#1422 Anthony Pompliano & Phil Rosen | Why Bitcoin Continues To Go Up

Phil Rosen, the Co-Founder of Opening Bell Daily, and Anthony Pompliano, Author of ‘How To Live An Extraordinary Life’ and CEO of Professional Capital Management, discuss why bitcoin is going up, presidential impact on the digital currency, US dollar being devalued, and future economic outlook. ======================= 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/. ======================= The Pomp Podcast is powered by BetOnline.ag, the premier crypto-friendly place to gamble on politics and sports, casino, poker and horse racing. BetOnline.ag gives you the ability to use Bitcoin and more than a dozen altcoins to make deposits and withdraw your winnings. There are no crypto transaction fees, and processing is instantaneous and secure. Visit ⁠⁠https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp⁠⁠ and use PROMO CODE: POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline.ag is available in nearly every country around the world, making it the top global gaming destination for crypto users. ======================= 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? Bang, bang. Today I got a great conversation with Phil Rosen. He's the co-founder and editor in chief of Opening Bell Daily. In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin, why it's going up, does the president matter for the digital currency? How the heck has the US dollar been devalued by 50%

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  over the last 30 years? Where I think value is going to get created in financial markets based on who becomes president? And what are the big risks to Bitcoin moving forward? I think this conversation will give you a ton of insight and hopefully make you smarter about investing in financial markets. Here's my latest conversation with Phil Rosen.

• 1:03Speaker 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.

• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:13Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:55Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:12Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Phil, what's first topic you got?

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Okay, so Bitcoin is up more than 10% in the last week, and Bitcoin reserves held on centralized exchanges are at a record low, so that means more long-term holders. And millions of dollars worth of bets on Polymarket expect a new record high before the end of the year, I think 73% odds. So what is driving this recent price action right now?

• 3:36Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a lot of people who think Bitcoin is going up because of who the president's going to be or something with politics. I don't think that is what is driving Bitcoin's price up. I think that the macro environment is very conducive to Bitcoin appreciating in value. You have the Fed cutting interest rates, 50 basis points in September, likely to cut more through the end of the year. You also have China and elsewhere cutting interest rates, and so you have cheap capital coming into the market. On top of that, you have M2 money supply expanding. So not only is the capital cheap, but you have a lot of capital that is now starting to come into the market. You have a structural change in that you now have net new buyers coming from Wall Street, and so you have these huge ETFs and many other investors who are saying, hey, I want to buy this asset. On top of that, you had the halving earlier this year, and so it takes about six months

• 4:21Anthony Pompliano?

  or so to kind of work out that supply shock. And so if you really think about what has happened so far in 2024 is we had a supply shock in the halving, we had a demand shock with the ETF, and we had a repricing of the asset up about 50% or so. And so if you think that that demand and supply shock is only going to be a 50% increase, I have a lot of stuff to sell you. But if you then add in that macro tailwind, I think that we go up from here. And so September through the end of the year into Q1 of next year, I expect to look very similar to the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. Back then, in October, it was about $10,000 Bitcoin price. We then went all the way to 64,000 in March of 2021. I do not expect a 600% increase. I think it'll be something that is lower than that,

• 5:03Anthony Pompliano?

  but I would not be surprised to see Bitcoin go from here with that macro tailwind and then that net new buyers to come into the market.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, that makes sense. And I agree with you about the macro environment. So the stock market has also seen huge gains in the last year, but also in the recent few months that Trump's election odds have improved on betting markets. And I've seen a lot of commentators say, oh, this is markets pricing in a Trump victory with crypto up, stocks are up. And I think Stanley Druckenmiller said the same thing, maybe two days ago. He said markets are pricing in this Trump victory. I think that it's more macro factors driving all this. What is the tie? Like, if you had to make the case that it was a Trump victory, what's the tie in there?

• 5:50Anthony Pompliano?

  If you're a smart investor, you have to invest based on what the dumb investors are going to do. Because what ultimately happens is the market is made up of a bunch of individual opinions. And so even if you think, which I actually believe, that who the president is, does not matter for the stock market. Now, why is that important? Because the Federal Reserve Chairman is way more important than the president for stock market returns. If you go back and you look at the consensus or the narrative in public conversation, Republicans are good for the stock market, Democrats are not. If you go back and look over the last 50 years, the two presidents who had the best performing stock markets were Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. So you have Barack Obama and Bill Clinton produced the best stock market results. There's only one president who

• 6:35Anthony Pompliano?

  actually oversaw a down stock market during their tenure as president, that was George W. Bush. And so when you look at that, you say, wait a second, only a Republican has ever seen in the last 50 years, a down stock market, and two Democrats oversaw the hugest, their largest gains. Now, every other president during that 50 years, other than George W. Bush, saw an increase in price of the stock market. And so whether Harris or Trump wins this election, I believe the stock market will be up by the end of that term. So whether it's four years or eight years, stock market is going to go up because the dollar is being devalued. And so, yes, are there certain sectors, like, let's say, for example, if Trump gets elected, could we see the Russell 2000 outperform compared to if Harris gets elected? Why? Because well, Trump is going to go and he's going to really

• 7:20Anthony Pompliano?

  put pressure, get cheaper capital into the market. He's going to do all kinds of things for small businesses and therefore they're going to borrow more. They're going to be able to drive kind of more returns. Okay. But on an overall basis, the stock market is going to perform the same regardless of who is the president. Now, a lot of people will disagree with that. You at Opening Bell did an analysis, I think, two months ago or so, and you looked at Trump and Biden. And the story is that Trump's stock market outperformed and Biden's stock market, although doing well, didn't do as well as Trump. The day you did the analysis, the return of Trump and Biden for, I think it was the S and P 500, was identical. The number of days they had been in office, the exact same return. And so what you have to be able to do is you've got to be able to separate out what the story is from what

• 8:04Anthony Pompliano?

  the facts are. Now, why do I say that smart investors have to think what dumb investors are going to do? Because dumb investors get just as much vote in the market as smart investors. A dollar is a dollar. And so sometimes what you want to say is, I believe that the stock market is actually going to perform just as well under either president. But I know that everybody else believes that Trump is going to be better for the stock market. And so if the odds of Trump is going up, then everyone else is going to start buying into the stock market. So it doesn't matter what the actual fact is or my personal opinion. What I need to do is I need to put myself in the position to think like everybody else, because that consensus driven investing is ultimately what is affecting the price right now. And so Bitcoin is a similar thing where if people believe that Trump is better

• 8:49Anthony Pompliano?

  for Bitcoin than Harris's, then people will start buying Bitcoins. They think Trump's going to win. Now, what we have seen is that Bitcoin doesn't care who the president is. It's going to perform well under either president, but that's not the narrative. And so narratives are really, really powerful in financial markets because capital follows narratives. And so if capital follows narratives, then narratives really drive price. And so as a smart investor, you have to say, I let me have my personal opinion, but then let me think about what is the average consensus? What do they believe? What are they going to do? Let me go and invest alongside that.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  If your personal opinion is just gonna be put to the side for the consensus, does that mean you should just do what the consensus is doing anyway?

• 9:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Unless you think that they are wrong. So if you think that Bitcoin is gonna do well regardless of who the president is, and the consensus is Trump is gonna win and so Bitcoin is gonna do well, you both come to the same conclusion Bitcoin is gonna do well, so you buy. Where you would allow your personal opinion to trump over the consensus is if they think the price is gonna go up, you think it's gonna go down, or vice versa. And so what ends up happening usually is people get the end result right, because the structural element is there. Stocks go up, Bitcoin goes up, real estate goes up. And so it's kind of think of it as like, there's two different pieces of real estate sitting next to each other.

• 10:15Anthony Pompliano?

  One person does a whole study of an entire county, finds all the different plots of land, does traffic pattern analysis, blah blah, all this stuff, right? And they pick a corner lot in a shopping center and they say, that's the property we should do, that's gonna be the most profitable one. And then the second person says, well, I have a business. I just set up next to Walmart, right? And they do none of the studies. They're both right, they both picked the same location, but if you had to put money behind somebody, this is a good question. Like, who would you put the money behind? The people who do all the studies? Or the person who just says, I just find Walmart and I put my store next to them?

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Well, it's like the midwit meme where just the end of both sides, you should do what they're doing.

• 10:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, just keep it really simple.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so speaking of consensus, the betting markets, Kalshi and Polymarket have become super popular. Millions and millions of dollars of bets every day on literally everything, on whether Bitcoin's gonna go up, who's gonna win the presidency and so forth. How much credence do you give to those betting markets? Because in, you know, in some sense, what you're saying is Bitcoin's gonna go up no matter who's the president, and the betting market reflects that. But also, you know, who knows what the incentives are for all these different bettors? What do you think of these?

• 11:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm very tempted to say that the betting markets are wrong compared to the polls. So right now, they're saying that Trump is going to win by like 23 points. That could be Trump wins and he only wins by five points. But what will end up happening is people will point to the betting markets and well, they said Trump was going to win. Trump won like they were right. And so the degree of accuracy remains unknown. And so I'm not willing to say that they're wrong. What I am willing to say is the jury is out on the degree of accuracy. What I think they're very good at, at least from what we can tell so far, is the binary, like who's going to win?

• 12:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I don't put as much value on, hey, he went from an 18 point favorite to a 22 point favorite. I do put a lot of value on Trump over Harris in the betting markets. And so you can see there's changes or there had been changes until there was such a big lead. And so that then begs the question, are the polls right? And as we know in 2016, the polls were very wrong. And so I think that Trump in particular breaks a lot of the classic polling because people lie to the pollsters. Right? And that was the big thing in 2016 is they went in, they voted for Trump, they walked out and they didn't want to answer. Or they even maybe lied and said they voted for somebody else. So you do the exit polling and you get information, but the information is not accurate.

• 13:00Anthony Pompliano?

  So polling is only good as the information that goes into it. The betting market is a little bit more pure, like you're putting money to work. But it's not like these markets are billions of dollars. So the question is, how many dollars does it take to move the odds? Let's say one percentage point. I don't know the answer to that, but like that would be very telling in terms of how accurate can they be? Because let's say, for example, a hundred thousand dollars put into the market can move a hundred basis points. So if I go into the betting market and I say, okay, Trump is up 22 points. I want him to be up 23 and I can put down a hundred thousand dollars. Not very accurate, right? I mean, it's a hundred grand. Now, if it's a million, okay.

• 13:45Anthony Pompliano?

  If it's 10 million, if it's 100 million, like the bigger the number gets, the more accurate that the.

• 13:50Anthony Pompliano?

  That it probably is because that means that it is less of a couple of whales or individuals that are actually impacting this stuff. And so my personal view right now is the jury is out. If the betting markets predict a massive landslide for Trump and it happens when the polls said it wouldn't, you're going to see a hell of a lot of pollsters lose their jobs and there's going to be a lot more attention on betting markets after this election.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the polls are always, I take the polls with a grain of salt because you never know who they're asking and how big the sample size is. And I think in the same way on these betting markets, you don't actually know how many people are putting these bets down. Like, it could just be five whales, you know, going back and forth to your point. And, okay, so something this week, we are at the two-year anniversary of a Bloomberg economics study that showed 100% odds of a recession. And this was October 17th, 2022. Since then, GDP has been about 3% annualized growth, S and P is up 64%. Earnings are good, US has led the world in economic

• 14:56Speaker 03

  recovery. And we're on the other side of a Fed hiking cycle. So the Fed's already done one rate cut, more are coming. What do you make of all this? Because this falls into the prediction markets consensus views, things like that.

• 15:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Anytime economists have 100% confidence in something, I take the other side. Economists have an important job. They look at data, they provide opinions, they try to predict the future.

• 15:23Anthony Pompliano?

  But certainty is the kryptonite of an economist. And so when you see 100% odds of something, I mean, it's like easy money, just take the other side, right? They also need to be careful because they don't have skin in the game. So there's no punishment. So all of those economists who 100% agree that there's going to be a recession and then there wasn't, what happened to them? Did they lose their jobs? Did they lose money? Nobody knows. We don't even know who they are.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Probably got a pay raise.

• 15:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Yeah, who knows, right? So I think that's one big thing. The second thing I will say is, what actually did occur shocked a lot of people, even market participants. If I told you that the Fed was going to raise interest rates by five and a half percent, it's going to be the fastest rate hikes in history, and employment was going to stay where it did, asset prices were going to hit all time highs, and they weren't going to be able to get inflation down under 2%. You'd be like, there's no way. How's that happen? Right? It's kind of like, um, at one point in 2022, we saw both stocks and bonds go down. Their whole idea of a 6040 global portfolio is that when stocks go down, bonds go up and vice versa.

• 16:33Anthony Pompliano?

  So when it occurs is that people predict the world based on theories or based on past cycles. That's not what occurred. And I think that means that the economists had to be an harder job of predicting the future because it's something that they hadn't really seen before. But recessions in my mind are this weird thing where the more people talk about them, the less likely they are to occur. If everyone's waiting for a recession, what do you do? You don't invest like it's good times. You don't spend like it's good times. You're waiting for the recession. So when people start yelling and screaming about a recession, that may be one of the best times to go super long. Everyone's worried about the recession. Everyone's waiting, waiting, waiting, bracing for impact.

• 17:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Bam. Stocks take off all time high. Gold takes off all time high. Bitcoin takes off. Like everything took off. And so, uh, the same is true on the other side. It's just way harder to see. When everyone is super net long, everyone's saying the good times are rolling. It's never going to end. There's no way that there's a recession. That's actually maybe when you want to start bracing for impact. It's just that that feels good. Right? It's much easier to identify when everyone is yelling and screaming about the, the negative downside. And so over the last two years, the more I've heard that, seen that, et cetera, the more I've said, hey, this thing's going to keep rolling.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  So to your point that when everyone's talking about good times, I think we're in that right now. Everyone's looking at the bull market, the strength of the economy, employment. Something that I think gets overlooked, and you wrote about this in your newsletter this week. The US dollar has lost 50% of its purchasing power in the last 30 years. Explain in your view, why that gets sort of pushed to the side?

• 18:22Anthony Pompliano?

  This chart came from Charlie Belillo at Creative Planning, GOAT of the Charts on Twitter.

• 18:28Anthony Pompliano?

  The US dollar has lost 50% of its purchasing power in the last 30 years. That means that $1 can now only buy 50 cents worth of goods and services in a single generation. So during my lifetime, a physical US dollar can now buy only half of what it used to be able to buy. Half of the US population has 100% of all of their wealth sitting in cash. The other half has a majority of their wealth in investments. So when the dollar loses purchasing power, it punishes the bottom 50% of Americans,

• 19:08Anthony Pompliano?

  and it rewards the top 50% of Americans because those investable assets are denominated in dollars. So the same way that I had $1, it used to buy two chocolate bars, but now, 30 years later, my $1 only buys one chocolate bar. I literally, for the same dollar, get half as many goods. In investing, if I have one share, and that one share used to be worth $1, now, because the dollar has lost half its value, you need $2 to buy my one share. And so if I just hold cash, I lost because I need more dollars to buy food or whatever. But if I hold investments, somebody else needs more dollars to buy my asset. And so I got quote-unquote "rich."

• 19:53Anthony Pompliano?

  That is all investing comes down to. It is the simplest form of financial education. If you understand it, you invest. If you don't, you save. If you're a saver, you lose. If you're an investor, you win. But that is all the US economy comes down to for the next couple of decades.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  This plays very strongly into the bull case for Bitcoin, I think, because it's almost less about the strength of Bitcoin and more about the debasement of the dollar, I think. And you've talked extensively about this.

• 20:26Anthony Pompliano?

  But I think it's all assets, right? So Bitcoin is a big winner, but one of the things that the Bitcoin community probably should do a better job of doing is saying, "Look, Bitcoin is just the winner of the winning asset." Assets, but gold's up 30% year to date, right? Stocks have been flying. I think you've published that there are 46 different new all time highs this year. And so Bitcoin obviously is a winner as well, but gold being up 30% is a monster year for gold. And so that dollar devaluation, that inflation, all that stuff that's working in favor of financial assets, they're all going up. Bitcoin just may be the most sensitive. And so while gold's up 30%, Bitcoin's up 60%. So it's two times the return of gold this

• 21:09Anthony Pompliano?

  year, but they're both going up for the same reason.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  So to this, uh, close this inflation story, the S and P 500 has gained 972% in that 30 years that the dollar has lost half its purchasing power, just to close that loop. So I know we discussed how markets will go up no matter who's the president, but I do see a lot of commentary around Trump's deregulations and lower taxes as a reason to, you know, sort of bet on markets more under a Trump administration. Do you see any, um, if I, if I'm forcing you to make the case for what assets would perform better under each president, do you have a view on that?

• 21:57Anthony Pompliano?

  If you deregulate industries, companies in that industry are going to take off. So obviously if there are certain things that he deregulates, yes, you should go and look there. If you continue to have interest rates drop, then companies that borrow a lot of capital, usually small cap and medium cap businesses, so Russell 2000, those companies should do much better. If you have Bitcoin friendly policies, then you likely will see more and more people from the traditional world say, hey, maybe I should buy some. And so Bitcoin will do well. Now, the thing is that if, look at the opposite case, everyone always wants to talk about what are you going to do that's going to help? I like to look at what is either candidate going to do

• 22:39Anthony Pompliano?

  that's going to hurt the economy, hurt financial assets, hurt a certain sector.

• 22:45Anthony Pompliano?

  If Harris implemented the tax on unrealized gains, that would be destructive. I don't think that the current administration thinks they're going to get that passed. I don't think that anyone that is talking about it thinks it's going to get passed, but that would be destructive. I actually do think that at one of the risks is if Trump drastically increases spending, there could be a re-inflationary event. Now, one of the stories in the inflation kind of future outlook that people don't talk about is there's been a change to the deflationary nature of technology. How many companies are reporting cost savings from AI?

• 23:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if you're a company that can all of a sudden drop 20% of your costs because you start to use this technology, that's a deflationary pressure. And so if you're increasing certain inflationary components, but you have this new deflationary component to the economy, maybe it nets out. Or maybe the inflation isn't nearly as bad as you would think it is. Again, nobody knows. It's really hard to quantify what is that deflationary pressure. But we do know that companies are growing very quickly. They're very capital efficient. And there's a lot of companies that were already in existence that now are starting to implement this AI technology and they are driving down costs. And they pass that cost on to consumers, then naturally you're going to get that deflationary component.

• 24:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I just go back to and I say to myself, I have $1. Where do I put it? The first question I have to ask myself, what is the timeframe in which I am trying to evaluate? Because if I'm trying to evaluate what's going to go up the most under the next president, I may make one decision. But for me, I'm asking myself, what is going to compound for the next 50 years? The president is irrelevant. Find the best asset. Buy the best asset, hold the best asset. And if you do that for 50 years and you were right. Right? It's gonna be rewarded. But guess what? During that 50 year period, you're gonna have Republicans and Democrats. You're gonna have some people who really understand economics, and you have some idiots that don't understand economics at all.

• 24:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And everything in between. But if your timeframe is, who is going to experience the most appreciation in X, Y, or Z asset during a four year presidential term? I think that's a fool's game. And I think it's very, very hard to predict. Because there's a lot of industries that people thought were gonna do well under Trump. But they didn't think a public health crisis was coming. They didn't think that an entire country was gonna get locked in their homes. Under Biden, I think that they thought certain industries were gonna do really well, and then war broke out, where other issues start to happen. And so when you look at this, you say to yourselves, no one knows the future. But one of the best ways to negate short term uncertainty is to think long term.

• 25:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And if you can do that, then I think you've got a massive advantage in investing.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, the trying to plan your investments around the president, I think, is a pretty tough, tough game to play, as you said. So we, at the beginning of the show, we discussed how Bitcoin has a ton of reasons to be bullish right now. The macro, the Fed cuts, all this stuff. If you had to make the bare case as far as the biggest risks to Bitcoin. And I know this might be, you know, counterculture here, but where would you start with that?

• 26:11Anthony Pompliano?

  One, there could always be a self-induced bug into the code. So developers are updating the code, if that ever was to occur. I think it is nearly impossible, given how methodical, slow, and intentional the development process is. But that's always a potential risk. Two is if there was some sort of advanced technology, you know, the quantum computer, something that eventually got created. And there was a non-economic actor who wanted to go and attack the Bitcoin blockchain and do it to destroy the value rather than steal the Bitcoin. Because one of the things about if you steal the Bitcoin, then it loses all of its value. The whole value of Bitcoin is that the blockchain has never been hacked before. There are no fraudulent transactions.

• 26:53Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's kind of like grabbing water. Like for a second, you think you've got the water, but then just squeezes out of your hand. Same thing with the Bitcoins. You think you stole all this value, but then it squeezes out of your hand. And so you'd have to be a non-economic actor to go and attack it. And then the third thing is, does the Bitcoin community slow themselves down?

• 27:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Because we get too rigid in our thought process. Part of the value of Bitcoin is that it's very rigid, that doesn't change that much, right? It's curing a trillion dollars of value. But there's a balance between being very rigid and then being able to use new technologies. There have been upgrades to Bitcoin that I think Bitcoiners generally say, hey, that was good for Bitcoin. And so how do you find that balance? And so it isn't an existential risk that, hey, Bitcoin could, you know, become worthless or something like that. But if that risk is taking 10% a year off, so it compounds at 10% less every year, the gap widens over time. And so I think that, you know, the risks frankly are all like pretty amateur compared to what the bull case is.

• 27:56Anthony Pompliano?

  But I do think you can point at things that could kind of like wound Bitcoin, but couldn't really kill it. And I think that goes back to like, why are so many people such high conviction in an asset like this? Investors can deal with wounds in their portfolio. But the number one rule of investing is always, you know, don't get blown up. Don't, don't have an asset get killed. And so I think that Bitcoin is unique in that ability to say, hey, look, it's really hard to see something that could completely make it worthless, but there are definitely things that, you know, are challenges or obstacles it's got to overcome.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  So I remember in the earlier days of Bitcoin, the biggest criticism was that it's just an asset in the greater fool theory. Do you think with so much buy-in from mainstream and retail, sorry, Wall Street and retail, we are beyond the greater fool theory era?

• 28:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Every asset is part of the greater fool theory. If you buy a stock, unless you are going to start buying stuff with the stock, are you going to go to the store and cash in your stock to buy bread? No, you have to sell it to somebody. And so you are selling it because you have less confidence in the future value of that stock than the person who's buying it from you. Now, you may not think they're dumb for buying the S and P, but it is the same idea, right? Is the only way you capture value back into a native currency like the dollar is you got to sell it. And so the whole premise of the stock market is that if you buy something and you hold it, eventually somebody will be willing to pay you more for it.

• 29:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So what is always hilarious to me is that the traditional finance world and definitely the kind of economist and talking heads and stuff, they benefit from a system that they then somehow try to twist as a negative critique of Bitcoin. But the fact that Bitcoin has a greater fool theory means that it has just as much value as the stock market because the stock market does too. So it's this very weird dynamic of all of these assets are financial assets, but people want to say one's good, one's bad, one's this, one's that. There's no morality in an asset. It's a piece of software, stock of a company. Now, you may have morality for a company, say that company does something good or that

• 30:14Anthony Pompliano?

  company does something bad, but the stock is an inanimate object. Right? And so the same dynamics as to what has somebody buy it, sell it, whatever, is true of every other inanimate object that has value. So a baseball card, Bitcoin and a stock are all the same structurally.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  So I think on that note, we pretty much covered it all. Thank you so much for your time.

• 30:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks for doing it.

• 30:37Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up, guys? I hope you're enjoying this episode, but I got a quick message for you. I just released my very first book. It's called How to Live an Extraordinary Life. In this book, there are 65 life lessons that I've picked up over the years. These lessons will teach you about money, investing, relationships, work, health, happiness, and much more. In this book, I wrote letters to each one of my children and I tried to share those life lessons with them. If you pick up this book, there's three things that I can promise you. The first is that it is very concise. The audiobook is only three hours. You can listen to it on a long drive or on a rainy afternoon. The second thing is that you're going to learn something. It's worth the price of admission just for the lessons themselves. And then the third thing is it will make you think more deeply about your life and

• 31:21Anthony Pompliano?

  how you try to live it. So go pick up How to Live an Extraordinary Life today. It's a quick read. It's very impactful. It's very concise and it would mean the world to me for the support. Go check it out today on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever you buy your books, hardcover, audiobook, it all works. Thank you so much for the support and I'd love to hear what you think about the new book.