#1519 Anthony & John Pompliano | BlackRock’s Insanely Bullish Bitcoin Take

John Pompliano and Anthony Pompliano discuss Larry Fink being a big bitcoin bull, tariffs, stock market, recessions, crypto assets, and is a recession coming?=======================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/=======================Reed Smith is a dynamic international law firm dedicated to helping clients move their businesses forward. With an inclusive culture and innovative mindset, Reed Smith delivers smarter, more creative legal services that drive better outcomes for their clients. Their deep industry knowledge, long-standing relationships and collaborative structure make them the go-to partner for complex disputes, transactions, and regulatory matters. Learn more at www.reedsmith.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? We got a great conversation with John Pompliano. John is back and you guys are gonna love this one. In this conversation, we talk about Larry Fink being a big, big Bitcoin bull. We talk about what's going on with recessions, what you should actually think about tariffs, stock market, crypto assets, and much more. This conversation is always fun to talk to

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  my brother because him and I, we've been talking for a long time and these topics are things we talk about in private. So now you get to hear the whole conversation. I hope you guys enjoy my latest conversation with John Pompliano.

• 0:56Speaker 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.

• 1:20Speaker 02

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• 2:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Reed Smith. Their practice of law has the power to drive progress, to move businesses forward and support them in achieving their goals. By seizing opportunities and overcoming obstacles, Reed Smith is focused on outcomes. I personally use them as my law firm and I think that they are fantastic. They know that your time is valuable and that your matters are important. Their deep industry knowledge, longstanding relationships and collaborative structure make them the go-to partner for complex disputes, transactions and regulatory matters. Reed Smith delivers purposeful, highly engaged client service that drives progress for your business. Go to reedsmith.com to learn more about the best lawyers in the game. ReedSmith.com, go check them out today.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  All right, John, what's first topic? First topic, Bitcoin supremacy. Larry Fink bullish on Bitcoin, his recent comments about Bitcoin and his annual letter have come out. What are your thoughts about like Larry Fink and him being so bullish on Bitcoin?

• 3:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, Larry Fink's the CMO of Bitcoin. I think a really important part of this whole thing is sometimes the messenger is more important than the message. And what I mean by that is if you really look at the comments that BlackRock, Fidelity, many other people who are talking about Bitcoin on Wall Street, they're just repeating Bitcoin talking points. They're saying, hey, the debt's really bad. Hey, the dollar's being devalued. Hey, this thing is decentralized. Hey, this thing has sound money principles. Hey, this thing's outside the system. Hey, this thing is really valuable to people in international markets. Hey, Americans should really go and embrace this thing because there's only 21 million of them, right? All these things that they're saying, Bitcoiners have been saying for years. And so on one hand, you have Bitcoiners who have infiltrated into these organizations and they're saying the same stuff that they were saying before they were in the organization. But two is they're true.

• 3:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you just need intelligent people to spend the time to actually do the work to look at this stuff and then they come to the same conclusion. And that's why Bitcoin has been so successful and it continues to win in the free market. And so hearing Larry Fink or any other Wall Street executive talk about Bitcoin in this way is more so just the truth actually being kind of infiltrated into their organizations. And that messenger is really, really important because in the recent annual letter, Fink talked about the fact that the debt's exploding, you know, the dollar's being debased and he specifically says that if we do not correct the situation, the dollar... Risks losing world reserve status and it could be replaced by digital assets like Bitcoin. So it's not just, hey, we got problems, but now there's a potential solution.

• 4:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if people are going to show up to Larry Fink's door and say, you know, knock, knock, BlackRock, $10 trillion in assets, largest asset manager in the world. I hear you on the problems. What's the solution? It sounds like they may say Bitcoin, which would be kind of crazy to go from Satoshi Nakamoto, nobody knows, on an email list, puts this gift into the world, bam, fast forward 15, 16 years, and we got Larry Fink being like, oh yeah, this thing may solve all your problems. It's not exactly, I think, the speed run through this that everyone thought it was going to be.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  How do you think about different executives in the industry thinking about Bitcoin in different ways? So obviously Jamie Dimon is very anti Bitcoin. Larry Fink, on the other side, both large asset managers is very bullish on Bitcoin, or at least seems to speak positively of it. How do you think about like, why are there differences? And like, why can't these people just agree on, hey, is this solution or is it not? And there's a lot of intricacies here, but like, how do you think about the differences?

• 5:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think that there's two different things that are happening. One is they have different businesses, right? BlackRock's really more of an asset manager. JP Morgan is much more of like a bank or a financial institution. On top of that, you have, I think Larry Fink saying, hey, this is a safety mechanism, right? He's gone on television and he said, people are buying Bitcoin as a flight to quality. I think Jamie Dimon looks at it much more as a speculative tool. And that's no different than if you go outside of Wall Street and go into the market. Like, why is there a market here? It's because this thing is quote unquote controversial, right? There's a lot of debate around, is it going to go up? Is it going to go down? You need bears just as much as you need bulls to have that market and that liquidity. And so I think what you're really seeing is their public commentary, one is bullish, one is not. Okay, there's nothing wrong with that.

• 6:16Anthony Pompliano?

  What I will say though, is these executives, they are paid to make money even when they're wrong. And so if you think about a risk reward standpoint, JP Morgan is working on crypto related things, right? They may not be going and saying, hey, we're going to put Bitcoin on our balance. She is a publicly traded company, but they are not going to let this actually be a thing and not benefit from it. And so the risk of, let's say, putting a dedicated team of 10 or 20 people to work on this and being wrong, is whatever the cost of that 10 or 20 people, right? You kept it a small little thing in the corner. No one really cared. You were publicly bearish. You're good.

• 6:54Anthony Pompliano?

  If you put that 10 or 20 people together and they start working on it and it becomes a thing, then what do you say a couple of years from now? I'd be like, ah, yeah, at one point I was bearish, but you know, I changed my mind. We've had a team working on this for a number of years. You know, we're right there. We're a leader and we're good to go. And so what really ends up happening is the strategy of a lot of these companies is they hedge. They're never going to take a full-on 100% you know, strong position without that hedge. And frankly, I think it's good business. I think that it is, you know, good risk management, if you will. And that's why these people run these large organizations is because they're very, very effective at what they do.

• 7:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it reminds me of the Warren Buffett quote where when he was asked about his biggest mistake in investing, he doesn't talk about the ones that didn't do well. He talks about the missed opportunities, right? And I think that's a lot of what we're seeing here is like basically setting yourself up to look like, I don't want to miss opportunity. I want to be ready. But that doesn't necessarily mean I want to jump the gun and go ahead full speed. Let's talk about another one that's probably near and dear to you. Hut 8 did a subsidiary or announced a subsidiary yesterday with Don Jr. and Eric Trump. What are your thoughts on that?

• 7:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so the big thing to understand is business cycles are all about bundling and unbundling, right? So people take a bunch of things, they bundle them together, we go for a few years, and then somebody comes along and says, well, I bet you I can create some value by unbundling those things. And you see this with, you know, cable television, you see this with music, you see this with a bunch of this stuff. And so what really has happened over the last five years or so in what I'm just going to call kind of energy, energy infrastructure for modern use cases, is that there's been bundling. So people had Bitcoin mining, then they added into AI data centers, and you're starting to see more and more say, hey, look, we are just going to provide all of this under one roof. The problem with doing that is there's plenty

• 8:37Anthony Pompliano?

  of benefits, but the trade-off being that the market values Bitcoin mining and AI data centers at very different multiples. So I think the revenue multiple on average for Bitcoin miners is like 6 to 7x. I think the revenue multiple on an AI data center is something like 19 to 22x. So obviously, you get way more equity value on a revenue multiple basis for the AI stuff than you do the Bitcoin miners. And so if you have both of those sitting inside of a company, then you're like, likely to be undervalued, right? And so what you are seeing here is they basically are saying, look, we don't want to sell our assets. We don't want to like, give them away. What we want to do is we want to retain ownership of it, but we're going to separate it. And we're going to create two pure play kind of exposures.

• 9:19Anthony Pompliano?

  If you're an investor and you want AI data centers and energy infrastructure, now you go and you buy the Hut Eight stock. If you're an investor and you want Bitcoin mining infrastructure, then you go and you buy this American Bitcoin stock. And so when you do that, now you really, really make it clear in investors' minds where they want to allocate their capital. You give them choice. The second thing you do is you actually change the cost of capital, right? When you have things that trade at lower multiples and have kind of the risk profile of, let's say Bitcoin mining, with the cyclicality, et cetera, you may actually have more expensive capital that you have access to. And so if you're able to separate these, now your AI data centers should actually be able to get access to cheaper capital, which obviously is conducive to that business.

• 10:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And so the way I look at this, you know, look, I'm an advisor to the business. I'm a shareholder of the business. I really think that there is a big market opportunity for many winners around this energy infrastructure and being able to sell that energy and computational power or space to these modern use cases like Bitcoin mining and AI data centers, et cetera. But one of the things that I was really gravitated towards when it came to Hut Eight originally was, I want to be in business with dealmakers. And Asher Ganoot, who's the CEO of that company, you know, I said very early on, when I publicly was like, hey, I'm going to, you know, join these guys as an advisor, is I think that he is a very smart dealmaker and he structured some of the customer contracts in a unique way, where he's given himself a lot of optionality and things like that.

• 10:46Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a lot of hedges and stuff like that that he thinks through. But this is just another data point of like, dealmakers make deals, right? And so that's what you're seeing happen here is he's been able to figure out a way to do it. And then add in the fact that, you know, if you flip around and look at the other 20%, so Hut Eight owns 80% of American Bitcoin. The other 20% is owned by a business that used to be called American Data Centers. That counted Eric Trump and Don Trump Jr. as shareholders there.

• 11:13Anthony Pompliano?

  They now own 20% of this entity. Eric Trump is joining as the chief strategy officer and they're going to go build a Bitcoin miner. Right. And so if you look at the kind of Trump family, but also I think anyone who is wealthy from real estate or stocks or anything, if you want Bitcoin, naturally you start looking at Bitcoin mining as well because a good Bitcoin miner should be able to produce Bitcoin at a cost that is cheaper than what the market price is. And so anytime that you could produce something for, you know, 10, 20, 30% less than what it's actually trading for, that should be a good business. And I think that's really where these guys get attracted to this. And so, you know, Trump, the president, he's going and really embracing Bitcoin. It's obvious that his sons are embracing Bitcoin and crypto more at large. And I think this is just another step to it.

• 11:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, um, you know, I don't know what happens, right? I am, um, you know, watching like everybody else is, but I think it's a really unique way to kind of create that, um, you know, pure exposure and then also to, um, uh, cheapen the cost of capital for the AI data centers. So let's see what happens. And my prediction is if this works and you see a kind of positive impact from this decision, you're going to see a lot of the other companies that have Bitcoin mining and AI data centers say, well, maybe we should unbundle as well. And so last five years have been bundling or the next five years can be all about unbundling remains to be seen.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  How much do you expect the Trump family to be involved in this? Right. Obviously I think their name carries a lot of weight, uh, both as their father is the president, uh, but also their family just has a brand and a reputation with them, either good or bad. How much do you expect them to be involved in like the day to day operations versus, hey, look, I'm the chief strategy officer. It's more of a, you know, kind of title and I step away.

• 12:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I, I think each business that they're involved with is probably different. One of the big, you know, secrets, I think of people who are involved in a lot of businesses, I'm involved in a lot of businesses is you actually don't get super involved in the day to day operations of the businesses that are going well. They don't need you, right? They're, they're operating, there's a dedicated team. It's not like these guys are the CEO of this. And so what you end up actually doing is you end up getting involved in one of two cases. There's fires to put out, there's a problem, all hands on deck, we got to solve this problem. Or there's a potential inflection point in the business cycle that if you are involved, if you are helpful, if you make a connection, if you do this, that, whatever, then that will help accelerate the business.

• 13:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what I find is people underestimate how one person can be involved in many businesses, because they don't understand that you're not involved in the day-to-day operations every single day. Instead, you're looking for those fires to put out or for those potential inflection points. And I think that what you're seeing here with this structure is you've got a team that is already proven that they can build these Bitcoin mining facilities and operate them, et cetera. And then you're matching it up with, again, strategy, right? Chief Strategy Officer from an Eric Trump. And so I think that it's pretty clear, like, he's not gonna be running the day-to-day meetings. And that's probably a good thing. Like, you don't want him doing that stuff. He probably doesn't want to do that. And so like, I think that's where you kind of see these businesses gravitate to say like, who, what is everyone's strength? Let's all lean into our strengths.

• 14:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And by creating the right team structure, then there's an opportunity for us really to, uh, to build something special.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  Let's say, talking about Trump, let's talk about the father now, President of the United States, Donald Trump. Liberation Day is tomorrow. What do you expect to hear? And what is the sentiment around from what you understand in both the investing world and also operating businesses? Are people nervous? Are tariffs coming? Is it gonna ruin the economy? Like, what are we expecting to see tomorrow?

• 14:44Anthony Pompliano?

  People lost their minds. These people, these people are insane. If you're selling stocks because of tariffs, you literally should take all the money that you are managing for other people. You should give it back to them, right? Think about what a tariff does. A tariff increases the prices of people importing goods elsewhere. So if you're taking products from elsewhere and you're bringing it to the United States, those products are more expensive. So what does it do? It shifts demand towards American-made products. So American companies should do better, not worse, because of the tariffs. But that's not how people think about it. What people think about is like, oh, there's uncertainty. He keeps going tariffs on tariffs off tariffs on tariffs off, right?

• 15:23Anthony Pompliano?

  On top of that, they say, oh, the consumer, the consumer is going to bear the brunt of the tariffs. Wrong. They say tariffs are inflationary. Wrong. And then they also say that tariffs end up actually causing this isolational isolationism, right? And nobody wants to trade with people who have really high tariffs. Wrong. So think about this. Every other country in the world, pretty much, that is a material trading part of the United States, they have higher tariffs on us than we have on them. They seem to be doing all right. No one's like, we're not going to trade with Mexico anymore because they got tariffs on us, right? No one's like, we're not going to trade with Canada anymore because they got tariffs on us. What do we do? We still trade. And so the same thing is going to happen here. The United States can put tariffs in place.

• 16:07Anthony Pompliano?

  No one's going to stop trading with us. We're the most important capital market. We're the most important economy. Everyone wants to sell their products to Americans. We are the definition of consumerism. We consume goods and services. If you got something to sell, you want it in front of Americans because we got money. We're dumb enough to buy it. And we also don't put a really high emphasis on quality products. So you probably can sell the same product three or four times. And so everyone wants to sell to Americans, right? Now, if you go and take a look at inflation, well, if tariffs are so inflationary, then why are all these other countries not have high inflation? It's because they're not actually inflationary.

• 16:51Anthony Pompliano?

  On top of that, if you go and you look in 2018, we put tariffs on products. And we saw not only that the price of those products went down over the next 18 months, but also inflation did not go up across the country. And so everyone's worried about all this stuff, but it is all rooted in this like mental disease of what has been taught in these economics classes inside these universities, which is wrong. The same people who are regurgitating that tariffs are bad, tariffs are inflationary, tariffs are going to ruin the economy, tariffs, all this stuff. Literally, in the same breath, will tell you that the efficient market hypothesis is true and intrinsic value exists. Like, it's dumb. You're wrong. And so if you're so smart, why aren't you richer? That's my point to all these people, right?

• 17:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you look at it, it ultimately goes back to, guess who is really, really rich? Right? Multi-billionaire rich.

• 17:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Scott Besant, Howard Lutnick, Donald Trump, right? Just go down the line, all these people in the administration. Elon Musk, et cetera. Guess what they're saying? Put the tariffs on. So.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  But they're all in, they're all in Trump's cabinet, right? So they are.

• 18:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  From the megaphone.

• 18:03Anthony Pompliano?

  They're, they're voicing from the Trump megaphone. But here's the thing. It's hurting their wallet. Billionaires in America, since Trump got elected, have lost $400 billion in their net worth. Elon Musk personally has lost $100 billion. And he, they're still doing this. They're still saying this is a good thing. And so I think the part that people kind of get lost in this whole conversation is that the tariffs, everyone is looking at them through the lens of this like Kenziean collegiate, academic, economic view. Your college professor was wrong. That's not how the world works. We have example after example after example. We have examples in the United States in the last 10 years, putting tariffs on, prices go down.

• 18:46Anthony Pompliano?

  American jobs get created, American manufacturing comes back. We have examples around the world of people who have VAT taxes or who put tariffs in place, et cetera. Inflation doesn't happen. And so when you look at this, it all goes back to, you can either buy into the mainstream narrative, which is just basically the regurgitation of people saying, I'm worried about the future, I'm worried about the future, I'm worried about the future. But none of them can point to, show me a specific example of why you think American citizens, not wealthy people in their investment portfolio, but American citizens are actually going to be worse off. Cause you know what's happened so far? Again.

• 19:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Gasoline, one of the staple purchases of American citizens, four-year low already. We, it's been 75 days. Gas is at a four-year low. Egg prices have fallen more than 50%. So you look at this stuff and you say, wait a second. Let's take a look at what is already happening to prices. And so the dirty secret is that the same people are yelling and screaming that tariffs are bad, or the same people who are telling you that inflation's at 2.8%. They're looking at the government data. The government data is wrong. You know how I know? Because Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, was asked point blank in an interview with Chamath Palpatia and David Freiberg, they said, do you believe the economic data? GDP, inflation, et cetera.

• 20:11Anthony Pompliano?

  The first word out of his mouth was no.

• 20:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Why would you believe that data? We know the data collection is inaccurate. We know the methodology is flawed. It doesn't make sense. If you go and you look at something that's more of a real time metric, that's an alternative inflation measurement like Trueflation. Inflation has dropped. It was at over 3% in December. So it was actually, they were showing a higher inflation number than the government data in December. It has now dropped more than 50%. And today they showed about 1.38%. Inflation has been crashing because what is the government doing? The politicians are creating uncertainty because they're trying to slow the economy. They're trying to get interest rates down. And so everyone's yelling and screaming worried about inflation. I'm worried about the opposite. I'm not worried about inflation.

• 21:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm worried about actually that inflation is too low. Because what it's going to do is everyone starts to now hoard. Right? When you start to hoard, you get the economic slowdown. And so guess what's going to happen? Knock, knock Jerome Powell, knock, knock Federal Reserve. Start cutting interest rates. Actually go and start to spur the economy. Now they can't cut interest rates right now. There's no way they can do that. They cut interest rates right before the election and they're not going to cut them right now. Because that would mean that Donald Trump is right. And so again, I think that sometimes Donald Trump does good things. I think sometimes he does absolutely crazy things that are completely outlandish. And I completely disagree with him. Right? Same thing with Biden. I think actually that people are very accurate in some of the critiques of Biden.

• 21:44Anthony Pompliano?

  But also they don't give him credit for things like the stock market did pretty well under Biden. Right? And again, that doesn't mean that he's a good president or a bad president. But you can look at the facts and you can say that some good stuff, some bad stuff with Biden, with Trump, some good stuff, some bad stuff. That's every president regardless of what aisle you're on. So if you're an independent and you look at this stuff and you say, tell me a specific thing, a topic, and let me evaluate it. Right now, the economic policy is working. The problem is that the people who control the media, the people who go on television and talk about it, the people who hold assets that are all over Twitter, they're yelling and screaming about it because their investment portfolios are down. But you want to know who's really happy right now? The working class. And people don't quite understand this. If you're living

• 22:26Anthony Pompliano?

  in the coast, right? It's hilarious for me to be like the coastal elites, living in New York City, right? Doing what I do on a day-to-day basis. But as I've talked about before on the podcast, is I basically have two different groups of friends. I have what I call like my New York friends. They're all super successful. They're killing it. They're making money. They're doing all the things that you would think that they're doing, right? I have a whole nother group of friends that pretty much were my entire life before, whether it was the people that we grew up with, whether it was people that I played football with, people in the army, all those people, right? If you are part of the kind of elite wealthy class, right now, you're like, oh, there's a lot of uncertainty and stocks are falling and this is crazy. I didn't vote for this. This is nuts, right? The working class is saying, I did vote for this. This guy actually

• 23:11Anthony Pompliano?

  understands our plight. This guy is advocating for us, a return of these jobs. He's trying to actually help us. And so it's not 100%. But I do know that the polls that are run by both Republican media outlets and Democrat are showing that the current number, depending, actually, Republican media sites are showing 38% of the country says that we're heading in the right direction. The Democrat polls are showing 44%. Both of those are near or all-time highs over the last 20-plus years. So more people think the country's heading in the right direction than at any point in the last 20 years. And again, if you go and you do just a Wall Street poll, confidence is down, people are worried, stocks are down, like that is the,

• 23:54Anthony Pompliano?

  that's the ultimate poll, right? Is people are selling off their stocks. But why is it that such a large portion of the country thinks we're heading in the right direction? It's because it's the group that's not involved in that stuff. And so I just think that the tariff conversation, like Liberation Day, there's a reason why it's called Liberation Day, right? Is because literally, we're going to play a game. And we're going to tell American citizens, if you don't want to pay the higher prices for non-American-made goods, then buy American.

• 24:26Anthony Pompliano?

  It's very simple. Buy the American-made good, right? In many cases, we actually have the capacity to produce more. And now that's the goal. Get people employed, get that production going, and get to people actually buying American goods. If you're a company who's outside the United States and you don't want to pay the tariff, no problem. We created a loophole for you. There's a free walk to not paying the tariffs. Come and produce your product in the United States. You still get the revenue. You still get the profits. You still get to sell to America. You still get to do everything you want to do. Come and build your product here in America. Use American labor to actually go and do this. That should take a few years to actually come into fruition, right? Maybe. What I know is that in 2018, we put tariffs on washing machines.

• 25:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And within 18 months, two different South Korean manufacturers of washing machines came. They built American plants, and they created 2,000 American jobs. And washing machine prices went down over 18 months. So guess what? I don't think they went and they bought like some random patch of land and was like, let's build from scratch. They probably went, they found a facility, right? They were able to move into it. They started a production, got up and running. There are very few goods that America could not produce. Avocados, we ain't going to be the best producers of them, right? There's certain things, obviously, that we're not going to be the best at. Bananas, probably not going to be our thing. Chiquita, they got other operations going on. So again, you go and you look at this and you say to yourself, there are certain things, yes, you may actually end up seeing those things

• 25:55Anthony Pompliano?

  pay a little bit more prices if there's blanket tariffs. But it will be offset and you'll actually see overall prices go down. Things like grocery prices have actually not been growing. The rate of growth has been drastically slowed since these economic policies have been put in place. And so if you can already see grocery prices going down, gasoline prices going down, things like that, that is what people spend money on on a day-to-day basis. And so naturally, if they're actually able to get more money in their pocket, Tariffs are working. People may not like that. People may not want to give one political side a win, but at the end of the day, the tariffs are working. And I think what you're going to see a lot of is a return to, we are going to keep a steady hand here. We're

• 26:40Anthony Pompliano?

  going to keep these on. And what I personally think is that we should actually have tariffs that are blanket 5% or 10% tariffs on every single import into the United States, point blank, period. And then that's the default. We say to people, there's a product that you have. Oh, you have avocados? We need those really badly. We'd like you to come sell them in the United States. We're going to remove the tariff. Right now, we have zero tariffs and we add them as a punitive damage, right? As a punishment. Instead, why don't we actually say, everyone has tariffs, and then we're going to incentivize people to bring us products that we need, right? And we'll remove them. Now, it's an incentive system. That's a very different way of looking at it. But I think that's how the administration's doing it.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  All right, let's talk about a recession. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, every company in the world thinks that, or every bank and financial institution in the world seems to think we're going into a recession. Goldman Sachs raised the chances of a recession from 20% to 35%. And then JP Morgan has it at 40%. Deutsche Bank has it at 50%. Calci has it at 42%. Are we about to see a recession?

• 27:44Anthony Pompliano?

  No. No, I mean, just let's think of the odds. You named one company that has the recession odds at 50/50. Every other company, yeah, people are like, oh, 40%, 30%, 20%. That means that there's a, if you have your odds of a recession at 20%, that means there's an 80% odds that you're not going to see a recession, right? If you're at 40% odds of recession, woo, big scary. That means you're 60% confident or 60% odds that we're not going to have a recession. So the odds still drastically are in favor of us not having a recession. On top of that, the Fed, they got a lot of firepower. They got a lot of interest rates they can cut. And so I think that there's just a lot of ways to avoid this kind of slowdown. Now, will we see economic, you know, velocity of money, spending, growth,

• 28:28Anthony Pompliano?

  etc. come down a little bit? Absolutely. Because of some of these economic policies. But what you're really doing is you're whacking the market, right? You're kind of building Building this foundation and then go you fire the firepower and we take off. And so I think that that's pretty much what's going to happen here. I would not be surprised if stocks and crypto hit new all time highs by the end of the year. That would be like if I had a probability bet right now, I would say that both of them hit all time highs by the end of the year. And I think that a recession is very unlikely if everyone's talking about it. So every if you go and you see a bunch of headlines of recession, recession, recession, recession.

• 29:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Probably not going to happen, right?

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Definition of recession is what? Two negative quarters of GDP growth?

• 29:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and so maybe we get one in Q1, we'll see. Who knows if the government data is accurate, but let's see what they say. So let's go, right? I mean, look, we had two previous quarters of negative GDP growth. They said it wasn't a recession. And everyone said, what are you talking about? Definition of recession? And they said, no, no, there's this random organization that no one knows anybody who works there. They get to tell you if it's a recession or not. Like, okay, like now we're just playing gaslighting, right? So I don't know, maybe, but I do know this. There's two negative quarters of GDP growth. I promise under this president, they definitely gonna say it's a recession.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Let's talk about one thing real quick about the idea like most of the conversation I have heard around the tariffs and around other things is that the Trump Organization wants to get interest rates down so they can refinance our debt. You think that's true?

• 29:56Anthony Pompliano?

  100%.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  You think that's their main goal?

• 29:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, we have like six to eight trillion dollars. I forget the exact number, maybe seven trillion dollars of debt that is needs to be refinanced this year. We could do it at four and a half percent or whatever. No, you want that thing down, so get that thing down, right? And remember, he advocated, he told Jerome Powell, cut interest rates. He tweeted at him, right? Posted on Truth Social, he said, truth them, right? Like dunked on his ass and said, get the interest rate down. And Powell said, no. And then immediately people were like, are you going to step down if he tries to fire you or you know, pressure you or anything? Powell said, no. So Scott Besson, Howard Lutnick and Donald Trump went into the Oval Office. They stroked their chin, said, well, how do we get interest rates down? They said, we got a grand plan that come out and they're going to get interest rates down. And they're going to do it because they're basically going to break the arm of Jerome Powell to do it. And he doesn't want to cut interest rates right now, that's fine.

• 30:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Inflation is down under 2%. They're going to break him and they're going to make him cut interest rates. And so, you know, let's see what happens. But I think the Fed should be independent. I don't think that, you know, the president should set the interest rate or anything crazy like that. Although, you know, some people think differently. But I just think, yeah, that's, that's kind of the collision course that we're on. Awesome. All right. Thank you. Thanks for doing it.