The Pomp Podcast - My Prediction For Bitcoin's Price In September | Anthony & John Pompliano

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

John and Anthony Pompliano discuss bitcoin, why gold has been going up, will the ethereum rally continue, solutions to fix parts of the government, and predictions for the month of September. ===================== Markets are at all-time highs. Public equities are outperforming. And individual investors are driving it all. It’s officially the rise of the retail investor. On September 12th in NYC, I’m hosting the Independent Investor Summit — a one-day event built exclusively for self-directed investors. We’re bringing together some of the smartest public market investors I know for a full day of macro insights, market predictions, one-on-one fireside chats, and actionable investment ideas from each investor. This is going to be an absolute banger event. Join us if you like markets and think retail is two steps ahead of Wall Street.👉 TICKETS: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.independentinvestor.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠ (use promo code POMPYT25)======================Check out my NEW show for daily bite-sized breakdowns of the biggest stories in finance, technology, and politics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠http://pompdesk.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ 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 $500 in rewards.======================Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join.======================TimeStamps:0:00 - Intro1:36 - Bitcoin’s recent performance vs gold16:44 - Solutions to fix parts of the government26:44 - Why has ethereum gone up so much?34:37 - What to expect going into September?

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano many of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them

for hours while i ask questions in an effort to learn so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform watch episodes on youtube and tell your friends and family about the podcast my goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. What's going

on, guys. Today, we got a great episode with John Pompliano. In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin gold's rise, why it's up 70% in the last 18 months, how to think about Bitcoin's performance in comparison to gold, why central banks are buying so much gold and will they eventually buy Bitcoin. Then we talk about TSA and DMV and why the government may not be the best people to always provide services to people and why Bitcoin is actually telling us something about that situation. And then lastly, we end up talking about the month of September. Everyone knows that the month of September for Bitcoin and stocks usually is a little bit weaker. Prices tend to go down. So I explain why maybe I think actually September is going to be a month where

we go up instead of down. I give you all of the reasons why. That and much more in this conversation with John Pappiano. All right, John, what's the first topic? All right, let's talk Bitcoin performance over the last eight, nine months. So Bitcoin as it sits now is essentially it's up for the year, but compared to gold and other assets, it's looking a little flat and kind of underperforming, especially when compared to gold. Why is it underperforming gold right now? Well, let's talk about gold for a second. Central banks have been buying a lot of gold. Last year, central banks were 20% of global demand for gold. Historically, it's only been 10%. So it's two times more on a percentage basis. And what we have seen is that we have seen gold last year surpass

the euro as a reserve asset for foreign central banks. So it's a big deal because historically, what we have seen over the last two decades or so is that fiat currencies, those were the chosen method for storing value for the central banks. They're in the business of holding, issuing, playing with fiat currencies. So naturally, that's what's in their reserves. Gold, they never left, but it was a smaller percentage. That has completely changed. And now what you get is you get the fake world, the fiat world. The fake world is being kind of replaced or is being eaten into by things that are real, things like gold, Bitcoin, et cetera. Now, with central banks in particular, as they have kept buying gold, that is a persistent demand for gold. So gold is up

from the start of 2024 till today, about 70%. For an asset that is usually pretty stable, that's one of the attractive features of it. The fact that it's up 70% in a little over 18 months, it's pretty incredible. This is like a historic run for gold. Now, why is it that gold is going up? Well, it's because you have governments that are printing a lot of money. You have interest rates that are colluding with the printing of money uh you uh around the world you get a lot of interest rate cuts right now even though the u.s is fighting it right the globally there's a lot you get the issue that occurred in 2022 when the united states of america decided that we were going to go and we were going to unilaterally seize the reserves of russia now whether you

agree with that decision not agree whatever but the implications of that meant that no longer was the US dollar and treasuries going to be a neutral asset. Jeff Park, CIO at ProCapBTC, he's got a fantastic piece out talking about this specific thing on there. I highly recommend people read it. Now, when you think about all of these different components that are feeding into central bank demand for gold, what people are really saying at the central banks is we need to have more allocation to a sound money principled store of value. Now, that doesn't mean the dollar is going away, right? The dollar is still the number one reserve for these foreign central banks. Gold is just now number two. It used to not be number two. So gold's been moving

up, but the dollar is still king when it comes to foreign central bank reserves. Bitcoin one day will be in the mix. Not yet, but it will be in the mix. Now, why is gold 70% up and you say that Bitcoin is flat? Well, it's all about relative performance to expectations, not necessarily to other assets, because Bitcoin is still destroying all of these other assets. Bitcoin was $70,000 in November of 2024. It's now $115,000. So it's appreciated quite a bit. Now, on top of that, Bitcoin was $40,000 in January of 2024. So Bitcoin is up almost 300% in the same period that gold is up 70%. So yes, gold is up a lot compared to its historical kind of volatility. Bitcoin is up a lot compared to gold, but people expect Bitcoin to go up hundreds of percent every single year. And so

when it doesn't do that, then people start to think, oh, why is Bitcoin not up more? Oh, I thought that Bitcoin should be up more. Gold's up 70. Why isn't Bitcoin up a thousand, right? That's kind of what we're starting to see. So it's always very important to separate yourself from the feelings over the facts. And the facts are that Bitcoin's up a lot in the same period that gold's up a lot. Why? Because not only central banks, but companies, investment firms, individuals, organizations, nonprofits, everyone who can allocate capital is realizing that holding dollars and bonds is a losing trade. And therefore, they want to hold sound money principles. And you're watching that play out with the adoption of gold and the adoption of Bitcoin. Both are

going much higher. And I don't think it's going to stop anytime soon because we're about to get rate cuts, more money printing, and people are going to realize that the problem that they're running from is only about to get worse. And therefore they need to put bigger and bigger allocations into Bitcoin and gold. When you think about holding cash as a strategy, that's essentially what the central banks and institutions are doing, right? And you can talk about, hey, look, good strategy, bad strategy, whatever. Over the last five years, it hasn't been that great of a strategy, but maybe over the last 12 months, it actually has been an okay strategy. How do you think about the relationship between, hey, why don't we just go print a bunch

of fiat and go buy gold or Bitcoin or something like that, these central banks versus let's hold the U.S. dollar and continue to have that relationship with the United States and the U.S. dollar through that liquidity? Well, so it depends on which central bank you're talking about, right? In the sense of the Fed is very different than, let's say, any foreign central banks. There's kind of two things, domestic and international. And then within the international community there are people who are friend and foe of the united states and so if you look at somebody like a russia a china a venezuela north korea uh whatever right those go in the foe category for the most part they are lessening their dependency on it you know uh china and

japan now japan has to be a friend but china and japan i think used to be the like seventh combined buyer of treasuries or something like that. Like they were very big buyer of U.S. debt. Now they're like 22nd. So they have significantly fallen in terms of their demand for buying. Doesn't mean they've stopped, but it just means they're buying less than they used to.

They've also been buying a lot of gold. And so I think that you are watching this kind of reallocation or rebalancing occur. Now, in terms of our friends, sure, there's plenty of central banks that still hold dollars, number one reserve asset in the world. But what people are looking at is

what's the interest rate i'm getting on that so if you have you know think about if you're a non-profit with uh responsibilities and liabilities if you're a pension fund if you're an endowment right like the the fixed income is actually pretty important the problem is that the fed has been telling people that we have a two percent inflation target first of all they've been completely off on that hasn't been two percent since like 2020 right so the fed not only is not doing their job but on top of that to go all the way back to 1971 when we came off the gold standard, and you look at the dollar debasement over that time, we've actually been debasing at about 4%, not 2%. So okay, why is that important? Well, what is the Fed funds rate

right now? Right? It's not much more than 4%. So now all of a sudden, you start asking yourself, wait a second here, on a real return basis, because we know that if that's the period of debasement from 1971 to today, but the US dollar has lost 30% of its purchasing power since 2020, money. That means we're accelerating the debasement. Wait a second. If I'm holding treasuries, I'm not making a real rate of return. I'm actually getting paid a negative real rate of return. So take what am I getting paid plus the currency debasement or minus the currency debasement and puts me negative. So it means if I hold treasuries, I'm actually losing money. So there's only one of two reasons why you would hold treasuries for the most part. Either one,

you don't know that this is happening and you're just not that smart. And so you're taking a negative real rate return on the chin and that's not good or two you know it's happening and you're doing it for non-economic reasons you're doing it to remain friends with the united states you're doing it for short-term purposes right where you don't have to worry about the longer-term currency the basement there's all these other non-economic type things that you may be driving you to do it so that brings us to the question of the speculative attack which is what you're talking about uh this was a idea that was popularized by pierre rochard back in 2014 he wrote about the idea that a government may go and print money in order to be able to go and buy

Bitcoin. At some point, they would just say, screw it, print as much as we can and go buy as much Bitcoin as we can, sell the past, buy the future type situation. But the problem with doing that is the second you start to print money to buy Bitcoin or gold, you essentially are saying to the world, you're signaling to them, we as a government, as a central bank have lost confidence in our fiat currency, in our national currency. You're telling everyone, go dump it. So then it becomes a race for the exits. You're going to have this massive currency collapse.

Now, how quickly? Is that like a one-day thing? Is that a one-year thing? All up for debate. But I think that's the big thing is classic innovator's dilemma, right? I don't want to disrupt myself because there's value to keeping the thing that I got.

And so if no different than a big business, if I've got a business that is working, maybe it's not the best business, It's not the worst business, right? Why would I take the risk of going and trying to disrupt it with a brand new thing that may or may not work, but if it causes me to give this thing up?

But if your business is losing money, wouldn't you go do that? Liquidate the assets, try to get as much out of it as possible. Yes, it hurts citizens and things like that. So there's like, it's not just a business, but- So that's the whole thing is, where do you see countries adopting Bitcoin?

You see it basically in countries that have nothing to lose. You see it in El Salvador. you see it in an Argentina, you see it in a Bhutan, you see it in the kingdom of Tonga, you see it in Russia, right? These are all places that are making decisions with their backs against the wall.

And they realize there's nothing that we can lose. El Salvador doesn't even have a national currency, they lost it, right? And so now they're a dollarized nation. Well, what are we gonna do? We can't print money anyways, right? Just go and do this. And so I think that you're seeing that.

The other place you're seeing this is people who are saying, well, maybe we're not going to buy it, but let's mine it. And you see a lot of countries that have, frankly, abundance of energy. And they're saying, rather than us go and spend capital, why don't we just go monetize the energy abundance that we have and go mine Bitcoin and then hold it? And so I think those are the two big things that you're watching play out here. Now, gold is really no different. I do think that gold, it's interesting because gold is a situation where people don't usually expect it to go up like this. And so it's been a pretty stable asset.

And so if you're kind of selling, let's say, a fiat currency to buy gold, yeah, maybe over a really long period of time, there was like an arbitrage in terms of the dollar would be debased or some other currency would be debased. But in a six-month or 12-month period, the difference wasn't really that big, right? If gold only goes up a couple percent and the dollar only goes down a couple percent, you're talking about a 5%, maybe 10% net difference. Not really that big of a deal. But if now you're talking about gold's up 70% in 18 months and the dollar may be down 6% or 7%, now you're talking about a freaking gap big enough you can drive a Mack truck through. That becomes way more interesting.

So that's where Bitcoin, I think, has really been pretty interesting, is this idea of how do we go and use the tools that are available to go and buy more Bitcoins? People mining it, buying it, holding it, earning it, all these things. And so I think central banks, eventually, they're going to do the exact same thing. It's just that right now, central banks, it is an accepted thing for them to buy gold. What do you think they're going to do next? They're going to extend out. We want sound money principles. Outside the system, no one can print more of it.

Okay, well, gold's a great thing for that. Bitcoin's a great thing for that too. And as young people ascend to the positions of power and influence inside of these central banks, duh, they're going to start buying Bitcoin. It's just a matter of when are they going to do it? Are they going to talk about it publicly when they start to do it?

What are the implications of it? I mean, there's a whole conversation we could have based off of that, but it's going to happen. Today's episode is brought to you by Zappo Bank, where eligible members can unlock the power of Bitcoin without selling it. Need cash fast? With Zappobank's Bitcoin-backed loans, you can access 40% of your Bitcoin's value, borrowing as much as $1 million for a full year with low interest rates, zero fees, and no early repayment fees either.

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They have that FOMO effect. is there something that would make you know most central banks around the world say look we have to have exposure to this asset well i mean there's like pretty extreme things you know if the federal reserve tomorrow said hey we're gonna print you know two trillion dollars and we're gonna go and we're gonna try to buy as much bitcoin as we can and because bitcoin's entire uh market cap is a couple trillion right it's a set of shit you know flying um sure then i was essentially oh my you know whatever that's not essential banks really work right they're pretty prudent um not always smart but they're pretty prudent in terms of you know trying to steer like a cruise ship more than

a speedboat um and so i just think that it's time like that is the biggest thing is we just need time to pass there's some competitive dynamics to it but i think more importantly is uh simply just saying look let time pass let young people get into these positions let's you know kind of death by thousand cuts right um the treasury is now more sympathetic to bitcoin than it was four years ago okay so is uh the fed it seems like the sec the president right like just think of the change that's happened in the last four or five years we went from anti to pro we didn't really do that oh yeah we set up a strategic bitcoin reserve kind of right like we didn't buy more uh at least not publicly um we're not mining any as a country um we just had a sentiment

shift it's kind of the american strategy right like like push the productivity and the opportunity to the private sector let them go do this stuff right um but i do think that you'll see change happen at some point um just gonna take some time yeah you seem like a big fan of like hey let's take the resources instead of giving them to the government to go do let's just give them to the citizens whether it's the grants whether it's through a bunch of different vehicles uh and then give that to the private citizens to go figure out the solutions to these problems well first thing we should start with is stop taking the money from the citizens right i mean there are people in this country that pay more than 50 of their income to the government they don't work for

themselves they work for the government more than 50 of their income goes to the government right You know, I always joke around usually July 15th, sometimes July 25th, somewhere in that range. I have friends who they pay more than 50% and I text them. I say, congratulations, you start working for yourself now for this year. I mean, it's crazy, right? And so if you think about that, okay, that's the first thing. The second thing is why does the government need so much money, right? Well, I think we've noticed that there's a lot of things that they're spending money on that probably aren't really things that should have money spent on them.

That's another thing. And then I think that there's this philosophical aspect to it of name something that the government is good at, that they are better at it than the private sector. Now, there are some things, right? I don't think the government is completely inept. Printing money. Well, definitely printing money. But if the if the private market was allowed to do it, the private market would be better than the government printing money. Right. I think that there is quite a bit of even in take defense. Right. Like people like, oh, the public sector is better at defending America than the private sector. Well, from a people standpoint, potentially, but you had organizations like Blackwater, Triple Canopy, many others, like the government was just outsourcing the work to them. So the private sector was better able to deliver on some of these things than the public sector was, right?

If you look at a company like Anduril, I would argue they're much better at building munitions and defense technology and equipment and stuff like that at this point, right? So the government really ends up being a purchaser, a organizer, like a logistics manager. But from a pure production standpoint, even the military, right, is the government really is using the private sector to do a lot of the work. And so that, again, doesn't mean that the government is bad or shouldn't have a participate in some way. But it does mean that the private sector, I think, is much better at allocating capital. And mainly it's because there are ramifications, both positive and negative for the decisions they make. And that ends up being good for, you know, I think the country is having put the money in the hands of the capital allocators, right? I always joke that. Do you think that we could

fix the DMV if we turned it over to the private sector? I think pretty quickly, it'd be like a no brainer, right? Like people hate this example, but if we put Jeff Bezos in charge of the DMV for 12 months do you think it'll get better you'll be getting your your driver's license within six hours well i would argue this ship to your house i would argue this if he is allowed to actually run it like a business and he can actually fire underperformers and he is given the same budget the same resources everything not only will the experience be better but i actually bet it will lead to more people being employed by the DMV. Because what will happen is you'll get higher throughput. And my guess is that they could do that and lower the cost. Right? So imagine how

crazy that would be. Jeff Bezos, if he took over the DMV, probably could lower the cost for the customer, could increase the velocity and throughput, could improve the experience, could expand the product offering, and probably could drive top line revenue higher, which means that he could then go build more facilities, get closer to the customer, again, get wait times down, throughput higher. It just feeds on itself, right? It's efficiency. So if Jeff Bezos could increase the efficiency of the DMV and could lead to more government revenue, expanded services, and more job creation, wouldn't that be a good thing? Of course. But that's not how the government thinks, right? And so I just think that that's a pretty good example of it's not a public-private

sector thing. It is like, who is empowered to do thing, right? Because if you gave Bezos the same exact um capital as the government has now well he understands how to do this whereas the people who run these things sometimes don't and by the way their hands are tied i think that that's one of the lessons from doge is like these guys were like yo you can't fire anyone it's crazy right what do you mean you can't fire someone who's doing a bad job i mean look at the fed governor right now again i'm not saying whether she should be fired not fired go to court this whatever all i know is that you have a uh fhfa uh director bill polte who says the fed governor committed mortgage fraud pretty damning evidence in terms of what's been posted online now is it real i have

no reason to believe it's not so okay then you have the president come out and say that she's fired still on the website still going to meetings still participating you can't fire me i mean that's kind of crazy right so okay well if that's happening at the fed board governor level we think it's happening at tsa dmv post office right all these like same shit's happening right and so again like every single time that i have gone to one of those places it's just like any organization you've got superstars and you've got underperformers and guess what the superstars they know who the underperformers are. They don't want to work with the underperformers, right? Because they got to pick up the slack. And so you don't think that the superstars wish that they could

get rid of the underperformers and replace them with other superstars? Of course they do. And so it comes back to this idea of we're talking about organizational kind of management now. We're not talking about public or private sector. It's just that the government inserts itself with these rules that protects the free market or interferes in the free market in a way that now starts to screw up these organizations. So again, do you think that certain people who have great businesses couldn't be in charge of the TSA and get you through the airport faster? Right? By the way, Clear is a great example. How crazy is it that Clear created an express lane and now the express lane is backed up because there's so many people who are willing to pay to get through faster.

why why did it take the private sector to do that shouldn't the government like you're running the checkpoint figure it out right and they tried to with the uh kind of uh um what is it the the pre pre-check global entry yeah all this stuff right they try whatever but it's not working right to the degree that there was a market opportunity clear stepped in and and was able to show that And so all of a sudden, you ask people, are there people out there who'd pay $10,000 to go to the airport and walk right through? You walk through a machine or whatever, right? So you still get checked. You don't wait in line.

You don't. But just you're promised you will get through this five minutes or less. That's the promise. If you don't, you get money back or something, right? Whatever the thing is. Of course, it's people who pay. Not everybody. A lot of people can't afford it.

but there's the person who travels multiple times a week for business. Yeah. If they don't pay their business, they'll pay. Right. Okay. Well, how many $10,000 people do you have to get? And how much does it cost to, I don't know, staff a whole nother line. Right. Like these are the things that if you were operating a business and looking at it from an efficiency and a revenue driving standpoint would be completely different. So again, it goes back to, well,

everything is free for the most part, right? Maybe the one-time fee, whatever. It's mostly free. It's a horrible experience. That's why Bitcoin is going to beat out the Fed over time. It's because it doesn't have all that nonsense, all the bureaucracy, all the human-led kind of bad decision-making.

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That's BitcoinIRA.com slash Pomp to upgrade your retirement today. Speaking of outperforming, one person who's been on an absolute roll recently is Tom Lee from Fundrat. He seemed to be timing up Ethereum pretty well with his predictions over the last few years. What do you think about Ethereum and how people are starting to use it similar to the Bitcoin treasury companies? It looks like he is trying to do that on the Ethereum side. Well, it's always a chicken or egg. Did Ethereum go up and Tom Lee realized that? Or did Tom Lee say Ethereum was going to go up and then Ethereum followed? I think that one of Tom Lee's greatest assets i think he's incredibly smart i really like him uh a lot is um people are listening

and so when he says hey i think that this is going to be a thing a lot of people move capital based on that um and so it kind of doesn't matter was it ethereum was going to go up and tom just realized it earlier or tom said it was going to go up and then it went up right like he not only said something he also put skin in the game built a business right and ethereum has gone up now what What I will say is that Ethereum is still down in Bitcoin terms from the last all-time high, right? So it's all kind of relative performance-based. But I think that the key thing that Tom understands about Wall Street is that Wall Street really likes yield. They really like cash flow.

And by doing the treasury strategy, not with Bitcoin, but with one of these altcoins where they're staking, there's yield and there's revenue and there's profit. And so, yeah, sure, there's speculation, if you will, on the price of Ethereum going up over time. But more importantly is he is giving them a box that they understand. And he's saying, well, what if I could build a business with not that many people but could have a lot of revenue and a lot of profit? Would that be interesting? they say uh yeah that'd be interesting right he says okay well what if that trades at a premium to the underlying ethereum because it gets a um uh an equity value right it's got a actual equity premium because it's got a business got cash flow it's a forward-looking thing what is the multiple it's going to trade at well if you take 2025 revenue let's say and it trades at a 10 times multiple i don't know what the multiple is right let's just say it's 10 times well now all of a sudden how are you gonna ever trade below nav if you've got a 10 times premium on this year's

revenue right so you start to do these things like tom lee understands wall street tom lee also understands crypto and so he's putting these two things together and he's figured out a mix to bring to the market and say hey there's a hole here people want this but no one's done it yet so i'm gonna be the first one to do it now in terms of ethereum's prospects i don't hold ethereum right So forget what I'm saying. Just watch what I'm doing. I famously, infamously sold my Ethereum for Solana in December of 2023. Solana was at like 70 bucks.

I think when I made kind of the big decision, I had started buying it somewhere in the 40s. Solana is around 200 today. Right? So again, it's all relative. buying Bitcoin at certain points during that time period has outperformed Ethereum and Solana, right? So it all kind of goes back. Andrew Keyes, somebody who has been around for a long time, I really respect. He went on CNBC when he announced his Ethereum treasury strategy. And although maybe I think he was being a little bombastic in this comparison,

I think he said something like Ethereum has outperformed Bitcoin 50X since Ethereum's ICO. okay um you know but that wasn't really available to most people in the market like it was a it was a you know if you know you know thing um it was basically like a private seed round deal um but again it all goes back to over time what is the long-term you know trend of these things and in my personal view which these guys may disagree with me on but in my personal view um i think that ethereum will have a very hard time growing in value in bitcoin denominated terms and i've been talking about for months, if not years now, this idea of Bitcoin rate of return is what I am looking at. I am personally trying to understand what are the assets that are going to outperform

Bitcoin in Bitcoin terms so that I can think about portfolio construction. My rate of return is not the dollar, the S&P, treasuries, or anything like that. My rate of return, my hurdle rate is Bitcoin. So if my hurdle rate is Bitcoin, I need something that's going to outperform that. And I don't think that over long periods of time, any altcoin is going to be able to do that. Now, will you find periods of time, one, three years? Sure. I'm not a trader. I don't want to be in there making decisions. I want to buy something today and hold it for as long as possible. You know, one of the things that I like to ask people sometimes, you know, who is somebody who you've heard say something that really stuck with you and why did it stick with you? And for me, one of the answers would be Ken Langone did an interview with Joe Lonsdale of 8VC. And in the interview, Ken Langone said that his average holding period for his portfolio, the average holding period was 42 years. So first of all, I'm not even 42 years old, just to put it in perspective, right?

That is an incredible track record. He just doesn't sell? He just doesn't sell. He buys things. He's got conviction and he just holds them. Now, it happens to be that he bought like Eli Lilly when it was like a penny. or whatever, right? And many other great companies that he was able to do that, right? But average holding period of 42 years, that's crazy. I aspire to be able to say that one day, right? Some really,

really long holding period. So what that means is you got to be able to buy things that have a long-term value kind of accretion to them, right? And I think that is, again, from my investing philosophy from my perspective, I think that Bitcoin more so than anything else in the entire crypto ecosystem is most likely to have resilience and to be anti-fragile and continue to appreciate over a 30, 40 year time period. I don't know what happens to the other ones. Some of them are going to win. Some of them aren't going to win. There's going to be competition. There's going to be upgrades. There's going to be improvements, whatever. Anything that I've ever done outside of bitcoin i look at it in terms of it is something that is a more short to medium term express

expression of a view more so than anything where i'm going to hold it for a long period of time and i think that that is you know that's the question right is um these other altcoin treasures not just ethereum there's now solana ones and many others what happens over the long run nobody knows right um i i would argue that there's plenty of people have predicted the demise of ethereum as the second largest blockchain for a long time hasn't really happened right um doesn't mean that ethereum is outperforming bitcoin in bitcoin terms but it also doesn't mean that ethereum is going to go to zero right um and has anyone built anything that's bigger from a market cap basis no so maybe one of the lessons is like first or second mover advantage

is really powerful because it was able to capture a lot of capital and a lot of attention make a lot of progress and developers and all this stuff because the first one that was ever created is the biggest the second one ever creates the second biggest that could change but right now actually being early seems to have been an incredibly important part of being successful over the long run in terms of getting scale what do you think about as we end towards the end of this year september is normally a down month for equities bitcoins like pretty much across the board uh we are expecting a rate cut this month i think there's like a 92 chance that they end up cutting rates uh what do you expect going into kind of like the end of the year the last four months

i have 75 confidence on what i'm about to say so i i i'm gonna take the intellectual uh soft route and say i have a escape here uh because there's 25 of me thinks that what what I'm about to say may not be true, but 75% confidence. September is going to be an up month for stocks and Bitcoin. Why? Everyone thinks it's going to be a down month. The second everyone gets offsides and thinks something's going to happen, immediately I started thinking maybe the opposite has higher odds. Now, again, doesn't always work. Right? There are times where people have heard me. I had a similar thought when nobody thought they could balance the budget i said oh there's probably higher odds that they could balance the

budget than people are giving it credit for because everyone is so convinced it's impossible right i don't think that's true right so i saw what was happening right i don't think we can get to a balanced budget september up that's not that crazy right uh especially because we were down in bitcoin from the all-time high on september 1st so our entry price into september much lower so i think that we could have a up september and a up bitcoin because one you got that entry price two is you're gonna get the rate cuts and i do think that that'll be pretty bullish and then three is i think that there's a lot of people who just are convinced like oh it's it's always down um and doesn't that create the flywheel effect of it always being down people

think okay cool it's gonna go down let me sell my stuff now and then it proceeds to fall even farther so yes the question is just are people going to sell because of that right um i think the month of august was uh this past month was the first down month for august in the year after having in history for bitcoin i think that's true um so like well august is always up in the year after having right it's always for 15 years that's happened well it didn't happen so september right could we get the opposite effect um again 75 confidence like that's pretty high but i'm not 100 confident in that um and so i just think that people when you start to see people regurgitating the same thing i see people all over the internet september's down september's down september's down

like what if it goes up well why would it go up well you have interest rate cuts people are off sides you know all this stuff like okay that could be interesting so i i do think that people just to be very careful um with looking at history and saying this always happens usually by the time people start to identify this always happens usually is about the time where this always happens becomes that used to happen now we're doing something else yeah that makes complete sense i think that's all i got for you today all right i appreciate you doing this thanks so much We'll do it again next week.