#1470 Anthony Pompliano & Phil Rosen | This Metric Controls Bitcoin’s Price

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 bitcoin’s relationship to global liquidity, inflation moving forward, interest rates, Donald Trump, federal reserve, and what is going on with TikTok? ======================= The future is being built today and the future of currency isn’t dollars, euros, pounds, or yen, it’s crypto. And Gemini thinks that’s a great thing. Because a future where money is decentralized, inclusive, and globally accessible, that’s a future that we are anxious to be a part of. Go where dollars won’t. With Gemini. ======================= 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 I've got a great episode with Phil Rosen. Phil is the co-founder and editor in chief of Opening Bell Daily. In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin, its recent price movements, its relationship to global liquidity, how I think about inflation moving forward, whether global liquidity or interest rates are more important to pay

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  attention to. Then we get into the Fed, Donald Trump, and what his policies could do for the economy. And lastly, we finish up with the rumor that Elon Musk may be buying TikTok. That one is kind of crazy. So here's my latest conversation with Phil Rosen. I hope you guys enjoy it.

• 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.

• 1:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Gemini. The future is being built today and the future of currency isn't dollars, euros, pounds, or yen. It's crypto. And Gemini thinks that's a great thing because of future where money is decentralized, inclusive, and globally accessible. That's a future that we are anxious to be a part of. Gemini teamed up with futurists, technologists, and designers like award-winning artist Matt Griffin, known for his illustrations for Dune, to craft a vision of the future with crypto at its core. The creative theme, "Go Where Dollars Won't," emphasizes exploration, growth, and the crypto market's limitless potential. Whether it's going on that Martian safari to capture an unforgettable photo of a herd of woolly mammoths grazing the red planet, or using Bitcoin to pay for your Lyft pass to go strata skiing down the mountain peak of a

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Breathtaking comment. Whatever adventures we'll be living, one thing is for sure. In a future this fantastic, the limits of traditional currency simply cannot keep up. Financial innovation will usher in this new frontier, and so go where dollars won't with Gemini. Go check them out at gemini.com/go-were-dollars-won't. Again, go check it out at gemini.com/go-were-dollars-won't. 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.

• 2:55Anthony 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.

• 3:35Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Phil, what's first topic?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  So you shared a chart this morning, and it showed how global liquidity has pulled back in recent weeks, and so has Bitcoin and the S and P 500. In your view, you said that this is the most important chart for investors to be paying attention to right now. Can you explain that?

• 3:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, liquidity drives markets, and so if governments around the world are pushing more liquidity into the market, think of it like water, right? That's why it's called liquidity. When they push it into the market, everything goes up, and so you see asset prices rise. If you've got a bathtub full of water and you start to drain the water out, what happens to all the little toys that are floating in your little kid's bathtub? It starts to drop, right? And so liquidity can be this like buoyant force, or it can be this draining force in the market.

• 4:20Anthony Pompliano?

  The word liquidity is such a great word because it's literally showing you either it's pushing asset prices or it's pulling them down. And so if global liquidity, if M2 supply is coming down, asset prices likely will follow. It's not immediate, right? It takes some time to work through the system, but it can be, you know, within a couple of weeks, you can start to see those asset prices come down. The good news is that global liquidity, you know, goes up, goes down, but over the long run, the trend is up and to the right. And so therefore, asset prices should be up and to the right as well.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Do you think that something like monetary policy, or even the president, or something to do with rate cuts or no rate cuts, does that have any more or less impact on asset prices compared to liquidity?

• 5:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I definitely think that rate cuts matter, right? And use the extremes. If rates are going up, then that has a draining function, right? It makes capital more expensive. If capital's more expensive, it's harder to move around. If you are cutting interest rates, it makes capital less expensive. If it's less expensive, it's sloshing around, it's much more freely, right? So think of interest rates almost as like friction. You're increasing the friction to capital, you're decreasing the friction to capital. And so anytime that you are decreasing the friction to capital, well, that means more people are going to have access to capital. More people have access to capital, means they're deploying more capital. And so therefore, asset prices should go up. You're increasing the liquidity in the market. If you are raising rates, you're doing the exact opposite, right? It's a draining

• 5:46Anthony Pompliano?

  function. It tightens, it adds friction to the system. And so just on the kind of a binary, are we cutting or are we raising? Obviously, that has a massive impact. I tend to think that interest rates and liquidity are somewhat interlinked, and they kind of work in tandem to a degree. But global liquidity definitely is the thing that I would spend more time paying attention to than the interest rates, although there is some, you know, kind of back and forth. As liquidity is changing, obviously, the interest rates are responding. But this idea of is capital going in or is capital coming out is really important for asset prices.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that makes sense. Right now, Wall Street is pretty optimistic on asset prices from Bitcoin to the stock market, but their expectations for Fed rate cuts have come back dramatically over the last few weeks and even couple of months. And the December jobs report was a big part of that. I don't want to get into a guessing game on how many rate cuts we're going to get. It's either going to be zero, one, two, three, maybe, who knows. My question for you is whether those rate cuts actually matter for asset prices?

• 6:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I don't care what Wall Street says, right? How many of them were right in 2024? Why are we, this like guessing game doesn't really matter. Now, what people can do is they can say, hey, look, we're trying to figure out what our expectation is. We're trying to plan around that. Is capital going to be more cheap, less, you know, less cheap, et cetera. But ultimately, the kind of analyst expectation game, it's nearly impossible, right? What are the odds you're going to get the exact number correctly, right? And actually, if an analyst was intellectually honest, what they should do is they should not only say how many cuts, they should tell you in advance which meetings do they think the cuts will happen at, right? Because sequence matters as well. And so now, not only do you have to get the exact number correct, but you got to nail every single meeting?

• 7:36Anthony Pompliano?

  How can you pick what's going to happen in the Fed meeting 12 months from now with no inputs, no data points, right? It's very hard. And so I tend not to pay attention that much to kind of the analyst's expectations. And it's much more valuable to just listen to what the Fed's saying, right? And so I do think that there's been some language where, hey, you know, they've made some cuts, that they seem to be kind of cooling off on, you know, that that cut process. But I do think there will still be cuts, right? And so your question about how much does that impact financial assets? Well, it also depends on which asset class are we talking about, right? Obviously, something like real estate, the name of the game is interest rates, right? Even more so than global liquidity. And then if you go to maybe stocks, well, large cap stocks are much less reliant on

• 8:19Anthony Pompliano?

  interest rates versus small caps. Small caps tend to borrow more money, right? And interest rates tend to really have an impact there. And so there's not really kind of a one size fits all across. The market, you really have to unpack, what is the asset class I'm looking at? What is the individual security or individual investment opportunity? And then what is the factor here? Is it liquidity? Is it interest rates? Is it both? How do I weigh on that? And so, you know, there are certain areas of the market that I would actually argue interest rates like real estate for sure. It's more important than global liquidity. But on a overall metric, I think that global liquidity is probably the bigger deal for most people's portfolio. Because usually, most people's portfolio is majority equities rather than some of the like more interest rate sensitive asset classes.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  So specifically about Bitcoin, then if we get, let's say, a handful of rate cuts versus your rate cuts. Do you think that has a dramatic impact on the price of Bitcoin?

• 9:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it definitely helps, right? If you get the interest rate cuts. But again, global liquidity is a much bigger impact. And so Sam Callahan and Lynn Alden did this great study where they showed that Bitcoin is the single most sensitive asset to global liquidity changes. So if global liquidity increases, Bitcoin has kind of the most pronounced positive kind of response. If global liquidity starts to go down, then Bitcoin has the most pronounced negative reaction as well. It's hypersensitive to global liquidity. And so over a long period of time, that's great because structurally liquidity is going to increase. But what we've seen in the last, you know, couple of weeks here is that global liquidity has actually been going down. And so naturally, the S and P turned over, Bitcoin turned over, right? We got these drawdowns.

• 10:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And so the question becomes, how much is it going to draw down? I tend to think that about here feels like some good timing. Now, why is that? Because I think that Donald Trump coming into the White House, he's already tweeting saying that interest rates are too high, right? He's already talking about a bunch of things that tend to increase liquidity into the market. And so you have to really, to be a good investor, in my experience, you've got to not only be able to understand the financial metrics, but then you've got to be able to overlay domestic politics, geopolitics, and then you've got to look at specific policies that may have an impact as well. And so that's what makes. I think investing so intellectually stimulating, but it's also what makes it so difficult is that

• 10:44Anthony Pompliano?

  there is intense complexity to these machines that are markets. And so you've got to understand, well, if this thing gets pulled, or if this button gets pushed, what's the impact? How does it work itself through the system? I'm not claiming to be an expert, right? But definitely as a student of this stuff, you begin to understand how some of this stuff relates to each other, and it makes you a much better investor if you can do that.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  I do think from all the conversations, conversations I'm having, the things you're writing, the things I'm reading, Bitcoin is going to be one of the outperformers of 2025, and Trump is a big part of that. You had this recent interview with a macro investor named Jordi Visser, and part of his thesis, I think, from what I took was this AI boom is going to help drive efficiency and decentralization, and Bitcoin is the ultimate decentralization bet. Can you unpack that a bit?

• 11:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, if you think about AI and Bitcoin, you know, I've been writing for a long time that this is all about automation. Everyone wants to say Bitcoin's in one corner, and artificial intelligence is another corner. I think that these are all part of the same trend, which is automation. And what I mean by that, if you think about what artificial intelligence is kind of promises to be, where you're going to write software, and that software is going to automate away human time, effort, etc. So if you go and you look at some of the things that are popular right now, you know, AI agents is one, and people have shown, you know, a gazillion different examples on Twitter where they've created some sort of AI agent. That agent may go and check local restaurants for a reservation, and look at your calendar,

• 12:25Anthony Pompliano?

  come back to the restaurant, make a reservation, send you a text message or an email that says, hey, I made a reservation for this many people at this time at this restaurant. I put it on your calendar. Great. Usually that'd be a human doing that job, right? So AI is automating away that time and effort from the human. Now, if we go and we look at what Bitcoin did, Bitcoin used software to automate away the time and effort that usually humans would put towards monetary policy. And it just said, we're just gonna write this in software. And so again, Bitcoin automated that central banking function for this new type of digital currency. And so now all of a sudden, you say, well, hold on a second. It's just software that's automating human time and effort. So now you can start to see the commonalities.

• 13:09Anthony Pompliano?

  On top of that, you then can go a step further and say, okay, all these AI agents that everyone's talking about, they're gonna do different activities. And so I may be able to create an AI agent that goes on Amazon. And I tell it, hey, every time that I want to buy a book, I'm just gonna tell you the name, go find it, go put it, make sure my address is right, make sure that my credit card is right. You know, go do this, blah, blah, whatever, hit buy, done. Great. Amazon has my credit card information saved. Now, could I tell my AI agent, hey, if you go to a website that I'd ever been to before and you're gonna check out for me, here's my credit card information? Of course. But what ultimately is gonna end up happening is these things that right now are simply extensions of us

• 13:51Anthony Pompliano?

  eventually are going to be self-sustaining, you know, kind of agents. And so they're gonna be able to earn a living. They're gonna make money. And so they're gonna have to have some way to get paid. Well, what's an easier way to get paid? I don't know if I call up, you know, Fidelity or Wells Fargo or JP Morgan and I say, hey, guys, I got a great idea. My AI agent needs a bank account. They're gonna say, that doesn't pass KYC. So now all of a sudden, a digital wallet is really easy. You can spin up a digital wallet, it can receive funds, whether that's Bitcoins, stablecoins, whatever, right? Now it's got it. Then it can go and it can spend that currency with other AI agents. And so for years, I've talked about this idea of, you know, kind of Bitcoin was my original idea, but I actually think that stablecoins increasingly

• 14:34Anthony Pompliano?

  are becoming a big part of the story, is money for machines. And I used to use the example of a car driving. So think about the kind of linear progress of a car paying a toll. It used to be, first of all, there were no tolls and you rode your horse, right? Then we created a car and then somebody said, well, why don't we just create a toll? And that was technology. And then we said, okay, well, you drive up, you stop, you take the coins, you hand them to somebody. They check to make sure you paid the right amount. They give you your change and you keep driving. Then we use another piece of technology to create those baskets where you could throw the coins in. Now we don't need a person there, right? We can just automate the counting, bam, bam, bam, go, right?

• 15:17Anthony Pompliano?

  We don't need a human, so we automated away the human. And then we said, well, let's take it a step further. Why don't we just put a sensor in your car on the EZ Pass? When you drive down the road, you don't even have to stop. Now it'll just read it right on the highway. Eventually what's going to happen is you're not even going to need the sensor. There's just going to be a digital wallet built into the car. And when you're driving down the road, it's just going to pay the road through your digital wallet in your car. And so all we saw there is we saw very disparate technologies for a single use case. I need to pay a toll and the technology kept getting closer and closer and closer to being fully integrated. And you had any human intervention in that entire process get automated away. So when you start to see that, you say, wait a second.

• 16:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Now we are starting to put these technologies together. Is the wallet inside of a car robotics? Most people would argue a car is not a robot. Well, what if I take it a step further and now all of a sudden I have a humanoid robot? And the humanoid robot is going to walk down the street. And when it walks into the Amazon Go store that doesn't require me to check out and has some sort of facial recognition or it has something, some sensor that's built into it. Now you start to see these technologies are coming together. We have robotics, we have crypto, we have machine learning, we have AI facial recognition. All this stuff comes together in this new world. So the reason why I think that is so important is for the next 20 or 30 years, there are going to be two types of investors.

• 16:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And this has been true for a very long time. There are investors who are going to bet on things that they believe are not going to change. These are the value investors, right? I buy X company because I think that, you know, IBM is going to continue to produce the cash flows they produce. And it's a steady Eddie and that's what I want. I want my, you know, 12% growth year over year and that's great. Those investors are betting on things that don't change. But then there's a whole other class of investors that are betting on the world changing. And so you have to ask yourself, which one are you? I know who I am. I'm an investor who likes to think about and spend my time and money betting on how the world is gonna change. But I have a lot of friends who are in the other camp. Neither one of us is right or wrong. It's just two different approaches to investing.

• 17:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And the beauty of a market is that there's so many different opportunities between both camps that you can make a lot of money. You can be successful doing either one. You've just got to be true to yourself and understand who are you? What is your advantage? How do you think about the market? You spend all your time, you know, kind of poo pooing on all the new ideas like, oh, shut the hell up. There's no way that a humanoid robot's gonna get in a robo taxi and be driven from work at the factory, right? To come back to your apartment and get recharged? No way that's gonna happen. Okay, maybe, I don't know. But that's the world I like to think about. But there's a lot of people who say, I would bet a lot of money that's never gonna happen. And instead, I'm gonna bet on, you know, some sort of business

• 18:13Anthony Pompliano?

  that is going to benefit from robotics and humanoid robots never being a thing. And so that's where the market gets made. And I think that ultimately, AI, Bitcoin, a lot of these technologies, it's all part of one big theme, which is just kind of automation. And it is freeing up time and energy for humans to work on things that the machines and the software can't do.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  So to your point about AI essentially doing all these essential jobs that forever have been the role of human beings to do. I saw a report from Bloomberg. It said Wall Street's can replace 200,000 jobs with AI in the next three to five years. And everything you're saying, and then if you look at the Wall Street jobs and a bunch of other white collar jobs that are disappearing, a lot of critics would say this sounds like a very anti-human future. I'm very pro-technology, pro-innovation. But to those critics, what would you say?

• 19:16Anthony Pompliano?

  You're wrong. Simple. Right? Like, what are you talking about? If the rise of the car industry was that anti-horse, right? Like, what are you guys talking about? What is a machine gonna do that a human should be doing?

• 19:34Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the better question. 90% plus percent, I don't know what the number, but some big percentage of the tasks that the robots are going to take over, or the software is going to take over, humans don't want to do. They would prefer to be doing other things. And so that is really where I think we're kind of headed with this is, people say, oh, my God, you know, self-driving cars are going to have this massive impact.

• 20:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Another way to think about it is, what if we give the ability for every single taxi driver, rather than them have to sit in that taxi and personally drive the car, for the same amount of money, they can just own the robo taxi, and it can go do the work for them, and they still get paid. Wouldn't that be better? Wouldn't that still allow them to have a living? Does that transition them from an employee to now an asset owner? That sounds like a massive wealth generating event. It sounds like an incredible opportunity. And so what this is going to do is, we're actually going to have enormous economic mobility

• 20:45Anthony Pompliano?

  for a very large portion of the population, who right now have to trade their time for money. Instead, they're going to be forced to trade their money for money, which is actually what wealthy people do. And so if you think about a taxi driver, they buy in. That's how they get there, right? And they start going, and they're trading their time for that money. But what if we can get the cost to the point where for that same cost of a medallion, or, you know, entering into that business, they could simply just have a car drive itself. Be pretty powerful. And then you say to yourself, well, hold on a second. What about me as an individual who has to sit and answer all these emails? What if I could just have software do it over time?

• 21:28Anthony Pompliano?

  It goes back and it reads the 50,000 emails that I've ever written, and it simply says, okay, we now are going to take all of that learning, and we're going to predict what's the thing you're going to say in the next email? You think that it could be effective? Of course. And it gives me back my time. What is my time worth? Right? And a lot of people think of what is a unit of their time worth? They say to themselves, what is my hourly wage? Right? And really successful people say my hourly wage is $5,000. Or maybe it's 25,000. Or some people are like, I'm so wealthy that one hour of my time is worth a million dollars. Okay. But for the average person, they may say, I don't know, 100 bucks an hour. Right?

• 22:13Anthony Pompliano?

  If you really take what you get paid in a year, divide it up by how many hours you work? $200, $50, whatever the number is. Would you be willing to get something that can help you still earn a living? But you're not actually trading your time for the money? Pretty powerful idea. Complete fantasy until recently. And now we're saying, hold on a second. They got robots making food. They got robots that are driving. They got robots that are doing work online. They're coming for everybody's job. But that's a good thing. Because machines previously came for everybody's job. 90 something percent of people were farmers.

• 22:56Anthony Pompliano?

  They literally lived off the land that they had. I think the number now is 2% of people are farmers. So we compressed all that time, energy, et cetera, down. And we only need 2% of people now to produce the food for the entire country. We are the greatest civilization ever created. We're geniuses for doing that. Because it freed up 96% or 98% of people, depending on how you count the numbers, to go and do everything else.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  There's a million productivity implications to everything you're saying, of course. And that means there's a million economic implications as well. I want to ask you a bit about inflation for the year ahead, because that has been a huge topic of debate among Wall Street people, economists, politicians. A lot of people expect Trump's deregulation sort of administration and his tax cuts and tariffs to be inflationary. And I think we're still too early, let's say in the next 12 months, to see the productivity.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Revolution from AI. So if we focus on these political angles, where do you see inflation going in the next year? And what's the case against maybe Trump's critics that are expecting a big inflation jump?

• 24:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that there's a very good chance inflation may come back, right?

• 24:28Anthony Pompliano?

  You have a delicate situation where they never got inflation under control. Trump is walking into, you know, 2.8% inflation.

• 24:38Anthony Pompliano?

  That's high inflation compared to the target. It's almost 50% higher than they want it. And so now what you're going to do is you have interest rates coming down. You have, up until recently, stocks and asset prices higher. And you have new policies that are coming in that have the potential to be inflationary. Thankfully, you also have a very important activity in Doge, which is trying to cut expenses.

• 25:07Anthony Pompliano?

  You may have a weird impact on inflation in the deportation of a lot of labor and the stopping of more labor coming into the market. And so you put all that together and it's a murky, muddy water. It's not clear what's going to happen. The thing that I would say that I think is really important for people is when you look at inflation, you have to realize that inflation is higher than they're telling you. So let's just say, we'll use easy numbers. Inflation's at 3%. I think it's probably higher, but let's just say it's at 3%.

• 25:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Right now, on various treasuries, 4.5% to 5%. So if I hold that, I pay taxes on the interest. And let's just use easy numbers. And let's say that I pay 40% tax. So I get paid 5% interest, pay 40% in tax, and then I've got a 3% inflation rate. Whoops.

• 26:10Anthony Pompliano?

  I had no real return. If interest rates are at 5%, if interest rates are at 4.5%, now I actually have a negative real rate of return because of taxes and inflation. And so what it starts to do is it actually starts to make more sense as to what is happening with equities. The value of equities, the return on annual basis, has been creeping up. It was, you know, 7%, then we got into 8%, 9%, right? Now we've put up two years of over 20%. Well, the businesses are getting better. Another thing that people don't realize is not only are the businesses in terms of net

• 26:53Anthony Pompliano?

  cash flow improving, it's about a 5X since 1970. Also, the revenue per employee has been drastically increasing over the last couple of years. So the companies are getting more efficient, they're more dominant, which again drives those asset prices. And so if you go back to this idea of inflation, asset prices going up can be inflationary. If it enriches people, then now they have more money and they go and they spend it in the market. But instead, what is the bigger concern is not that, that we could live with. The bigger concern is, is the government going to do something? Or some of these new policies going to be inflationary? Or tariffs going to create issues? Right?

• 27:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I actually think that people are overreacting to a lot of the tariff talk. I think that people are misunderstanding the strategy that is at play right now. I think a lot of people think Donald Trump on January 21st is going to walk in there and be like tariff, tariff, tariff, tariff. Instead, what I think he's doing already is threat of tariff, threat of tariff, threat of tariff. And that is bringing a lot of people to the negotiating table. And so we'll see what gets implemented, but all these little things could be inflationary. But the biggest issue is that we never got inflation under control, we never got it back down to 2%. And so already we're on an elevated base. If you get any sort of resurgence, we back to 4%, 4.5% pretty quickly if we're not careful.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  I've seen headlines that say Trump is walking into a ticking time bomb of an economy. And then I see the Biden administration tweeting, "We are handing off the greatest economy of all time." Where on that spectrum do you, do you think the truth is?

• 28:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Both are true. They're both right. Biden is handing off stocks at or near all time highs. You know, there's a little bit of that global liquidity that's been drained out in recent weeks, but also Trump is talking down the market. Trump doesn't want to come in with stocks at all time highs because now his entry price is higher. He wants to talk the market down. So when he shows up, the stock market is a little bit lower because his base, his entry price is lower. So now all of the future gain accrues to him under his administration. It's a lot of strategy to this stuff, right? And so why would the president be talking markets down? Well, he's trying to get some of that kind of frothiness out of the market, right? And just talking about it. Fed does the same thing. Politicians do the same thing, whatever.

• 29:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So Biden, pretty good stock growth in his time. On the other hand, home affordability is pretty bad, et cetera. Now Trump's in a pretty interesting situation. He's coming in and the ticking time bomb is because asset prices are high, right? If you look at P multiples, if you look at all these data points, there's a number of them that say, hey, wait a second, a recession might be on the way. But I continue to say, I think an underrated point is that Donald Trump knows he cannot get it reelected in four years. And so for four years, he can throw the kitchen sink at the market and he can do everything in his power to get the stock market up.

• 30:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And then he walks out, he's president for eight years. He can be president again and it's all about legacy at that point. So let's see what happens.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  I think one maybe downside to that reality is that if he focuses all his efforts on asset prices and, you know, let's say liquidity, then that doesn't necessarily mean like good things for the economy, like it could, but I think there's a lot of.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  Problems in the economy like affordability that could get swept under the rug in that scenario?

• 30:42Anthony Pompliano?

  It, um, I was talking with Plin about this recently. How do you measure whether it's a strong economy or not? Some people look at the stock market. Some people look at home affordability. Some people look at inflation. Some people look at, you know, uh, dollar, uh, devaluation. Some people look at, name some other metric. There's no clear answer and that's why there's a lot of arguing. It's because one plus one equals two in math. In science, you can do an experiment. Either the chemicals react or they don't.

• 31:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Politics and economics, it's all up for debate.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  So something, uh, to change topics for a moment. There are these reports that are floating around that TikTok could be sold to Elon Musk. And he already owns X, formerly Twitter. And TikTok has more than double X's audience. And I think they do four times the revenue.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  When you saw this, what, I mean, what was your reaction to this?

• 31:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Why buy it when you can beat it?

• 31:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? The thing is TikTok is a very good product. That's why people are using it. It's addictive. But it's just software. And so if you look at somebody like an Elon, he got into a industry that he previously wasn't in in terms of social media. Why go buy up all the companies? Compete. And he's done this in other industries. Right? And I do think that, um, he's more likely to do that than to buy TikTok. Uh, I also think there'd be a lot of geopolitical questions. You know, it gets real dicey when you're trying to work with NASA and launch rockets.

• 32:29Anthony Pompliano?

  But at the same time, you own an app that has some questionable geopolitical and national security concerns. How do those two things go together? So from my perspective, uh, it's likely just kind of an unbased rumor that people, you know, who, who's the rich guy? He's got a lot of money. Um, I do know that there's a couple of people, Frank McCourt, Kevin O'Leary, et cetera, that are, uh, trying to buy this.

• 32:57Anthony Pompliano?

  We'll see. They claim that TikTok claims that they'll shut down before they sell.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I saw that, which I think that that proves it's like a political apparatus or political delivery device if they don't even if they're going to disregard the business like that.

• 33:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't don't get fooled by negotiating tactics. I think that they are posturing. Well, we'll shut down rather than sell. The politicians say, well, if they're going to shut it down, then can't really force them to sell. That wouldn't make sense. And they never shut down.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  It's art of the deal tactics.

• 33:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that works unless maybe you are negotiating with the guy who wrote the art of the deal.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think he's coming in. He's vocalized that he wants to rescue this or prevent it from falling through the cracks here.

• 33:52Anthony Pompliano?

  It's pretty un-American to ban technology. And so there's a very difficult balance. And I've changed my mind on this back and forth. You don't want to become China in an effort to beat China.

• 34:07Anthony Pompliano?

  But also, you can't have a national security concern where every teenager in America is getting their brain programmed by an adversary. And so the single greatest solution to this problem would be Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or somebody creating a product that is able to go and drastically change what these teenagers are using. And so rather than complain about TikTok, compete, go win in the free market. And if you can do that, that would be the best solution.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  With that, thank you for your time, Pump.

• 34:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks for doing it.