The Pomp Podcast - Why Bitcoin’s Next Big Move Is Closer Than Everyone Thinks

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

Mel Mattison is one of the leading macro strategists on the internet, known for his deep insights into global markets and digital assets. In this conversation, we break down why inflation fears are overstated, why rates may fall faster than expected, and how energy and politics are shaping today’s markets. We also cover the rise of young independent investors, growing distrust in institutions, and what all this means for bitcoin, stocks, housing, and the AI-driven economy ahead.======================Uphold is the easiest way to buy and sell crypto unlike any other platform allowing you to trade in just one step between any supported asset. Check them out at https://uphold.sjv.io/K0RXra. This video includes a paid sponsorship with Uphold. I’m compensated by Uphold for promoting its products and services and may receive commissions from referrals. Terms apply. Not available in all jurisdictions. Digital assets are risky and may result in the total loss of your capital.======================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/======================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 – Intro2:55 – Is inflation actually a problem?6:21 – Where interest rates are ultimately headed9:47 – The “affordability crisis” vs what the data really shows21:36 – Human nature, incentives & “rich thinking”32:14 – Distrust in institutions & the rise of independent investors40:43 – What caused bitcoin selloff & 2026 outlook45:59 – Why mindset matters more than macro for individuals

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. There's a lot of big institutions that might even be behind some of this sell-off that want to drive it lower because they want to get in. I think there's huge institutional big money demand to buy Bitcoin. It's just waiting to pounce. And so once that pounce happens, we're going to be at 150. I still think, and the last time I was on, I said, I think we'll be at 150 by the end of February. I hate to do it, but facts change. I got to change. I'm going to back it up just a little bit and say, I think we'll be at 150.

you back. What's going on, guys? Today, we got a great conversation with Mel Madison. In this conversation, we talk about inflation, interest rates, the Fed and asset prices. He also goes into a historical overview of what's been happening both in the United States, Western Europe, Canada and all around the world. Why so many social and political trends are actually affecting asset prices? Why things like Bitcoin have become popular and how young people are beginning to invest more and why they're doing it. This conversation touches on both the financial impact, but also the social impact of so much that's happening in the American economy. I'm excited to bring it to you and hopefully you learn something.

Here's my latest conversation with Mel Madison. All right, Mel, I thought a great place to start the conversation. Everyone is worried about inflation. The Fed's been worried about inflation. That's the big reason why they claim that they haven't been cutting rates more aggressively. We see lots of people who were saying that tariffs were going to be inflationary. They were wrong. What's your take?

Is inflation actually a problem that we should be worried about? Or is this disinflationary or deflationary theme that now you're hearing Elon Musk and other people talk about actually the thing that we should be paying attention to. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think we've got huge deflationary forces, you know, in effect that have been going on for some time. I think a lot of people are kind of dissing Hassard as if he gets appointed Fed chair, he'll be a puppet of Trump and he's just talking about lower rates. But if you listen to what he's saying and also if you listen to what Scott Besson is saying, Besson has talked about the three I's, immigration, interest rates, and then I forget the third one, but it has to do

with energy. So basically with inflation. So energy is the key to inflation. And if you look at where oil is, it is absolutely dirt cheap, even at $60 a barrel. If you go back to 2007, when we reached $150 a barrel and inflation adjusts that. I mean, oil could go up to $80. It's still dirt cheap. I just filled up my car yesterday. I go to a Harris Teeter here in North Carolina and my fuel points kick in and I get like a 70 cent gallon discount. It was $2.10 a gallon to fill up my car. Anytime you go back and you look and you say, when did inflation spike? It spikes with oil. It spikes with energy. You go back to 2022, gas was $5 a gallon post the Ukraine-Russia war starting. Oil spiked to $120 a barrel. That led us off that inflationary spiral. A lot of people

think it was all about QE, all about COVID spend, and they completely forget about the fact that oil literally went from negative to $120 a barrel in less than a year. When you move like that in oil and energy, you're going to stoke inflation. And we don't have anything that is stoking inflation right now. In fact, we have everything pointing down. We have housing going down, energy going down. If you even look at foodstuffs, you know, these things are the Trump administration is now working on all of those things, those are going down. I mean, I don't see any way that you can't see that basically CPI, PPI, something like that. It's going to be between two and two and a half percent by the end of next year, like very close to the Fed's target. One thing I would note,

we do tend to see inflation, even though it's seasonally adjusted, go down at the end of the year and then spike at the beginning of the year. So what I wouldn't be surprised to see is to see January or February, CPI prints a little high. People get freaked out. Maybe yields go up a little bit. And then it starts that normal trajectory downwards and probably somewhere between two, two and a half percent by the end of next year. And I mean, that's basically the Fed's target. So there's no reason to be restrictive and above neutral. And that's why they should be cutting. And it's completely legitimate. And that's exactly what Hassett or whoever the next Fed chair is going to be arguing in a few months when they're in the post.

So we've been getting these rate cuts as we go lower and lower, and sure, they're fighting it as they're doing it, right? And obviously the president, the administration, and many people would like it to go faster. One of the questions I started to ask people, what is the final resting place? Should we be at 2%, 2.25, 2.5, 3? Where do you think it's like kind of when we're done with this rate-cutting cycle, where should we end up? Yeah. I mean, this is the very academic conversation about our star, right? The neutral rate. This is the supposed rate where it's the Goldilocks rate, where you're not overly stimulated to the economy, you're not overly restrictive. I actually think that what we need to do is we need to get to our star, and then we

need to go lower. And I think that if it's Hassett who's the next Fed chair or whoever it is, they're going to be of the same opinion. And this is, in effect, an advocation of some form of YCC or yield curve control, which is essentially saying we need to dampen interest rates to an excessive level for a number of fundamental reasons, the first of which is just the fiscal situation in the United States, the amount of net interest expense that we are paying. I was just looking at the monthly Treasury statement from the end of September, which is the end of the fiscal year. It was actually not too bad. We ran a smaller deficit in 2025 than we did in 2024, not by a huge amount, $60-70 billion. We took in a lot more money, and that

was the result of the tariffs, but we also spent more money. So we spent over $7 trillion for the first time ever the U.S. federal government spent over $7 trillion. In about a $30-some trillion economy, that's almost a quarter of the economy is federal government spending. So we reduced the deficit, but we still have this huge debt that's growing. We did $17.75. That was our deficit for for 2025, $1.75 trillion. That interest expense is going to grow. We need to keep that down. What people like Hassett have been talking about, if you read through the tea leaves, is that they believe that a lot of this balance sheet activity and the expansion of the balance sheet, the QE, the money printing, that was a primary driver along with kind of supply chain

controls of the inflation. And that actually keeping interest rates lower, so long as energy is also lower, it is not going to stoke inflation. And so I think we're setting up for a period where they're going to reduce interest rates to a very low level, probably below 3% by the end of next year on the Fed funds. This is going to stoke housing, which we need to stoke. And then what we're going to do is we're going to counter inflation by a bunch of other different policies to make sure that energy stays low and that these input prices on different commodities stay low. And we're going to try to thread this needle. And I actually think it's going to be successful in the same way that a lot of people were flipped out about the tariffs and that's going to create

a collapse. People are going to be flipped out that the Federal Reserve wants to lower interest rates. And they're going to say it's going to cause yields to spike and inflation to get out of control and it's just not going to happen. Now, there's this whole idea of loss of affordability narrative. And you mentioned that food prices are coming down, gas prices are coming down, housing prices are coming down. I think that there's also, though, a feeling of like it's not enough. It's not happening fast enough. And so the severity of that, even though, yes, it is a negative number, it's not like housing's fallen 15 percent in price. How do you think about the loss of affordability and maybe where that narrative is accurate and then maybe where people

are kind of saying, I feel this way. But when you actually look at what's happening in their life, they may not really understand how good they have it. Yeah, I think there's a lot of very major meta, what I call meta narratives that are being pushed by the mainstream media right now, in large degree, to counter the success of the Trump administration. And this is not coming from someone who's trying to be a Trump cheerleader. This is just someone trying to call balls and strikes. This is what I see. When I listen to a Bloomberg or CNBC or an Andrew Ross Sorkin, I mean, it is so ridiculous. It's like out of control. I mean, I listened to an excellent interview he did with Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir at the Dealbook Summit. I mean, I say excellent because of Alex Karp's performance, not Andrew Ross Sorkin's. Andrew literally had the CEO of one of the fastest growing, most important companies on the planet on stage for 40 minutes.

He spent half of the time trying to draw up like quotes that were supposedly attributed to Alex Karp from like 10 years ago about Donald Trump. And he's trying to say these people are completely missing the whole narrative of what's going on right now. So the narrative out there right now is a few meta-narratives that are completely wrong. One of them is that illegal immigration stokes growth, and now that we're cutting that off, we're going to be in trouble. The other one is lower interest rates stoke inflation. That is not true. We had low interest rates year after year after year post-GFC. Japan has had negative or zero interest rates for decades.

They are only starting to get a little inflation now. You can maintain low 1%, 2%, even negative interest rate year after year at a central bank so long as the economy is not in such a state that it's naturally generating inflation. And we're not in that state right now. That's why I think we can drop interest rate. The other major meta-narrative that I think is really wrong right now is this affordability narrative. I think that the United States is probably about as affordable as it's ever been. And most people will just step back and say, what are you talking about?

Like, that's ridiculous. You know, I just posted something that I pulled up from Fred. It was basically like real wages, you know, CPI adjusted. Now, I know CPI is a little light, but like we're at like multi-decade highs. If you look at net worth owned by the bottom quartile of U.S. population, we're at multi-decade highs. We basically have one of the best economies we've ever had. We have 4.4 percent inflation, excuse me, unemployment.

We have under 3 percent inflation. We have a housing market where, yes, they're a little bit more, let's say, unaffordable than they were 10 years ago. But that's still only one kind of slice of the pie. And I think what people have to look at and they have to they have to think about is how is the pyramid changing? because that's what I think is really going on, which is there used to be this pyramid of society where if you went to college and you got a bachelor's degree, you basically had your ticket punched and you were now in that upper echelon of the pyramid. And now what we're seeing is we're seeing Wall Street Journal just had an article about electricians making over a quarter

million dollars a year at data centers. Plumbers now make routinely six figures. What we're seeing is people who went to college, maybe got a bachelor's degree in sociology or a master's degree in Russian literature, and they have all this debt. And then they're going out into labor force and they can't afford shit. And they're like, oh, my God, this economy sucks. And it's like, yeah, it does suck for you. But actually, for the 45-year-old electrician who was struggling 10 years ago when the housing crisis was busting, he's now living the best years of his life and making $200,000 a year. So there's a lot of people making a lot of money right now. And then if you look at, like I said, all of these aggregate levels, disposable income, net worth as a

percentage in the lower quartiles, all these things are at basically record levels, record levels, and the media wants to promote affordability crisis. Today's episode is brought to you by Uphold. Are you someone who's tired of juggling multiple apps just to trade, earn, stake, or spend your crypto? Then listen up, because Uphold does all of that in one single unified platform. You can access 300 plus crypto and fiat currencies with an interface that works for you, whether you're a beginner or an expert. Uphold also features any to any swaps, where you can swap crypto to fiat, fiat to metals, and tokens to tokens directly in the app. If you prefer self-custody, Uphold's vault gives you multi-stick security,

key recovery, direct trading access, and peace of mind without giving up convenience. Uphold is also 100% reserved, meaning no fractional practices and proof of reserves are updated every 30 seconds so you can verify your assets anytime. For U.S. users, you can even earn yield on dollars with a USD interest account. No fees, no minimums, and funds are insured up to $2.5 million through the Atomic Cash Suite program. If you want one app for your entire digital asset life, check out Uphold today. Go to Uphold.com to learn more. Uphold.com. Go check them out today. Now, when you look at that affordability crisis, can both things be true? That most people are actually doing much better than they think,

but the people who are in pain are just in much more severity of pain? Or do you think it's completely nonsense? No, I think there's a lot of people in pain. I mean, don't get me wrong, but I think what we have to do is we have to look at it from a contextual basis. So if you look at it and you think, okay, there's a family of four. They're truly struggling. Yes, they are. But that's basically the way it's been for the last 800 years. I mean, like go back to medieval times and you can literally like go into Gemini and say, what percentage of wealth was owned by the top 2%? I mean, it's going to give you an astronomical amount. And all that's happened over the last four or 500 years is that amount has gone down. It still continues to be this way where there

are literally most Americans are not upper class. I mean, by definition, I mean, most people are. It's like you ask someone a question. Do you think you're above average intelligence? Like 80% of people will say yes. We know that 30% of those people are wrong, right? Because if you're above average, it's only 50%. If you say, how are you doing? And you're like, I'm not doing that great in this economy? Like probably yes, because guess what? Life is hard. You know, it's not easy. You don't just get given the four bedroom home with the granite countertops and the swimming pool in the backyard and the 90, what I call the 90210 life. Like my wife grew up in Columbia and she used to watch American TV and she used to think that everybody in the United States lived like

90210, you know, that this was the way it worked. The reality is the United States is a very class based society. It's it's there have always been the extremely wealthy, the extremely poor. The vast majority of Americans live somewhere in the middle of that range, which is basically a struggling range. And that's exactly where we are now. But we're actually a little bit better than we used to be. So if you go back to the 80s or the 70s or even the 60s or the 50s, we're doing better. Here's one key difference. What a lot of people do is they'll look back to the 1950s and they'll say, wow, that was just this immaculate time where like, you know, you could graduate from high school with a high school diploma and go work for a factory somewhere and

afford a house. That's true. If you are a white native born American male, if you were black in the 1950s and you live where I live right now in Durham, North Carolina, good luck. You know, if you are a woman, good luck. If you are an immigrant, good luck. So basically what I'm saying is the pyramid has evened out, where right now we have a lot of people that used to be cut out from success. Hispanics, Latinos, African-Americans, homosexuals, all these people are rising up to extremely important positions in society right now. And what's happening is a certain group of, say, white, heterosexual, Christian, native-born males are not, like, basically given the keys to the kingdom like we used to be. My uncle basically was born in 1929.

He fought in Korea. He graduated college in 1952. He's a white man in America with a college degree. He's got the easy life ahead of him. That's not the way it works right now. At that point in time, the United States was 50% of world GDP. We essentially dominated world GDP. We had a legally segregated and racially and ethnically stratificated society where there was whole large swaths of society kept at the bottom of the pyramid. So, of course, it was easy for him to be successful. Of course it was. That's not the society we want. We're not going back there. Now we're trying to uplift everybody. And if you look at society in aggregate and you don't just compare us to like leave it to beaver type people, but you compare it to American society writ large, we are the most prosperous, wealthy, affordable, upward mobile society ever. And I will point to this as exhibit A. I mentioned white, Christian, heterosexual,

native-born males as kind of the man. Not one single mag seven company, and you can include Broadcom and OpenAI into that, is run by a white, Christian, native-born, heterosexual American male. They're all run by immigrants like Elon Musk or openly homosexual people like Tim Cook or Sam Altman or non-Christians like Jassy or Zuckerberg, like the American society has changed and it's opened it up to everybody. And now what's happening is that certain people that felt they were an entitled group, that maybe their parents were upper middle class or upper class, and they went and they got that fancy degree from, you know, Harvard or Columbia, and they're struggling and they're like, everything is broken.

But what's really happening is we're going through a massive reorganization of society. We're breaking down the discriminatory barriers that used to exist in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and the 80s. And we're opening it up to everybody. And on an aggregate level, we're going up.

But if you look at it from, say, a white middle-class society person, you might say, oh, my standard of living's going down. But that's only for a certain group. If you're a plumber, electrician, your standard of living has been going up for the last 10 or 15 years by a lot now when you think about this you've got this uh thought process of like there's too much quote-unquote rich thinking going on um and you also talk a lot about uh the tri-lateral commission i think is what it's called

um describe a little bit as to like rich thinking and the tri-lateral commission and how these things relate to each other yeah well i i think it's very wrong-headed to feel ashamed of being in a privileged position and wanting to keep that. I think that, you know, any animal, you know, I can look at my cat. Like, my cat is a stray cat. I brought in this cat. This cat had a very tough life. It's now been living with me a few years. All it wants is treats, right? You know, temptations. Like, the natural tendency of mammals, homo sapiens, we want more. We want to improve our own life. And I don't think we should be ashamed of that. I think we should embrace it. And I think, you know, this is part of that Alex Karp interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin. The first question

Sorkin's asked is about a quote in Karp's book by Samuel Huntington, where he talks about how Western society has essentially reached an apex point globally because of our superiority in the application of organized violence. And I think a lot of people look down on that. I think they're ashamed. I think they talk about colonial history. I think they talk about what happened with Native Americans. I think, like, they act as if these are all things to be ashamed of, to apologize for, to lament. And I just don't see it that way. I think the world's a tough place, okay? Like, I know for a fact my ancestors got tomahawked in the back by Native Americans and killed because the Native Americans wanted the land my ancestors were living on. Now, perhaps my ancestors also

did stuff to Native Americans. I don't know. All I know is that in the 1770s, this type of era, and I know this because my grandmother, who's from Tennessee, has done a lot of family research. I know that a great-great-uncle of mine is basically Davy Crockett. I know I'm a direct descendant of his sister, Elizabeth Crockett. And there's been a biography written about basically an Indian massacre of the Crockett family. And so I know that one of my family members was supposedly like washing clothes in a creek and Indians came and tomahawked her in the back and killed her. Like that's the world we lived in. And the other thing, it's interesting because there was this great documentary by, you know, Ken Burns on the revolution. And he talks about moving into

the Ohio Valley where Indians had lived for, he says, hundreds of generations. It's true. Indians did live in the Ohio Valley for hundreds of generations, but not the same Indians. So there have been, for thousands of years, massive wars, like the Lakota Sioux taking over areas in the Dakotas and slaughtering and killing other Indian tribes to take over their land and vice versa. And if you actually look at the white people that live in North Dakota right now, they have lived there longer than the Lakota Sioux lived there when the white people came there, because that was actually a recent migration of the Lakota Sioux into that territory where they took it over from a different tribe. In other words, these are not things to be ashamed of.

Like people 200, 300 years ago, they fought for land and they fought desperately and they fought Native American against Native American, white against white, black against black. And in fact, the Portuguese, when they first went to Africa with their sailing ships, they went in search of gold and they went to these shores and they were like, you know, we need gold. We want gold. The Africans came to the shore and said, look, we don't have gold to the Portuguese. But what we do have is we have all these slaves that we've captured in the interior of Africa that we can sell you. And so it's important to understand that, like, why are there so many African-American slaves? Because there are a lot of Africans on the shores of Africa that wanted to sell Africans to the Portuguese and the Spanish. And that actually slavery is something that has existed in Native American tribes, in European tribes.

I have a mother of Polish descent that's Slavic. Basically, Eastern Europe was known as that's where you go for slaves in the Roman time. So I think probably my ancestors spent as much time in slavery as the average African-American's ancestors have spent in slavery. And there's just all this apology. Let's apologize for all of this. Let's apologize that we won. Let's apologize that we fought wars and defeated tribes. tribes. And we basically, you know, hit the apex. And then not only did we do that, but then we

became the least bigoted, the most open, the most giving, the most, probably the only people on the planet to really relinquish power. I mean, if you think about the fact that hundreds of thousands of white American men died fighting in the Civil War, in large part to free African Americans. That's one of the greatest acts of sacrifice in human history. And it was done by white American men. And we are looked at as the villains of history. We are looked at as the ones that have created this colonial empire that is an oppressive, evil empire. And I think if you look at, like, How do things work in the Middle East? How do things work in South America? How do things work in China? They're all authoritarian, male-dominated, sexist, racist empires. And the only place where people are actually opening and loving and have given up power is in Western Europe, the United States, Canada, this place. And we should embrace ourselves. We should thank ourselves. We should love ourselves. And then we should look at the abundance we have with AI and all these opportunities and not feel sorry for ourselves. Everybody wants to be a victim.

The minorities are a victim. White people are victims because boomers bought all the houses cheap. You know, fiat currency is the problem. Fiat currency is not the problem. Fiat currency is the symptom. It's a symptom of the fact that the United States openly decreased its domination of world GDP because we wanted the rest of the world to grow. Now, we didn't do that for altruistic reasons. We did not want Germany to fall to the Soviet Union or Japan to fall into authoritarian hands. So we wanted to support the growth of these areas. But all of these things are going on.

And I know I've ranted for a while here, but I just think there's so much crap out there right now that's just destroying this country, Western civilization, in a very serious and profound way. And if we don't stand up for it and start talking about it, then everything is going to be gone And it's just going to be a disaster. And so I appreciate the opportunity to say this.

I normally am very finance related, but I'm just really disappointed in some of the narratives that are out there that are just kind of stepping on the gravestones of a lot of good men who fought to make the world a better place. Today's episode is brought to you by Zappo Bank. Are you a Bitcoiner looking for yield, security and liquidity? Zappo Bank is a fully licensed private bank and a virtual asset service provider. They're regulated in Gibraltar, and they've built one of the most trusted vaults for Bitcoin custody since 2013. And now they offer so much more. Security is just a start. With Zappo Bank, your Bitcoin can grow every single day.

Members earn 3.6% APY on USD deposits and 0.5% APY on Bitcoin balances up to two Bitcoin. And they've got interest paid daily in Bitcoin. That's pretty cool. You can also spend worldwide with their premium debit card, earning up to 1% cash back in Bitcoin and no foreign exchange fees. And when you need liquidity, you can borrow against your Bitcoin up to $1 million instantly with no hidden fees and no early repayment penalties. That means that you can access cash without selling your Bitcoin. And if you ever need help, you can talk to a real person, too. Zappos expert team is available 24-7 to answer your questions.

Pomp podcast listeners, that's you, who sign up as new users will receive $150 off their first year of membership. Just a heads up, this special promotion for Pomp listeners runs until the end of December, so go get it while it's hot. Go straight to zappobank.com slash pomp to start the application.

That discount will be applied to your account after registration. That's x-a-p-o-bank.com slash pomp. Promotion till the end of December. Go to zappobank.com slash pomp today. Today's episode is brought to you by Simple Mining. Have you ever been interested in mining Bitcoin? As a miner myself, I've been using Simple Mining for the past few months,

and the experience has been nothing short of seamless. I mine with the pool of my choice, and the Bitcoin is sent directly to my wallet. Simple Mining, which is based in Cedar Falls, Iowa, offers a premium white glove service designed for everyone, from individual enthusiasts to large-scale miners. They've been in business for four years and currently operate more than 20,000 Bitcoin miners, including mine. Their electricity is over 65% renewable thanks to the abundance of wind energy.

Not only do they simplify mining with their top-notch hosting and on-site repair services, but they also help you benefit financially by running your operations as a business. This approach offers 100% bonus depreciation to optimize the profitability of your investment. Do you ever worry about the completion of maintaining your mining equipment? They've got you covered there too. For the first 12 months, all repairs are included at no extra cost. If you experience any downtime, they'll credit you for it as well. And if your miners aren't profitable at the amount, simply pause them with no penalties.

When you're ready to upgrade or adjust your setup, their exclusive marketplace provides a seamless way to resell your equipment. Join me and many satisfied miners who have simplified their Bitcoin mining journey. You can even get started today with a seven-day miner trial. Visit simplemining.io slash POMP to get started today. That's simplemining.io slash POMP to get started today. With Simple Mining, they make it simple. What's interesting is I think that there are some people who say everything that you're

talking about right now, that's history, that's maybe politics, that has nothing to do with finance. I actually think, though, that what you're talking about is related to finance in that as you destroy the fabric of a belief system, an economy, a society, et cetera, it shows up in financial assets. I would actually argue that part of the tearing apart or the extremes in politics between these parties leads to an immense amount of distrust and distrust in the media, distrust in the political apparatus, distrust, maybe even religion, distrust in, you know, kind

of the, you know, family unit, just all these different components, something like Bitcoin shows up and it says, you don't have to trust, you can verify it's decentralized, you know, that nobody controls it. Like, like that actually is a growth from these forces that you're talking about. I would also go and argue that a huge piece of distrust is driving what I call the rise of the independent investor, the people who are saying, I want my information online. So I'm going to go to the podcast and newsletters and X and Reddit and all these places. I'm going to go learn for myself. And then I'm going to turn around. I'm going to go on to eToro and Robinhood and Public

and Webull and Coinbase and wherever. I'm going to allocate my capital independently. I don't trust a stockbroker. I don't trust a financial advisor because I'm losing trust in these institutions. And now I need to go do it myself. I recently saw a stat that 63%, if I remember correctly, of all of Gen Z is now investing before the age of 21. Why is that important? Because the numbers were in the low 30s for millennials and in the low 20s for Gen, kind of like the boomer generation. So you think about it, young people are actually participating more than ever before on a percentage basis. And so in a weird way, we do live in a society because of the access to information where these things are all intertwined. You may not like

politics, but politics cares about your portfolio because now you have the administration making economic policies or making even investment decisions that affect various assets. You see regulation creating a boom for AI and for crypto, but actually it may be being negative towards other types of businesses. The deflationary force of immigration policy, right? Like all this stuff is very connected. And I think that's why you see people saying like everything is becoming financialized and people feel like everything gets politicized. But because people have access to information now, they start to understand, oh, I'm not just looking at finance. I'm actually looking at this very complex machine called the U.S. economy or U.S. society. And then that

interacts with this global system. And I better understand a lot more than just like, what is the stock doing because that is being driven by capital flows, the Fed, the Treasury, the White House, and many aspects. And so it's a very interesting kind of weird dynamic where historically people would say, you know, don't talk about politics at work. Pretty much every investment firm I know, you better be talking about politics, right? Not in terms of like, what are your politics, but what are the politicians doing? What's the White House doing? There's a reason why White House asset management is now a term that is, you know, used either as a critique or endearingly in order to understand, like, there's a new player in the market.

No, definitely. And look, the political is the financial is the economic, and this is all happening. And I think we're at a very critical point. I mean, I think the wheels are about to fall off the track here. And I think it seems like everything is great and society is just moving along well. And in some sense, it is. And my argument has been it really is. But I also think there's like, it's like sometimes right before the greatest success can be your most critical point. I don't know if you've ever had a success in life where there was like a breakthrough moment, but just a little before that breakthrough moment, there was almost a point where you could have fallen off the cliff. I think we're at that point. I think with AI, I think with the way the world is connected right now, the way people have access to information through programs like this or YouTube, social media, I think

we're actually at this point of kind of a breakthrough moment in society. I think most people don't want big wars. They don't want things to happen. Like, I don't think World War I could happen right now. I think people would just basically be like, look, we don't want to just go off into the trenches and die by the millions, you know, every month. Like, I think these things are very important, but I think it's a very kind of precipice-type point that we need to push through that. We need to be able to kind of cut through the crap and just say, look, let's just be open

and honest with everybody. Let's just say, look, are there people that say, look, you know, we want to have some sort of a semblance of the culture or whatever it is in our society politically that we feel is historical? Yes. Do we also want to embrace immigration? Yes, but in a legal and controlled way. Do we also want to enable upward mobility? Yes. But do we want to give everyone a complete social safety net where they get, you know, all of their food from a city-run grocery store, all their health care is universal, they've got rent control, free apartments? Like, what does that lead to? And I'll tell you what it leads to, at least a disaster. I mentioned my wife immigrated from Colombia, but half of her family actually still lives in Venezuela, in Caracas.

It's horrible right now. You're not hearing this on the mainstream media. I just heard this from my wife yesterday, talking to her aunt in Caracas. You go out on the streets of Caracas right now, the military is just rushing on you, puts an automatic rifle to your face, says, give me your cell phone, enter in the password, and they're going through and they're searching to make sure if there's any like anti-Maduro or anything like that. Like, these are the types of things that happen in authoritarian socialist countries. And you can say, well, that's because the U.S. is threatening it right now. But like, let's be aware, Maduro and Venezuela are not the good guys, okay? These are people that are, you know, essentially enriching

their own pockets while they strip Venezuelans of their wealth. When I was born, Venezuela was in the top 15 of wealthiest countries in the world. Venezuela has more oil and natural gas wealth than Saudi Arabia. Venezuela should, by all rights, be the Norway of South America. Every single person in Venezuela should have free health care, great education, a fully stocked cupboard, everything. The reason they don't is because there's someone at the top that's stealing everything and nothing's going to the people. Now, I'm not saying the United States should go in there. You asked me about Venezuela the last time I was on. I said it would be a mistake to start a war in Venezuela. It's a huge country. It's bigger than France and Germany

combined. It's a massive land area. But I think we have to understand where these socialist policies lead. I mean, they lead to disaster and poverty, whether it's Maduro or Castro or, you know, the Soviet Union. They don't work out well. And the reason they don't work out well is because human nature is such that, you know, I quoted something in my notes. It was a quote from Jefferson. Mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed, which is a fancy kind of 18th century way of basically saying people will just kind of suffer through stuff as long as they get the basics. If you just give people the basics, they're just going to sit there and suffer and

languish. And Alex Karp said this in that interview. He said, if you think for one moment that these leftist socialist policies are helping out the inner city black kid, you're fooling yourself. They're not. They're keeping him down. They're keeping him in poverty because guess what? He's being given just a little bit, the little piece of cheese at the end of the tunnel, at the end of the maze to keep him alive and keep him going. And you need to give people the opportunity to sink or swim. If you just give people a little lifesaver and that's all they've got, they'll just float and bob around in the ocean for the rest of their lives. When you look at current market dynamics, what are you excited about? There's all the issues, all the challenges, all the stuff, stocks, AI, Bitcoin, gold, real estate, 2026 kind of outlook. What are you excited about?

Mm hmm. OK, so we have a lot of huge things coming. Trump started last night. He did a big speech in Pennsylvania like he's going on the campaign campaign tour. Susie Wilde said, look, Trump doesn't know yet, but he's going to be campaigning like 2024. for. The entire U.S. government, the most powerful financial, economic, military force on the planet is basically going to be dedicated for the next 12 months to making affordability, making America great again, housing emergencies. We're going to have record tax refunds. As I said, we had record government spending last year, over $7 trillion for the first time. That's going to continue. We're going to have, you know, large, almost $2 trillion deficits. We're going to have massive AI CapEx spend by the hyperscalers. We're going to have, you know, AI productivity gains. I mean, like there's so much to get excited about that I think it's inevitable that we're

going to have another good year for markets. That doesn't mean there's not going to be rotations. That doesn't mean there's not going to be downfalls. And I have to admit, I'm very disappointed with the way Bitcoin has behaved. Last time I was on, I basically said, I think, look, we could get into the 90s, 97, 98, but we're going to bounce from there. And I was totally wrong about it. And I want to admit that because I made some great calls this year, but this was a bad one. I was convinced and I was investing my own money when Bitcoin, you know, was hitting those levels thinking we're going to bounce. And I think fundamentally what happened was I misunderstood the impact of the October 10th debacle. I think that was a bigger deal than

most people realize. It happened after the close. I remember that day very well. October 10th, NASDAQ went down like 3%. It was like 4.30, 5 o'clock, or maybe it was like just after 5, right after futures closed. And I looked at my account and I'm like, what the hell just happened to crypto. Things like Solana went down 40%. It was a massive, it was greater than the FTX collapse. That did damage to the market structure that's taking time to repair. And I think that's where I got it wrong. I think I was looking at the charts thinking it's life is normal, we should bounce from these levels. And I think all things equal, we probably would have. I think that there was some real damage done to market structure.

Like people were like flipped out a little bit, like watching that in crypto. That crypto then turned over into a little bit of, well, a lot of those people are also into Bitcoin. So we need to sell Bitcoin. So a lot of this got piled on to the fact that OGs were selling, that we essentially had a momentum crush. Because I don't think you want to, a lot of people say compare Bitcoin to the NASDAQ. Bitcoin does the same. Now, don't compare Bitcoin to the NASDAQ. Compared to high level momentum stocks, things like a Robinhood, an Oklo, whatever, those all went down 30, 40 percent, too.

So it wasn't just Bitcoin. I mean, Robinhood was over 150. It went down to under 100. I mean, it lost over 35 percent, too. So the high momentum, high flyers got taken to the woodshed in a very deep way. I think we're still recovering. I think if you look at those charts, it's very possible that at one point we have a retest of that low, something around that $80,000 range. I don't know if that's going to happen, but I'm not going to give out any proclamations because I was completely wrong, and I don't want to steer people wrong.

I don't know. I do think it's possible we go back to $80,000, maybe very high $70,000. That's possible. Maybe not. What I do feel confident about is that the long-term trajectory, because of the fundamentals, are high. And everything I've heard and read and researched is that there's a lot of big institutions that might even be behind some of this sell-off that want to drive it lower because they want to get in. Whether it's the Black Rocks of the world, the hedge funds, I think there's huge institutional big money demand to buy Bitcoin. It's just waiting to pounce.

And so once that pounce happens, we're going to be at 150. I still think, and the last time I was on, I said I think we'll be at 150 by the end of February. I hate to do it, but facts change. I got to change. I'm going to back it up just a little bit and say I think we'll be at 150 by the end of the first quarter. So I think by the end of March, we'll be at 150 new highs because I think that underlying institutional demand is huge. When does it step in? I don't know.

But I do think that that four-year cycle, we're in a new bull market and we're going to go to 40 or 35. I'm not there, but you know what? I was wrong before about Bitcoin. Maybe I'm wrong now. So take it with a grain of salt. Let's see what happens, my friend. I think that admitting you're wrong happens to all of us. I've been wrong plenty of times this year alone, right?

So it's how much you make when you're right, less about how many times you're wrong. Famous kind of traitor quote. But I do think that there is something that you're highlighting here, which is the public narrative and the underlying economic data are very different. And some of the economic data from the government is just wrong, right? So it's just you're looking at inaccurate data, and then that leads to an inaccurate conclusion. But also, I think that there's winners in every economy. And I always tell people, there's people who live in communist socialist countries. They figure it out.

There's people who live in democratic capitalist economies. They figure it out. If you have some degree of being a self-starter, if you have some degree of curiosity, if you want to work hard, if you are going after some opportunity, there is no greater country in the entire world for social and economic mobility than the United States of America. Add in the fact that now you have all this technology, it is incredible what is possible. And people don't like that because it means that you have to have agency and you're kind of responsible for good or bad outcome. You're not responsible for where you start, but you are responsible for do you get to where you want to be or not. And I think that the more that we can have people take some self-responsibility, the better off that the economy is because people are becoming more productive. They're creating things of value.

They're building things. They're solving problems. They're generating wealth. Those are all positive for America. It's actually one of the lessons that we should be teaching other than financial education and general education is you are responsible for your decisions. And if you make good decisions, then you are likely to end up in a much better place that, you know, sounds a lot better when you say it's somebody else's fault. Yeah, I mean, two last things really quick. I think one, you're absolutely right.

I think one thing that's important to remember is like nobody had like this, like on a generation wide path, like everything like pristine, right? Whether you go back 100 years, 200 years, you go back to the people that had to fight in World War I or fight in World War II or fight in Vietnam or go through this, like life just doesn't tend to hand you the four-bedroom, three-bathroom home with the swimming pool and the granite countertops. That's something that is typically a reward that very, very few people attain. And you've got to work for it. You've got to also get lucky to get it. I think a lot of people that have that also got lucky along the way they got help. And the last thing is something I just want to thank you for, because I noticed on, you know, X, like you tend to like do like a Twitter post or something like have a good day or, you know, today's like that attitude. That's probably the most important thing to success.

Like if you wake up with that attitude, well, I'm a victim. I'm screwed over because of the boomers or because of this or that or, you know, the good days are over. if you wake up with that attitude, you're almost guaranteed not to be successful. If you wake up with the attitude like, yeah, I might be heading up to bat. They might already put one strike against me. But you know what? I'm going to get a hit. If you wake up with that attitude, I think you can be successful. I think if you wake up and you just want to blame everything on the macroeconomic world and the horrible situation you're born in, not only is that the wrong way to do. But also for people that are born in the United States, you've got it about

as good as you're going to get it. So, you know, is it perfect? Is it easy? Is there a primrose path to wealth that's just guaranteed and paved with gold and it's going to be easy peasy? No, absolutely not. But you've got a shot and that's the most that anybody can ask for. What else do you want other than a shot, my friend? All right, Mel, thank you so much. We appreciate it very much. Every single time we talk, I learn a ton. So it's great to talk with you. I know that you're going to be gone for a couple of weeks.

We'll pick this back up towards the end of the year or beginning of next year. But it's been great having you on a couple of times this year. So we appreciate all your time, effort, knowledge, and we'll do it again soon. Thanks, Anthony.