The Pomp Podcast - #1504 Anthony Scaramucci | Is Trump REALLY Good For Bitcoin?

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat

Starting point is 00:00:40 any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by Nasdaq-listed Bitdeer. They trade under the stock ticker BTDR. They're led by a seasoned management team. Bitdeer is a global leader in Bitcoin mining and high-performance computing for artificial intelligence, and they are backed by technological innovation and a massive 2.5 gigawatt global power portfolio. Recently, Bitdeer launched its own Bitcoin mining ASICs named the Seal Miner to target what Wall Street analysts project to be a multi-billion dollar

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Starting point is 00:04:20 Scaramucci should get in touch with Trump and ask him for a one-day contract. Just go back, get a couple headlines. Trump loves headlines. Scaramucci would get a little... Let's see. You see, the people clapping, that's because you don't know Trump. That's why you're clapping. All right, let's... If you knew Trump, you'd be running for a bomb shelter somewhere. Okay, go ahead see how i could get i promise you i will get back into the white house that i will wash dishes at some point in my life so i can stay that i was there for an even dozen days but go ahead anthony what do you want to talk about i'm gonna go as far as to say your ability to understand the financial markets understand that skybridge's business model

Starting point is 00:05:00 was uh like a melting uh type business because people wanted to go we were in the type we were in the typewriter business. Yeah. People wanted to go direct. The funds were getting better at marketing, all stuff. You saw Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. And to your credit, you said this is going to be important. You made a big, big bet on it. And not only did that turn Skybridge around, you put in one of the best performances of last year, which historically fund-to-fund type managers do not beat the actual hedge funds themselves. But I think the publicly reported numbers, 42% you did last year, which is a killer year. Talk a little bit about how important Bitcoin's come to your firm. Well, first of all, thank you for bringing up the... I'm not allowed

Starting point is 00:05:47 to talk about the performance, but I appreciate you mentioning it. I guess... See, I help them out every once in a while. I appreciate it. That's very nice. But I guess what I would say to you is adapt or die. And we were in a typewriter business, typewriter business being people don't like fees on top of fees. So we had to figure out a way to go into funds that were lower feed in order to earn our fee. And then we had to figure out if there was something happening in the world from a macro perspective that could benefit our clients and benefit ourselves. And we've got about $3 billion under management now, about 10% of that is the partner money. And so our money's right in there alongside of the clients. And obviously we want to make money and we want our

Starting point is 00:06:32 clients that make money. But this was a controversial strategy because we put Bitcoin in our portfolios in October of 2020. Clients were mad at me. Most of these clients are institutionalists or they're individuals that are the scale of institutions. I call those individuals, right? They're lots of money and they make quick decisions. And a lot of these clients were mad at me, and then 2021 happened, and we got calls at the end of 2021, and clients said, okay, you guys are geniuses, you got me into Bitcoin, and then 2022 happened, and then clients called and said, you guys are imbeciles, and so we went from geniuses to imbeciles, and then 2023 and 24 were very good years, but if I'm being brutally honest in this room,

Starting point is 00:07:19 we lost a lot of clients at the end of 2022. And then I had like a really nasty article written about me, which was like a financial obituary of me and the firm. And that caused a lot of clients to leave. And that was probably the low point actually of the, of the business. And so you typically, when you get that really negative article written, it's usually a sign that things are bottoming out. And then we went up in our business, probably 3X from that bottom. And so the clients that stayed with us and our own money, we've done very well. But it's been brutal to be an institutional investor, somebody on Wall Street for 36 years, and to make that transition without paying. It looks really neat, top line. But we had a lot of turnover on our

Starting point is 00:08:09 client base. And now we're in a rebuild and we're getting back to a really good three-year track record. And we're starting to see what I would call the green shoots of new money coming into the fund. But I would be dishonest if I told you guys, oh yeah, we're super smart guys and we saw something before other people. You're a super smart guy. You saw something way before me. You came to my office to talk about Bitcoin when I had absolutely no Bitcoin exposure. You gave me an education on it. And we built, it took us two years.

Starting point is 00:08:48 I think Mark, did Mark speak here yet or not yet? He's after you. Oh yeah, so I would say Mark is another intellectual mentor. Listening to Mark, listening to you. I had the, I don't know if anybody here knows Pete Brigger, but I work with Peter Goldman. He was partners with Mike Novogratz for many years.

Starting point is 00:09:05 He introduced Brett Messing and I to Michael Saylor, who's become a very close personal friend. And so it was an odyssey into Bitcoin. And I would tell you that we were very nervous about doing it because we're institutional investors. Jamie Dimon was calling it rat. I think he called it a Ponzi scheme or decentralized pet rock. and then Warren Buffett called it a rat poison and the late and very great Charlie Munger called it rat poison squared.

Starting point is 00:09:34 And so when we were going like this, I was like the poster boy for rat poison squared. It's not fun. But here's the thing I would say. The people in this room are not the converse. We don't have to convert these people. They're here. They love you, Anthony,

Starting point is 00:09:49 and they love the ideas of what's going on in the digital space. I guess what I would ask the people in this room to think about is what do you see that other people don't see? And I've asked you this, I've asked myself this. I was at a meeting, I was at Goldman Sachs. It was my 35th anniversary Goldman Sachs training class.

Starting point is 00:10:11 Started at Goldman in 1989. And I said to the people in the room that were there, ages 58 to 63, how many of you own Bitcoin? Nobody. Okay. How many of your kids own Bitcoin? And maybe five of the 60 people in the room said that they own Bitcoin. And so this room owns it, or most of the people own it, or they're doing a lot of homework on it. But to really explain to people how early we are. So when you hear that Bitcoin has now crashed from 100 to 84,000 or 108 to 78,000,

Starting point is 00:10:49 when it was 12,000, I would have gotten on my knees and prayed, please let Bitcoin crash from 108 to 80,000, right? But people from a distance, they don't understand it, but they will. And there is a rate of change going on right now where there are skeptics that are being converted into adopters, which are going to be converted into believers. So one of the paradoxes of your life, You're not the biggest fan of Trump, as we all know. But he's good for the portfolio in terms of Bitcoin specific. He's been pro-Bitcoin. Bitcoin went up a lot when he got elected.

Starting point is 00:11:30 How do you kind of think through his impact on Bitcoin in particular? And do you see the regulatory environment changing or clients calling you and excited? I'm going to, you know, most of these people in the room probably voted for Trump, so I'm going to piss off everybody. So let me just say this to everybody in the room. I want you to think about this for a second, because some of us started with very little. Let's say that you grew up in a blue-collar family, and it was either you or your brother or sister became very, very wealthy. You lived the American dream.

Starting point is 00:11:58 But you've got a lot of blue-collar people around you. Maybe it's your parents even or your cousins, and you make a decision that you're going to pay for some college tuitions, and you're going to buy a few cars and maybe help somebody with emergency medical expenses, and you do that for your family. Let's take another family. One of the kids in the family becomes very, very wealthy and they have a beautiful house with a mansion and they have this beautiful swimming pool and then they want to charge their family members to come and swim in the swimming pool. Which family is going to do better? The one where the people are thinking about it holistically

Starting point is 00:12:36 or the one where we're now going to charge the other family members for the swimming pool? And don't forget this conversation, by the way, because there's a lot of people here that like Donald Trump, and I get it. And I can give you the objective reasons why you should like him as it relates to this industry, because the Democrats are really out to lunch with Bitcoin, crypto, and the blockchain.

Starting point is 00:12:57 And I told you this, you know, Mark Cuban, Michael Novogratz, and I, last summer descended into the White House, descended into meetings in Washington, senators, policymakers, assistant secretaries to the treasury. What are you guys doing? You've got to get off the anti-crypto brigade. And Donald Trump has amazing political instincts. You can like or dislike him. He's the most prejudiced political figure of our time. And I would define that time over the last 50 years. And just think about it for a second. There was

Starting point is 00:13:35 an interregnum period between his two terms. And so he's really been sitting out there in our air space for, will end up being at least 12 years. And he's having a very, very big impact. But I tell you the parable of those two families for a reason, because this is the United States. This is a country that has 4% of the world's population, 26% of the world's GDP, $30 trillion of GDP. And I can tell people here in the United States, we see the country one way, as Americans, but the world sees us a very, very different way. In Eastern Europe, the world sees us as a guardian of freedom. You know, when Reagan landed in Moscow, he was told by the State Department, when he was going to visit Gorbachev, not to visit the Jewish dissidents that were in Moscow

Starting point is 00:14:29 protesting the Soviet Union. And what did Reagan do? The first stop that he made was to the Jewish dissidents. And Nathan Sharansky wrote about this in his book. They were tapping Morse code to each other in these Siberian prisons, that there was a leader of the free world that was championing their cause for freedom and wanted to help them as a liberator of the ideas of Western liberalism and Western freedom. And I get that there are good things about Donald Trump, but remember something about Donald Trump, and don't forget this,

Starting point is 00:15:04 you get the entire buffet table with Donald Trump. So you go there with your tray and maybe you're a low-carb person or a keto, and you want certain things from the buffet table. Maybe you want pro-crypto regulation. Maybe you want some Operation Chokepoint 2.0 to end. Maybe you want some deregulation or some relief on your state and local income tax deduction. But you get that. But then you also get the meme coin that gets launched 48 hours before the person becomes the leader of the free world, and he takes $500 million out of it for himself and his cronies. And you get the tweets about Canada becoming the 51st state. And now you've got the Canadians booing our national anthem.

Starting point is 00:15:48 And then you get the discussion about Greenland being part of the United States. And we're now going to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And then you get the rebuking of our Western allies. And then we have Vladimir Zelensky today, who they tried to humiliate. Him and Vance tried to humiliate him today in the Oval Office. and maybe there are people in this room who think that really reflects well on the United States and those are good things for the United States to do.

Starting point is 00:16:16 But I'm telling you, in the last 80 years, you lived in a country that supported the rest of the world. Not perfectly, we're an imperfect country, but you've lived in a country that said, you know what, we've got to create rising living standards around the world and maybe we're going to accept some asymmetric activity in trade

Starting point is 00:16:38 to support free democracies elsewhere. We're not going to reciprocal everything in the trade community because that could be very damaging to the free world. And I'll leave you with this one thought before Anthony asks me another question. You have 5.7 billion people in this world living under some type of authoritarian regime.

Starting point is 00:17:00 And you have the United States in this unbelievable country, this multi-ethnic, unbelievably diverse nation that was founded on some ideals, not perfect, but trying to get more perfect, is now going to retrace and retract itself from the world. And if you don't think that's going to be bad for the United States and bad for our future,

Starting point is 00:17:24 and it's going to cause a real alignment in the world that's not going to help American businesses, you're not studying history. You're not studying the forces of history. So yeah, he's good for crypto. He's got some very smart people in the administration that are being very, very good for crypto. But I just want you to think of that macro parable

Starting point is 00:17:43 that I told you and about the danger that that represents to your families and to free people around the world. When you see that world happening, which my guess is probably the room is 50-50. Some people agree with you. Some people disagree with you. Does Bitcoin-

Starting point is 00:18:01 Not in this room, it's probably 80-20. Listen, how many people in this room voted for Trump? Raise your hands. There's got to be more than that. Yeah, people are lying. How many people voted for Harris in the room? Raise your hands. All right, there's like four Harris family members in the back.

Starting point is 00:18:18 People are reluctant to say it, but you know. I mean, look, listen, he's good for my wallet. I probably owe Trump a Christmas card. My Bitcoin went from $69,000. Where is it trading now, Pomp? 85 or something? 85 something, yeah. Yeah, look, what the Democrats have done,

Starting point is 00:18:37 I mean, the best thing that Trump has going for him are the Democrats. I mean, they imploded on his watch and they still only lost by like 1.5% of the vote. So here's a good question. If you're the Democrat party, what do you do with Bitcoin and crypto so that two years from now,

Starting point is 00:18:57 you don't get the floor wiped clean again? Well, listen, it's very hard, because Will Rogers once said something that I think is very true about the world right now. He says, you know, I belong to six disorganized parties. I'm a Democrat, and they are very disorganized, and they are very siloed, and so what they they should do, they will not do, but they need radical moderation, radical moderates in that party. There used to be something when I was growing up, some of the older people here will remember the Blue Dog Democrats. They were sort of conservative in certain

Starting point is 00:19:40 ways and liberal in others. And if they were smart, they would team up with the former Republicans. Donald Trump decapitated that party. He took a third party insurgency and installed it in that party. And I can provide evidence of that. Tulsi Gabbard is that former Democrat. Bobby's that former Democrat. And he created a new party. And if they were smart, they would align themselves with former Republicans. And they would increase the scale of their party to beat the current party now known as the Republicans. And this happened in the 1850s. People may remember their history from 10th grade, but the Whig Party was in existence against the Democrats, and there was a fight over the abolition of slavery, and a new party was

Starting point is 00:20:32 formed in 1856 called the Republicans. And what did the Republicans do? They launched a marketing campaign. They went after Whigs that believed in the abolition, and they went after Democrats that believed in the abolition, and they elected the first Republican president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, and they killed the Whig party. So if you want the MAGA party to live, then stay with the MAGA party and go with them. But if you're a Democrat and you see the potential danger of this, this sort of nationalism and this pervasive anti-globalism, and you think it's a danger, which I do, then you would reform the party and bring more people into it. They're not capable of doing that, though, because they have an ideological anchor to

Starting point is 00:21:18 certain things. You know, there are people, I won't mention their names, but they're high-profile, former elected officials for Republicans that wanted to get on the campaign plane with Harris or wanted to get on the campaign with senators or governors, whatever it may be, and the Democrats rejected them because of their former affiliations with Donald Trump. And so you have to make a decision, just like you do in a business. My narrative is not working. Do I adapt my narrative? Do I bring other ideas into my political narrative to increase the bandwidth of potential demand for my product? And I would tell you right now that Democrats are not ready to do that.

Starting point is 00:22:04 And so, I think they're going to have a lot of problems if they don't do that. But if I were them, I would be at least neutral on Bitcoin. Anthony, you know this. I know this. Most people know this. I applaud Scott Bessent for saying this. He said it on, you can ask Charles Payne who's outside. He said it on Fox Business.

Starting point is 00:22:22 He said that the jihad that Gary Gensler and Elizabeth Warren perpetrated on this industry was born from the Sam Bankman Freed FDX debacle. They were very close to Sam's parents. They met with them countless times off the grid in restaurants or people's residences. And they were close to giving Sam margin approval on that business. He flamed out.

Starting point is 00:22:49 And in order to protect themselves, they rampaged indiscriminately and wantonly when after this industry. And guess what? There are no, when Elizabeth Warren says they're going to have an anti-crypto army, they couldn't find any anti-crypto voters. But there are pro-crypto voters, and there are pro-people. And give Donald Trump credit.

Starting point is 00:23:12 Donald Trump said, okay, well, let me get this right. You'll hit me and my party with $250 million, and you've got how many wallets? $40 million, $50 million, $60 million? And so some of those wallets are single-issue voters, and some of those people might be in swing states. Okay, I'm with you guys. What do I got to say to those guys in Nashville? Give me the speech. And so you got to give him credit for that.

Starting point is 00:23:35 The fact that the Democrats didn't see that and didn't see the power of this industry is a sign that they are derelict in their duties right now of really understanding what's going on in the marketplace. Before I let Anthony get off stage, you guys want to have some fun? Yeah? All right.

Starting point is 00:23:55 Earlier today, our opening speaker was Vivek Ramaswamy, and he talked about he's running for Ohio governor. I like him. And he talked about how he's going to bring back manufacturing, he's going to make Ohio one of the leading states in the country. He's very pro-Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:24:09 I think that every governor eventually is going to be pro-Bitcoin. If we cheer loud enough, will you run for governor of New York? Dude, man, I'm... Look at him squirm. Look at him squirm. I'm running for re-election in my marriage, man.

Starting point is 00:24:24 That's all I'm doing. I'm just, I'm just trying to stay married. Okay. By the way, by the way, my, my wife has a castration policy, Anthony, you know, just trying to stay married guys. Thank you guys for having me. Appreciate it. Great to be here.

The Pomp Podcast - #1504 Anthony Scaramucci | Is Trump REALLY Good For Bitcoin?

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