The Pomp Podcast - Larry Fink Is RIGHT About Bitcoin | Anthony & John Pompliano

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Anthony and John Pompliano break down what’s really happening in the bitcoin market — why price has stalled, how volatility is evolving, and what most investors are missing about the next phase of this cycle. We dig into the Federal Reserve’s rate-cut debate, the broader economic backdrop, and how liquidity conditions are shaping risk assets — with a brief touch on BUD/S training and why discipline matters in markets and life.=======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 80+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $1,000 in rewards.=======================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/=======================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.=======================0:00 - Intro0:25 - Larry Fink: bitcoin as an “asset of fear” & why price has stalled 7:10 - Why drawdowns matter less over time11:00 - Jobs data, wages, & the macro split narrative15:55 - Consumer sentiment vs social media sentiment18:02 - Santa rally & market psychology19:32 - Can anyone catch up to  Strategy? 25:22 - Has the bitcoin narrative changed? & 2026 outlook 39:07 - BUD/S training comparison & volatility 

What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great conversation with John Pompliano. We're going to talk about what's going on in the Bitcoin market. Why is price not going up? I've got a very interesting idea that I think you will like about how to see the Bitcoin market moving forward. We talk about the Fed cutting interest rates, what's going on in the economy. And of course, how could we possibly talk about Bitcoin and Bitcoin volatility without talking about buttons training and ringing the bell? You're going to love that part of it as well. Here's my latest conversation with John Pompliano. All right, John, what's the first topic? larry fink boss bitcoin is an asset of fear you you believe him 100 100 his point uh so he recently

went to uh the new york times dealbook summit he was talking with andrew ross sorkin and he talks about how bitcoin is uh an asset of fear and his point was when people are fearful they look for some sort of safety asset right it's a flight to safety so gold and bitcoin historically have served as a great thing if it's uncomfortable if you're nervous you go and you store something where you have confidence that it's going to still be there. And so his point was when the U.S.-China trade deal got announced, Bitcoin went down. Why?

There was less uncertainty. There was more certainty. More certainty equals less fear. Less fear equals a lower Bitcoin price. And so if you extrapolate that to today, why is Bitcoin's price not going up? That is one part of it. It's like, what is there to be fearful about right now?

Were you nervous about AI? Were you in an AI bubble? But gold is typically a fear asset as well, right? And that has rallied pretty well. Well, so Bitcoin and gold both rallied up until about a month before everyone thought, oh, the four-year cycle type stuff, right? So another thing that I think is pretty important is Jeff Park. He wrote this great piece recently about a lot of large holders or kind of OG whales

selling calls against their Bitcoin. And so you can think about this like call selling is essentially they're selling away the upside of the Bitcoin, right? It provides some sort of like ceiling or pressure on Bitcoin's price. I don't think that there's one single silver bullet you can point to, but I think it's the culmination of a lot of this stuff. And then I do think that there is just some belief that like, hey, the four-year rally and cycle is supposed to hold. And so there's a bunch of people who were selling before that. Now, what I do find pretty interesting is Bitcoin's volatility has continued to stay pretty suppressed.

You're somewhere in the like 40s, maybe you jack up to into the 50s. But the lower that the volatility is, the less upside you should expect, but also the less downside you should expect. And so if we stay within kind of a 40% drawdown, 126 to 80,000, give or take, then that's a lot easier to stomach than if it goes down 80%, right? So nobody's talking about it from that perspective. Everyone's talking about, I want it to go to 200. Of course, everyone wants it to go up. But there is some confidence that gets instilled if the drawdowns get shallower and shallower over time. You will elicit more capital into the asset. And so I don't think that Larry Fink is wrong about Bitcoin being a fear asset.

But I also think that Bitcoin is different things to different people. If you're in a country where you're worried about somebody seizing your assets, sure, or maybe you're driven by fear of that, so you go and you buy Bitcoin, but you're really buying it for the Caesarship resistance, right? If you live in a country where there's very high debasement, again, you could describe it as, oh, I'm fearful of debasement, therefore I go and I buy Bitcoin, but you're buying it for the protection against debasement, right? You're not necessarily buying it because of a macro kind of market dynamic. And so I think that Bitcoin, although people may not like it, Bitcoin's kind of doing what it was intended to do. It's the most disciplined

monetary policy in the world. It continues to produce block after block after block of transactions. It's higher today than it was 14 months ago. Everyone looks back at one year and they're like, ah, Bitcoin was $69,000 on November 1st of 2024. Today it's 86, 87, 90,000, wherever it is. Okay. That's pretty good return for most assets in a given year, right? It's just that exactly one year. It was post-run up from November 1st to end of December because of the election. And so people would say, ah, in 12 months, it's flat to negative. Well, yeah, but if you go back 14 months, then it tells a different story. And so you just got to be very careful. You don't just arbitrarily select these timeframes. I'm just as guilty as everybody else.

Sometimes you're like, hey, you just hit the one-year chart. It's pre-made for you. Here's the percentage, bam, you tweet it out, whatever. But if you do look back over time, you know, Bitcoin has done pretty well. It's very hard to remember this, but when Michael Saylor and Strategy started to buy Bitcoin, Bitcoin was sitting somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000. So think about that. That was in 2020, August of 2020. In five-ish years, Bitcoin has 10x'd, and there are people who are upset. It's all relative, right? It's all just like perspective matters.

And so if you were buying in 2020, yeah, sure, you wish it was up 20X, but like you're doing okay. If you bought at 125,000 in 2025 and it's now sitting at 90,000, you're like, this thing sucks, right? And so I think that, you know, people just got to calm down.

Bitcoin is an asset that continues to compound at a very attractive rate. If you want something that doesn't have lots of drawdowns, go buy stocks. But understand that stocks are unlikely to outperform Bitcoin over the next five or 10 years. So what are you looking for in your portfolio, right? This is a tool you can put in your portfolio. What do you need? If you need a shovel, don't buy a hammer.

A lot of young people like Bitcoin because it's asymmetric, right? It protects against debasement. It compounds at a higher rate, all that kind of stuff. Okay, great. If you're not looking for that, then don't buy Bitcoin. And I think that's really what people are starting to figure out here is the institutions are now interested in Bitcoin because Bitcoin has reached a level where it's not too volatile. So again, I've talked about this ad nauseum, but the less volatile Bitcoin has become, the more attractive it has become to large pools of capital. It's pretty interesting, right? But here's something that no one really talks about. Bitcoin's a very small market.

Here, think about that for a second. If you've been around the Bitcoin industry for a while, you think that Bitcoin, huge now, $2 trillion. Well, it's because you started when it was a $200 billion. It's 10x, look how big we are. There are individual companies that are publicly traded that are bigger than the entire Bitcoin market cap. One company.

It's a very, very small market in the grand scheme of things. So when you think about it from that perspective, you have to remember that, you know, if Bitcoin is, you know, kind of the smallest market, if you will, AI might be an even bigger market, right? Then you've got kind of the entire stock market. Then you've got the debt market, you know, real estate, all this stuff. So it's a fairly small market. And so I think Bitcoiners want everything now, right? Hey, price go up, all that kind of stuff. Give it time. It's going to grow. It will eventually be much bigger, 10 trillion, 20 trillion, whatever it is. It's just going to take some time to get there.

First impressions obviously matter. If you got into Bitcoin at $126,000, like you said, and you experienced that drawdown to $80,000, it's tough. But if you got in at whatever price, $40,000, and it goes to $80,000, you doubled your money and you're extremely happy with the asset. What would shake people out that have been through the previous cycles? I'm sure a lot of the audience has already been through 80% drawdowns. Is there something that could shake out a lot of holders, do you think? Or is it just, hey, look, if you've already gone through this drawdown before, you know, you're more likely to be able to be resistant to it when it happens or if it happens in the future. I don't think a drawdown could shake them out. I think that

a perception that future returns are lower could shake them out. So everyone who starts in Bitcoin is very worried about the drawdowns. Most of the people who have been around Bitcoin for a long time understand that the drawdowns are a critical part of the asymmetry. You need hyper volatility. So you're going to get some of the drawdowns, but it's almost like a slingshot, right? It'll send you higher later on. I don't think that if you've lived through two 80% drawdowns, a 50% drawdown, all of a sudden you're like, oh, now you got me this time, right? What I think is that the future return profile. And so you can kind of think of this like if you take a cowboy off of the frontier and tell him to get a desk job, he'll go, I'm not interested in that.

I want the risk. I want to be out on the frontier. I want to ride my horse into town, right? I want to go have the six shooter high noon draw. I don't want to sit at a keyboard and punch numbers in a spreadsheet. Bitcoiners are much more historically like the cowboy than the corporate desk jockey. So if you think about it from that perspective, if Bitcoin as an asset is now becoming attractive to traditional finance, people with the spreadsheets, people who are not the cowboys, the people who are governed by a committee, they have a fiduciary duty to external shareholders, all of that stuff. The cowboys all of a sudden are saying, is this the game I want to play? Am I ready to hang up my hat and boots? Or is there something else I want to do? And so

I think that that's really what gets those guys to do something different. Now, most of the OGs that I know, they're not selling their Bitcoin. They're just not going to keep taking net new dollars and buying more Bitcoin, right? Because they're saying the incremental return from here, in their opinion, is much less than what it used to be. And so therefore, they may see some other opportunity of where they can go and drive return. We'll be right back.

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that you're seeing play out? Depends what side of the political aisle you're on. I see all the people on the right saying expectations were 50,000, jobs came in at 64,000, growth, amazing, job creation, greatest economy of all time. They're not wrong in terms of 50,000 was the expectation, 64,000, all that kind of stuff.

Flip side is I see many of the critics saying, whoa it's been basically no job creation since april wage growth uh is decelerating so it's still increasing but it's at a lower pace than it was in the spring you know uh health care and construction is where all the jobs that are being created are coming from the rest of the economy is basically in a job recession you know all this stuff they're not wrong either so that's the problem when politics and finance become very intertwined. Same data, two different stories, both are true. People don't like that conversation because what it means is now you got to think critically. Everyone wants to be force fed a headline that just says good or bad. That's how

the human mind works. Jobs numbers come out, was it good or bad? Well, it was kind of both, right? It was better than expectations, but there are some broader concerns. Now, what I will argue is that the economic policies that have been put in place may actually have prevented a worse situation. So again, it goes back to like, okay, there hasn't been a lot of job creation outside of construction and healthcare, and real wages are growing 3.2% or so, but it was growing faster in the spring. Great. Well, if this administration's economic policies were different, maybe we'd be in a worse position, but you don't get to run that experiment. It's all pontification at that point. So that's what makes this really hard to analyze. Now, what I will say is I have been

very surprised positively about how quickly we have seen these economic policies have the impact that they've had. So let me give you a couple stats. The deficit this year for the US government is likely to be $600 billion lower than it was last year. So they're not going to get to a balanced budget, in my opinion, but they've been able to shrink that deficit. So if you shrink the deficit, that's a good thing. Now, there's a lot of people say, oh, you know, it's a one-time thing. It's not possible. Whatever. That's fine. But the data is the data, right? So they shrunk the deficit. Regardless of what side of the political aisle you're on, you should say, you know, congratulations, good job. The second thing is that

real wages are growing. That's a positive thing. We should be excited about that. Gasoline prices have come down significantly. Oil is at $55 a barrel. I think I saw a stat 38 of the 50 states now have oil or have gasoline below three bucks. That's great. That's great, right? People should be excited about that. On top of that, you can see that GDP is growing 3.5 to 3.8% according to the Atlanta Fed. That's great. We should be excited about that. So you look at this statutes, there's a lot of great things to point to in the US economy. Now, the critics will say, well, of that GDP growth, 60% is coming from AI-related investments. They'll say deportations are going to lead to a worker shortage, which is going to cause these issues or whatever.

They'll argue that the tariffs, although they may have not had such a negative impact on consumer prices, there weren't empty shelves in the Great Depression, that's still going to actually be a slowdown for the economy over time. They'll point to the fact that, oh, there's a recession going on and all these other verticals. It's just that the good things are outweighing the bad things. Well, that's how it works, right? So you look at it, you just got to, again, the job of an investor is to seek truth. You cannot make money as an investor if you do not seek truth, right? In a repeatable way. You can get lucky, right? You can kind of, a monkey can throw darts at a dartboard blindfold and eventually they'll hit the board. But if you want to have a

long career, if you want to make money over and over and over again, if you want to have that repeatable process, you gotta seek truth. And so what we're watching in the economy right now is that the economic policies have actually been much, much more positive than the critics thought they would be. But also if you go and you only talk to people on the right and you don't hear people on the left, then you hear a very different story, right? There's kind of like everything is amazing there's no identification of you know potential negative things um but the people i respect the most both in you know kind of center right or center left um those folks some of them are in the administration some of them are the starkest critics of the administration but the

people who you know i kind of say look they have political leanings but they're rational they're data-driven etc um i think that they understand there's things that we should do to get better right how do we get better um and maybe the area where i find it most interesting is um the sentiment surveys. So everyone points to the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey. As I've pointed out now plenty of times, it's corrupt. It's wrong, right? They're oversampling Democrats versus Republicans because they moved to this online format. 65% Democrats, 35% Republicans. Democrats tend to have a more negative view of the future economy than Republicans have. And so therefore, you skew those results significantly. Now, what's interesting is the

Goldman Sachs Social Media Sentiment Index is actually telling you the exact opposite thing. So the Consumer Sentiment Survey from the University of Michigan is down, but the Goldman Sachs Social Media Sentiment Index is up. Those used to trade in lockstep, they pretty much were overlaid on each other until the Consumer Sentiment Survey from the University of Michigan changed its sampling. And then what's the methodology difference of those two? So the way I view it, this is like the layman's way, the social media sentiment is basically listening into people who are talking, but they don't know you're watching.

It's kind of like the rawest form, right? Like what is the sentiment on social media? The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey is somebody sending you a survey, in this case online, and you fill it out. You know you're being sampled. You know that you're being surveyed, right? So again, like how truthful are you?

A little bit different. And so again, like just try to find truth. Like I believe the social media sentiment survey much more than I believe the consumer sentiment survey. There's obviously the data issues with the Michigan survey, but also just by structure, people are likely to be more honest if they don't think that they're being surveyed. So that's probably a more realistic kind of data point. I understand both of them. I understand what the differences are, but I just – I trust the Goldman Sachs social media sentiments index much more than I trust the University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey. It's kind of like the election stuff, right?

All the polls are saying one way, some guy took the neighbor poll and was essentially like, look like all these people, like, I don't know what they're thinking, but like all my neighbors are going one way or this community is going one way or another. How does this all fit into context with the Santa rally that I've heard you say before? Well, I didn't come up with the Santa rally, but, um, you know, you'll hear the, uh, Santa rally, end of year chase, uh, Christmas rally, you know, all these kinds of different things. basically um the end of the year is usually pretty good um for a variety of reasons um carson group ryan dietrich and those guys uh they have a chart that shows i think they go back to

like 1950 until like 2024 or something and uh the last two weeks from december 15th through the end of the year uh there's something like a 1.4 1.5 percent gain on average like so there's this like chase into the end of the year. And some of that is, um, people start looking towards the new year. Some of that is, uh, people who might've been shorting things start covering, right. And they're kind of like going into the end of the year with a, with a clean book. Some of it, uh, frankly is, uh, driven end of year there. You start to get some of the data points coming out about all of the holiday shopping. You know, there's all these different reasons why. Um, but December 15th is usually the day that uh the market bottoms in december um that was yesterday let's see what

happens for the next two weeks right i i don't know what's gonna happen the second that everyone starts talking about the fact that there's a santa rally is when santa doesn't show up and the grinch shows up instead right but um i think that uh it's usually a pretty good kind of festive time you know okay um i saw a stat this morning that micro strategy now owns 3.2 percent of all bitcoin can anyone catch up can anyone catch up um well we don't know how much everyone else owns so that that's kind of the first uh you know first question um i believe that if i remember correctly satoshi has 800 000 bitcoin so technically satoshi has more um than uh than strategy do i think that any public company is going to uh to catch up um very hard to see that

happening uh you know you you could tap capital markets like there's certain things that you could try to do the amount of capital that has been raised to accumulate that amount of bitcoin and given where the price was when it started remember the first purchase was like 500 million dollars at like 9 or 10k right so just that alone somebody today would have to pay nine times more money to buy the same amount of Bitcoin, right? So if you have 9x or 10x the amount of money for every purchase that they made, you got to raise hundreds of billions of dollars, right? Or you've got the greatest business in the world that's throwing off hundreds of billions of dollars. Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it likely? I don't think so. But let's see. 3.2% is a big

number, but it's also a small number, right? It's not like they own 10%. Could they get to 10%? You know, there is a question about the threshold, you know, at what threshold would people be concerned? Some people are concerned at 3%. Some people say 5%. Some people say 10%. Some people say, I don't care how much they own, right? I don't know if I have a strong opinion. Is that given the like centralization versus decentralization aspect of Bitcoin, or is it something else that people would be concerned about? Well, regardless of how much Bitcoin you own, you don't have like a bigger say in the network, right um you know if you had hash rate or nodes or something then that'd be a little bit different

um but yeah the beauty of bitcoin is that it is built to be decentralized and so regardless of your ownership stake you still have you know kind of one voice right um so i don't think it has so much to do with the uh centralization like in the governance of the network i do think that there's some people who say hey wait a second here if you are uh the largest holder of bitcoin and then you decide to sell or um you're in a structure where you get liquidated right i don't think strategy is going to get liquidated but you know those are the questions that people have is like you know same thing of kind of like if satoshi came back and sold all their bitcoin what would happen to the price what would happen to the market what you know whatever so i think people just get um

they get nervous of the unknowns more than anyone can point to like what is the risk right and i i don't think that that's like a crazy exercise to go through. I think it's very fair and prudent to say, hey, what are the risks here? But I have not heard a compelling argument as to this is the thing that, you know, we should be yelling and screaming and saying that no one should own 3% of the Bitcoin. 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.

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As you look towards the end of the year, everyone was expecting the Q4 rally. That has not happened yet. Fourth quarter. Fourth quarter. Do you think that we flip and December 15th is kind of the market bottom for December and we go somewhere else from here? Or is there another thing that you're thinking about heading into the new year? So, what's it?

Elon's got the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. What would be really entertaining? Everyone is convinced we're headed to a Bitcoin bear market. What if this thing dips to like 78K and turns and rips right back to a new all-time high? Shots up. I'm not saying that that's going to happen, but that would be the most entertaining outcome.

It dropped 40%. Everyone thinks it's going down 80% from the all-time high. And then it turns and rips right back in their face. And everyone then says, oh, wait, the four-year cycle's over. Let's see. I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball. A long time ago, when you're a bull rider, you don't tell the bull where to go.

You just hold on, right? The bull's got a mind of its own. It's going to thrash around. It's going to buck. It's going to do all this stuff. the best bull riders say be one with the bull you want to go left let's go left you want to go right let's go right you want to go up down sideways or backwards i ain't letting go that's what i think you know the best bitcoin uh kind of holders do if if there's like a category of

best bitcoin holder is you know don't fight the bull right just just hold it and uh it's gonna take you all over the place it'll take you all over the world you'll meet all kinds of interesting people it'll go up it'll go down it'll bring you tears and joy it'll actually teach you a lot about the world in terms of everything from geopolitics to economics and everything in between but just go with the bull man don't fight it you know be one with the bull and uh and life will be good okay um let's end on this so the bitcoin narrative seems to have shifted and like it's trying to find its place in the economy today it's you know the store of value it's the medium of exchange like where does Bitcoin sit in your eyes today when given like the narrative, like, what is this

asset? The apex predator. I don't think that anything has really changed with Bitcoin. I think the world has changed around Bitcoin and that is probably the mental like dichotomy that people have, or like the paradox of this is all of the Bitcoiners have been so focused on Bitcoin that it's kind of like if you're playing football, you got to keep your head on a swivel. You got to keep your eyes up. You're going to get knocked out, right? Same thing here is if you just watch Bitcoin,

but you don't watch the world around Bitcoin, you can miss things. Because the beauty of Bitcoin is Bitcoin is not going to change. The monetary policy is going to execute. It's software driven. It's programmatic. And regardless of what happens in the world, regardless of the increase or decrease in demand,

And nothing about Bitcoin's monetary policy is going to change. But the world's going to change. And so the introduction of stablecoins, whether people like it or not, that definitely took some of the use case of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. Stablecoins are a better medium of exchange than Bitcoin for certain use cases. Again, if you want 100% full resistance to censorship or censorship, Bitcoin is the best thing to use for a medium of exchange. if you just want really fast cheap stable price payments stable coins are better right so i don't know what percentage of bitcoin's future value was going to be derived from it as a money but that is now being co-opted by stable coins now you could argue that stable coins have also been

a huge boom to bitcoin i would argue that right in terms of the ability to get more money into Bitcoin and let people hold Bitcoin. Um, so it's not a clear stable coins are good or bad for Bitcoin, right? There's kind of different components to it. But if you also then look at like these banks coming into the game, right? Like think about what's happened in the last five years, Bitcoin made two of the most powerful, uh, uh, Bitcoin made two of the most powerful organizations in the world bend the knee the u.s government and wall street banks five years ago people were worried are they going to ban bitcoin i literally know people mike green who were saying that bitcoin was going to get a band by the government wrong and

wall street banks jamie dimon was saying that he'd fire anyone who was trading it uh larry fink you know what was very anti it uh bank of america just nobody wanted anything to do with it now we have a strategic bitcoin reserve the president's sons are building american bitcoin and they're mining bitcoin uh you've got the president united states you've got the treasury secretary who tweeted about bitcoin the cabinet holds bitcoin like the u.s government bent the knee they now adopted bitcoin they are bitcoiners wall street banks are doing the same thing right We've recently gotten news that they're starting to either work on or build or launch Bitcoin-backed products or Bitcoin-linked products. They're starting to think about lending against Bitcoin.

They're starting to think about custodying Bitcoin. Two of the most powerful organizations in the world, U.S. government, Wall Street banks, bent the knee, and Bitcoin is winning. So if you look forward, what's the role of Bitcoin? man this thing's a force that's why i say it's like an apex predator you could fight it for a long time but bitcoin is in the shadows it's stalking you it's watching you it's just waiting and waiting and waiting and eventually you and bitcoin meet again and you say i can't beat you so i must embrace you but those two groups look at bitcoin i think quite differently of course i'm correct right well the government people say uh government and the banks just want to make

money from them well the banks for sure they love fees right that they're in the business to make money to facilitate payments etc uh but the government looks at it i think from an investment standpoint of like hey will this value yeah yeah they want to make money but but also look there's a security as well like yes uh the banks look at it as new revenue new users new profits right um and and uh you know new assets into their banks uh the government looks at it as a new asset into the balance sheet but i also think that they look at it go back to larry fink you know bitcoin is a fear asset right is uh they're very much focused on um this idea that bitcoin can protect us from things that we are worried about right so the banks they are worried about

entropy they are worried about uh you know this kind of like um boringness and irrelevance and you know lack of growth well bitcoin as we saw with blackrock can inject new revenue new profits new users, new energy, new attention, all of that. Okay, that's interesting. If you're a financial institution, you're like, how do I get a little taste of that? Give me a little sugar high off that, right? The government as well, though, it's a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Well, they think it's strategic. It's not strategic because they're speculating. They didn't call it the speculative Bitcoin reserve. They called it the strategic Bitcoin reserve. The reason why they did that is because they think that there is some value from a defensive purpose of holding Bitcoin

on the government's balance sheet i don't know what do i know better than them they're they're smart people right so i think that's the um yeah that's the thought and the other thing too i would say is just uh i do think people drastically underestimate how valuable it is that bitcoin has been around for 15 years now there's the like lindy effect of the longer it's around the more likely it is to be around in the future um there's the you know uh oh i didn't like it a year old three years five years right but like now i'm convinced because people been talking about it for more than a decade. My friend got rich on it,

you know, whatever. But you know the thing I really believe is most important about time expiring? Young people are now ascending to positions of power

and influence inside these organizations. And the young people are Bitcoiners. So, you know, I've been meeting with a lot of financial institutions over the last year or so.

A lot of the work is being done by 27, 28 to 45 year olds. sure they might have a boss or a principal they work for or whatever but these people are young and maybe they heard about bitcoin for the first time 10 years ago so they were 18 to 35 they've got a little bit you know more in terms of personal capital they've got more influence at work they've got more power they probably have more assets at their disposal to deploy in a professional uh you know setting they're sympathetic they're enthusiastic about bitcoin

So as time goes on you get more and more bitcoiners, right? Um, I think I told you before Uh, I definitely said on the podcast many times eventually a bitcoiner will be president And I used to always say it's not because someone's going to run on a platform for bitcoin It's that somebody who owns bitcoin is going to become the president Now what's interesting about trump is he kind of did both he held bitcoin and became president But he did have a i'm, you know, i'm going to do stuff with bitcoin Right So like when I used to say that people would be like that's crazy

but like here we are I can we can probably look up the tweets but like I don't know five years ago I was saying that

took five years but I think like everyone in the market points like they want a catalyst right they want something to come out

and have the good headline of you know Bitcoin adopted as you know the global reserve currency I'm just going to use a crazy example but like

if that got adopted you know Bitcoin price skyrockets everyone's happy as a clam but what I think it is is like the global wealth transfer for example People haven't been waiting on that for a long time.

And it's not like one day you wake up and all the money has been transferred to the younger generations. What it is over time, it slowly gets adopted and money is slowly seeping into the younger generations. Bitcoiners are an interesting bunch, man. Bitcoin has grown on a compound annual growth basis over the last three years at 70%. Those are video game numbers. That is insane. And people are unhappy. Maybe they should be unhappy

because they were promised it was going to 200, right? And we're at 87 or 90, right? On the other hand, it's really, really hard to look at the context. And when sentiment shifts as it has, and you see the fear and greed index at sub 20, it's like, damn, this is not working. Yeah.

but you know one of the interesting things about uh you know what a um bear hibernation you know how they go in its winter time right now it snowed in new york city recently right people are hibernating you know when the hibernation's over when the bear wakes up well you know when the bitcoin low sentiment is over when bitcoin goes up and so it can change like that all of a sudden bitcoin jumps from 87 or 90 000 to 100 bitcoiners they're gonna be dancing on graves again talking their shit you know dropping the tweets and the memes and all this stuff and it's gonna be you know it's party like it's 1999 again right maybe it's good to get some you know prudence in the market get some uh kind of uh calmness take away the froth because it basically allows for you to

build the foundation for the next you know leg up but i i continue to tell people i i do not expect bitcoin to go up 20x in bull markets right but that's okay i just want something that is better than other assets to me the relative performance is important i can't tell you how many friends you said earlier in this episode, how many friends of mine that I know that have stopped putting net new dollars into Bitcoin because they don't see the asymmetry and they don't see, hey, how does it go from 100 to 200? Is that really going to happen as quick as, you know, this equity or, you know, this other asset going up double in price? What I usually tell people is if they say Bitcoin doesn't work anymore, I say, well, just give me yours. I'll hold on to them for you.

Right. All of a sudden, they're not so interested in that. Okay. All right. So obviously you think there's some value to it, right? Now we can disagree on where the value is, but at least we know it's not zero, right? We take a dollar, what about $10, right? You know, and eventually you realize that they would probably not sell it to you at $87,000, right? And so you say, okay, hold on a second here. So you think it's worth more than $87,000. Remember, you know, kind of the famous Buffett quote, markets are a voting machine in the short run, but a weighing machine in the long run. Emotion and sentiment really drives market prices. Over the long run though, eventually the value is kind of priced in. So the beauty of Bitcoin, if you think that

Bitcoin is not interesting, if you think that Bitcoin is not valuable, you can go right now and there are millions of people who will take your Bitcoin from you for $87,000 per Bitcoin. Go give it to them. It's kind of like a budge training for Navy SEALs. Go ring the bell. At any point, you could step off the train. You can quit. You can go home.

You can get a hot meal, get warm, write and tell all your friends about what could have been. There's no way you just compared to selling your Bitcoin to ringing the bell at Bud's. Well, I mean, think about it. One is a mental, essentially torture, volatility mentally really messes with people especially when they start to believe certain

narratives and they end up not being true the hardest part of investing is controlling your emotions so the mental component of this whether people like it or not is actually probably one of the most important things buying is a rational investment decision holding it's kind of an irrational emotional exercise so what does buds do it tortures your body but it also tortures your mind right and the ringing of the bell is basically mentally giving up and saying no no mas i'm done go get a hot meal get warm and talk about what could have been how many people throughout the years couldn't handle the volatility and they said no mas and rather than ring the bell they hit the sell button and then they talked about what could have been right so again it it is

um one is physical that impacts mental the other in terms of bitcoin is volatility that impacts mental which leads to eventually like hitting the sell button or ringing the bell are both forms of capitulation right what i have learned from the people who've been around bitcoin way longer than i have been is that holding over a long period of time a great asset works and you know maybe last thing i'll leave you is i don't know if you saw um some numbers i don't know if the numbers are accurate but uh some numbers came out about uh peter teal and his spacex ownership and they're claiming that he's going to own 42 billion dollars of spacex when it goes public at 1.5 trillion there's some assumptions in there about like carry and you know whatever

but like if you if you never sell or you don't sell a lot works out pretty well right yeah so let's see that's all i got for you today all right we'll see you guys next week