The Pomp Podcast - #1545 Anthony Scaramucci | How Trump’s Trade Policies Could Supercharge Bitcoin

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

Anthony Scaramucci is the Founder and Managing Partner of SkyBridge Capital. In this conversation we talk about bitcoin, tariffs, economy, Trump, and his brand new bitcoin book.=======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $500 in rewards.=======================Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join.=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got an awesome episode with Anthony Scaramucci, the better looking, younger Italian version of me. Anthony is not only a smart person,

but he also is very, very well educated when it comes to history, history of money, history of economics, and also understanding where the world is going. In this conversation, Anthony and I get deep into what's going on with Bitcoin, the economy, terrorists, Trump, Kamala Harris even comes up, and we even talk about his brand new book, The Little Book of Bitcoin. Hope you guys enjoy the conversation. Here's my latest episode with Anthony Scaramucci. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular

investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin IRA. Are you a crypto investor with a retirement account, but don't have any crypto in your retirement account? Then listen up, this is for you. Bitcoin IRA is revolutionizing the way Americans save for retirement by helping smart investors diversify their savings

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Zappo Bank has been a trusted partner for those looking to make the most of their Bitcoin while keeping it safe. Your Bitcoin stays safe in your vault, untouched, never lent out, and secured a global network of military-grade bunkers with cutting-edge security technology. Head to zapobank.com forward slash pomp to learn more. That's X-A-P-O-B-A-N-K dot com forward slash pomp. Go check out Zappobank today at zappobank.com slash pomp. All right, Anthony, I thought a great place to start this conversation. Bitcoin is doing okay because of all these tariff talks while the stock market is down? Did you expect Bitcoin to be higher? What's going on? Why is Bitcoin kind of going sideways while the tariffs

are destroying the stock market? So I would have said that the hope is that Bitcoin would be making a transition away from a linked MAG-7 tech asset, NASDAQ asset, to something that's more non-correlative that would be more akin to digital property slash digital value, digital gold, et cetera, store of value. And so I think what's happening is the Trump tariffs, and obviously you and I have some intellectual disagreement on those, but I think that the Trump tariffs, I feel the policies are misguided, but what they are doing is they are leading us to a world where a non-sovereign digital currency, there's a much bigger, much broader bullish case for it. And so let's just pretend we're the rest of the world for a moment. You and I are

both Americans, love America, both patriotic Americans, but we're 4% of the world's population. We might be 26% of the world's output, but let's examine the other 96% of the people. We're like, wait, whoa, we've relied on the dollar. Dollar primacy has gotten way stronger Anthony, way stronger. Actually, in the last 20 years, stronger than people like Ken Rogoff, who just wrote a new book about that the dollar thought would get other economists. But it's incredibly, it's controlling the global economy. So the United States not only has 26% of the world's output, but our money is controlling the world economy. And I think the earthquakes that the tariffs are presenting are suggesting to people, wait a minute, we may need to have

a different strategy here. We may need to be decoupled from one sovereign's currency. And so I think that is what's contributing to Bitcoin strength, relative strength. Obviously, markets are down anywhere from 5% to 8%. But Bitcoin is holding its own. It's probably roughly where it was at the beginning of the year. Do you think that we are going through a reordering of the global monetary order and therefore bitcoin will be the big winner and it'll become like the next global reserve currency or do you think that we get more of like a bipolar you know maybe there's an east-west currency or like how do you see this playing out moving forward so what i would say to you is no i think the dollar is going to stay

in its primary position i think even even with what's going on with the trump situation I think it's very, very hard to find an equivalent. And I think that there's a sturdiness to our system. And one of the beauties of the system is a very flat, decentralized system. And so I think the dollar maintains its primacy. But I do think that people will be safeguarding themselves against executive policy behavior. So again, not the people in your podcasting the history lesson, but these powers got ceded to the president because the Congress was too cowardly to control these powers the congress once had the power to declare war they did that in vietnam they all got ousted from the uh their seats lots of protests so they said

let's leave it to the executive and so they said the executive if you declare emergency emergency powers act then we'll let you declare war we'll let you make tariffs more or less whatever you want them to be but the tariff power if you will alongside of the taxing power because the tariffs or effectively another form of taxation, really resided in the Congress. And so now that we're telling the world we're not going to do that anymore, and so we're going to have an executive, you know, it could be a Democrat or Republican. There'll be some arbitrariness.

There'll be some capricious nature to the administration of it. You better defend yourself. I think that's really the answer is how do you defend yourself? That's why gold's moving around the world. Gold is at an all-time high. and Bitcoin for people of your generation, younger than mine, and even people that are your children's generation, Anthony, would be ultimately my grandchildren, will end up having Bitcoin as a store of value. So to me, I'm not saying the dollar is going away. I think the

dollar outlives Donald Trump and his policies and will stay in its primary position. But I do think if you're a smart business person or smart capital allocator around the world, smart political executive. You're going to have other things in your portfolio now. Well, you're obviously the youngest, best looking Italian on this podcast right now. And you sometimes go to the Middle East, to Asia, to Europe, many places around the world. And you talk to all these institutional investors. There's a lot of things I love about you. I love the tie with the rep qualities. I love the American flag. I love you sitting in the back of the press room where I once gave a press conference i love i love i was in the fake room it was in the fake press you know what i want

you know what you know what i love the most about you is that you really try to bullshit a bullshitter i mean that's what's the best part about you like okay not only am i younger and better looking let me see if i can out bullshit him even though he has 30 more years of experience of bullshitting let me see if i can out bullshit him on my own podcast i'm not gonna ask you if you have pants on right now in this interview, but I know, come on. All right. So here, here's my question, the pants on, by the way, you're in your office. So you must, I got pants on. Come on. I don't have pants on, but you know, I put the shirt and tie on. Yeah, you look great. And I respect for Anthony Pompliano. I put it on for respect for you. All right. So you go to the institutions,

you go to the middle East, you go to Europe, you go to Asia, you go to all these different places. And, uh, when you go there, you talk to lots of institutional investors. You, you probably more than many people uh really have a lot of trust they tell you what they're thinking they explain what their views are what are they saying about bitcoin right now are they all like buying it up and not announcing it yet or what's going on yeah so i i think they are i think they are buying it i think they're buying it on the margin i don't think it's going to be a gigantic uh groundswell of buying until we green light legislation in the United States. So if you tell me before the end of the congressional term, we've got a stable coin regulation,

we've got guidance for money center banks and how they can custody Bitcoin and other assets, and we have some discussion about the tokenization of stocks and bonds and other assets, then I will tell you that there'll be large blocks of buying or they're people worth 10, 20, 30 trillion dollars buying a half a billion dollars of Bitcoin, buying a billion dollars of Bitcoin. Yes. Are people on the margin buying Bitcoin today? Yes. But if you want to see a million dollar Bitcoin, that's when somebody at a sovereign says, OK, this is part of the infrastructure of the world's financial services architecture, a result of which I have to own some of this property, I have to own this rail system. And they try to establish one, two, three

percent positions in their portfolio. And so, again, I think you're with me on this, where this is my position, Brett Messing, Skybridge Capital's position, that Bitcoin is an asset class. If Bitcoin's an asset class, then it trades $20, $30 trillion in market capitalization akin to gold. If it's an investment, then it will be in the $1, $2, $3 trillion area alongside of the MAG-7 stocks as an interesting investment and a potentially heirloom collectible. But if you're telling me that things like Stacks, the Lightning Network, things are going to start to evolve in the system that allows us to use Bitcoin in varying different ways, then yes, you'll see way more institutional ownership. And by the way, I got this wrong. I'll be very happy to admit that

to people on your podcast. If you had asked me that question three years ago, let's say it was January or December of 2021 into January of 2022, and you said, is there going to be institutional buying? I would have said it's going to be massive institutional buying. I got that wrong. People are slow on the uptake because most of the people running these institutions, Anthony, are older. They're in their 60s. They have some skepticism about Bitcoin. Hunter Horsley, a friend of ours, both you and I know him well, has told me that there are people out there that are buying gold right now. And they think it's more portable and it's easier to use than Bitcoin.

okay and they're you know but their their their birth dates are in the 1960s or in the 1950s not the 80s 90s or the 2000s when you think about the other investors that you probably interface a lot with is kind of this like private wealth channel what are they doing right it's one thing for these big institutions that are sovereign wealth funds or whatever but the private wealth uh they have a client or they have maybe a model portfolio or you know it's kind of a different thing what are they doing well they're cautious i mean again i'm i'll i'll make their case for a second they're cautious i mean the the the original knee-jerk reaction is the sale reaction i wrote about this in my book the little book of bitcoin michael saylor was a bitcoin skeptic uh paul

tudor jones bitcoin skeptic larry fink has the largest most successful bitcoin etf in the world as recently as 2021 was a bitcoin skeptic i started out as a skeptic uh and so what's what's happening is is that there's just a slow glacial move to acceptance as it becomes more accepted then it then it's going to scale more broadly but a wire house is sitting there saying i don't want to lose my client the wire house doesn't say anthony come on in i'm going to try to triple your assets the wire house says anthony come on in i'm going to get you six seven not going to hurt you or your family i'm going to take some fees from you and i'm going to be happy my shareholders are going to be happy your private wealth manager is going to be happy and you're

going to basically be not unhappy yeah i'm not saying you're going to be happy and so why take a risk on something that's ill-founded you know they'll be super bowls on bitcoin at a at a million uh they're super bears on bitcoin at 10 000 uh and by the way they sold me out i mean they took my fund my fund was a buy on almost every one of those wire houses it got it got downgraded to a sell once i put the bitcoin position on if you know and i'm allowed to talk about my performance but again i put the bitcoin position on average price at around 20 000 a coin the coins are trading at 90 000 and so you would imagine that that was quite beneficial to our performance uh and and and not without some roller coaster activity you know we did very poorly in 2021 lots

of negative articles written about us your wife paulina was kind enough to write an article that was at least observant of the facts you know we've had very good performance um but uh but the wire houses fired me four years ago when bitcoin was at 20 000 they're about to announce bitcoin purchases and bitcoin allocation strategies for their clients four or five years later so I don't say that with any level of derision. I actually understand that. They have to be behind first movers. They have to be behind innovators because their number one thing is not blow up the client.

Number one thing is try not to lose the client in terms of the client being a client and try not to lose the client any money. And certainly, you don't want bad press. And so I'm capable of taking bad press. you're capable of taking bad press although you always get good press it could be part of your looks and your charm that allow you to have that good press but i i take it i got a lot of bows and arrows and don't mind it when you think of uh the current administration you're not the biggest fan i think that's safe to say um but they are good for bitcoin and kind of crypto assets in general or do you think that the potential negatives of the economic policies and like

broader financial market impact could actually still be a negative for Bitcoin and crypto? So I think the policies are good for crypto. As I pointed out, if you're going to have mayhem in the markets, mayhem in the global trading system, I think more people will lean on Bitcoin. I think you're making a bold case for Bitcoin. I don't like the policies. I don't think the policies make sense for America. I think what Donald Trump is very good at is he can identify a problem. And there's truth, a lot of truth in what he's saying. And I do admire that about him. And then the step, the bridge to the policy, let's be fair to him for a moment, the bridge to the policy on the border identifies the problem. We definitely have a problem on the border. He inputs

a set of policies that reduce the traffic at the border. That's a win, a win for the Trump administration, so much so that I'll make a prediction to be very hard for the Democrats to campaign going forward on an open border. The Americans don't want that. And as a conservative, Milton Friedman, the conservative economist, would tell you, you can't have an open border, Anthony, because if you're in a welfare state, which the U.S. is a welfare state, market forces dictate that people will run across the border to participate in the welfare state. You have to have a controlled border. I'm for legal immigration. I believe you are also for legal immigration helps our population growth expands our economy but you can't have

that's kind of nonsense so he did a very good job on that he's right that there have been trading unfairness a lack of trading parity in the marketplace but you have to step back and look at it holistically it was a feature and a design of the american trading system so not to your people through 80 years of trade history but the united states basically said in 1946 we're going to accept tariffs from other countries as we export our goods and services and we're going to allow them to come into our country relatively unfettered why at that point we were two and a half percent of the world's population 65 of the world's economic output and the us took a position that rising living standards around the world would reduce the likelihood of a conflict

nobody wanted to have a third world war and so we even in addition to that we bolstered that anthony with the marshall plan so the trading system was set up to be uneven in the beginning um i haven't talked to president trump about this in a long time but i would think even he believed that that was long term a good strategy for america because it expanded our soft power expanded our influence around the world lots of american popularity post-second world war in the free world. Where the president is right is that unevenness, Anthony, went unchecked for too many years. And then to further compound the problem, in the late 90s, we made a decision, the Clinton administration made a decision to let China in to the World Trade Organization.

If you remember this, China came in as an emerging country. And so China had the benefits of protectionist strategies for themselves. But we had leniency towards them as they were exporting not only here into the United States, but around the world. And Clinton said, we're doing that to urbanize people. We're doing that to make China a less poor country. And by the way, the more that we do this, the more they'll integrate into the world. And since it'll be prosperous for them, they'll accept the rules based order of the world and they'll morph their system into something that looks more like democratic capitalism um now you're not old enough to remember this but i am and i got this severely wrong in 1999 uh american workers went

to the world trade organization meeting in seattle and they protested they said this is terrible uh you can't do this you'll hollow out our industries you'll vanquish our manufacturing we'll lose our middle-class jobs you have to have more checks on the chinese i was a young wall streeter 29 years old in 19 uh actually 35 in 1999 when they did this i said jesus this is stupid we need lower cost of capital peace dividend was going in the u.s francis fukuyama said the end of history we're all going to globalize we're going to be one happy community one happy family uh the protesters are wrong. Well, the protesters were right, Anthony. The arrogant Wall Streeters, which would include me, we got it wrong. Okay. And so anyway, fast forward, Trump was right. These

malpractices by establishment politicians in the United States allowed for China's rise. And again, let me just continue to add to this. They link their currency to our currency. our currency was getting devalued at the time because of our deficit they were an exporting nation they should have had a strength strengthening currency at that time but they had a weakening currency because we let them couple their currency to our currency that's how they printed 10 12 15 percent growth so again the president's right about all that stuff it needed to be recalibrated he moved with robert lighthizer in the first administration to recalibrate that um one of the things again he's also right about is they were supposed to buy

certain amounts of products from us agricultural products from us and so forth in the ensuing four or five years they didn't do that so he is also right about that they'd like the system to state status quo. But I would have recommended to the president something less aggressive than this, because he's got the dollar. He's got the dollar primacy. If he wants more manufacturing in the US, he could create tax-free enterprise zones, something he talked about in the campaign. He could effectively create new cities in the United States using the tax policy to reshore manufacturing. By doing it this way, it's going to cause too much of a supply shock in the system. It's going to be overly disruptive

to the American economy and overly disruptive short term to the American worker. And so I don't agree with the strategy. OK, but I'm not going to tell you that the president is not right. So, again got the border right took that under his care with very good policy the border problem is generally fixed to give him a lot of credit for that um you're we're going to get the crypto in a second the trade policy i would have just simply said listen i signed a deal with you guys you didn't adhere to the deal you got 60 days to start adhering to the deal if you don't want to adhere to the deal you know i have to ratchet up tariffs on you and i have to figure out with my allies. I wouldn't have ripped up the European contracts. I wouldn't have ripped up USMCA. He

called it the greatest deal ever. He's the one that put the deal in place. If he didn't like aspects of the deal, I would have gone to those trading partners and said, listen, I'm back in town. I don't like aspects of the deal. Let's fix this. And oh, by the way, Europe, let's fix this. And then all of us together, as citizens of the free world, let's take on the Chinese. but he declared war on everybody and a 360 degree angle. And I'm just questioning that as a long-term policy. I think that that is a policy that will unnecessarily hurt the US consumer, unnecessarily hurt the US worker. When he had other options, he had other game theory options to deploy. So again, I'm trying to be as pragmatic as probably open-minded to what he's

doing, but I'm trying to offer you balance. On the crypto side, I would say you're at the Trump buffet table. And so what happens at the Trump buffet? You get a very large buffet. Imagine you're at Mar-a-Lago, got a very large buffet. You can't take your plate to the Trump buffet and pick out pro-crypto regulation and better taxation policy and better banking policy and and stable coin legislation and then take the plate back to your seat. You can't do that. With Donald Trump, you have to eat everything at the table. And so that would include the meme coin activity that started before the inauguration, the world liberty coin stuff that started before the inauguration. It would include post-inauguration, put money into my meme coin

and have lunch with me or dinner with me. It would include his sons and Wyckoff's son going around the world, touting the deals that they're doing and how the deals are connected into US policy. I think that that's a dangerous thing to do. And I know there's whataboutism, right? We had Hunter Picasso Biden. I mean, his middle name was Picasso. He was selling paintings for millions of dollars. And then after his father no longer was president, we dropped the middle name Picasso, right? He can't sell his paintings anymore. So I know there's whataboutism and hypocrisy on both sides. But what I'm saying is I like the pro-crypto legislation. As a person whose business is relying on this, I disparage the Biden administration, Elizabeth Warren,

Gary Gensler, and others. I said these are very bad for U.S. industry, very bad for U.S. financial services. If you want to maintain our mantle of financial services leadership, we have to have the right crypto policies. So I applaud the president for that. But again, unfortunately, you get everything. And I think some of this stuff is mucking up the wheels. It's ungreasing the wheels of progress towards good stablecoin legislation, greater clarity at the SEC, greater ideas about what banks are going to be doing in terms of custody. And so again, people can disagree with me and they say he's resoundingly great for crypto. If you're asking me a question is he a better guy better president for crypto than kamala harris yes is he a better

guy for the u.s economy or kamala harris i got that at a maybe because of what he's doing with the trade situation okay he he if he was trump one it would have been a resounding yes but trump two i think there's some level of chaos and by the way you can't negotiate 70 country one per country trade deals, Anthony. You can't do it in 60 days. It's not possible, okay? If you ask a trade rep, it usually takes about 18 months to negotiate a one country to country trade deal. So you're going to run out of supplies here in the US. We effectively have a trade embargo going on with the Chinese. And of course, the Chinese are clever people. They're half manufacturing there and they're shipping goods to be finished in places that don't have as big

of a burdensome tariff. But that in itself is still a problem. I think there's a cleaner way to do this. And I think there's a more prosperous way, not only for America, but for the rest of the world to do this. One of the things I find interesting is you, Ken Griffin, Mark Rowan, I can go through the list. A lot of people, I think, are coming to the conclusion, he's calling out the right problem he's taking steps to try to get to the right solution i don't like the way he's doing it i don't like the steps or you know some version of that and it does feel like i think i heard david sack say this recently um it does feel like that is a different conversation than even you know four or five months ago and i'm not saying that he's gonna end up being right

or wrong or this is gonna work or not or whatever but just like it almost feels like in a weird way By him talking about and doing some of this stuff, which I think anyone objectively can say has been very chaotic and the messaging and all these kind of issues, it has brought a ton of attention to it. And attention doesn't necessarily mean solution will happen, but it does mean that the more people are paying attention to it, maybe the odds go up that we get to a solution, even if it is chaotic and uncertain and kind of volatile along the way. Would you agree with that? Well, I mean, I think you're making a bigger case for him. I think you're saying that he's a disruptive guy, and sometimes you need a disruptive guy to come into the situation, shock the system, and put it a little bit on tilt to get it right. But I also, and, you know, I think one of the things that maybe people don't realize, like, here's one of the things that I've thought a lot about. I don't think Biden got enough credit for the stock market performance under his time in office.

and I think that there's plenty of stuff that people could critique him on and did critique him on and was right right so it's like you know Biden had positives and negatives Trump same thing there's positives and negatives but I think with him and these policies one of the areas that I go to is like okay and I think you actually offered this is is like what else would you do right so if everyone agrees like this is a problem then we got to do something to address it what else would you do you're unique in that you actually have other ideas right you're like hey there's kind of, you know, a more clear path to doing this. You can go enforce the current rules, all the things you described.

But I do wonder how much of the United States policy right now is if somebody else was president, we would just be kind of going along the same path. The debt would be exploding, like all these issues that we had. And so I kind of come back to this idea of just like, what's the one thing, if we had to pick one thing for him to be successful on i don't i don't know if it's the trade war stuff right to me that feels like it's not the single most important thing some people would say the border some people would say the national debt some people would say you know they'd all have kind of different things to pick if you had to pick one thing and you were like

you know i have to pick one thing for trump to be successful on that would really define a presidency and or uh ensure that americans are better off in the future than they are today like what do you think the one most important thing for this current administration to do well again i mean one of the things you learn when you work in the white house you have a plan and then your plan meets contact with the enemy and then the plan changes right you know there was a joke about infrastructure week and trump one they never got there because there's so much things that are going on at the same time so so what i what i would say to you is that if i wanted if i wanted to see one thing for the u.s it would be economic growth because economic

growth and if and if we could get it done in a way where capital and labor are roughly 50 percent like if you bring mike novogratz on when he worked in the uh white house he would tell you the rule of thumb was 20 of the u.s federal budget should be it should be tied to 20 of our gdp it's at like 26 27 now it's too high but the other thing you would know are moments of greatest prosperity is when the distribution the economic rent between capital and labor coming from a productive enterprise or an economy is roughly 50 50 anthony that's when we feel our most prosperous that's when we feel our most aspirational the irony there is that the capital there's less people that own the capital they get very rich in that period of time but the poorer people don't care

because they feel aspirational they have a platform frankly like my dad did in the 70s and the 80s where he wasn't rich but didn't care there was enough opportunity for his sons and his daughter to live an aspirational life in america so when you go 55 45 yes you'll get a jeff bezos at 200 billion or elon musk at 300 billion and i don't begrudge them god bless them don't want equal opportunity to be changed to equal outcome i want equal opportunity unequal outcome so god bless those guys but i'm just saying to you from a socio-economic historical analysis 50 50 we do great we're some something like 55 45 right now and there's a lot of people that are unhappy about that so if you said to me the president was going to achieve

economic growth and there was going to be a better distribution of the economic rent back to something that makes americans happy i think that solves a lot of problems moreover i do believe you can outgrow the deficit and i think you believe this because i listen and to you and i read your newsletters i think you see the abundance coming with ai the abundance coming in biotech the abundance coming in automation robotics there's a tremendous potential to unleash another gigantic wave of economic growth, where we're way richer in 100 years than we are today, all of us, all of our living standards, you know, and again, economists will point out the lowest members of our society here in America are middle to potentially upper middle class in certain

countries around the world. And so I'll say this to you. And I want to say this to you to provoke you. If I gave you $150,000 US dollars, they were $1925. You have 150,000 of them. And you'd be one of the richest people in the society per year if you made that amount of money. And I said, but you got to live in 1925. But here's the $150,000. Or I gave you $150,000 of $2,025. dollars but you got to live in 2025 now one person is exogenously crazy rich the other person is probably at least in the city of new york in the middle class right but the question is which society you want to live in i'm taking the society with the better medicine the better streaming service the 4k super bowl game that i can watch on super bowl sunday versus the transitioning

economy from the locomotive and the horse and buggy into the automotive. And you're getting the point that I'm making. And so if we can scale up, we can cure the deficit, we can solve some of these problems, but there's right or wrong policy. And I'm not talking about left or right policies, there's right or wrong policy. I think some of these policies are misguided. But one other point I wanted to make to you, which I think is important for your listeners, is Trump's view of Europe. I think people need to understand this because I do. And this comes from my time on the campaign with him. And remember, even though I was only in the White House for 11 days, I did spend almost a year with him traveling the country, did 71 campaign stops. Trump believes that the euro

was put in place to devalue the industrial currencies in Europe. So just stay with me for a minute. Euro's created, it binds the industrial, stronger nations of France and Germany to weaker industrial nations like Portugal and Greece and Spain. Okay, Italy has become a little bit more industrialized, but that would have been included 30 years ago when it was originated. And so it pulls down where the Deutschmark would trade in the free market, right and so the euro really is just in a fixed exchange rate among those countries it's not really a sovereign currency like the u.s dollar right we have a 50 state free trading block they have a 25 state fixed exchange rate and so when trump says things like oh they rig the system

against us or you know the eu the european economic union was designed to plunder us because they got the deutschmark lower through the euro and they exported their products the united states at a lower currency price okay and so that's something i think is important for people to understand when we're having these conversations around the world and so there was an opportunity to do a bretton woods too there was an opportunity to do a plaza accords okay we could say to everybody and say okay we're all fairly rich now we're all fairly stable countries it's not 1945 this is what's fair to america at this point and let's get there over time i know i'm not going to force it today but i'm going to give everybody six months to get into compliance with

this and that would have been way less disruptive to the supply chain it would have been way less disruptive to the stock market and people's 401ks. And so he didn't do that. And so we have a little bit of a COVID-19 situation going on. It's sort of Trump 25, where in COVID-19, the supply chain got shocked and it caused a lot of shortages, which led to inflation. Fed thought it was transitory, but it was more secular than transitory. And I think that that's coming. I think that shock is coming. And by the way, you don't have to go by me. Listen to Paul Tudor Jones. He was on the air this morning explaining this very same macro dilemma. And Anthony, we could solve these problems. I'm not saying the problem doesn't exist. I'm not saying

the president isn't right to identify the problem. But I'm saying, okay, there are other ways to solve the problem. And again, if you want to use tariffs as a negotiating thing, or you want to use tariffs surgically, read Robert Lighthizer's book. He's not part of the administration this time, primarily because he had a more balanced, more measurable, measured approach than the one that President Trump wanted to take this time. But in his book, No Trade is Free, he makes the case for surgical tariffs. So if you have a country where the private marketplace is being funded by the government to dump lower prices and not market-based prices on another country in terms of price dumping, then you have to put up a tariff to protect your workers.

All of that makes sense to me. I'm for surgical tariffs. I understand that no trade is free. I want fair trade. I understand all that, but going about it this way, I think is unnecessary. I think causing too much damage and in some ways it's it's hurting the reputation of the united states and so so and i and i don't want that i don't think anybody really wants that and by the way he's got too many sycophants around him where there's nobody in the room literally telling him exactly what i just said and he could he could disagree respectfully or disrespectfully but we can't anthony when you have a sycophantic board you you're a private investor if i had a board let's see invested in my company and i had a board with the first hour they had to kiss

my ass before the board meeting started you would fire every one of us or you would divest your money from the from the company you know that i know that you don't have to answer because i know you're a trump lover but but you know what i'm saying is correct i'm independent somehow here's the other thing that we gotta move on talk about your book but um okay one of the things that uh i do think has happened um online especially like the anonymous accounts is uh there's a lack of intellectual rigor in talking about this like you and i can talk about very nuanced components we can talk about hey they should have done this or this or you know i like this policy i don't like this policy like there's a um an attention to detail and nuance but what i see

online is basically uh everything is just getting politicized to the point where if somebody says they like an economic policy immediately they're just like oh you're like a mega person or if you don't like it, you're immediately, you know, you've got TDS, right? And I think that we've got to get back to being able to talk through this stuff with some degree of rationality because that's where like reality lives is in the gray. Listen, I'm all for that, which is why you and I are friends. I respect your view. I've read your stuff on the tariffs. Some of it I frankly agree with. Some of it I don't agree with. But I think that, you know, that's what would make good business partners. That's what makes good podcasts. That's what makes good Americans,

frankly. I don't want to be pitted one way or the other. You know, people, everybody hates me. My 33-year-old son, who's closer in age to you, he's Stanford Business School graduate, his dad, the Republicans hate your ass because you left Trump. You don't, you disavowed Trump. And the Democrats hate your ass because you were with Trump. And so therefore, you're definitionally canceled to them. And I looked at him and he said, and you're killing my networking chances, by the way, you fucker. And I look at him and I say, well, maybe I'm getting closer to the truth. You see, what makes you successful, I'm teasing you about your Trump love, but what makes you successful is you're an analyst. You're sitting there trying to look at all sides of the

argument. You're not trying to get welded to anything. Both sides are actually making some good arguments. You know, if we listen to each other, there is a matrix where you say, okay, that left-leaning idea is probably the right one on certain libertarian goals for a society to allow people to live exactly the way they want, not the imposition of whatever our ideas are of how to live, right? And maybe that's a good goal. And this capitalistic goal, which is a right-leaning one, which creates a free marketplace, which has unleashed a tremendous amount of abundance and is taking billions of people around the world out of poverty, maybe that's a good idea. My point is, we are shutting each other down, not you and I, I'm talking about the left and

the right, shutting each other down because it's either left or right. And if it's not that, I don't want to hear it. And I think it's very, very dangerous. And Anthony, you know this, our adversaries want us to do that. Of course, our adversaries are so jealous of our prosperity and they're so they can't believe this sloppy country with this free speech and this lack of orthodoxy and this this decentralized country with lots of checks and balances to clip people of having absolute power is flourishing. What irony to a strong man, what irony to a authoritarian that a country like this can kick everyone else's ass, despite how sloppy and chaotic it looks. I thought they were just envious of your great hair. That's what I thought.

Well, you're a little envious of that. I mean, I'm looking at your hairline. You could use a little help there. Yeah, we're working on it. We're working on it. Well, I mean, at your age, you got too much for said, you got a little bit of a Fauci like recession going on over here. I, I can, I'll get help you with that afterwards. You know, and by the way, if I help you with that, you'll get advertising related to dermatology and skin products. You'll add that to your advertiser support.

If I'm ever advertising a dermatology product, you get 10%. The little book of Bitcoin you wrote, it came out earlier this year. it is excellent. It's got a ton of great stories. It's got kind of your story. There's a number of other things that you kind of cover on that. Why did you want to write a book that wasn't so much about like, what is Bitcoin, but it's more your story around Bitcoin? Well, I wanted to write a book where somebody could pick up the book and feel comfortable and not intimidated. There are, you know, if you read Safa Day and Amos, who is a friend of yours, I listened to that whole conversation. Brilliant guy. He wrote The Bitcoin Standard. That's

probably more of the treatise on Bitcoin. That's probably more of the academic. Everything you know is in that book. But I've got to get people's appetite wet for Bitcoin. I've got to get people thinking about Bitcoin. And I thought the approach to writing a short book about it, a little book about Bitcoin, was personal stories and the odyssey of going from a non-coiner on zero, which frankly is the first time you and I met in my office and I did your podcast. I was a non-coiner. I was at zero. And how do you go from zero to one in Bitcoin? How do you get yourself off of zero? And I think what I would say to people, read my book first, read Safa Dayan's book second, because his book is a better book, by the way, and it's going to

be outsell my book, and it should, but at least my book will get you oriented, make you less insecure about your knowledge, make you more comfortable with the idea that this idea is being embraced by a lot of people who originally did not embrace the idea. And I think this is a bad neuroplasticity, right? You know, you could convince me of something, okay? And I would imagine I could convince you of something over time, you know, and we could, and I can look back on things that I've done and say, well, I got that wrong. I should have said this, or I should have said that, or should have handled this a certain way. And I think we're at our best when we had that neuroplasticity. And so the book is really about that. The book is about how did

Saylor say that this was going to be like failed online gambling. That's what he called Bitcoin, honestly. And now he's got $45 billion worth of Bitcoin in his company. How did it go from that? I think it's an interesting story. How did Larry Fink go from telling me in the lobby of the El Arion Four Seasons, the El Arion Island in Abu Dhabi, Four Seasons Hotel, in the lobby during Abu Dhabi Finance Week, that he didn't like Bitcoin, but he just made a big investment in Circle to having the largest ETF, best, most successful launch in ETF history and the largest Bitcoin ETF. How did that happen? I think these are interesting stories. I think it makes people comfortable with the stories. You said Bitcoin is Netflix, Bitcoin is the iPhone.

What's that mean? Well, there's universality to it. Bitcoin is going to be your iPhone. I think every one of us in the modern world industrial has one now it could be a samsung phone i use the iphone frankly because i have an iphone i have two of those actually and i just think bitcoin is going to be as ubiquitous as your iphone i will i imagine a day where bitcoin is on everybody's iphone you'll have a digital secure encrypted wallet and there'll be some store of value known as bitcoin on that phone i think it'll have that ubiquity to it and so that's what i mean by You also wrote, I knew the risks of not jumping in were far greater than playing it safe. And it seems like we're reaching that point now where a lot of institutions are saying to themselves, I got to have a strategy, having no strategy or my strategy being I'm going to do nothing may actually now be putting me at a disadvantage. yes i i absolutely believe that and i'll say it from a portfolio manager's perspective

is if i'm not long if i if what i believe is going to happen happens if bitcoin is an asset class that means there's a portfolio consultant in the year 2030 that's sitting down with the state teachers of xyz state or the sovereign wealth fund of zyx and they're saying hey uh here's my model portfolio. You should have this much in stocks, this much in bonds, this much in gold, this much in real estate. And oh, by the way, we have to have this much in Bitcoin. Do you see what I'm saying? And when that happens, it's sort of too late, right? Because you're under-invested and that's happening. The state of Wisconsin, they started buying Bitcoin, right? They were like, well, why are you buying Bitcoin? Well, somebody's going to tell me someday that it's

in the model portfolio. I want to be there now. I don't want to be under-invested in it. And so to me, I think the evolution of an asset class requires you to be somewhat predictive, look into the future. If I'm right about that, what happens, right? So it is now public knowledge that your flagship fund in 2024, so $1.7 billion fund at the time, posted a 43 return which was the best performance since inception it outperformed its index which only returned 9.8 percent uh talk a little bit as to how transformative this stuff is right if you put some of it into some of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies into these funds they start to perform very well i think you guys were one of the top 10 best performing hedge funds uh last

year when people see that happening do a bunch of people who weren't in the top 10 start to say wait a second like we're at disadvantage we got to put the stuff they say look at those lucky dopes they put some of their money in bitcoin and they got lucky uh and by the way i was up for all of these different hedge fund awards didn't get any of them we had the top performing uh you know crypto related etf last year didn't get that award either and the naysayers would say well he put bitcoin in the portfolio i mean if i if i had done those returns with structured credit i when I came home with the award. But like I tell my staff, I would rather have the money than the award. You know, I'm not trying to prove myself to anybody. I'm just trying to say, listen,

I believe this is going to work. I'm doing this 39 years, Anthony. And so I put my money, my personal money's in that fund, my personal money's in Bitcoin, my personal money's in digital assets. And I'm telling my clients, if they're patient, okay, they're going to be very well reward it's not going to say it's not going to come with some level of volatility we look like dunces i mean you know the funny thing is when i was a kid we had heroes and goats okay but now the goat because of tom grady's or because of muhammad ali greatest of all time when i was a kid we were heroes and goats i was a goat or the anti-hero in 2022 i was getting lit up like a christmas tree for being the poster boy for stupidity look at this dope he went into bitcoin

and he got torched in 23 they didn't say anything in 24 those returns that you're speaking of not me because i'm not allowed to speak about them but those returns you know finally someone like paulina says hey you got to give the guy credit i mean that you know you know what does part bill parcells say about a football coach you're as good as your record you know you can all the bullshit aside can the people perform or not we put on a macro bet and we are performing and i believe we're going to continue to perform with some level of volatility. And if people are patient, they'll be well rewarded. And I think, I think you, listen, I read your stuff. I think you understand this as well as anybody in the world. And I would encourage people to buy your

newsletter, read your stuff because you see it and you see it from a very interesting perspective because you see it from a skeptic's perspective. You're not a jingoistic person. You try to provide balance and uh objective analysis to the situation it's not just oh you know he's a jingle he's pro bitcoin so now he's just going to talk his book you know the reason why i listen to sailor all day is that sailor's an analyst okay sailor is like a financial engineer he understands the mechanisms uh tied to the technology and probably frankly he understands it way better than i do even. And so, you know, I implore people to expand their horizon, read Safa Dayan's book, read your book about life, which was a great one, read Saylor's letters, listen to Saylor's

speeches, and get off zero, because here's what's going to happen. If we're, let's say I'm wrong, and let's say you're wrong. And I told you, you had one to 2% of your portfolio in Bitcoin, it went to zero now you have 98 cents on a dollar are you really going to be that damaged but if i'm right and it goes from one to two to twenty percent as a role of being right this is significant change to your portfolio significant beneficial change now sailor got really mad at me you were at that book party where sailor said hey man i'm not putting my forward into this book if you're at 2% recommendation. And so I had to adjust the last chapter and say, hey, I got 70% of my money in this thing. Saylor's at 101, I think. I don't know what the hell he's at.

But some people are saying 2%, but this is the best idea that I have seen in my career. And I missed ideas. I missed Amazon. I did participate in Apple because I, I mean, I participated in Amazon and Apple, but mostly through the S&P, Anthony. I missed their inception points and the inflection points in those stories you know and i don't want to miss this one the little book of bitcoin that's available on amazon barnes and noble and everywhere books are sold it's good to be on with you my man you're a good dude oh i'm asking the little book of bitcoin oh i thought we were done no we're not done okay good no no yeah that's where it is yeah you buy it anywhere i got an audio book listen if you don't ask for the order at the end i got the kindle i

I got every, you, you, you do the audio book. I'm a, you know, I, I did the forward to the audio book. I did my forward and sailors forward. I didn't do the audio book. I've done the audio book on some of my books, but I've got a, such a New York Italian accent that, uh, I thought you were Irish. Let me, let me tell you something. You know, when the Irish hang out with the Italians, you could tell all your Irish friends

this. Okay. When the Irish hang out with the Italians, it's form of social climbing for the Irish. don't forget that okay and make sure they don't all right thank you very much for doing this we'll do it again in the future it's good to be on with you thank you