#1525 Anthony & Polina Pompliano | Exposing Why Wall Street Hates Tariffs

Polina Pompliano, Author of ‘Hidden Genius’ and Founder of The Profile, and Anthony Pompliano, Author of ‘How To Live An Extraordinary Life’ and CEO of Professional Capital Management, discuss everything that is going on with tariffs, why the tariffs will work, what the tariffs will accomplish, and what Wall Street and the media do not understand. =======================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. =======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $500 in rewards.=======================BitcoinOS is bringing Bitcoin into a new era. For the first time, Bitcoiners can access real DeFi across the entire crypto ecosystem, powered by revolutionary zero-knowledge technology. No more trusting sketchy bridges or giving up security. BitcoinOS reunites all of crypto around the chain where it all began. Follow BitcoinOS on twitter @BTC_OS and Be early to Bitcoin again.=======================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 up guys? We got a great conversation for you. Today is with Polina Pompliano, and we're talking tariffs, and we get deep, deep, deep into the spicy details. Polina and I both, we've been talking a lot about this, and so we are understanding what's happening, why it's happening, and then I reveal something as to why I'm so confident

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  that actually a big part of the country, they want the tariffs and they think they're going to work, because I went and I did the work and no one knows it yet. But we'll talk about that later today. And so here's my latest conversation with Paulina Pompliano.

• 0:57Speaker 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.

• 1:21Anthony 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 a 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

• 2:06Anthony Pompliano?

  of a breathtaking comet, 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 where dollars won't. Again, go check it out at gemini.com/go where dollars won't. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin IRA. Are you a crypto investor with a retirement account, but don't have any crypto in your retirement account? Then listen up. This is for you. Bitcoin IRA is revolutionizing the way Americans save for retirement by helping smart investors diversify their savings with access

• 2:48Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:33Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:14Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:58Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Polina, what you got for us?

• 4:59Speaker 02

  All right, let me just, before I dive into this, let me just set the scene a little bit about what my life looks like in the era of tariffs. So we're at home, nice, lovely night. And then at like 8:00, 8:30 PM, the phone starts ringing. All these people start calling you freaking out tariffs. What are you saying? Why are you saying it? I disagree. And so I am having to listen to the tariff conversation all weekend. Tell us more.

• 5:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think a lot of my friends are very smart. I think that they are good, well-intentioned people. And I think that they're very scared and nervous because their portfolios are going down, which is a normal human reaction. Is to be nervous when something is happening that's negatively impacting you. Makes sense. But also, what you didn't say is I've had a number of conversations with my friends who are not in New York or in San Francisco or in LA, who are not in finance or who don't run a company. And those people, they're having the exact opposite conversation, which is I voted for this. I think this is a good idea. Finally, somebody is listening to me. Finally, I feel like there might be hope for the people in my community.

• 6:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And so my big takeaway from the tariffs is it's like a massive magnifying glass on America. And what it is showing is two completely different Americas. One is wealthy people who own assets who have benefited for the last 50 years on the debt fueled growth that we've seen. On this globalization, on this pursuit of cheapest labor possible in the world. That's been amazing for a certain portion of the population. And guess what? The reason why they like that is because it benefited them, obviously. But also, there's a growing number of people who that system is not working for. These people can't afford a home. They're getting hit with high inflation.

• 6:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Their food prices are exploding. Their dollars are being devalued 26% over the last five years. They are not getting raises to keep up with inflation, so their real earning growth is actually negative. There's massive problems for these people, and they happen to live outside of major cities. And so in their communities, the job prospects are much lower. And so there's this huge disconnect between these two groups. And what I keep saying to people is, what you have to remember is that the tariffs and the current economic policy, they're not targeted at helping rich people. They are specifically saying, if we wanted the wealthy people to benefit, we keep doing what we were doing. Now, these policies, it's not saying we're going to abandon the wealthy people and we're only going to help the working class.

• 7:38Anthony Pompliano?

  What they're saying is, we need to go back and get the working class and bring them along for this ride. So both groups can benefit together. Nearly impossible to pull this off, but you have to do something different if you want to try it. And so I'm very supportive of the economic policies. Forget the candidate, forget the administration, the economic policies I am very supportive of, because I think that, one, the pain that is felt by that working class is very real. It's very misunderstood by people who I would consider in my wealthy elite circles. And I also think that those people, what the true secret is, they work harder than the people who do the white collar work.

• 8:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Imagine, I always say this to friends of mine who, like I'm planning on working a lot of hours, all this stuff. Like dude, we literally sit and play on our computers all day. Yeah, you got some stress, people call you, you gotta do some emails, whatever. Imagine if you had to go and work the graveyard shift at a factory, or do manual labor, or in the middle of the summer, you gotta go out and lay bricks, or go up on a roof. Right? There are people in this economy that work their butts off, but they're not seeing the economic reward from that hard work. And part of it is, they don't know that they have opportunities to... Go into higher earning or more skilled labor, things like that, right? Some of it is that you're somebody who's high rise in high school.

• 9:03Anthony Pompliano?

  You're killing the game. You think you're gonna go get a good job. Oh, I had a kid when I was young, or, oh, you know what? I didn't go to college, or all these life events happen as well.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Explain to me how the tariffs would help those specific people.

• 9:17Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a number of different things, and it's not black and white. And I think that's the part where there's a lot of controversy around the tariffs is the tariffs really are doing three different things. We want to raise revenue. We want to reshore and create American jobs. And then we want to get other countries to stop taking advantage of us in bilateral trade. Those three things are ultimately the objective. And the reason why it's important for us to align on those objectives is because if you do policy without an objective in mind, you don't know whether the policy was successful or not. So a tariff very clearly raises revenue. People want to access our market. They have to pay the tariff, whether it's 10%, 30%, 50%, whatever. Now, I personally think that the tariffs, as I have been saying for weeks, if not months now,

• 10:02Anthony Pompliano?

  should be 5% to 10% blanket tariff on all imports to the United States. And then we remove the tariffs for the products that we want to come to the United States. Use tariffs as an incentive system, not a punishment system. That's my stance. What was announced was not that. It was a further kind of aggressive stance, which was 10% on everyone in the world. Cool, we're aligned there. Then we're gonna go country by country and increase the tariffs. So China has 34, 54%, these huge, huge numbers.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  And now this is more of a punitive tariff, but do you think it's a negotiating tactic?

• 10:36Anthony Pompliano?

  So if you stay on the line of what are the objectives, right? If you simply want to raise revenue, then you can just put whatever tariff you want. You're gonna raise the revenue, right? If people want to still access the market. So the whole balance would be what's the highest tariff I can place? Where people still want to access my market? I'm gonna get that revenue. Great. The second thing, though, is that you want to actually go and get these other countries to be a more fair trading partner. So for example, there's a guy on CNN. It's not Fox News. It's not some crazy, you know, right-leaning CNN. Marlin Steel, steel company here in the United States. They sell steel in the US, but they also go and they export steel products all around the world. The CEO is on the factory floor in a CNN interview.

• 11:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And what he says is, I make, and he pulls up a basket. He goes, this is a specialty basket for medical purposes that is made with steel. We make this product. If I take this product and I send it to Germany, when that thing goes into Germany, there's a hundred and I think it was $26 that they have to pay for me to bring it into Germany. If that same product is made in Germany and comes to the United States, they pay like a dollar 50. So that is the imbalance is the American producer. If someone wants to buy their product in Germany, they have to pay this huge tax. But if that same product was made in Germany, wants to come to the United States, there's a lower tax. And so some people say, well, like, that's great for America. It is great, again, for a part of the country because they get access to cheap goods.

• 12:05Anthony Pompliano?

  They have money to do that. That's amazing for them. But what it does is it ultimately hurts the American producer. As the American producer gets put behind, they don't have that level playing field. Now they don't have as much revenue, they don't have as much profits. They have to fire people. You hollow out the manufacturing of America. That middle class now disappears and you ship those jobs overseas. And that's the problem.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  If I remember correctly, from my high school economics class, we talked about how America is like a consumerist economy, right? We're not necessarily producers as much as we used to be. Is that, is that what we're trying to get back to? And what period in time was America a more of a producer economy? And was it better that way than being a consumerist?

• 12:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, because think of it this way. If, if you're hungry, right? Let's say that you want to be a, you want to be a boxer. And nobody knows who you are. Guess what you do? You obsess over training, right? Use Conor McGregor as an example. MMA fighter, famous. On his way up, he was a plumber who quit, who lived with his girlfriend, then wife, at his parents' house. He had nothing, nothing to his name. He was hungry, wide-eyed. I gotta go and I gotta fight. I'm literally going to fight my way out of the position that I am in life. If I can knock people out in that octagon, then I'm gonna make money. If I can make money, I can pull myself up. Guess what? He was very good at doing it. He worked his ass off.

• 13:35Anthony Pompliano?

  He went, he practiced, he got good at it, and he kept knocking people out. He was an entertainer. He gave the market what they wanted, which was somebody who was good and entertaining, and he was able to rise and make a lot of money. But at some point Conor McGregor, he all of a sudden went from the incumbent, or I'm sorry, from the challenger to the incumbent. And then he got kinda fat and happy. Now, all of a sudden, he didn't have that hunger. Now, oh, maybe I'll fight, maybe I won't fight. Right? I don't really need the money. I got too much money now. That's the United States. We used to be that young, hungry fighter that wanted to work really hard, that we had a challenge. We broke away from Europe. We had nothing. The government had no funding. We put tariffs in place to fund the government. All of our industries were infant.

• 14:19Anthony Pompliano?

  They had nothing. We're a very fragile nation. And so if we wanna build ourselves up, if we wanna build strength, then those tariffs protect it. It's part of protecting the country and those industries. And so, as we went up through the Industrial Revolution, we won the game. America is better than anyone else at the world in this Industrial Revolution, and we built America, the greatest economy the world's ever seen. Now, we're fat and happy. We're drunk on debt and eh, you know what? We'll go and we'll patrol the world. What we went from is a country that taxed the world to benefit the American people to now it's flipped. We have very high taxes in America. We have an exploding national debt.

• 15:02Anthony Pompliano?

  We ship a lot of that money all around the world, and then we provide security for people all around the world, and we get nothing in return. These countries, they're not begging for money. These countries have money. These countries have resources. Think about, for example, in the Ukraine situation.

• 15:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, I don't want to see anyone die in a war, right? I've seen what that looks like. That's not good, right? It's actually one of the most barbaric things that people can go through. I think that this administration feels very similarly. But the United States is much more outsized commitments and contributions to supporting the Ukrainian people with weapons and money and all this stuff than the Europeans. Guess what happens? If Russia rolls through Ukraine, they don't come to America next, right? Why is it that the US is being asked to send all this money, all these resources there to an ally, but it is bankrupting us?

• 16:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And so instead, now all of a sudden you say, hey, we're happy to do this, but we need to have a more level playing field. And so that's not necessarily like true trade that we're talking about here, but it's an example of if you go around the world, Taiwan, all of the different bodies of water, if you look at certain parts of the Middle East, if you look at certain parts of Europe, if you look at Latin America, right? If you look at certain countries in Africa, we provide all this security. Those are American taxpayer dollars that are being sent around the world. And now what we're saying is you can't have us do all of that. Plus, when we send you that steel basket, you're going to charge our American producers and put them at a disadvantage in trade than the way we treat you.

• 16:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And so people will argue, oh, we need trade deficits to be able to ship dollars around the world. I disagree with that premise. I don't think we need those trade deficits. And so again, it goes back to this idea that we need to raise revenue, we need to reshore American jobs, which will create, or reshore American manufacturing, which will create jobs, and then we need to get a more level playing field. And other countries know it, because now other countries are showing up to the negotiating table, the UK Prime Minister, Taiwan, Cambodia, all these guys, they're saying, we hear you. We'll drop all the tariffs, we'll drop the trade barriers, we'll invest in America, we'll buy American-made products. They know that they've been getting away with this for a long time. And so that's why I am pro tariff policy, is because I think that we should create a more level playing field, and it's not policies that are necessarily created simply to benefit the wealthy.

• 17:33Anthony Pompliano?

  It is policies that are trying to bring back opportunity, hope, and some sort of financial security for people in this country. And the last thing I'll say is Scott Bestin, the Treasury Secretary, he said a quote that is, it's like been haunting me. I can't stop thinking about this. He said in 2024, during the summer, there was a record number of Americans who went on vacation in Europe. At the same time, in the summer of 2024, there's a record number of Americans who were dependent on a food bank. And that's your two different Americas. And so what we have to do, people can go on vacation to Europe. I love that for them. Be successful, be happy, kill it. But let's not leave behind another portion of the country

• 18:14Anthony Pompliano?

  where we simply are not willing to stand up for ourselves and protect those people. And I think that's ultimately why you're seeing those phone calls at 8pm from all of the people in finance. Now, I don't know how many people have called me or DM'd me on Twitter, probably hundreds at this point.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:29Anthony Pompliano?

  They're all saying a lot of the same thing. But then when I go talk to my friends from the military, I played football with, people that I know who live in these rural communities, they're all saying the exact opposite.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  But do you think they 100% understand what the implications for them could be?

• 18:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that people who are blue collar in these businesses understand how manufacturing and industrial businesses work way better than people on Wall Street.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  They've seen it firsthand.

• 18:57Anthony Pompliano?

  They're in it every day. If you, if you go, here's a good example. If you look and you talk to people on, uh, on Wall Street, here's a comment that go here. If we put a 20% tariff on China, that means products in America are going to go up 20%. You gotta be the dumbest person in the world to think that that's true, right? Cause here's what actually happens is in 2018, we put 20% tariff on China. Guess what? Prices went up 4%. Well, if we put a 20% tariff, why did it only go up 4%? I didn't know. So what did I do? I went and I talked to a bunch of people who were importing products from China during that. And I said, what happened? And you know what they said to me? Oh, well, people think that it's 20%, but here's what actually occurs. There's a producer in China that actually makes the product. Then there's usually some sort of shipper or distributor, et cetera, in China.

• 19:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Then it comes over to the United States and there's a distributor. Then there's a retailer and then there's the customer. Each one of those stops in the supply chain eats a little bit of the tariff. And so no one's going to just simply jack up their prices by the full 20%. Instead, each person kind of takes a little piece of it. Then on top of that, China started to manipulate their currency. And so they were able to try to smooth that tariff and not make it such a big deal in that bilateral trade. And so 20% tariff led to a 4% increases in prices on just the products that were made in China, not on any other products that weren't tariffed. And so it goes to this idea that you can look at things from an academic standpoint, or you can go talk to the people who literally are on the floor.

• 20:23Anthony Pompliano?

  In the last 18 months, I have gone and I have gone to South Carolina and I've gone and I've went to machine shops where literally they're making rock crushers and talked to those people. And how are they actually doing this stuff? I've gone to Michigan and in Michigan, I've literally gone and seen the people who are doing all of the wiring for all these electrical components and stuff where they're sitting on a factory floor and they're assembling these parts and stuff.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Atlanta with the pallets.

• 20:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Went to Atlanta, looked at the pallet brokers and stuff and looked at this stuff. In Florida, I went and I looked at the people who are making the traffic signs, using the actual materials that go on the highways, all this stuff. And along the way, I didn't go because I was like, oh, what happens if tariffs come, right? But I was talking to these business owners. I was listening to these people. I was understanding how these businesses work. And the truth is that they understand this stuff better than the people on Wall Street. The people on Wall Street look at spreadsheets. These people look at actual businesses. The businesses are complex. There's nuance. There's intricacies that don't show up in the spreadsheets. And so I think that is where you're seeing the dichotomy or the paradox between these two groups. Is that Wall Street, it's all about the spreadsheet says it should go up 20%.

• 21:34Anthony Pompliano?

  There's assumptions made. The people on the ground, it's reality. And so I'll take the people with the reality all day long over the people who are making assumptions in a spreadsheet.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Okay, let's, let's talk about Wall Street for a second. So, I mean, I'm sitting here. I'm very convinced by this argument. You've made a good case, but it's important to state that you're a very lonely voice in your take on pro tariffs, right? There's not a lot of people in finance who are willing to say the same, or I don't even know if there's any who like think positively.

• 22:08Anthony Pompliano?

  That's probably why I'm right.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  So, okay, so there's a few people. So Bill Ackman said the tariffs were a major policy error, calling it an economic nuclear war that could have happened.

• 22:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think just to put some nuance, I think that he is okay with the tariffs. He's not okay with the size, severity and abruptness in which they were rolled out.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Right, okay. He proposed the 90-day timeout. Jamie Dimon cautioned that the tariffs could lead to higher inflation, higher inflation and slow economic growth. So don't you think that would affect the people on the ground, though? Higher inflation.

• 22:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, if high inflation happens, of course, it would hurt them. But in 2018, if you go back and you look, all of the products that were tariffed were cheaper within 18 months, and inflation went down, not up, over the next 12 months since the tariffs were implemented. And so the whole idea that people don't realize is that tariffs lead to higher prices on imported goods, imported goods. But the domestic producers, let's get going. And so this whole message of like tariffs, tariffs, tariffs, tariffs, there is a balance to the equation. It's like trying to do math, but you only get one plus, and they don't tell you the rest of the equation.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Tariffs is one piece, but the American producers, this is their prime. This is their Super Bowl. They are going to get to work, and they're going to start producing products here in America. And as you increase supply, it drives down prices. We saw it with steel, saw it with washing machines, we saw it with solar.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Do we think we have enough American manufacturing and producers to do this?

• 23:44Anthony Pompliano?

  It is ridiculous that the American media, the American finance industry thinks that we can't compete on a global scale. Show me who else got reusable rockets. Show me who else builds a $30,000 electric vehicle that can drive itself. Show me who else can do a plethora of other things at the size, scale, and speed that we do. Nobody produces things like America produces. Are there people who can produce shoes and shirts and things like that better than us right now? Of course. But America has Historically has said that is something that they can do because they have cheap labor. Instead, we're going to focus on other things.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Why is it that the American tech industry, the most valuable companies in the world are all in America? Cause we can build things. The problem is that somehow the media and others, they look down on the builders. They say, what do you mean you want to build stuff? Literally, I see people who are building these companies and like, what do you mean that you want to build this stuff here? And so if you go and you look, and I've talked about these companies over and over and over again. These startups, which again, people are like, well, how are they going to be able to service blah, blah, blah, whatever? Hadrian, high-tech manufacturing, do things faster and cheaper and more efficiently than any other manufacturer out there. Right?

• 25:06Speaker 02

  But can they do it on mass scale?

• 25:08Anthony Pompliano?

  They're literally creating the products that are used in Teslas and SpaceX and Anduril, et cetera. You're telling me Anduril, a company that was started, I don't know, a couple of years ago? They are kicking ass of all of the defense contractors. No one builds weapons better than the United States. And our best weapon producer is literally a startup with a guy who's run, who's got a goatee and a Hawaiian shirt on. I will take American entrepreneurs over all of these other countries any day of the week. And so this trope that's like, oh, America can't build anything. Well, guess what? You don't know what you're talking about when I hear someone say that. Because America's doing a pretty damn good job of making things that we need right now.

• 25:48Anthony Pompliano?

  It's that we don't have people who have been in these political offices that are willing to stand up, who are willing to say to these entrepreneurs, what do you need from your government? The government will create the environment that you need to succeed. We will cheer you on and we'll get out of your way.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm tired of hearing how we think that somebody in Cambodia or Vietnam or Thailand or wherever, which are great countries, great people. But you're telling me that they can do things better than the United States of America? There ain't no way.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  But don't you think that this is a little bit of an isolationist approach? I mean, we have to be a global player.

• 26:27Anthony Pompliano?

  We're the biggest global player. What do you mean it's isolationist? All we're saying is, we keep doing all this stuff for you. You have to start not hurting us. We're not saying that all of a sudden you gotta help us. We're not saying that all of a sudden, uh, we need, uh, some of these countries to buy more products from us than we buy from them or something. What we're saying is, stop hurting our country. Stop hurting our producers. Here's another example for you. I think in India, 100% tariff on American-made cars. 100% if I remember correctly. Why? Why should we be okay with that? There's no good answer.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Okay, so you said, in your newsletter today and then earlier in the podcast, you said, Trump has to pull off this impossible task. Why is it impossible?

• 27:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Because what he basically has to do, everything that would be good for the negotiation is bad for the market. Everything that would be good for the market, neuters him at the negotiating table. So what you need to do at the negotiating table and what you need to project to your foreign leaders, kind of your adversaries in the negotiation, is we are strong, we are tough, we are not gonna back down, we're serious, come to the negotiating table, give us a good offer. If you don't give us a good offer, we're gonna keep the tariffs in place and we are going to crush you in, uh, until you go ahead and you create this level playing field. Because the whole thing is, there's no free trade. Right? These countries are tariffing us. These countries are manipulating their currencies, they're subsidizing their producers, they're doing all this stuff. And so you gotta be super strong with them. That you negotiate from a position of strength.

• 28:07Anthony Pompliano?

  But if you do that and you keep doubling and tripling down on the tariffs, the market's gonna be in freefall. So what you have to do is, you have to go to the market and say, everyone calm down. I'm gonna get a deal done. Don't worry, I'm focused on getting the deals done. Calm, zen, patience. But now you're weakening your position at the negotiating table. And so there's a tightrope walk. You've got to be strong to your negotiating partner, but you've got to be clear, patient, and very, very focused on the finality of the situation to the market. And that's just a very hard thing to walk. And so guess what happens? Why do you see Scott Besson out there talking about, "We're going to get deals done"? He's talking to Wall Street. Trump's talking to the negotiating table. I'm not backing down. No, that's not a good enough deal. Let him be the tough guy to the negotiations,

• 28:52Anthony Pompliano?

  and then let Besson talk to the market and try to calm everyone down.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Interesting. I just, by the way, looked up the free trade definition in the dictionary. Free trade is defined as international trade left to its natural course without tariffs, quotas, or other restrictions.

• 29:07Anthony Pompliano?

  There is no free trade. That's the whole point. There is no free trade. Anyone who says, "I believe in free trade," then you should be for tariffs, because the whole point of the tariff is that you ultimately want them to back down.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:20Anthony Pompliano?

  We're not going to leave tariffs at 54% against China. If they go ahead and they give concessions, we will bring those back down.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  I think that the rest of the world defines free trade as free trade for the United States should participate in free trade, but other countries can kind of...

• 29:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Which isn't free trade.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Well, right.

• 29:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Of course. Is, "Hey, we want free access to your market, but you can't have free access to our market." And now what we're saying is, again, it goes back to, "How did our country get built?" We're going from the fat, happy cat who's literally getting fed grapes laying on your, you know, sunbed next to your pool at 2 o'clock, taking a siesta, to now, all of a sudden, we're going back. We're saying, "Hey, you've got to get in the gym. We're doing three workouts a day. Let's get this moving. There's no more grapes. No one's feeding you. You're going to drink protein shakes. You're going to start doing pushups. Let's get to work." And guess what? All the people you hear screeching, they ain't doing the work. Right? They're not the ones who we need to step up.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  You know what I'm very interested in? From a media perspective, I'm very interested in how this gets covered, because I actually think for... There's been a generation of journalists who went to journalism school, et cetera, et cetera. But it used to be that you were trained on a lot of this stuff and covering trade and covering like international affairs. And then it became more like, "Let's cover culture and what's happening inside the United States." So I'm very curious to see whether this kind of like... You know, a new group of media emerges that really focuses and specializes in international affairs.

• 30:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, I think that if you're a journalist and you think you've over rotated and you've talked to a lot of people on Wall Street, but you want to talk to people in these blue collar industries, call me, email me, DM me on Twitter. I'll introduce you to them. They're happy to talk to you. But when the Marlin Steele CEO goes on television and he literally says, "I now feel like there's going to be a level playing field," give me the opportunity.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  What was CNN's take on that?

• 31:19Anthony Pompliano?

  He said, "Give me the opportunity to pull the people in the local community out of poverty and back into the middle class. I want to create good, high-paying jobs for these people. Give us the opportunity. These people want to work." And that's the difference is that everyone else who is not talking to these people, who is not listening to what they're saying, they think that they are unskilled, that they're dumb, that they don't know what they're doing. Most of these people, in many cases, maybe not most, but many of them, have bigger businesses than the people I know on Wall Street. Right? If you go and you look at this, some of these businesses are doing hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. And so you say to yourself, "These people are not idiots. They've chosen to operate in a different industry.

• 31:59Anthony Pompliano?

  It's an industry that's important to the country, and if you give them a shot, they will deliver for you." And I think that is ultimately why I continue to say that the political parties have swapped. These people that used to be hardcore Democrats, somehow now the working class has shifted over, and they now are actually voting Republican. And the things that the parties believed have swapped. And again, it's not good or bad, right? You have to get away from the party allegiance and simply say, "What do I believe? Do I believe that we should have unfettered ability for us to compete on a level playing field?"

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. Do I believe that we should be anti-war? That we should operate from a position of strength, but that strength is used to deter any sort of war? That used to be a Democrat talking point. That is not anymore. And so this is where ultimately I think that people are trying to figure all this out. And again, I don't care about the parties. I don't care about 99% of the policies that have been announced, both by Biden and Trump. I don't care. But this one in particular, I feel very, very, very strongly that Bitcoiners understand it better than most because we understand currencies, we understand trade, we understand decentralization, we understand the dollar and the national debt and all these things we've been studying for years. Yeah.

• 33:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And also I've been not only talking to, I've gone and literally walked the factory floors. Right? I've gone and I've talked to these people. I've sat in their conference rooms and I've said, explain to me your business. Explain to me your input cost. Explain to me. But here's a great one. I and a friend of mine, we went to Michigan and we went and we saw an electric harness. The electric harness is crucial to almost every single piece of electronics. An electric vehicle has something like 40 something electrical harnesses in it. Right? It is the connectivity between all the electrical components, all the stuff. I noticed on the factory floor, there was tons of women and they were assembling these electrical harnesses.

• 34:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And I asked the guy who runs the company, I said, why are there so many women here? That surprised me. I would have thought it's supposed to be long grueling hours, it's in a factory, like all these assumptions that I had as an idiot going into this situation. And he said to me, well, when you're assembling the wire harnesses, actually one of the really important parts is the dexterity and nimbleness of your fingers. In the same way that sewing and the electrical harnesses. And so actually women end up doing a better job and they're drawn to it more so than men are because men who have bigger fingers and stuff, they have a harder time doing it. That's only something that you learn if you want to look at what is the impact on labor going to be in the manufacturing sector?

• 34:50Anthony Pompliano?

  If you go and you talk to the CEOs, if you go and you actually look at this stuff. And so I think that's the big disconnect is that the people on Wall Street, they're watching the news, they're talking to their friends, they're reading their spreadsheets. I love my friends. I think that they're incredibly smart. They're going to figure out how to make money here. It's just a different experience, it's a different set of knowledge than the people who are on the ground. And I think that's why people are like, why is this guy going so hard at this? It's because frankly, those people, they don't have a voice. And I think that people are drastically underestimating what they think. And to me, they're the more important group over the long run, is we need them to step up and deliver for the country. And I think they're gonna do that.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I just gotta say, the thing that I've been most surprised by with tariffs is I did not expect this to be this hot button of a topic where I'm, now I'm getting messages about you talking about tariffs. You've been getting crazy things online about it.

• 35:51Anthony Pompliano?

  That's how I know I'm right. That's how I know I'm right. You want to know why? The more that people don't allow the dissenting voice, the more you know you're over the target. It has become taboo. If you come out and you say tariffs are good, you get attacked. You get called stupid. You get called, oh, you're just a partisan hack. Oh, you're a mouthpiece for the administration. These people don't know me, right? Again, I have no party legions whatsoever. But the more they attack me, the more I know I'm right.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  The thing that I think makes me a little nervous is even if you're right, I think that there's a big part where you have to just like trust that the Trump administration's gonna pull this off. And you have nothing to do with them. So therefore, it's hard because it's like, it's not like you're advising them. You know what I mean?

• 36:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. But it goes back to, the policy is correct. I disagree with going huge and going 54% in China and all this stuff. So you can disagree with the nuances, right? I wish that there were certain communications. I wish they were more call to action for the entrepreneurs and industrial manufacturing businesses, etc. There's a lot of stuff that I actually think that they should have done differently. But ultimately, their goal is an admirable one. I think that they're listening to the people who voted for them. And I think that the policy directionally is correct. And I hope, and I'll be the first one to say, if they don't pull down the tariffs into that 5 to 10% range, I'll say, look, they went too far. Right, but I think it's a negotiating tactic. I think it's anchoring. I think that it's shock and awe.

• 37:22Anthony Pompliano?

  But again, if they don't pull it down, I'll be the first one to criticize them and say, hey, what are you guys doing? And so can you be supportive of the direction? But disagree with the details? That's really hard for a lot of people to do because they simply want the answer, black and white tariffs, good tariffs, bad. What is it?

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:36Anthony Pompliano?

  It's not how the world operates.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Cool. Thanks so much.

• 37:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Appreciate you guys watching. Talk later.