#1537 Saifedean Ammous | Will Bitcoin Replace Gold & The Dollar?!

Saifedean Ammous is an internationally best-selling economist and author. In this conversation we talk about bitcoin, are we heading towards a bitcoin standard, global trade, tariffs, what the US government is doing, mistakes they are doing, and what Saifedean would do to fix it. =======================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/=======================BitcoinOS is bringing Bitcoin into a new era. For the first time, Bitcoiners can access real DeFi across the entire crypto ecosystem, powered by revolutionary zero-knowledge technology. No more trusting sketchy bridges or giving up security. BitcoinOS reunites all of crypto around the chain where it all began. Follow BitcoinOS on twitter @BTC_OS and Be early to Bitcoin again.=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  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. What's going on guys? We've got an amazing episode for you today. It is with the economist and author Saifedean Ammous. He is here to explain to us exactly what is happening with Bitcoin. Are we on the precipice of the Bitcoin standard that he wrote about so many years ago?

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on in global trade, tariffs, what the US government is doing, what mistakes he thinks that they're making, and also how he would fix it from his perspective? Saifedean is one of the smartest people I know. He's been a hardcore Bitcoiner for many, many years. I've learned a ton from him. And in this conversation, he shares not only a bunch of unique insights, but he also goes over his analysis of what's happening in the world today. So you're going to want to make sure that you listen to the whole thing. Here's my conversation with Saifedean Ammous.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:34Speaker 02

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• 2:36Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:20Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:46Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Saf, I thought a great place to start this conversation is, everyone knows that there's economic uncertainty and chaos going on in the market right now. But there's this really interesting idea of the US dollar being the leader, the king of the world. It's the global reserve currency. You wrote "The Bitcoin Standard", kind of this idea that we would move from a dollar-based standard to a Bitcoin-based standard. Are we on the precipice of this happening? And Bitcoin is starting the ascension to become that new global reserve currency? Or is it still kind of a ways away? And we've got some time before you think that actually happens?

• 4:14Speaker 03

  It's a difficult question to answer because timing these things is very difficult. You could say it's all going to look like the precipice in a couple of hundred years. But looking at it from here, it could take a while. So it could be a while before we see this happen. But it is happening in a sense. I mean, I wrote the book. Actually, today is the, yeah, today's the seventh anniversary of the publication of the book. Amazing, congratulations. Yeah, thanks. So seven years ago, I wrote the book and the price at that time was around $7,000, I think, when I wrote it. And now here we are, it's $93,000 today. So it's already up about 12, 13 fold in only seven years. So this, I would say, probably exceeds the expectations for pretty much most people back then.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  Most people weren't Bitcoiners and most people, if you told them Bitcoin was going to perform this well over the next seven years, they wouldn't have believed you. They'd have thought this is insane. But here we are, it's going up. And I think, you know, it's still early days in the sense of just numbers. Because I think it's, you know, it's not, it's not a matter of consumer adoption. It's not a matter of how many people download the iPhone, how many people download a Bitcoin app. For me, it's about the size of the cash balances, more than the number of people. And so you can look at the size of cash balances that are in dollars. There are, or dollars or dollar-based currencies, which are all other fiat currencies in the world.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  You've got around $100 trillion in fiat currencies. You have another $100 trillion in bonds. And you have something like another 30, 20, 30 trillion dollars in gold and some other assets, maybe real estate and stocks. Some of that you could think of as being a cash substitute, which Bitcoin is competing with. So I would say the total market for a monetary asset is about $300 trillion. Bitcoin's already at 2 trillion, which is, I mean, impressive because in 15 years, going from zero to 2 trillion is the fastest that we've ever seen. We've never had an asset, anything, go this fast. So it is quite impressive, but still got a long way to go. And I would say

• 6:20Speaker 03

  You could, you could say that Bitcoin is the monetary standard of the world when it is the largest of these assets, probably around something in the range of 100 trillion or so. So still a while away, but with Bitcoin, you never really know how long it could take, you know, that could be another few months because we've seen these crazy pumps in Bitcoin. But most likely it's not going to be a few months, most likely it's going to be several years. And that's fine. I think it's, it's, it's a process that needs time. People need to accumulate cash balances. People need to become more familiar with how to use Bitcoin. And I think over time, it's just inevitable because the people who accumulate Bitcoin will witness the value of their cash balances increase, whereas the people who don't accumulate

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Bitcoin will witness their cash balances decrease in value.

• 7:07Anthony Pompliano?

  How does the introduction of stable coins and their rise in popularity kind of change the evaluation in that, you know, Bitcoin, electronic peer-to-peer cash, I think that there's plenty of people who do use it as cash, but there's more and more people I think that are using it as a store of value. And now all of a sudden I get the kind of digital rails, but I get to use the dollar. And so I think the United States government, rightfully so, is saying the stable coins are pushing US dollar global adoption. This is good for the dollar. It'll extend kind of the hegemony, like, you know, all the things we hear people saying. Does that slow down Bitcoin becoming the global reserve currency? Or actually, because of all the global uncertainty and kind of geopolitical posturing, maybe actually people don't care whether it's an electronic or digital dollar, they're going to just abandon it and go for something like Bitcoin?

• 7:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can see the case for it strengthening dollar dominance for sure, because it's allowing a lot of more people to access dollars and access dollars directly. Essentially, you buy a Tether, you're buying an asset backed close to 100% by US dollar treasuries. So that's good for the US dollar treasuries because it's more market for them. And let's face it, it's also good for people all over the world who are using that rather than their local currencies, which are a much crappier version of money backed by treasuries.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Because they're getting it from their central bank, their central bank holds treasuries, but there's a lot less treasury covering their central bank and the central bank is a lot more inflationary. I think a good way of thinking of it is just compare Tether, which is likely the most efficient company in human history. They've got less than a hundred people working for them and they're making, what was it, thirteen?

• 8:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Thirteen billion, I think, yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, thirteen billion last year, just profit, yeah, for a hundred people, which is just insane. There's never been anything like this, ever. So compare that, where you're running, they've got a hundred and fifty trillion, uh, billion dollars of stable coins around the world. Now, compare that to the average government that has a hundred fifty billion dollars of treasuries and hundred, or a hundred fifty billion dollars of currency out in circulation. And think about their overhead. If you want to compare it to the one hundred people that are in Tether, you've got a central bank, you've got a government, you've got a military, you've got a police force, you've got all kinds of corruption, you've got all kinds of horrible things that governments are doing. So you're having to basically pay for that as a user of these third world currencies,

• 9:26Speaker 03

  rather than um, the, just paying for a hundred staff members of Tether. So it's clearly a much more efficient way for getting people onto the dollar than the rest of the world's currencies. And yes, it will lead to more demand for the dollar, but I think there's a case to be made that that's likely a little bit overstated because first of all, it's not really competing with Bitcoin. It's competing with other currencies that are already backed by the dollar. And so people, say in Turkey or in Brazil or in um, Egypt, might be using those stable coins rather than using their local currency. But their local currency is backed by dollars. Now they're moving to something that's more efficiently and um, more backed by the dollar. So yes, it's more demand for the dollar, but it's not that much demand for the dollar extra.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  And secondly, the dollar already has an enormous capitalization. The dollar is already the largest currency in the world. And so there's just not that much more for it to grow. So even if, think about the most bullish case for Tether over the next ten years, you know, it grows uh, ten X in size. It eats all of the world's other central banks. Even if you do something like that, you're still talking about maybe uh, two X increase in demand for the dollar, which over ten years or so is not that much. I mean, you're, that's about seven percent increase per year over ten years. And that's Probably close to the rate of monetary inflation anyway.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  So yeah, buys the dollar some time, but it doesn't really change much of the dynamic ultimately. Because the dollar is already very big and the dollar, the market for the dollar is already pretty saturated. And ultimately it doesn't change the fact that the inflationary forces in the US are likely going to eat up whatever extra demand there is. So the more people are going to buy the dollars, the more demand there is for treasuries. That's not going to reflect in more appreciation in the dollar. That's going to reflect in more government spending, more US dollar spending. So therefore, I don't think it's that bullish for the dollar. And I don't think it fundamentally alters the thesis for Bitcoin.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Because ultimately Bitcoin's value proposition is that it continues to appreciate as a form of money. Whereas the dollar does not. And I don't see that changing because of Tether. It's not going to, people aren't going to be buying the dollar for the appreciation because they expect other people to be buying it. So ultimately, I think on the contrary, when people start using Tether and start, you know, when you upgrade from the Brazilian or Argentinian or Turkish currency to the USDT backed by dollars. It's going to make you more familiar with digital money, make you more familiar with using private keys and public keys. And then that's going to make you more likely to appreciate and understand the upgrade from dollars to Bitcoin.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  So as with everything in this world, it's also good for Bitcoin, I would say.

• 12:22Anthony Pompliano?

  What about the US government starting to hold Bitcoin when they say they're going to buy more? But it does feel like when El Salvador, Bhutan, some of these other countries. I think Bitcoiners like, hey, that's a big deal. It's the first country or another country, whatever. Even Russia, I would argue, you know, they're openly talking about this now. But the United States is the United States, right? It feels like that was like kind of a big shot heard around the world. Do you think that that actually accelerates? You know, Bitcoin is a global reserve currency and it hurts the dollar? Or do you think that they've done it in a way where it definitely helps Bitcoin? But it isn't necessarily hurting the dollar and people aren't losing faith in the dollar, even though the US is holding Bitcoin?

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's difficult to tell. I mean, initially, if you told me this a year ago, a year ago, nobody had expected any of this stuff in April. Trump was not talking about it. I would have thought that if at this point they'd followed through with this strategy, I would have thought it would have been a bigger deal. But similarly, you know, we we expected that the first corporation to buy Bitcoin was going to cause a run among corporations. We thought that the first government that buys Bitcoin is going to do that. And yet, you know, it's worked out well for Salvador. It's worked out well for MicroStrategy. But there haven't been a lot of copycats. And I think it's it's it's just the way that Bitcoin is. People need to take their time to really get it.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  So I'm kind of underwhelmed by the response in a sense. You would have imagined that more countries would have started paying attention, given that Trump has been doing this. But in a sense, yeah, there was a lot of talk about Bitcoin strategic reserve, purchasing Bitcoin and so on. But ultimately, all that has really happened is that they've just kept the Bitcoins that they've had, which isn't very different from the policy that was being adopted previously, because previously it was ambiguous. It wasn't clear whether they were going to keep them or sell them, and they were selling them unannounced. Now it's clear that they're going to keep them, which I think is just on a very simple market dynamic level is bullish for the price, because you're not going to be getting a dump of 10,000 coins on a random Tuesday morning without anybody finding out.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  So I I I believe it's likely going to be bullish in the long term. But it's it's not clear that the administration is really is really convinced of the idea of using Bitcoin as a strategic reserve or as a replacement for the dollar. This is the thing. So they're continuously saying, we're going to use Bitcoin to enforce dollar hegemony. So that message has not really, the message of dollar of Bitcoin as an alternative is not really being pushed. And it's, I don't particularly find that very convincing. I don't think you can use the dollar to, you can use Bitcoin to bolster the dollar. I think they are competing. It's a zero-sum game, and there is no prize for second place.

• 15:09Anthony Pompliano?

  What about gold? And gold did pretty well last year. Bitcoin did better. But to start 2025, gold has done very, very well. It's up like 30%, 31%. Bitcoin is kind of sideways for the most part. How do you look at that playing into the equation?

• 15:25Speaker 03

  I'm skeptical that gold can continue its rally significantly for a long time. I think the fundamental dynamics of the gold market have been broken by the fact that gold is just not used as money in a practical sense. So yeah, you can hold it, you can buy it, you can put it under your mattress. You can store it in a financial institution, but you can't make payments with gold. You can't, there are no gold banks. And so therefore it's always going to be separate from your cash balance. It's always going to be separate from the money that you can use for settling trade. And that for me prevents it from appreciating significantly, prevents it from accumulating enough monetary premium.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  And I think that's why it's been used a lot more during the last century in industry. And a lot of the gold bugs will tell you that, you know, gold, it's good for gold that it's used in electronics, that it's used in jewelry. I think that's actually very bearish for gold from a monetary perspective. As I discussed in the Bitcoin Standard, what made gold money was the fact that it has a very large stockpile compared to its annual production. And so this idea that annual production is always a small fraction of existing liquid stockpiles that are used as money is what makes it a great money, because then if the people start using it more as a store of value, the gold miners can't increase the supply significantly.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  But if you start taking the liquid stockpile, the gold out of the liquid stockpile and putting it into industrial uses, you're effectively reducing the size of the stockpile. And therefore, the new production is a more significant part of these stockpiles. And so therefore it becomes more inflationary as a monetary asset. And that's what's been happening over the last century. As gold has been demonetized, the more you see it used in non-monetary uses, the less of a money it is, in a sense, and the more of an industrial metal it is. And that's how silver was demonetized, that's how copper and iron before that were demonetized. So I think this is still the case with gold, even with this appreciation. If you look in the long term, I think it's not really caught up.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  To dollar inflation. I don't think gold has held its value well compared to the amount of devaluation of the dollar. So if you were to measure the price of real estate in terms of gold, it's still gone up. Real estate has gone up in terms of gold in most places. And that's because gold has not really managed to keep up because it's not been accruing monetary premium over time. So I'd be skeptical of its ability to continue to hold on to value for a long time, as long as it's not possible to use gold as money. And it doesn't look like that's going to change. We don't see it happening in the US. We don't see it happening in any of the other countries that could be working on an alternative monetary

• 18:15Speaker 03

  system. You know, you don't hear about China or India or Russia setting up gold payment networks, gold settlement, infrastructure, places for settling gold amongst each other. The global gold market still relies on the London Bullion Association, which is very centralized and very shady as well. So there are a lot of shenanigans going on in the gold market. You can't verify gold like you can with Bitcoin. You can't run your own gold full node. And so you're always, you're always at the mercy of centralized forces.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  So I don't necessarily think that that has changed much. And I think this recent bull run, you know, it's, it's good for the gold bugs who have suffered a lot over the past couple of decades with watching pretty much everything go up except gold and silver. So that's encouraging for them, but I don't see it, I don't see it being sustained for a very long time.

• 19:21Anthony Pompliano?

  What has to change for the central banks that are buying gold right now to start buying Bitcoin, you think?

• 19:27Speaker 03

  I think what they need to do is if they start thinking about moving to a gold standard and then start operationally working on making gold trade work on an international level, then they'll start thinking about the real cost of making these things happen. And then the value proposition of Bitcoin will become apparent for them.

• 19:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So you actually think that the central banks may become more interested in Bitcoin by going away from fiat, thinking about gold, realizing, hey, this would be really hard, and therefore, we need something that has gold-like properties but can be used for transactions?

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think if you start thinking about it operationally, you know, if, say, Russia and China decide that they want to start trading gold directly, now they need giant facilities for verifying it. Yeah, trucks and airplanes. And most importantly, I think the most, the trickiest part of it is if you really want to trade gold trustlessly, there's no way to figure out whether this, these giant gold bars, which are about 400 ounces, 12 and a half kilograms, there's no way of knowing whether they're 100% pure gold or not, except melting the whole thing down and recasting it again. So that's really expensive. Every time you want to trade that across borders, you're going to have to recast it. It's a lot cheaper to just verify with a Bitcoin node. So I think the, you know, the number go up technology in Bitcoin, the fact that Bitcoin

• 20:48Speaker 03

  appreciates a lot faster than gold and a lot more than gold, and the fact that it's a lot easier to verify, those are the two things that people need to get. But I just, unfortunately, it doesn't look like many people get them, which, you know, fortunately for you and me, means we can stack more stats.

• 21:03Anthony Pompliano?

  The ETFs have come out, have been wildly popular, number one, you know, financial product ever launched on Wall Street. There seems to be more of a financialization of Bitcoin in the industry in general. I always joke that Larry Fink from BlackRock is now Bitcoin CMO, like, doing a fantastic job. He goes out, you know, flight to safety, whatever, flight to quality. Isn't that positive? Like, do you think, even though I think like the hardcore Bitcoiner mentality is self-custody, run your full node, all the things that are kind of like anti-Wall Street, frankly, but do we still think that they've been a net positive? Positive to Bitcoin in the industry?

• 21:38Speaker 03

  I think so. I'd say that they are net positive. It's just more demand for Bitcoin, more liquidity. Ultimately, money is a game for cash balances and the bigger the cash balance, the bigger the liquidity and the more that something can function as money. So you want more people to be holding Bitcoin. Yes, I would prefer if everybody held their own Bitcoin with their own private keys. But I think people, you know, my fellow hardcore Bitcoiners, we need to recognize that Bitcoin is permissionless. And that means that you can't stop people from selling their, from selling IOUs for their Bitcoin. There is no way on the protocol level that you could force people to hold their own private keys.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  They can hold their own private keys and then sell access to the Bitcoin without selling the private key. And that's just the way it is. So we can't stop BlackRock from buying Bitcoin. We can't stop anybody from buying Bitcoin for other people. It's inevitable and it's just the way that the network scales. Let's face it, there's not enough room for everybody to be transacting on-chain on Bitcoin. So this is inevitable. And, you know, it's important for Bitcoin's security that it be decentralized. But we don't need it to be decentralized to the point where everybody's coffee transaction is registered on-chain.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  We need it to be decentralized to the point where nobody can change the supply, nobody can censor transactions. And that's a huge difference. So we don't need to have a couple of trillion transactions on-chain every day. We can do with half a million transactions, the most important half million transactions or one million transactions on-chain. And that would be likely enough to maintain its security model. And ultimately, you know, all of this stuff about it threatening Bitcoin, I don't really see it as being a very credible threat for the very simple reason, which is that these people become invested in Bitcoin. They have an interest in maintaining. So compromising the network is going to compromise their investment.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  So you don't have to like Larry Fink. You don't have to think that he has the best intentions in the world. But he is out there looking out for his bags. And now his bags are Bitcoin. So he's going to be looking out for Bitcoin.

• 23:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that BlackRock or Strategy or any of these companies can have too much Bitcoin?

• 24:02Speaker 03

  I don't think anybody can have too much Bitcoin. There's always, everybody's always looking to have more.

• 24:07Anthony Pompliano?

  From their perspective.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  From their perspective, yeah, exactly.

• 24:10Anthony Pompliano?

  But like from a network standpoint, is there a threshold where, forget who the player is, right? But just like if somebody had 10 million of the 21 million Bitcoin, would we be like, hey, that's bad? That there's a risk there or doesn't matter how many you own, you get no preferential treatment in the network?

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, ultimately, I don't see how it would threaten the protocol in a serious sense. If you, if Michael Saylor ends up with 10 million Bitcoins, what's he going to do? He's likely going to just leverage them to buy more Bitcoin. But, you know, that he's not going to wake up one day and decide, all right, let's make, let's try and hard fork this so that we can add another 5 million Bitcoin to the supply so that I could have 15. I think if he does something like that, he'd be the biggest loser because his 10 million Bitcoin would lose value. So it's, you know, from, from, from an egalitarian perspective, it doesn't look nice.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  It would be nice if everybody else got to play on, in this game and rather than Michael Saylor monopolizing them all. But again, it's permissionless and I generally have learned to try and not get angry at things that I can't control and rather focus on growing my own stack rather than looking at other people's stacks. And I encourage everybody to have that attitude.

• 25:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that there's a net impact, like a net negative impact by whether it's Black, I mean, BlackRock has more than strategy, right? And I think the, maybe the counter argument is always, uh, strategy is a company with shareholders. Technically, it's like the shareholders Bitcoin, um, the ETFs are made up of shareholders. It's like their Bitcoin, you know, so it's not like BlackRock has it on their balance sheet and it's only BlackRock's Bitcoin. But, um, do you think that there are downsides to this? Or do you just look at it as like, hey, there's some threshold that, you know, uh, it'd be nice if there was more available. But at the end of the day, um, it is just buying demand and that drives the price and that's possible.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it would be nice. I know a lot of people. From my personal life and a lot of people that would just benefit from having bought more Bitcoin. I wrote a book about it. I run a podcast about it. I'm doing my best to tell all of these people to buy. They choose to laugh at me. They choose to call Bitcoin a stupid Ponzi scheme. And then Michael Saylor chooses to buy his coins. So, you know, what ends up happening is fair because that's what everybody decides. Everybody from day one, you know, from Satoshi's genesis block, everybody has had the same opportunity to mine or buy Bitcoin at the same market price or mine it at the same difficulty. So it's been an equal playing field for everybody everywhere from day one.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  And I don't think anybody has any grounds for complaint in that sense. So, yeah, it would be nicer. Of course, it was a little bit more equal, but some people got this opportunity early on and figured out how to capitalize on it. But yeah, ultimately, as you said, whether it's strategy or it's BlackRock, it's not like Michael Saylor himself or Larry Fink himself owns all of those Bitcoins. They have shareholders who own those Bitcoin or EDF holders who hold those Bitcoins. And to the extent that BlackRock and Strategy hold those, they hold them because they are doing their fiduciary duty to their shareholders and to the ETF holders in a satisfactory way. The moment that they start running this in a way that's not good for the shareholders,

• 27:31Speaker 03

  the moment that they start abusing that position is the moment that all those people sell their ETFs and go buy ETFs from somebody other than BlackRock. Or they sell their MicroStrategy stock and they buy similar stock, or they sell their MicroStrategy stock and buy Bitcoin stock. Ultimately, all of this stuff happens above the protocol level. We don't see it happening on the protocol level.

• 27:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And as you've seen Bitcoin kind of continue to rise up here, one of the aspects that maybe I'm most fascinated by is everyone wanting to take the innovations from the altcoin market and bring it to Bitcoin. So things like payments, obviously Lightning Network, very popular. But then there's NFTs and, you know, all this other stuff where it's like, hey, Bitcoin's gonna be this layer one. How do you look at the Bitcoin market, maybe the layer twos or sidechains, and then like the altcoin market? Are you still of the belief altcoins are all zeros? Bitcoin stuff is not really going to be that valuable other than just the layer one or what?

• 28:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty much. I think all of the other things that people mention are not even a rounding error. Because ultimately, money is a $300 trillion total addressable market. This is by far the largest market in the world. Nothing comes close. Nothing. Nothing else is... You know, the total value of, I think, the NASDAQ is, I think, around $40 trillion. So the S and P 500, the 500 companies that make up the S and P combined are also, I think, around $40 trillion. So the total addressable market for just money is five or six or seven times larger than all of the S and P 500 companies combined.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  So that's just such an enormous magnitude that all of these other use cases... I mean, I'm skeptical that they're gonna have any kind of demand. I think they've been mainly used just to pump tokens. But even if we go along with all of those narratives, you know, real estate on the blockchain and blackjack on the blockchain and collectibles on the blockchain and Pokemon cards on the blockchain, even if you're going to give them all of their most bullish scenario possible, it's still a rounding error next to the total addressable market for Bitcoin. It's, for me, it's as inconsequential as somebody saying, "I'm going to start painting on dollar bills and I'm gonna start selling my dollar bills for more than $1."

• 29:48Speaker 03

  And so, yeah, maybe you do that. You know, maybe some artist in New York City manages to pull this off and start selling dollar bills for $2 because he paints something nice on them. It's completely and utterly inconsequential to the dollar and the market for the dollar. It's just a very, very tiny little thing. And yeah, with altcoins, I also think it's, it's really been a couple of rough years for altcoins and I think it's going to continue that way. I don't see a compelling value accrual narrative for any of the altcoins. Their narratives are novelty, flash in the pan, short term, and you can get marketing behind it for a while, but...

• 30:29Speaker 03

  After a while, you know, the supply keeps going up and eventually the demand can't keep up. And then the tokens crash. And you know, we've got more than, I think, 30 million tokens at this point. And at least 99.9% of them have gone to zero already against Bitcoin. So it won't be long before the rest go to zero as well.

• 30:51Anthony Pompliano?

  You don't think fart coin is the future?

• 30:54Speaker 03

  I, you know, I don't make trading investment advice, but no.

• 30:59Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, you, uh, you live outside the United States.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I think you are very well versed, uh, in global economy, in monetary policy, kind of all the things that have made you, I think, a very unique voice looking at Bitcoin. Um, the United States, we like Donald Trump, he shows up, he's like, I'm gonna switch up this whole world order. Um, and I actually think it's important that people voted for that, right? People, hey, the America First agenda, all, uh, kind of what he said he was gonna do. He is doing in theory or maybe in spirit. I think there's a lot of questions, even from people who voted for him, as to whether the way he's doing it, the way he's messaging it. Is that the right path to pursue these things? Um, and some of it is like the actions, some of it's the messaging, and then some of it is actually like the speed. Right? You know, I've seen people online who are like, hey, I'm cool with what you're doing, but just like, give me six months to prepare my business rather than just do it, you know, tomorrow.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, just talk to you, like, what is the perspective from outside the United States of what people, you know, kind of think is happening or see is happening?

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Well, outside the United States is a very big place. So I, I, I don't claim to be speaking for, uh, all, uh, 7.7 billion non-Americans out there. Uh, but I do speak for myself and, you know, I've got plenty of perspectives to share. So, um, I mean, I think the, uh, the, uh, I personally was pretty excited about the whole Doge agenda initially. I thought that would be fun. And I thought if Elon would bring his, uh, private sector, uh, razor to the government, that would be pretty cool. And I think, you know, the more drastic and the more painful it is, the better it would be. But I've been massively disappointed by it.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  So, uh, at the, on the campaign trail, I remember Musk saying something like $2 trillion reduction government spending and then kept coming down and now we're at, I think, 70 billion, which is essentially a rounding error. So, um,

• 32:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that it is because there's not things to cut or like they got neutered? Like I was having this conversation with a friend, right? Of every candidate through my entire life has always been like, I'm gonna do. And they say something and everyone's like, yes. And then like, you gotta imagine they like walk in the Oval Office, they get tapped on the shoulder. They're like, you're not gonna do that, right? You know, whether it's really some file or, you know, they get told some story or whatever.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that's part of it of like, okay, that sounded good on the campaign trail, but like, you can't touch that group or you can't touch this thing?

• 33:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I mean, it's, it's, it's difficult to tell what it was in this case. And I thought with somebody like Musk, you know, he's.

• 33:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Kinda doesn't care?

• 33:32Speaker 03

  Kinda doesn't care. And, you know, what's the worst that can happen? He loses $50 billion, you know, he spent $40 billion on buying a meme website for shits and giggles. So you could have imagined that he would have had the fortitude to go along with that. And the fact that he hasn't is quite depressing. But it just confirms what, you know, Lynn Alden always likes to say, nothing stops this train. And I think this is, uh, this was an incredible turnaround because an enormous amount of expectation was placed on this and then it didn't quite materialize. So I'm not, uh, I'm not sure, you know, behind the scenes, how this has played out. I'm not sure what kind of, uh, what, what kind of pressures came to bear.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  But I think initially there was a, there was a, um, initially the rhetoric was government is wasteful. It was very libertarian. It was almost Rothbardian, you know, let's get rid of this and get rid of that. But then it's, you know, it's, it, it gets watered down. And now we're talking about individual cases of social security fraud and stuff like that, which is again, you know, rounding errors. So that unfortunately doesn't seem to have panned out. It would have been nice because I think, you know, the United States government is massively, massively oversized. I think you could cut 90% of the United States government budget and you would improve pretty much everything, particularly defense. I mean, if, if, if you wanna cut something, you could bring it back.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  All US soldiers outside the US borders, bring them into the US and you would actually improve US security. Americans would be a lot safer if that were the case, because I think the vast majority of. Military presence abroad is actually making the US less safe, gaining more enemies for the US. So that would be an easy thing to cut, but of course, that's the one thing that not even Musk had even mentioned suggesting. And of course, you know, we probably should have seen the writing on the wall. I mean, Musk himself gets a lot of his business contracts from governments. I think Twitter might be the least government dependent of his businesses, but you know Tesla relies a lot on government subsidies and tax breaks. Starlink gets a lot of its contracts from governments.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  So if you really wanted to cut, you know, there's, you may think going to Mars is a great thing, but you should be able to finance that with your own money. There's no reason that taxpayers and dollar holders should be financing that. So that doesn't seem to have worked out. Then the tariffs, I think that was, that was, I believe it was a catastrophic mistake and I still think it is. I, I don't think that was on the agenda. I think if Trump had run with the agenda of we're going to put these enormous tariffs that they announced a couple of weeks ago, I don't think people would have voted for that. On a practical sense, people would have just looked at their own balance sheets and would have said, oh, wow, you know, my laptop would have become so much more expensive, my,

• 36:23Speaker 03

  the equipment that I need for my business would have become more expensive. And I think it just throws a lot of business models down the toilet and that wouldn't have appealed to people. I don't quite understand how they came along with it, but I'm still very skeptical of it. And I think it's, you know, it was very clear, the market reaction was devastating on the stock market, but also on the bond market. I didn't think that was the big one because it seems pretty clear that what they thought was we're going to do this, it's going to be bad for the stocks, but if it's bad for stocks, that's going to mean it's going to be good for bonds. And if it's good for bonds, that means that we can refinance the debt at a lower interest rate. Well, that didn't work out because the bonds went up and I think that's, there was no reason to presume that that would be the case.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  Just because there's generally a correlation between stocks and bonds doesn't mean that everything that's good, that's bad for stocks is going to necessarily be good for bonds. So because of that, we saw the bond yields rose beyond 4.5, which I think was the red line. And when it hit 4.5, they backed down, they gave a 90-day pause. And then it became all about China and about trying to fight with China, some dominance play with China. I don't think this is in any way productive. I don't think this is good for the US, for the American people. I think it's, it's very wrong-headed in the way that they're, that they're looking at the issue of trade as a zero-sum game. And it's very wrong-headed

• 37:54Speaker 03

  because they're looking at the trade deficit as being the fault of China, when really China is powerless to affect the US trade deficit. It's exactly like you blaming the supermarket for taking your son's money when you gave your son a credit card. And he goes to the supermarket, and he goes to the mall, he goes to the nightclubs, he spends all of his money. Well, you know, these are just businesses. They've got price tags, anybody's welcome to come and spend. And they can't look at your balance sheet to decide whether it is a responsible thing for you to be spending this or that. There are millions of Chinese businesses selling to Americans, and they're just looking at their own business. You know, you're selling tables to an American consumer. You're, every single one of those people

• 38:38Speaker 03

  is just looking at their own business. I'm gonna sell this table for $500, I'm gonna get $500 in return. They're not thinking of it in an aggregate sense of, oh, there's too many of us selling things that is causing the trade deficit. So trying to address the trade deficit with tariffs, I believe, is counterproductive. Because what's making the trade deficits grow is the fact that the US government can print money.

• 39:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So yes and no, I agree with you, right? On one hand, yes, I grew from that Chinese business. They're just going to sell to whoever's going to buy, right? It's how business works. The economic incentive is there. If you don't agree with that, then like you don't understand how, you know, kind of economics work. So I agree with that point. But I do think that there are very well documented examples where a business in China can sell unfettered to the US consumer. But when the US business wants to sell back to China, they are manipulating the currency, they are hitting with tariffs. There, you know, there's, there's all kinds of things that aren't true free trade. And so I guess the question becomes if your goal is to get back towards free trade,

• 39:45Anthony Pompliano?

  where you're taking down those blocks, you know, that a foreign country has put on your businesses. Do you agree that the tariffs, if that's the end state, are worth doing that? Or do you see it as it doesn't matter what they're doing? Taking the approach of the tariffs just doesn't make sense? And, you know, find a different way to kind of address the issue?

• 40:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I definitely the second. So I think tariffs are essentially, they're a punishment by the government to its own people primarily. So if the US imposes tariffs on Chinese goods, the main people that are hurt are the American consumers who rely on those Chinese goods and foreign goods. And the second order effect is to hurt the Chinese businesses. The Chinese businesses are hurt less than American consumers because Chinese businesses still have the entire rest of the world to sell to. And the US is only 4% of the world's population. And, you know,

• 40:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Buy a lot of stuff, though.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  They do buy a lot of stuff, but still it's now, what is it? 10%, 15% of the world's, it's 12% of China's exports, which is, you know, it's, it's the biggest importer from the, from China, but it's, there's still 88% that's not the US.

• 40:55Anthony Pompliano?

  How, how much of the consumer behavior do you think shifts, right? So let's say there's a widget that's made in China, sold to the United States. We put a, let's not go to 150%, but you know, 20% tariff or whatever. Do you think that consumer shift? And they say, well, if there's an American made product that maybe is the same price or slightly cheaper, that that actually can help the consumer, but not, I'm sorry, hurt the Chinese business and help the American consumer?

• 41:20Speaker 03

  I don't think that's really the case. In the most cases, the economics aren't going to be affected by a small little marginal tariff. Because they, you know, the, with a lot of those things, they're not even being made in the US. And ultimately, the, I think the thing that is missed and that the econ textbook, the econ textbook on trade does a terrible job of teaching trade because it oversimplifies it in a way that doesn't really capture the complexity of the real world. I think the, the key thing to keep in mind is that the, the tariffs also hurt the domestic producers because they need to buy the imports that go into the production process. So, yes, we're They're source materials.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, the source materials and these things, it's, it's, it's a very, it's a very ancient mentality to imagine that you can just have self-sufficiency. Today's supply chains are just so complex. I mean, there, there's, there was that meme going around of these, I can't remember what fruit it was that was

• 42:26Speaker 03

  grown in Thailand, packaged in Argentina, and then consumed in the US. And it sounds like it's insane and it sounds like it's wasteful, but it just ends up working because that's how the supply chains work. You've got a massive facility for processing these things that does them really well in that country and that facility can produce so much with their local product. And then they realize, hey, we can start sourcing some material from abroad. And then they source us it and it makes sense. And then the consumer buys it. And even though it might seem inefficient, the market shows us that it is the most efficient way. And that's just a very simple example of a fruit. But of course, when you get into the complex products, TVs and electronics and so on,

• 43:05Speaker 03

  you're talking about extremely sophisticated supply chains where it's very difficult for one person to be able to figure out how these things are made. So, you know, the, the people at Samsung, they don't even know how the supply chain for their own TVs looks like. They know that they get the chips from this place and they get the silicon from that place and they get this from that. But they don't know how the supply chain for the chip that they bought was made in Taiwan. Or China or the US and they can't know that. And so every single person involved is involved with a tiny little aspect of this. And so the more trade barriers there are, the more complex this process becomes, the more expensive it becomes. And then the more difficult it is to compete.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  And so any country that has lower trade barriers ends up having an enormous advantage over countries that don't. Because they are at every step in this production process. They can take their pick from all of the world's suppliers. So you can get the cheapest copper, the cheapest silicon, the cheapest anything. And when you start imposing those tariffs, you're basically hand, you're placing a handicap on the local producers. Because you're making it so that, all right, well, we can't get the Chinese steel and we can't get the Canadian maple syrup or whatever it is. But you know, you can't get all of these different supplies into the production process.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  And so it makes it very difficult to make it competitively. So what you would want really for your own sake, I think, is to just have as little tariffs as possible. And I think, you know, the historical record shows this to be the case. I think, you know, people look at China and they say, well, China has some trade barriers. It does have some trade barriers now, but they're a lot lower than what they were 40 years ago. And that's why China's advanced so much in those 40 years. And I think if they reduce their trade barriers further, they would do even better. And I think this is, this is, this is the kind of very destructive mentality that governments get into. Once they start thinking of trade as being an adversarial game, that we're going to impoverish our people in order to show the Americans. Or we're going to impoverish our people in order to show the Chinese.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  It's the two governments essentially holding their own populations hostage, ruining the profitability of their businesses, increasing costs for their customers. In order to play a game of dominance against each other, which is very dangerous because it's, you know, it's hurting both populations. But it's even more dangerous because it escalates. It escalates from trade tensions into political tensions and it can escalate into military tensions. And this is how World War Two escalated. This was a big part of the, of the lead up to World War Two. That all these governments became a lot more statist, a lot more centralized. Trade barriers went up enormously in the 1930s and that helped. Militate governments against each other to help make people hate each other and prepare

• 45:59Speaker 03

  people for war. So I think it's a very dangerous game to play. But overall, I think there's nothing better for people in any country, wherever it is, to just have the option of being able to buy and sell from the rest of the world at the lowest cost possible.

• 46:14Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see these tariffs getting put in place, it seems like that has kicked off some of the gold buying, that has kicked off some of the maybe conversations from foreign countries saying, okay, is the US trying to isolate China? Is China trying to isolate the US? Whose side am I on? Is there bricks coming together and they want to create a currency? You know, there's, it almost kind of feels like there was already a lot of conversations. And in my opinion, a lot of it started with the US sanctioning Russia. And, you know, kind of showing that maybe the way that we're going to handle some of these situations is not what the global world thought. And now tariffs are accelerating some of that conversation. Now, I would argue, we're just accelerating the people to which side of the fight they would be on already. The rest of the people who are going to be

• 46:59Anthony Pompliano?

  allies of the US are come running and they say, hey, let's be partners. We, you know, we, Taiwan's a perfect example. They need the US. They want the US. They, you know, want to keep doing business with the US. Their trade offer out of the gate, very strong. And it basically is what you're saying. There's no trade barriers. There's no any of this stuff. Like, let's just be friends, right? But it's a lot of other countries that are saying, well, hold on a second. I was already leaning towards, you know, China or kind of a bi bilateral kind of component here. And so they're like running towards that. And so, or the tariffs actually just like accelerating us more towards this world of like who's on whose side and that world order, that capital stack getting more decentralized?

• 47:35Speaker 03

  I think so. And I think it's, I think people in this administration have likely vastly miscalculated the amount of economic influence that China has. I think a lot of people in the Republican Party are influenced by Anti-Chinese sentiment, you know, there's an author called Gordon Chang, who's quite influential. He wrote a book in 2001 talking about the impending collapse of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party. And he said within 10 years, by 2011, this is going to be gone. And I, you know, as a Bitcoiner, I think that we should, we should, we should notice the parallels here. Because people have been saying China is about to collapse for all of my life, you know. All my life, I'm hearing people saying China is an authoritarian, repressive communist regime.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  And it's all smoke and mirrors, all of their statistics are cooked up, and it's all going to collapse. And on the contrary, just like with Bitcoin, you know, it's not just that it hasn't collapsed. It's also gone up enormously. So you look at pictures of Shanghai today versus Shanghai 30 years ago. It's the exact opposite of a collapse. And you look at the pictures of small little towns that used to be very poor towns in China. And now they've become industrial superpowers with incredible infrastructure. China is the world's leading producer of steel. It produces more than half of the world's steel. Its steel production is more than 10 times larger than the second largest steel producer, which is India. China is already the prime trade partner for 120 countries in the world.

• 49:05Speaker 03

  So 20 years ago, the US was the prime trade partner for most of the world. Today, it's already China. And that was all before Trump got into office. This has just been the case for a while. And that's been the case because of China's growing industrialization and the US's deindustrialization, which is driven by the fact that the US has a money printer that makes it not so useful to get real productive business in the US, because you could just go to the money printer. So that's why all the smart kids in the US want to go into investment and investment banking and hedge funds and so on. And, you know, ultimately, in a place where there's a big money printer, if you're good at your job as an engineer or as a doctor or as a, as an industrialist,

• 49:49Speaker 03

  if you're good at that job, but you don't know how to manage your investments, then that's pointless. It doesn't matter. If you get a good salary, you make good money. But then you don't know how, and then you put it in a bank account and then... You lose seven percent per year, then it's pointless to have been a good engineer. So you need to figure out how to play the fiat casino in order to keep your wealth. But if you know how to play the fiat casino, then it's pointless being an engineer also. Why would you want to go to engineering school, work a real job, go into a real factory, deal with actual workers, when you could just sit in an air-conditioned room and pick stocks and figure out how to play the fiat market? So naturally, everybody gravitates towards the fiat market.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  I think this is the fundamental driver of the deindustrialization in the US. It's the fiat money printer. And so this trend is accelerating with the acceleration of the use of the fiat money printer. And so when the Trump administration says, we want to increase dollar hegemony, we want to spread the dollar further, we want to use stable coins to make the dollar stronger as a global reserve currency, that is in direct contradiction to the goal of bringing back industrial to the US. So I think this notion that China is this paper tiger that's going to crumble if the US places tariffs is vastly misplaced.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  I think China can handle US tariffs a lot better than the US can handle its own tariffs. And I don't even think that China needed to retaliate. I think if I was in China's place, I would have just completely ignored all of these tariffs and wouldn't have imposed anything myself. And I think the, you know, the people have been talking about this as being sort of this genius negotiating tactic, but you're really pushing people away from you as a negotiator if you're just willing to break away all those deals. And this is the sort of thing that makes countries inhospitable for business. This is why people don't invest in basket case countries, because you know, you...

• 51:54Speaker 03

  You can expect that whatever agreement you've got going with the government will be thrown in the dustbin once the next regime comes in. And so when there's an election in these countries and the president is removed, the new president comes in, everything is thrown out. These countries don't attract capital. These countries don't attract a lot of interest in money because people want stability. And so I think the long run impact of this tariff thing, whatever happens now, whether they keep them, remove them, keep them on some countries or whatever it is, the uncertainty of it all is just going to push everybody to try and reduce their dependence on the US, I think.

• 52:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I think, I actually think the uncertainty and the lack of clear messaging is much more of a fair critique than the tariffs themselves. And if you were to critique tariffs, I think that the severity of them is something to critique. So it's like, I've been saying from day one, if we end up with five to 10% blanket tariff, and then we remove tariffs for things we want. So computers, you know, all the like, advanced things that we either would struggle to make in the United States, or we already get elsewhere, and we want to continue to keep those products imported into the US, you remove the tariffs, you turn tariffs into incentive system versus like a punitive type system. I think that, one, you would accomplish the goal of you get more government revenue. Two, because you're incentivizing certain products, you keep the things you want,

• 53:17Anthony Pompliano?

  and the things that you don't want, if people still want to sell, then there's the barrier, but it's kind of like you don't care about those things as much. And then I also think that you can use that as an incentive to help some reshoring. I think most people agree, like, I saw a stat, 75% of Americans think America's better off if we reshored manufacturing, but only 25% of Americans say they'd be better off if they worked in a factory. Like, Americans don't want to go and stitch sneaker, you know, do all that stuff, right? They want to work in high-tech, advanced manufacturing, like, that's a good job, right? They want that stuff, it's high-paying, it's high-skilled, it's high-status, whatever. But I don't think we're gonna like, move back the, you know, we're gonna sew together t-shirts from Vietnam type stuff, right?

• 53:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So, when I look at this, I say to myself, okay, if you just came out and you said, here's the plan, six months from now it goes into effect, and we're gonna incentivize, we're gonna do all, you know, blah blah blah, whatever, I think there's still some people who would say, hey, I don't like this plan, I don't think we should use tariffs, whatever, but like, okay, I got it. It's the, it's on, it's off, it's on, it's off. That uncertainty has upset a lot of people. I think it's really showing up in the market, as you said, in both stocks and bonds. But then on top of that, it's the like 150% on China, right? I mean, just like, it's not even a 20, 30, 40%, which still would be incredibly high. It's like to the point where if I said to you, hey, we have 150%, you know, tariff on China, and they also are like ratcheting it up over 100%, you'd be like, stop.

• 54:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, you can't, almost couldn't fathom that two years ago.

• 54:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's just, I mean, you know, people keep saying the art of the deal, the art of the deal. This, I'm no master negotiator myself, but this seems to me like the worst way to go about a negotiation, where you staked out a completely unsustainable position, which anybody can tell that there's no way that you can sustain that. And the markets called the bluff and the markets started to collapse and forced them to back, to back down from this. So that shows that you're not very serious about this. And then if you started off by showing that, you know, you are, that this is my pain point, and I can't really maintain this, and this is not a credible threat, then you've really undermined your ability to negotiate.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  But I think more generally, I mean, I'll agree with you on this. I'll disagree with you that this would have been a preferable stra-, I agree with you that it would have been preferable if this was done predictably, but it still wouldn't have been good. I think it would be better to just get rid of all tariffs, even the existing tariffs. That would have been much better for American industrialization. But I would still say the, this whole idea of trying to use these tariffs as a way to negotiate for the well-being of the country. I just simply reject this overall, because I think Trump is applying his playbook from negotiating for real estate deals in companies that he owns to negotiating for a government.

• 56:14Speaker 03

  On behalf of millions of people's own businesses. And these people's positions are not all identical to each other. And so he's in no position to be determining what every single business needs to do. And so.

• 56:30Anthony Pompliano?

  It's possible for him to do that.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  Exactly, and this is, this is basically from my perspective as an Austrian economist. This is what Mises calls the calculation problem. The reason that economic central planning doesn't work is that because you don't have property rights. The central planner is unable to figure out the correct allocation of resources. Because he has no possibility of allocating things rationally, because there are no prices. If the government owns all of the factors of production. Then the government, think about, you know, the example of steel going into trains and cars. So if the government owns the steel mills and the raw iron ore mines. And it owns the car factory and it owns the train factory.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  And it allocates the trains and it allocates the cars to people and it decides how many people get trains and car. There's no way of figuring out the rational allocation of where should the iron go to which steel mill? And where should the steel go to the cars or the trains? Because as long as it's not the consumer who's making the choice. And then the entrepreneurs getting responding to these signals based on private property. There's no economic calculation without economic calculation, economic production falls apart. That's the most important insight of perhaps the Austrian school. And it's something that most people don't really know. When, when people think about the problem of socialism, they think of the problem of incentives. You know, people aren't going to rich and so aren't going to get rich in a socialist system.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  And so that's why the thing falls apart. And that's completely separate from the Mises and Austrian critique of socialism, which is about property rights. It's not about incentives. The Soviet Union solved the problem of incentives. If you didn't work, you went to the Gulag. Not going to the Gulag is a stronger incentive than getting rich for most people. So people had an incentive to work for in the Soviet Union. And absenteeism was not why the Soviet Union collapsed. We're showing up to the factories. It's just that the factories weren't running because they were missing value, uh, essential inputs. And those inputs were missing because they couldn't calculate the allocation of resources in a, in a rational way.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  So in a sense, this is what trade policy is. Uh, it's, it's less severe than full on socialism because people still own their capital. But ultimately, you know, when you're placing a hundred and fifty percent tariff or twenty percent tariff or fifty percent tariff on these businesses, you are completely obliterating whatever business model they had. Everything changes, you know, their inputs become more expensive, their exports become more expensive. And now instead of focusing on their business, these people are having to speculate on, um, policy decisions and on, uh, market actions. So I would say this is really the ultimate, uh, thing. And, and I think I would say if as a businessman, you wanted to really do what's better for the U S, you'd let people have the freedom to make their own calculations.

• 59:21Anthony Pompliano?

  When you look at, um, moving forward, if you were Trump, what would you do to balance? You want to solve these problems that he's outlined. Um, you got the tariffs already in place. Uh, I think there's something about like saving face. Uh, if you are to back down in any shape or form, I think China and many other countries have the same thing who've kind of ratcheted it up in response. Uh, so you've got like a geopolitical, you know, kind of, uh, negotiation, if you will. Um, and then you also have what I would consider, uh, like the financial inputs. You gotta be careful of the market and, and kind of what happens there. Do you just rip the Band-Aid off in your opinion and just remove everything and say, just kidding? And the market rips and you don't care what anyone thinks about you or, or what?

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think, well, you know, saving face and doing what's best for the market are at this point contradictory goals. So,

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  if you, uh, if the concern was what's better for the American people, I would just get rid of all of these tariffs that were imposed in the last couple of months and just say, yeah, we're just kidding, or just call it a win or, you know, find a way.

• 1:00:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Trust me, they will call it a win for sure.

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, just frame it as a sort of, yeah, we were, uh, we were just trying to show the world how much, uh, they need us and now. We've got delivered a message, but just kidding, we're going back to tariffs as they were before. That what I think would be best, I think, whoa, that would be good. What would be even better is to get rid of the tariffs that already exist to reduce tariffs even further. Now, if you wanted to think about the problem of the trade deficit, and I agree the trade deficit is a problem. And it is a problem because it's sustainable for a very long time. But you can't sustain a trade deficit for a long time without going bankrupt unless you've got a money printer, which effectively.

• 1:01:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Which is basically why they have the money printers, because they know that they have this problem. And so people kind of forget they invented the money printer.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, you know, you can't, it's, it's, it's having your cake and eating it too. We want to print money so that we can have all of the money in the world to buy all the things we want. But somehow we want to run a trade surplus. Why would you need a money printer if you want a trade surplus? A trade surplus means you're earning more than you're spending. What's the point of having a money printer? Like, if you had a money printer in your basement, it would be weird for you to run a trade surplus, right? Because a trade surplus means that you are working in order to generate the money that you can print for free. It would be like me writing books and selling them in exchange for pieces of paper that have my signature on them. But I can make pieces of paper with my signature on them for free.

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  So it doesn't make sense when you've got a money printer. The only reason you want to have it is this, so that you could get free stuff. Now, getting free stuff is not a good thing because it's destroying the industrial capacity of the country. It's destroying the ability of people to work. It's destroying all the, and not all, but it is, it's not conducive to the growth of industry in the US. So you do want to fix that. And so the way to fix that for me is to get rid of the money printer. The way to fix that goes back to Bitcoin.

• 1:02:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So I was gonna ask, is the solution then go back on my old standard or create like a Bitcoin standard? Where you still have dollars backed by Bitcoin or is the only solution Bitcoin itself?

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, dollars backed by Bitcoin or Bitcoin is the same thing. I think the, you know, if the US government wants to run a, on a Bitcoin standard, I mean, likely they're going to do it with a currency that's backed by Bitcoin. It's going to be like a second layer on Bitcoin. So I think the way to do that would be to just keep buying Bitcoin until the value of the Bitcoin held by the US government is equal to the outstanding money supply. And then you're able to redeem all the outstanding dollars for Bitcoin. So currently, what's M2 at these days? I think 30 trillion or something like that. Yeah, and Bitcoin is about $2 trillion. So you need a 15x in Bitcoin. Oh, but no, actually, well, this 30 trillion dollar, the US has about 200,000 Bitcoins. So

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  200,000 Bitcoins to 30 trillion dollars. You know, they keep buying as they keep buying, the number of Bitcoin that the US government holds goes up, but also the price of Bitcoin goes up in dollar terms. There comes a point, likely it won't take long, I presume in six months or so, if they keep buying, eventually there's going to be enough Bitcoin on the US government balance sheet to redeem every single dollar outstanding. So once that's the case, you back the dollar with Bitcoin, and now the US government is on a Bitcoin standard. And now the US government can't print money. So now the US government has to run a balanced budget. And now the trade has to be balanced. Now there's no more trade deficits. You can't run trade deficits. And you could run trade deficits for a year or two or so on, but it can't be held, something that drags on sustainably for decades.

• 1:04:01Anthony Pompliano?

  In that Bitcoin standard that there are dollars outstanding, what's the reason for the dollar?

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  Just a, just another layer of Bitcoin. And so it's like the dollar when it was backed by gold.

• 1:04:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, are we better off just getting rid of it and just everyone use Bitcoin?

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, you could. But I mean, that would just mean that all of the dollar assets that are out there would get wiped out. So they'd go to zero. But I don't, I think it would be, it would make more sense to just back it. Just back it. Because, you know, all of the financial institutions and all of the liabilities and assets that exist in dollar terms. I mean, you can't just get rid of all of that and scratch it all to zero. You could just back it.

• 1:04:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Tell some of the Bitcoiners. They think that's for sure possible.

• 1:04:50Anthony Pompliano?

  My last question for you is around this whole theme of like where we are headed. And one of the areas I've become very interested in is humanoid robots and a lot of the kind of rise of artificial intelligence, but not the like, hey, I created this little dinky app that, you know, it kind of is cool and shiny for a few minutes, but like the big systemic changes that are happening in society. I'm of the belief that there's going to be, you know, robots in everyone's home and kind of all the things that maybe are hyper bullish in that space. I probably think it'll take longer than most people think, but that's kind of my worldview.

• 1:05:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin for a long time was thought of as like money for machines as well. And it feels like a lot of the problems that we still are talking about in the Bitcoin world are like you and I and humans and like what we're doing. But it does feel like we know the electronic dollars of two day settlement times are not going to work for the machines that want instantaneous automated payments and stuff like that. So do you see Bitcoin being that solution? Or do you think that like stable coins or something else kind of fulfills, you know, what is right now probably a very, very small market. But if that future of robotics becomes quite large, you know, that thing should really become a large portion of global transactions.

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  I'm skeptical of this idea that machines are going to need their own money to transact with one another because I think ultimately machines are property. And so you've got a robot and you know, you've got a toaster and a vacuum cleaner and a laptop and all these different machines. Whatever they need in order to continue to operate is essentially not monetary. You know, they need electricity, they need information, they need an API, they need

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  fuel or whatever it is they require. It's going to require some kind of physical infrastructure in order to facilitate it. Now, how you monetize that, ultimately for me, it all comes down to the fact that these things are going to be repetitive transactions. So this robot, this toaster, this whatever it is, whatever it is going to need in order, when it's interacting with the world, it's something that's going to be recurring. And so therefore you don't need that thing to be constantly trading with the rest of the world. In the same way that you don't need your fridge currently to have its own. Account with the electric utility company. All of your electronics, they suck up all of the electricity. At the end of the month, you get a bill and you settle that bill with one transaction.

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  So I'm skeptical of this idea of money for robots. I think, um, I think.

• 1:07:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Basically, what you're arguing is like, they'll just use whatever money their owner uses.

• 1:07:30Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:07:30Anthony Pompliano?

  No different than Alexa from Amazon. You tell it to buy something. It just uses whatever credit cards on file. So you think it's very similar?

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think all that money just wants to be one. I think this is one of the big misconceptions in the altcoin space that every time you find a new use case, it's going to need its own currency. The whole point of money is that it is one thing. And so money wants to be one, and it's the same money for robots, for machines, for, um, for humans. Everybody wants to use the most liquid money. Everybody wants to use the money that has the highest liquidity, the most salability, the one that you could sell at the, uh, with the least amount of slippage. So everything's going to, I believe, tend toward the one monetary asset. And then whatever other uses that are introduced through technology are likely just going to be ways of managing this.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  Just accounting essentially. I don't, I don't believe it's going to fundamentally alter the monetary infrastructure. It's just going to be a new way of accounting.

• 1:08:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Where can we send people to find your books, your lectures, your podcasts? You know, I've learned an immense amount from you over the years.

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:08:43Anthony Pompliano?

  I always tell people that, uh, if somebody writes one book, they're either smart or they're crazy. If they write a second book, I can guarantee it, they're a masochist. You've written many books at this point. So like, where can we send people to go get all this stuff?

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, my website, safedean.com, and you can find my books, The Bitcoin Standard, The Fiat Standard, and Principles of Economics, my third book. And coming soon, my first work of fiction.

• 1:09:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really?

• 1:09:08Speaker 03

  Economic fiction, yes, the gold standard. It's an alternative history of the 20th century where the world goes on a gold standard in the 20th century.

• 1:09:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow, okay.

• 1:09:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:09:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And why did you want to do fiction?

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  Well, it's just something that I've had.

• 1:09:21Anthony Pompliano?

  You got tired of writing the truth?

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  It's something that I've had in my mind for a very long time. I've always thought about what the world would have looked like. And I thought it would be a lot more interesting to write it as a kind of alternative history book rather than a thought experiment where I sit and try and analyze those things. So it's written from the perspective of an economist writing a book in the year 2000, similar to the Bitcoin standard, but in the year 2000 and explaining the monetary system of the 20th century having been run on gold, and then how the world would have been different. So that's my next book coming in the next few months. It's running a little bit behind schedule. I apologize for everybody who pre-ordered, but I'm on it.

• 1:10:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. All right. safedean.com.

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:10:11Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Thank you so much for doing this. We'll do it again in the future.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  Cheers, man. Thank you for having me.