The Pomp Podcast - The New Bitcoin Trade Everyone Is Doing | Jeff Park

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

Jeff Park is a Partner and Chief Investing Officer of ProCap BTC. In this conversation we talk the debasement trade, bitcoin vs gold, why everyone seems to be getting rich while the government is going broke, Ken Griffin & Paul Tudor Jones being so excited about the market, and what the $2 billion Polymarket deal means for the future. ======================Check out my NEW show for daily bite-sized breakdowns of the biggest stories in finance, technology, and politics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://pompdesk.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠======================Core is the leading Bitcoin scaling solution, enabling you to lock in yield by locking up your Bitcoin. Simply lock it on the Bitcoin blockchain to secure the Core network, and get rewards. No bridging. No lending. Just holding. Still your keys. Still your coins. Now your yield. Start at https://stake.coredao.org/pomp======================⁠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.======================Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 0:54 - US government going broke while everyone is getting rich? 5:00 - Why the “debasement trade” is now happening 10:13 - Wall Street capitulates to bitcoin 13:29 - Gold vs bitcoin 19:48 - 1999 vs 2025 market euphoria 24:05 - What Jeff is paying attention to 30:44 - ICE invests $2 billion in Polymarket

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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. Gold may actually be like $8,000 to $10,000 an ounce if Bitcoin didn't exist. What do you think? all roads lead to Bitcoin, right? In my opinion. That's why people also have said, you know, within the crypto VC industry, like all coins have been, you know, on the margin great because at some level, those who find success in all coins eventually allocate some portion back to Bitcoin regardless. Wealth creation leads to Bitcoin as part of the denominator. And so in some sense,

gold is also an altcoin in my opinion, because. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great episode with Jeff Park. Jeff is the CIO at ProCapBTC. And in this conversation, we talk about the debasement trade, why governments are going broke, but everyone else seems to be getting rich. What's going on with Paul Tudor Jones, Ken Griffin, and many others being so excited about the market. And then we talk about the poly market and the ice deal where $2 billion is being invested into poly market and what that means for prediction markets, news and entertainment in America. Here's my latest conversation with Jeff Park. All right, Jeff, big week for us to talk through. You had a great tweet though, before we get to the current events that is important to

talk about, you said, has there ever been a time in history where the government went broke and everyone else got rich, which I think is just a very good visual as to what seems to be happening right now with the US government and all of these investors. Has there ever been another time like that? How do you think about this current situation we're in? Isn't that funny? I feel like the first time we had a US government shutdown, I remember vividly people were freaking out about US credit downgrades and the market would have huge sell-offs. And then of course, it quickly bounced back. But there was this location, there was heightened volatility, and there was a lot of drama. Now, it's actually kind of amazing how much of it has become part of our social fabric

and accepting that government shutdowns is a way of life. Volatility has not gotten higher, equities are still rallying, and the world is moving on. And I thought how amazing that would be in the context of the big picture here, actually, being that only the US government shut down, but really, you know, which government didn't shut down in the world? China, right? Like China is a government that has actually never shut down and it works every single day. And I thought maybe there's something there as a story that we need to understand as Americans. The other thing that kind of took off this week, I don't know if you were following it

on Twitter, was they had this great release of a new bridge they built, the Huanjiang Bridge across these two very rugged mountain peaks. And it was a sight to behold. It was like this incredible bridge that's like 2,000 feet above the ground and connects basically two mountains. And apparently, it cuts the traffic of what used to be a two-hour drive into two minutes. And just to put 2,000 feet in context, that's taller than the World Trade Center. So, imagine a bridge that's the height of World Trade Center just going through mountains and the industrial capacity of a country that can put that into might. um and then the u.s government of course shut down and like you know the other thing you said

happened was the mt just raised fares to now another 10 cents so it's three dollars to for the ever fiscal problem that the mta will never solve and so you see this like contrasting story and i think that's actually what's at the core of it the u.s government shutdown is not the story anymore that kind of drives global markets nobody cares nobody cares nobody cares it actually shows you i think the center of gravity has changed from that being driven by market first principles of what the U.S. stock market would do by investor flows to actually one that is driven by global fiscal dominance across every sovereign actors in which the things that people are worried about and caring about is the things happening on the political arena. So the other big news that were

happening throughout the week is, you know, Japan now has a new prime minister, Sane Takachi, who is basically going to print money forever. And you also had the French bond blow out because their PM resigned. And all of these things actually are correlated to the continual path of just fiscal dominance of there just being more continued printing of money. And so I think US government shut down a site like that, that just becomes irrelevant as a story when other things that are happening in the rest of the world is driving that, you know, unstoppable agenda. What's funny to me is as all this is happening, obviously institutions like these people are very smart. They're paying attention all around the world. They've got

a lot of data and analytics and they obviously have access to this information of the stories and all of a sudden they now have a new new thing to cling on to which is the debasement trade the debasement trade is going to be the thing that protects them um which is the same thing that gold bugs have been yelling about for you know 50 years uh bitcoiners for about 17 years um and it just feels like now the institutions are kind of like oh the light bulb went off like no one's ever going to stop printing money why do you think now is actually hitting is it because we're five years after you know 2020 and people start to feel it uh is there some data point that they're looking at like why is the quote-unquote debasement trade now the thing that they're all

like all right fine you guys are right i think it's happening because the slow build-up to that moment of reckoning has been seeded into our minds over now for a long period of time really post-covid and post-russia ukraine war and everything else that's been happening to show you that the kind of unipolarity of the geopolitical order is a bit at risk. So I don't think people just woke up one day and decided like, oh, debasement is the thing that we want to focus on. It's been like a steady crescendo of a buildup. And now what we're seeing is just more kind of, I think, authentic embrace by the people and recognizing that it's actually happening. And in a maybe more optimistic lens, what can we do about it? And actually try to be

on the right side of history to see that as an opportunity rather than fighting this thing as if there's a solution. I think there used to be a time when people really wanted to talk about how do we cut down social security? How do we cut down these things and bring fiscal health? And I think you ask an average person on the street whether this is on people's mind anymore. I don't think it is. People, I think, have accepted that this is actually what's happening. And now it's up to you individually to figure out how to best navigate that for your own personal self-preservation and i think that ethos is kind of what changed um the other thing with uh that in particular is like it really comes down to the u.s credit ratings continually being downgraded

and and now just having also been kind of not been taken as seriously as it once might have been like that i think that stick is no longer that powerful so last week moody's again threatened that they're going to have another notch of a downgrade and no one really cares right it's actually the french bonds downgraded and no one really cares like it actually is just kind of i don't know like financial games in a world where the entire narrative has moved towards like industrial production so so i go back to china kind of where like the thing about china whether you like them or not but that they've been very truthful about is that they're leading by industrial might it's like real commodities real production like putting real things into actual kind of people's hands to

build. And so this funny money game is actually becoming less relevant as people are now opening their eyes towards the importance of these true productive capacity, which is why I think on the other side of the basement trade is the AI trade and all the massive capital that is flowing into what people are hoping will be actually productive utilities. But that great picture is the trend that's, I think, somewhat unstoppable. I joked about a month ago, I put out a little bit of satire, which was that we need to think about risk-free rate having a totally different definition now. And we now have to go around and tell everybody and call it the risk-full rate to start really

normalizing that idea. The risk-free rate of the dollar hegemony is obviously the thing that's at risk. And if you embrace that to now be considered risk-full rate, well, there's a lot of other things I'd rather bet and take risk than trading US bonds. And I think that's what we're seeing. People are taking more risk on the risk curve because if the bonds are unstable anyway and that premium is not worth it, then there's tons of other things you'd rather be doing. and a vertically integrated licensed trust company. It's no wonder more than 200,000 Americans

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So we now are seeing a lot of very well-respected investors come out and talk about this. We saw Ken Griffin come out and say that individuals are de-dollarizing their portfolios and they're inflating asset prices. Paul Tudor Jones was very bullish on CNBC this week, talking about things like Bitcoin and gold and saying he wants to have a position there. We saw Morgan Stanley now say that a 2% to 4% allocation is something that they want to support their 16,000 financial advisors in doing because they're getting a lot of inbound inquiries. Vanguard now is kind of capitulating and waving the white flag. I mean, you just go through and you're just like,

okay, hold on a second here. This now feels like there is no longer a debate about this, that people realize the dollar and bonds are going to have a lot of trouble moving forward and therefore Bitcoin and gold are definitely benefiting. I also think stocks have become somewhat of a inflation type hedge or a debasement type hedge, but Bitcoin and gold seem to be the ones

that people are really latching onto as part of this quote unquote debasement trade. Absolutely, absolutely. I think going back to your Morgan Stanley news flow, the part that was really kind of amazing there is one, I think we've been so excited and wanting to see private wealth management and financial advisors come to embrace Bitcoin as an allocation in what is pushing out the efficient frontier of modern portfolio theory. So that's great news.

On one hand, though, the thing that I thought was a little funny and I snickered a bit was that the way they allocated the recommendation was 4% for a bucket that was called opportunistic growth. Opportunistic growth. I thought that was funny. Why? Number one, opportunistic implies as if this is like a temporal event-driven dislocation. That maybe you'll do. Yeah, ship now, but then later you'll trace back and buy something else. And it's like an opportunistic thing, like right now. Which I thought was kind of funny because anyone who's been around long enough knowledge. This is actually the opposite of opportunistic. It's as evergreen as it comes. It's the store of value. It's permanent. You should have that always. There's nothing

opportunistic about wanting the best store of value. And then growth, I thought was also pretty hilarious because growth, again, financial advisors think about it in terms of equities versus bonds, like growth in equities because earnings are growing and we're actually inflating the economy with productivity gains and the rise of young people having more children. Growth in a capitalism definition is pretty market-driven, right? But Bitcoin in growth, I mean, that's not really growth. I would call that kind of value, right? It's the idea of buying something that you think is valuable to store wealth.

Yet again, that isn't really driven by growth. So I just thought it was funny that Morgan Stanley made the move, but they called it opportunistic growth when in hindsight, I think it should have been called evergreen value. Evergreen value, right? you can just imagine maybe they'll do that next year you know we got to start somewhere i don't know if they're gonna do that ever but uh we can only we can only hope right um but i do think that um to me i took away the fact that they explicitly called out that

the financial advisors were coming to them saying my clients want this right and it does feel like there is um this pull in the market um and you know i still am getting a lot of questions from people about gold and bitcoin and the fact that gold is up 50 year-to-date bitcoin's up 33 if you go back a year right obviously bitcoin is double the performance of gold to go back five years bitcoin is 10x the value of gold or appreciation of gold um but i do think that there is this like short-term momentum focus especially on wall street of like this year gold is outperforming should i buy gold instead of bitcoin how do you think about like looking at short-term momentum versus maybe the longer-term trends where bitcoin's really been outperforming

I think both are durable allocations investors must have, and there are distinct advantages and disadvantages to both. But in 2025, the idea of having store of value in your portfolio that isn't dollar denominated is a key story. Even in most financial crises in the past, what you saw was generally the dollar strengthened and investors' flight to safety included dollar-based assets and wanting to save money with US bonds. And that paradigm has fundamentally changed. I don't think people are looking for dollar denominated assets. That's why gold is actually so powerful in its outperformance and noticeable by even Americans. And Bitcoin, I think, is part of that narrative. The difference there being that Bitcoin still hasn't found institutional

flow the way gold has. But institutional flows can just mean different things for retail investors finding allocations for. Gold is, to be honest with you, very hard to store. I know it's easy to buy GLD, the ticker, and have allocation to gold price. But one of the things people have called on for years, even the most diehard gold bugs, is that GLD is not gold. Because it's an IOU that once you feel like you need it at the exact moment of its tail risk, it may not be actually available and it could just evaporate. And in that sense, that challenges the idea of custody, the idea of self-custodial ownership to which anyone who owns Bitcoin, I think will find that aspect much easier to do. Of course, there's still the Bitcoin ETF that is a parallel comparison

into GLD, but it's much easier to buy Bitcoin in store than actually buying bullions and trying to find a safe box and put it through and hope you don't get robbed. So I do think eventually people will see there are different benefits to Bitcoin too, where it's actually pretty useful from a velocity of transaction and velocity of transfer perspective. I think institutions, once they see that, will also find this to be a much more efficient way to actually store wealth. And we're just at the very, very early innings of that story. So gold success is good for Bitcoin. I have always shared with people that we must root for some success of gold to the outcome that we're driving about self-sovereignty. And then the journey advances once people realize that there's

different trade-offs to which Bitcoin can outperform even gold. And I think what we're seeing is more of that migration across the mass population psyche. You know something I said to a friend that i never thought about before everyone always thinks about you know bitcoin is growing and gold is siphoning some of the capital flows from bitcoin into gold uh central banks and all the stuff but if you think about the opposite way if gold is at four thousand dollars an ounce imagine if bitcoin didn't exist it'd be at i don't know 10 right or something you know some big now again the market caps and so maybe you'd say oh actually it'll only be at 4500 or whatever But just like the fact that you have the fracturing, it's not just about the pure

market cap of spot Bitcoin. You then also on top of that have the Bitcoin treasury companies. You have all of the private companies associated with Bitcoin where capital has gone to get exposure to Bitcoin indirectly. Like you start to like stack all this up and you're like, gold may actually be like eight to $10,000 an ounce if Bitcoin didn't exist. What do you think? All roads lead to Bitcoin, right? In my opinion. That's why people also have said, you know within the crypto vc industry like all coins have been you know on the margin great because at some level those who find success in all coins eventually allocate some portion back to bitcoin regardless wealth creation leads to bitcoin as part of the denominator and so in some

sense gold is also an all coin in my opinion because those who make money on gold especially the young people will eventually look to diversify and the correlation will not be perfect and so if you made a ton of money in gold you have the higher chance of winning allocation from that pocket of money to invest in Bitcoin than from NVIDIA or from French government bonds or anything else. So actually, that kind of diversification outside of gold is probably a pretty meaningful trend we'll see. That's why when Tether also launched the product for where there's performance dictated by Bitcoin and gold performance as one of the first products they're going to institutional investors with um that that shows you already the interplay that's possible by kind

of widening the mode of people to invest capital into a pool of asset where you're actually being kind of trojan horse bitcoin exposure in the back end yeah it's pretty interesting how i mean tether what they have x aut i think is uh their gold uh back token and then um them and canter launch this like gold and, and, uh, uh, Bitcoin thing. Um, gold is an alt coin for Bitcoin. Yeah. I like, I kind of like that. I don't know if a lot of the gold bugs are gonna like that, but to your point, especially young people, like, yeah, it does make sense. Absolutely. And that's why I think, um, it, one of the, one of the just challenging things with Bitcoin right now is when the volatility is low, young people are not interested. Young people

really do like momentum and they like volatility. And as much as we talk about Bitcoin, the virtues, at the end of the day, people want to own things that they feel excited by and things that represent kind of their investing style. And you can't deny that momentum and volatility embracing is the most important thing for which I think gold has succeeded. Gold's volatility is higher now and momentum has been great. And so it has become a bit of a substitute good for that. But at the end of the day, Bitcoin will triumph all because the definitional construct of its Scarcity means that there will be higher volatility in the future. Paul Tudor Jones was very bullish, as I mentioned, but he said it feels like 1999, just not the

end. He kind of felt like we're in the middle of it. You, I think, have a different view as to like 1999 and the feeling of the euphoria and excitement that people have in the market right now. Explain it. Yeah, yeah. By the way, Paul Tudor Jones has been a Bitcoin bull for a long time. And I think long term, he understands the exact Bitcoin thesis.

At the same time, it's hard for me these days to dispassionately remove the Bitcoin narrative from stock market valuation at some level, because I think they are more correlated than people want it to be. So the first dimension really is recognizing that we're in a totally different public versus private sector investment scheme. In 1999, the US GDP was growing on the back of de-globalization as a trend, and the debt-to-GDP ratio was around 40%. It's a healthy market to grow into. Right now, it's 120%.

We're over one, right? So that's very different. And then two, from a fiscal deficit perspective, we obviously know we're now in a deficit where in 1999, we were actually a net saver. Even though the current account deficit was starting to grow because of the federal surplus, it was still actually a saver economy, which is unimaginable to even think about for most young people today. So that backdrop is already really different. It means that the role of the private economy had been a larger presence in 1999 than I think now in 2025, where most of the kind of financialization of the markets we're seeing is really driven by sovereign flows. So in that sense, this overvaluation and the stretch is not just coming from, I think, the private sector and individual investors.

It's really coming from institutional flows. And there's not a more prime example to share on that beyond the fact that the US government is proactively taking stakes in public companies here in this country at this moment. There's more than five now, right? And Intel was the first kind of- Only 10%. Only 10%. Only 10%.

So, you know, capitalism is still very much alive. But to me, like, that is so incomparable to 1999 as a construct. And on the political front, what was happening in 1999, too, was like, again, the beginnings of globalization, right? China was not part of the WTO yet. In fact, the euro currency actually was not really adopted in 1999 either. It would actually take a few more years. I believe it was 2002 when the euro actually was put in the hands of the people. And in 1999, the idea was introduced as an accounting principle.

So this is a pre-euro, pre-China WTO, pre-Eastern Europe being part of the eurozone world to which now we've shown all of that has not worked. And it's totally being unwound to this particular moment where I think all of this just shows like there's there's many other things that are happening at the at the at the global level that we have to take into account today's episode is brought to you by core you can earn yield on your bitcoin by just holding your bitcoin it's simple core the leading bitcoin scaling solution will reward you for not selling your bitcoin it's not magic here's how it works core is a protocol secured by elected validators you can help elect validators and secure the network by simply locking

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stake.cordow.org. Or go click the link in the description. When you think about kind of capital flows in general, one thing that I think people look at is look at like M2 Money Supply. I think they'll look at what central banks themselves are doing in terms of putting things on their balance sheets. I think that there's now starting to come an understanding of stablecoin or Bitcoin or on-chain type capital flows. What else do you pay attention to that you think are really insightful data points when really understanding where is the money, where is it going, and what does that tell us about financial assets? I think global liquidity is a bit of a catch-all phrase to include a lot of things people are paying attention and looking at.

For me, I definitely pay attention to the construct outside of the Western paradigm. So looking in towards China and what they're doing with their liquidity machine is pretty important. And on that point, the biggest driver of liquidity this year has been China, right? Their M1 liquidity actually has increased tremendously this year. And they are on now a pretty well-documented plan, right? They're actually cutting down the oversupply of all their industrial output. that they're actually trying to bring consumption back a little bit, invest in the private sector

the correct way. And so you've seen actually Chinese equities react to it. So M1 liquidity injection by China is very real. And that, I think, is the headline story of 2025. Beyond that, credit creation also happens based on these funding-based liquidity models that I think is really important. So in the past, it used to be that people would look at debt to GDP ratio as a way to understand the health of the global macroeconomy. But folks like Michael Howell have come out and said, actually, that's the wrong metric. What you really need to focus on is the GDP to liquidity ratio

because liquidity itself represents the duration of refinancing risk that is now being more kind of meticulously challenged by kind of the oversupply of global debt. So it's not important to just think about kind of GDP as a static measure. It's like, how much debt is there? And actually, how frequently do you have to refinance that? because every refinancing is an event risk. So funding-based liquidity models are really important.

So to that extent, looking at not just like VIX for equities index fall, but looking at rates fall is huge because rates fall is the thing that is applied on the collateral haircut levels that cause liquidity issues. So anytime there's like a market shock and it's not driven by like something

really secular at the level, but something being broken in the financial system, then you'll see it arise out of that funding-based liquidity lever. So I think there's a lot to observe there. And then the third I would add is the amount of shadow money creation in general. The private credit sector as a whole, I think, is something we all must pay attention to, both in China, but also here in the US. And you hear a little bit about how, oh, US economy is doing well because earnings are growing, but also corporate credit spreads have narrowed. And so that must mean that the health of the US economy is a lot stronger.

I have a different view on that. My different view is that there's an absolute return level that credit investors at the corporate level seek to clear the hurdle to put allocations for. There's an absolute number. It's actually not a spread number. There's an absolute spread. I need to hit my bogey of like eight or nine. Well, when the US interest rate itself is giving you four and a half, right? Like the US is already giving you a lot of that kind of bogey. So what that means is actually, if you're not investing on a spread-based level, but an absolute level, you have more room to compress on the credit side because the totality of it is actually still the same number. It's just that the US is taking a greater chunk of that credit risk in that construct

as a percentage. But man, how symbolic is that to the conversation we're just having from the beginning, where the sovereign risk is becoming the risk in which all of these things are weaponizing the economy, where I think everything about the financial system today is like a wartime economy construct, then like a peacetime economy construct. So this idea of even having compressed corporate credit spread to support the U.S.'s economic might to continue exporting its financial might, that is kind of all related at some level as to why we think the U.S. economy is very healthy. It's just driven by kind of U.S. sovereigns.

It's fascinating to kind of just think through the Western versus Eastern viewpoint and how much of the conversation in the modalities that we get information, X maybe being the biggest one, is just so Western centric. Right. But then China liquidity actually matters quite a bit. It does. It does. So funny, there was Token 2049 in Singapore and Korea Blockchain Week and the crypto community

the prior week. And so everyone is now back in the U.S. after that. And I've now gotten so many pings about how people, uh, are, are sharing, man, Asia is so wonderful. It's like so clean. Like the Singapore airport is a modern Marvel. Like it is pretty crazy when you go, it is, it is, you can't, you can't discount that. Um, but, but they'll say it like in ways to put kind of the Eastern economies, like in

a bit of a pedestal, like, oh my God, Chinese, like the things are producing how incredible the bridge that i'm telling you like and and and the they say it as if that also feels like it's an opportunity for them like oh yeah i'm just gonna go live in singapore now or china i'm gonna leave the u.s like i'm gonna leave this dump uh and the funny thing i find about all this as a as an asian person who's lived in both sides of the water is this realization that the crypto bros don't know that you can't actually live in these countries and find acceptance because asia by most levels of its social kind of societal foundation is pretty protectionist like i don't want to say asians are racist but there is a level of homogeneity for which the entire social hierarchy

is built on so like yeah japan's clean and it's great but guess what like you will never be accepted as an expat into japan ever so so turn that back around like this is the greatest virtue of this country as America. Yes, maybe there are problems with our infrastructure. And yes, I hate riding the subway here every day. It's a pain in the ass. But you know what? Anyone can actually still come here and make their work count and belong. And you might think that the shiny things that they're building in Asia is great, but by no means is that an invitation for you to actually come live there, at least for now. So I think that's why we still have to continue to root for US exporting its culture as part of a global superpower. Let's talk real quick. ICE and

PolyMarket announced a pretty big deal. ICE is going to invest $2 billion at a $9 billion post-money valuation in PolyMarket. I mean, prediction markets are here. This is real, obviously. What is your take on the old guard partnering with the new guard rather than just taking it on the chin and getting disrupted? There are so many ways to take this conversation, but the TLDR is I'm here for it. I love it. I absolutely love it. I have been sharing with folks that we must learn how to invest in a professional way that might also be called professional gambling. And professional gambling really sounds like a negative word, but I really mean it when I say, just like you have to understand accounting and mortgage math and

how to save money and how interest works. And you must also learn how to bet in life, because betting is actually a probabilistic exercise that is so good for you outside of just the monetary outcome. It really helps you think about the world in a lens that helps you understand the ambiguities that exist across a spectrum of outcomes that the world is quite gray and never black and white. So the readiness of polymarket being a part of our financial infrastructure is showing you a big mega trend, which is financial information is becoming actually news information, which means if you want the world to be less divided about having political opinions that appear black and white, you need to start financializing it and then see

the grayness of the news items to which people can make smart, educated, probabilistic bets and expressions of their ideologies. And so it's really a wonderful thing. I think that it shows you that ICE is also going to become, at some level, maybe a media company. I mean, imagine that, right? It looks like an infrastructure play. But if you ask Shane, Shane will say Polymarket is first and foremost also a media company in the ways that they're a source of truth and being the oracle of the world's biggest information market. And in that sense, the convergence of finance and information is happening. And at the center of that is that reality that data is kind of the last frontier of colonization. That's all we have left. You and I

have valuable data. It's the one thing we can empower ourselves to find productivity in. What can you do about it that's not going to be consumed by the fangs of the world that you get to own and exercise the right to earn an income off? I think polymarket and the way you can bet on information is an incredibly useful tool at the individual level. And we should really kind of usher in that era for everyone's possibilities to participate in that market. The other thing I will add is there's been a long growing trend of actually the CFTC becoming a little bit more retail centric at some level too. And you see that through the lens of the CME, because CME once upon a time you would have known is just an institutional trading exchange for big boys,

right? It's not a place for like retail investors to go trade. But over time, the stance has changed a little bit. You saw it when, for instance, the CME group launched these micro futures contract called Bitcoin Friday Futures, which they coined as BFF as a little moniker to be your Bitcoin's best friend or whatever, forever friend. And, and, and, and then you saw their recent partnership with FanDuel as well to kind of bring in more professional gambling into the arena of like business. And you're seeing that like happen. So, so, so, so this idea of like retail financializing betting markets is not just like a retail story it's actually an institutional story too and the lines again are becoming very blurry and i think that trend is pretty inevitable at this point

i think that um the prediction markets are now people are starting to understand the financial component um if you go back to february when we announced the uh partnership we did with x one of the big things in there was like the prediction markets should be incorporated into the news and i am shocked but you hear it every once in a while elections or something right but how many people go and buy tesla stock based on a belief that they're going to hit or miss delivery numbers why not just bet on that one thing and why not talk about are they going to hit it or not not based on wall street analysts what is the market saying right right like that is so much more powerful totally polymarket now i think uh sends out weekly this like a newsletter

which shows you their most active markets. And I look at that newsletter because to me, it shows you what are the news items people are focused on. It's actually a great filtering mechanism because it's showing you there's economic activities around the things that have attention. And so rather than going to the New York Times where you're looking at like a curated list of stories,

someone's telling you, these are the things you should be reading. Here's Polymarket just literally saying, these are the most active markets. Therefore, it must be the most interesting market, not just because people are focused, but because they have views and spreads. And what's more interesting than an arbitrage that comes from there being a spread in the market? So I absolutely believe that the information market becoming financialized is actually a pretty decentralized way of pushing forward what people care about the most without there being an intermediary. And then the other thing on top, again, professional gambling is such a life skill.

Like knowing how to play poker, knowing how to sports bet, knowing how to do parlay bets are important things. And we shouldn't we shouldn't make it criminal. And we definitely shouldn't kind of look down upon that as like an activity that is beneath anybody, because it's actually just a huge unlock for how people think. You recommended a book to me some time ago by Billy Walters. Oh, which I would also recommend to anyone here listening to give it a read. Uh, it's, it's the secret life of gambler and the ways that you get to experience all the highs and lows of an addiction that could also be used into something pretty productive. And it's this whole autobiography, right? And there's a quote, um, that he shares that I think is really important

to kind of cement in all our, in our minds, which is that, um, the harder you work, the luckier you got and i think there's nothing more emblematic than what polymarket can do for the average person the harder you work the harder you try to get information these markets are generally full of opportunities because information is in itself not something that is um that's obvious not a price yeah listen i uh i'm very excited about it billy walters we have a field day with prediction markets if he's out there still um thank you very much for doing this we'll do it again next week. Let's do it.