The Pomp Podcast - Why Is Bitcoin’s Price Going Down? | Anthony & John Pompliano

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

John and Anthony Pompliano discuss bitcoin, why the price is going down, what’s going on with the federal reserve, where the pressure from the White House is coming, prediction for the next 10 years of the US economy, and will Powell cut interest rates? ===================== Markets are at all-time highs. Public equities are outperforming. And individual investors are driving it all. It’s officially the rise of the retail investor. On September 12th in NYC, I’m hosting the Independent Investor Summit — a one-day event built exclusively for self-directed investors. We’re bringing together some of the smartest public market investors I know for a full day of macro insights, market predictions, one-on-one fireside chats, and actionable investment ideas from each investor. This is going to be an absolute banger event. Join us if you like markets and think retail is two steps ahead of Wall Street.👉 TICKETS: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.independentinvestor.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠ (use promo code POMPYT25)======================Check out my NEW show for daily bite-sized breakdowns of the biggest stories in finance, technology, and politics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠http://pompdesk.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠======================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.======================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/======================TimeStamps:0:00 - Intro0:23 - Why is bitcoin dropping? 4:34 - Bitcoin vs money supply 12:12 - Where does bitcoin go from here? 21:31 - Why bitcoin is now a consensus trade25:44 - Early bitcoin stories and ancient coins 34:44 - Feedback from Jerome Powell and Jackson Hole 41:00 - Lisa Cook situation and where we go from here 

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You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. What's going on, guys? Today, we got a great episode with John Pompliano. In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin. Why is the price going down?

What's going on with the Federal Reserve? Where the pressure from the White House is coming? And do I think that Jerome Powell is going to bend the knee, wave the white flag, and eventually cut interest rates? On top of that, I make a prediction about the next 10 years of the U.S. economy. Let's just say I call it, why more light? And I think you'll understand why at the end of this conversation. Here's the latest episode with John Pompliano.

All right, John, what's the first topic? All right, let's talk Bitcoin price. It is down. What is going on with the Bitcoin price? Why is it at $110,000? Well, because there's more sellers than buyers. Easy explanation, obviously. But look, I think that there are two different aspects that are at play here.

The first is any time that you look at the historical seasonality of Bitcoin, the end of August into September, not a good time for Bitcoin. September is actually the only month of the year that historically is negative. All of the other months, sometimes they're big months up, sometimes they're small months up, but September is the only month that historically is down. So it's somewhat to be expected. The seasonality is here. Now, also, why does it start in August and go into September? Well, what happens in August? The running joke. Everyone is on vacation. They're all somewhere else. They're not in front of their screens. See this in the stock market, see this in Bitcoin, etc. So I

think that's one piece of it. It's definitely that. The second thing is that as you look at the legacy or the traditional finance world, there's a lot of uncertainty still. There's a lot of speculation that's going on. Some people are trying to figure out what's going to happen with interest rates. Now we got a little bit more clarity given that Jerome Powell has come out and said that he's going to likely cut rates in September. But I still think that there's a lot of folks who are saying, what are we going to do with our tactical allocation? If we have uncertainty, maybe we're not going to put as much money into the market as we previously thought we were. So what's interesting is Bitcoin is going down at the same time the S&P has been going down

over the last week or so, right? This is a thing that is a broad market pull down or a kind of resetting. Now, the reason why I think that's important, maybe the biggest takeaway from this is what you don't want to have is you don't want to have Bitcoin's price go from $69,000 in November. It was $69,000, I think, on November 1st of last year, all the way up to, let's say, $150,000, which I pretty much have been saying I could see that happening in this bull market. If you just get a straight line there, then what ends up happening is you're probably going to get a very big dump on the other side, right? The bear market's going to be pretty brutal.

So instead, what you want is you basically want these advancements in price. You want some sort of correction and resetting, right? You want to wipe out some of the open interest and some of the leverage in the system, kind of reset at a lower price and then move up after that. So I think that's what's happening right now. I don't know where we'll kind of end up is 110,000, you know, the bottom 108, 105, 112, like somewhere in this general range, I think that we are going to reset. And then that gives us the ability to move back up. And so you can almost think of like setting a foundation of the price, all of the conditions become much more attractive and we go up. What I don't think

people should expect is some like magical fast recovery. Remember, September on a seasonality basis is usually down. So I'm not saying it's going to be down this year, but I am saying that you should have tempered expectations going into this. And the other piece is there's a lot of buying coming. Like you ever heard of, you know, people being like, what was it? The British are coming. Remember Paul Revere, right? He was running from house to house on his horse saying the British are coming, the British are coming. The Bitcoin treasuries are coming. The Bitcoin Treasuries are a company. Tell your friends. All of them are about to get access to their capital and they're going to start buying in the market. And so it's billions of dollars collectively that

should be buying Bitcoin. Now, there is not as simple of an analysis because some of those dollars are hedged. So when they put on the Bitcoin exposure, their investors are then putting on a short Bitcoin spot exposure. And so they can be kind of negated dollars. But I do think that as that capital starts to flow into the market, you're going to see a lot of people get very excited because there's going to be continuous announcements of people buying Bitcoin, right? Which kind of gets people excited. It's hitting the news. It's driving some FOMO to it. But the second thing is that if there's more buyers than sellers, the price should start going back up again. And so I think that this range that we're kind of in, call it 125 to maybe

110, we'll kind of hang out here for a while. But as we see these buyers come into the market, As we see the interest rate cut in September, like all of these components are going to feed into Bitcoin, I do not believe has topped in any way for this market cycle. When does Bitcoin become uncorrelated with the global money supply, right? Obviously, everyone's seen the charts, the M2 money supply going up, and then Bitcoin's correlation with that. But if stocks are going to go down, Bitcoin's most likely going to go down because just less liquidity into the market. Well, there's two different things there. So like Bitcoin's correlation to other financial assets and then Bitcoin's correlation to the M2 money

supply. So Bitcoin's correlation to other assets, depending on what the asset is, sometimes it has high correlation. There are times where Bitcoin has a much higher correlation than normal to, let's say, tech stocks, right? If Nvidia is going up and Facebook's going up, then Bitcoin's going up, right? And vice versa. But there's also times where Bitcoin is actually very non-correlated. I mean, there was a very long period of time where Bitcoin's correlation to stocks was like 0.15, right? So if you think of one being high correlation, negative one being negatively correlated so if that goes up this goes down uh and zero is basically non-correlated right so 0.15 is actually pretty close to non-correlated uh very attractive for people to put a non-correlated

asset in their portfolio uh especially when it comes with a high sharp ratio and all this stuff so i think that uh depending on the market conditions depending on the time the correlations change depending on the asset so at times bitcoin has been very correlated other times not it is higher correlation today than it was five years ago it makes sense right think about it from kind kind of a just common sense approach. Okay, if I am an individual and it is 2015 and I'm a crazy person on the internet, frankly, that's what everyone was,

I'm going to take as much money as I possibly can. I'm going to put it in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the only thing. There's no correlation. I'm not like buying stocks and buying Bitcoin. I'm not selling stocks and buying Bitcoin, right? I just own Bitcoin. Like, that's it.

It was just crazy people. And I say that affectionately because like that was me, right? Was I didn't have any other assets. uh to the most part and so it was just like there is no correlation because we all are just in bitcoin now fast forward what do you see big financial organizations hedge funds etc now bitcoin is becoming a part of their portfolio so as bitcoin becomes a part of the portfolio now they do have other assets so they begin to act well are we risk on or we risk off are we

allocating or are we divesting right now there starts to be more correlation between the assets It's because the people holding Bitcoin has changed and they think in a more holistic portfolio construction manner. And so Bitcoin will naturally get put into that and start to be part of these similar types of trades or these similar types of positions. So I think that's important.

Now you asked about global M2 supply and I think this is very fascinating. Lynn Alden, Sam Callahan did a fantastic studies probably two, three years ago. Bitcoin is the most sensitive asset to global M2 expansion or contraction. So a lot of assets move If global money supply is increasing, then these assets go up.

If it's contracting, these assets go down. Bitcoin just happens to be the most sensitive, which means that for every net unit of growth of global M2 money supply, Bitcoin will move the most for that growth, right? And so if you want to make a bet on global M2 money supply growing, then you would buy Bitcoin because it is the thing that will express that impact the most, right? So that makes sense. you've also probably seen these charts of like m2 supply goes up and then bitcoin kind of follows it right well what's happened in the last two to three weeks is that m2 supply had gone up

bitcoin went up a little bit now it's been going kind of sideways so there's two schools of thought either one is that gap's going to close where bitcoin will accelerate and will eventually get to that m2 money supply or maybe it's broke now maybe you know quote unquote this time is different. I do not think that this time is different. But I also think that as soon as everyone starts to think something is true, that is when you should start questioning it. And so the second that everyone, including myself, sharing these charts saying, hey, look, this is what happens, right? This has historically happened. You always have to think probabilistically and say, well, maybe the probability of this happening for the 19th time may be a little

bit lower than it was on the third or fourth or fifth time, right? And so I do think that Bitcoin is still very susceptible to money supply growth. But I now see, well, there's a fracturing of capital going into Bitcoin, right? So think about it. It used to be you could buy Bitcoin. That was pretty much it. Okay, well, now if I want Bitcoin exposure,

I can buy the ETF, which goes and buys Bitcoin. So you're still getting the exposure to Bitcoin. Dollars are flowing into Bitcoin. Bitcoin's price is still there. But what if I want to now buy, let's say, a Bitcoin treasury company? I'm getting underlying Bitcoin exposure, but I'm doing it in kind of this levered vehicle.

And so there's some fracturing. Not every single dollar that goes into the Bitcoin treasury company is going into Bitcoin. It's trading at a premium. So there's gotta be, somebody's paying the premium, right? So if you pay, let's say a 50% premium, that means that for every $1.50 that you're investing, a dollar of Bitcoin is actually held in the treasury.

That's 50 cents worth of demand that technically is demand for Bitcoin, right? In this unique type of structure, but it's not going into Bitcoin. So that is being siphoned somewhere else, right? It's having less of an impact. Then if you go and you take a look at, well, let's say the miners,

similar type of thing, right? If you start to look at now there are these funds, there's like real estate, you know, Bitcoin funds, et cetera. Like there are a lot more opportunities to play Bitcoin today and they're not all dollar for dollar. And so I think that is where you're starting to see some of the, yes, increased interest,

but also there's fracturing of the monetary energy going into Bitcoin. A lot of it's still getting into Bitcoin, 70k now it's you know 110 120 whatever on a given day but it used to be that 100 of that demand went into bitcoin which caused these massive explosions in price now what you're seeing is bitcoin's going up but so are public stocks and you know these fund structures etc and so i think that uh it's very important for bitcoiners to not get complacent and to constantly try to pay attention talk to people learn listen to podcasts you know read all the great work that people are putting out

and understand that the market is changing, the market players are changing, the market dynamics are changing. And that doesn't mean that the overall thesis of Bitcoin is changing. It just means that the severity, the speed of these moves may be impacted. And the more you understand about those changes,

the more that you can start to understand about how Bitcoin should act in these kind of time periods that people are paying attention to. Today's episode is brought to you by Zappo Bank, where eligible members can unlock the power of Bitcoin without selling it. Need cash fast? With Zappobank's Bitcoin-backed loans, you can access 40% of your Bitcoin's value, borrowing as much as $1 million for a full year with low interest rates, zero fees,

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for you. With over a decade of experience in the Bitcoin space, Zappo Bank has been a trusted partner for those looking to make the most of their Bitcoin while keeping it safe. Your Bitcoin stays safe in your vault, untouched, never lent out, and secured in a global network of military grade bunkers with cutting edge security technology. Head to zapobank.com forward slash pomp to learn more. That's X-A-P-O-B-A-N-K.com forward slash pomp. Go check them out at zapobank.com slash pomp today. How much of every vehicle that you've mentioned, the ETS versus the treasury companies versus buying spotlight, how much of Bitcoin's price is in relation to just market participants, right? Like on a given day, you are going to have

buyers and sellers, regardless of the asset. Like there's never going to be a day where it's like, oh, we only bought Bitcoin, everyone on the planet. But how much is it reliant Bitcoin's price and price appreciation? Like all these vehicles seem to be reliant on the price appreciation and new market participants and new money flowing into the asset. How do you think about the relationship between all of these products and really Bitcoin's price and like where it goes from here. So if you look at it from the perspective of the treasury companies, the ETFs, et cetera, right? They all have different quote unquote business models. So if you think about an ETF, if let's just say an ETF has a hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin

and they charge a 25 basis point fee, right? Now we're going to start doing public math here. So got to be careful. But that would be the equivalent of 25 cents, right? So the ETF is going to earn 25 cents for every $100 that is sitting inside of their ETF, okay? They don't care if more people come in or not. They're going to make that 25 cents off of the $100. Now, would they like that $100 to become $200 of Bitcoin, whether it's through net new inflows or the price of Bitcoin appreciating? Of course, right? Because now 25 basis points on $200 is 50 cents. They doubled their revenue, right? So yes, it is beneficial, but it is not dependent. Their success does not depend on it, although they would like it. The Bitcoin treasury companies, they need to raise

more capital to buy more Bitcoin, right? That's part of the whole thing. And they need to do it in a creative manner. So they need the NAV premium to be high in terms of if your company trades at the amount of Bitcoin that you have in your balance sheet, it's not really a huge advantage to raising more capital to buy more Bitcoin, right? Yeah, Bitcoin can appreciate, you know, there's, you know, kind of some edge cases. But the whole value proposition here is if the company's equity trades at, let's say, two times the value of what's on NAV. So if I have $100 of Bitcoin sitting on the balance sheet and my stock is trading at the equivalent of a $200 market cap, well, if I sell shares and I buy more Bitcoin, I'm selling something that's worth two times

the value that's sitting on the balance sheet. And I'm using that additional capital to go buy more of that same thing on the balance sheet. And so I should be able to get a two times multiplier, right? So for every dollar of Bitcoin I buy, I'm getting $2 a market cap. And as long as that holds, you can play this game, which Saylor has done a fantastic job of. So I think that that is a very different kind of dependency. Again, not dependent on Bitcoin's price going up, but dependent on that premium being there. So you have to go vehicle by vehicle or strategy by strategy to understand what is it that each thing is reliant on or really needs for it to work. What I think you said, though, about being dependent for Bitcoin's price going up, well, of course, if let's say 100

million people around the world hold Bitcoin and there's no net new demand, well, Bitcoin's price shouldn't go up, right? It shouldn't go down either, right? If 100 million people are just holding it and they don't sell and there's no new buyers, then Bitcoin's price is just, you know, what it is. Where Bitcoin has really benefited is the finite asset. And there has been some that have been lost and destroyed and, you know, unaccessible, etc. So as net new demand has come in, the finite asset, well, the only thing that can move is the price. So naturally, think about it as if you have, let's say you have a car, right? And you hold that car and you bought the car for $30,000. And somebody comes to you and says, well, I'll pay you $28,000 for it. You'd

say, well, I'm not going to sell it for $28,000. Like I just bought it for $30,000. Okay. Well, I'll pay $30,000 for it. You'd say, well, I need the car. Like I bought the car, right? I need it. Okay. Then somebody says, well, I'll pay you $32,000 for the car. Well, that's a little bit more interesting, but for $2,000, I want to hold the car, not enough money. Then somebody shows up and goes, that guy's a moron. I'll pay you $50,000 for your car. Here are the keys. Well, you're like, yeah, I just bought it for $30,000. I'll sell it to you right now, $50,000, right? So there's a price at which you are willing to part with your car because economically the incentive is so large that you're willing to sell, right? Same thing, now go to Bitcoin. Let's say that you bought

Bitcoin, you bought one Bitcoin for $50,000. And somebody shows up and says, well, I'll buy it from your $55,000. There's a lot of people in the world who say, well, I need this. I need Bitcoin to protect my economic value. Why would I sell it to you for $55,000? That's crazy. I just bought it for 50. It's only 10% increase. But if somebody shows up and says, well, what if I'm willing to pay $120,000 for your Bitcoin? There's some people who say, you know what? I bought it for $50,000, $120,000, I might, yeah, you can have some of my Bitcoin. Not all of it, but maybe some of it, right? And so as the price moves, the price is unlocking supply, right? That is held by holders. And so as you see the price go higher, you should see more supply come into the market because

they're getting paid more money for the asset that they hold. And you see this in every bull market. Now, naturally, as you get to the other side and Bitcoin starts to crash, then what happens? now all of a sudden people say wait a minute i don't want to sell bitcoin i want to be buying bitcoin because now bitcoin is at a lower price it's more attractive the economic incentives for me to go buy it up now of course the people who are usually selling in the bear markets they're the people who are either new so they don't understand it two is they're over levered they are a forced seller there's some issue right that is why they are selling it they may be long term believers in bitcoin but they gotta sell and so naturally there's a transferring of bitcoin

from the people who mismanage something or are a forced seller into the hands of the people who are prepared, have capital, and have conviction. And so then we go through the cycle again, right? At some point, we exhaust all the sellers. People have now hold the Bitcoin. They are long-term believers.

They're not willing to sell. So in the last cycle, if you bought Bitcoin under $20,000 in the bear market, you're not selling it because you have a viewpoint that is worth a lot more. And so now all of a sudden, if Bitcoin's trading at $120,000, For every Bitcoin you bought under $20,000, you're making at least $100,000.

There's a lot of people who say, okay, I'll start giving you my Bitcoin, right? So I think that's the market dynamic that's at play here. And so the success of Bitcoin is ultimately hand-in-hand. It's going to have a chicken and egg. The more people that want Bitcoin, the more valuable it is from a perspective of price, like the price goes up. But also as the price goes up, it serves as the marketing campaign for Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin has no CEO, no board of directors, no marketing budget, no marketing team. There's no corporation.

There's no kind of centralized planning, et cetera. So, well, what happens when Bitcoin's price goes up? The media starts talking about it. You get text messages from your high school friends. Hey, man, what about that Bitcoin thing? Is it a good time to buy now, right? People start explaining it. I always know that it gets a little crazy whenever you see the Uber drivers.

they're they got uh you know one of the apps up on their phone they're checking their stocks or their crypto and so okay we're we're getting close to you know a top uh if you see people who usually don't pay attention to finance start talking about it younger people um a great signal a lot of times uh i found is moms right because you know uh moms i think are um a lot of my friends moms they don't pay attention to finance on a day-to-day basis they pay attention to what their kids are paying attention to. So if their kids start talking about it, then the moms start talking about it. And if all of a sudden you see the moms saying, yeah, that Bitcoin thing is working or, you know, some moms, that Bitcoin thing, right? Like, you know, you get like the

whole thing that they're looking at it and they kind of sort of know, but they really don't understand it. What you're really measuring is like how far has the media exposure, the price going up sends a ripple. Like you ever, if you throw a rock into water, you know how there's like ripples of the water? Well, when price goes up, that's the rock hitting the water. And then what you're trying to measure is like, well, how many concentric circles out has this news hit? And if it has reached a lot of people who are on the edges of those concentric circles, that means the price had to go up a lot, right? You need a fatter rock to hit the water rather than a little pebble.

And so when you start to understand some of these market dynamics, it doesn't give you a perfect like, hey, this is the top, this is the bottom, whatever. But you can just directionally understand kind of where you are in these cycles. And what I have found is it doesn't change my opinion on should I sell?

I ain't selling, right? Unless I got like a tax bill or something, my plan is to take whatever Bitcoin exposure I have, give it to my kids, my grandkids, et cetera. So what it does do is it starts to influence the rate at which you buy, right? You made dollar cost average every week, every month, every day, whatever.

And then at certain times, you may want to speed it up because you feel like Bitcoin is trading at a lower price. So that's kind of how I think about this idea of like Bitcoin going up and its impact on various parts of the market. It's funny because like, I have a decent tap on the younger generation.

I'm definitely not in high school, but I still know a lot of younger people much more than you. But it's funny because they never- You call me old? No, not at all. I just dropped. Did you hear that? That rock, uh, lake ripple corn. I heard all that was off the dome. Like, but it's interesting because no one ever, like most of traditional finance is probably

boring to the average person, right? Bonds and fixed income and all their mutual funds. Like that, that sounds boring. Uh, what's interesting is making a lot of money extremely quickly. And that's what I think time tested, time tested idea, but those are the, let's just get rich quick. But that's what I think attracted people to crypto was that like, no one's texting me about Google stock, right? No one's like, oh, Google's up 7% today. Like, what do you think? Or whatever.

But that's why I think crypto is super interesting to the young generation because they want to see that price appreciation. And then their moms get involved, their dads, their brothers, their sisters. Anyone text you about Opendoor? Yeah, I did get a text this morning about Opendoor. Okay, so if you think about that, right?

Again, it goes back to no one would be talking about Opendoor unless the price was going up. But same thing with the meme retail stocks. 100%. Bitcoin, no one's talking about it until the price goes up. So there's this weird dynamic of there are consensus trades and contrarian trades, right? And the contrarian trade is you buy something when it's not popular. And then the secret to a contrarian trade or a contrarian idea is you need it to transition from a contrarian idea to a consensus idea. You don't want to be on an island forever by yourself. You go hungry. What you want is you want to discover the island

and eventually everyone else is like, yo, that island's cool. Let's all go there. And you're the guy who built the hotel, set it all up. Like, hey, here comes everybody joining the party, right? That's where the returns are. So you want to be early, but eventually you need the idea to become consensus. And so that is what Bitcoin has done. Many other things is it starts off as this thing that's very unpopular. Nobody cares about people even question whether it's legal, all that kind of stuff. And then it transitions. It is now a consensus trade on Wall Street. Like Larry Fink is out there talking about Bitcoin is real. Bitcoin is high value. Bitcoin is this. I'm a believer. All these things. You went from the cypherpunks to Larry Fink. That's your contrarian

to consensus transition, right? Now, what you have is you have a mainstream asset. And so the mainstream asset, again, it goes back to think of it on like a horizontal basis. When you start with the cypherpunks, they are amazingly intelligent nerds, right? Okay, very small group, very convicted in terms of their kind of ethos, right?

And their worldview. It's just by nature, a very small group of people. But Larry Fink, there's a lot of people who believe the same things Larry Fink believes. And so that transition to Bitcoin kind of infiltrating their brains and gaining conviction now means that you have arbed away a lot of the return, right? I mean, Bitcoin has compounded for 10 years. Compounding your growth rate of Bitcoin for 10 years is over 85%. It's a bonkers number.

So all you had to do is buy it 10 years ago, hold it till today, and you outperformed every single hedge fund in the world, according to all the Bloomberg lists, right? Now, 10 years ago, Bitcoin's price was still hundreds of dollars. It started out at pennies. So it's not like you were the first guy to discover Bitcoin, right? You weren't the first guy on the island. Maybe you were one of the first parties to go and visit that guy on the island, right? You were early, but you weren't first bitcoin came out in 2009 so if you think about that 10 years ago 2015 it's more than half a decade after it came out you still could have bought it held it for a decade now performed every hedge fund in america pretty crazy but i think that is what people are

understanding is like the uh the reflexivity of this type of asset when it transitions from contrarian to consensus bonkers it's fascinating to think how contrarian of a thought that must have been in 2009 or 10 well i know most of it was probably trading on you want to hear okay i think the price will go up you want to hear a couple stories i i know people who were buying bitcoin in uh 2009 and 2010 um or or receiving it some of them were there weren't even exchanges you know satoshi right um i don't know i don't want to know who satoshi is um adam back satoshi emailed him right uh received it it wasn't like a we're gonna get rich thing it was like a computer science like hey can we figure this out so there was no economic you know belief of like oh if we

buy a bunch of this is going to be like super valuable i know one guy in the finance industry he had shorted the housing market so he was already rich right he'd done very well for himself and um he uh bought some bitcoin but like a throwaway investment at the time like $50,000, but he's worth, you know, probably hundreds of millions of dollars, right? It's like a dinner bill. Yeah. Like, well, I don't know about that. I don't know what dinners you're going to do, 50 grand, but yeah, like it. Well, I don't know what dinners that guy's doing.

Yeah. I don't know. Maybe he was going to really cool dinners. But, you know, it was, to him, it was like, hey, I don't want to lose money, but, you know, I'm not going to miss it if it's gone. Bought some Bitcoin. Then he had a company. everyone had computers and so he started to have everyone when they went home they were mining on their computers overnight right i don't remember the exact number but i'm pretty sure that he was accumulating the bulk of the bitcoin at less than a dollar i have spoken to this individual he still personally holds almost all of it it's crazy to think not only to have the conviction to go do all that etc now again

fifty thousand dollar investment if you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars got it um using your company's like hardware to mine, a little bit crazier, right? The crazy part is not selling. So Bitcoin goes from less than a dollar to a hundred dollars. You don't sell. It goes to a thousand dollars. You don't sell. It goes to $10,000. You don't sell. It goes to $100,000 and you don't sell. You think that guy, when it gets to a million, he's like, all right, fine. you know here you go no at some point you gotta sell a little bit no if you hold from less than a dollar to 100 grand you ain't selling yeah so here's the crazy part does he really have the money what do you mean it's basically like an illiquid asset sure you could borrow against it

or whatever but if you're never going to sell it which means you're never going to use it then you're basically holding something that's worth something on like your personal financial statement. But it's like illiquid startup equity. Can't do anything with it. It's numbers on a page, but you can't consume it to go buy things. So yes, you can borrow against it. I get it. This person doesn't strike me as a person who's borrowing against it. Right. And so if you think about it from that perspective, it's kind of like, you know, if a tree falls in a forest, no one heard it did it really fall if you own something that you're never going to sell you're not going to use you're not going to consume anything with it do you really have that you

know value that's a different mindset because there's not that many people who could have you know tens of billions of dollars based on my calculation um right of value that guy ain't touching it which then goes to like satoshi i don't know one of the world's richest people not touching it like we're playing a non-economic game at that point right these people aren't looking at it in terms of how much money am i going to make they have a deep-seated belief in something else and so there is this threshold at the 10-year mark called uh ancient coins anything over 10 years called ancient coins and obviously the longer bitcoin goes the the more people who potentially could be in the ancient coin well there's a lot of folks who are crossing

over into ancient coins. One is because Bitcoin became more popular in 2013, 14, 15, right? So we're now kind of crossing over those 10-year thresholds. So there's more potential people who hold Bitcoin from that era that now could be ancient coin holders. But more importantly is the conviction that these people have. When they were first, you know, if you bought Bitcoin at 20 bucks, well, maybe it becomes a thing. I mean, how many times is there tweets that people pull up from, you know, way back in the day and people were like, it hit $8. Oh my God. Right. And then they're like, uh, I sold my Bitcoin. Thank God it crashed to five. And you're like, dude, you like I sit in there like 120,000, like, oh my God. Right. So like, it just goes back to, you can look

in the data and you can see more and more people are becoming these ancient coin holders. And the reason why that's important is because that means that that supply is essentially taken off of the market. Now, I'll give you another example. It recently came out that Kevin O'Leary, this guy, Paul Warshaw, and this guy, Shine, Matt Allen, came together and they bought the world's most valuable sports card. I'm not an expert on sports cards, but it's got the logos, it's got multiple players, et cetera. They paid almost $13 million. I think it was $12.9 million. And in one of the news articles i was reading you know i'd like to to read and learn um it says something to the effect of uh one of their quotes was like this will never trade again they're just never gonna

sell it okay i called them called kevin heard his view of it i called shine i said hey you know what what's going on like i told him i said tell me about the uh the auction like that's like high stakes you know you got the whole game theory explain the whole thing to me it's fascinating but that card is now known as one of if not the most valuable sports cards in the world you think there's not a billionaire somewhere who'd be willing to pay more than 12.9 million dollars for it now simply to say i own the world's most valuable sports card okay well what if they're not willing to sell you think someone would be willing to overpay to get them to give it up so what's it worth now two times higher but if they're never going to sell it

it's a different ballgame so i think that's the that's kind of what's happening with bitcoin now is there's a bunch of bitcoin that people hold they ain't never gonna sell it it's just taking off the market forever and they're gonna give it to their kids or their grandkids and they're gonna leave a note that says i will come back if you sell this do not sell the family's bitcoin right i'd love to see your will listen it's uh this is a cultural phenomenon think about um india in indian culture passing down the family gold you don't sell it right same thing i think here is like these bitcoin families they're just like yo don't sell it just hold it it's going to be worth a lot more i think that that is not abnormal or weird i think it's actually very rational for

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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. That makes sense. All right, let's switch gears a little bit. Jerome Powell, Super Bowl last week, Jackson Hole. What are your thoughts about what happened last week at Jackson Hole and Jerome Powell signaling that in September we are most likely going to see at least a 25 basis point? You remember when we were little kids and I was eight years older than you. So I obviously had a physical advantage and I would come in your room and we would start to tussle. right and at some point you'd be like okay enough of this and you would yell for mom or dad and be

like yo yo he's bothering 100 right yeah okay that's what jerome powell did on friday he waved the white flag he bent the knee the public pressure became too much he he just can't he can't deal with it anymore they just kept going at him and going at him and going at him he finds out i'll cut rates in september now he's gonna claim which he did that he's cutting rates because the labor market oh i'm worried about job loss whatever what that tells me is people aren't losing jobs companies are making more money so the companies are becoming more efficient so what he's doing is he's bailing out the humans the human labor market he's bailing out with the rate cut and that's what he's going to blame that's the scapegoat

but he's saying inflation maybe it runs a little hotter but uh i gotta worry more about the labor market than the inflation what i think is they are miscalculating job growth in america significantly give you a good example in our company just pick any one of them we have not hired two times the number of employees in the last year that are human. We've hired more than two times the number of people, digital employees, AI agents, automation, all this stuff. So what normally would have been humans doing something, we are now using technology. Well, for every agent that's been hired in the American economy, the company isn't paying for them from an expense standpoint, but they're getting the worker productivity of the AI agent. That doesn't

show up in the job numbers. So is the American workforce actually bigger? Could it be 50% bigger, two times bigger than it was a year ago, if you include the digital workers and the human workers? But again, his job isn't to worry about that. His job is to worry about the humans. So it comes to this idea of like what he sees as weakness actually is probably signaling strength in the economy that the company's earnings are going up. Facebook, Meta, I can't remember the exact number, but I want to say that they are growing their net income

like 20 or 30% year over year. It's a $2 trillion company growing 20 or 30% year over year profits. That's ridiculous. that's crazy Palantir said that they are going to 10x their revenue and do it with like 400 or 800 less employees 10 to 20 percent of their workforce they're going to get rid of and they're going to make 10 times more revenue does that sound like weakness to you it sounds like the companies are becoming more resilient more productive more efficient which means there should be more valuable but his job is to look at job data so he's not looking at it holistically

he's just looking at the job data he says oh that looks like a little weakness there let's cut rates now i like the end result of cutting rates i think it's complete nonsense that he's blaming the job market for cutting the rates and i think instead he should just come out and say hey rates are too high i've been late we should cut we're going to go ahead and do that my apologies the market clearly thinks that he's going to cut and he said he's gonna cut yeah in uncertain you know in as about as certain terms as you could expect yeah right that's the other thing is these guys like just just use english man stop with all the nonsense of the like uh uh we're gonna be tethered to reality on inflation or uh we will re-evaluate our policy and then there's some guy

who's like he's got a red tie on he spoke for 32 seconds that means rate cuts coming in september 25 basis points like dude what are you a translator right you have to leave it up for some uncertainty like you can't say we're 100 going to cut rates in september you don't have to say 100 you can say based on the facts that we have right now we are likely to cut interest rates in september by 25 basis points if the facts change we reserve the right to change our opinion done i saved them a 27 minute speech just say the freaking two sentences get off the stage right but that's not the game the game is all stuff so it comes back to this idea if you are going to give guidance of the future of what you're going to do speak in plain english just

say it so anyone can understand because i would argue here's a good one federal reserve is discriminating they're discriminating by only sharing their forward guidance of policy with people who have the sophistication and education to decipher the Fed language. You're putting the people in the American economy who don't understand all your big fancy words at a significant disadvantage. Why don't you just use simple language so more people understand what you're going to do? Why is it that you are trying to only tell a certain group of people what you're going to do but not everyone aren't you discriminating against everyone that's an interesting idea you could stretch that pretty far though you got to be careful

with that line of thinking well again it's the onus is on them why are you giving some information to only some part of the market and not to everyone that's fair right so the question becomes, should they be given the guidance at all? Huge debate. But it comes back to this idea of he bent the knee. I'm in your room. You're yelling, mom. He finally said enough. Now, he got another big legal fight on his hands. And I don't know how this one's going to go. Lisa Cook, who now, she's famous now. No one had ever heard of her until two weeks ago. uh bill pulte fhfa director bill pulte uh bitcoiner uh philanthropist uh overall certified good guy as we've gotten to know him uh he got the fhfa director role okay i remember i

saw him tv he was like there ain't nobody working here we're gonna get everyone back they came back a week later everyone was there i was like seems reasonable to me he and his team has discovered that Lisa Cook allegedly claimed that she had a primary residence, got a mortgage, like 21 or something, signed. A month later, in a different state, said, I'm getting another mortgage for a different house. That's my primary residence, signed. She could have moved in a month.

But on a different document that I saw get published, she posted the house i think it's in atlanta for rent to other people and then signed another document saying it was her primary residence it's fishy maybe it's illegal maybe it's fishy i don't know there's smoke here so they uh recommended i think for like a criminal uh situation with the department of justice trump came over the top he fired her she came back so i'm not leaving oh okay hold on a second reality show get the cameras we got the president saying he's firing the board governor at the federal reserve we got the board governor who says she ain't leaving that so you can't fire me already we got we got you know we'll see i don't know if you want to

fight with the president united states that don't seem like a great idea but okay jerome powell him and the fed i've read two different viewpoints on this if they allow her to continue to serve as the board governor and the president and the white house is right that she's fired do they take on legal liability for having someone work at the federal reserve who has access to sensitive information when she has been fired that would be a very big deal now there are some people who say well if there's like an appeals process or a court thing actually you can't be held liable for anything that happens until there's a final decision i don't know i'm not a lawyer i don't want to be a lawyer somebody smarter than me will figure that out but i think that again it goes

to show we're now leaving the like twitter or x wars of let's put a public pressure campaign now we're now we're in the courts and the courts gonna have to figure this out and there's a lot of dynamics at play here because the board governors plus stephen uh myron uh being um nominated like there's a world where the white house they got their people in the federal reserve critics will say well federal reserve is not independent then i would argue federal reserve not independent before what makes you think that they were independent before right look at donations to only one political party really right not not uh most if you look at the way that they operate if you look at the secrecy if you look at when they've chosen to cut at certain times

maybe two months before an election i mean there's a lot of stuff there so if they're already not independent, now you're just going to have this pendulum swinging back and forth. Who's president and who gets to control the Federal Reserve? I actually think that if you're going to have a central bank, you do want it to be independent. It's just that I don't think it's been as independent as people want it to believe. And I think that, unfortunately, it's going to get less independent if we continue to see this play out. And so I'm watching as a market observer, because I think we are watching a chess game play out here between the Fed and the executive branch i don't know who wins but i know one thing rates are going to come down so everyone could

chirp back and forth you know what was the saying uh trigger fingers turn to twitter fingers right whatever i just know rates are going to come down and the market's going to win the market is saying we want rates down rates are going to come down and i think that that is ultimately investors can uh pay attention to all the the noise for entertainment purposes fascinating you're fired no i'm not here we go let's go to court fascinating the only thing that matters are rates going to come down or not palaces are going to come down president says he wants them down rates probably going to come down then if that's the case you're going to see cheap money coming to the market you should see a tailwind for public equities housing out for the open army

uh housing should see a resurgence in terms of transaction volumes if your business is benefiting from higher transaction volumes of housing. That might be good for you, right? All these things kind of trickle through the economy. And so it's like macro's back, baby. Let's think through how all these little things interact with each other, try to figure out what ultimately

is going to be the end result. I would love for them to cut rates. You think so? I would love it. I think that would mean, in theory, asset prices should increase. Yeah, look, there is an argument that cutting rates would be great for half the country.

there's also an argument that if they cut rates and it's coupled with printing money we get what we got in 2020 which was a massive increase in wealth inequality right and so 50 of the country is not in a great spot now i would argue that that's a education gap more than anything else but you know it is uh it is what it is and also i mean the house affordability home affordability is a huge issue in america right um two times as much to buy a home right now than it does to rent the average home it costs two times as much yeah i think it just hit another two times yeah that's that's a huge gap um i don't know what the number is but if it's two times that's crazy um so yeah i just think that uh we we are watching all of this play out and uh what i would suggest to people

is um you know uh they have a gator light i think it's called you know like gatorade right i think something called gator light right or um they basically take the same gatorade but they diluted a lot with a lot more water right so gator light it's gatorade but lighter version i'm going to go out on a limb and predict that the next 10 years of the american economy is Weimar light. Weimar light. Weimar Germany, it's the light version. We're going to base the currency much faster.

There's going to be a lot more risk-taking. I'm not predicting hyperinflation, but Weimar light. And so if you think about that, wealth inequality explodes. Houses become very unaffordable. We're seeing a lot of this stuff. So not Weimar.

Weimar light. Usually a little bit more expensive. than the original version because they added water um but uh a lot of the same things right you're gonna sell it to you as it's good for you too of course weimar light isn't weimar right just weimar light so that that's that's kind of my viewpoint is like if you go and you really pay attention to weimar germany there's other examples around the world but i think weimar is the one that's been like most studied from an economic standpoint um there's a lot of great books and just go on any llm like you know chat gbt perplexity whatever and just start banging

out, you know, what happened to Weimar Germany with hyperinflation? What were the drivers? What were the risks? How could it have been avoided? You know, what assets did well? What assets did not do well? Who were the famous investors who profited off of it? Who are the people who got hurt? I mean, just go through the whole thing. What are the policy mistakes? You know, all that kind of stuff. Weimar Lite is the way to think about the future of the US economy over the next decade or so. I love it. All right. Thank you. All right. That's it, guys. Thanks so much.