Anthony Scaramucci, Founder of SkyBridge: Politics, Economics and Bitcoin’s Future

Anthony Scaramucci is the founder of SkyBridge and the former White House director of communications. In this conversation, Anthony and Pomp discuss the macro economy, the history of money, the current structural issues in America, what Anthony took away from his time in the White House, and why he thinks Bitcoin could be interesting. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO. COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visitcoinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world.

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

• 0:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Anthony Scaramucci, who's lovingly known as "The Mooch", is the founder of Skybridge, a global alternative investment firm, and also the founder of Salt Conference. He previously served as the White House Director of Communications for 11 days under President Trump. In this conversation, we discuss the macroeconomy, the history of money, the current structural issues in America, what Anthony took away from his time in the White House, and why he thinks Bitcoin could be interesting. This is one of the more entertaining interviews I've done,

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  and it is always great to talk to another Italian in finance. I enjoyed it, and I hope you do as well. Before we kick off this podcast, first a word from our sponsor BlockFi. As many of you know, crypto investors store their digital assets on exchanges or in cold storage for long-term safekeeping. However, this strategy doesn't help them grow their investment holdings or build overall wealth. With the new BlockFi interest account, users can now securely store their Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest, paid monthly in cryptocurrency. 6% is an absurdly high rate. It's the best rate in the industry. I highly suggest you go check out blockfi.com/pomp. Again, that's blockfi.com/pomp to sign up and start earning crypto today.

• 1:30Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:15Anthony Pompliano?

  That's right, go to coinmine.com, tell them Pomp set you, and thank you later.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  All right, guys, I'm sitting here with Anthony Scaramucci in his office in midtown Manhattan. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  Pomp, it's great to be here. I got a few questions for you, though, too. Is that okay?

• 2:57Speaker 02

  You can ask whatever you want.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  All right, so how did you get so hooked into digital currencies? Like, what was the apple that hit you in the side of the head and said that this is your eureka moment for your life?

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a couple of things. So I've always looked at innovative technology and kind of thought how, when you apply this to certain places, where's the most disruption or the most kind of value capture? And it was very obvious to me quickly that the idea, humans are trusting algorithms more than they are other humans. So if you look at Google Maps, you trust more than asking somebody for street directions or Spotify for music recommendations rather than your friend. The idea that we were going to stop trusting institutions and human-led organizations, but would rather trust cryptographically secure technology or algorithms and software seemed to be a trend that was worth betting on.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  So, and so the old fogies, I mean, I'm an old fogey, a lot of the old fogies don't

• 3:50Speaker 02

  You look like you're 22.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Well, that's botox and hair diver, man. I'm going to teach you how to do that, okay? Okay, you're too young for that shit right now, but when you get a little older, we'll dust you up a little bit. Okay, so, but the old fogies don't like it.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  I think that they don't understand it, right? And so anytime that you have a technology that you don't understand, there's a little bit of fear, there's a little bit of, you know, why do we need something new? What we have already works. But as we know, you know, that's what, where the opportunity for disruption is.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, but the governments hate it because the governments like manipulating the currency. You know, the governments have figured out that there's been a 100-year scheme where what they do is they overpromise people, things like entitlements and social welfare payments and things like that, and then obviously they can't afford the stuff that they're promising. So you're undertaxing, overpromising on services, and you're creating these very large deficits. And so what the governments want to do is they want to continue to monetize those debts.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  So why would a government allow a digital currency to come into place that is something unassailable to them?

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Here's the kind of crazy part of this.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  There's no army behind Bitcoin, as an example.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Well, I'll get to that in a second. But for example, when it comes to the governments, right, the US likes the idea that we can manipulate the US dollars, the global reserve currency, etc. But there's a lot of countries around the world that don't like that we can do that. If you look at Russia, China, you know, other countries, they actually want to get off of the US dollars to reserve currency. And so if you think about bilateral trade between two countries that neither have the reserve currency, I have to trust that you're not manipulating your currency to my harm. You've got to trust that I'm doing that. In game theory, why don't we just trust this thing that we both know can't be manipulated, right? So just kind of opt out into a non-manipulated currency.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  Okay, so but that could cause, again, in a modern society, I'm going to take you back to the 1929, 1933 crisis and recommend to your listeners that they read Lords of Finance, the title of the book Lords of Finance by Lea Quad Amet. And basically, what happened is everyone was stuck on the gold standard. These digital currencies, because of their scarcity, have an absolute standard.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Sound money, yep.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Sound money. And so but sometimes sound money in a deflationary environment or in a tight environment, governments have figured out that they could use levels of laxity, okay, in their currency to create slack and...

• 6:22Speaker 03

  You know, feelings of buoyancy in the economy and things like that. How do you do that in a digital currency world?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  So I think that you nailed exactly what the governments are doing. And I think that there's a large number of people who believe, you know, the fiat experiment, if you will, of having it not be sound money. It has propped up the economy. And every time we get towards these recessive periods, which would be natural market corrections, we just print more. We cut interest rates, right? We just continue to manipulate. And I think that a growing number of people feel like that is one unsustainable or two, you know, actually net negative over a really long period of time.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Well, no, it's very net negative for middle class and lower middle class people. It's very net positive for elites. Because when you're devaluing money and you're elites that hold capital inflation hedged assets, you could care less. So if I have a building right here that's worth a million dollars in 1901, and I own it and they deflate, or I'm sorry, they inflate the money. And now it's today and it's worth $30 million. It's still representative of value to me in terms of that transfer. But a person has wages. Their wages have actually declined steadily. So middle class wages are down about 25% as a direct result of this monetization that the Fed and people like that are doing.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  If you go back, there's a white paper that the IMF wrote about inflation being one of the largest drivers of wealth inequality. And they basically cite two reasons why that is. One is if you're paid in an hourly wage that has no inflation adjustment on an annual basis, obviously, your purchasing power is decreasing every year, but you think you're getting paid the same.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  I'm a lot older than you. I don't want to express cynicism on your podcast, but I want to express.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  I want you to express the truth.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  These politicians suck. Okay, I mean, let me tell you something. I have an 11-day PhD now in Washington scumbaggery. Okay, I know what these people are really like. They could care less about these people.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  They just want to stay ruling. They don't want to serve the people. It's about how do I perpetuate the ruling class that I'm in? And how do I hang out with other clever people and virtue signal to them?

• 8:29Speaker 02

  So let's say that's true.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  And make sure that my family is okay. I could care less about somebody in the middle of the country or some middle-class or lower-middle-class family that's struggling. Me personally, I care because I came from that. And so, you know, one of the reasons why I wanted to go into the government is I thought, you know, we got to change these policies and make things better. So, okay, so the millennials, you're a millennial. You guys are going to change everything then, right? You're going to bring in a stable currency and then you guys are going to accept the roughness that that stability may present in terms of the potential recessionary cycles, which are normal for industrial economies. You're ready for that.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  So I think that...

• 9:10Speaker 03

  You're willing to handle that.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  What you said in terms of the politicians wanting to continue to perpetuate basically their benefit and they don't care about everyone else. In a normal world, what they would be able to do is, hey, there's a threat, right? And that threat is coming and it's a technology, it's a company, it's a person, et cetera. They would regulate it, they would jail them, they would do something to stop that threat, right, from changing that life that they're living and kind of the model that they have. The difference is this is a decentralized network that cannot be shut down, right? And so where it becomes is you actually get a clash of the elitism and kind of the current system is going to clash with and try to put all of the normal constraints and regulation and sanctions, et cetera, onto something that can't be regulated away.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  And you're seeing this in Congress today where congressmen are coming out and saying, listen, we can try to go do that. It will not be successful. We need to figure out something else in order to address this because trying to...

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Well, the IRS is talking about taxing people that are trading in digital currencies. Like, how are they going to do that?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Well, that's actually what they should do, right? You know, I'm on record as saying the first country to embrace this and say, look, we want the entrepreneurs here, we want the innovation here. We're actually going to work with them because it's going to lead to tax revenue. We're going to figure out how to incorporate this into our financial markets. I think they're going to have a very, very kind of big head start versus countries that try to go and outlaw...

• 10:31Speaker 03

  One of my closest friends, Noriel Rabin, he calls it shitcoin and they're all shitcoins and all that. And what do you say to him?

• 10:39Speaker 02

  So I actually think that he's doing a lot of entertainment, right? But I do believe that he thinks it doesn't have as much value as everybody else thinks, right? So I think he understands why people are interested in it, etc. You have to separate out blockchain technology, Bitcoin, and then all of the other crypto assets, right, all the utility tokens, etc. 99% of the utility tokens and what he's talking about, the shitcoins, they're all worthless, right? So he's actually directionally correct on that. When it comes to Bitcoin, again, we were talking before we started recording, it's an asymmetric investment, right? So it's non-correlated to traditional assets, which has some benefits to your portfolio. And then on the upside, right, 10, 20, 50, 100x type upside, there's just not very many assets in the world that can do that. And so I tell people, don't buy into the qualitative.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  It's going to be the next global reserve currency. Forget all of that. If you look at your portfolio and you put a non-correlated asymmetric asset in it, it can change the makeup of your portfolio in a positive way.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  All right. Well, so let me give you my personal odyssey. Because I think it'll be valuable to you because I'm an entrepreneur. I've started two businesses, sold one business, ended up working for the company that I sold the business to. Newburger Berman bought my first company, Oscar Capital Management. Then it got sold to Lehman. I was at Lehman for a few years and then started Skybridge. And so, but for my 11-day odyssey in Washington, I've been at Skybridge the last 14 years. I built the company from scratch, three people in a room. You're sitting in my office now, there's 80 people here and just under $10 billion of assets. We've got four offices around the world. I'm an adaptive guy. I'm willing to embrace change. You can see a lot of young people in this room. I feel you can learn.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  The young people make a mistake because they think that they're smarter than their parents and their grandparents. And the old people make a mistake because they think that they're smarter than the young people. But at the end of the day, you can learn from me, I can learn from you. We're separated by 25 years. of life experience, but you're learning things that I've not experienced yet. And so now I've returned to Skybridge. I was blown out of my seat like an Austin Powers villain because I said Steve Bannon was sucking his own dick. I mean, big deal. The guy probably couldn't do that because it's probably the size of an orange Tic Tac. So I mean, it's like, there's no way he could probably do that, but that's fine. My mistake. I own it. Fireable offense. I'm accountable for it. Move on.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  So I'm back here in Washington.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  In Washington.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Do I look like I was having fun? Did you see my press conference? I mean, will you see the press conference?

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Listen, as an Italian.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm always having fun.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  When I, when I watched you up there, I said, that dude's having the time of his life. And then I read a, a article where, uh, I think the story is after the press conference, you basically walked in and it was Trump and somebody else. And, uh, Trump turned to him and said, you know, tell him what you said. He goes, uh, you know, Mr. Skybucci, that was one of the best press conferences I've ever seen.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was a Naval Reserve kid. Yeah, yeah, kid Alex. He was, he was serving the president's Diet Coke, uh, in the study off the Oval. Listen, I love the, I just had, I just had dinner with Don Jr. last night. I love the president. Um, I think he's an awesome guy. I think he's flawed. We're all flawed. You gotta watch it with the, uh, he's not a racist, but you can't say racist shit. Okay. Because what ends up happening is you're the leader of the free world. The mantle of leadership requires you to just get as far away from that stuff as possible. If we're having a debate over whether or not the president is racist, he's not racist, and I'll defend him till the cows come home on that. But he can't be saying racist oriented shit. Okay, just stupid. But let's move on from that.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Um, and the stuff he's saying about digital currency right now is, uh, to me is a, I'm a contrarian. So the fact that he's railing on it and Steve Mnuchin's railing on it means, okay, it has arrived. Um, but I want to explain this odyssey to you because I think it's important. So I, I come back to my firm. The firm has been wounded by our merger potentiality with, uh, the Chinese, the H and A guys. We're great guys, by the way. CFIUS says that we can't sell to them. We're a national security threat. Ha ha, no problem. The deal fades. I'm back at Skybridge working. Again, no whining, no complaining. Life is what it is. But now I gotta look at the world and where the world is right now. Jamie Dimon says that he hates digital currencies and he hates Bitcoin and all this stuff.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Okay. And then he's gonna launch one. And then he's gotta walk it back, cause he's got five, six hundred people working for him. And so Jamie, and I have all the respect in the world for Jamie, he's probably seven or eight years older than me, he's one of the smartest people I know in financial services, and then boom, he's caught in a generational blind spot, okay? And by the way, same generational blind spot that I would be caught in, same generational blind spot that Yousko, your partner, would be caught in. So now Jamie's gotta walk it back, and so I turn to my staff here, my young staff, I said, "Okay, there's something here, I don't know enough about it, we have our SAW conference, we're gonna bring a group of people from the crypto space, and we tried to get you

• 15:34Speaker 03

  guys there, unfortunately couldn't connect, to learn more about it, and, and trust me, I'm fifty-five, there's a lot of fifty-five year olds in financial services that know nothing about your space. So I'm gonna tell you where I am personally now, after evaluating it for a year, I'm still skeptical, I'm not gonna say that I'm not, but I do think it will exist. I think there are, there's value to the notion that I can exchange value with you confidentially, and I can exchange it through a mechanism that looks very secure. Now, that, those mechanisms will get even more secure in the future than they are today. My issue is a political issue, because I understand how governments work, and I'm

• 16:17Speaker 03

  gonna take your listeners through a quick history lesson on our money. In nineteen twenty-nine, nineteen thirty-three, we tightened at a time when we needed to loosen. It wasn't until Franklin Roosevelt got the reins in nineteen thirty-three that he took us off the gold standard and created some slack, which created some relief for everybody. Now, that's always temporary relief, you know, when they're devaluing, it's always temporary relief. But relief was needed from political purposes, and so you have to be very, very careful with dogmatism and absolutism, because what happens is, it's like Mike Tyson said, everybody's got a plan until they're punched in the face. You're the leader of the United States during a recession, and you need to offer relief

• 16:59Speaker 03

  immediately, so you don't have a revolution, you're gonna take the country's currency off the gold standard. So it makes me worry about Bitcoin because Bitcoin is a fixed standard, it's a fixed supply, and it will trade relative to what's going on in the world irrespective of the world and irrespective of governmental manipulation. Can we both stipulate that? Yeah. So that makes me wary as a practical person because I know what governments will do in times of expediency. George W. Bush said, "I'm a conservative. I believe in free market principles. The world was coming to an end." He veered to the left very hard and he sent a trillion dollars to the banking system through TARP to save the TARP. What do you think about TARP?

• 17:39Speaker 03

  Well, I think it worked and I liked TARP, but it was, you know, if they allowed free market principles, they had allowed Bitcoin-ish or digital currency-like absolutist, every bank in the country would have failed. You would have gone to 25, 30% unemployment. We're not smarter than our grandparents. 35% unemployment, you're gonna have a revolution here, just the way it works. So, yeah, you had to send the money to TARP. It got paid back. It got paid back with a profit. A lot of people, you know, don't understand that. That was valuable to the US government. But the truth of the matter is, that's what governments do in times of crisis. They veer very, very hard to the left. I'm not saying it's right, but I'm saying that's what they do. That's what they do, yep.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Okay, so now, second problem that I have, and it's just a quick history on our money. So the money's now devalued, we go to war, we have Bretton Woods, we just separated, celebrated the 75th anniversary of Bretton Woods. They fixed the exchange rate mechanism among the Western capitalist powers. We have a Marshall Plan. We put a trade system together that's unfair to the United States to help the rest of the world grow. We have deficits. We want to fight communism everywhere. We run up a big deficit in the 60s to fight a proxy war against communism in Vietnam. We killed 60,000 Americans roughly. We're running very large deficits. And so now, the price of our currency, which was fixed

• 19:06Speaker 03

  at Bretton Woods, to be $35 an ounce of gold... is released in August of 1971. Richard Nixon says shit, we gotta monetize our debt in order to pay back. And so therefore, we're unclipping our dollar from gold. The dollar is gone from $35 an ounce in 1971, 2019, it's roughly $13.50 an ounce. We crushed our currency. The currency is down 97.5%. Okay, who did that? The Chinese then said, okay, great, we're gonna reform our economy. They link their currency to our currency. Okay, we allowed that to happen because we were fighting the Russians. Nixon opened us to China. And then he said, okay, great, you can link your currency to our currency.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Even though you're creating industrial factories and a mercantilist economy, which should drive your currency upward, we're gonna allow you to link your currency to our currency, which will increase your ability to grow. Because you're gonna be operating in the world stage with a devalued currency, which is the United States currency. So this works for China. They're clipping off 10, 12, 15% growth. They create an economic miracle. They go from an impoverished agrarian society 40 short years later to the second largest economy in the world. They got problems, China. I'm not saying they don't, but they've done that. And part of that was being able to hitch themselves to our currency. It's like a rocket ship for them. Go to the other side of the world. Okay, what do you think the Germans did? The Germans, same thing.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  They say, hey, man, this is great. Let's link up with all these Southern European countries. They've gotta devalue every five years. They're swimming naked in the Mediterranean, drinking Uzo, retiring at age 55. Let's link up with them. And if you price the Deutsche Mark today versus where the Euro is trading, it's at about a 22, 23% premium. And lo and behold, the Germans, they reform their labor market and they create this industrial, mercantilist exporting powerhouse. Right? They have a very large economy, they have a budget surplus, and they're at full employment. All done through currency manipulation, all done through rigging the system to benefit Germany. See, Trump understands that, that's why he's mad at them. So now, here we are.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Okay, the United States is sitting on $22 trillion of debt. We have the largest military, we still have the largest economy, and we're a direct beneficiary of great resources here, and we're protected by two oceans. But political leaders are going to want to annihilate digital currencies because they will put to Risk the manipulation that political leaders have been able to do over the last 100 or 150 years of our manufacturing society. So, again, I'm not saying it's not gonna work.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  But I'm just telling you the problem that you're gonna have of getting Bitcoin to be a major, not Bitcoin, digital currency in general, maybe it's Ethereum, the ones that you like, I don't know.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so let me, everything you just said, completely agree with, right, from a history lesson standpoint. One thing I think a lot about is if you zoom even farther out, right? The fall of every great empire has been the debasement of their currency, right? If you go back to ancient Athens, Romans, etc. When the currency starts to be devalued away, right, eventually the currency goes and becomes worthless. It does not happen overnight. It takes decades, if not hundreds of years, right? What worries me is-

• 22:33Speaker 03

  You think America's gonna cheat that system, Paul?

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Cheat that system in what sense?

• 22:37Speaker 03

  Oh, you have the rise of the American empire, starts in 1776, is 243 years old. It's the longest standing republic. I mean, the Roman Republic probably ended after 225 years. So, you think we're gonna be able to cheat history?

• 22:52Speaker 02

  My thing is, every great empire falls. I don't think that anything horrific is gonna happen in my lifetime. I hope it doesn't happen, right? I actually, you know, like, I was in the army, right, and tend to be very American-minded. But at the same time, I think that there's very real risks with the structural issues that we're facing. And the part to me that-

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Well, our political leadership sucks, okay? They'll blow an unbelievable thing. I mean, they got handed a unbelievable country. Some of it was luck, some of it was our geography and natural resources, and after the end of the Second World War, they got handed this unbelievable country. When the baby boomers, which I am one of, okay, so I feel grounded in being able to criticize baby boomers, when they got handed the baton from the greatest generation, the World War II generation, we blew it. We fucking suck because we killed a million people in the Middle East, as you know, because you were in the army, 70,000 American servicemen and women killed, you got seven, I'm sorry, wounded, 7,000 dead. You had 22 dying from PTSD every day.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  We blew out a $22 trillion debt. We blew up our infrastructure. Our bridges, roads, tunnels, airports are crumbling, look like third world countries. Educational system sucks. The K through 12 educational system, totally uneven, totally unfair. Common core is a disaster. I don't know anybody that even likes it or thinks it makes any sense. You've got to put your kids in private school if you're smart now to get them to avoid common core. And then you've got an industrial policy that is an absolute mess because there's no policy. So, the political leadership in the country, which controls 25, or if you take state and local governments, 50% of the country's GDP, they suck. I mean, they absolutely unmitigatedly suck.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  They perpetuate these false arguments and they gerrymander themselves into permanency in their districts, while your country, my country, the one that we love, is actually crumbling. What would you do? So, I don't think we can cheat history unless we have a huge wake-up call. Okay, somebody like you is an example. It's got to be your generation that does it because my generation sucks and we won't be able to do it. We don't have any political leaders in my generation that can do it, but it has to be somebody from your generation that says, "Okay, this completely sucks. You guys blew it, but we're going to take it over and we're going to not focus on left and right, but we're going to focus on right or wrong and we're going to pick policies that are going to work and we're going to tell the American people the truth."

• 25:24Speaker 03

  It's going to take 25 to 30 years to fix these problems. It's not going to happen overnight. There's no quick fix, no quick solution. What would you do to fix them? Like, what do you think the solutions are? Well, I mean, there's hundreds of them, but, I mean, you know, and here's the thing, okay? Bitcoin, okay, could have a role, okay? It could be another currency, another commodity. It could be like gold is, or platinum, or palladium. It could be... Store value? It could be, yes. I'm not disputing it. I'm not Nouriel Roubini where I think it's shitcoins. I actually think your generation is embracing it and what you're saying about algorithms and artificial intelligence and the future of what's going to be trusted and what isn't,

• 26:09Speaker 03

  I believe in all that stuff. But... If we can get your generation focused on this and put leadership together and says, "Okay, here is the strategic plan for America. We want to cheat history. We want to return, we want to turn a republic that typically lasts two to 250 years into a 500-year republic. Here's what we need to do. We have to invest in our infrastructure and we have to invest in our educational system and we have to right-size our deficit." Now, the good news is we can right-size our deficit. Bad news is, is that it's, it's got to be energy-related because, you know, we can take the energy out of the ground. We just have to figure out a way to burn it cleanly. You know, these climate accords

• 26:52Speaker 03

  and all this nonsense, not going to help. We have to figure out, it's a carbon-based world, at least for another 50 to 100 years. We don't want to coke up the environment. We're having like a frat party with the environment right now and then we want our kids to live in the frat house on Sunday morning with the beer and the bongs everywhere. The bong water spilled on the rug. Now, we got to fix, we got to fix the environment, right? So, you're not going to fix it by signing climate accords because no one's adhering to them, but you have to figure out if there's a way, the same way we desalinate water, is there a way that we can burn this energy more cleanly or is there a way we can filter the energy or is there a way to create photosynthesis through technology where you're literally

• 27:33Speaker 03

  taking the carbon in and doing exactly what a plant or a tree would do and convert it back into oxygen? And again, I don't know the answer to that because I'm not a scientist, but to me, your generation's got to figure that out. We have to figure out a way, yes, clean energy, wind and, and things like solar and stuff like that, but at the end of the day, you're going to have to figure out a way to burn carbon more cleanly. If you can do that, you can solve the deficit crisis because through fracking, you know, the United States owns, I don't know, 30% of the land. You can Google it. It's probably 28 or 30%. Underneath that land is an unbelievable amount of energy, trillions of dollars of energy that's owned

• 28:17Speaker 03

  by the United States effectively. So, if you look at the US balance sheet, it's probably got $60 trillion on its balance sheet and $22 trillion of debt. Look at it from that perspective. And so, then you need to plan, 25-year plan of how you're going to defuse that deficit, strengthen your dollar by doing that.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  And strengthen your economy, secondary plan. You need an educational plan, K through 12. You need technical jobs training plan. So people don't necessarily have to go to college, but they can make high income in a passion that they have, that they can learn more about and get technically trained for. I mean, the infrastructure is a disaster. You've got water pipes in a city that's 95 years old. What are these people doing? Okay, I mean, what are you doing? What are you doing with the money? Okay, you have a $92 billion. You've got a $92 billion budget for New York City, $200 billion budget for the state. That's $300 billion. What are you guys doing?

• 29:15Speaker 03

  That's 8%, 7.75% of the federal government's budget to be spent in the city of New York and the state of New York. What are you guys doing? Where is the money? Where's the audit on the money? Okay, so you need an anti-corruption plan. You need an infrastructure plan. You need an industrial policy plan. There's no living politician that wants any of that to happen because they are feathering their bed, short term. Okay, to benefit themselves, short term, and their families, and they could care less about the rest of the United States. So until you can break that fever and get people in the game that are committed to public service, it's not going to happen.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  But, you know, your podcast is about digital currency. And so my conclusion, after looking at this thing for a year plus, is that I think it's sustainable. I think it's going to be here. I think it's going to be a... I think it's going to be a future where, you know better than me, I don't know which currency is going to be there, but the blockchain's going to get tighter and more reformed and more secure. People are going to have more confidence in it. And I don't think it can be stopped, actually. I don't see, even though it's going to upset governments and it's going to upset that whole process that I just explained to you of devaluation

• 30:41Speaker 03

  and, you know, keeping people short term happy, it's going to be present. I just don't know. I don't know how big of an impact it's going to have because the... Players like the government, again, the US government, $4 trillion budget, they're controlling 22% of the US GDP. They don't want it, they don't like it, and they're gonna do everything they can to disrupt and break it.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  The last thing I'll say is, you said something earlier that I think is the absolute key, which is you, I, others probably even listening to this podcast, understand how the game's played. And so we take wealth and we get it out of the currency into real assets. And that actually benefit from the inflation, right? What excites me, I think, about Bitcoin specifically is as a store of value, I think there's a lot of people who, they're not investors, they don't understand asset management or portfolio construction or real assets versus currencies, etc. But if there is a store of value currency that they are able to simply park their wealth in, and over time, rather than being devalued away because it is that deflationary model, they actually can preserve their wealth or even increase their wealth. I think that's a really powerful change.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  But to your point, I think that there's a very, very bumpy road from here to that being the kind of, you know, default state. And that's kind of what makes it, you know, one, exciting, but also, two, the unknown.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, what you just said is more than I think the future is. And so, look, I mean, the Bible says the poor will always be among us, pump. Okay, but the rich will always be among us, too. What has made the United States so successful is that very thoughtful policy leaders, even if they had racism in the country, and even if there were bad things in the country, and your Italian grandparents and my Italian grandparents were discriminated against, they created a free market meritocratic-based system where families could come here from wherever they were coming from and do really, really well. We have to figure out a way to maintain that system. And if we can do that...

• 32:45Speaker 03

  The future is very, very bright. Now, the great news about us is that human beings is that we are constantly innovating. Digital currency is a representation of that. And so if we just stay out of wars, you know, 10, 15, 20 years from now, there'll be vertical farming, there'll be artificial intelligence, there'll be increased automation in manufacturing that will probably reduce prices further. There's a lot of great things happening. And so I do think digital currencies will be a big part of that future. For sure. The question everyone wants to know is, do you own any Bitcoin? I don't own any Bitcoin right now, no. But that's not to say that I won't. And it's not to say that I'm not open to potentially creating. You know, we're a fund of funds.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  So if you said to me, could I have a fund of digital currencies, a fund of funds of different funds that trade in currencies? Yes. I don't own any Bitcoin right now. But if you come and see me, if you invite me back on your podcast in a year, I bet I'll have a different answer. All right. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I know you're super busy. Thank you. God bless. Good luck. Keep up the good work, okay? Make sure you get your name out there, okay? Right now, I don't think you're that well-known yet, Pom. Get your name out there a little. Be more aggressive with that, okay? Anthony is going to give me all the secrets to... The only thing is, I don't think I could have... Don't go into the government, though. Been on the national stage. Although if you end up in the government, man, I gotta tell you, try to maximize. If

• 34:12Speaker 03

  you can only spend one mooch, which is 11 days, try to maximize it like I did. You're a legend for hitting the national press with the finger guns. All right, thanks.

• 34:20Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to that podcast. Before I let you go, one more word from our sponsor, BlockFi. Their new interest account allows you to securely deposit your Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. This rate actually compounds, so you receive a 6.2% APY, which is very attractive, given the alternatives. So you can actually take your Bitcoin, you can deposit it with BlockFi, and get paid an interest rate of 6% in return. Go check out blockfi.com/pomp. Again, blockfi.com/pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today.

• 35:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Everyone wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy POMP's got you. Everybody got some electricity and wifi. All you gotta do is go to coinmine.com, you buy a coin mine. It's like an Xbox or a Playstation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. That's right, you purchase it, it shows up at your doorstep, you pull it out of the box, you plug it in, connect to your wifi, 5 minutes or less, you're mining Bitcoin. All you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide, and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis. Kinda like how Tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software. Just your update in your coin mine. Consumer mining made easy.

• 35:42Anthony Pompliano?

  That's right, go to coinmine.com, tell them POMP set you, and thank me later. Hey everyone, POMP here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the 5 blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening, and see you next time on Off the Chain.