← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Bitcoin vs. The U.S. Dollar: The Financial War That Will Change Everything | Anthony Pompliano PT 2
01:24:44
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- [00:01]
Anthony Pompliano
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- [01:00]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome back to Impact Theory. In Part one, Anthony Pompliano dug deep into the chaos that's reshaping the markets, why speculation is running wild, how Bitcoin fits into the picture, and whether traditional investing is dead. But now we need to push further, because AI isn't just disrupting jobs, it's coming for investing itself. If markets are already unpredictable, what happens when human intuition gets replaced by by machine precision? How do you stay ahead when AI can move faster, think bigger, and react before you even know what's happening? That's what I'm pressing Pomp on next. And now let's get right back into it. I have to keep running this thought against more historical examples, but I have a feeling that a very substantive percentage of what's happening among the young people that are investing in things like Reddit Coin instead of Reddit, the stock. Stock is this is an echo of the Occupy Wall street movement where they feel isolated from a financial system. They're in a worse place now than their parents were at the same age. They feel like the American dream of buy a house and everything else is going to take care of itself. It doesn't exist that something has happened to the system that has leveraged it towards the old and against them. And I think there's a lot of resentment built up in the system. And the thing that people just do not think enough about is you're going to have incredibly intelligent people that are going to find a way to get out from under that system. And so I think they're the the old proverb of if somebody is not embraced by the village, they will burn it down to feel its warmth. Like this is there is a reason that they launched Reddit Coin at the same time that Reddit the stock was going live. Now, part of it is it's just smart because you know that people are going to be talking about it. So now there's going to be attention. You can run in the parallel system, but you also know that you're going to take that liquidity just like you were expecting that, oh, this is going to flood in because all these guys use it and they're going to want to be participating in the system. It feels like the stock that was made for them and they're like, not. You guys had your chance. We're going to create a parallel financial system. Now you're bringing up a really interesting point, which is in this parallel financial system, I think that there, there isn't the long term trend. This is all cultural energy. It's very fickle, very high volatility. And so people that are day trading are going to get a lot of mileage out of it if they can win in the long run, which most of them will not be able to. But I get the attraction. Not thinking about compounding getting something right away, but over time, what will the market that they control turn into? Because boomers are going to die and they're ultimately going to control what this financial system becomes. And I am so curious to see if it's just a classic example of you're very rebellious when you're young and suddenly you start having kids and you realize, whoa, whoa, whoa, I can't deal with this level of extreme volatility. I need something that's going to earn over time. So I'm curious what it becomes. But I again, going back to this idea of building a predictive engine, when I look at it and say there's a lot of resentment here, it makes more sense than if I just assume that it's something that's more familiar or they're more digitally native.
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Anthony Pompliano
They're.
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Tom Bilyeu
That's part of it. But it feels like if you don't account for the resentment, it doesn't make as much sense.
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Anthony Pompliano
There's this whole element of kind of revenge or, you know, kind of the resentment you're talking about. And historically there's a lot of people who probably were upset by something, but they couldn't really do anything. And you know, it's funny because in the book, one of the things I talk about is compete, don't complain. And what's really interesting about this idea is, let's take, for example, the. The United Healthcare shooter, which, you know, obviously is incredibly tragic. And in that scenario, you have an individual who was upset with the insurance company, and rather than compete, he essentially decided that he was gonna go find somebody in the industry and kill them. But in a competitive world, the better story and probably what would have affected more change and obviously wouldn't have led to the death of an individual and then ruining of his life is he sat down, he said, I'm a smart guy. I've got an engineering degree. I'm going to build a better health insurance business, and I'm going to figure out how to do this so that it helps people. And so if you then extrapolate that and say, look at what Mark Cuban is doing with Cost plus drugs. Health care system is pretty broken. Prescription drugs are really high. He's figured out this model to go and actually do cheaper drugs online. Competing, not complaining. Right? And so it goes back to this idea of, like, maybe a part of in the financial world is people are saying, hey, I'm done complaining. Occupy Wall Street. Did it really affect any change, or should we compete? Now you're going up against a highly regulated industry. And so naturally there's going to be a lot of questions about laws and securities and things like that. But is that part of the story? Absolutely. Compete, don't complain. And so I think that if you go throughout history, how many companies were started out of spite or out of revenge? Somebody gets fired and they go and they start a company to take on their old employer. How many people applied for a job and didn't get it? I mean, if you look at WhatsApp, WhatsApp was bought for like, $22 billion. John, the CEO and founder, it's got a famous story. He applied for a job at Facebook and got turned down. So then he only started WhatsApp, and then WhatsApp bought his company for $22 billion. Right. Like, how many stories are there of that in history? Tons. Creating a, you know, crypto coin almost seems amateur hour compared to building a $22 billion, you know, company that gets bought by the people who turned you down. But it's still the same theme, right, is somebody got scorned somewhere and, you know, they're on a mission.
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Tom Bilyeu
No doubt. What's interesting here, to your point about this, is a highly regulated industry that they're going to be competing against. One of the things that young people, I think, are really aware of and they're taking advantage of is the rate of change of these technologies is too fast for regulators to keep up with. And so they're able to get in, spin these companies up, bet like crazy, move on to the next, onto the next, onto the next before regulators are going to be able to do anything. And if the thesis is right that in the next 10 years we're going to see 100 years of innovation, good luck keeping up with the regulatory burden on that. There's just going to be so much wild Westerly, it is going to be crazy. So yeah, what comes out on the other side really does feel like it's on the other side of the technological singularity. I can't see around that corner. I just know that when there is this rate of change and you get smart, fast acting people, the, the change will be the thing that dominates. And the only option that the government will have, which I think will get pushed back on aggressively in America, is to be authoritarian and clamp down from the top down. And this is why it scared me so much with what the Biden administration was doing with AI, where they were just like. And this from Mark Andreessen was really unnerving when he said, oh, they just told us outright, do not build AI companies because we are going to control. There's going to be a very. And while I doubt they use the phrase regulatory capture, that was the implication that we're going to work hand in glove with them, they're going to be compliant, there's not going to be anybody else. And when I think already how much I rely on AI, oh man, it is crazy to think that the government would be able to get their tendrils in there and really control it. So with Trump in office now, I don't think we're going to see that same push for top down control. I think we're going to see a push for innovation, things that hit the bottom line, gdp, so that he can point to that and brag about it, quite frankly. And so it's going to be wild, man, these next four years are going to be wild.
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Anthony Pompliano
If you put somebody in the White House that measures the success of the US economy by the stock market and by the bitcoin price, odds are those things are going higher. Right? And so if you need those to go higher, there's a bunch of manipulation that can happen with monetary and fiscal policy. But also you just need the companies to be better, you need to make more money, you need them to drive revenue, you need them to innovate. You need, you know, the R D, et cetera. And so a great way to do that is to deregulate, is to empower them to do more. And so if you think about Trump's plan, he is really saying, hey, I want to reduce taxes, I want to deregulate, I want to, you know, kind of empower our entrepreneurs, which likely should drive to more profits, higher stock prices, higher asset prices, more money in individuals pocket, you know, that are invested in the market. And all of that leads back to him claiming victory, that hey, I implemented my agenda. And so I think that the odds, you know, barring some sort of external shock, is that that stuff's going to happen. And so if you take that to the extreme, you say to yourself, okay, well these AI companies, if now all of a sudden they do have the freedom to go and innovate, what are they capable of? We're probably underestimating. You know, one of my favorite quotes is Bill Gates has this famous line where he says, we underestimate or excuse me, we overestimate what is possible in two years and we underestimate what is possible in 10. And so if you think back, you know, 15 years ago, who could have ever thought coming out of global financial crisis that we'd be here where we are today? Nobody. Who would have thought, Just look at Bitcoin, one asset, who would have thought that Bitcoin be a $2 trillion asset? Nobody, right? And so if you, you start to look at this, you say to yourself, okay, well what about 10 years from now, 15 years from now? It's crazy. The iPhone is less than 20 years old, right? And you think about just how ubiquitous that is. Do you think about just how much this idea of a touchscreen supercomputer in our pocket has changed our lives? If you think about something like that. IPhone release also came with GPS, which empowered things like Uber and food delivery and all of these other use cases simply because there was GPS in the phone. Now those things all got unlocked by one single product release. And so if you then take that, what other product releases are going to come out? You know what's possible now? Because ChatGPT or perplexity or name your different thing three years ago, four years ago, nobody talked about prediction markets. Prediction markets were the first and most accurate market to determine the US Presidential election. Right?
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Tom Bilyeu
That was crazy to watch four years ago.
- [11:48]
Anthony Pompliano
No one that wasn't even in the lexicon. And so you kind of look at these things and you say, man, we're getting this rapid innovation now. And Some of it's because we're all digitally connected, some of it's because capital is more abundant. But a lot of it, frankly, is. I blame the social network, the movie. If you think about that movie, that movie red pilled an entire generation of people that they wanted to be founders. And they watched the movie and they're like, that looks cool. I want a startup. And it made startups from like the nerd activity that your parents would yell at you because you didn't go get a real job to. Then all of a sudden it said, startups are cool. You can go and you can do this. And it's actually a high status thing. And we had an influx of people that went and started companies. And so if you think about things like even movies or music or whatever, completely change society in a way that is really hard to know in the moment, but you only can see it with hindsight. And so what movies are going to come out next?
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Tom Bilyeu
Right?
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Anthony Pompliano
You know, one of the stories right now that I think is just absolutely incredible is J.D. vance. J.D. vance was born, I believe, in West Virginia to a drug addicted single mother, one of the poorest countries, one of the poorest parts of the country. He was just sworn in as the Vice President of the United States. Should not be possible anywhere in the planet that you can go from the situation he was born into to the second most powerful person in the world. Only in America is that possible. Economic and social mobility. And along the way he was in the Marines. He went to college. He then went to Yale and got a law degree. Right. He became an investor. He like did all these things that he became senator. He was a senator for less than two years, I believe, and became the Vice President, United States. So you look at that and you say, when is that movie going to come out? Because that movie would probably be pretty inspiring and empowering to a lot of people in the United States who are saying, hey, I was dealt a bad card, a bad hand of cards. I need to figure out, how do I get out of here? I need to figure out, how do I improve my life, how do I improve my family's life? And the craziest part of that entire story is that when he was sworn in the other day, he had his wife, his three kids standing beside him. And a lot of people didn't notice, but there was a woman standing next to the person who was reading him. You know what to repeat? That woman was his mother. And she's been sober for 10. She's been sober for 10 years. And I was reading into her story and actually one of the reasons why she got sober is because she was inspired by her son.
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Tom Bilyeu
Wow.
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Anthony Pompliano
And so you say to yourself, a story like that comes out in a movie, it will empower the country, it will inspire people, it will tell people that in this country there is mobility. The same way that the social network kind of red pilled all these people and said, hey, you can become a founder. And so then it asks the question of, we talked a lot about technology and the rapid, you know, kind of acceleration that we're watching. AI is going to change the way movies are made. And you know, I know you know quite a bit about all the ideas of brands and various things. Right. As AI starts to change the way that movies and content is created now we're basically going to empower and democratize access to movie making and we can actually accelerate. How many people can we empower and inspire? How many people can help spread ideas in a way that's entertaining for folks? And so the same way that military movies are really, really instrumental for the US army or Navy or Marines to be able to go and recruit people to join the military, these movies are really important for society. And so I think about these technologies not just from a pure hey, what stocks do you buy? But the kind of second and third order effect. If now all of a sudden we can triple or 10x or 30x the number of movie makers and they can do it because it's cheaper, they got the tools at home and they don't actually need to go spend all this money to, you know, film all these different scenes. What's possible? I don't know, I don't have a crystal ball, but it feels like that's a pretty important thing that's really going to change the fabric of society as more and more people can tell inspiring stories.
- [16:06]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, no doubt about that. That is going to get weirder than people think in terms of just the amount of stuff that will come out the way that people will try to influence, slash control you with media. And now that the cost drops to zero, you're going to be getting pulled in a thousand directions. What's real, what's not real? Yeah, that, that one is something I think a lot about, is somebody who sees himself in that, in that world. Yeah, that I will say the entertainment side of my business is the one that has existential AI risk. Just because once it is truly ubiquitous, it'll be amazing. From our ability to take in incredible stories to your point, it will all be democratized demonetized, will be very easy for very talented, very incredible storytellers to make sweeping epics. You know, on. On the scale of a Marvel movie. Cutting through the noise is going to be a different story, but, yeah, that's going to be really fascinating. Before we go too far down that road, though, I want to talk about inflation. So underlying all of this is a story of inflation. I think that the fact that we can't run a balanced budget and we're printing money like crazy, Trump is in office and is going to do what some people think is going to be very inflation. Um, what do you think is going to happen to inflation in the near term? We'll be back in a second, but here's something to keep you thinking. Some people are about to cash in big, while others will get left behind. What's the key difference that's coming up?
- [17:45]
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- [18:16]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, thanks for sticking with us. Let's jump right back in. What do you think is going to happen to inflation in the near term?
- [18:25]
Anthony Pompliano
So inflation, the headline title right now is that inflation has come down, but that's not really true because inflation was sub 2%, meaning that it was growing, you know, 1.8% year over year before the pandemic. It then spiked at one point, was growing at 9% year over year. And that's the official metrics. There's an unofficial measurement that's much higher, but let's just use the official ones for this conversation. And so now what we have is inflation has come down. It's like 2.9%. And so people say, wow, it fell from 9% to 2.9%. That doesn't mean that inflation stopped. It just means that it has slowed and it's still growing at 2.9% year over year. 2.9% is 50% higher than what the Federal Reserve's target of 2% is. So we are still elevated levels from where they would like us to be. The reason why that's important is because you compound inflation. So if it goes up 2% in one year, then it goes up 5% the next year, then it goes up 9% the next year, and it goes up 3% the next year. Right. Obviously, that is not sustainable. And so what we have seen is there's been a bifurcation from an impact standpoint in the economy. People who had financial assets benefit from inflation. When inflation happens, those asset prices go up. So you see in countries like Argentina or in Venezuela or other places that have high inflation, those are some of the best performing stock markets every year, because a stock is one share, right? And the denominator is usually the local currency. And so if you're devaluing it, well, it used to be, you know, a hundred pesos to buy that one share. But now this currency has lost so much value that now It's a thousand I10X. And so the same thing happens in the US is as inflation hits, the asset prices go up. So if you're holding assets, you're getting richer. The problem is 50% of Americans don't hold investments. They sit in 100% of their net worth in cash. So what is happening is as that inflation is happening, the rich people with assets are getting richer, and those without the investment assets are actually losing money. So if you've sat $100 in a bank account since January of 2020 till today, your $100 can buy only about 70 to 75 cents worth of goods. From 2020, it's lost 25 to 30% of its purchasing power. And that is why you see the bifurcation. And we have this wealth inequality gap. It's not some evil billionaire thing. It's not, you know, anything other than it's actually an education gap, which is some people know that you have to buy investments and they benefit from the dollar devaluation. Other people don't know that, and they save. And so savers are losers in this economy and investors are winners. And so it's a structural thing that really affects people. And it's why, you see, why are wealthy families or asset owners, their kids usually do pretty well. Some of it may be environment, or maybe their parents are good or, you know, whatever thing. But a huge part of it is they teach their kids, buy assets, don't sit in cash. Like that is the one lesson. If you could teach every kid in America one thing and you wanted it to have the most profound impact on their financial future, you would teach them, invest, don't save. So if you think about inflation going forward, we're still elevated at 2.9%. There are a number of things to be excited about that could potentially get inflation to come down. Technology is very deflationary. So if you look at all areas where technology has an impact, those prices tend to come down over time. If you think of Uber, used to be really expensive for you to get a private car. Now you can press a button on your phone and it's pretty inexpensive and it shows up within minutes. That is a deflationary element of technology. If you think of TVs, it's like one of the craziest things. If you ever wanted to go buy like an 80 inch, you know, screen TV, you'd go to the stores, like thousands of dollars. You can go now, they're like 400 bucks. Still not, you know, $5. But the cost has drastically compressed. And the TVs are better. Higher quality, more definition, better surround sound, like all these things, right? And so you've got a better product for less money. That is technology being deflationary. And the beauty is that if you're able to get tons of technology into the economy, it's this downward pressure on inflation, because that deflationary element is applying now. The problem is that while technologists and entrepreneurs and business owners are trying to create productivity, they're trying to drive this kind of deflationary aspect of technology. We have politicians who didn't get the memo. And so the politicians are spending money, they're creating inflation. One of my favorite quotes of all time is Milton Friedman, the famed economist. He says that inflation is only created in one place. That's Washington, D.C. it's nobody else's fault. It's not created anywhere else. The politicians create inflation by spending money, by printing. And so if you look at right now, the US national debt is increasing by $1 trillion every 100 days. But here is the more concerning part, is that it used to be maybe every two years, then it was every year, Then it was every six months, then it was every three months, it was every two months. Now we're at 100 days. And so every hundred days, we are adding a trillion dollars to the debt. At some point, if we continue on this path, it'll be every 90 days, it'll be every 80 days, there'll be every 50 days. Because what we're watching happen is not just that inflation is going, but interest rates are higher. So the interest expense on the national debt is higher, meaning the government's having to pay more and more money to interest. Right now we spend more money on the interest expenses for the national debt than we do on the defense industry of our country.
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Tom Bilyeu
So Crazy, crazy.
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Anthony Pompliano
We're basically paying more on our interest payments than we are to defend our country. And so you start to say to yourself, okay, that's obviously a big problem, so what can we do? Another thing that we can do to positively impact inflation is we can actually go and we can cut cost. We can say, hey, right now we have a $2 trillion annual deficit. All that means is we spend about $6 trillion a year and we take in about 4 trillion. There's $2 trillion deficit. That's not good. That's like making $80,000, but actually you spend 100. How long can you do that for? Right? Got to keep taking on debt. That's what the US Does. And so what we can do is we can start to put a dent in that, and we have to get back to a surplus. Now, the United States has not operated at an economic surplus in more than 20 years. It was like 2000 or 2001 was last time we operated at a surplus. So it's been nearly 25 years since we actually did not have that annual deficit. And cutting cost would be a big boom to doing that. That's why you see the establishment of the Department of government efficiency, Doge with Elon, etc. And so can they do it? Remains to be seen. They're going to try, though. Pretty important, you have Trump coming into office saying, hey, we're not going to spend on some of this stuff. We're actually going to get rid of some of these departments. We're actually going to stop some of the, you know, insane spending that they're doing. But on top of that, he also wants to go and drive revenue. So, again, if you go back to an individual's, you know, kind of financial statement or you go to a business, they have two levers. They can drive revenue or they can cut expenses. Cutting expenses is what DOGE is tasked with. That would really make a dent in that national annual deficit. But if you want to make more money as a country, you have two options. You can look internal. The Internal Revenue Source Service, irs. They tax you so we can raise taxes so that we make more money. It's like raising prices in the grocery store. The grocery store makes more money, and so naturally, people don't want their taxes raised. So the next option is, rather than look internal, we can look external for more revenue. And so Trump has established something via executive order called an External Revenue Service. Exactly what it sounds like. Look outside the US Rather than tax the people, find me other revenue. One of the areas where he believes there's a lot of revenue to be captured is tariffs. Tariffs are basically a tax on foreign countries and corporations if they would like to bring their products to the United States. So if you make the products in the US you don't worry about the tariff. If you make the product somewhere else, you want to bring it to the country, you got to pay a higher tariff. We have tariffs on some countries, other countries have tariffs on us. It's the way that global commerce works. Now, if you go back in history and you look actually a bulk of or majority of the US Revenue used to be from tariffs, and there was almost no income tax. So it used to be that we taxed other people to benefit the American people, but at some point that switched, and now income tax is the bulk of the revenue. Kind of internal revenue comes from taxing the people, and tariffs is a very small percentage. So now we are taxing the people in the United States to benefit people outside the United States. And so Trump's entire idea is, let's switch that back. Let's start tariffing and taxing these other people internationally so that then it can benefit the United States. We don't have to raise taxes here. We can drive more revenue, we can get the balanced budget, and then we can get inflation come back down. Now, that sounds amazing. One of the big questions that people have is, if you add that tariff to these products that are coming into the United States, won't the companies just raise their prices? So now it becomes more expensive for Americans to buy these products, which would then contribute back to inflation. So the question of, are tariffs actually inflationary? Very highly debated topic right now. And so, one, it really depends on how do you implement the tariffs. Right. If you're talking about 1, 2, 3, 5%, probably not that big of a deal. There's been numbers like 25% that have been thrown out. A 25% tariff would have a significant impact in the market. And so how you do it and who you do it to is pretty important. And so I.
- [28:42]
Tom Bilyeu
So he's already put 25% on Mexico and Canada. Do you think that that is going to be inflationary, or do you think that it's somehow not?
- [28:53]
Anthony Pompliano
So I think that he's threatened Canada and Mexico, and he said, hey, I'm going to do it. But both of them came to the table very quickly and said, hey, let's negotiate, let's do. Let's kind of make some deals. And so his supporters will say the tariffs are actually a bargaining chip. He, you know, he's the art of the deal. He's a master negotiator. What he's doing is he's threatening them with a stick and then he's offering them a carrot in his other hand. And so they're showing up to the table and they're saying, I don't want the 25% tariff. Please don't do that. You're going to destroy our economy. You're going to really make a big problem for me. What do you want? He says, fine, I won't put the 25% tariff if you close the southern border. If you, you know, ABCD other thing. And so that's one idea is that these are just negotiating tactics remains to be seen. But the other thing is, what he also has said is that he is trying to incentivize people to manufacture in the United States. So he says, look, the tariffs aren't a problem if you just make your stuff in the US So rather than run around the world and try to go to Southeast Asia and find somewhere where you can manufacture really inexpensively, build your manufacturing plant in Ohio, build it in Arizona, build it in a local area in the United States, employ American workers, and you don't have to worry about the tariff. And so if I put a 25 tariff on something coming from Thailand or China or wherever now, that 25% would make it more cost effective to actually just make it here in the United States. And so there's this game getting played in this kind of global, complex economic machine where what he really is trying to do is he's trying to drive American manufacturing, bring back American jobs. He's trying to drive external revenue for the United States to benefit the people here. And it really all falls under this banner of, quote, unquote, America first. Now, great plan. It remains to be seen what the risks are. And there's plenty of critics, right? And I think the critics have some validity in some areas, and I think the critics are wrong in other areas. But what you ultimately, I think I find solace in is regardless of who the President is, regardless of who anyone voted for, the path that we're currently on, we can't stay on. We can't operate with a 36, $37 trillion national debt adding a trillion dollars every 100 days on inflation at 2.9%, home affordability, the worst it's been in 40 years and a southern border that's porous. Right. Manufacturing jobs that are leaving the US En masse, and an education level. You know, there's a stat one out of every five Americans can't read above a third grade level. Whoa, crazy numbers. One in every five Americans cannot read past a third grade level. So you say to yourself, okay, we gotta fix that stuff, right? And so if we can't stay on the path we're on, the first and most important thing is we gotta do something different. He's at least and him, his administration are gonna do something different. Is it the right plan? I don't know. I don't think anyone knows. Right. It's kind of like, it's almost like we're gonna run an experiment. There's a lot of data, there's a lot of studies, there's a lot of things that have gone into formulating this experiment or this plan. But we really are not going to know does it work or not until we get three, four, five years from now. But we just know we can't stay on the path that we're on. So there's a lot of people who are advocating for this plan is bad, maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I know for sure 100%, there's almost unified agreement that the path we're on is the bad, wrong path. And so I think that becomes really interesting where you think about this inflation, because if the tariffs are inflationary, if some of the policies are inflationary, could we have inflation come back? Absolutely. Is it going to happen? I don't know. But if we're already at 2.9%, if the Fed's cutting interest rates by 100 basis points already, and now you have these policies that come in that potentially could be inflationary. If you said to me, hey, we are, you know, in 2026, and sometime between now and 2026, we saw inflation at 4%, 5%, it's possible. Is it probable? Eh, you know, that's a pretty big leap. Something would really have to go wrong. But at 2.9, could go to three and a half. Absolutely. And any time that you start to creep up again, it hurts the bottom 50% of Americans that just hold cash, but it will enrich the 50% of Americans that have investable assets. And so what I always tell people, kind of going back to the beginning of our conversation, is like, how do you invest? I always say to them, whether you agree with the system or not, whether you think that the structure is fair or not, you, I and them can't change it. Nothing we're going to do. We can yell and scream all we want, we're never going to be able to change it. But what you do control is, if inflation is available or higher than it is right now, are you going to benefit from it or are you going to get hurt by it? And so if you want to benefit from it, you got to be invested. If you want to be hurt by it, you would sit in all cash. And so it's kind of this idea of, like, regardless of how you view the structure of the system and the fairness of it, your personal thing that you can control is, are you invested in the market or not? Doesn't mean you have to go take immense risk. Doesn't mean you have to go buy meme coins or any of this stuff. Right. But it does mean that, again, what did I start with? S and P? Nasdaq 100 Bitcoin. You can make, you know, the s and P500 the bulk of your investment portfolio. You can put a little bit of nasdaq, a little bit of Bitcoin. Probably gonna do pretty well over the next decade or so. Right. But it really comes down to what you're betting on is inflation is not going to zero, it's just going to be above zero. And so these assets are going to continue to go up. Maybe the rate of change or the appreciation, you know, kind of percentage each year varies. But it is very hard to see a world where those three assets are not much higher 10 years from now because of inflation. And many of the issues that the
- [34:31]
Tom Bilyeu
country faces hang tight. We're about to pull back the curtain on what's really moving the money. And trust me, it's not what you think. Think more with Anthony Popliano right after this. All right, we're back. Let's get into it. Yeah. When I look at Trump's policies, it seems inevitable that in the short term, it is. He's either going to get every concession that he wants in the negotiations, which I doubt, or he will slap tariffs on as an incentive to drive manufacturing back to the US it will create short term inflation in that you're. Now, if. If he can generate revenue off of the tariffs, lower people's income tax, at least in that case, while you will get inflation, it becomes discretionary. If he is wise and makes exemptions for things that are the basics, the essentials that you need, food, shelter, energy, things like that, that. Okay, cool, those aren't going up. Some of the discretionary things are going up. But at least I control my money. I have it. It's not being taken away from me. I think people will be able to handle that. I do think, though, there's going to be, they will have to put a focus on getting some of the regulations out of the way because of somebody living in California. We have these grand projects and we're not able to actually move forward with them because there's so many regulations that stop even the government from running its own projects that people are going to realize very quickly that back in the day when we were able to live off of the tariffs and only to either not tax, not do a federal income tax at all or keep that federal income tax in the neighborhood of 1%, which would be shocking for people to hear that we did that. But back then we had a really strong, really strong manufacturing base here. We were not a globalized world. So we were making everything here in the U.S. so if somebody wanted to bring something in here and we tariff the life out of it and it became more expensive or hit parody, you had American made options at that time, which we will not have now, at least for some amount of the future. And so while we spin up the manufacturing base, which I think is going to be measured in the three to seven year range, it's not going to be super fast. This is not World War II where you know, we turn on a dime and all of a sudden instead of making a bunch of Fords with the, the assembly line, we're making battleships and things. We're just not going to that. You're starting from scratch this time. So I think there's going to be a little bit more sloth in the system than people are prepared for. But to your point, we have to change something and so it'll be very interesting. I, I want to get your take on this. So I think one thing people have to think about when you talk about America first is there are, there are two parts of that and I think they need to be rank ordered. So part number one is you are born here, you're a citizen. And so we want to make sure that you're employed first and foremost. Okay, that would be one interpretation of America first. And the other would be that we want to make sure that America remains number one on the global stage. And so whether it's H1B visas or whatever, we are attracting the best and brightest from all over the world to bring here to make sure that we are out innovating everybody else in the world and whether that's in military or whether that's in technology, but we're just out innovating. We have the strongest economy in the world and so we're already peers with China, in some ways, they are ahead of us economically. And so we really have to be thoughtful about that. Now. To me, America being number one, having the strongest economy is the most important thing. But I know that that's going to set some on edge. And they want to make sure that because you're American, that you're getting employed first. And I think that that could weaken our standing internationally. And I think having your standing weakened internationally is the more problematic because we are going to be able to do less things to make your life better here in the US Whether social safety net, job opportunities, whatever. And so while I think they are both incredibly important, and I do understand why Americans would feel betrayed if we're importing a bunch of people from all over the world. Um, but remaining number one should be the most important because it will have the biggest impact on everyone's lives. That's my instinct. And I think it takes a very small number of people, relatively speaking, to ensure that we keep the strongest economy. What do you think about that? Yeah.
- [39:07]
Anthony Pompliano
You know, when you ask yourself, what is America? America really is a melting pot of people from all over the world. My family, if you go all the way back, somebody came here from Italy, then another person came from Italy, another person came from Italy, Right. If you go and you look at many people, they came here from somewhere else, whether it's them or their families. And so America really became America because we took the best from around the world, whether it was the best risk takers, the smartest people, whatever. And they all came here and it was the land of opportunity, and people were able to take risk and get rewarded. And the capitalist kind of democratic system is the greatest system ever erected. The founding fathers were able to be incredibly prescient in their thought process. And this is probably the thing that has the best shot of continuing to exceed moving forward. But in the debate of H1BS or other, you know, kind of immigration, legal immigration, visas, etc. The hard part about it, the reason why it's so controversial, is everyone's right. That's the part that people don't want to talk about. So what do I mean? Everyone's right. There's a cohort of people who say that American citizens should not be hurt and given less opportunity by people who are coming here from elsewhere. True, you're right. Americans should not be at a disadvantage in their own country. Okay? Another cohort of people say, hey, I operate business. I need the best people in the world. True, they do. We should find the best people, whether they're American or not, everyone should have an equal opportunity to go and work there, and the employer should be able to hire whoever they want. Then people say, well, the H1B program is abused. True, there's definitely abuse in the system. You can go and you can look. You know, there's this famous example of one of the big four accounting firms. They're literally using H1BS to financial level accountants. You're telling me you can't look in America and find an entry level accountant. Why do you need to go elsewhere to do that? Right? And so again, true. Then there's people who say, well, actually what we're doing is we're incentivizing all sorts of other issues where people are basically getting into certain universities simply to get visas, et cetera. True. Like that's absolutely happening. And so you just go through this debate there, there's, you know, maybe 20 different perspectives on the debate. Every single person is correct, whether it's a small correct or a very big correct in their viewpoint. And that's why it's controversial is because when you go and you talk to each one of these, you know, kind of perspectives and you hear them out, so you're right that that 100% is happening. So what is the solution? Right. If everyone is right, what is the solution? And I think that one of the best examples is that there's got to be a merit based system where the best person wins. With that, we have to educate American citizens. Rather than spend money internationally doing all kinds of stuff, let's invest that here so that our people have the skills and experience that's necessary to build our companies here so we can be successful on the national stage or on the international stage. And so what you can say is the best analogy I've heard about this is kind of like a sports team, right? A good sports team wants to really have a lot of homegrown talent. That should be the bulk of the team. And every once in a while you want to import an overseas player. The Dodgers go, they get a player from Japan, pretty good player, right? If you look at Wembley in the NBA, pretty good player, right? And you go and you do this over and over again. But if you have homegrown talent that should make up the bulk of the team, then you go and you get specific skills or experience and you bring them in. But then what do you do? You invest in baseball, what do you do? You invest in your farm team. You want to have homegrown talent, you got to put money there, got to give them Opportunities, right? You got to go and you got to work, you got to hire coaches, you got to do all this stuff. And so I think that is the hard part about the, the conversation is that no one extreme is correct. If your position is the H1B program is perfect and there's no abuse, you're not correct. If your position is, hey, we should have zero legal immigration, your position is probably not correct either, right? And so the truth is that the, the answer is in the middle and the middle is kind of the, the messy part. People don't like the answer of, okay, we should really spend a lot of more time, energy and money on helping Americans be better educated, more experienced, etc. One in five Americans aren't literate past the third grade level. We should probably fix that, right? And guess what? The money the government spends, you know, $6 trillion. We got the money, let's fix it. But also, it's true that there are people who come from outside the United States that are just as capable, if not more capable in certain fields that we should go ahead and we should have them go and do it. And so one of the things I always point to is there's a lot of people who say, I buy American made products. That's exclusively. Okay, well, there's a lot of products that you use on a daily basis that are not made in America because somebody can make it cheaper or somebody could make it better, right? Are there American products that are great? Yeah, of course. I know a guy in South Carolina, he makes weights, like iron cast, you know, like barbell weights. Made in America. It's like one of the only people supposedly that make American weights. Got good business. A lot of people want to buy weights made in America, right? But there's also a lot of people who say, just give me the cheapest one, right? Like, you know, it's all 225 pounds on the bench press. 225 pounds, like, just get the weights on for the cheapest cost. So it's all different preferences for different people. And so I think that when you look at this, you have to say to yourself, okay, is it true that immigrants have come here and create a lot of value? Elon Musk, great example. Jeff Bezos, American born. Jeff Bezos, his parent, not born in America. And so you don't just get the individuals, but then you get the parents, the grandparents, the great grandparents, the great great grandparents, etc. And what you realize is ultimately the debate really comes down to do you prefer nationalism or do you prefer excellence? And rarely can you get both. Because the greatest nations throughout history have always sought the best technology, regardless of where it came from, the best people, wherever it came from, the best ideas wherever they came from, the best capital sources, regardless of where it came from. And so the same thing here is the most patriotic thing you can do is to make sure you, your family, your children and those around you are as best possibly suited to succeed in America. But then you should also hope that we're able to build an all star team of people from outside the United States who come here. Let's get them going too. Right. And so it's very much this like team effort. But people specifically on the Internet like to debate back and forth on these like black and white scenarios. Should there be legal immigration or should we have no immigrants? The answer that it's just, it's too simple of a, you know, kind of choice. Instead, why don't we take the people that we have, do as best of a job as we possibly can to educate them, make sure that they have equal opportunity. Like going back to your point about American citizens, I think where people get really upset is that they say, wait a second, I'm being penalized for being an American in my own country. That doesn't feel right. Level the playing field. Give everyone an equal opportunity. Let the best man or woman win. Sometimes it's going to be somebody who comes from somewhere else. That's okay.
- [46:57]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. This is going to be a raging debate because, yes, I agree with you, we have to fix the education problem, but it's going to take a long time for that to turn out a crop of people. That's why I think we have to rank order this stuff. Yeah. So you've been getting more into politics and we've sort of subtly moved from finance to politics and back again. The two are very connected. What originally got you into beginning to think more politically and commentate on it?
- [47:30]
Anthony Pompliano
I think that there's a lot of folks in tech and finance who were disinterested in politics, but politics became interested in them. And so it's really the political arena that's pulled a lot of people in. Bitcoin and crypto is a great example where I think most people said, hey, let's let, let us do our thing, right? We see an opportunity, we're deploying capital, we're holding an asset, we're building companies, et cetera, just let us do our thing. And the political arena kind of came for the industry. And so there's a lot of people who said oh, man, I got to pay attention to this. I don't know if Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos really cared about politics until the political arena kind of came for them. I don't think Elon Musk probably cared about politics until the political arena came and knocked on his door and said, you know, we're coming for you. And so I think that it's less about these people are getting interested in politics. It's more of they have identified politics as a crucial component of their business now because the politic kind of apparatus came for them. And so when you look at it from that perspective, you're right, they are intertwined. And if you look at bitcoin as maybe the purest example, bitcoin success and failure on a day to day, week to week, month to month basis very intertwined with banks, regulation, politics, et cetera. Now, over the long run, bitcoin probably succeeds regardless. We've seen in certain countries where the government's banned bitcoin and adoption goes up. So, you know, doesn't mean that politics can kill some of this stuff, but it definitely means that it's a smoother road if you participate rather than ignore it. And what's interesting, I think, from my perspective is I don't really care too much for the actual politics themselves. I'm an independent, registered. You know, I frankly look at each topic and there's topics where I'll say, I think a Democrats right, I think a Republican's right. And a lot of times it's not because they're a Democrat or Republican, it's just because who they are. Right. We've seen a lot of people switch kind of parties in the last couple of years where they said, hey, you know, I was a Democrat. Now I feel like I'm more aligned with the Republicans and vice versa. And so I think that this stuff is less black and white. It's become much more fluid. And so what we're really watching play out here is people are trying to understand how do I think independently, how do I think critically? That's what I try to do. I try to say to myself, what are the topic? What are the different arguments? Who do I agree with? And sometimes I'm surprised. You know, I've had people come on our podcast, and my favorite is people who lean really hard one way, and I'll always ask them to say something nice about the other side and something they agree with. And I don't know, 50% of people can do it. 50%, their brain's like broken like, there's literally nothing I agree with the Republicans on. Or there's nothing I agree with the Democrats on. You're like, there's nothing. You know, let's start with. Do you think that everyone should be safe? Oh, yeah, I agree with that. Okay, all right. Like, at least we got some common ground, right? And so, like, you know, you just kind of have to understand that being able to think critically in today's day and age is really important. And the last thing that I would say is I have a lot of friends who've gone to work in this administration. They frankly are both Republicans and Democrats. Most of them were not political before. One of my really, really good friends I've known for a long time recently called me and out of the blue said, hey, I put my name in the hat for this position. I think I'm going to get it. I looked up the position. That's a big boy job. Would have never thought that this guy would even be ever interested in politics. But he's like, I'm not interested in the politics, I'm interested in going in working on this problem. It's a hard problem. And so if you then go and you look, one of the beauties that Elon Musk in particular has really perfected is he's able to identify problems in society and explain to people how important it is that they get solved. And he's able to attract talent to come and work there because it becomes a high status job. So we want to go and build a civilization on Mars. Wow. If you want to do that, come work at SpaceX. SpaceX immediately. High status job. You tell somebody you worked at SpaceX immediately, hey, you get credit for working at SpaceX. Working in the government was about the low status job you could get, you know, outside of maybe being the president or somebody. But all of a sudden, Elon and a bunch of these people from Silicon Valley, they have now made it another high status job. They said, hey, we're looking for the smartest people in the world to come work on this. If you can pass our filter and you can come here, work here for a year, three years, four years, whatever, this is going to be a high status thing to put on your resume. Immediately the quality of talent goes up.
- [52:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Is that what caused this rapid turnaround? Because all the sudden you've got some of the most successful people in the world wanting to participate in government? Is it just that Trump is like, all right, this is a return to merit and I've got the best and the brightest here and they're naturally going to try to get the best and the brightest. And by dint of association, people are now flooding in. Is that the whole game or is there something else going on?
- [52:37]
Anthony Pompliano
I think there's probably three things that are going on. I do think there's a lot of people who frankly said, hey, I'm just fed up, right, with whatever. Whatever their issue is. Some people, there's, you know, a homeless problem in my city. There's a crime issue, the inflation's too high, you know, housing is unaffordable, the border is open, you know, whatever the thing is, and free each person. I think it's a little bit different, you know, kind of what their red pill moment is or their topic. But eventually they just said, hey, look, you know, I want to be part of the solution. I'm tired of complaining. I want to compete. I want to go solve the problem. So I think that that's some version. I think that Elon Bezos and other people's kind of participation, really, there's a lot of people who look up to them and are inspired by them, and they said, hey, well, if they can do it, I'm going to go do it. You know, if Elon can go and give away money and go door to door, I can go spend a year working in the government, a certain job, right? And so there's kind of that high status component of the job and then the third thing, and this is probably the most controversial one, but I've talked to a lot of friends, frankly, that are Democrats, and they've met Trump and they come back and they're like, I hated that guy. I actually kind of like him now. He's cool. He, you know, he's charming. He's this whatever in private, blown away. Like, people who, you're like, there is no way in hell they're gonna go meet Donald Trump and walk away and be like, I like that guy. Right? They would. They would literally be outside, you know, picketing, more likely than they would walking away saying that. And they come back and they're like, dude, I hate to say this, like, you're never gonna believe it, but I kind of like him. He's charming. And so if you think about that, you know, if you think of quote unquote, leadership, like, what do leaders do? What is the definition of leadership is to get people to do things they otherwise wouldn't do without you, right? And so, in a crazy way, one of the most unpredictable presidents that we've had is actually able to inspire a Bunch of people who want to go work for him. Now, the question that I would pose, which we don't have the answer to yet in the first administration, there's a lot of those people. A lot of them didn't make it. His argument is, hey, I kind of, you know, really embrace the, like, political machine. I put a lot of people in positions that were suggested to me by the political machine. I'm not making that mistake twice. Is that true? Is it not? I don't know. You go and you talk to some of them. Right now, I'm friends with Anthony Scaramucci,
- [54:59]
Tom Bilyeu
literally, who I was thinking of.
- [55:01]
Anthony Pompliano
Yeah, yeah. He's not super excited, right?
- [55:04]
Tom Bilyeu
That's a gentle way of putting it.
- [55:06]
Anthony Pompliano
Yeah. But, like, you know, there's plenty of these people, right, that all kind of, you know, come together. And so you look at it, and I always say that whenever I hear someone be passionate about something for it or against it, I always think to myself, there's probably some portion of what they're saying is true, or some portion of it is if you think somebody is smart and they make good decisions and they're able to kind of evaluate situations, maybe they're exaggerating, maybe they're this or whatever, right? But, like, nobody is 100% good. Nobody's 100% bad. And so the question is just like, what are the things you care about? And it is 100% possible to look at every single president in American history and say, what's the best thing they did and what was the most atrocious, worst thing they did? And you'll come up with something. Right? And so when you look at it from that perspective, I think that that is a much better way to evaluate this stuff is not Biden is good or bad or Trump is good or bad. Instead, it is, hey, on these different topics, how would you grade them? Do they get an F? They get an A, they get a B. How do you think about it? And the truth really comes down to, like, most presidents are probably more of a net positive than they are a net negative. But every president has contributed some damage, whether it is on spending, crime, you know, whatever the thing is. And so going into the Trump presidency, is he going to do everything 100% right? Of course not. It's impossible. Right. I mean, just think, he sat there yesterday and he signed how many executive orders? There's no way that you can get every single thing right. You're talking about, like, 200 things. And we're talking about, like, geopolitics. We're talking about the World Health Organization, like all this crazy stuff, right? And so you almost have to go into it and say to yourself, okay, for me, individually, I'm going to evaluate the performance of the president or my governor or my city mayor. What are the things that I care about. I get to pick two or three of them. If they're good on these things. Most other things, if they're just okay, I'm good with that. And I think that's where you see a lot of these people who. Hardcore Democrats, right, that are saying, hey, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna work on this is. Cause they're kind of saying to themselves, look, if I can have an impact, maybe. Actually, I think that the administration is gonna be in trouble. Maybe I participating can help pull it closer to the vision that I have. And that is the beauty of democracy, right? Is that everyone gets to participate in some form or fashion. And so I just think that politics is, like, very polarizing. But what we now have seen is politics, tech and finance are all meeting and there's a lot of things to work out. But in my years of kind of participating in markets and building businesses, you can't work those things out if people aren't sitting at the table. And it feels like now we got everyone sitting at the table and they still disagree on a lot of stuff, but, like, I don't think Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump were going to talk five years ago, at least now it seems like they're cordial and they got some work to do. Right? And so I think that I kind of put my optimistic view on, and I say, all right, we got everyone at the table for the most part. Let's go figure this stuff out. And, man, are we lucky that it's not just government officials doing it. We got some business people, we got some nonprofit people, we got some finance people. Right. We got the politician people. Get them all at the table. Let's go. Let's all work together and try to figure this out. It's probably a better situation than not.
- [58:33]
Tom Bilyeu
What do you think about the people that look at this and go, yo, you've got like a handful of the richest people in the world effectively sitting right next to him at the inauguration, working in different parts, either advising or what have you, that this is oligarchy writ large?
- [58:50]
Anthony Pompliano
Yeah. I mean, look, if you go back 50 years, guess who was sitting next to the president? The people who owned all of the industrial manufacturing businesses, the people who owned the big corporations. Right. It was the same thing. It was just different types of companies. And so I think that's one is just like these people are the different people, right? They're new people. The second thing is every single one of those individuals you probably could put on a list of who's created the most value for society and they'd be up there at the top of the list. So it's a sign that capitalism is working in that if you create the most value, you should get the most economic reward. And so the richest people, for the most part actually are the ones who created the most value.
- [59:31]
Tom Bilyeu
That is, they have the most say. Because that's how people are going to push back and say, sure, let them capture the economic value, that's fine. But I don't want them in there telling them how to run the government. They're just going to swing it all towards them.
- [59:44]
Anthony Pompliano
So it goes back to, okay, who are the most effective people? Who are the people who, quote, unquote, are the smartest. And smartest isn't like IQ test, right? But smartest is like, can you take ideas, can you implement them? Can you do all this stuff? Well, the people who won in the free market have a natural proclivity to be, quote, unquote, the best. Like, the market has determined that Jeff Bezos is really good at allocating capital, you know, doing complex decision making, thinking long term, doing all stuff. That's how you build Amazon, right? Elon Musk has been able to prove in the free market with merit that he's got really interesting ideas that he can grow, that he can scale, that he can, you know, change the world, etc. And so on the positive side, those are the people that you want trying to help you solve problems 100%. On the negative side, those are exactly the people that you don't want steering things in their favor, right? And so again, it goes back to like, the world isn't just black and white. It's like you get the good with the bad, right? And it's not a Republican or Democrat thing. Like, Biden obviously had tons of people around them that were super successful, that were probably trying to steer stuff in their direction. And so I think that the best thing for the country is our smartest, most effective people are trying to help solve our biggest problems. But also the beauty of a democracy is there's supposed to be transparency. And we should have people who are standing there scrutinizing it and saying, hey, they're doing this. That's actually, you know, helping them. They shouldn't do that. And that's how the system kind of course corrects. So it's not, hey, just because there's a risk of somebody steering something in their favor, we shouldn't have our smartest, most competent people working on something. Instead, use sunlight as the best disinfectant. Have our smartest people work on the problems, but just have the ability to have transparency so that external people. That's what part of the media's job is. It's also the beauty of kind of the individual, you know, becoming kind of their own media. Have these people critique them. The critics are actually a really important part of the system because they help make sure that we don't sway in any one direction. And so in that scenario, what do we get? We get our best people working on the biggest problems. We get tons of transparency. So everyone knows what's going on and feels confident that people aren't doing things to their benefit. And the third thing is that the journalists, et cetera, are able to keep the people informed. It's like a win, win, win.
- [61:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Given, though, that Elon controls X, you've got Bezos owns the Washington Post, you've got Zuckerberg controlling arguably the largest media company in the world. Should people be paranoid that not only do they control the money or have enough money that they can really sway politics, but that they also happen to control so much of the media?
- [62:20]
Anthony Pompliano
It's a perfect example. Transparency would solve a lot of it, right? Have them public. What are the algorithms? Show the people just open them and there's competitive secrets and all this stuff and everything. But explain to people, let them see what is being downranked, what is being removed. Imagine a feed where any journalist could go and they could see all the things that Twitter or Facebook or anybody else is deleting. How much confidence would that restore in these platforms where people would say, hey, we now get insight into what's happening. Again, how do you do it? Like, I'm not smart enough to figure out all those details. But I think that so much of the distrust with the mainstream media, with social media, with other things, really comes down to the fact that there's not transparency. And so Facebook is a black box, right? And so you say to yourself, when the, you know, Hunter Biden laptop story got suppressed, at first, you don't know, is it because it got like reported a bunch by bots or something? Or is it that they're actively doing this? Only when people find out they're actively doing it, people, hey, what the hell, right? And distrust, you know, explodes Higher. And so I think that it's not there. There'll be no perfect system. But I do think that there's an element of transparency that can be introduced that again, at least you're never going to get to the point where there's blind trust. We don't want blind trust. What we want is kind of cautious optimism, right? We want people like a journalist's job is to be skeptical, go and figure out what's happening, and if they're doing bad stuff, tell us. Right? Like, we should celebrate the journalists that go and find stuff that is actually bad stuff. We shouldn't celebrate the journals that manufacture things just for the clicks, right? That ends up being kind of twisted facts. But I think that's really, again, it goes back to, like, the world's not black and white, it's gray. And so adding that transparency would be really important. One of the things that's really interesting to me that I like that Trump does, is when he was signing the executive orders, he sat for, like, 90 minutes and he fielded all these questions. And frankly, my observation was like, the guy likes it. He's, like, holding court. You know, like, you ever, like, go and talk to a grandpa and he's like, sitting at his favorite bar, he's got all his friends around, he's, like, holding court. That's kind of what Trump was doing. But it's like, man, you want to know what this guy really thinks? It's completely unscripted, and people are asking him questions, and guess what? He said a couple of things. And of course, the media is like, hey, what the hell? Like, that's not cool. But that's what their job is to do. It's like, get understand, what is he doing? What is he. What is he trying to do? Right? And so if we had to choose, would we rather a situation where the President doesn't talk to the media, or we'd rather a situation where the President sits and holds court and, you know, for 90 minutes, just answer random questions. You could say, hey, he's lying, or he's not, or, you know, whatever. But, like, we'd much rather, obviously, the President, who is more forthcoming and kind of transparent with his thoughts, than anything else. And so I think the same thing is true of social media right now. It's just a black box. And there's been attempts to build, you know, decentralized versions and kind of all this stuff. But I think the way you really establish trust is you just keep giving people information. And maybe a theme through this entire conversation is we live in a society where there are certain companies, organizations, institutions and people who feel like they are smarter, better have the moral high ground on the masses. Let's not give them information, let's not let them talk, let's not let them transact how they want to transact. Right. That is a key theme in society, but that's a losing strategy. I think the better thing is where is their excitement, where is their trust, where is their productivity happening? It's when people say, I actually think the masses are smart. Give them all the information, let them talk, let them transact, let them do what they want to do. Let's empower them rather than stifle them. And so whether it's social media, whether it's the president, politicians, whatever, like that, that is the, you know, kind of bifurcation of approaches. And so hopefully we get the transparency and empowerment more so than we get, you know, kind of backroom deals and, you know, all the nonsense that, you know, the critics are worried about.
- [66:32]
Tom Bilyeu
Fingers crossed. We'll see. People have referred to Trump as the first bitcoin president. One, what do people mean by that? And two, assuming that that is true, what would you want to see him do that would allow bitcoin to flourish?
- [66:53]
Anthony Pompliano
The first bitcoin president I think originally started as, hey, he's the first president to openly say, I'm going to support bitcoin, I'm going to protect bitcoin, I'm going to protect your right to hold bitcoin in self custody, all these things. So he kind of was like the first president to openly, positively embrace bitcoin. Fast forward to today. It still means that, but it also means that the guy's got majority of his net worth right now in crypto. Right? You know, between bitcoin and all the other assets, it's something, you know, it's like, I don't know, like 80% of his net worth now is in the industry. So you could also say like, hey, you know, the first bitcoin or first crypto president is just like he's the first one to have majority of his wealth in the industry. But I think that's kind of the last, you know, couple of days or weeks more so than what it originally started out, which is like he embraces it and you know, in terms of what he can do, I think there's three major things that he should do. Right? Will he do them? I'm not sure. The first thing is I think that he should repeal something called SAB121. It's a very kind of technical legislative thing. But essentially what it would do is it would drastically reduce the friction for banks to hold Bitcoin and other crypto assets. So right now you can hold the assets in self custody, you can hold them at Coinbase or you can buy the etf. Banks generally are pretty trusted, you know, institutions with high security and all this kind of stuff. And if you allow them to hold the assets, it probably would create a safe custodian kind of relationship for a lot of people. But also then those banks can offer tons of financial services. They can lend against those assets. They can, you know, use it on a personal financial statement to get a mortgage, like all those types of things. So I think that would be a really big boom. And the banks have recently, the bank of America CEO came out, said, hey, I want to do this. So the banks want to do it, the people want to do it. It's just kind of this regulatory situation. The Congress and Senate actually approved this to happen and Biden vetoed it. And so it's kind of like one person really kind of, you know, came in and stomped it at the end. And so I think Trump should repeal that and allow banks to do that. The second thing is we should establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve, which simply means that we should hold the 200,000 bitcoin that are currently on the government's balance sheet, don't sell them, and we should start to acquire more Bitcoin. How much we acquire and how quickly somebody smarter than me will figure that out. But I do think that if Bitcoin is a great reserve asset for individuals, if it's a great reserve asset for financial institutions and corporations, it will be a great asset for countries as well. And we know other countries are stockpiling bitcoin, and so we should also be a leader there, and we should be doing it as well. And then the third thing, and probably one of the things that would be most complex but, but most important, is we should change the tax treatment for, for using bitcoin to buy goods and services. So right now if I go and I sell a stock, I obviously pay capital gains tax, but I can't use that stock to go buy dinner, right? I got to go from stock to dollars dollars to dinner. With Bitcoin, I could in certain restaurants buy dinner, as an example, but when I do that, I pay for the meal, I tip the waiter or waitress, I pay the sales tax, and then I also pay capital gains tax when I spend the bitcoin. And so what we'd have to do is create a way where you can spend your bitcoin for goods and services. You do not pay the capital gains tax, but you also still need to tax people who are just trading bitcoin. So basically if you're selling bitcoin for dollars, then you get hit with capital gains. If you are buying a good or service with bitcoin then you don't pay the capital gains. And I think that would be a big kind of tailwind for bitcoin as well. So three things, I don't know if he'll do them, but I think all three of those would have a significant impact on kind of continuing the adoption of bitcoin and obviously creating more value.
- [70:24]
Tom Bilyeu
If we created a strategic reserve that would essentially be investing in bitcoin with the expectation that it goes up. Does the US invest in the stock market and anything else or would that be a break with tradition?
- [70:39]
Anthony Pompliano
Well, the US has gold, you know, as maybe the, the closest proxy in the central bank reserves. It's probably one of the most popular know central bank reserve assets in the world for different nation states. All hoard gold. And so I think that there's no reason why the US couldn't do it with bitcoin. Right. Bitcoin is kind of gold with wings, you know, digital sound money. And I think that's kind of the easiest argument. The US also has a lot of real estate, has a lot of land. It does buy obviously via the Federal Reserve, which isn't so federal, but you know, Federal Reserve obviously buys a lot of debt and things like that. And so it really depends on kind of where you look. There's even things like there's this new office that was created and I recently met some of the guys there called the Office of Strategic Capital. Basically the government is making strategic loans to certain types of businesses that do business or could help the government. And so, you know, like the government's like in the lending business. And so we definitely are buying various types of debt or you know, kind of commodity based assets. And so I think bitcoin kind of fits right in there. And you know, to your point, are they buying it because the price is going to go up? It's probably part of it. But I also think they're buying it because it's sound money. And even if the price just stayed flat, the dollar is going to continue to be devalued and therefore, you know, the US dollar price would kind of move more so the dollar falling rather than bitcoin becoming, you know, Quote, unquote, more valuable to the individual holder.
- [72:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Now, one thing I've heard you say that I thought was a little crazy is to print money and buy bitcoin. And I'm like, hold on a second. Printing money is bad. While good for the price of bitcoin, I hate it for the price of the dollar. Would you still like to see the government do that?
- [72:25]
Anthony Pompliano
Well, my point was, you know, if we're increasing the debt by a trillion dollars every 100 days, if we printed $250 billion, we wouldn't even notice. It'd be a rounding error. And if we could then do that to buy a substantial percentage of the bitcoin network, and it depends on where the price is, etc. But we're not talking about buying 1%. We're talking about buying a very substantial part of the network with that $250 billion. Call it, you know, 10 to 15%, depending on the market cap. All of a sudden you say to yourself, is it worth it? Probably over the long run. Now the question is, would I rather not print the money? Of course. So could we find $250 billion of savings somewhere in the budget and then use that money? That would be better. Could we actually get to a surplus and use the surplus amount to buy the bitcoin? That would be even better. Right? So more so I was using the, like, go print 250 billion and buy the bitcoin for illustrative purposes in terms of, hey, we should go do this, like, with size and kind of intention. Now, one of the most interesting things is everyone was really disappointed in the kind of bitcoin world that on day one, there was no executive order to establish the strategic bitcoin reserve. But if you're a country, wouldn't you want to buy the bitcoin and then tell everyone you bought it rather than tell everyone you're going to buy it, the price goes up and then you start buying. And so that's definitely true.
- [73:57]
Tom Bilyeu
I have an instinct that Trump isn't going to do that. I think he's going to be very slow to move on that because I think there are going to be enough people that are freaked out by the idea of us buying a highly volatile asset that that one feels more like a bit of a political hot potato. We'll see. He certainly signaled, obviously positive things. But my gut is the first two things you talked about. You've probably got a pretty high chance of him doing the strategic bitcoin reserve. I don't know. I'm a Little more skeptical. We'll see.
- [74:28]
Anthony Pompliano
Yeah. And look, I think that the. Probably the most likely common ground between the skeptics and the enthusiast is we have 200,000 bitcoin in the US government's control today. Just say, hey, we're not going to sell that, so we're not going to buy more. Right. But we're also going to commit to not selling again. That kind of feels like probably both sides are a little disappointed. You know, the skeptics are like, hey, why do we have to hold this? And the enthusiasts are like, why aren't we buying more? And as you probably know, you know, the best negotiations are where everyone feels like they left a little on the table.
- [74:56]
Tom Bilyeu
He's already making those noises, right? Like he said, ah, we're not going to sell it. I mean, in this typical Trump way where it doesn't feel exactly firm. But I think he's indicated strategic ambiguity,
- [75:08]
Anthony Pompliano
I think is what they call it sometimes, right?
- [75:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, yeah. Certainly when it's named to China, no doubt. So you wrote a book. Give us your hardest hitting. What is like, if you were going to say, this is the way to live an extraordinary life? What. What is that most important thing that people could do?
- [75:28]
Anthony Pompliano
Well, I think the first thing is everyone has a different version of what their extraordinary life is. Right. So what I want my extraordinary life to be is very different than yours versus anyone who's listening to this. And so understanding what is the life you want to live and being intentional about that is pretty important. And it doesn't mean like, hey, what job am I going to get? But, like, what are the things that are important to you? How do you spend your time? Right. Do you spend your time going out? And you like to go to a lot of business dinners and, you know, meeting a lot of interesting people? Do you like to spend your time sitting at home hanging out with your wife and kids? Right. You know, all these different components. But designing your life in terms of kind of your aspirational life put you on a path to accomplishing that extraordinary life. And then when I wrote the book, I wrote 65 letters to my kids. And it's kind of all these different life lessons that I've picked up over the years. And it's everything from health and wealth to work relationships to running a business to how I think about happiness, et cetera. And the major theme throughout the entire book is that you have agency. We live in a world where every single thing around us tells us the world happens to you. Just sit down, shut up and Let the world happen and you have to take what the world gives you. But the most successful people I know, the happiest people I know, the people who feel like they've lived kind of the most fulfilling, extraordinary life, they're the people who say, no, I have agency and I am actually going to act on the world. And so if I want something, I go and I get it. If I want to accomplish something, I set a plan and I go and I execute. If I want to feel better, health wise, I put together a plan and I go and I do it. And so when I sat down and I started writing these letters to my kids, my wife and I had basically decided on two things. If we can only teach our kids two things, what is the thing that we want to teach them? The first thing was we wanted to teach them to be good decision makers. It is a very specific skill, but it's applicable to everything in your life. Should I go to that party or should I not? Should I take that job or should I not? Should I make that investment or should I not? Should I hang out with this person? Should I not? Right. Should I do drugs? Should I not? You teach them to be a good decision maker. It applies to every aspect of their life and something. How do you teach better at over time? I think a big part of it, frankly, is you got to expose them to a lot of decisions and then you got to talk through it. Right? It's no different than trying to help a, you know, an employee at a company get better at decision making. You got to put them in this, in scenarios and say, okay, here's the scenario, here's your two choices. What do you think? Why'd you choose that? Oh, well, here's how I would think about it, right? And you just constantly are trying to get better, but there's no finish line. You never get to the point where, like, I'm a great decision maker. You're always like, I can be better at it. And so it's kind of, again, this aspirational thing. But that was one thing we really wanted to teach our kids, was be good decision makers. You do that by exposing them to a lot. The second thing is we want to teach them that you have agency. You know, kind of the Internet, you know, meme is like, you can just go and do things. And so if somebody is a good decision maker and then they know they have agency. Every outcome in your life is ultimately determined by the actions you take. And so if you think about J.D. vance, the reason why I think that story is so inspiring is because he basically was dealt the worst hand if you were to concoct, you know, hey, okay, well, you think that everyone's life is all based on the decisions they make. Well, what about the guy who's born to a drug addict single mom in West Virginia who's no connections, no education, no money, etc. It's like the guy just became the Vice President, United States, right? And most of the things that he did were decisions that he made. He chose to go into the Marines. He chose to apply to college. He chose to apply to Yale. He chose to study. He chose, you know, and you just go through these things now. Everybody has help along the way. Rip. A part of that is he met, for example, Peter Thiel when he was at Yale. Peter Thiel seems to have been a pretty big part of his story. And so, again, he went to the dinner. Right? Like, all these actions are really important. And so imagine if you started off in a position in life that wasn't born to a single mother who's a drug addict in West Virginia with no money, no education, no resources, no connections. You already have a leg up on J.D. vance, and he became vice president. Imagine what you can do, right? And I think that that agency is really important. And so pretty much every letter in the book is reinforcing that across a couple of different ways. And one of my favorites is this idea of luck is not real.
- [79:37]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm going to ask you how much pushback you get on this idea.
- [79:40]
Anthony Pompliano
Probably the most controversial letter in the book, but really my message in it is, let's say that, you know, you, Tom and I, we walk across the street and we get hit by a bus and we both lose our right leg. And our friends come to visit us in the hospital and they say, oh, my God, Tom, you lost your leg today. What happened? You say, man, I was so unlucky. I was walking across the street. This bus hit me. Now I lost my leg. I'm such an idiot. But then they walk over to my bed and they say, hey, what happened today? I say, man, I am so lucky. I was walking across. I got hit by the bus and I'm still alive. You know anyone who got hit by a bus and lived? How lucky am I? Two people, same scenario, same outcome, two completely different views on luck. And so when you realize luck is actually a psychological concept, there's academic studies that show that you can make yourself luckier by simply thinking you're lucky. It is all about perspective in life. That means that Luck is not a real thing. It's all about how you think about the things that happen in your life. And once you begin to understand that luck is not real, it is all about your perspective. And you are in control of your perspective. It goes back to, you have agency. Whenever you think you're unlucky, you should say to yourself, what is the good thing that comes out of this? And in another chapter in the book, I talk about this idea of good. Jocko Will Nick, who is a very well decorated and well respected Navy SEAL commander, he, you know, said one time that he had guys on his team who'd come to him, whatever, they had bad news and say, hey man, we got bad news. But I already know what you're going to say. He said, what are you going to say? So you're going to say, good. And his point was, you know, training gets canceled today. Good. We got more time to clean our equipment. You didn't get the job that you wanted. Good. You got more time to get better so you can get a promotion in the current job you got, you know, you didn't get the grade you wanted. Good. It's a reminder that you got to work harder, right? You just go through this and it's looking at the light, at life through a specific lens that is much more positive and optimistic than looking at life through the lens of the world is happening to me. I have no control, I have no agency, and, you know, everything is screwed. And so again, you go back to this idea of you want to write letters to your kids, what do you want them to learn? You want to be good decision makers and you want them to learn that they have agency. Put 65 letters down, put in a book, and, you know, hopefully learn from it.
- [81:52]
Tom Bilyeu
Now even the luck one seems like a very positive, empowering idea. Why is it controversial? What, what does that trigger in people?
- [82:01]
Anthony Pompliano
I think that people fall into two categories. There's definitely people who just, they're intellectually lazy. Like they just don't think about anything. And it's like much easier just to blame luck. I'm an unlucky person. Something happened, you know, it's not my fault. I don't want to take personal responsibility. And so luck kind of becomes like the boogeyman. And usually that's when it's a negative thing, right? But then there's a lot of very successful people who they actually want to downplay their success. And so you'll go talk to like a multibillionaire and like, I just got lucky. Nobody gets Lucky becomes a multibillionaire, right? Like, obviously, they did things, they knew things, they acted, etc. And so luck in both the negative and positive sense is really used as a crutch. The people who think that they're, quote, unquote, unlucky, they use it because they want to take personal responsibility for the situation. The people who are successful, they use it as a crutch because they're embarrassed that they were successful. They want to downplay what they did, and they want to more so, you know, kind of claim a moral high ground and say, oh, I was just lucky. You know, if I ran the experiment 10 times, you know, this only happens once. I just, you know, lucky, not. Not my fault. And so I think that luck, when you remove it both from the positive and negative sense, it gets back to the same thing. Your decisions, your actions determine your outcome, regardless of the details of where you start. J.D. vance becomes Vice president. You can go through history. You know, Elon Musk, born to an abusive father in South Africa, right? And you just look at this over and over and over again, and you say to yourself, why is it that. That so many highly successful people actually started out with really bad childhoods? Jeff Bezos, I think he grew up in a single mother household at first, and then his mother remarried. And you look at it over and over and over again. You say to yourself, maybe actually a big piece of it is you've got to forge yourself in the fire. Got to make the right decisions, right actions, and your outcome is then determined by those decisions and actions. It's fascinating, right? I don't have all the answers I'm figuring out alongside everybody else, but when you start thinking about why is this controversial? It's because it basically strips away a crutch from people, and it makes them look in the mirror and accept the fact that the outcomes that I get in my life are solely dependent on what decisions I make. Some people are happy with the decisions they made. Some people aren't. But the beauty is it's never over. There's people who, you know, turn their life around. At 40, 50, 60 years old, after years of drugs and alcohol and, you know, crime and all these crazy stuff, it's okay. One of my favorite stories is Mark Wahlberg. People forget Mark Wahlberg actually got arrested when he was a teenager. Pretty bad incident. He, you know, beat a man in the street. Probably not proud of it, but then he went. He became a rap star. Marky Mark. Today, he's pretty successful businessman, obviously well paid actor. You know, highly, highly, highly successful. Doesn't matter what you did in the past. It's all about moving forward. And so again, it goes back to at any point you can choose, hey, I'm going to make the decisions that put me on the right path. And I think that, you know, from people I've heard so far from the book, you know, the book's been able to get them to think differently about some of the things that are done.
- [85:11]
Tom Bilyeu
I love it. All right, well, if people want to stay on a good path, where can they follow you?
- [85:16]
Anthony Pompliano
Just go to Twitter, a Pompliano. Pompliano is probably the best spot. And then I write a daily email, two investors, about 260, 000 investors on there. Just my thoughts on financial assets, markets, etc. And you just go to pomp. Letter.com just p o m p letter.com I love it.
- [85:35]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, everybody, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary.
- [85:41]
Anthony Pompliano
Take care. Sam.
- [86:16]
Tom Bilyeu
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