#1486 Anthony & John Pompliano | BlackRock & Metaplanet Buying Bitcoin

John Pompliano and Anthony Pompliano discuss why Metaplanet continues to buy bitcoin, what is so special about their strategy, bitcoin market, what the most important thing is for the price, taxes, tariffs, and how Rohinhood is changing financial markets.======================Bitwise is one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto asset managers. As of December 31, 2021, the company managed over $1.3 billion across an expanding suite of investment solutions, which include the world's largest crypto index fund and other innovative products spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto equities. Whether you’re an individual, advisor, or institution, Bitwise provides intelligent access to crypto with your unique circumstances in mind. Visitwww.bitwiseinvestments.com to learn more. Certain of the Bitwise investment products may be subject to the extreme risks associated with investing in crypto assets. Visitwww.bitwiseinvestments.com/disclosures/ to learn more.=======================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.=======================This episode is brought to you by Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR), a global leader in Bitcoin mining and high-performance computing for AI. Led by a seasoned management team, Bitdeer is driving innovation with its proprietary SEALMINER ASICs for Bitcoin mining and has a massive 2.5 GW power portfolio across three continents. Learn more about Bitdeer atwww.bitdeer.com=======================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.

• 0:30Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on guys? Today we've got a great episode with John Pompliano. John's in the studio and I'm on the road because I'm traveling. We didn't want to miss this conversation, so we still got great topics for you. The first up is Metaplaning, how they continue to buy Bitcoin and what's so special about their strategy. On top of that, we talk about the Bitcoin market, what I think is the single most important thing in 2025 for Bitcoin price. We then get into topics like taxes and tariffs and how these things are interconnected, what I believe the administration is going to do, how reciprocal tariffs work and why I believe that that's going to end up being an important detail for financial investors going throughout this year. And then lastly, we talk about Robinhood, what's going on with their business, why the rise of the self-directed investor is so important, and how that's changing financial markets. This conversation touches on a lot of topics. I'd love to hear what you agree with and what you disagree with.

• 1:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Once you get done listening, jump on Twitter or X and let me know exactly what you think. Now, here is my latest conversation with John Pompliano.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:43Anthony Pompliano?

  It's no secret that Bitcoin ETFs have taken Wall Street by storm. With over $35 billion in assets in just one year, it's become the most successful ETF launch in history. My partner Bitwise is the first and only Bitcoin ETF provider to openly publish its Bitcoin wallet addresses, allowing anyone to verify the fund's holdings. I believe this level of transparency is exactly the kind of innovation that only crypto makes possible. Bitwise is also the only ETF issuer that is Crypto specialist asset manager, meaning their team solely focuses on Bitcoin and they have the research, education and support to help investors navigate the space with confidence. All of that is great, but what I love most about Bitwise is probably their commitment to developers.

• 2:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitwise donates 10% of their ETF's profits to Bitcoin open source developers. Bitcoin developers are the unsung heroes, working tirelessly to maintain, improve and innovate the blockchain. Their efforts ensure that Bitcoin remains true to its promise as a decentralized system that is built to last. Go to bitwisepomp.com to learn more about their ETF and other services. Once again, that's bitwisepomp.com. Bitwise P-O-M-P dot com. As always, remember investing is risky and carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before you invest. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin OS. Bitcoin OS is the ultimate upgrade to Bitcoin.

• 3:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoiners can now experience the magic of the entire crypto world, including DeFi, scalability, privacy and more. But you don't have to give up control of your hard-earned stats. Bitcoin OS is powered by revolutionary zero-knowledge technology and they let other blockchains plug into Bitcoin, offering their service to the world's largest digital asset. This lets Bitcoin holders securely move their coins across the crypto landscape, turning Bitcoin into a productive programmable asset. Putting your Bitcoin to work once meant trusting centralized companies and bridges to protect your assets. A model that's lost crypto owners billions to hacks and fraud. Bitcoin OS lets you be your own BOS, using a system based on cryptography rather than trust, the way Satoshi intended.

• 3:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Using Bitcoin OS, all coins are returning home, eager to plug into Bitcoin's security, network effects and $2 trillion capital base. Bitcoin is the first and final BOS of all digital assets and will soon be reborn as the foundation of the united crypto world. Follow Bitcoin OS on Twitter, at BTC underscore OS. Again, that's at BTC underscore OS and be early to Bitcoin again.

• 4:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by NASDAQ listed Bitdeer. They trade under their stock ticker BTDR. They're led by a seasoned management team. Bitdeer is a global leader in Bitcoin mining and high-performance computing for artificial intelligence, and they are backed by technological innovation and a massive 2.5 gigawatt global power portfolio. Recently, Bitdeer launched its own Bitcoin mining ASIC named the Seal Miner to target what Wall Street analysts project to be a multi-billion dollar annual market. Their proprietary Seal Miner ASICs are redefining efficiency and performance, and they are backed by the industry's most advanced chip roadmap with two more groundbreaking models set to launch in 2025. To learn more about Bitdeer's

• 4:49Anthony Pompliano?

  cutting-edge technology and business, visit their website at bitdeer.com. That's B-I-T-D-E-E-R.com. Go check out Bitdeer today.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  All right, Anthony, how are you doing? No suit today. What is, uh, what is going on? We're going to talk a lot about Bitcoin, uh, but first let's catch up. Why no suit?

• 5:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I am currently in Whistler, Canada. I'm speaking at an event later today, and I will be wearing a suit during the event, but it's quite early here right now. In Whistler, it is 13 degrees, nice and cold. And I'm used to being the one in the studio and somebody else being remote, but I'm glad that we're, uh, we're switching places.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. Um, let's just get right into it. Uh, we got a lot of Bitcoin news to talk about. The first thing that I think is worth mentioning is MetaPlanet. They are raising $26 million to go buy more Bitcoin. Uh, they are getting added to the MSCI index in Japan. Uh, first, can you explain a little bit, what is the MSCI index? And then like, is MetaPlanet, they're going to keep going? They're going to keep buying Bitcoin? What's going on?

• 5:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So first of all, we know that, um, this idea of weaponizing your balance sheet by putting Bitcoin on it, this strategy worked. Last year, MetaPlanet was the single best performing public equity in the world. Out of tens of thousands of companies, MetaPlanet outperformed all of them. It was up something like 3,200% in the last 12 months. Uh, so great performance. Uh, second is the part of the strategy that people, uh, undervalue is not just putting Bitcoin in the balance sheet, but it's continuing to acquire more Bitcoin and get that Bitcoin yield up. And for those that don't know, Bitcoin yield is essentially the idea. Bitcoin am I adding to the balance sheet over the dilution that I'm taking? And so that's kind of accretive addition of Bitcoin means that each individual share is getting

• 6:33Anthony Pompliano?

  more and more Bitcoin exposure, even though the company is technically selling equity, raising debt, all of those things. So the multiple that you get on the stock, you know, or the premium that people talk about is really predicated on the fact that the market believes this company is going to continue to buy more Bitcoin in an accretive way. If for some reason they came out and they said, we are not going to buy any more Bitcoin, those premiums or those multiples would collapse and these things would trade much closer to NAV. And so a big part of the strategy is not just owning the Bitcoin, but continuing to buy more and more. And that's how you get that premium. So I think that Meta Planet, along with the other companies pursuing this Bitcoin treasury strategy will continue. Another point that I think is important, which you brought up was this MSCI index. Now, the reason why public companies want to be in the index is one, they get a lot more awareness.

• 7:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Two, they get passive flows. People just buy the index and naturally that gets put into the various stocks within the index. But then three is there's this legitimacy that comes with it. Hey, if we are in certain indexes, we can show up. So you see MicroStrategy talk about the fact that they're in the NASDAQ 100. You see Meta Planet now is going to start talking about they're an MSCI Japan Index Company, et cetera. And so it's a pretty big deal if you're into like the nuts and bolts or the nuances of public markets, but overall, nothing really changes for the company itself in terms of its day-to-day operations. I think that Simon, Dylan and the team over at Meta Planes do a fantastic job. And something tells me that, you know, they're going to continue doubling and tripling down this strategy again because it works. And so anytime you see something working, you're going to get a lot of copycats around

• 8:01Anthony Pompliano?

  the world, but the company needs to stay focused and make sure, hey, just keep buying more Bitcoin, right? Just whatever you can do, figure out how to get as non-dilutive capital as possible, buy more Bitcoin and the stock price will be taken care of.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  If I owned a company, what do you think the best way to raise money to buy Bitcoin is? Or should you not raise money and then just use the cash flow from the business? So I go back to MicroStrategy and Meta Planet, right? Is it better to do a convertible note for some of these organizations? Or is there something else that could be more advantageous? And obviously each company will act a little bit differently.

• 8:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think that's the answer, right? Is each company is on a case by case basis. So MicroStrategy had $500 million of cash on their balance sheet to start and they took, you know, 450 million of it and they bought Bitcoin. So they had the benefit of being able to do that. Meta Planet did not have $500 million on their balance sheet. Instead, they were a former hotel company where it wasn't really working. But one of the advantages that they have is they have about $80 million of tax losses that are sitting on that balance sheet that they'll be able to use to their benefit in the future. And so each company, I think you have to look at, hey, what are the strengths that we have? What are the weaknesses that we have? Let's lean into the strengths. Let's try to mitigate those weaknesses. Now, what's really interesting also is that Meta Planet's success widely is attributable to the fact that they're doing it in Japan, right? A huge part of that strategy is that you're able to arbitrage between the dollar and the yen.

• 9:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And so there's some foreign currency components to it. And then they were able to become the most heavily traded, from a volume standpoint, stock in Japan. So now you have all these Japanese stock investors who are looking for volatility, right? Japan is not necessarily known for volatility in their public stock. By introducing that volatility, what I think these companies that are operating on a Bitcoin treasury strategy have figured out is that traders and investors want volatility. Historically, the kind of financial advisor universe says, oh, we don't want volatility. Volatility is risk. We want to mitigate risk. We want kind of steady Eddie, you know, 5%, 10% returns a year. But actually, what a big kind of eye opener was for a lot of people is no, investors want volatility.

• 9:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Volatility equals, when it goes up, returns. And so having that volatility has really drawn a lot of capital into these businesses. And so I think that they're going to use every tool available to them. They're going to raise equity. They're going to use these converts. They're going to issue straight debt. They are going to do whatever they can. I believe Meta Planet is even selling options on some of their Bitcoin. Don't quote me on that, but I'm pretty sure they are. And that's driving some income and then they're able to use that to buy a coin. And so every single one of these levers that they can is ultimately in the pursuit of how do we get as much Bitcoin on our balance sheet as possible?

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Do you see it? I see it as a few different stages, right? It's how deep in the pool do you want to go? You can obviously use the operating cash flow that from your business and just buy Bitcoin, hold it on your balance sheet. There's people that get paid in Bitcoin and have it on invoices. But then there's this, there's this world where it's like, hey, like, do we want to issue more debt? And do we want to just continuously going down? And then it's like, almost, is it a bet on Bitcoin going up?

• 10:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, of course. You definitely benefit from Bitcoin's volatility here, right? And so this strategy, think of real estate. Real estate 100% has a comparison to these Bitcoin treasury strategies. A real estate company goes, they use debt to acquire a building or a home or whatever. They have some equity in the deal, but they also have debts. They're levered in that acquisition. And a huge part of it is continue to pay down the debt, allow the equity value of the real estate to grow. And then over time, you refinance, you use that cash, cash out repot, so then go acquire another building. And so what you're essentially doing is you're using your balance sheet and the appreciation of the assets on your balance sheet and your financial engineering, a way to acquire more and more assets over time. As you do that, you obviously see, you know, kind of the equity value of the company go up.

• 11:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And so really what Bitcoin has done is Bitcoin has replaced that kind of real estate strategy and says, well, what if we have something that's more volatile? We find that's more liquid and we have something that for the first few companies that do this, you can now give exposure to very large pools of capital that they can't get anywhere else. So these debt investors, and as an example, are corporate bond investors. They have no ability to buy Bitcoin. That's not their mandate. But they can buy bonds from a public company. And now they understand that the underlying exposure is to Bitcoin. And so it's, you know, a kind of a window in time where these companies early on are able to go and do this. And I think that you're going to continue to see more and more companies do it because they realize it works.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Let's talk about Goldman Sachs. A recent article came out that they hold over $2 trillion of crypto, specifically 1.6, or excuse me, $2 billion of crypto, specifically 1.6 billion of that is Bitcoin. I think about 1.3 billion is going to be BlackRock's ETF and then another 300 million of Fidelity's ETF. What's going on with all these asset managers? Are they just going to keep buying it and, you know, this is now mainstream and here we go? Or is there kind of something underlying there that no one's thinking about?

• 12:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, people on Wall Street know this, but for people that don't live and breathe this stuff every single day, one of the things to remember is Goldman Sachs is the name of a large business. It's kind of the name on the front door. But within Goldman Sachs, you have an organizational structure where there are different teams. And so you have, obviously, wealth management, you have investment banking, you have asset management, you have kind of all these different components. And then within, let's say, asset management or prop trading, you're going to have different teams with different mandates. And in some cases, they are, you know, kind of friendly competitors with each other. They're all trying to make as much money as they can because their individual bonuses and compensation is tied to what they're able to do. And so naturally, even if, let's say, Goldman Sachs isn't into Bitcoin, you may have a team that says, well, the best place to go and invest is in Bitcoin

• 13:35Anthony Pompliano?

  ETF. You may have an investment banking team that's really looking to go and work with Bitcoin or crypto companies in the public markets. But you may have another investment team that says, you know what, this isn't for us. We're more focused on emerging market, you know, value investing. And so that is the beauty of some of these really large financial institutions is that they actually have different teams, different divisions, that they don't agree with each other, or they're optimizing for different things. And so it doesn't surprise me that there are people at Goldman Sachs on some teams that hold the Bitcoin ETFs. And then you're also going to see like custody companies, right? They're going to come out, they're going to say, hey, look, we actually don't have a directional opinion on any one asset, but we hold, let's say Bitcoin for the ETF, or we hold it for our company. And so you're going to see a lot of the financialization of Bitcoin. And so you're going to see people

• 14:20Anthony Pompliano?

  want to play in this game because this is where capital is going, this is where users are going, and ultimately, this is where energy and attention is going. And anywhere on Wall Street where there's energy and attention, there's people making money. And I think that these firms have a financial incentive to go ahead and embrace this stuff. And that's why you see Goldman Sachs and many others saying, look, we may take a different approach to play in this kind of pool, but we are going to play. And so whether that's holding the ETF, whether that is providing investment banking services, the financial advisors helping their clients participate, you know, all these different components, this is where revenue is. And wherever there's revenue, there will be Wall Street institutions that want to play.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  How do you think about owning the ETF versus owning Bitcoin, both for the individual, the individual using these banks and these asset managers to kind of hold it on their behalf, and then also these corporations that are going out and buying Meta Planet, obviously, Michael Saylor as well, should they just hold their private keys and, you know, multiple people in an organization have a word or something like that, or, you know, should most people just go buy the ETF because it's easier and it's more accessible?

• 15:19Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a good question. I think it really depends on who you're talking about, right? It's kind of like when people ask me for personal finance advice. Say, well, look, I don't know anything about how much income you have. I don't know what your monthly expenses are. I don't know what your risk profile is. I don't know if you're married with kids, you're single, how old you are. Like, there's so many different factors that go into this. But when you think of Bitcoin in particular, I always tell people that the first thing you should do when you get into Bitcoin is just go read the white paper. Go understand, hey, what did Satoshi say when they went and they published this thing? The second thing you should do is you should learn how to buy and hold Bitcoin in many different ways. So you should go onto an exchange and you should buy Bitcoin. You should move it between an account, put it on a wallet, take that hot wallet, put it into cold storage,

• 16:01Anthony Pompliano?

  right? Move it, hold the keys, do all these different things, get familiar with how the actual asset works, and do it with a small amount of money. Do it with $5, $10 worth of Bitcoin. If you lose it, eh, you're probably not going to be happy about it, but you only lost $5 or $10. And so, being familiar with the asset builds confidence. Confidence ultimately leads to competence, in my opinion. And so I think that's where you're going to see a lot of people go and kind of play around. Now, the ETFs are interesting because you have a cohort of people, I think generally they're kind of older people, a little bit more successful, who say, look, I got a brokerage account, I wanted to buy this Bitcoin thing. I'm not going to go, what's this Coinbase company? Sounds, you know, I don't know what that is. I never heard of them. I'm just going to buy a brokerage account. Okay, now I can go and I can buy Bitcoin. And I really don't care about kind of the critical Bitcoin

• 16:44Anthony Pompliano?

  ethos. I don't care about self custody. I don't think the banking system is going to go down tomorrow. I just want price exposure. And so, price exposure from Bitcoin can be accomplished through those ETFs. I think a lot of people, especially people who are worried about the self custody and they feel like they don't have the confidence to do that, then that's a solution for them. Now, if you go and you talk to most Bitcoiners, they'll say, hey, look, actually, a huge component of the value proposition is that You should hold Bitcoin in private keys, right? Take self custody, become sovereign with your assets. And so I think that that's a pretty well understood, you know, kind of path of Bitcoin ownership. And then when you look at these companies like Meta Planet and MicroStrategy, in some cases, like we previously talked about, some people can't buy Bitcoin or can't buy the ETFs, and so buying the equity is important. But there's other people who say, well, look, these companies are actually much more volatile than Bitcoin.

• 17:29Anthony Pompliano?

  If I'm going to seek out volatility, Bitcoin's good, but these companies are great. So they want them, they want to go play there. And so again, it's almost like now we're creating a buffet. You show up and hey, what do you want, right? You may feel like salad today, but your friend may will say, you know, I want steak. That's okay. You go to the buffet and anyone can get whatever they want. Now, what I will say is, I do think that as the banks begin to be bigger and bigger players in the Bitcoin world, you're going to see more and more people using Bitcoin, holding Bitcoin via the banks. And what I mean by that is, you know, if you take somebody like me, right? I own some of the ETF. I have, you know, a kind of third party, hyper secure custody of. And so you look at that and you say, okay, well, why are you doing some of that stuff?

• 18:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it depends on a variety of factors. But if all of a sudden the bank that I use for personal wealth comes in and says, hey, look, we actually can custody this stuff or we can help you do certain things with this asset. Obviously, if you have a relationship with that organization, they may not do 100%, but they may start to do some for you. And I think that's really kind of a big unlock. The ETFs obviously had a massive impact, but I also think that there is quite a bit of kind of inflection point that will be driven by these banks starting to participate because they have trust. They're really big, they have big marketing, kind of budget, sales forces, et cetera, and they are salivating. They want to be able to help the people who are playing in this asset. Historically, they just haven't been able to do that, and I think that's going to change in 2025.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love that analogy, the buffet. When you compare it to real estate, right? There's multiple ways to get exposure to real estate. You could buy the actual asset. You could go buy REIT. You can go buy other things. You can invest in corporations that are, you know, managing real estate or owning it on your behalf. So I think that analogy makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about Robinhood. Let's talk about these exchanges and these brokerages. Obviously, they love volatility because it just it nets trading fees for them. Robinhood just posted their Q4 earnings yesterday. They had over a billion dollars of revenue. That's up 37% quarter to quarter. Crypto was a massive part of that. I think crypto was their crypto trading fees. They grew over 500% to a record 358 million.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  This is becoming a large part of their business. Is this going to be similar to what we saw in 2021, where their business ramped up a ton because of crypto? And then kind of had that fall off as crypto fell off as well? Where do you see this kind of playing out? And how do you see Robinhood being a player in this industry?

• 19:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, one of the funny things about humans is we like to chase returns. And so the higher that a price of an asset goes, the more attention, the media talks about it more, word of mouth spreads, people want to buy it. You can see Nvidia, you can see Bitcoin, many assets like this. And so as attention goes, then what happens is trading volume follows. And so whether it is, you know, order flow stuff or various other revenue sources that Robinhood has, you're going to continue to see that where the attention is followed by revenue for these organizations. Now, what I do think is pretty interesting is Robinhood has really pioneered a very important component of the market, which is the rise of the self-directed investor. So if you go back and you think, you know, 20 years ago, pretty much all the news somebody got was via mainstream media.

• 20:43Anthony Pompliano?

  They would read the newspaper, they would watch, you know, television, and then they would have to call. And there was an intermediary, whether it was a stockbroker, a financial advisor, a big institution, whatever. But there was somebody else that was executing the trades for you. What Robinhood did is they kind of positioned themselves perfectly. They said, well, with the rise of the internet and social media, these investors now are becoming much more educated. They don't have to call up the stockbroker and say, well, what do you think we should buy today? They're reading the Content for themselves on Twitter or X, reading it, you know, or watching on YouTube, reading newsletters, all that kind of stuff. So if you were informed yourself, now you're saying, well, I want to go execute myself. I don't want to call a stockbroker and hear his opinion. I want to call and just go execute myself. And so Robinhood shows up, public.com, Weebull,

• 21:26Anthony Pompliano?

  eToro, you know, there's a lot of these companies that have kind of come into this sector, allowing for a self-directed investor now not to be self-educated, but also self-reliant on the execution. And so naturally, if you remove an intermediary like a financial advisor, and people are able to directly interface with the market, you would expect that to continue to grow over time. And so that's exactly what you're seeing here. Now, they've also done a great job of, you know, started in public equities, they then added crypto, they now have a subscription service, they've got a credit card. I mean, they're really pushing into a number of the, I think it's a debit card, not a credit card, but they're really pushing into these different financial services. And so I just look at these businesses like the public.com,

• 22:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Robinhood, et cetera, as a beneficiary of the rise of the self-directed investor. That coincides with the rise of Bitcoin, where Bitcoin really was a bottoms-up story. It was individuals who first adopted it, and then it was corporations, now nation-states. And so I think that we should continue to see this happen. One of the areas that I think is going to become really interesting when it comes to Robinhood in particular, probably public.com, others will enter this at some point, is they are going to start to go horizontal in the other types of assets that they offer. So look at, let's say, crypto. Stocks was very simple. Hey, we're going to go offer US public stocks. With crypto, it started with like two or three different assets. Now they're starting to push the long tail. So you're able to buy more and more assets on there. If you go

• 22:48Anthony Pompliano?

  and you look at the kind of asset buckets, Robinhood recently announced a brand-new partnership with Caoshi on prediction markets. And so Caoshi is a US kind of regulatory, legal prediction market provider. And so they're using Robinhood for distribution. So it's a kind of a nice partnership there. And so I think that you're going to see these guys say, look, we have a direct relationship with the self-directed investor. What do they want? And whatever the answer to what those people want in financial markets, Robin Hood is going to go and try to continue to build this, as will the public dot coms, the e toros, weebles, etc. And so I think that really is the bet in a company like that is what is ultimately going to be the self-directed investors kind of desire.

• 23:32Anthony Pompliano?

  These companies will service that and naturally if they continue to do that, well, then revenue will follow.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Well said. Let's talk about something that's probably on a lot of people's minds now. I know it's on mine, taxes. Tax season is coming up. What should Bitcoin holders be thinking about? I assume your answer is going to be do not sell your Bitcoin, but I am curious what your thoughts are around taxes, given that Bitcoin's risen over the last few months.

• 23:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, look, there are a number of different components. The first is obviously you don't pay taxes until you sell. And so if you don't sell, that is kind of the quote unquote best tax strategy because it minimizes taxes because you pay zero. The second thing is people need to live though, right? And you can't live in your Bitcoin, you can't drive your Bitcoin, you can't eat your Bitcoin. And so there's plenty of people who are going to see gains in their investment accounts. So hey, I need to take some of that, convert it to something I can consume with. And so, you know, when you have to do that, obviously there are a number of tax incentives in the United States between short-term and long-term capital gains. So waiting a year after you purchase versus not is a huge component.

• 24:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I would tell people to consult their kind of tax advisor or their accountant on things like tax loss harvesting, right? So if you came in and you bought Bitcoin at $109,000 and then it trades down to 92,000, there are certain things that you can do to kind of benefit from tax losses. That could potentially be helpful to you depending on your situation. But also I think that there's a number of products, you know, we recently had a guy on who was talking about your retirement account. And so if you're able to actually put capital into those retirement accounts, say Bitcoin IRA as an example. Then what you're able to use Bitcoin IRA for is you can actually go and buy Bitcoin inside of a tax advantaged account. And so now all of a sudden you're saying, look, I'm a long-term holder or maybe I'm a trader.

• 25:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Either one, I'm in a sheltered account. Now there's trade-offs to it because you can't. For a certain period of time, etc. But I think those are the things that people really need to pay attention to. And one thing that I would call out, I forget who did this analysis, so I apologize to whoever I saw. Who did it, but they went back and they looked at the nominal versus the return. For some reason, I think it was Med Faber, but I may be wrong on that. Of the stock market. So he looked at from like the last 125 years. What was the return of the US stock market on a nominal basis is something like, you know, 9.3% or whatever. Something like, you know, kind of just over 9%. But if you go and you actually look at the inflation adjusted return, kind of the quote, quote, real return of the stock market. It was actually closer to like 6.5%.

• 26:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And so now, and you take a look at that, you say to yourself, one third of the return of the US stock market was actually eaten up by the official government inflation metrics. Now, I would argue that if you go and you take a look at inflation today. Right now, it was just reported that January's inflation number was 3%, right? That's a big number. We're growing 3%, 50% higher than the Fed's target of 2%. But actually, if you go and you take a look at the US money supply over the last 12 months, it has increased by 5%. So what number are you going to believe? Are you going to believe that inflation is 3%? Or are you going to believe based on the growth of the money? 4%? People will disagree. There's a bunch of debate. I'm not here to try to solve that, you know, kind of controversial debate. But I do think that the number is probably higher than you would think.

• 26:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And so naturally, taxes are a very important part of investing because it can eat into, right? The US stock market, the real return is actually one third lower than the nominal return, simply because of inflation. And so if you then also were not buying and holding for a long period of time. If you were buying and selling every single year, well, you're paying taxes on that. And so you're literally quote, quote, disrupting compounding. And so I think that taxes and inflation, you know, when you sell, all of these things play into it. And all we've seen over very long periods of time is the best investors who are able to compound capital for, you know, 30, 40, 50 years. Usually buy a great asset and they hold it for as long as possible. So you see Warren Buffett doing this. Another really kind of interesting story is Ken Langone.

• 27:33Anthony Pompliano?

  A lot of people don't know who Ken Langone is, but he's one of the co-founders of Home Depot. He's a fantastic investor. He also happened to have gone to Bucknell University where I went, like every building on the campus. After Ken Langone, because he's a great flash question and donor. But I was listening to an interview he did with Joe Longsdale. And Ken Langone said the average hold period for his portfolio is 42 years. On average, when he bought a stock, he held it for 42 years. And so you think about that and you say to yourself, that takes incredible patience, discipline, long-term thinking, et cetera. And that really is, you know, he's a multi-billionaire, but a lot of successful people I know, that is what they're doing. And so if you want to completely avoid taxes, then don't sell.

• 28:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Just be a long-term holder of a great asset. And that's certainly a strategy that a lot of people I know are employing with Bitcoin.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  People are obviously chasing returns. One thing I think is worth talking about is that as Bitcoin gets bigger, it is expected that the returns will be diminished, given that the volatility will not be as great. You actually probably saw that with a lot of public companies as well, right? Amazon, over the last 20 years, has grown exponentially. But like, how much more could it grow, right? And how fast can it grow? How do you think about, both in the public equity market and Bitcoin, about diminished returns, given the size of the market?

• 28:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, we've definitely been seeing that with Bitcoin over the last couple of years, right? Is it used to be compounding at over 100% a year. Now it's compounding at like 60% a year. Eventually, I think it'll be compounding at 40, then 30, then 20%. When that happens is anyone's guess. But as you mentioned, it's kind of law of large numbers. The larger the asset, the lower the return usually is going to end up being. Now, what's interesting about Bitcoin is 60% compound annual growth rate. Complaining about that, right? That is still very, very high compared to stocks or other kind of traditional assets. And so I think that these compound annual growth rates can go on longer than people realize. So if it's 60% today, if in three years, it's only 55%, that's still pretty damn good, right?

• 29:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So how long can we kind of continue at a higher rate is a pretty important point. The other thing that I would say is, you know, to me, the most important thing in 2025 is whether the United States is going to buy Bitcoin or not. If the United States buys Bitcoin, it'll be an incredible explosion of interest, new demand. You have finite asset, the price goes much higher. If we don't, I still think that the price of Bitcoin goes up. It just won't have that, you know, kind of rocket fuel tailwind of US buying Bitcoin. So it's kind of like, hey, we're Good spot, but would be an amazing spot if the US went ahead and did this. So I think that's a kind of core component of this whole story is just what should we expect? If the US buys Bitcoin and really the answer is like a much higher price.

• 30:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And the reason why I call that out and talking about, you know, kind of diminishing returns for a larger asset is there are still these external factors that can kind of reaccelerate an asset. And so a country like the United States buying and then that leading to other countries buying obviously could change the trajectory and preserve a higher rate of for a longer period of time. And so I think that's really the stuff that Bitcoiners are looking at is saying to themselves, hey, how can we go and find new pools of capital who want to buy this thing? If it's good enough for an individual, if it's good enough for a corporation and for a financial institution, it's probably good enough for a country. And I think that we're going to see not only the United States buy Bitcoin, but I think you will see a number of other countries over the next eighteen or twenty-four months. Go ahead and announce the same thing.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  I think once you get one big mover, right? Everyone else kind of moves in. El Salvador was the first one, but we'll see where we go from here for sure. So I saw some news recently about reciprocal tariffs. Can you talk about what this is and why it's important?

• 31:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So first of all, tariffs obviously are a tax that is being levied against other countries, products or companies that are being imported into the United States. And you could think of them as an incentive system or a kind of punitive punishment system. Right now, the United States sets it up much more as a punishment system. So what we do, zero percent kind of blanket tariff. So everyone starts off at zero and then we pick certain products, companies or countries to go ahead and to tariff, to increase the taxes that they have to pay when there is these imports. I personally think that the United States should flip that. We should invert it and we should go to an incentive based tariff system. And we should start with a 10% blanket tariff across all imports to the United States.

• 31:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Then what we can do is we can selectively go product, company and country by country and say, okay, do we want to decrease or completely remove the tariff? So the default goes from no tariff to now the default is 10% tariff. And then we go in and we incentivize certain things that we want to bring into the United States. That to me is a much Better system and it is a more positive oriented versus right now kind of punitive punishment system. Now reciprocal tariffs are kind of this interesting dynamic because I actually think there's more agreement on reciprocal tariffs than there are on the existing tariff system that Trump is trying to implement. Or even that kind of incentive system that I described. What a reciprocal tariff basically looks at is, okay, let's go around the world. Who's tariffing the United States?

• 32:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, we make, you know, a certain product and we ship it to Germany. Germany has a 10% tariff on American made products on X. Okay, we turn around and say, well, now any German manufacturer who makes that same product and tries to send it to the US, we're going to create a 10% on you. So it reciprocates. Almost think of this as we take a mirror and hold it up to the world. We say to people, hey, whatever you do to us, we're going to do back. And the idea is, you know, a lot of people are confused as to why I am so pro tariff as somebody who is so pro free market. You would think that those two things are at odds with each other, right? I'm very fond of saying the free market is the referee. The free market can really, you know, kind of solve these problems. Well, the problem is we don't live in a free market right now as seen by the tariffs that other countries have against us.

• 33:22Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, if you go and you look at, there was this great chart that I tweeted, the average US tariff is some of the lowest in the world. Most other countries have higher average tariffs than the US has. So that means that all American manufacturers that are exporting goods to these other countries are getting hit with tariffs. And one way you can think about this is as we pursued globalization, countries started to take advantage of us. They started to say, well, we're going to tariff you, but you're not going to tariff us. And so naturally the American manufacturer is getting penalized, but the foreign manufacturer is not. By doing reciprocal tariffs, it simply says, we're going to even the playing field. And you can almost think of this as we're bringing it back closer to a free market by using the tariffs. Right? We're saying, okay, you're tariffing us 25%.

• 34:05Anthony Pompliano?

  In some cases, there are countries that are tariffing some of our products 2 or 300%. And so we say, okay, you want to tariff American dairy products in Canada at 250% or whatever the number is, well, anything that comes from Canada to the US, we're going to implement a 250% tariff on your dairy products. Well, guess what happens usually is those other countries say, well, that sounds a little bit aggressive. Why don't we lower our tariffs on American products? Right? Because it's reciprocal. So how do you get the US tariffs down? Well, you lower the tariffs on American manufacturers. And so those types of things become really interesting. And the reason why I say there's more buy-in, I think, for the reciprocal tariffs is because people feel like that's more fair. They say, oh, well, it is fair. If they're tariffing us, why don't we tariff them back? And so

• 34:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I think you're going to see a lot of buy into that. Now, it was supposed to go into, or supposed to be announced today, but instead, it sounds like the Trump administration is going to move this back till about April, before they would want to implement it. But I do think that we are going to see more and more tariffs. Obviously, we got the Mexico and Canada announcement that got postponed for 30 days because they gave concessions. We've seen a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum. Now we're talking about reciprocal tariffs. I keep, you need to say this over and over again. Welcome to the new tariff era. I believe this is going to be the single most important economic tool that Trump uses in geopolitical conversations, but people are just discounting this and saying it's only a negotiating tool. I do not believe that to be true. I think that this is an economic tool that is going

• 35:32Anthony Pompliano?

  to drive more revenue for the United States government. It's going to create more American jobs. We will see GDP growth off of it. There will be more American manufacturing capacity created because of these tariffs. And on top of all of that, inflation will not flare up because of the tariffs. They may flare up because of other reasons, but not because of the tariffs. And I also think that the American consumer prices they pay for these goods will actually go down over time. And as I've talked about before in other episodes, and I also wrote a very long piece on this, is if you go back in 2018, and you look at the tariffs that Trump implemented, both solar panels, washing machines, and steel, all saw lower prices within 18 months. So we created the tariffs. The tariff is supposed

• 36:13Anthony Pompliano?

  to be inflationary. Inflation went down from January of 2018 to January of 2019.

• 36:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Didn't show up. On top of that, the prices of those three goods that were tariffed actually went down over the next 18 months. There was an initial spike and then because of American production came, all of a sudden the prices went down. And then obviously the government was able to create more revenue as well. And so I think there's a very big misunderstanding of how tariffs work in the mainstream conversation. I think that there is a very serious approach to these tariffs. Here's Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnick, Donald Trump, J D Vance, many other people talking about this. I do not think it's a negotiating tool. I do think these are kind of economic tools. And the reciprocal tariffs are probably the least controversial program that they could implement. And so naturally, if you have a tool you want to use, if the tool works and you think that there's going to be more buy in for that, then you should expect them to go ahead and lean into that. And that's exactly what they're doing.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  For the reciprocal tariffs, would it just make sense to eliminate tariffs on both sides? If you're going to tariff me and I'm going to tariff you in return, right? It may be a little bit one sided depending on what actually is like the total volume of imports and exports of that country. But like, would it just make sense to eliminate the tariffs completely as long as the other side is in agreement there?

• 37:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So this is like, again, one of the paradoxes. People want black and white answers to these questions, right? If you said to me, hey, you get to draw the scenario from the start and you can do anything, you would have complete free trade, right? But free trade would be coupled with a heavy incentive system for American manufacturing, American jobs, et cetera. So one of the big lies of global finance is that globalization was good for the American consumer. Globalization was great for the wealthy in America. They continue to solidify their position at the top of the food chain and their economic kind of hierarchy. But actually globalization has been horrible, just destroyed the American middle class and hurt the people in the lowest socioeconomic classes. And so who are the people who usually are talking about terrorists?

• 38:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Who are the people who are usually talking about globalization? It's the wealthy people. They control the media. They're the ones, you know, in finance, et cetera. So they're all like, globalization is amazing. Why would you ever want to stop this? Well, I think that Donald Trump and J D Vance, right? J D Vance wrote a whole book about this. Is they are actually saying, look, the finance people are going to be fine. Globalization has hurt two thirds of American citizens. We need to do something for them. And so again, it goes back to this idea of free trade is great and you want the market to work. But every country is incentivized to not participate in free trade. Right? Because you want to be able to actually incentivize some production domestically. You want to create and protect jobs inside your country. Internationally, what do you do? You subsidize, which gives your producers a advantage in the global market.

• 38:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And then you also implement tariffs to put pain on foreign producers of those goods. And so, yeah, free market would be amazing. The problem is that no country is incentivized to actually participate. Everyone wants to protect themselves and have nobody else protect themselves. How a system works. Anytime you have an incentive system where everyone is incentivized to protect themselves. Naturally, you're going to get subsidies. You're going to get tariffs. You're going to get all this stuff. And so I actually think that the better thing to do is for the United States to kind of play out this reciprocal game. And say, look, if you do it to us, we're going to do it to you. And I think that would drastically change the economic conversations between countries. Makes a lot of sense. All right. That's all I got for you today. Thank you for your time.