The Pomp Podcast - Why Bitcoin Will Beat Gold In The Long Run | Anthony & John Pompliano

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

Anthony and John Pompliano discuss everything happening across the markets — bitcoin, gold, stocks, the Fed, and where things could be headed next. Are we going up or down? Should investors be worried or getting excited? And why retail investors might actually have an edge over institutions right now.======================Check out my NEW show for daily bite-sized breakdowns of the biggest stories in finance, technology, and politics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://pompdesk.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠======================In this episode, Pomp spotlights easyBitcoin.app—the app that pays you 1% extra on recurring buys, 2% annual bitcoin rewards, and 4.5% APY on USD. Download it now for iOS or Android at https://easybitcoin.onelink.me/F1zP/klc4v1p8 and start earning today. Your capital is at risk. Crypto markets are highly volatile. This content is informational and not financial advice.======================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/======================Bitwise is one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto asset managers, with more than $15 billion in client assets across an expanding suite of investment solutions—including the world’s largest crypto index fund—plus products spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto equities. In addition to managing assets, Bitwise helps investors stay informed about the fast-moving crypto market. Every week, CIO Matt Hougan breaks down what’s happening in crypto in five minutes or less. Read the latest at https://experts.bitwiseinvestments.com/cio-memos. Certain Bitwise investment products may be subject to the extreme risks associated with investing in crypto assets. Visit https://bitwiseinvestments.com/disclosures to learn more.======================Timestamps: 0:00 – Intro1:34 – Gold’s performance and macro shift6:11 – What is more likely: Gold standard or Bitcoin standard?14:02 – Risk assets vs Safe Haven assets18:55 – Why retail may outperform institutions29:30 – Government shutdown impact36:45 – Upcoming Fed meeting and rate cuts

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 what's going on with Bitcoin, gold, AI stocks, the Fed, and of course, the market. We're trying to figure out, are we going up? Are we going down? Should we be worried? Should we be allocating? Why are retail investors at such an advantage compared to institutional investors? And how are asset prices going to do going into the end of the year? All that and much more in this conversation with John. Before we get into

the episode though, I need your help. My goal is to get to 1 million subscribers on YouTube, and that's where you come in. Right now, we have about 632,000 subs, a little bit more than that. My goal is to get to 1 million. We're so close. So hit the subscribe button, help us get there. Let's get into this conversation with John. All right, John, what's the first topic? All right. Gold, best performing asset over the last 20 years, up 11% annualized return. Congratulations to the gold bugs. I'm very happy for them. I think that gold bugs understood before most. What was the problem in the traditional financial system, which was they are going to debase the currency, hard assets are going to do well. The stock guys, they were

yelling and screaming. They were all celebrating because they thought that these productive things that were going to outperform non-productive assets didn't happen. Gold bugs do not get enough credit for not only one, buying gold, but the harder thing is if you bought gold 20 years ago and didn't sell, you took it to the chin for years of people making fun of you. Why do you have that gold. Oh, you're just some old crazy person. Why are you still holding this thing? It doesn't go up. It's stable, whatever. I've jumped in on the gold bugs at times. If you've held gold for 20 years, congratulations, you were right. You deserve all of the returns that you're getting. Now, what I will say is still only up 60% this year, which yes, that's a lot for this year.

But if you go back and you look at what was gold trading that in, I don't know, 2020, it's up 150-ish percent. Bitcoin's up 1500%. So let's just put it, just for my Bitcoiners out there. Let's put this all in context. But gold bugs still, they should get plenty of credit. And I think what it does is it calls into question, why is it that a non-productive asset has beat the productive assets over 20 years? And so I recently wrote this whole thing about Peter Lynch. Peter Lynch is famous. One of his best quotes ever. He spent 13 minutes on economics. You have wasted 10 minutes. Banger one-liner. That guy was made for Twitter. He would be going viral every day with the one-liners. But that was back when he managed the Magellan

fund at Fidelity. Well, guess what? That was from 1977 to 1990. Goat. Best performing mutual fund at the time in the world. He had a 29% annual return. Destroyed the S&P 500. But the problem is that back then, you didn't have to pay attention to macro because you could buy these businesses. And if you bought businesses with good fundamentals, they would continue to appreciate in price. All the macro stuff would kind of work itself out. Now what we have though, is we have a market that has been broken. 2008 was the breaking of the market. 2020 was the acceleration of the market.

We have a currency that is debasing. It's lost 30% of its purchasing power since 2020. Macro is all that matters. And so that is why you see risk assets and safe haven assets all going up at the same time. And so it's not so much that buying a good company with good fundamentals at a good price, that's of course always gonna be a good strategy.

No one is hating on value investing or any of that stuff. those people are smart, they're going to make money. But actually, the more important thing is the environment in which it is operating. And now that you have these global central banks, you have this money printing, you have this national debt issue, you have the currency debasement, all of that is showing you the environment, the macro stuff matters way more today than it did, let's say, 50 years ago. And that's why gold has outperformed for 20 years is because it was more of a macro trade than it was any individual stock. Right now, it seems like a debasement trade.

Well, the debasement trade is kind of like this new word that Wall Street came up with because they wanted to see the thing about Wall Street. Here's the whole thing is you get to claim credit for an old idea if you give it a new name. That's how it works. Right. If you take an old idea, you just kind of, you know, spit shine on it, put a new name on it, you get a call. so what used to be the sound money trade or the gold trade or the bitcoin thesis or whatever all of a sudden people said well what if there's some genius on wall street what if we called the debasement trade and the second they called it the debasement trade bam new thing shiny go capital flows so they're just doing what they're incentivized to do but it's no different than what gold bug's been saying forever i mean peter schiff if you go back and you listen to what

he was saying in the early 2010s that man is saying the same stuff today right now it took 15 years for him to be right in terms of gold really making a big move. But it doesn't mean that back then he wasn't right. And so sometimes the market takes a long time. You know, Warren Buffett is the market is a voting machine in the short term. It's a weighing machine over the long run. Well, the weighing machine is telling everyone gold is actually really valuable and it is a solution in someone's portfolio for the macro environment that we're in. Bitcoin, obviously, similar thing but for 15 years 18 years these people were mocked ridiculed they were like the bastions of the financial system and people just put them over in the corner and said you know

that's cute with your little pet rock they're winning now congratulations to every single one of those people so obviously in the 1970s we got off the gold standard do we go back on the gold standard do a combination of gold bitcoin standard obviously bitcoin's a younger asset with a little bit more volatility well i guess gold so there's a couple thoughts there's a couple thoughts here um i think that we are more likely to go to a bitcoin standard uh in the western world than a gold standard when we talk about why um i forget i talked to a lot of people so i forget who said this is not my idea this is jordy visser jeff parks somebody um maybe china is trying to go back onto a gold standard though could there be a bifurcation in the east versus the west

china's been aggressively buying a lot of gold now are they going to actually like peg the currency to gold, well, that's a little bit harder to see, but they could try to do that. But they're just filling their reserves with gold, right? So in a way, it is a backed currency, right? The reserves are gold. Now, the pegging, I think, is a little bit different. So I think that the United States is very forward-looking, very technologically innovative. And I believe that we are not going to sell a bunch of gold to go buy Bitcoin. I don't see a world where that happens. I think now if you were to value the gold that the United States has at market value, it would be a trillion dollars. That's a lot, right? But if you also

look like our debt's pretty big. 34 trillion. I think we're at 37 or 38 trillion now. Yeah. So, you know, just think about that. You didn't look for like a week and all of a sudden, you know, it increased 10%, right? So I think that there's an issue there as to what is the United States going to do. Now, I do not see the United States going and buying a lot more gold. I think that there's a drumbeat of people saying, go and buy Bitcoin. In a way, the United States is acquiring more Bitcoin. There's this recent story that came out, they call it a pig butchering scheme. Now, just to be clear, when I first saw the headline, I was like, damn, somebody's butchering pigs? That's crazy. Then you read the article and you're like, no, no,

know like they were basically calling uh the people they were taking the money from like they were like butchering pigs right so it's not actual like animal cruelty pita relax uh instead it was them taking advantage of people online running scams and stuff like that um probably why you get so many spam calls and so from there the united states was able to get i think it was something like 15 billion dollars of bitcoin whatever the the number is and uh they put that into the Bitcoin and strategic reserve. So in a way, the United States over the last two months has acquired another $15 billion of Bitcoin. They just didn't spend any taxpayer money to do it. So I've got some mixed feelings here. On one hand, the United States having more Bitcoin

in terms of the perception of the United States' strength, that is good for the United States of America. Is it good for Bitcoiners, for nation states to hold tons of Bitcoin? Well, it's inevitable. They're going to go and do this. But I think part of the beauty of Bitcoin is that the system itself, the network is decentralized, the nodes, the miners, the holders, etc. But also ownership has been very centralized. And so I don't think we want anyone, I don't think we want a public company, I don't think we want a government, I don't think we want anyone owning 10% of the supply as an example, right? I think instead of what we want is we want decentralized ownership of this thing as best as we can get it. Now, the balances, the free market ultimately

determines that. So it's everyone's responsibility to go and acquire whatever Bitcoin they want so that other people don't get it, right? And so the incentive kind of takes over. So even if you take something like strategy, right? On one hand, you're like, oh, one company has all this. Well, technically that company is made up of lots of shareholders, right? So if you think of it from that perspective, it's a lot of people who pulled their money to go and buy the Bitcoin, not just one business or one person going and doing that. Now, if you bring it back for a second to this idea of going back on the gold standard, I do believe that there is a psychological scarring that occurred in 2020, in 2021, where people just do not believe that fiat currencies have

the staying power or the value stability that they once had. So kind of cats out of the bag. Now, can you go back to those people and say, actually, we are going to put you back onto a gold standard. We're going to back this currency with the gold. And don't worry, the problem is uh not going to come back i don't know it's a very interesting question because on one hand it's you know what is it like uh uh fool me once you know shame on you fool me twice shame on me right so same thing here is are people going to go plow a bunch of their economic value back into a currency like the venezuelan government or the zimbabwe government how many times have they come out with some new change to the currency like don't worry it's not going to happen again right eventually

people are just like dude we don't believe you and so is the united states there probably not like i do think that there would be a surge in confidence of the dollar if it was backed by gold bitcoin you know some kind of asset um i just don't think we're gonna see that happen because that would take away a lot of the value of the money printer and so if you can't print more money then essentially the united states like kind of the the fiat ponzi scheme is over it's almost like holstering your gun it's like no more no more holstering your gun it's like knowing that there's a bunch of criminals with guns in a location, not just holstering your gun, leaving your gun at home, getting in your car, driving over there with a big sign that says,

I don't have a gun, right? So, you know, what do you think is going to happen? And so I think that it's just, we're on a path. And, you know, I think it's Lynn Alden says, you know, nothing stops this train. I don't think anything stops the train. And so on that path, what I think will happen is you're going to see people kind of reach for emergency, you know, exits and whether it's gold, Bitcoin, whatever, they're going to have to put that in their portfolio. Easy Bitcoin is live right now on iOS and Android. Hit pause, click the link in the description, download the app and start earning

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it's a sound money asset. Bitcoin is the complete opposite side of that coin, right? Bitcoin is looked at hopium and going to go up over time. When you think about Bitcoin and stocks correlation to then gold, should everything go up as money gets cheaper? Or will there be a divergence eventually? Well, so this is the whole thing is this whole idea of like risk assets and safe haven assets going up at the same time. Historically, it's been pretty much the opposite, right you see risk assets run then people say oh no we're fearful right they come back in on the risk curve and then all of a sudden safe haven assets run and so you know i always laughed that um if you go back to november of 2021 uh we saw the market kind of turn over and as people ran

out of tech stocks and stuff like that they all started to fall all of a sudden berkshire hathaway started hitting like new all-time highs again not perfect right but but the value investing kind of cash flow based business versus you know more of the tech type business so i do think that there's there's this relationship between risk and safe haven assets. Part of the reason why I think that both are going higher right now that I don't see anyone really talking about is just that the base of investors in financial markets has gotten bigger. So there is this belief, which I hold, there's always good news and bad news in the economy. Just depends on who you're talking to. So that K-shaped economy, there are people right now who are like, this is amazing. Stocks keep

going higher. I'm getting richer. This is awesome. And then literally like on a subway train, you can walk over to the person right next to them and say, how's it going? And they'll be like, this is horrendous. I can't find a job. I can't afford a home. Literally this, I can't afford kids. Like this is everything that I don't want. Those two people exist in the same economy. And so that K-shaped economy is one is telling a story of prosperity and the other is telling a story of economic pain. They're both right because there's a bifurcation in the market. Now, if you go and you look at risk assets and safe haven assets, same exact thing is happening. There are people who are making a lot of money right now on risk assets. They've pushed out on the risk curve and

they're really allocating there. And those assets are going up. They're in all the AI companies and the tech companies and all that stuff. At the same time, the gold investors are seeing gold surge higher. So wait a second here. Why is it that both of these are going together? Well, there has been an explosion of capital market participants. There's this chart that recently came out of interactive brokers, they now have over 4 million account holders. And it's like a perfect line of kind of growth, right? They just keep compounding over time and they have more than 4 million people. Now, some people will look at it and say, oh, it's a great business, whatever. That's all probably true. My takeaway from it is there are more people today with brokerage accounts and

investing in the market than ever before. We're at an all-time high of market participants. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal recently that said more people that make, I think it was like under $50,000 or something that are participating in the stock market than ever before. So at all income levels, you are seeing an increase in participation. Some of that is just like access to the internet. They see information, they start to learn, they realize they need to be an investor. So they start to allocate. A big part of it is also the tools are available now, whether it's the Webulls, Publix, Robinhoods, Coinbases, whatever, like they're all going in and they're investing there. And so when you see this, you start to say to

yourself, hold on. It's not like we went and dug up 20% more gold last year, right? So there's only so much of an asset that is available. It's not like these public companies all of a sudden issued tons more shares, right? And so you have more people in the market, which means you have more money in the market. And so now all of a sudden you have some people who are bullish, some people who are bearish, some people who are on offense, some people who are on defense. And as they allocate their capital, you can actually see both assets start to go up. Now, why is that? Because the loser in that scenario is cash. It's bonds. It is the thing that people use to store tons of economic value. The quote-unquote financial battery, which was cash, is being expended.

People are saying the battery doesn't work. The battery, I put energy into it, and that energy energy dissipates very quickly. I wanted to store energy here for next week, right? But I can't actually power my home because the battery won't hold the charge until next week. So what do I have to do? I have to go find somewhere else to put the energy. And that's what you're seeing in financial markets is people are saying, I'm not going to just sit with my money in cash because it doesn't hold value over time. I need to get out. And so whether I'm defensive or offensive pushing getting that energy out of the quote-unquote financial battery of cash is ultimately driving the market and they're doing it because of all of the

undisciplined monetary and fiscal policy retail continuously buying the dip yeah over and over and over again right i think kabosi had a great car adam kabosi great guy great awesome company kabisi that's how you say it i usually mispronounce every single person's name but that was that one was on you i do it all the time don't worry about it uh adam's a fan of the show fan of the show Like we're a fan of him, I meant. Yeah. $3.9 billion worth of stocks bought last week. As retail, as you think about retail investors,

normally like, it's great. You can trade from your iPhone, right? But as you look at those types of investors, they act much differently than institutions. They're smarter. You think they're smarter? Why do you think that? In some regards, absolutely.

I think that if you give an investor a spreadsheet today, there are certain businesses where they will be able to identify opportunity that an investor without the spreadsheet can't identify. right? Value investing is a great example. You need to understand what is the fair value of the business. What is the kind of asset value of the business? And if it's trading below that, then go buy it. You need to spread it. Whether you use a napkin or a spreadsheet, you got to do some math, right? I don't think that's really where the majority of the retail movement shines.

Where I do think that the retail audience shines is momentum and dip buying. And you don't need a spreadsheet for that. In fact, if you have the spreadsheet, you may be at a disadvantage because if you go back to April, right? You and I are very fortunate. We got a lot of friends, a lot of different industries. I got friends that work at restaurants, that are doormen, that are police and firefighters, that are in the military, that are teachers, doctors, lawyers, and work on Wall Street and everything in between. And guess what? My smartest friends, they were all freaking out in april my friends who you know they kind of invest on vibes they were buying like maniacs in hindsight who was right the people who were buying so if you went

you talked to them which i did i have one friend who called me i'll never forget because he kind of spooked me a little bit he was like oh my god this is gonna just be like covet again i'm gonna do this. I'm going to like, like they were like slowing their wires out to vendors. They were trying to pull capital. They were worried about having to like lay off employee. I mean, just like mass changes inside the business. And I was like, man, am I, am I wrong? Like, am I misreading what's going to happen here? And then I remember talking to one friend and every time I, every day I talked to him during that whole chaos, he was just like, yeah, I bought more. I was like, where are you finding all this money from? Right? Like, it's not like he's like super rich or anything.

He was like, no, he's just like, if the market goes down, he's going to go back up. He's like, I'm a young dude. Like it'll, it'll go back up. And so going back to this idea of like the spreadsheet, you could have calculated what the tariff rates are, where all the imports were coming from. You could have went and said, you know, Oh, Canada and Mexico are our biggest trading partners and they're not going to like us now. And Ford's going to move their facility here.

And then, Oh, all of a sudden I see somebody tweeted from the UK that they're not going to do business with us. Oh, none of it mattered. the faster stocks fall, the faster they recover normally. Study reflexivity. And retail investors have been convinced that that is true. And so guess what? They invest off of momentum and they buy dips. And that has been a great strategy. And so I think that the retail investors are, in some regards, smarter than the institutional investors because they also don't have the constraints. That's the other thing is that people forget. If you're sitting inside of a

institution you have first of all it's not your money usually right it's an it's somebody else's money so you have fiduciary duty to those people you can't just like yolo buy on on a dip second thing is that you have an investment committee so all good ideas go to die inside of a committee um so if you're the guy who's like hey i think we should buy everyone sitting around the table doesn't want to get fired if they're wrong so everyone starts to hedge together right and you basically evolve into this world of like, let's wait, let's wait, let's wait. Right. But actually the best investors, they're very, very courageous and bold at the right moment. And that takes the unilateral ability to execute an investment without having to go convince a bunch of other

people, because usually it's not popular at the time. The third thing is that they have all sorts of risk mitigation and risk limits for good reason, but they have those constraints where retail normally doesn't. Certain sizing requirements. It can't be, you know, a single name can't be a certain size. There's volatility requirements. If, you know, the pod shops are famous, if you're down like 5%, they'll take back half the money they've given you. I think if you go down 7.5% in most shops, you're out, right? So again, what are you doing? You're hedged, you're, you know, delta neutral, you're, you're arbing, you're doing all these things because you don't want that downside draw, right? And then the other piece is rebalancing,

right? They usually can't let their winners ride again because of the requirements. And so you just have all these things that put the institution actually at a disadvantage when you have high volatility. And that's where the retail investor, people are like, oh, they're dumb. Well, one, they're smarter than most people think, but also two is they're unconstrained. And so their participation in the market in an unconstrained way, I think better positions them to be able to drive returns and outperformance than if you sit within a risk mitigated framework where actually you may not be trying to drive the highest return. Like I don't think many of the pod shops, their goal is to drive the highest return possible. Howard Marks, if you're willing

to be the number one best investor every year, you're also going to be willing to be the last investor in a given year because you've got to take such immense risk to be number one that if it doesn't go right, you'll end up being the last. And so the pod shops don't want that. What they want to be is they want to deliver kind of low teens return every single year, light clock work and do it with incredible lack of volatility and risk. Great. They're serving a purpose. They found a customer in the institutional LPs and they said, I know what you need in your portfolio. That's a problem. I can solve it for you. What if I could deliver to you low team returns with very low correlations, low volatility, low risk per unit of reward, but whatever.

And institutions say, let me hit that bid. I'll give you the money, right? So again, it's like they're optimizing for something else compared to the retail investor where most retail investors I know, they're optimizing for pure alpha generation or outperformance. Hi, I'm Matt Hogan, CIO of crypto asset manager Bitwise. Look, crypto can be confusing. There's so much noise and the space changes so quickly. That's why every week I write a five-minute memo on the biggest stories impacting crypto in plain English.

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100% agree. Speed, the ability to not have to rebalance and all those things are extremely important. But there's also the other side of the coin, which retail investors notoriously, they're chasing returns, right? I've talked to some of my friends and they're like, 8%, that's it? 8%. I'm looking for low cap stocks that are going to, you know, 2, 3, 4x, right? It's a different type of investing, but I also think there's a place for both, right?

And when you think about who is investing on the retail basis, it's, you know, the barber, it's the teachers, it's all these people. I don't think that they should be singling out personal stocks as much as they should be diversifying a little bit more because I see people, everyone's a genius in a bull market, right? And when a bear market comes, things get ugly fast. They do. But it also comes back to, if I go talk to institutional investors, one of the challenges

is how well can they know their entire portfolio if you own 50 stocks, right? Like the level of research that you can do is actually pretty shallow versus let's say a retail investor that owns maybe three or five stocks and knows everything about those companies. Now that's not true everywhere, right?

There's plenty of investors who maybe don't have 50 stocks, they have 20 and they know everything and it's their job. They have a million analysts under them. Correct. Or there's plenty of retail investors who they've got more than three stocks

or they don't really understand the three stocks they own that well, whatever. There's always exceptions. But for the most part, having a concentrated portfolio means that you can actually understand what you own much better, right? You don't, you're not required to relearn 50 businesses. And so, you know, I mean, just again,

like go back to the legends. I'd rather have, you know, a basket of a few eggs and watch it closely, right? Concentration builds wealth, diversification protects it. Like these are classic timeless investing principles that have been around for a long time. It's not rocket science. It's just that there's some, you know, in politics, people talk about like TDS, Trump

derangement syndrome. I'm going to label a new thing. You know, I'm going to spit shine an old idea. And we're going to call it RDS, right? Which is retail derangement syndrome. The second you say retail investors are doing something, people's freaking brains break. They got smoke coming out of their ears. And they're like, ah, these morons, they're gambling.

Like, hold on a second here. Hold on. Everyone calm down. Pump the brakes. they're doing in many cases, the timeless investing principles, right? When stocks go down, they buy, they don't sell, right? Uh, why would you sell if the market is going down? If you liked it yesterday and it's 20% cheaper or 10% or 5% cheaper, shouldn't you like it more today than yesterday? That's timeless investing principle, right? Buy things for less than their

worth. Timeless investing principle, concentration builds wealth, timeless invest, like just go down the line. And so in a very weird way that retail guys are actually following this timeless advice, but the framing of retail investor, completely different ballgame. So you know what I want to do? One of my goals for 2026 is I'm going to do my best to reframe from retail to independent investor. Because that's what they are.

They're independent, right? They don't have allegiance to any one company or idea. They don't have allegiance to any one LP or one shop. These people are thinking independently. They're thinking critically for themselves. They're trying to establish financial independence and they are independently acting without all of the loyalties,

allegiances, constraints, et cetera. So the independent investor, I think is very, very well positioned moving into the future compared to the institutional investor, which has artificial constraints put on them because it's much more important to not lose the assets, not lose your job

than it is to drive returns. 100% agree that that is what most people are looking for is they're looking for a fee. They're not necessarily looking to maximize return. Yeah, look, it's understandable. I get it. What else you got? All right, let's switch gears a little bit.

Government shutdown, still going on. What is happening? Is this going to get resolved? Did you know that the government was shut down? Not really. Like most people don't know. Now, if you want to use a government service, right? You know, look, I have certain things

that the government is supposed to be approving or evaluating, et cetera, right? In terms of we have a public market deal, right? Well, with the government shutdown, that there's uncertainty. When is it going to reopen? What do you do? All this kind of stuff.

There's certain services that people depend on from the government. They definitely know that the government shut down, right? I mean, there was talk of, are they going to have the money to pay the soldiers, right, and the military? People that work in the government definitely know it shut down.

100%, right? So like if your paychecks come from the government, you're not getting your paycheck, you definitely know. So I don't want to dismiss the fact that there's some portion of the population that knows the government is shut down. But if you walk down the street

and ask the average American, did you know the government shut down? Most of them will say some version of, oh, I kind of heard, is that still going on? I didn't know that. And then if you tell them like, by the way, it's been shut down for like 20 days, they're like, what?

I didn't know that. Like, you know, I'm just going to work. We'll open it. Yeah, I'm just going to work, right? So again, this is weird dynamics. Like there are people affected. There are people who this is very real to them, but there is a very large portion of the population

who like, they don't realize it. They don't even know. Financial markets, they don't care. A little sell off. But other than that, like, you know, we've been up into the right. And so I think that it's nonsense, frankly, like the government should open up. What I find very interesting, again, like put all your like political legions aside. I like to look at the data. Right. I've been very clear that just for all people who think, you know, I'm one sided. Joe Biden didn't get enough credit for how well the stock market did under his presidency. Okay, you can argue why, was it good, long-term pain, like stock market went up under Joe Biden. He should get credit for that. On the same side here, the government shutdown happened.

You would think that when the government shuts down, the confidence or the like polls of the sitting president go down as well. People are pissed. Trump's polls have gone up during the government shutdown. I wouldn't have bet on that. I wouldn't have thought that happened, right? So it kind of comes back to this idea of

there is a change in the way that people view some of this stuff. They're starting to see it for what it kind of is. It's this like dramatized soap opera, you know, of politicians yelling and screaming at each other, whatever, like they're posting memes on the internet. Like these people do not look at it and say, oh, we have to like all get in a room and close this out, right? You have one side saying, we're not agreeing to this nonsense. You got another side that says, we're not going to move forward unless you agree to the nonsense. Okay. Let's see what happens. Right. But my guess is why I know a deal will get done at some point, right? We're already pretty far. Like this wasn't like a, Hey, we shut down for 24 hours. This is one of the longer shutdowns

in history. 100%. I think the longest in history is 35 days. Uh, I heard from somebody, um, that is, uh, is pretty well connected in DC. Their bet was that the shutdown was going to continue until Q1 of next year. I mean, that would be another, you know, what, 60, 70 days. I don't, I mean, that would be, that would basically put us like near a hundred day shutdown. A lot of people will know the shutdown for a hundred days. Right. But, but I think that also, if you look at the prediction markets, you know, just recently I was looking at a poly market, the odds of the shutdown ending between October 23rd and 26th surged to over 40%. Now, 40% still means it's more likely than not that it stays shut down. But that surge, somebody somewhere thinks they

got some information. I don't know what the information is. I don't know who it is. But somebody thinks they got information to be willing to wager on the fact that it's going to reopen between October 23rd and 26th. So we'll find out. But as investors, there's some economic data that didn't come out, which might be a positive because it was going to be inaccurate anyways. Um, but other than that, I think that, uh, you know, the world kind of keeps spinning. Yeah. When you think about it through an investor lens, that's kind of what me and you talk about a lot.

Um, should investors really be worried that the government shut down at all? Or should it be more of a, Hey, look, the government shut down. Great. Stocks are still going to do their thing. Companies are still going to operate. Most companies are still going to operate within, um, kind of like their realm of operations. Do investors even care? Like especially the retail investor, if they're investing on vibes, why would they care?

I think that some investors care for sure, right? Investors like certainty and there is uncertainty introduced when the government is shut down, you know? So when the government shutdown ends, I would expect enthusiasm to increase even further. I would expect investors to have more confidence to allocate to certain parts of the market. But I agree, like again, the independent investor, they don't care. It also depends. Are you a trader trading on day-to-day emotional, hey, look like short-term volatility versus, hey, I'm trying to wake up in 20 years. Well, here's an interesting way to think about this. There's macro and micro politics to pay attention to, right? Listen to what I just said. Not economics, politics. What

do I mean? Is it more important for the government to be open or closed? Or is it more important for Trump to tweet or not tweet? I would argue that the stock market responds more to a tweet than it does to whether the government's open or closed. So all of a sudden now you say, well, that just puts immediate clarifying, you know, kind of dichotomy of it is less important whether the government is open or closed for the stock market than it is whether the president tweets. Okay, so what are we talking about here, right? You can kind of, you know, pick up pennies in front of the steamroller, but you can be trying to trade all off the government, whatever. This guy tweets, he's telling the market where to go, right? Abracadabra, go up, go down.

you may not like it by the way the other uh politicians both on republican and democrat side and past presidents they've done the same stuff they may not have used social media in the same way press releases press releases press conferences announcement oh come on stop it stop it joe biden calling uh jerome powell into his office uh elizabeth warren writing a letter telling him that he should be cutting interest rates trump tweeting at powell trump tweeting about the stock market they all are doing this stuff it's modern communication and so uh i think that you just gotta update your view of the world right it's not a right or left thing it's not a blue or red thing it is just simply this is the way that the world works now upgrade your software

in your brain and uh you know start navigating it's not even a u.s thing that's the thing is you start seeing china start talking about certain things uh and other presidents bukele is famous for his bitcoin trade right um and i think that that provides two sides to the coin one it does provide uncertainty because one person has a lot of power both across the world um but also it creates an opportunity for one person to be able to communicate with so many different people and be able to say this is our plan right you don't want to give away too much strategy because it basically lets the other person know your play uh but ultimately like the bitcoin trade like it doesn't matter if people know that you're buying bitcoin it's probably a good thing that

that Bukele and all these guys have bought Bitcoin and said they bought it out loud. 100% agree. Okay. FOMC meeting next week? You expect rate cuts? Is it going to happen with the government shutdown? FOMC?

FO what? Cut the rates? I mean, that's all that's going to happen, right? Of course they have to cut rates. Listen, they can sit there and not cut rates. That's fine. They're going to get steamrolled by the labor market. Of course they're going to cut rates.

And if he doesn't, it just proves that these people are numbskulls right which i don't think that they are i think that they're very intelligent i think they look at the data all this stuff before people were saying hey the data is telling you something right i mean how many times we talked about they used to say we're data dependent now all of a sudden they're like forecasting whether inflation is going to come or not so they've changed their strategy but the data is very clear they should cut rates labor market has pain in it uh there's issues here and and they should address it now if they don't cut, I think what you're going to see is you're going to see investors actually start to

lose significant confidence in them because the Fed is now going to lose predictability. And a huge part of the predictability is if the data is telling you to cut and you don't cut, then how do we invest? It's already hard enough when we don't know what the cost of capital is going to be in a year. If I don't know what the cost of capital is going to be in three years, how do I invest? What sectors? What is the borrowing cost going to be? All these inputs are determined by 12 people who go sit in a conference room and most people don't even know their name. But if the data overwhelmingly says you should cut,

which it does, and the market is pricing in that cut, which it is, then the Fed doesn't cut, hey, man, we got a whole nother conversation to happen, right? So I think that it's pretty much a foregone conclusion. Now, something could happen between now and then. So I reserve the right to change my mind if some external crazy event happens or tweet happens. Again, I mean, look, man, this stuff is crazy, right?

Like, you know, I like to wake up early. And so that means that you got to go to bed at like a normal hour. But if I go to bed sometimes 10, 1030 at night, you know, if you're like a sports fan, you know, hey, the game's on, I'm gonna go to sleep, you know, seventh inning, whatever, right? And I'll wake up tomorrow and I'll either watch the last two innings or whatever, or the football game, whatever. In the world of investing, you go to sleep at midnight, wake up at six, bam, you're like, what? Who said what? who did that 24 seven world. And so it's just, you know, it is what it is. You just gotta get comfortable with the, you gotta sleep. You, you gotta,

you know, there's certain things are going to happen that you don't know about. I hope you didn't go to sleep during the giants game on Sunday, man, the New York giants. I love them. Cam Scadaboo, Jackson dart. It's just, you know, it's like make New York giants football fun again. Right. How awesome. Amazing. But boys, you gotta close out the game you can't give up a a huge thing a huge lead i i think that i read uh the broncos scored 33 points in the fourth quarter they were up 19-0 at one point yeah so you know

we're gonna work on that it's all right but but cam scataboo uh we we need somebody to uh do some technology innovation make sure his helmet is good that man i love that man he he's just fun He's brutal. He's like Pat McAfee and Rob Gronkowski put into one person. And he's good at football, which I love. But yeah, we need to protect that man at all costs because at this rate, he might not make it to week 12. I mean, he's just running over people and stuff. I love it. All right. I got one more question for you. The Fed is extremely reactive most of the time. They're looking at data and they're saying, cool, what has happened? Should they be taking a more proactive approach to this stuff and trying to forecast because forecasts are normally always wrong.

Doesn't matter who's doing it. No, no. Cause if you can't, if you can't make good decisions based on the prior information, you guys are fortune tellers, right? These guys think that they're going to do some like astrology or something, try to figure out what's going to happen. They have no clue. Right? I mean, here's the craziest part. I would love to sit down with somebody at the fed and have an honest conversation and start asking them questions about what they think is happening in the economy and i don't know like there may be answers that i'm like wow i'm learning a ton from this person they have an immense understanding and intricate you know uh data etc on the other hand half of me thinks like i started talking to be like bro no wonder y'all

are behind the curve right both of those things are potential outcomes which is part of the problem right there's a lot of places like if you go and you're like you know if i go talk to mark zuckerberg about social networks, that guy probably got a pretty good idea. He probably understands the landscape really well. He understands what's working, what's not working. He understands inside the company, like great detail, blah, blah, whatever.

If I go talk to, you know, Jensen Huang about AI data centers or chips or whatever, like he's probably got a pretty good understanding. If I go talk to a Fed governor, I don't know. And I think that's part of the issue is there's a good chance. I mean, I'll never forget Jerome Powell saying when inflation was higher, he said,

we don't think that inflation is a problem it is not hurting people's quality of life and they said how do you know and he said no one's come to my office and told me oh bro stop stop you won't let anyone in your office they're building a new office don't worry yeah two billion dollars all right that's it for today thank you guys so much for watching we'll do it again next week