Pod Insights The Pomp Podcast #1545 Anthony Scaramucci | How Trump’s Trade Policies Could Supercharge Bitcoin About this episode Anthony Scaramucci is the Founder and Managing Partner of SkyBridge Capital. In this conversation we talk about bitcoin, tariffs, economy, Trump, and his brand new bitcoin book.=======================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.=======================Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join.=======================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/
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Anthony Pompliano? What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on guys? Today, we've got an awesome episode with Anthony Scaramucci, the better-looking, younger Italian version of me. Anthony is not only a smart person, but he also is very, very well-educated when it comes to history, history of money,
0:44 Anthony Pompliano? history of economics, and also understanding where the world is going. In this conversation, Anthony and I get deep into what's going on with Bitcoin, the economy, terrorists, Trump, Kamala Harris even comes up, and we even talk about his brand-new book, The Little Book of Bitcoin. Hope you guys enjoy the conversation. Here's my latest episode with Anthony Scaramucci.
1:03 Speaker 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.
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4:05 Anthony Pompliano? All right, Anthony, I thought a great place to start this conversation. Bitcoin is doing okay because of all these tariff talks while the stock market is down. Did you expect Bitcoin to be higher or what's going on? Why is Bitcoin kind of going sideways while the tariffs are destroying the stock market?
4:20 Speaker 02 So I would have said that the hope is that Bitcoin would be making a transition away from a linked Mag7 tech asset, NASDAQ asset, to something that's more non-correlative, that would be more akin to digital property slash digital value, digital gold, et cetera, store of value. And so I think what's happening is the Trump tariffs, and obviously you and I have some intellectual disagreement on those, but I think that the Trump tariffs, I feel the policies are misguided, but what they are doing is they are leading us to a world where a non-sovereign digital currency, there's a much bigger, much broader bullish case
5:05 Speaker 02 for it. And so let's just pretend we're the rest of the world for a moment. You and I are both Americans, love America, both patriotic Americans, but we're 4% of the world's population. We might be 26% of the world's output, but let's examine the other 96% of the people who are like, wait, whoa, we've relied on the dollar. Dollar primacy has gotten way stronger, Anthony, way stronger. Actually, in the last 20 years, stronger than people like Ken Rogoff, who just wrote a new book about that the dollar thought would get other economists, but it's incredibly, it's controlling the global economy. Okay, so the United States not only has 26% of the world's output, but our money is controlling the world economy.
5:49 Speaker 02 And I think the earthquakes that the tariffs are presenting are suggesting to people, wait a minute, we may need to have a different strategy here, or we may need to be decoupled from one sovereign's currency. And so I think that is what's contributing to Bitcoin strength, relative strength. Obviously, the markets are down anywhere from 5% to 8%, but Bitcoin is holding its own. It's probably roughly where it was at the beginning of the year.
6:18 Anthony Pompliano? Do you think that we are going through a reordering of the global monetary order and therefore Bitcoin will be the big winner and it'll become like the next global reserve currency? Or do you think that we get more of like a bipolar, you know, maybe there's an east-west currency or like, how do you see this playing out moving forward?
6:36 Speaker 02 So what I would say to you is no, I think the dollar is going to stay in its primary position. I think even with what's going on with the Trump situation, I think it's very, very hard to find an equivalent. And I think that there's a sturdiness to our system. And one of the beauties of the system is a very flat decentralized system. And so I think the dollar maintains its primacy, but I do think that people will be safeguarding themselves against executive policy behavior. So again, not the people in your podcast need a history lesson, but these powers got ceded to the president because the Congress was too cowardly to control these powers. The Congress once had the power to declare
7:21 Speaker 02 war. They did that in Vietnam. They all got ousted from their seats, lots of protests. So they said, let's leave it to the executive. And so they said to the executive, if you declare emergency, Emergency Powers Act, then we'll let you declare war, we'll let you make tariffs, more or less whatever you want them to be. But the tariff power, if you will, alongside of the taxing power, because the tariffs are effectively another form of taxation, really resided in the Congress. And so now that we're telling the world we're not going to do that anymore. And so we're going to have an executive, you know, could be a Democrat or Republican, there'll be some arbitrariness, there'll be some capricious
8:01 Speaker 02 nature to the administration of it. You better defend yourself. I think that's really the answer. So how do you defend yourself? That's why gold's moving around the world. Gold is at an all time high. And Bitcoin, for people of your generation, younger than mine, and even people that are your children's generation, Anthony, would be ultimately my grandchildren, will end up having Bitcoin as a store of value. So to me, I'm not saying the dollar's going away. I think the dollar outlives Donald Trump and his policies and will stay in his primary position. But I do think if you're a smart business person or smart capital allocator around the world, smart political executive, you're going to have other things in your portfolio now.
8:46 Anthony Pompliano? Well, you're obviously the youngest, best looking Italian on this podcast right now, and you sometimes go to the Middle East, to Asia, to Europe, many places around the world, and you talk to all these institutional investors.
8:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things I love about you. I love the tie with the rep qualities. I love the American flag. I love you sitting in the back of the press room where I once gave a press conference. I love, I love all the things about you.
9:13 Anthony Pompliano? It was in the fake press conference.
9:14 Speaker 02 You know what I love the most about you is that you really try to bullshit a bullshitter. I mean, that's what's the best part about you. Like, okay, not only am I younger and better looking than Scaramucci, let me see if I can out bullshit him, even though he has 30 more years of experience of bullshitting. Let me see if I can out bullshit him on my own podcast.
9:31 Anthony Pompliano? I'm not going to ask you if you have pants on right now in this interview, but...
9:34 Speaker 02 I don't have pants on. I want to see. Look, I don't have pants on.
9:40 Anthony Pompliano? I know. Come on. All right. So here, here's my question though.
9:42 Speaker 02 You have pants on, by the way. You're in your office, so you must have pants on.
9:44 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, I got pants on. Come on.
9:45 Speaker 02 I don't have pants on, but you know, I put the shirt and tie on.
9:49 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, you look great though.
9:50 Speaker 02 Out of respect for Anthony Pompliano.
9:52 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, I put it on for respect for you. All right. So you go to the institutions. You go to the Middle East, you go to Europe, you go to Asia, you go to all these different places. And when you go there, you talk to lots of institutional investors. You probably more so than many people, really have a lot of trust. They tell you what they're thinking. They explain what their views are. What are they saying about Bitcoin right now? Are they all like buying it up and not announcing it yet? Or what's going on?
10:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I think they are. I think they are buying it. I think they're buying it on the margin. I don't think it's going to be a gigantic...
10:28 Speaker 02 Groundswell of buying until we green light legislation in the United States. So if you tell me before the end of the congressional term, we've got stablecoin regulation, we've got guidance for money center banks and how they can custody Bitcoin and other assets, and we have some discussion about the tokenization of stocks and bonds and other assets. Then I will tell you that there'll be large blocks of buying. Or there are people worth 10, 20, 30 trillion dollars buying a half a billion dollars of Bitcoin, buying a billion dollars of Bitcoin, yes. Or the people on the margin buying Bitcoin today, yes.
11:12 Speaker 02 But if you want to see a million dollar Bitcoin, that's when somebody at a sovereign says, okay, this is part of the infrastructure of the world's financial services architecture, a result of which I have to own some of this property, have to own this rail system. And they try to establish 1, 2, 3% positions in their portfolio. And so, so again, you're, I think you're with me on this, where this is my position, Brad Messing, Skybridge Capital's position, that Bitcoin is an asset class. If Bitcoin's an asset class, then it trades 20, 30 trillion dollars in market capitalization akin to gold.
11:53 Speaker 02 If it's an investment, then it will be in the 1, 2, 3 trillion dollar area alongside of the MAG7 stocks as an interesting investment and a potentially heirloom collectible. But if you're telling me that things like Stacks, the Lightning Network, things are going to start to evolve in the system that allows us to use Bitcoin in varying different ways, then yes, you'll see way more institutional ownership. And by the way, I got this wrong. I'll be very happy to admit that to people on your podcast. If you had asked me that question three years ago, let's say it was January or December of 2021 into January 2022, and you said, is there going to be institutional buying? I would have said, there's going to be massive institutional buying.
12:38 Speaker 02 Institutional buying, I got that wrong. People are slow on the uptake because most of the people running these institutions, Anthony, are older, they're in their 60s, they have some skepticism about Bitcoin. Hunter Horsley, a friend of ours, both you and I know him well, has told me that there are, there are people out there that are buying gold right now, and they think it's more portable and it's easier to use than Bitcoin. Okay, and they're, you know, but their, their, their birth dates are in the 1960s or in the 1950s, not the 80s, 90s or the 2000s.
13:10 Anthony Pompliano? When you think about the other investors that you probably interface a lot with this kind of this like private wealth channel, what are they doing, right? It's one thing for these big institutions that are sovereign wealth funds or whatever, but the private wealth, they have a client or they have maybe a model portfolio or, or, you know, it's kind of a different thing. What are they doing?
13:30 Speaker 02 Well, they're cautious. I mean, again, I'm, I'll, I'll, I'll make their case for a second. They're cautious. I mean, the, the, the original knee jerk reaction is the sailor reaction. I wrote about this in my book, The Little Book of Bitcoin. Michael Saylor was a Bitcoin skeptic.
13:45 Speaker 02 Paul Tudor Jones, Bitcoin skeptic. Larry Fink has the largest, most successful Bitcoin ETF in the world as recently as 2021, was a Bitcoin skeptic. I started out as a skeptic. And so what's, what's happening is, is that there's just a slow glacial move to acceptance. As it becomes more accepted, then it, then it's going to scale more broadly. But a wirehouse is sitting there saying, I don't want to lose my client. The wirehouse doesn't say, Anthony, come on in. I'm going to try to triple your assets. The wirehouse says, Anthony, come on in, I'm going to get you six, seven, not going to hurt you or your family, I'm going to take some fees from you, and I'm going to be happy, my shareholders are going to be happy,
14:29 Speaker 02 your private wealth manager is going to be happy. And you're going to basically be not unhappy. Yeah, I'm not saying you're going to be happy. And so why take a risk on something that's ill founded? You know, there'll be Super Bowls on Bitcoin at a million. There are Super Bears on Bitcoin at 10,000. And by the way, they sold me out. I mean, they took my fund. My fund was a buy on almost every one of those wirehouses. It got it got downgraded to a sell. Once I put the Bitcoin position on, if you know, and I'm allowed to talk about my performance. But again, I put the Bitcoin position on average price at around 20,000 a coin. The coins are trading at 90,000. And so you would imagine that that was quite beneficial to our performance.
15:13 Speaker 02 And not without some roller coaster activity. You know, we did very poorly in 2021. Lots of negative articles written about us. Your wife, Paulina, was kind enough to write an article that was at least observant of the facts. You know, we've had very good performance. But the wirehouses fired me four years ago. When Bitcoin was at 20,000, they're about to announce Bitcoin purchases and Bitcoin allocation strategies for their clients four or five years later. So I don't say that with any level of derision. I actually understand that they have to be behind first movers. They have to be behind innovators because their number one thing is not blow up the client.
15:57 Speaker 02 Number one thing is try not to lose the client in terms of the client being a client and try not to lose the client any money. And so, and certainly you don't want bad press. And so I'm capable of taking bad press. You're capable of taking bad press, although you always get good press. It could be part of your looks and your charm that allow you to have that good press. But I, I take it. I got a lot of bows and arrows and don't mind it.
16:22 Anthony Pompliano? When you think of the current administration, you're not the biggest fan. I think that's safe to say. But they are good for Bitcoin and kind of crypto assets in general? Or do you think that the potential negatives of the economic policies and like broader financial market impact could actually still be a negative for Bitcoin and crypto?
16:46 Speaker 02 So I think the policies are good for crypto. As I, as I pointed out, if you're going to have mayhem in the markets, mayhem in the global trading system, I think more people will lean on Bitcoin. I think you're making a bold case for Bitcoin. I don't like the policies. I don't think the policies make sense for America. I think what, what Donald Trump is very good at is he can identify a problem and there's truth, a lot of truth in what he's saying, and I do admire that about him. And then the step, the bridge to the policy, let's be fair to him for a moment, the bridge to the policy on the border identifies the problem. We definitely have a problem on the border. He inputs a set of policies that reduce the traffic at the border.
17:29 Speaker 02 That's a win, result win for the Trump administration, so much so that I'll make a prediction, it'd be very hard for the Democrats to campaign going forward on an open border. Americans don't want that. And as a conservative, Milton Friedman, the conservative economist, would tell you, you can't have an open border, Anthony, because if you're in a welfare state, which the U.S. is a welfare state, market forces dictate that people will run across the border to participate in the welfare state. So you have to have a controlled border. I'm for legal immigration. I believe you are also for legal immigration. Helps our population growth, expands our economy, but you can't have, that's kind of nonsense. So he did a very good job on that.
18:10 Speaker 02 He's right that there have been trading unfairness, a lack of trading parity in the marketplace. But you have to step back and you have to look at it holistically. It, it was a feature and a design of the American trading system. So not to take your people through 80 years of trade history, but the United States basically said in 1946, we're going to accept
18:36 Speaker 02 Tariffs from other countries as we export our goods and services and we're going to allow them to come into our country relatively unfettered. Why? At that point, we were 2.5% of the world's population, 65% of the world's economic output, and the US took a position that rising living standards around the world would reduce the likelihood of a conflict. Nobody wanted to have a third world war. And so we even, in addition to that, we bolstered that, Anthony, with the Marshall Plan. So the trading system was set up to be uneven in the beginning. I haven't talked to President Trump about this in a long time, but I would think even he believed that that was long-term a good strategy for America because it expanded
19:19 Speaker 02 our soft power, expanded our influence around the world, lots of American popularity post Second World War in the free world. Where the president is right is that unevenness, Anthony, went unchecked for too many years. And then to further compound the problem, in the late 90s, we made a decision, the Clinton administration made a decision to let China in to the World Trade Organization. And if you remember this, China came in as an emerging country. And so China had the benefits of protectionist strategies for themselves, but we had leniency towards them as they were exporting not only here into the United States, but around the world. And Clinton said, "We're doing that to urbanize
20:02 Speaker 02 people. We're doing that to make China a less poor country." And, by the way, the more that we do this, the more they'll integrate into the world. And since it'll be prosperous for them, they'll accept the rules-based order of the world and they'll morph their system into something that looks more like democratic capitalism. Now, you're not old enough to remember this, but I am, and I got this severely wrong. In 1999, American workers went to the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle and they protested. They said, "This is terrible. You can't do this. You'll hollow out our industries. You'll vanquish our manufacturing. We'll lose our middle-class jobs. You have to have more checks on the Chinese."
20:46 Speaker 02 I was a young Wall Streeter, 29 years old in 19, actually 35 in 1999 when they did this. I said, "Jesus, this is stupid. We need lower cost of capital." Peace dividend was going in the US. Francis Fukuyama said, "The end of history. We're all gonna globalize. We're gonna be one happy community, one happy family." The protesters are wrong. Well, the protesters were right, Anthony. The arrogant Wall Streeters, which would include me, we got it wrong. Okay, and so, anyway, fast forward, Trump was right.
21:23 Speaker 02 These malpractices by establishment politicians in the United States allowed for China's rise. And again, let me just continue to add to this. They linked their currency to our currency. Our currency was getting devalued at the time because of our deficit. They were an exporting nation. They should have had a strengthening currency at that time, but they had a weakening currency because we let them couple their currency to our currency. That's how they printed 10, 12, 15% growth. So again, the president's right about all that stuff. It needed to be recalibrated. He moved with Robert Lighthizer in the first administration
22:08 Speaker 02 to recalibrate that. One of the things, again, he's also right about is they were supposed to buy certain amounts of products from us, agricultural products from us and so forth. In the ensuing four or five years, they didn't do that. So he is also right about that. They'd like the system to stay status quo. But I would have recommended to the president something less aggressive than this because he's got the dollar. He's got the dollar primacy. If he wants more manufacturing in the US, he could create tax-free enterprise zones, something he talked about in the campaign.
22:48 Speaker 02 He could effectively create new cities in the United States using the tax policy to reshore manufacturing by...
22:57 Speaker 02 By doing it this way, it's going to cause too much of a supply shock in the system. It's going to be overly disruptive to the American economy and overly disruptive short term to the American worker. And so I don't agree with the strategy. Okay, but I'm not going to tell you that the president is not right. So again, got the border right, took that under his care with very good policy. The border problem is generally fixed. I give him a lot of credit for that. We're going to get to crypto in a second. The trade policy, I would have just simply said, listen, I signed a deal with you guys. You didn't adhere to the deal. You got 60 days to start adhering to the deal. If you don't want to adhere to the deal, you know, I have to ratchet up tariffs on you and I have to figure out with my allies.
23:41 Speaker 02 I wouldn't have ripped up the European contracts. I wouldn't have ripped up USMCA. He called it the greatest deal ever. He's the one that put the deal in place. If you didn't like aspects of the deal, I would have gone to those trading partners and said, listen, I'm back in town. I don't like aspects of the deal. Let's fix this. And oh, by the way, Europe, let's fix this. And then all of us together as citizens of the free world, let's take on the Chinese. But he declared war on everybody in a 360 degree angle. And I'm just questioning that as a long term policy. I think that that is a policy that will unnecessarily hurt the US consumer, unnecessarily
24:21 Speaker 02 hurt the US worker, when he had other options. He had other game theory options to deploy. So, so again, I'm trying to be as pragmatic, as probably open minded to what he's doing, but I'm trying to offer you balance. On the crypto side, I would say you're at the Trump buffet table. And so what happens at the Trump buffet? You get a very large buffet. Imagine you're at Mar-a-Lago, you got a very large buffet. You can't take your plate to the Trump buffet and pick out pro crypto like regulation and better taxation policy and better banking policy and, and stable coin legislation and then take the plate back to your seat. You can't do that.
25:03 Speaker 02 With Donald Trump, you have to eat everything at the table. And so that would include the meme coin activity that started before the inauguration, the world liberty coin stuff that started before the inauguration. It would include post inauguration, put money into my meme coin and have lunch with me or dinner with me. It would include his sons and Wicoff's son going around the world touting the deals that they're doing and how the deals are connected into US policy. I think that that's a dangerous thing to do. And I know there's what aboutism, right? We had Hunter Picasso Biden. I mean, his middle name was Picasso. He was selling paintings for millions of dollars. And then after his father no longer was president, we dropped
25:47 Speaker 02 the middle name Picasso, right? He can't sell his paintings anymore. So I know there's what aboutism and hypocrisy on both sides. But what I'm saying is, I like the pro crypto legislation. As a person whose business is reliant on this, I disparage the Biden administration, Elizabeth Warren, Gary Gensler and others. I said, these are very bad for US industry, very bad for US financial services. If you want to maintain our mantle of financial services leadership, you have to have the right crypto policies. So I applaud the president for that. But again, unfortunately, you get everything. And I think some of this stuff is mucking
26:28 Speaker 02 up the wheels. It's ungreasing the wheels of progress towards good stablecoin legislation, greater clarity at the SEC, greater ideas about what banks are going to be doing in terms of custody. And so again, people can disagree with me and they say he's resoundingly great for crypto. If you're asking me a question, is he a better guy, better president for crypto than Kamala Harris? Yes. Is he a better guy for the US economy or Kamala Harris? I got that at a maybe because of what he's doing with the trade situation, okay? If he was Trump, one, it would have been a resounding yes, but Trump, two, I think there's some
27:10 Speaker 02 level of chaos. And by the way, you can't negotiate 70 country.
27:17 Speaker 02 One per country trade deals, Anthony. You can't do it in 60 days. It's not possible. Okay. If you ask a trade rep, it usually takes about 18 months to negotiate a one country to country trade deal. So, you know, you're going to run out of supplies here in the U.S. We effectively have a trade embargo going on with the Chinese. And of course, the Chinese are clever people. They're, they're half manufacturing there and they're shipping goods to be finished in places that don't have as big of a burdensome tariff. But that in itself is still a problem. I, I, I think there's a cleaner way to do this. And I think there's a more prosperous way, not only for America, but for the rest of the world to do this.
27:57 Anthony Pompliano? One of the things I find interesting is you, Ken Griffin, Mark Rowan, I can go through the list. A lot of people, I think, are coming to the conclusion, he's calling out the right problem. He's taking steps to try to get to the right solution. I don't like the way he's doing it. I don't like the steps, or you know, some version of that. And it does feel like, I think I heard David Sacks say this recently. It does feel like that is a different conversation than even, you know, four or five months ago. And I'm not saying that he's gonna end up being right or wrong, or this is gonna work or not, or whatever. But just like, it almost feels like in a weird way, by him talking about and doing some of this stuff, which I think anyone objectively can say is like, have
28:38 Anthony Pompliano? been very chaotic and the messaging and, you know, all these kind of issues. It has brought a ton of attention to it. And attention doesn't necessarily mean solution will happen. But it does mean that the more people are paying attention to it, maybe the odds go up that we get to a solution, even if it is chaotic and uncertain and, you know, kind of volatile along the way. Would you agree with that?
29:00 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, I think, I think you're making a bigger case for him. I think you're saying that he's a disruptive guy. And sometimes you need a disruptive guy to come into the situation, shack the system and put it a little bit on tilt to get it right.
29:12 Anthony Pompliano? But, but I also, and, and, you know, I think one of the things that maybe people don't realize, like, here's one of the things that I've talked a lot about. I don't think Biden got enough credit for the stock market performance under his time in office. And I think that There's plenty of stuff that people could critique him on and did critique him on and was right, right? So it's like, you know, Biden had positives and negatives. Trump, same thing. There's positives and negatives, but I think with him and these policies, one of the areas that I go to is like, okay, and I think you actually offered this is like, what else would you do? Right? So if everyone agrees like this is a problem, then we got to do something to address it. What else would you do? You're unique in that you actually have other ideas,
29:56 Anthony Pompliano? right? You're like, hey, there's kind of, you know, a more clear path to doing this. You can go enforce the current rules, all things you described. But I do wonder how much of the United States policy right now is if somebody else was president, we would just be kind of going along the same path. The debt would be exploding, like all these issues that we had. And so I kind of come back to this idea of just like, what's the one thing, if we had to pick one thing for him to be successful on? I don't, I don't know if it's the trade war stuff, right? To me, that feels like it's not the single most important thing. Some people would say the border. Some people would say the national debt. Some people would say, you know, they'd all have kind of different things to pick. If you had to pick one thing and you were like, you know, I have to pick one thing for
30:40 Anthony Pompliano? Trump to be successful on that would really define a presidency and or ensure that Americans are better off in the future than they are today. Like, what do you think the one most important thing for this current administration to do?
30:53 Speaker 02 Well, again, I mean, one of the things you learn when you work in the White House, you have a plan and then your plan meets contact with the enemy and then the plan changes, right? You know, there was a joke about infrastructure week in Trump one, they never got there because there's so much things that are going on at the same time. So, so what I, what I would say to you is that if I wanted, if I wanted to see one thing for the US, it would be economic growth. Because economic growth and if, and if we could get it done in a way where capital and labor are roughly 50%. Like, if you bring Mike Novogratz on, when he worked in the White House, he would tell you the rule of thumb was 20% of the US federal budget.
31:37 Speaker 02 Should be tied to 20% of our GDP. It's at like 26, 27. Now it's too high. But the other thing you would know, our moments of greatest prosperity is when the distribution, the economic rent between capital and labor coming from a productive enterprise or an economy is roughly 50, 50, Anthony. That's when we feel our most prosperous. That's when we feel our most aspirational. The irony there is that the capital, there's less people that own the capital. They get very rich in that period of time, but the poorer people don't care because they feel aspirational. They have a platform, frankly, like my dad did in the seventies and the eighties where he wasn't rich, but didn't care. There was enough opportunity for his sons and his daughter to live an aspirational life in America.
32:20 Speaker 02 So when you go 55, 45, yes, you'll get a Jeff Bezos at 200 billion or Elon Musk at 300 billion, and I don't begrudge them. God bless them. Don't want equal opportunity to be changed to equal outcome. I want equal opportunity, unequal outcome. So God bless those guys. But I'm just saying to you, from a socioeconomic historical analysis, 50, 50, we do great. We're something like 55, 45 right now, and there's a lot of people that are unhappy about that. So if you said to me, the president was going to achieve economic growth, and there was going to be a better distribution of the economic rent back to something that
33:04 Speaker 02 makes Americans happy, I think that solves a lot of problems. Moreover, I do believe you can outgrow the deficit. And I think you believe this because I listen to you and I read your newsletters. I think you see the abundance coming with AI, the abundance coming in biotech, the abundance coming in automation, robotics. There's a tremendous potential to unleash another gigantic wave of economic growth where we're way richer in 100 years than we are today. All of us, all of our living standards. And again, economists will point out the lowest members of our society here in America are middle to potentially upper middle class in certain countries around the world.
33:48 Speaker 02 And so I'll say this to you, and I want to say this to you to provoke you. If I gave you 150,000 US dollars, they were 19.
34:00 Speaker 02 Twenty-five dollars. You have one hundred and fifty thousand of them. And you could be one of the richest people in the society per year if you made that amount of money. And I said, but you gotta live in nineteen twenty-five. But here's the one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Or I gave you one hundred and fifty thousand dollars of two thousand twenty-five dollars, but you gotta live in two thousand twenty-five. And one person is exogenously crazy rich. The other person is probably, at least in the city of New York, in the middle class, right? But the question is, which society you want to live in? I'm taking the society with the better medicine, the better streaming service, the 4K Super
34:41 Speaker 02 Bowl game that I can watch on Super Bowl Sunday versus the transitioning economy from the locomotive and the horse and buggy into the automotive. And you're getting the point that I'm making. And so if we can scale up, we can cure the deficit, we can solve some of these problems. But there's right or wrong policy. And I'm not talking about left or right policies, there's right or wrong policy. I think some of these policies are misguided. But one other point I wanted to make to you, which I think is important for your listeners, is Trump's view of Europe. I think people need to understand this because I do. And this comes from my time on the campaign with him. And remember, even though I was only in the White House for 11 days, I did spend almost a year with him, traveling the
35:25 Speaker 02 country, did 71 campaign stops. Trump believes that the euro was put in place to devalue the industrial currencies in Europe. So just stay with me for a minute. Euro's created, it binds the industrial, stronger nations of France and Germany to weaker industrial nations like Portugal and Greece and Spain. Okay, Italy has become a little bit more industrialized, but that would have been included 30 years ago when it was originated. And so it pulls down where the Deutschmark would trade in the free market, right? And so the euro really is just in a fixed exchange rate among those.
36:10 Speaker 02 Countries, it's not really a sovereign currency like the US dollar, right? We have a 50-state free trading bloc, they have a 25-state fixed exchange rate. And so when Trump says things like, "Oh, they rigged the system against us," or, you know, "The EU, the European Economic Union was designed to plunder us because they got the Deutschmark lower through the euro and they exported their products to the United States at a lower currency price." Okay, and so that's something I think is important for people to understand when we're having these conversations around the world. And so there was an opportunity to do a Bretton Woods, too.
36:54 Speaker 02 There was an opportunity to do a Plaza Accords, where we could say to everybody and say, "Okay, we're all fairly rich now, we're all fairly stable countries, it's not 1945. This is what's fair to America at this point, and let's get there over time." I know I'm not going to force it today, but I'm going to give everybody six months to get into compliance with this, and that would have been way less disruptive to the supply chain, it would have been way less disruptive to the stock market and people's 401Ks. And so he didn't do that, and so we have a little bit of a COVID-19 situation going on. It's sort of Trump 25, where in COVID-19, the supply chain got shocked, and it caused
37:38 Speaker 02 a lot of shortages, which led to inflation. You know, Fed thought it was transitory, but it was more secular than transitory. And I think that that's coming, I think that shock is coming. And by the way, you don't have to go by me, listen to Paul Tudor Jones. He was on the air this morning, explaining this very same macro dilemma. And Anthony, we could solve these problems. I'm not saying the problem doesn't exist, I'm not saying President isn't right to identify the problem, but I'm saying, okay, there are other ways to solve the problem. And again, if you want to use tariffs as a negotiating thing, or you want to use tariffs surgically, read Robert Lighthizer's book.
38:19 Speaker 02 He's not part of the administration this time, primarily because he had a more balanced, more measurable, measured approach than the one that President Trump wanted to take this time. But in his book, No Trade Is Free, he makes the case for surgical tariffs. So if you have a country... Where the private marketplace is being funded by the government to dump lower prices and not market-based prices on another country in terms of price dumping, then you have to put up a tariff to protect your workers. All of that makes sense to me. I'm for surgical tariffs. I understand that no trade is free. I want fair trade.
39:03 Speaker 02 I understand all that, but going about it this way, I think, is unnecessary. I think it's causing too much damage and in some ways, it's hurting the reputation of the United States. And so, and I don't want that and I don't think anybody really wants that. And by the way, he's got too many sycophants around him, where there's nobody in the room literally telling him exactly what I just said. And he could disagree respectfully or disrespectfully, but we can't... Anthony, when you have a sycophantic board, you're a private investor. If I had a board, let's say you invested in my company and I had a board with the first hour, they had to kiss my ass before the board meeting started,
39:45 Speaker 02 you would fire every one of us or you would divest your money from the company. You know that, I know that. You don't have to answer because I know you're a Trump lover, but you know what I'm saying is correct.
39:55 Anthony Pompliano? I'm an independent. Somehow, here's the other thing, Matt. We gotta move on and talk about your book, but one of the things that I do think has happened online, especially with the anonymous accounts, is there's a lack of intellectual rigor in talking about this. You and I can talk about very nuanced components. We can talk about, hey, they should have done this or this, or I like this policy. I don't like this policy. Like there's an attention to detail and nuance. But what I see online is basically, everything is just getting politicized to the point where if somebody says that they like an economic policy, immediately they're just like, oh, you're like a MAGA person. Or if you don't like it, you're immediately, you know, you've got TDS, right? And I think that we've got to get back to being able to talk through this stuff
40:39 Anthony Pompliano? with some degree of rationality because that's where like reality lives, is in the gray.
40:45 Speaker 02 Listen, I'm all for that, which is why you and I are friends. I respect your view. I've read your stuff on the tariffs, some of it I frankly agree with, some of it I don't agree with. But I think that, you know, that's what would make good business partners. That's what makes good podcasts. That's what makes good Americans, frankly. I don't want to be pitted one way or the other. You know, people, everybody hates me. My 33 year old son, who's closer in age to you, he's Stanford Business School graduate. He says, Dad, the Republicans hate your ass because you left Trump. You don't, you disavowed Trump. And the Democrats hate your ass because you were with Trump, and so therefore you're definitionally canceled to them.
41:29 Speaker 02 And I looked at him and he said, and you're killing, and you're killing my networking chances, by the way, you fucker. And I look at him and I say, well, maybe I'm getting closer to the truth. You see, what makes you successful, I'm teasing you about your Trump love, what makes you successful is you're an analyst. You're sitting there trying to look at all sides of the argument. You're not trying to get welded to anything. Both sides are actually making some good arguments, you know, if the, if we listen to each other. There is a matrix where you say, okay, that left leaning idea is probably the right one on certain libertarian goals for a society to allow people to live exactly the way they want,
42:13 Speaker 02 not the imposition of whatever our ideas are of how to live, right? And maybe that's a good goal. And this capitalistic goal, which is a right leaning one, which creates a free marketplace, which has unleashed a tremendous amount of abundance and has taken billions of people around the world out of poverty, maybe that's a good idea. My, my, my point is we are shutting each other down, not you and I, I'm talking about the left and the right, shutting each other down. Because it's either left or right. And if it's not that, I don't want to hear it. And I think it's very, very dangerous. And Anthony, you know this, our adversaries want us to do that.
42:51 Anthony Pompliano? Of course.
42:51 Speaker 02 Our adversaries are so jealous of our prosperity and they're so, they can't believe this sloppy country with this free speech and this lack of orthodoxy and this, this decentralized country with lots of checks and balances to clip people of having absolute power is flourishing. What irony to a strong man? What irony to a authoritarian that a country like this can kick everyone else's ass despite how sloppy and chaotic it looks?
43:25 Anthony Pompliano? I thought they were just envious of your great hair. That's what I thought.
43:29 Speaker 02 Well, you're a little envious of that. I mean, I'm looking at your hairline. You could use a little help there.
43:33 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, we're working on it. We're working on it.
43:34 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, at your age, you got too much for, you got a little bit of Fauci-like recession going on over here. I can, I can help you with that.
43:42 Anthony Pompliano? All right.
43:44 Speaker 02 Afterwards, you know, and by the way, if I help you with that, you'll get advertising related to dermatology and skin products. You'll add that to your advertiser support.
43:54 Anthony Pompliano? If I'm ever advertising a dermatology product, you get 10%. The little book of Bitcoin you wrote, it came out earlier this year. It is excellent. It's got a ton of great stories. It's got kind of your story. There's a number of other things that you kind of cover on that. Why did you want to write a book that wasn't so much about like, what is Bitcoin? But it's more your story around Bitcoin?
44:20 Speaker 02 Well, I wanted to write a book where somebody could pick up the book and feel comfortable and not intimidated. There are, you know, if you read Saphadean Amos, who is a friend of yours, and I listened to that whole conversation, brilliant guy. He wrote The Bitcoin Standard. That's probably more of the treatise on Bitcoin. That's probably more of the academic, everything you know is in that book. But I, I've got to get people's appetite wet for Bitcoin. I've got to get people thinking about Bitcoin. And I thought though- Approach to writing a short book about it, a little book about Bitcoin, was personal stories and the odyssey of going from a non-coiner on zero, which frankly is first time you and I met in my office and I did your podcast.
45:06 Speaker 02 I was a non-coiner. I was at zero. And how do you go from zero to one in Bitcoin? How do you get yourself off of zero? And I think what I would say to people, read my book first, read Saphidain's book second, because his book is a better book, by the way, and it's going to be outsell my book, and it should. But at least my book will get you oriented, make you less insecure about your knowledge, make you more comfortable with the idea that this idea is being embraced by a lot of people who originally did not embrace the idea. And I think this is a bad neuroplasticity, right? You know, you could convince me of something.
45:50 Speaker 02 Okay, and I would imagine I could convince you of something over time. You know, and I can look back on things that I've done and say, well, I got that wrong. I should have said this, or I should have said that. I should have handled this a certain way. And I think we're at our best when we have that neuroplasticity. And so the book is really about that. The book is about how did Saylor say that this was going to be like failed online gambling? That's what he called Bitcoin, honestly. And now he's got $45 billion worth of Bitcoin in his company. How did it go from that? I think it's an interesting story. How did Larry Fink go from telling me in the lobby of the El Arian Four Seasons, the El Arian Island in Abu Dhabi,
46:34 Speaker 02 the Four Seasons Hotel, in the lobby during Abu Dhabi Finance Week, that he didn't like Bitcoin, but he just made a big investment in Circle, to having the largest ETF, best, most successful launch in ETF history, and the largest Bitcoin ETF? How did that happen? I think these are interesting stories. I think it makes people comfortable with the stories, you know?
46:57 Anthony Pompliano? You said Bitcoin is Netflix, Bitcoin is the iPhone. What's that mean?
47:03 Speaker 02 Well, there's universality to it. Bitcoin is gonna be your iPhone. I think every one of us in the modern world, industrial world, has one now. It could be a Samsung phone. I use the iPhone frankly, because I have an iPhone. I have two of those, actually. And I just think Bitcoin is going to be as ubiquitous as your iPhone. I imagine a day where Bitcoin is on everybody's iPhone. You'll have a digital, secure, encrypted wallet. And there'll be some store of value known as Bitcoin on that phone. I think it'll have that ubiquity to it. And so that's what I mean by it.
47:41 Anthony Pompliano? You also wrote, "I knew the risks of not jumping in were far greater than playing it safe." And it seems like we're reaching that point now where a lot of institutions are saying to themselves, "I gotta have a strategy." Having no strategy, or my strategy being, "I'm gonna do nothing," may actually now be putting me at a disadvantage.
48:01 Speaker 02 Yes, I absolutely believe that. And I'll say it from a portfolio manager's perspective, is if I'm not... If what I believe is going to happen, happens. If Bitcoin is an asset class, that means there's a portfolio consultant in the year 2030 that's sitting down with the state teachers of XYZ State, or the sovereign wealth fund of CYX. And they're saying, "Hey, here's my model portfolio. You should have this much in stocks, this much in bonds, this much in gold, this much in real estate, and oh, by the way, we have to have this much in Bitcoin." Do you see what I'm saying? And when that happens, it's sort of too late, right? Because you're under-invested.
48:46 Speaker 02 And that's happening. You know, the state of Wisconsin, they started buying Bitcoin, right? They were like, "Well, why are you buying Bitcoin?" Well, somebody's gonna tell me someday that it's in the model portfolio. I wanna be there now. I don't wanna be under-invested in it. And so, so to me, I think the evolution of an asset class requires you to be somewhat predictive, look into the future. If I'm right about that, what happens? Right?
49:12 Anthony Pompliano? So it is now public knowledge that your flagship fund in 2024, so $1.7 billion fund at the time, posted a 43% return, which was the best performance since inception. It outperformed its index, which only returned 9.8%. Talk a little bit as to how transformative this stuff is, right? If you put some of it into some of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies into these funds, they start to perform very well. I think you guys were one of the top 10 best performing hedge funds last year. When people see that happening, do a bunch of people who weren't in the top 10 start to say, wait a second, like we're at disadvantage? We gotta put this stuff in our portfolio?
49:50 Speaker 02 They say, look at those lucky dopes. They put some of their money in Bitcoin and they got lucky. And by the way, I was up for all of these different hedge fund awards, didn't get any of them. We had the top performing crypto-related ETF last year, didn't get that award either. And the naysayers would say, well, he put Bitcoin in the portfolio. I mean, if I had done those returns with structured credit, I would have came home with the award. But like I tell my staff, I would rather have the money than the award. You know, I'm not trying to prove myself to anybody. I'm just trying to say, listen, I believe this is gonna work. I'm doing this 39 years, Anthony. And so I put my money, my personal money's in that fund, my personal money's in Bitcoin, my personal money's in
50:34 Speaker 02 digital assets. And I'm telling my clients, if they're patient, okay, they're gonna be very well rewarded. It's not gonna say, it's not gonna come with some level of volatility. We look like dunces. I mean, you know, the funny thing is, when I was a kid, we had heroes and goats, okay? But now the goat, because of Tom Brady, or because of Muhammad Ali, greatest of all time. When I was a kid, we were heroes and goats. I was a goat, or the anti-hero in 2022. I was getting lit up like a Christmas tree for being the poster boy for stupidity. Look at this dope. He went into Bitcoin and he got torched. In 23, they didn't say anything. In 24, those returns that you're
51:15 Speaker 02 speaking of, not me, because I'm not allowed to speak about them, but those returns, you know, finally, someone like Paulina says, hey, you gotta give the guy credit. I mean, you know, what does Bill Parcell say about a football coach? You're as good as your record. You know, all the bullshit aside, can the people perform or not? We put on a macro bet and we are performing. And I believe we're going to continue to perform with some level of volatility. And if people are patient, they'll be well rewarded. And I think you, listen, I read your stuff. I think you understand this as well as anybody in the world. And I would encourage people to buy your newsletter, read your stuff. Because you see it and you see it from a very interesting perspective.
52:00 Speaker 02 Because you see it from a skeptic's perspective. You're not a jingo whiskey person. You try to provide balance and objective analysis to the situation. It's not just, oh, you know, he's a jingo, he's pro Bitcoin. So now he's just going to talk his book. You know, the reason why I listen to Saylor all day is that Saylor's an analyst. Okay, Saylor is like a financial engineer. He understands the mechanisms tied to the technology. And probably frankly, he understands it way better than I do even. And so, you know, I implore people to expand their horizon. Read Saffadain's book, read, read your book about life, which was a great one.
52:44 Speaker 02 Read Saylor's letters, listen to Saylor's speeches and get off zero. Because here's what's going to happen if we're, let's say I'm wrong. And let's say you're wrong. And I, and I told you, you had one to 2% of your portfolio in Bitcoin. It went to zero. Now you have 98 cents on a dollar. Are you really going to be that damaged? But if I'm right and it goes from one to two to 20% as a roll of being right. This is significant change to your portfolio, significant beneficial change. Now, Saylor got really mad at me. You were at that book party where Saylor said, hey, man, I'm not putting my forward into this book. If you're at 2% recommendation.
53:28 Speaker 02 And so I had to put, I had to adjust the last chapter and say, hey, I got 70% of my money in this thing. Saylor's at 101, I think. I don't know what the hell he's at. But, you know, some people are saying 2%. But this is the best idea that I have seen in my career. And I missed ideas. I missed Amazon. I did participate in Apple because I, you know, I mean, I participated in Amazon and Apple, but mostly through the S and P. Anthony, I missed their inception points and the inflection points in those stories, you know, and I don't want to miss this one.
54:01 Anthony Pompliano? The little book of Bitcoin that's available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and everywhere books are sold?
54:08 Speaker 02 It's good to be on with you, my man. You're a good dude.
54:10 Anthony Pompliano? Oh, I'm asking the little book of Bitcoin.
54:12 Speaker 02 Oh, I thought we were done. No, we're not done. Okay, good. No, no. Yeah, that's where it is. Yeah, you buy it anywhere. I got an audiobook.
54:19 Anthony Pompliano? Listen, if you don't ask for the order at the end.
54:21 Speaker 02 I got the Kindle. I got everything.
54:23 Anthony Pompliano? Did you do the audiobook?
54:24 Speaker 02 I'm a, you know, I did the forward to the audiobook. I did my forward and Sailor Sword. I didn't do the audiobook. I've done the audiobook on some of my books, but I've got such a New York Italian accent that.
54:40 Anthony Pompliano? I thought you were Irish.
54:43 Speaker 02 Let me tell you something. When the Irish hang out with the Italians, you could tell all your Irish friends this, okay? When the Irish hang out with the Italians, it's a form of social climbing for the Irish. Don't forget that, okay? And make sure they don't.
54:56 Anthony Pompliano? All right. Thank you very much for doing this. We'll do it again in the future.
54:59 Speaker 02 It's good to be on again. Thank you.
Previous #1544 Anthony & Polina Pompliano | Why Isn’t Bitcoin $150K If Everyone’s Buying? Next #1546 Jordi Visser | Bitcoin’s Price Is About to SHOCK Everyone - Here’s Why Page updated October 17, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
