#1554 Anthony & John Pompliano | The Bitcoin Bull Run Is Back

John Pompliano and Anthony Pompliano discuss bitcoin, bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, bitcoin treasury companies, macro environment, inflation, timeless investing principles, and how this all impacts your portfolio. =======================Bitwise is one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto asset managers. As of December 31, 2021, the company managed over $1.3 billion across an expanding suite of investment solutions, which include the world's largest crypto index fund and other innovative products spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto equities. Whether you’re an individual, advisor, or institution, Bitwise provides intelligent access to crypto with your unique circumstances in mind. Visit www.bitwiseinvestments.com to learn more. Certain of the Bitwise investment products may be subject to the extreme risks associated with investing in crypto assets. Visit www.bitwiseinvestments.com/disclosures/ to learn more.=======================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.=======================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.=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on guys? Today we've got an excellent episode with John Pompliano. That's right, Johnny Jets is back and it's a great, great conversation. In this one, we talk about what's going on with the macro environment, inflation, why is Doge waving the white

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  flag? What about Bitcoin, the Bitcoin conference, all the Bitcoin treasury companies, and how I think about learning from the past and taking timeless investing principles, but applying them to brand new places, both in industries and in your portfolio. We do our best to unpack what's happening in the world and also how it's going to impact your personal portfolio. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with John Pompliano.

• 1:05Speaker 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.

• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

  It's no secret that Bitcoin ETFs have taken Wall Street by storm. With over $35 billion in assets in just one year, it's become the most successful ETF launched in history. My partner Bitwise is the first and only Bitcoin ETF provider to openly publish its Bitcoin wallet addresses, allowing anyone to verify the fund's holdings. I believe this level of transparency is exactly the kind of innovation that only crypto makes possible. Bitwise is also the only ETF issuer that is a crypto specialist asset manager, meaning their team solely focuses on Bitcoin and they have the research, education, and support to help investors navigate the space with confidence. All of that is great, but what I love most about Bitwise is probably their commitment to developers. Bitwise donates 10% of their ETF's profits to Bitcoin open source developers.

• 2:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin developers are the unsung heroes, working tirelessly to maintain, improve, and innovate the blockchain. Their efforts ensure that Bitcoin remains true to its promise as a decentralized system that is built to last. Go to bitwisePOMP.com to learn more about their ETF and other services. Once again, that's bitwisePOMP.com. BitwiseP-O-M-P dot com. As always, remember investing is risky and carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before you invest. Today's episode is brought to you by Zappos Bank. This is where eligible members can unlock the power of Bitcoin without selling it. Do you need cash fast? With Zappos Bank's Bitcoin-backed loans, you can borrow up to 20% of your Bitcoin's

• 2:57Anthony Pompliano?

  value in just a few minutes, and you can do so with low interest rates and zero fees. Here's the best part: you keep your Bitcoin, meaning you get to watch your holdings grow as the price of Bitcoin increases. Whether you're looking to buy a house, fund your child's education, or seize an exciting investment opportunity, these loans give you the flexibility to access cash without selling your Bitcoin. Unlike traditional loans, Zappos Bank's Bitcoin-backed loans, they have no minimum repayments, no early repayment penalties, and the flexibility to settle your loan in USD or Bitcoin whenever it suits you. It's liquidity entirely on your terms. Zappos understands the unique needs of Bitcoin holders. That's why they developed a product designed specifically for you. With over a decade of experience in the Bitcoin space, Zappos Bank has been a trusted

• 3:40Anthony Pompliano?

  partner for those looking to make the most of their Bitcoin while keeping it safe. Your Bitcoin stays safe in your vault, untouched, never lent out, and secured in a global network of military-grade bunkers with cutting-edge security technology. Head to zappobank.com/pomp to learn more. That's X-A-P-O-B-A-N-K dot com forward slash pomp. Go check out Zappos Bank today at zappobank.com/pomp.

• 4:06Anthony Pompliano?

  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 to over 75 cryptocurrencies. With world-class customer service, military-grade encryption, and a vertically-integrated licensed trust company, it's no wonder more than 200,000 Americans trust Bitcoin IRA to secure their financial future. Getting started is quick and easy. It takes just three minutes to open an account. Once you're set up, their team of IRA specialists will reach out to guide you through every step of the process. Whether you're transferring an IRA from a legacy bank, rolling over an old 401K, or

• 4:48Anthony Pompliano?

  starting fresh with new contribution, the Bitcoin IRA team is here to help you get access to real crypto in your retirement account. And here's the best part, as a listener to this podcast, you can earn up to $500 in rewards when you add funds to your account. That's right, search for Bitcoin IRA in the App Store or visit bitcoinira.com/pomp to join 200,000 Americans on their journey to upgrade their retirement. Bitcoinira.com/pomp to upgrade today and you can earn up to $500 in rewards when you add funds to your account.

• 5:23Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, John, what's the first topic? What you got for us?

• 5:26Speaker 02

  What's going on? All right, let's talk about Bitcoin. 110,000, the Bitcoin crowd seems to be extremely excited about the price movement recently. We have the Bitcoin Conference coming up here in Vegas this week. What are your thoughts? Where are we within this cycle and within this calendar year for Bitcoin?

• 5:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Classic Bitcoin price movement before the Bitcoin Conference. So if you think, you know, coming up on a new all-time high, we're knocking on the door, breakthrough, kind of chill right around that all-time high price, and people are excited because the Bitcoin Conference is going on. David Bailey, BTC Inc., they do a fantastic job every year. I've read that 30,000 people, three, zero, zero, zero, zero, 30,000 people are headed to Vegas and they're all going to be there. I saw Peter Schiff, he had his nice little booth set up. He complained that everyone else had nicer booths than him, and it's because gold price hasn't kept up with Bitcoin over the last decade. But I do- I think that one, there is a kind of evolution of the speaker set. You obviously have the hardcore Bitcoiners.

• 6:22Anthony Pompliano?

  People have been around for, you know, a decade plus. You've got a lot of finance folks that maybe otherwise wouldn't have gone to the Bitcoin conference, you know, five, six, seven years ago. And you've got a lot of politicians and kind of people within the political realm that are going to the Bitcoin conference as well. And so I think that really the Bitcoin conference today is Bitcoin is just maturing. It's kind of growing up, which is a good sign for Bitcoin. It means that Bitcoin is being adopted by these new people, new cohorts, larger pools of capital, et cetera. And so naturally Bitcoin's price is up. Now, I do think though, that there's also this belief that Bitcoin has gone from a contrarian asset to a consensus asset.

• 6:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And part of that, you can see it with Wall Street now embracing it. But I think that's always a really important part. Everyone knows that, you know, doing something different in investing is really important. And being right is really important, right? If you do something different, but you're wrong, then you're just a dummy. Like you're just wrong and you lose money. But if you do something different and you're right, that's where potential returns can be. But another part of that equation that usually gets left out of the conversation is you need an idea to go from contrarian to consensus. Because you need everyone else to eventually see what you saw early. And I think that's really what Bitcoins are experiencing now is when you were buying Bitcoin, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago. What you saw were a lot of folks who were saying, that's crazy. Why would you put your money in that thing?

• 7:42Anthony Pompliano?

  It's for drug dealers or criminals, or the government's going to shut it down, or it wastes too much electricity, or whatever the thing was that they scared away by. Well, the people who were buying Bitcoin, whether you were dollar cost averaging or whatever you were doing. Now that went from a contrarian thing to everyone else was like, well, I need some Bitcoin too. And so that shift from contrarian to consensus is really important. I think that also leads to kind of the higher price point is because it's kind of like the meme, you know, hey, the water's warm, come on in, right? Is the water was cold five years ago, 10 years ago. Now it's warm. Now everyone's like ready to rock and roll and they're going to come into Bitcoin. So I think you're starting to see that in a major way.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  How much of this is price action? Hey, look, price is going up. I want to be involved. It was contrarian. Now it's And the reason that the price is going up is because it's becoming more of a consensus idea. Versus, hey, the technology, what people are building on it is super exciting, right? Like, why are 30,000 people going to the conference when last year, when the price was down? Not that, not 30,000 people went.

• 8:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, I think there's a couple of things. So, uh, price in relationship to value is always a chicken or an egg, right? Does, uh, the network become more valuable and the price goes up? Or does the price go up and the network becomes more valuable? I would argue that one aspect or framework that I use is, uh, Bitcoin does not have a centralized executive team. It doesn't have a board of directors. It doesn't have a marketing budget. It doesn't have, you know, annual earnings reports. It doesn't have, uh, kind of, uh, these plans that are laid out for, for folks, right? It is this decentralized network. And so the quote unquote, marketing campaign is the price. And you see this, right? As the price goes up, what happens? People start to get more excited because they're holding Bitcoin. They start telling their friends, their friends start asking them about it.

• 9:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Everyone, the word of mouth starts to spread among individuals. On top of that, you then get the media starting to write articles or do interviews or podcasts or whatever. So now you've got individual word of mouth spreading. You've got the media megaphones propagating the message on a broader basis. And then you have things like institutions or others who are saying, hey, the trade is working. And so they start to get this, uh, confirmatory, uh, kind of feedback from the market. And so they say, oh, I bought a little bit, it's working. Good investors, they press their winners hardest, right? So they're going to go put more capital into the trade. And so I think that when you look at those three things, it really is the price is the marketing campaign. Now, of course, the way I usually describe this is as price is going up, more people are coming in.

• 10:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Naturally, more capital is coming in than is leaving. So it's pushing the price further. Then we at some point will get overvalued, right? Or, or the price will go up too much. And so when that occurs, what will happen is the price will start to try to correct. It'll try to find some equilibrium. Now, some people will have bought Bitcoin on the way up. They'll have learned about Bitcoin, they'll become kind of these hardened, you know, uh, long-term holders. And they will hold Bitcoin regardless of what happens with the price. But a lot of people. They're going to come into Bitcoin as a get rich quick scheme towards the end of that bull market when the price is really kind of running. And when they come in, they're going to, within a month, two months, three months, the price is going to correct and they're going to basically now be underwater on their Bitcoin. Some of those people will continue to hold. A lot of

• 10:54Anthony Pompliano?

  those people though will sell and say, I'm never touching Bitcoin again. No different than if you have a mobile app and you run a marketing campaign and 100 people sign up. Well, if all of a sudden 100 people signed up, how many of them are still around a month from now? Maybe 30 of them. Right? So a 30% retention rate after one month. Great. Well, if you then run another marketing campaign for 100 people and you only are left with 30 at the end of that next month, well, you only have 60 total users. You had one, you had 30 after the first month, 30 after the second month. That's your retention rate. The 70 that are leaving from every single marketing campaign, that's the equivalent of the Bitcoiners who are buying at the top of the market. And when it corrects, they just say, I'm out of here. I don't understand Bitcoin. I was here for get rich quick. I'm losing money. I don't want anything to do with this. And so I think that price is a marketing campaign,

• 11:38Anthony Pompliano?

  but the steeper the price acceleration, the better it is at marketing. And so I always get very nervous towards the ends of these cycles because what you see is a lot of people coming in who don't understand it, who aren't going to be long-term holders and they're likely to get burnt. And so the best thing I've found is just like any timeless investing principle, just dollar cost average into a great asset over a long period of time. And it doesn't matter if the price is up or down or sideways, just keep dollar cost averaging and over time, you get this nice, beautiful blended thing. And if you hold for a long enough period of time, pretty much everyone who's bought in the last four years, or I'm sorry, pretty much anyone who has bought Bitcoin at almost any time in its history and held till today is in profit. Right? And that'll continue

• 12:20Anthony Pompliano?

  to be true over the long run. And so like, just let the market work for you rather than trying to outsmart the market.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Did you see, I saw on X that someone has leverage on Bitcoin where it could be liquidated at about 105,000? What are your thoughts about using leverage and just like, is it propping up the market versus is it like real sustainable price run that we're seeing?

• 12:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw the gentleman who's doing this. I think his name's James Wynn. I do not have the stomach nor the cojones to be out there with hundreds of millions of dollars of leverage, billion dollars, whatever, some crazy number. Obviously, that magnifies, moves in an asset. And so if you're long and with a lot of leverage and it goes up, then great, you're gonna make money. The same is true on the other side. And so I think it is, you know, a very risky game. It's not a game I play. But hey, if that's your game, maybe you've got an edge or some sort of competitive advantage, knock yourself out, right? People should be free to do what they want with their money. With that said, I've been loosely following. I think he was up at one point, like on a P and L basis, like 85 million bucks. That's

• 13:25Anthony Pompliano?

  life-changing money for pretty much almost anyone in the world. And he, you know, couldn't get away from the table. And so I think he's backed down closer to like flat on his P and L. Now again, if that's your game and you're used to wild swings, you know, go talk to somebody who goes to Vegas, like, you know, I had some epic runs and I had some, you know, absolute heaters that ended in sorrow. But on a net basis, I'm up or something like that, right? Here, I don't know what the rest of his P and L looks like. I don't know what other trades he did, but on this specific kind of, you know, two, three week run, it seems like he's kind of flat. And so in a weird way, maybe it's just entertainment for him, right? Maybe he's just really excited. But being up 85 million bucks and then going

• 14:08Anthony Pompliano?

  back down to to flat is probably a tough pill to swallow. I don't care how much money you got. You know, people would rather have the 85 than the zero. 100%. Let's talk about another Bitcoin buyer, which is DJT. They announced that they're gonna buy 2.53 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. What are your thoughts around Trump's organization, or at least that DJT entity, buying more Bitcoin and then doing it in such a large volume amount? Yeah, look, I think that anytime that you have a company where the stock is trading at a very high premium to what would be considered like book value, then it is the duty of that executive team to figure out how to sell shares and raise capital, right? Any company, I mean Warren Buffett,

• 14:51Anthony Pompliano?

  right? If we're overvalued, we should be raising capital. If we're undervalued, we should be buying back shares. That's kind of a traditional capital market exercise. I think there's a lot of people who look at that company in particular. You know, I've never talked to the team there or anything, but just from what I read online, it seems pretty overvalued, given what their financial performance is. Now, there's reasons for that. There's obviously a very kind of engaged shareholder base, like all the things that people will analyze. But if you just look at how much revenue, how much profit, what's the market cap, you know, big gap, raise capital, right? So like it's a very rational thing to do. Now, raising capital, you can do a lot of different things. You can go buy companies, you can reinvest in your business, you can go buy Bitcoin, whatever. And so there, it seems like from the reports, going to buy Bitcoin. And so if you go and you buy two and

• 15:36Anthony Pompliano?

  a half billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, my guess is that that's probably over a long period of time, as long as you hold and you don't do anything crazy, it'll be worth more in the future. And so I think that that's what you're starting to see a lot of folks say to themselves is, wait a second, if I can use the public capital markets, I can raise capital and I can then deploy it into an asset that seems to be very resilient and long term seems to be very attractive. What is the difference between if I said to you, you know, hey, they went and they raised capital and they're buying a business, the business has no cash flow, right? It's not losing money though either, but it continues to compound its equity value at, you know, 60% year over year. And it's done that for a decade. You know, that's pretty interesting. Even if it

• 16:17Anthony Pompliano?

  comes down to 30%, it's probably still pretty attractive. Can we beat that hurdle rate, right? Can we do better than 30, 40, 50, 60% compound annual growth rate? That's really hard to do. And so I think that's what you're seeing a lot of these public companies go through. Now, of course, this is going to get a lot of attention because of the relationship or kind of correlation with with Trump and his name. And so I'm not clear on what His actual ownership is or his relationship, whatever. I'm assuming he owns equity. But I'm not sure also like how involved he is in the management decisions. Like, you know, is he calling and he's like, you know, in the big short, he's like, bye. I don't know. He was tweeting bye, right, to the people and was eerily accurate in doing that.

• 17:02Anthony Pompliano?

  It helps if you can tweet bye and then strike a deal and announce it a couple of hours later. But I think that it's again, you know, it will get a lot of attention, but this is just kind of a rational position for a company like that to do. But also I think that a lot of people in the market, again, I keep saying, if you can't beat it, you gotta buy it. Right. And I think that that has been true of the S and P 500 for a long time. People said, hey, if you can't beat it, you gotta buy it. Right. Okay. Well, same thing here. I think for this whole new generation, kind of the internet age. This is the benchmark and you're going to continue to see people say, hey, if I can't beat it, then let me go and put some on the balance sheet.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  At what point does that capitulate though? And like, people are like, okay, like I have to buy Bitcoin because it still is a contrarian idea for most people and for most institutions. So like, there is a tipping point there, right? If it goes on another 20 year bull run where we're up another million percent over the next 20 years. Like people are, you know, is that the new benchmark? And like, when is that seen as the new benchmark versus, you know, traditional called ETFs, S and P, V O O.

• 18:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, let's flip this a little bit and talk about it from a different perspective, which is, what's the risk here? Nobody wants to talk about the risks, right? I do believe that a number of these companies are going to get over levered in a way where they are going to basically spit back out the Bitcoin. So you think about it, they're all sucking in the Bitcoin, right? But there's leverage. And so people do all kinds of calculations and they'll say, ah, you know, we need the Bitcoin price to go to X and then we would be in trouble, but X is a really low number. Or they'll say, oh, or, you know, leverage ratio right now is only, you know, 5% or 10%, whatever, right?

• 18:45Anthony Pompliano?

  People are way smarter than me are analyzing this stuff. All I know is I'm a pretty simple guy. If you have an asset that is highly volatile and in history, multiple times has drawn down 80, 85%. And there's leverage involved. At some point over the next three to four years, dead bodies are going to float to the water. Right? They're going to float to the top of the water there. Who is it going to be? I don't know. Somebody smarter than me will figure that out. How is it going to happen? I don't know. Somebody smarter than me is going to figure it out. But what I do know is if you are going to do this, you better do it with a minimal amount of leverage. Because that is ultimately the safe way to do it. Now, of course, it's like anything.

• 19:29Anthony Pompliano?

  If I tell you, hey, um, we can earn 5%. Somebody else shows up and say, we can earn 6%. Somebody else said, I can earn 10, I can earn 15, I can earn 20. Where's the line? We don't know. But I do think that being prudent in the public markets with this type of strategy will be a very strong, positive, kind of accretive thing for shareholders. But there will be companies that take it too far. They get over levered, they, they, they become undisciplined. They don't know how some of the instruments that they're using actually work. And that's where there will be some issues. So I don't know who, who it ends up being. I kind of think of it like, uh, if, uh, we're all walking across a field and there's some landmines planted.

• 20:14Anthony Pompliano?

  At the end of the field is, uh, the next bull market. Who's going to make it? Right? Uh, my guess is it's not going to be 100% of people. But also, look, I think that the public markets also bring a lot of scrutiny. One of the things that people don't give credit to the public markets is the public markets are pretty good about sniffing out kind of things that don't work. Right? If you remember, WeWork, when they got their S1, they put it, public markets basically rejected it. It said, uh, you ain't bringing this here at that valuation, et cetera. If you go and you look at, I saw, uh, my friend Austin Reeve. Yeah, he's retired right now, so he, he's got a lot of free time on his hands. I don't, he, co-founder of Morning Brew. Yeah, he's on, uh, he's on Google Finance, just Googling every company he could think of, I guess. Cause he was showing, you know, rent the runway.

• 20:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Is down like sub $25 million market cap, all birds down, you know, whatever significantly 30, $40 million market cap. And all these brands that really came from the last decade or so, got to the public markets and just got hammered. Now, some of them are probably getting hammered on, you know, in a way that isn't fair to them. But a lot of them just weren't that great a companies, right? And so you can build a great product, not be a good company. You can, you know, have all kinds of issues around capitalizing your business or the returns that you drive, whatever. So I just think that public markets in general are very, very, very good at scrutinizing companies. And I do think that the efficient market hypothesis is nonsense. I think there's a lot of asymmetry that ends up being available in public markets at certain times.

• 21:40Anthony Pompliano?

  But over the long run, usually public markets will get it right. And I think that that's why you continue to see certain companies do incredibly well in the public markets. And other companies basically just get chewed up and spit out. And, you know, let's see what happens with these Bitcoin companies. But right now, the market's very excited and they think that this is a strategy that is going to deliver at least short-term shareholder returns. And so far, they haven't been wrong.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Correct. Let's talk about public markets. And I think a big driver of the volatility that we have seen is obviously what's going on with the government today. Both with DOGE and just kind of like, what are they thinking about? Are we just going to keep printing money? Or is there no balanced budget? And we're just going to continue to print and asset prices will continue to go up over a long period of time? Is that kind of what your consensus is?

• 22:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, let's take a step back here for a second, right? So I think there's a lot of folks who were very excited about the current administration going into the White House. Now, if you remember, I called out throughout the entire campaign season, over and over and over and over and over and over again, that it was a shame that neither candidate was promising to balance the budget. And I said to myself, it used to be during my adult lifetime, you pretended. I promise I'm gonna, you know, balance the budget. Yeah, I'm gonna give it a good, you know, good try. Whatever you get in the office, you don't do it. So on one hand, I was like, well, at least they're not lying to us on this one, right? They know they can't balance the budget. On the other hand, like at least pretend, right?

• 23:12Anthony Pompliano?

  At least pretend you care. So when Trump got into office and he started talking about balancing the budget, I actually got really excited about that. I said, fuck, man, he's gonna take a run at this. Maybe he actually didn't talk about on the campaign trail because he knew that no one was gonna believe him. But now that he's in and he's got this mandate and his landslide victory, like he can go and he can really make a lot of change. And then he was like, I'm gonna recruit an all-star team. I got Elon Musk, the slasher of waste in all these companies. He's gonna come in and Elon's gonna bring all the super genius kids and he's gonna bring, you know, the co-founder of Airbnb and he's gonna bring that. And I was like, dude, let's go. Silicon Valley is going to Washington and they're bringing their scissors and we're just gonna,

• 23:58Anthony Pompliano?

  we're gonna cut all these things. So it was exciting. And the other thing that they did, which I thought was really important, is they essentially figured out how to make it a high status thing to go work in the government. How long have you heard me say that none of my smartest friends want to go work in the government? That changed over the last, you know, 12 months. A lot of my smartest friends went to go work in the government and also wanted to go work in the government. So I think that was like a very new thing that that happened. Fast forward, now we're in May. They got into office in January. White flags out. I hate to see it. I don't like it. White flags are out. And my assessment of what has happened is that the Doge and cost-cutting measures ran into two things.

• 24:41Anthony Pompliano?

  One is the brick wall of bureaucracy. It's just like, it's a blob. It's a faceless, big, brick wall of bureaucracy. There is no thing to, you can't get to it, right? And so the blob continues to win. It's like a Bubble Boy. Remember that movie? Right? It's like we put the government spending in this big bubble thing. Nothing can get in. You got a biological attack not getting in. You got, uh, cost-cutting is not getting it. Just whatever you try. You're gonna run into a roadblock. Bubble Boy is protected, right? The, the budget is protected. The other thing they ran into is they ran into the system.

• 25:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, the bureaucracy, to be clear, is not only the politicians. Politicians, do you remember the videos of them showing up outside of the government buildings, demanding to like see Elon? Yeah. Or being like, what do you mean you're gonna cut the whatever? And these guys were just tweeting like absurd things every day. It got to the point, they were tweeting these, you're like, that can't be true. There's no way that nobody with half a brain previously allowed that to happen. And then it comes on, it's like, that is true. Like, these people are just blowing cash all over the place. And a lot of it was waste, abuse, fraud, I think was the terminology that the administration used. I would argue there's a lot of people on the internet who were like,

• 26:03Anthony Pompliano?

  you should put that in the translator on Google Translate and actually it translate to corruption. Whatever words you want to use, that was what was happening there. But they also got fought by the media at every single step. And so what we had was, we had a part of the equation or part of the conversation that did not have the American people's best interests at heart. Instead, what they said was, anything that our political opponent does, we are going to fight back against. And whether people like it or not, the media is very left leaning, right? There are certainly pockets where people are kind of fair and balanced, or they are, you know, kind of not on either side. One of the terms that I hear reporters use a lot is they call balls and strikes, kind of like an umpire.

• 26:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Some of them do that, a lot of them don't. Yeah. Right? So there's some good ones, obviously. There's plenty that are just like mouthpieces for left-leaning causes, parties, etc. Right-leaning as well, too, right? There's some, but definitely the media skews to the left. I think that that's kind of an objective fact. We look at donations, we look at coverage, all this kind of stuff. So again, it's important to have both. I think you should, you want left-leaning, you want right-leaning, you actually want independent, you want kind of a full slate, you want to give people choice, you want to inform people, whatever, right? But if you go look and just objectively look at the coverage, the Doge effort, the cost-cutting effort got fought every single step of the way. And so instead, if we had a bunch of people sit down and say, hey, what's best for the American people? Cut government spending, great, let's do a group exercise.

• 27:31Anthony Pompliano?

  We're all together gonna go cut this spending, right? You have the media, have the politicians, have Elon and Doge, everybody sit down and that was the objective, I think that we could have made progress. The problem is that multiple people sitting at that table, that that wasn't their objective. Their objective was drive clicks, fight against the people they didn't like, claim victory, right? All these other things come into play. And then, of course, there's the incentive, like a lot of these people are benefiting from this stuff, right? And so you say to yourself, okay, well, if people are handing out money, there's a lot of folks interested in that not getting shut off, right? And so I think that was one huge kind of, I guess, brick wall of bureaucracy, media and politicians all get put in there. The other hand is the system.

• 28:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And the system, it's kind of like, if you've got a car, right, it's low and it's running low on gas, you gotta fill it up. If you don't fill it up, what happens? Stops running, right? Well, have you ever been in a car when it runs out of gas? What does it kind of do? It's like gasping for energy at the end, right? It's gasping for the last couple of drops of gasoline that it can use, right? Well, that's basically what started to happen here, was they started shutting things off and all of a sudden, you could kind of feel the, huh, we're running out of gas, right? And so naturally, there's a lot of things in terms of the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, the politicians, the president, that said, whoa, hold on a second, I don't want to run out of gas here. And so because of those two things, we waved the white flag and all you gotta do is just listen to what they say.

• 28:57Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the beauty of, I think, right now in modern politics and modern kind of monetary and fiscal policy, just listen to what they say. That was true of the Biden administration, that was true of the Trump administration. They went from talking about saving, cutting, waste, abuse, fraud, all the terminology, to now Elon's out there tweeting, he's talking about, I think we gotta grow our way out of the problem. Besen, he's on TV, he's talking about, we gotta grow without increasing the debt, right? Everyone now, it's like a memo went out and everyone was like, stop talking about cutting, start talking about growing. Well, when I hear growth coming from Washington DC, what I know comes next is printing.

• 29:41Anthony Pompliano?

  To them, growth is printing. Printing is inflation. If inflation comes, what I'll predict it right now, you're gonna see headlines, inflation's gonna come back and it may not go to, you know, 8%, 9%, whatever, but maybe it ticks up to 2.5%, 3%, 3.5%, whatever the number is.

• 29:59Anthony Pompliano?

  A bunch of these uh smooth brains on the internet, I think is the right term. They're gonna ah, that tariffs, the tariffs, look at the tariffs, right? I'm calling it right now. There's a line in the sand. We changed strategies, right? As a country, I don't agree with changing the strategy. I don't like it. But that's what just happened. And so now I'm going from telling you that tariffs are deflationary, which inflation fell off a cliff since December of last year because of all the tariff stuff. Everyone was worried about this economic slowdown, all this stuff. I'm telling you right now, we're going to regime change. And now we're going the other direction. Inflation is going to come back and it's because they're going to print money. Milton Friedman, famous economist, great guy, what's he say? Inflation is only created in one place, Washington DC. If they print money, that leads to inflation. They gonna print a lot of money.

• 30:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Spending bill, hey, party's back on, baby, right? That's something everyone in government can agree on. Hell, yeah. Listen, if they put a bill in front of you that says, we're going to give X dollars to your constituents. Who's gonna vote against that? It takes somebody so principled, so courageous, so strong of a backbone to say, no, I'm not voting for that, right? There are some people who are gonna do that. But their vote, no, no, and it ain't gonna matter. Cause most people, they gonna take, they gonna take the incentive, right? And so they're gonna vote for the bill. And so you got government spending coming, you got the money printer. You hear things like running the economy hot. That's code for money printing. And so what you're gonna see here is you're gonna see that.

• 31:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And so ultimately concludes with one simple thing. We're gonna go back to this only intelligence test that matters for people in their financial life. Are you a saver or are you an investor? If you're an investor, you're gonna be a winner. If you're a saver, you're gonna be a loser. Look, I just shoot straight, as blunt as I can put it. If you are sitting there, which something like 50% of Americans are sitting there with no investment assets and you have 100% of your wealth in dollars, you go and get crushed. I don't want you to get crushed. You don't want to get crushed. I wish the system wasn't built this way. I wish that incentives weren't in place. I wish they weren't gonna print money, everything we could talk about. It ain't gonna change the fact that you're gonna get crushed if you're sitting with 100% of your wealth sitting in dollars. And that's at least a very big percentage, if not 50% of the country. The other 50%

• 32:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Come on. You see the article in the Wall Street Journal, I think it was, or New York Times, talking about how much it costs to go to the Hamptons? No. You gonna see a lot. You gonna see a lot more. By the way, it's not what you thought it was. Hampton's is overrated. They followed like a group of women that went to the Hamptons. I think they said like the bill was like $3,500. I said, I don't know where y'all going in the. I saw that, actually. Staying at motel six, maybe. That seemed low. That's what I'm saying. They must. They had one meal the whole weekend. Yeah. Eat one meal, you know, go to the beach in the, in the public free zone, right? Go to motel six. He had 3,500 bucks, right? I don't know anybody that is going out there and the way that they were describing their life that spends $3,500.

• 32:51Anthony Pompliano?

  But there gonna be a lot more of that. You gonna see 2021, that was a warm up. That was like, uh, uh, going to the batting cage and being like, one day I hope I can go to the big show. Right? And you hitting the 95 mile an hour fastball. Nah, we going to the big times now. They print this money because now psychologically people, they've seen it before. They know, right? It's why all recessions have been outlawed in the economy is because as soon as the central bank sees recession coming. What'd I tell you? Everyone was just talking about recession three, four weeks ago. What are they gonna do now? Cut interest rates, print money. It's the playbook. Recession's are outlawed and they go and bring the heat now. And so when they do that, spending, all this stuff is gonna push asset prices, gonna put liquidity in the market. You're gonna see the velocity of money really take up.

• 33:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Business owners, asset owners, those people are gonna do really well. Well, what do they, what do they do when they do really well? Get on the planes, get on the trains, get on the yachts, right? Go to the different things, spend money, consume, do, it's a party. And so I think that's where we're headed back to. And so if you think about investment assets, anything that's liquid and denominated in dollars, probably gonna do pretty well. Public stocks going up, Bitcoin going up, gold going up, certain real estate REITs, things like that going up. If his liquid is denominated in dollars, five years from now is going up, right? And so the question then becomes, well, what about the private market? And my guess is that's also going up because you're gonna have more liquidity chasing all this stuff. And so 2020, 2021, go study that.

• 34:20Anthony Pompliano?

  If they print money, remember in April, when prices were down 20%? Remember that? Everyone was moving around. Everyone was all sat on the internet saying, oh, the recession. People talk about the Great Depression and all this nonsense. I, you ever seen the meme where that guy stands up in church by himself and he's like the lone voice? And I kept saying all time highs before the end of the year? Get a cigar ready. When that thing hits new all time highs, right? I'm gonna hit you with the, uh, the security guard shrug, uh, from the Michael Jordan documentary, right? Like, I told you, like, what do you guys want, right? The faster it falls, the faster it recovers, they're gonna print money, they're never gonna let us get into recession. And here we go.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  I mean, the correlation between M2 money supply and, you know, Bitcoin and pretty much every asset across the board for investors is a positive correlation. We could say that.

• 35:10Anthony Pompliano?

  If there's more money chasing the same number of goods, well, guess what happens? If there's more money chasing the same number of investment assets, guess what happens? And so that's what, that is ultimately what we're watching play out here. This is the only thing that matters in investing. You could be, you know, some genius portfolio manager, you could be at a hedge fund spending billions of dollars of, you know, CapEx and OpEx or whatever you want to do. Try to get your computer a little bit closer to the data center, right? Run the Fabrot, the cable, get your Bloomberg, have three Bloomberg, seven screen, whatever you want. If you don't understand this one thing, people who are literally trading on their phone are gonna beat you. Because guess what?

• 35:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Inflation is going to be a structural tailwind for asset prices. And therefore, if you just buy assets and chill, game on.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Let's end on this. So obviously, if there is a influx of new capital into the market, one of the big drivers, I think, of the Bitcoin price, and correct me if I'm wrong, is Bitcoin treasury companies. What is the appetite for Bitcoin treasury companies? And how much can it get diluted over, you know? If the next year, we see a thousand Bitcoin treasury companies come on and they all bought, you know, $10 billion of Bitcoin, obviously, there would be some price movement there. But is there an appetite from investors that want that versus just going off and saying, hey, look, let me go buy this asset myself? Because there are some, you know, custody concerns and some other things going on there?

• 36:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't want to get into all the details right now, but um many of the investors who are investing in these things, uh they're not just buying it for Bitcoin exposure. They can go buy Bitcoin, right? Um, they're, these people are very intelligent. They are very sophisticated. Uh, they have a lot of money and what they're not trying to do is they don't need to make 50x their money. If they can pick up a couple of percentage points here and there on a lot of money, that's good. That's good enough for them, right? And so, um, I will give you, um, maybe one example that would be helpful. There's a lot of people who are investing in these things as a way to arb the premiums. People smart, they can figure out how to do it. Um, but if

• 37:22Anthony Pompliano?

  something has a dollar worth of Bitcoin, but it's trading at $2, well, there's a dollar premium. You think people aren't trying to lock in that dollar premium? Say, I want no risk. I want to be neutral exposure to the asset and I just want to clip that $1 premium. Now you can see why so much capital is pouring in, right? That's just one of many ways that people are playing this. And so, um, yes, are people buying Bitcoin? Of course, right? They want exposure, all this stuff. But the really big pools of capital, the reason why this trade is so hot right now, has much more to do with people figuring out different ways to, um, kind of risk mitigated drive returns than just like, oh, I can't figure out how to buy Bitcoin. So let me go buy it over here. Right?

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. I feel bad for the day traders right now.

• 38:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 38:11Speaker 02

  Just so much volatility, so much uncertainty.

• 38:13Anthony Pompliano?

  They need volatility. Yeah. If you're a day trader, if you're like a legit, not like a, hey, I, I look at the market, but if you're like a legit day trader, you need the volatility, right? Um, if it just goes sideways every day, then you don't make any money, right? Um, so, so don't feel bad for them. They, they're thankful for it. Um, I think the people who, uh, hopefully are, you know, you send this stuff to your friends, right? Send this video, explain to people, listen, you gotta understand what you're buying. It's true of every asset class. Go and figure out, if you're gonna buy a stock, explain it to me. Can you explain the stock to me better than I can explain it to you? That's probably a pretty good spot to start with. Why are you buying this thing? Right? Um, I always love the, the idea of like, if you're gonna buy something and not hold it for, you know, two, three, five, 10, whatever your, your

• 38:58Anthony Pompliano?

  timeframe is, then why buy it for five minutes? Right? You know, all these different things. It just goes back to like timeless investing principles do not change. You can take those timeless investing principles, if you are smart, take the time to learn them, you know, implement them, et cetera, to new industries. But the timeless investing principles, they're timeless for a reason. And so I think that that's a huge piece of this is if you think that you're the next Warren Buffett, or George Soros, or Steve Cohen, or whatever, well, one odd is just given the probability you're not. Right? But somebody is, right? Okay, well, take the things to learn from these people and apply it in new areas. Right? There's a reason why they've been successful. Don't just, I always laugh when I hear people be like, uh, oh, they're dumb.

• 39:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, well, objectively, they're not dumb. Right? Actually, they're objectively smart. You may not like what they do. You may think that you can do something better or different or whatever, but learn from them and then make it your own. I think that's a huge piece of this is people want to operate in a black and white world. But like, the gray area is, can you explain to someone, why was Warren Buffett successful? Why was Steve Cohen successful? Why was Paul Tudor Jones, or Stanley Druckenmiller? Like, just go through all of these folks. Take the lessons from every single one of them and then say, from these lessons, combined with what I am uniquely good at or interested in, how do I apply it to a new area? And then that is kind of, that's your domain. Go play in that domain.

• 40:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And I just think that not enough people are doing that yet. And so I hope that people who come into Bitcoin, understand Bitcoin, go read the white paper. There's a gazillion hours of podcasts, or articles to read, or tweets, or whatever. Like, go learn. As you learn, implement best timeless investing principles and you'll be fine. Just let the market do its thing. There's 1,500 episodes of the Pomp Podcast that you can go listen to. I don't know if you want to do that. That'd take a long time and you'd probably get tired of hearing my voice, but. 2X speed. That's true. That's true. Well, you can talk a little faster, 2X speed. I probably. Yeah. By the way, people always say when they meet me in person, they're like, oh, you talk faster in person. I try really hard to slow down whenever a microphone's in front of me. But you know, it's not really that easy because I could talk like this.

• 41:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And then people are like, wait, what the hell? He's talking so fast. Like, well, I got a lot to say and you know, like, let's just be more efficient here. There's nothing worse than sitting down in a meeting and the person. Starts talking. Dragging it on. Like this. You know, oh, man. I love you. But I ain't got time for this. We gotta hurry up. Like, just tell me to spit it out. Let's go. What's the thing that you gotta do? Um, and so, uh, you know, this is what it is. All right, all right. Appreciate you. All right. Thanks, everyone for watching. Talk to you guys next time.