to buy it and hold it and i actually want to measure how long can i hold it for if that's your mentality then the answer to the question of is the four year cycle over or not doesn't matter okay let's switch gears for a second let's talk about strive buying some more scientific i know you know the guys at similar scientific what's going on with the deal you got any inside info for us i have no inside information um i know uh matt the vague um a lot of people at the strive uh business um i know eric uh i know um some people on the board et cetera at similar so you know uh congratulations to all of them right you know one of the beauties is uh this deal um i think first off that that kind of got overlooked is a lot of people have

talked about these bitcoin treasury companies um you know kind of preying on each other whenever somebody is uh trading at a huge discount to nav in a bear market like that's kind of the way people have been talking about it and i think that there's a lot of people who are kind of fantasizing that they're going to be some like activist investor and they're going to go and you know they're they're going to like take out their competitor or whatever. It sounds good. It's really hard to do. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people who have done that and they're like, look, man, this is not as simple as you press a button and all of a sudden there's a decision. There's proxy battles. There's, you know, activist campaigns. There's a lot of money spent. I mean, there's a

lot of stuff in there that I don't think people who are saying this stuff publicly really quite understand. That's not what this was. This was, you know, for general terms, I'm not going to get all the numbers exactly right off the top of my head, but Strive was trading about three and a half times above NAV, right? So at a 350% premium to their NAV approximately. And this data is coming from bitcointreasuries.net. And so if they're trading about three and a half times from NAV, Semler was trading closer to NAV, like about NAV, right? So you have one trading at 1X, one trading at 3.5X. Okay. Well, Strive steps in and says, you know what? You have approximately 5,000 Bitcoin similar. What if we buy you so that we can take your 5,000 Bitcoin and put it on our

balance sheet? We're going to team up here. We're going to merge together. Well, why would similar do that, right? If they're trading at one time, they should just go buy more Bitcoin and keep growing their balance sheet. Well, Strive says, well, what if we pay you more than what the market is valuing you at now? So Strive came in and said, well, we'll pay you 210% higher than the closing price from the Friday before the deal got announced. So I'll pay you basically double for your business what the market is currently valuing yet. Now, a lot of people, and I saw it all over the internet, they're like, whoa, this is so stupid. Why would you pay two times higher than what the stock is trading at, blah, blah, blah, whatever, right? Well, you got to convince

the people to sell. So how do you convince someone to sell their business? You pay them, right? And what do you pay them? You pay their shareholders double what the stock was worth before you bought them, right? Okay, clear to see why similar, right? As a company would say, we're interested. You're gonna pay two times more with the market value. We're interested. But why would Strife pay two times more?

Well, because their stock is trading at 350% premium. So the deal theoretically could pay for itself if you take 5,000 Bitcoin, you move it over. And now all of a sudden, even though, let's just say the 5,000 Bitcoin, use easy numbers. 5,000 Bitcoin was worth $500 million. dollars, but you're paying a billion for it, right? Because you're paying two times more. But if all of a sudden now the Bitcoin is actually valued not at a billion,

but let's say that the Bitcoin is actually valued at like $1.75 billion, well, you look like a genius at Strive because you basically created in that scenario about $750 million of shareholder value, right? Because you paid a billion dollars for something that you're now going to get $1.75 billion worth of value for. Okay, well, that $750 million difference is, quote, unquote, accretive to your shareholders. So you look smart. So what ends up happening is you pay two times more for the similar stock, but it's because your stock's trading at 3.5%, 3.6% to NAV. So it's a way to clear the market in terms of get someone to sell to you, but also accrete value to your shareholders. Now, what I think you're going to see a lot of these companies, not Strive in

particular, I think all of these companies that are trading at very high premiums, is you're going to see them essentially do whatever they possibly can to raise capital or get Bitcoin on their balance sheet until those premiums collapse significantly. And so, if you are running one of these companies and you're trading at three, four, five times MNAV, well, you got a lot of room there to do pretty creative things. You can go buy other companies and all stock deals like this was. You can go and you can raise capital. You can do all kinds of things because you have a very overvalued stock. Now, the word of caution to retail investors is if you're buying into a company that is trading at three, four, five, six, 10 times MNAV, maybe it works out. Bitcoin can go

up. They can continue to buy Bitcoin. The premium can hold. There's a bunch of scenarios. It's perfectly fine but there's also always the worry that the premium collapses right and so if you were buying at you know 10 times mnav premium and it collapses down to four without compression right the company didn't change but the stock price went down 10 times mnav that's crazy i think there are some companies that i uh that have gotten announced that yeah they traded at very high multiples now they come down over time right obviously uh i think even metaplan i forget the exact numbers but i think metaplan at one point was trading somewhere between six to eight times MNAV? Why are these companies commanding such high premiums compared to everything else?

Well, different investors look at it in different ways. So there's not going to be one single answer. The way that I've always thought about the MNAV premium is it is the quantitative measurement of how much the market believes you're going to buy more Bitcoin, right? Oh, you think it's buy more Bitcoin, not that Bitcoin appreciates to close that gap? No, because if the Bitcoin is going to appreciate, then your Bitcoin per share is not going to change. And so as Bitcoin appreciates, the stock price should track relatively about the same, right? So you've got 100 Bitcoin and 100 shares, that's one share for one Bitcoin. If Bitcoin doubles in price, then you would expect the share price to about double in price, right? Because you still have one share for one Bitcoin. So what's the share worth? Well, it's worth one Bitcoin. Bitcoin has doubled in price, so the share should double in price, right? What is really driving a lot of this is growing Bitcoin per share. So this is this whole idea

of like accretive accumulation of Bitcoin. And so when you get that accretive accumulation, what people are basically saying is, okay, how quickly do I think Bitcoin per share is gonna grow, right? How much do I believe they're gonna buy more Bitcoin in a accretive way? And then what I'm essentially gonna do

is I'm going to put some multiple on the current situation because they're gonna grow into it. So all the numbers for each company are a little bit different. it's very hard to kind of use one company as an example. So let's just use a hypothetical. But let's say that, again, 100 Bitcoin, 100 shares, one share per Bitcoin. And I think that the company is going to be able to go from one Bitcoin per share to two Bitcoin per share.

They're going to double, right? Which would basically be yielding almost 100% in, let's say, a year. Well, people may say, you know what? I'm actually willing to pay today at the beginning of the year, if I think that they're going to double their Bitcoin per share, I'm willing to pay a 80% premium because by the end of the year, they're going to have doubled. And so all I'm doing is I'm just paying up for the future growth that they're going to grow into, right? Now, again, each company is different. Some people, some companies are trading at like 400%, even though people think they're only going to double, right? Whatever. But it's no different than why don't people buy, you know, meta stock or Amazon stock at one times revenue? Well, because there's growth,

right and so they're willing to pay multiple to account for that growth so if i think that meta is going to grow again just use easy numbers if i think they're going to grow at uh 50 year over year revenue and profit then maybe i'm willing to pay 20 times their revenue today and i just look out and i say okay well 20 times is x percent um growth for y number of years and that's what i'm essentially doing right and so it really depends on like what's your time horizon what do you think the growth rate's going to be uh what risk do you see like there's all these things that feed into it and i think one of the parts that people don't want to talk about in the bitcoin treasury world is like we're still figuring out what the market thinks right there's been certain

situations where things have occurred that um have given us data points right you know a very obvious data point to me uh was uh when strategy came out and they said uh we're not going to sell common shares via our ATM and anything below two and a half times MNAV. Okay. Well, immediately the MNAV premium started to collapse. Not their fault, right? They had a hypothesis, most likely, I haven't talked about it, but like most likely, hey, if we give the market guidance, then they'll understand our kind of decision framework. Got it. Well, all of a sudden, as that MNAV premium started to compress, they said, oh, wait a second, maybe the market actually doesn't like that guidance, right? And so they turned around, they said, actually, you know what, we're going

to open that back up and we're and we're going to change our guidance right and nav premium started to expand again like that to me is a sign of intelligence from the strategy team saying to themselves hey we did something we saw a market reaction it gave us more information we changed our mind like that is the definition of intelligence you get new information you change your mind right when it's appropriate they did that so i think everyone else though and i've i've seen other people talking about this both publicly and i've heard people talking private is that was a data a point that actually maybe the market doesn't like very rigid guidance on when you're going to tap certain capital market tools. Maybe it was a one-off. Maybe actually the market does like

that, just in that scenario, they didn't like it, right? We don't know because a lot of times people are trying something. They're the only one who's doing it. And so what you've got to start to try to figure out here is where is the market going to coalesce around in terms of what are best practices, right? One of the things in public markets, beat and raise. Every quarter, if you can beat what your guidance was and raise your expectations for the next quarter the market likes that right well what guidance are these companies going to give how do they think about the guidance how do they beat the guidance how do they raise the guy like all of that is being figured out live and so like it's intellectually stimulating for i think a lot of people right but

it also brings a lot of skeptics who say you guys are idiots what are you guys talking about right You're talking about Bitcoin per share. I didn't read about that in my economics textbook or my corporate finance textbook. It wasn't on the CFA exam, right? Bitcoin per share. You guys are making this up. Okay.

But what if it's right? That's why there's so much debate and controversy is you basically have a group of people who are saying, this is how we view the world. This is how we measure our businesses. This is how we think about creating value. You have a whole nother group of people in the world that says, that is crazy.

I never heard that before. That doesn't make any sense. You guys are all just, you know, financial engineering, blah, blah, whatever. The market's going to figure it out. Let's see what happens. Today's episode is brought to you by Polkadot. Polkadot offers secure, scalable, and decentralized blockchain technology that perfectly aligns with the needs of innovative projects. It was developed by Gavin Wood, one of the co-founders of Ethereum and the creator of Solidity.

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programmable asset putting your bitcoin to work once meant trusting centralized companies and bridges to protect your assets a model that's lost crypto owners billions to hacks and fraud bitcoin os lets you be your own boss using a system based on cryptography rather than trust the way satoshi intended using bitcoin os all coins are returning home eager to plug into bitcoin security network effects and two trillion dollar capital base bitcoin is the first and final boss of all digital assets and will soon be reborn as the foundation of a united crypto world follow bitcoin os on twitter at btc underscore os and be early to bitcoin again follow bitcoin os on twitter today at btc underscore os uh one comment on the expectations and earning calls

and all that you remember the lift story when they uh someone put on the deck uh a typo and And instead of like 5% growth, they projected 50% growth and the market ran with it because it was set on an earnings call. Oh, I don't remember. Oh, yeah. It was for Lyft, I believe. Did they get in trouble for it? I'm sure that intern got a...

I'm sure that employee got reprimanded in some capacity because that's a big mistake. I'm sure there were some questions as to how did that get in there? All right. Let's switch gears again. Let's talk about AI and the Fed. Do you think AI could replace the Fed? Of course. How and why?

Well, AI can replace an accountant. AI can replace a lot of white-collar workers. What does the Fed do? The Fed ingests data. It synthesizes it. It makes decisions that are supposed to be data-dependent and programmatic. Doesn't that sound like a computer? So why couldn't it?

Are we really claiming that the Fed board governors are smarter than a computer? We know the computer can do better math. we know the computer can both collect and synthesize data better than humans so why can't it make a decision on the interest rate is there anything the computers have a disadvantage at in that scenario yeah of course the political aspect right um whether people like it or not like it's all politicized it's always been politicized right people like all the feds get out of here right the fed has never been independent the fed is run by humans it's like saying like journalists are unbiased get out of here right they're humans by the way it's not

their fault they're human right some reporters do a much better job in terms of at least putting on the facade of being unbiased but everyone has bias right so the fed has bias too if they were unbiased they wouldn't be donating to one political party or another right they wouldn't be commenting about politics right they wouldn't be doing so like just throw that out for a second forget all this nonsense about the fed independence all this kind of stuff all noise a computer can do the fed better than the fed obviously the question is do we want a programmatic monetary policy or not because what happens they use bitcoin versus the fed as a good uh comparison the bitcoin monetary policy is programmatic it was set in 2009 and pretty much has run since right 2008 2009 um

That policy does not care what's happening in the world, doesn't care if demand has changed for Bitcoin, does not care about geopolitical events, does not care about a global pandemic that locks everyone in their home, it does not care about any sort of controversy as to who the president is, does not care about who is in the Senate or Congress, does not care what you did today, does not care what anyone ate for breakfast, it doesn't care about anything. It just knows I run block after block after block of transactions, and based on a certain timeline. I emit a certain number of Bitcoin to incentivize the miners. And the monetary policy

is going to continue running to about 2140. And there's 21 million Bitcoin as a set amount, blah, blah, blah, whatever. People know this, right? That programmatic policy does not care what happens in the world. Flip though to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve, all it cares about is what is happening in the world. So on one hand, you have a monetary policy that is immune to changes in the world and is, I would say, offensive. It's not reaction. reactionary. It's offensive. This is what we're going to do. The world must conform to me. It's what a programmatic monetary policy does. The world has had to figure out that Bitcoin is valuable. Bitcoin didn't change. The Fed is different. The Fed is reactive. The Fed looks

around and says, show me all the data. Give me all the things that are happening in the world, whatever. Okay, here's what we think we should do. So they react to everything, which means that Bitcoin, a programmatic monetary policy, says the world must react to me. The Fed says we will react to the world. Well, which one do you think is better? Obviously, the programmatic monetary policy. Because what it begs the question is, how do you plan your life if you do not know what the cost of capital is going to be, not only in five years, but in six months? Right now, if you poll Wall Street and Main Street and you ask them, what is going to be the federal funds rate In January of 2026, you're all over the place.

If you go into the Federal Reserve Board governor meeting, which they did in September, and they said, show us what's going to happen to the end of the year. One person said that they should hike interest rates. Another guy, Stephen Myron, said that they should cut interest rates five times. Hold on a second here. The 12 people that are responsible for creating monetary policy in this human-led centric model, they don't even agree in unison on whether we should hike or cut, let alone the severity and the number of moves. This is chaos going on. So it comes back to this idea of programmatic monetary policy is better because a programmatic monetary policy tells you what the cost of capital is going to be in the future. If you know what the cost of capital is going to be in the future, you can then plan your life.

And so what we are requiring people to do is to guess what the humans are going to guess about in the future. To make matters worse, the Federal Reserve, they, again, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt, said they're not intentionally misleading people, but they have misled the market multiple times in the last six years. In 2020 and 2021, they said that interest rates are going to remain suppressed near 0% for an extended period of time. In 2022, they said, just kidding.

and they hiked interest rates at the fastest rate in history to the point where they brought professional risk managers who run banks down to their knees and put them out of business. Crazy. Now, were the banks wrong for not managing risk? Well enough, of course. But also the Fed told them that interest rates were going to be near zero. And so if the banks got it wrong, do you think Joe on Main Street or Sally walking around Manhattan, you think they got it right? You think they're smarter than the banks are whose entire job is to do risk management and to trade around interest rate decisions? No. So it's just a completely asinine model that not only has been destructive to the everyday lives of Americans, but on top of that, it has

been inaccurate. And we've seen that. They continue to be behind the curve. Why are they behind the curve? Because they're reacting to the world. They wait to see what's going to happen in the world. it happens, then they act. Duh. Of course you're going to be reactive, right? So the problem becomes now there's psychological scarring at the Federal Reserve. They don't want to be reactive. They're trying now to become predictors of the future. That's even worse because not only were they bad at looking at the data and making decisions, now we're telling them to predict what the data is going to be and then make decisions. This is crazy. This is crazy. And so what you will see is in all of the language, you're going to see that they used

to talk about being data dependent how is it data dependent if you're telling us that inflation's coming now you and my three-year-old should go talk about unicorns because y'all just making shit up yeah right because i guess what i didn't think inflation was coming they thought inflation was coming they also said inflation was transitory they said inflation was transferable i mean you just go do all these things right so again it comes back to you're asking humans to do a job that humans are not well-suited to do. So I rail on the Fed all the time and I think it's a crazy system

and all this kind of stuff, but I also have empathy. And I say, listen, they're operating within the confines of what they're supposed to be doing, right? They're looking at the data. The data's wrong, but they're looking at the data.

So if you look at wrong data, of course you make bad decisions, right? By the way, if I was forced to look at that data and then make the decision, I would make a wrong decision too. If I was forced to sit and be reactive, I would make the wrong decision too. And if you give me enough scenarios

and you say predict the future, I would be wrong too. so again i'm not saying i'm better than them or uh other people could be better it's just like you're asking humans to do a job that humans are not set up to do guess who is set up to do it a computer right now the secret is they got computers they're not operating with like feather pens and you know ink right they got electricity they're not operating by candlelight over there so they got a lot of computers they got a lot of data right they got a lot of smart analysts and economists, all this stuff. They're all trying to work together and try to figure

this stuff out. But there's still a human vote. And if you want to manage something by consensus, if you want to manage something by committee, you are pretty much guaranteed to make bad decisions. So anytime you bring 12 people in a room, you say, we all got to decide together. Guess what happens? Bad things. Yeah. One big piece of this that you talked about a little bit and touched on was this idea of bad data. And I've always been under the understanding, like trying to survey masses of people and trying to get information on masses of people

is extremely difficult to do. Is there a way to fix the data that's coming into the Fed? Because even if you load into a computer bad data, you are going to get a bad result, right? So I think you have to start at like the core of this, which is like, how do you get information on what is going on accurately? Stop asking people what they think

and just look at what they do. Like, duh, easy. Like, politics learned this lesson really hard. Stop asking people who they're going to vote for. They lie. Like, duh. Freaking guy on Polymarket from France literally destroyed everyone because he said, well, what if we don't ask them what they're going to do? What if we ask them, it's called a neighbor poll. Who's your neighbor going to vote for? All of a sudden, everyone told the truth. Right? Like, think of how crazy that is. In politics, polling, if you ask somebody who they're going to vote for, they lie to you. If you ask them, who is your neighbor going to vote for, they tell you the truth. Okay, well, in the Fed, stop asking people, what do you think you could rent your house for? Have you ever talked to someone who's trying to sell their house or rent their house? They're insane.

They list it for some crazy price, and then the market tells them, you're dumb. It's going to sit on the market for 500 days, right? Or you're going to lower the price. So of course, if you ask people, they're going to give you bad data. On top of that, if you ask people sentiment survey, when would you ever trust the crowd sentiment to make decisions?

Like you got to be just absolutely out of your mind. Again, go hang out with the unicorns and my three-year-old, right? Like, what are you talking about? Instead, you want to know what rent looks like? Go on Zillow, StreetEasy, or the 50,000 other companies that have been created over the years

and just look at what did houses rent for last week in a certain geography. And guess what? Now you don't need to call 2,000 people out of a country of 330 million Americans and then hope that they licked their finger, stuck it in the air and got close today. Instead, you can look at big data sets.

You can use a computer. You can use things like simulations and scenarios and you can start to predict it. So here's a little plug for you. you know that company Sylvia, the product that we built? People may not know this. Once you put all of your assets in there, your stocks, your crypto accounts, your real estate, your cars, your credit cards, your debt, any assets you got, you put into Sylvia, it gets anonymized, it gets encrypted, and then we overlaid all these AI things. You know one of the crazy

things we can do in there? You can now do Monte Carlo simulations. You can tell Sylvia, I want you to run Monte Carlo simulation on my portfolio, run a hundred thousand simulations and tell me where I'm likely to be in 10 years. And it will look at what assets do you own? What have you done over time? Your spending patterns, the performance, all these things. And it will run 100,000 simulations and it will come back to you in about seven minutes. And it'll tell you, here's where I think you're going to be in 10 years. If Sylvia can do that, which by the way, was built by one engineer who now has a couple more engineers around them the fed can't figure that out what are we doing calling people on the phone we have humans who walk into grocery stores

with physical tablets physical tablets and they go and they say let me find the can of tuna uh no no no salt no salt uh this is water yeah okay all right yeah this is the right one all right let me put manually the price in i bet if i sent you into the grocery store and i told you to do that for 100 items you'd mess one up not because you're my younger brother no not because you're my younger brother because you gotta do it 100 times obvious human error right like what are we talking about so hundreds of people do that at the bls it's crazy it's just crazy obviously i'm passionate about this because we keep getting bad decisions because we have bad data if you don't solve the data then you can't make good decisions so a computer can 100 replace all of

them. Artificial intelligence is coming for a lot of people, but central banks already been replaced by it. The Bitcoin programmatic monetary policy has shown it is more consistent. It is more predictable. It is more trusted and it is protected the economic value of hundreds of millions of people in a way that the US dollar hasn't. I rest my case. Well said. That's it for today, guys. Thanks for tuning in.