#1557 Anthony & John Pompliano | Countries Are RUSHING To Buy Bitcoin Now

John Pompliano and Anthony Pompliano discuss all things bitcoin, bitcoin bonds, hash-rate, legislation about the US buying bitcoin, stock market, why so many people missed the last rally, what it means for your portfolio, and how bitcoin and stocks could perform the rest of the year.========================Invest as you spend with the Gemini Credit Card® (https://www.gemini.com/pomp). Sign up today and get approved by 6/30/25 to earn a $200 Bitcoin bonus. Terms apply (http://gemini.com/legal/credit-card-intro-promo-terms). The Gemini Credit Card is issued by WebBank. See rates & fees (https://www.gemini.com/legal/cardholder-agreement) for more details. Some exclusions apply to instant rewards in which rewards are deposited when the transaction posts. This content is sponsored by Gemini, but my opinions are my own.========================Core is the leading Bitcoin scaling solution, enabling you to lock in yield by locking up your Bitcoin. Simply lock it on the Bitcoin blockchain to secure the Core network, and get rewards. No bridging. No lending. Just holding. Still your keys. Still your coins. Now your yield. Start at https://stake.coredao.org/pomp========================Polkadot is a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain technology aimed at creating Web3. Created by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot empowers users to build decentralized applications with ease. Backed by industry leaders, making it a preferred choice for big names, Polkadot stands out as a leading choice for investors seeking a reliable, future-proof solution in the growing world of Web3 technology. Learn more at https://polkadot.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. What's going on guys? Today, we've got an excellent episode with John Pompliano. We do rapid fire. We go through all things Bitcoin, Bitcoin bonds, what's going on with hash trade, what should we actually expect from legislation about the United States buying Bitcoin, and much, much more. Then we also talk about the stock market and why so many people missed

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  the most recent rally, what it means for your portfolio, and how I personally expect stocks to perform through the end of the year. This conversation is full with insights that I haven't shared anywhere else, so I hope that you enjoy it. Here's my latest conversation with John Pompliano.

• 1:00Speaker 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.

• 1:24Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Core. You can earn yield on your Bitcoin by just holding your Bitcoin. It's simple. Core, the leading Bitcoin scaling solution, will reward you for not selling your Bitcoin. It's not magic. Here's how it works. Core is a protocol secured by elected validators. You can help elect validators and secure the network by simply locking up your Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain. No bridging, no lending, and just holding. When your validator secures Core, it earns rewards fueled by network activity and passes them back to you as yield. With a minimum lockup of just one day, when the time lock ends, you get your Bitcoin back untouched. Still your keys, still your coins, now your yield. For even higher rates, stake Core alongside your Bitcoin and multiply your yield.

• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And if you want to see what your Bitcoin is securing, join millions of others in exploring the largest Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem. There are over 100 live apps in the network and the deepest liquidity in all of Bitcoin DeFi. Get off zero and start earning yield on even just 1% of your Bitcoin by going to stake.co dao.org/pomp. Again, that's stake.co dao.org/pomp, or go click the link in the description. Today's episode is brought to you by Polkadot. Polkadot offers secure, scalable, and decentralized blockchain technology that perfectly aligns with the needs of innovative projects. It was developed by Gavin Wood, one of the co-founders of Ethereum and the creator of Solidity. Polkadot aims to build an internet where users have full control over their data and their applications.

• 3:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Polkadot offers tons of unique features, a shared security model, along with the new auction model and significant implementations like ASIC banking. Given these characteristics, it's easy to understand why Polkadot is gaining more and more traction in the cryptocurrency world. Some people even are talking about it as the AWS of Web3. Now, companies such as Mythical Games, Astro Network, and over 50 other independent blockchains with hundreds of applications already leverage Polkadot's technology to power their platforms. If you're looking for a reliable, scalable, and cutting-edge solution, Polkadot seems to be the top choice for industry players. Go check them out today at polkadot.com. All right, John, what's the first topic we got going here?

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Russia's largest bank, Spur Bank, went ahead and launched a Bitcoin bond. What the hell is a Bitcoin bond?

• 4:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's a very good question. The first thing to understand is that Bitcoin is a magnet for capital, right? People want to go put their capital and store it inside of Bitcoin. Obviously, it's very asymmetric. Now, there's different types of Bitcoin bonds, right? Bitcoin bond is just bonds related to Bitcoin. Now, if you go and you take a look, there are things in the public market. Obviously, strategy and other companies, they're issuing all kinds of kind of debt-related instruments. They could be convertible notes. Some people are trying to do structured notes. There's all kinds of stuff. The idea there is, hey, I give you something. You give me capital. I take that capital and I go and I buy Bitcoin. You may convert it to equity later. I may pay you some sort of interest, whatever. But there's a lot of stuff happening in the public market. People trying to raise money to buy Bitcoin. Got it. Now, the second thing that people have been talking about, and it's become a more popular idea

• 5:10Anthony Pompliano?

  over the last three or four months, is this idea of a bit bond. The idea of a bit bond is, let's say that the US government would go and they would issue a bond, and you give $100. When you give $100 to buy that bond, what they do is they take 90% of it, and they say, we're going to go waste it by trying to fund the government. They take 100% of the money right now and go waste it and fund the government. So they don't take 90% this time, so we already got some improvement. The other 10% they would take and they would buy Bitcoin with it. Now, the idea is that they would promise you some sort of interest rate on it. Let's say maybe it's as low as 1% is what the proposal that I've seen from the Bitcoin Policy Institute. When they issue that bond and tell you that they're going to give you 1%, they've bought 10% Bitcoin, 90% goes to fund the government. Obviously, the thought process that Bitcoin will appreciate in value.

• 5:55Anthony Pompliano?

  As that Bitcoin appreciates in value, they may say to you, but you know what we're going to do? We're going to give you 100% of the return of the first 4.5% of the Bitcoin. So now, you got a 1% coupon on the bond. Now you get 4.5% from Bitcoin, so you got 5.5%. Sounds pretty good, right? But then they say, well, Bitcoin's probably going to go up even more over a long period of time. And so then, after the 4.5% of Bitcoin appreciation, we split it 50/50. So if Bitcoin goes up, let's say another 10% past the 4.5%, now you would get 5% of that, and the government would get 5% of that. And so when you do that, you then now have a way for them to pay much higher rates of interest or return on their bonds, but they're contractually only obligated to pay you 1%.

• 6:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's all dependent on the Bitcoin price appreciation. Obviously, if the government's able to do this, they still get 90% of the $100 to go and fund the government. That 10% makes it more attractive. It's a way to incentivize people to come in and buy the bonds of the United States, use Bitcoin to potentially deliver a better return. And also, the government may recoup some of the 90% that they wasted to fund the government, because they get 50% of the Bitcoin return above the 4.5% initial return. So a bit bond's very interesting, because if the government could do this, there are some rumors, analysis, proposals out there, that actually this could help address the national debt. Whether it could or not, I don't know. So we got the structured stuff and the public market stuff.

• 7:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Then we got the bit bonds. And then we have what we saw yesterday, which is this bank in Russia, they decided they were going to issue a bond that is related to Bitcoin. Now, what it does is, and we're still waiting for a lot of the details, but so far, what we know is there's basically two different ways that this bond can become more valuable in the future. The first is appreciation of Bitcoin US dollars. The second is that there is a strengthening of the US dollar against the ruble. And so what you are seeing is essentially the bond market, which is a very large, liquid, deep market of capital, is saying to themselves Bitcoin and bonds are going to marry each other. And people are going to find all kinds of interesting ways to do it. Maybe bit bonds is the thing that's gotten the most attention. And then obviously,

• 8:07Anthony Pompliano?

  the public company stuff because of these Bitcoin treasury companies. But I think that we are going to see people do all kinds of things moving forward. And you already see some of this, like BlackRock has a fixed income fund that they went and they changed the documents so that they can put, I think it's up to 10 or 15% of that fund into Bitcoin. I don't know if they've actually done that yet or not, but you can see people are saying, wait a second, if I take Bitcoin and I add it to a bond, or if I add it to a portfolio, the portfolio case, the sharp ratio goes up. If I add it to a bond, maybe the bond will perform better, which means that I can actually raise more capital. That's the future of where a lot of this stuff is going. And I think that is why people are so interested in kind of understanding the intersection of Bitcoin in the bond market.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Who's going to buy those bonds? Is it more countries? Is it institutions? Is it, you know, high net worth individuals? Like, who is actually going to benefit from owning these bonds? And like, where's the market, basically?

• 8:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it's all of the above, right? Different people want different things. So some people may be really attracted to buy a public company issued, uh, you know, kind of debt that is related to Bitcoin. They may want to buy the convertible notes. They may say, hey, look, I want to lend money and have some downside protection, but then I want to be able to convert into equity at some sort of premium or something. Right? You can see institutions doing that. You could see nation states. You could see sovereign wealth.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  That's similar to the Bitcoin treasury stuff?

• 9:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so like, uh, take a strategy as an example. Like, a convertible bond is essentially a way for people to say, hey, I'm going to give you this I O U, right? You're going to give me, uh, money. And a lot of these convertible bonds have been done at 0% interest. So I don't owe you any interest. But when you give this to me, I am going to give you some downside protection. You get paid first, right? You're at the top of the capital stack. There's all these kind of downside protections. And in exchange for those downside protections, you're not going to be able to convert that bond into, um, the equity at the current price. You may have to do it at 30, 40, 50% higher, right? And so there's this trade off of like, how much risk do I want to mitigate? Versus how much return do I want to try to capture? And so this is how the bond market works in general.

• 10:05Anthony Pompliano?

  But I think that you're going to see the bond market, which currently services all those groups that you mentioned. They're now just going to start to infuse Bitcoin. And it's less likely that like, oh, individuals will be attracted and institutions won't. What's more likely to happen is 10% of every group, 10% of institutions, 10% of sovereign wealth funds, 10% of individuals, they'll be attracted to this first. And then over time, that number will become bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think that's really how you bring a lot of capital into the Bitcoin ecosystem.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  All right. The Bitcoin conference was last week. David Bailey and his team seemed to do a fantastic job. Pakistan announced that they're going to do a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Are other countries coming?

• 10:41Anthony Pompliano?

  They're all gonna do it, of course, right? It's like saying, uh, is every country gonna have a gold reserve? Of course, uh, they need a way to store value. Now, in the United States, and we've talked about this, we have a strategic petroleum reserve. We have a strategic gold reserve. We have a strategic cheese reserve, right? We got all kinds of crazy stuff. Um, and so if you think about Bitcoin, Bitcoin is just another asset the government is going to hoard in case A, B, C, D, different things. Now, why is the United States doing it versus maybe another country? Uh, that's up for debate, right? There are plenty of countries that are gonna start buying Bitcoin and creating a strategic reserve because they're worried about US sanctions in the future. There's other countries who say, you know what? I'm a friend of the United States, but just in case, I'm gonna buy a little bit of Bitcoin. There's other countries that'll say, you know what? I'm gonna put in my sovereign wealth fund, right?

• 11:24Anthony Pompliano?

  We've seen that start to happen with the exposure to the ETFs. And I think that's gonna appreciate in price. So whether you're buying it as a store of value, whether you're buying it for the censorship resistance, whether you're buying it for price appreciation, or a multitude of other reasons, it kinda doesn't matter. It's just the fact that you have an asset that millions and millions of people around the world have all decided for different reasons, I want that asset in my personal balance sheet. Well, if it's good enough for individuals, then it's good enough for companies. If it's good enough for individuals and companies, it's gonna be good enough for countries. And I think that is the progression that we're seeing here. And as I've talked about for years, the beauty of this is that it started with the individuals. Historically, technology goes from the militaries and the countries to the companies and then the people. We were the last ones, individuals, the last ones to get cell phones.

• 12:10Anthony Pompliano?

  We're the last ones to get laptop computers, right? We're the last ones to use technology because you gotta get the cost down enough where an individual can buy it. Bitcoin has completely flipped that. It was actually individuals who adopted it first and were going back up the stack. And so it was individuals, then it was companies and financial institutions. And now we're getting to sovereign wealth, uh, funds and nation states, which is pretty cool.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  That is cool. Um, let's talk about Cynthia Lummis a little bit. Uh, she said that Trump, recently she, for the idea that Trump is supporting the 1 million Bitcoin purchase for the United States. How do we get there?

• 12:42Anthony Pompliano?

  We buy it.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  But how do we convince, you know, how do we get over the edge so they actually buy a million Bitcoin?

• 12:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't actually think that we need the congressional approvals and stuff. I know that that's the path that we're going to go, but I actually do think that we could just do it

• 12:57Anthony Pompliano?

  through the executive orders and stuff like that. But if we're going to go this path, great. I believe that there are a multitude of ways to get there. One, which I said at one point, I said, look, we should have just issued $250 billion worth of debt and just go buy Bitcoin, right? And we're like, ah, printing money, whatever. Like, we're going to print the money anyways, guys, right? So like, at least let's go use, good use for it. I don't like the idea of printing money, but when I said it, we can go back and check, the price was a lot lower, right? So we would have already maybe wiped off some portion of the national debt. So that's one, is we can just print the money. The second is that we could stop spending money on dumb things and start spending it on smart things, right? And I'm not somebody who thinks that the government should go put 100% of their assets in Bitcoin, right? Just like, I don't think an individual should do that either. But I do think that's probably a higher percentage than most people think.

• 13:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think that most Bitcoiners, if you go and you ask them, if you own Bitcoin, very few of them have only 1% of their assets in it, right? Again, each person's different. I know people who have 3% to 5%. I know people who have 10%. I know people who have 99%, right? But the idea that you're only going to put 1% with an idea like Bitcoin is probably not realistic. And so the US government likely is going to buy more. So you could stop spending money on things, change the budget up and just redirect some of those funds to something else. And then the third thing is we can earn or acquire Bitcoin through other means. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, should we have the United States using some of our energy resources to mine Bitcoin? Should we be asking other countries to pay us in Bitcoin?

• 14:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Should we figure out ways to acquire Bitcoin that doesn't require us to take dollars and issue them? Maybe BitBonds, right? Part of the BitBond idea is 50% of that performance over the first 4.5% goes to the US government. Well, in the proposal from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, that 50% that goes to the government would go into the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. So you could actually issue debt and somehow end up with more Bitcoin, right? And so there's all these different ways to do it. But I think that a million coins... Sounds like a great idea, right? Let's see, let's see if the US government can get there. What I hope does not happen, it's my big warning. I don't want to see companies nationalized. I don't want to see ETFs nationalized.

• 15:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't want to see the use of violence or the state coming in and coercing or taking people's assets. So I think that we have to do it, you know, in the proper way. But the United States should definitely rush and try to get to a million.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  So I think one thing that's been on a lot of people's mind recently as we've seen all these companies buying Bitcoin, right? GameStop was probably one of the most recent companies to announce, you know, a multi-billion dollar purchase of Bitcoin. Why isn't the price going up? I think that's a big concern. Yeah, I think that's a big concern for retail is look like everyone buying, buying, buying, buying, buying. But my stack's still the same size.

• 15:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, this is a little bit of alpha for folks. You are seeing people buy. What they are essentially doing is they are going and they are putting money into these companies. But a lot of the people who are putting money into these companies, they are more so arbing the difference between the price of Bitcoin and the premium that the public companies are trading at. So for example, if I have a company that I want to invest in and that company says to me, if you give me a hundred thousand, a hundred and $5,000, I'm going to go buy one Bitcoin. Great, well, they issue me that at their current share price, right? So I give them $105,000. I now have one share of, let's say, their company and there's one Bitcoin backing it.

• 16:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I then, because I am long their stock, go and I short Bitcoin for 105,000. And they say, well, if you're long 105,000 and you're short 105,000, what's the difference? Well, the third piece of that equation is that these companies are not trading at NAV. They're trading at a premium. So if the company now is trading at 150%, right? Kind of a 0.5% or a 0.5x premium. I now have neutral exposure to the market. I'm not long or short Bitcoin because I'm long the stock, I'm short Bitcoin. But what I'm essentially doing is in a very generalized manner, I'm locking in that premium. So I basically got, you know, again, generalized, 50% return.

• 17:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Because without taking risks to the market of Bitcoin going up or down. So when you see the dollars coming into the market, what you're seeing is, oh, look at billions of dollars is coming in to buy Bitcoin. What you're not seeing in the announcements is a lot, not all, but a lot of that capital is going and hedging elsewhere. And so they're essentially just balancing themselves out. So for every dollar long, there's a dollar short. Now, again, that's not 100% of people, right? We have seen Bitcoin's price appreciate over the last, you know, whatever, a couple of months. But I do think, I think it was at 70,000 on November 1st, it was $69,000. And so, you know, in less than a year, we're already up from 70 to 105. Like, hey, let's not be greedy here, we're up 50%, right?

• 17:51Anthony Pompliano?

  But I do think that as people are seeing so much buying coming into the market, a huge part of this is that there are long dollars that are being hedged on the short side. And so the question becomes, you know, do those, some of those shorts get blown out at some point? Is there a rush, a short squeeze? Do those people take that stuff off? They sell the shares and then they take off the short at the same time? A lot of unknowns in the market and it's hard to really understand what are the exact numbers, right? You know, how much capital is long, how much capital is short? What are their hedges are they using, what derivatives or spot? Like, it's just very, very difficult. People smarter than me can try to figure it out. But that is one of the main reasons why you're not seeing Bitcoin's price just explode is because there's actually kind of a neutralizing effect of the capital that's going into these companies.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Staying on the topic of market participants, Bitcoin hash rate reaching all time high. What's going on with the market? Are more, are there more miners online? And, you know, it's just pushing the hash rate up? Or what is the correlation between price, hash rate and market participants?

• 18:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that there's just a long-term trend about the Bitcoin hardware for mining gets more and more efficient over time. You know, if you go back and you look at even like the S9, which, you know, I don't know, about a decade ago or so, was the equipment to today. Like, the equipment is way, way better. Also, not only is it just like pure hardware improvements, but what we do with the hardware. So things like immersive cooling, right, is a completely different way. To think about setting up these facilities than air-cooled facilities and where you can do them and how you do them and all this kind of stuff. So I think that's kind of one big thing is you would expect that as these companies get bigger, they get more access to capital, they're buying more efficient machines. There's kind of a persistent tailwind that happens there. The second thing is that people want Bitcoin. And so just like people are buying Bitcoin in the

• 19:35Anthony Pompliano?

  spot market, that means people are incentivized to mine Bitcoin as well. Mining is a hard game, though, right? And so you're not only seeing very large players do it, you're trying, you're seeing people very small try as well. But it's a very difficult capital intensive game to get it right and especially be able to weather kind of these cycles, but people want to do it. And I think the third thing is that you're just generally across the world seeing more computing power come online. As you see more computing power come online, people are choosing, should I do it with artificial intelligence and some of the computational needs there? Should I do things with Bitcoin or something in between? But I think you're just seeing in general us move from kind of an industrial manufacturing, physical world, you know, type economy to something that is much more about electrical, robotics, computation power, you know, all that stuff.

• 20:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And so naturally, if that is a big generational shift that we're living through, you're going to see more and more computing power come online for all kinds of use cases. And obviously Bitcoin will be a big winner there, too.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Okay. JD Vance recently got interviewed and seemed to be pretty bullish on Bitcoin and looking forward to the future. How much of this is sediment versus, you know, hey, we're actually going to do something and we're kind of sitting, we're waiting, we're learning. And then, you know, in two, three months, maybe they announce something, or maybe they they get into the market a little bit deeper.

• 20:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know. But what I do know is I don't want to be short the US government, right? In things like this, there's plenty of things that you could short the US government on in terms of, you know, the treasury, or, you know, all kinds of stuff that they're involved in. But when you have something where there is an asymmetric information aspect to it, where at any moment in time, the government can go and buy Bitcoin, announce it, and it probably will have a positive impact on price, and the people who are responsible for the administration and those potential decisions, they're talking bullish? You don't want to get caught off sides, right? And so I think that it goes back to, we could sit and then analyze, you know, what are the words J D Vance used to see, you know, tipping something off?

• 21:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Do people think, you know, this date or that date or this amount or whatever? But I always go come back and kind of zoom out for a second. I say, look, Bitcoin is an asset that has sound money principles, that's decentralized, that continues to appreciate at a very attractive rate compared to other assets in the market. In a way, Bitcoin has become the hurdle rate for an entire new generation, myself included. If you can't beat it, you gotta buy it. Okay. Then it almost doesn't matter what the administration does. It doesn't matter what people are saying. It doesn't matter about bit bonds and this and whatever, right? Instead, the best strategy for people over the last 15 years was to simply just continue to dollar cost average into Bitcoin. And don't worry about it. It's kind of the S and P. Like, is the S and P going to go up, down, sideways, backwards, whatever? Like, I don't know.

• 22:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I just know that the S and P goes up into the right at a 45 degree angle because they have not stopped and printed money. Okay, well, you should just keep dollar cost averaging into the S and P, right? Bitcoin very much is becoming that thing for an entire new generation. And so it's intellectually stimulating to talk about and learn about and, you know, try to predict what's going to happen in the future. But at the end of the day, really what we're seeing here is just people are going to keep putting capital into the Bitcoin network and that likely is going to continue to give them a return that they are excited about so that they keep putting more and more capital into, which then has a reinforcing effect to it, which drives the price higher and higher over time.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  I'm glad you mentioned the S and P. Let's talk about stocks for a second. There's a comment saying doomers make headlines, optimists make money. In May, it was the best month for stocks in 30, best May for stocks in 35 years. Why?

• 23:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's a classic example of, uh, surprise, everyone was off sides, right? If you go back to, uh, February, I think that there was a lot of folks when they first started talking about the tariffs, were like, ah, it's negotiating posture. They're not really going to put tariffs on our two, you know, two of our three largest trading partners. They're not really going to tariff Mexico and Canada. And then bam, bam. It was like, I think in like a one week or maybe in the same day or whatever, right? And they just knocked. Both of them. And all of a sudden, people were like, uh oh, like, didn't expect that. And so that was the first surprise was people thought it was a posturing thing and it turned out to be a reality thing.

• 23:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? I don't even remember if I had an opinion as to whether they're really going to do it or not do it. I think it was just kind of like, hey, they're talking about this. Maybe they do it. Maybe they don't. I don't really remember. At that moment. Fast forward through February, March, we got some announcements. This is whatever gets a liberation day. Everyone remembers they brought out the the poster boards like they were doing a seventh grade science fair, right? You know, Howard Lutnick there. He had his little thing, bam bam, this is what we're doing. And people were like, yo, these guys ain't playing around, right? And you had a choice. It was a it was a fork in the road. You either believed what they were saying, or you didn't believe what they were saying. And I chose to simply listen.

• 24:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I said, there are people who are making these decisions with more information than I have, and they also have the benefit of understanding what their ultimate strategy is and their goal, etc. If they tell me that they're trying to get the 10 year yield down, I'm going to believe them. If they tell me that they are going to put the tariffs in place, I'm going to believe them. If they tell me that inflation is not going to come, then I'm going to believe them. Right? And there's a lot of people, and I took a lot of heat. I mean, how many times have you and I talked privately where I would tweet things or talk about this stuff? I got attacked mercilessly. Still, I'm still getting people who just will not stop. And what they essentially said, if I had to characterize all of the attacks, was the following.

• 25:09Anthony Pompliano?

  You're dumb. You're some MAGA mouthpiece, and you don't know what you're talking about. We all have reached consensus that tariffs equal bad tariff equal inflation. That's basically their their entire talk. And as I've talked about on this podcast many, many times, I knew they were all wrong. When dissent was outlawed, the second that they all said, you can't have a different opinion, I said, the different opinion is right. And so I said, okay, well, let me go and let me do the work. These guys are saying that there's not going to be inflation. These guys are saying all this stuff. I get that it's political posturing and talking and all this nonsense. But what if they're right? Right? And one of the experiences that I've had in my life that actually drove me, and I

• 25:49Anthony Pompliano?

  haven't shared this yet, is I went down to Texas a couple of years ago, and I had the pleasure of going to lunch with Kyle Bass. Kyle Bass, the famous investor, he's short the housing market, everything. And afterwards, Kyle was kind enough, we went back to his house, and we sat there and we recorded a podcast episode. It's one of my favorite episodes, because Kyle said something to me in there that was one of those like, small offhand comments that I extrapolated on, and I use all the time in my life. And what Kyle said to me was, the reason he knew to short the housing market is because he was looking into housing. And he kept asking people that were analysts, okay, you have this model,

• 26:33Anthony Pompliano?

  that housing price is this, and mortgages, whatever, all of your models go up. They all say that housing keeps going up. What if housing doesn't go up for a year or two years? And they were like, well, no, housing always goes up. Like, that never happens. And he was like, but what if it does? Right? And so that gave him the intellectual curiosity to go and investigate more and say, well, what are the odds that it goes down? What happens in that? And he uncovered what was probably one of the greatest trades of our lifetime. To me, the tariff situation, understanding that Kyle Bass story, drove me to say, well, what if the tariffs actually don't lead to inflation? What are the odds of that? Right?

• 27:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's what I went and I looked. So if you bring that to stocks, there's a bunch of people who listened to the mainstream media, the conversation in social media, listened to their economic professor at college, and said tariffs equal bad, bad equals inflation, inflation equals stocks go down. And here's the thing, is that stocks did go down. They went down 15 to 20%, depending on the different index, etc. But let's say 20%. Because, famous Buffett quote, The stock market is a voting machine in the short term. It's a weighing machine in the long term. And so guess what? When it was down 20%, I came on here. I said, all time high before the end of the year. That all looks so crazy now. When we're down 20%, it looks insane. And I knew that and I took the heat for it.

• 27:59Anthony Pompliano?

  But I think I'm going to end up being right and I'm more convicted than ever. We're going to hit an all time high before the end of the year. Now, we may not, but I think we will. And so if you go and you fast forward to, okay, well, let's look at the month of May. And there's this guy, Ryan Dietrich. He is the chief market strategist at the Carson Group. It's like a $40 billion RIA. I recently did a podcast interview with him on our new show from the desk of Anthony Pompliano, which you can watch on YouTube and also on X. And in that conversation, Ryan walked through the fact that the S and P 500 returned 6% in the month of May. Now, why is that important? That has only happened six times in history and all six times within 12 months, 100% of the time, the stock market is higher. Average return 20%. So if you go and you look at this, you say, wait a second, the month of May, he says,

• 28:44Anthony Pompliano?

  is the single best predictor of performance for the next year. Out of all the different months, month of May is really important. And if the month of May, the S and P appreciates more than 5%, 84% of the time, we rock and roll in through short term, 100% of the time over the long run. And so if it went up 6% in May, listen, maybe, maybe history doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme a lot. And so my guess is that we're going to see a very, very good performance in the stock market. And I think that's okay. Like this is like the most hated rally of all time. People are like, ah, it shouldn't be going up. Well, like you could take that perspective, or you could take the perspective that the market's the referee

• 29:27Anthony Pompliano?

  and the market is telling you that maybe your worldview, your framework was incorrect. So you can fight it and be like, ah, the market is wrong. Or you can say to yourself, maybe I missed something. Maybe I don't understand some component of this and go do the work, try to figure that out. And we're going to have both people, right? That's how markets get made. That's why some people are still selling. That's why institutions are sitting on the sidelines. The institutions are too smart. They're looking at all these data points, doing all this calculation, whatever, right? It's like, you ever seen the memes? It's like, you know, this is my quant and they got, you know, some, some whatever. Guess what retail did? Retail simply just said, I'm buying. I don't care how far it falls. It's going to come back. I'm buying. Discount, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. Hand over fist, buy as

• 30:12Anthony Pompliano?

  much as you can. I saw another data point, maybe it came from Ryan, maybe from somebody else. US retail investors have bought $50 billion of stocks since I think April or March. Huge number. But here's what's most interesting. On down days, dips, retail heavily bought. The performance of the next day after a down day has been 0.36%, which doesn't, like 0.36%, what? Historically, the performance of the stock market the day after a down day is 0.02%. So call it 15x plus higher performance the day after a down day. What is that? That's retail buying the dip. And so if you see that play out, you say to yourself,

• 30:58Anthony Pompliano?

  we got two different players in the market now. Institutions are still larger. I think that the numbers like retail investors have about 36 or 38% of stock, you know, allocations.

• 31:10Anthony Pompliano?

  But that used to be a lot lower. At some point, they're going to flip. Retail will be bigger than the institutions, I believe. Oh, you think so? Well, that's the trend, right? I don't know. Maybe it takes 20 years, but like if we're at 36, 38, whatever the number is, like if you just increase by 50%, you're knocking on the door now, right? A 50. Well, do you think it's going to grow more than 50% their share of the market, right? Over the next 10 years, 20 years? Of course. We're shifting from a world that used to be all about institutions and financial advisors and stockbrokers and all that stuff to a world where all that's being compressed, the fees are being compressed, that it's becoming harder for the people to run those businesses. The idea of quote,

• 31:52Anthony Pompliano?

  quote, advice, you think AI is not going to start to play a role, give people the ability to allocate directly to the market? Like the trend is we are going to have a rise of self-directed investors. Okay, well, individuals, self-directed, independent, retail, whatever you want to call them, they're going to have a larger and larger share of the stock market moving forward.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Hot take, I actually think most people should be self-directed and not use an advisor.

• 32:14Anthony Pompliano?

  It depends what you're trying to accomplish, right? I know some advisors that are amazing. I know a lot of advisors who are idiots, right? And everything in between. But guess what? I know some doctors that are really good. I know a lot of doctors that are idiots, right? I know some investors that are really good. I know a lot of investors that are idiots. And so it just goes back to, like anything, the top 1% or the top 10% of a profession are really, really good. And then the below average people are below average, right? So I think it's just, if you need certain types of advice, if you need certain types of services, if you need certain types of products, go find the best at it. And I think that financial advice is an area where you probably don't want to skimp out on, oh, this person's not as good as the other person, but you know, they're going to charge me

• 32:58Anthony Pompliano?

  a little less in fees. Like, it's kind of, to me, right, in my opinion, that's a place where you probably want to pay, you know, you want to get what you pay for. And so finding the right type of financial advice. I'm not in the financial advising game, right? I don't do that. But if it was me, that is the thing that I would look at. It's just like, hey, who's the person who can give me the best advice? Not who's the person who's going to charge me the least.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  So you talked about S and P hitting an all-time high this year. You and Tom Lee seem to be kind of on board with that. He was on CNBC yesterday talking about a $6,600 S and P. What are the important metrics to watch as we go throughout the year, right? Is it, hey, look, let's look at the futures market? Is it, hey, look, let's just look at broader sentiment or sentiment in the market? What are you looking at to hit that new all-time high?

• 33:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that you've got a couple of data points. The first is, are they going to print money? And it looks like they are, right? Looks like they're going to blow out the frigging deficit. So I don't like it. It's good for asset prices. Dichotomy. Not good for my country, great for my portfolio. I think there's a lot of people who they're sitting there saying, I'd actually give up a little bit on my financial returns if it was better for my country. I definitely would do that. I'm not the decision maker. So not good for my country. It's going to be great for my portfolio. I think that's one big thing. The second thing is that you need to watch GDP growth. Q2?

• 34:23Anthony Pompliano?

  We're gonna be booming, booming. Is that based off tariff revenue? Booming, no. It's the fact that everyone was contracting. Oh, no tariffs, economic downturn, doomsday, recession. Remember recession, depression, black friday, all crazy things people were predicting. The second that they were like, eh, tariffs are lower, let's get rocking and rolling. Boom, here we go, we're booming again. And I think that there's gonna be a big time GDP jump. By the way,

• 34:57Anthony Pompliano?

  no recession. If we boom in Q2, there ain't no recession, like I told you. Uh, and I think that that's not priced in yet, so that can drive asset prices higher. Um, I also think job growth has stayed very steady for the most part. People still getting jobs. Jordy Visser, who we talk with every Saturday, amazing episode, many of you like it. Uh, he has said all along, you can't have a recession if you don't have job loss. Right? And then I think that there is going to be a bunch of deregulation and tax breaks and stuff. Again, just pushing capital, pushing innovation into the economy. And so I think we are gonna have the golden age, we're gonna have the economic boom, all the things that were promised. I think that we took a very winding, you know, route with no straight line.

• 35:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, there are things that the administration was talking about that I really like and excited about them doing. There's things that they're doing that I think, you know, hey, I probably wouldn't do that if I was them, right? Um, but I think there is some sobering going on of, uh, people across both sides of the aisle. The people who are big time critics are like, all right, maybe this isn't gonna be as bad as I thought it was gonna be. The people who were supporters, they're saying, hey, you know what? Not everything is, you know, uh, flowers and roses and, and sunshine. And then there's people like me who are in the middle who say, look, I'm an independent. There's some things I like, some things I don't like, there's some things that Democrats do I like, some things they don't do. That's fine, whatever, I'm a rational person, right? Not, no one I know is a hundred percent bad or a hundred percent good. Right?

• 36:23Anthony Pompliano?

  You can go and you can look, and there are people like the dichotomy of life or the paradox of life is the fact that you can have somebody who's a murderer who still does something positive. Murder's bad. You should go to jail, right? You should be in trouble, obviously. It's common sense. But how do you explain that? Right? And so the same thing happens when it comes to politics or whatever is they can do something that is absolutely asinine. You're like, what are you doing? But then you can say something else in their activities or legislation or whatever. And you're like, that's a good idea. That's what we've lost, I think, in this country is the ability to say, let me look at topic by topic. What do I agree with? What do I not agree with? Everything is just blue or red. Right? And I think that's a bad way to look at it.

• 37:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And if you really ask me why I think a lot of people miss this entire economic situation is because they were blue or red. Now, the red people seem to have done better because they believed. Right? But I don't see blue or red. I'm like, uh, what is it? Blue and red mix, they get green? I think, right? I'm a green person. And, uh, it's just like, look, I think that there's both sides, whatever. In this specific case around terrorists, I, I, I believed what they said. Right? And it seems like that's working out. There's other things I don't believe. Right? And that's fine. But I think that is really how you're going to see this play out. So if you look at the economic data points, it's growth, it's jobs, it's printing of money. It's all the normal stuff. It's right there in front of your face.

• 37:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Global liquidity is telling you where asset prices are going. All you have to do is open your eyes and look at the chart. Guess what? Up. Here we go.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  I appreciate you being, uh, on the fence because I know you get called a MAGA mouthpiece. You also get called a Democratic mouthpiece on the same video.

• 38:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, that literally happened. Literally people in the comments will be like, you're a MAGA mouthpiece. And then there'll be somebody else and they'll be like, look at this Democrat left-leaning shill. I'm like, can't win. Well, that is winning. To me, that is winning. That people are so confused that I could somehow be accused of being both. Right? That's, that says more about them than it says about me.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. All right. I think that's it for today.

• 38:33Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Thanks for doing it.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Yep.