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

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

John Pompliano and Anthony Pompliano discuss bitcoin, bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, bitcoin treasury companies, macro environment, inflation, timeless investing principles, and how this all impacts your portfolio. =======================Bitwise is one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto asset managers. As of December 31, 2021, the company managed over $1.3 billion across an expanding suite of investment solutions, which include the world's largest crypto index fund and other innovative products spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto equities. Whether you’re an individual, advisor, or institution, Bitwise provides intelligent access to crypto with your unique circumstances in mind. Visit www.bitwiseinvestments.com to learn more. Certain of the Bitwise investment products may be subject to the extreme risks associated with investing in crypto assets. Visit www.bitwiseinvestments.com/disclosures/ to learn more.=======================Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join.=======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $500 in rewards.=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

going on with the macro environment, inflation. Why is Doge waving the white flag? What about Bitcoin, the Bitcoin conference, all the Bitcoin treasury companies and how I think about learning from the past and taking timeless investing principles, but applying them to brand new places, both in industries and in your portfolio. We do our best to unpack what's happening in the world and also how it's going to impact your personal portfolio. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with John Pompliano. 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. It's no secret that Bitcoin ETFs have taken Wall Street by storm. With over $35 billion in assets in just one year, it's become the most successful ETF launch in history. My partner Bitwise is the first and only Bitcoin ETF provider to openly publish its Bitcoin wallet addresses, allowing anyone to verify the fund's holdings. I believe this level of transparency is exactly the kind of innovation that only crypto makes

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more about their ETF and other services. Once again, that's bitwisepomp.com. Bitwise P-O-M-P dot com. As always, remember investing is risky and carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before you invest. Today's episode is brought to you by Zappo Bank. This is where eligible members can unlock the power of Bitcoin without selling it. Do you need cash fast? With Zappo Bank's Bitcoin-backed loans, you can borrow up to 20% of your Bitcoin's value in just a few minutes, and you can do so with low interest rates and zero fees. Here's the best part. You keep your Bitcoin, meaning you get to watch your holdings grow as the price of Bitcoin increases. Whether you're looking to buy a house, fund your child's education, or seize an exciting investment

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Getting started is quick and easy. It takes just three minutes to open an account. Once you're set up, their team of IRA specialists will reach out to guide you through every step of the process. Whether you're transferring an IRA from a legacy bank, rolling over an old 401k, or starting fresh with new contribution, the Bitcoin IRA team is here to help you get access to real crypto in your retirement account. And here's the best part. As a listener to this podcast, you can earn up to $500 in rewards when you add funds to your account. That's right. Search for Bitcoin IRA in the App Store or visit BitcoinIRA.com to join 200,000 Americans on their journey to upgrade their retirement. bitcoinira.com to upgrade today and you can earn up to $500 in rewards when you add funds to your account. All right, John, what's the first topic? What you got for us? What's going on? All right, let's talk about Bitcoin. $110,000. The Bitcoin crowd seems to be extremely excited about the

price movement recently. We have the Bitcoin conference coming up here in Vegas this week. What are your thoughts? Where are we within this cycle and within this calendar year for Bitcoin? what? Classic Bitcoin price movement before the Bitcoin conference. So if you think coming up on a new all-time high, we're knocking on the door, breakthrough, kind of chill right around that all-time high price. And people are excited because the Bitcoin conference is going on. David Bailey, BTC Inc. They do a fantastic job every year. I've read that 30,000 people, 3-0-0-0-0, 30,000 people are headed to Vegas and they're all going to be there. I saw Peter Schiff. He had his nice little booth set up. He complained that everyone

else had nicer booths than him. It's because gold price hasn't kept up with Bitcoin over the last decade. But I do think that one, there is a kind of evolution of the speaker set. You obviously have the hardcore Bitcoiners. People have been around for a decade plus. You've got a lot of finance folks that maybe otherwise wouldn't have gone to the Bitcoin conference five, six, seven years ago. And you got a lot of politicians and kind of people within the political realm that are going to the Bitcoin conference as well. And so I think that really the Bitcoin conference today is Bitcoin is just maturing. It's kind of growing up, which is a good sign for Bitcoin. It means that Bitcoin is being adopted by these new people, new cohorts,

larger pools of capital, etc. And so naturally, Bitcoin's price is up. Now, I do think, though, that there's also this belief that Bitcoin has gone from a contrarian asset to a consensus asset. And part of that, you can see it with Wall Street now embracing it. But I think that's always a really important part. Everyone knows that doing something different in investing is really important and being right is really important, right? If you do something different, but you're wrong, then you're just a dummy. You're just wrong and you lose money. But if you do something different and you're right, that's where potential returns can be. But another part of that equation that usually gets left out of the conversation is you need an idea to go from contrarian to

consensus because you need everyone else to eventually see what you saw early. And I think that's really what Bitcoiners are experiencing now, is when you were buying Bitcoin five years ago, 10 years ago, what you saw were a lot of folks who were saying, that's crazy. Why would you put your money in that thing? It's for drug dealers or criminals, or the government's going to shut it down, or it wastes too much electricity, or whatever the thing was that they scared away by. Well, the people who were buying Bitcoin, whether you were dollar cost averaging or whatever you were doing, now that went from a contrarian thing to everyone else was like, I need some Bitcoin too. And so that shift from contrarian to consensus really important. I think

that also leads to kind of the higher price point is because it's kind of like the meme, you know, hey, the water's warm, come on in, right? Is the water was cold five years ago, 10 years ago. Now it's warm. Now everyone's like ready to rock and roll and they're going to come into Bitcoin. So I think you're starting to see that in a major way. How much of this is price action? Hey, look, price is going up. I want to be involved. It was contrarian. Now it's consensus. And the reason that the price is going up is because it's becoming more of a consensus idea versus, hey, the technology, what people are building on it is super exciting, right? Like, why are 30,000 people going to the conference when last year when the price was down, not

that not 30,000 people went? Yeah, well, I think there's a couple of things. So price in relationship to value is always a chicken or an egg, right? Does the network become more valuable and the price goes up or does the price go up and the network becomes more valuable? I would argue that one aspect or framework that I use is Bitcoin does not have a centralized executive team. It doesn't have a board of directors. It doesn't have a marketing budget.

It doesn't have, you know, annual earnings reports. It doesn't have kind of these plans that are laid out for folks, right? It is this decentralized network. And so the quote unquote marketing campaign is the price. And you see this, right? As the price goes up, what happens? People start to get more excited because they're holding Bitcoin. They start telling their friends, their friends start asking them about it. Everyone,

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

campaign. Now, of course, the way I usually describe this is as price is going up, more people are coming in. Naturally, more capital is coming in that's leaving. So it's pushing the price further. Then we at some point will get overvalued, right? Or the price will go up too much. And so when that occurs, what will happen is the price will start to try to correct. It'll try to find some equilibrium. Now, some people will have bought Bitcoin on the way up. They'll have learned about Bitcoin. They'll become kind of these hardened, you know, long-term holders, and they will hold Bitcoin regardless of what happens with the price. But a lot of people, they're going to come into Bitcoin as a get-rich-quick scheme towards the end of that

bull market when the price is really kind of running. And when they come in, they're going to within a month, two months, three months, the price is going to correct. And they're going to basically now be underwater on their Bitcoin. Some of those people will continue to hold. A lot of those people, though, will sell and say, I'm never touching Bitcoin again. No different than if you have a mobile app and you run a marketing campaign and 100 people sign up. Well, if all of a sudden 100 people signed up, how many of them are still around a month from now? Maybe 30 of them, right? So a 30% retention rate after one month. Great. Well, if you then run another marketing campaign for 100 people, and you only are left with 30 at the end of that next

month, well, you only have 60 total users, you had one, you had 30 after the first month, 30 after the second month, that's your retention rate, the 70 that are leaving from every single marketing campaign, that's the equivalent of the Bitcoiners who are buying at the top of the market. And when it corrects, they just say, I'm out of here. I don't understand Bitcoin, I was here for get rich quick, I'm losing money, I don't want anything to do with this. And so I think that price is a marketing campaign, but the steeper the price acceleration, the better it is at marketing. And so I always get very nervous towards the ends of these cycles, because what you see is a lot of people coming in who don't understand it, who aren't going to be long-term holders, and they're

likely to get burnt. And so the best thing I've found is just like any timeless investing principle, just dollar cost average into a great asset over a long period of time. And it doesn't matter if the price is up or down or sideways, just keep dollar cost averaging. And over time, you get this nice, beautiful, blended thing. And if you hold for a long enough period of time, pretty much everyone who's bought in the last four years, or I'm sorry, pretty much anyone who has bought Bitcoin at almost any time in its history and held till today is in profit, right? And that'll continue to be true over the long run. And so like, just let the market work for you rather than trying to outsmart the market. Did you see, I saw an X that someone has

leverage on Bitcoin where it could be liquidated at about 105,000. What are your thoughts about using leverage and just like, is it propping up the market versus is it like real sustainable price run that we're seeing? I saw the gentleman who's doing this. I think his name's James Wynn. I do not have the stomach nor the cojones to be out there with hundreds of millions of dollars of leverage, billion dollars, whatever, some crazy number. Obviously that magnifies moves in an asset. And so if you're long and with a lot of leverage and it goes up, then great, you're gonna make money. The same is true on the other side. And so I think it is, you know, a very risky game. It's not a game I play. But hey, if that's your game, maybe you've got an

edge or some sort of competitive advantage, knock yourself out, right? People should be free to do what they want with their money. With that said, I've been loosely following. I think he was up at one point, like on a P&L basis, like 85 million bucks. That's life changing money for pretty much almost anyone in the world. And he, you know, couldn't get away from the table. And so I think he's back down closer to like flat on his P and L. Now again, if that's your game and you're used to wild swings, you know, go talk to somebody who goes to Vegas. I'm like, you know, I had some epic runs and I had some, you know, absolute heaters that ended in sorrow. But on a net basis, I'm up or something like that, right here. I don't know what the rest of his P and L looks like. I don't

know what other trades he did, but on this specific kind of, you know, two, three week run, it seems like he's kind of flat. And so in a weird way, maybe it's just entertainment for him. right maybe he's just really excited but uh being up 85 million bucks and then uh you know going back down to uh to flat is uh probably a tough pill to swallow how much money you got you know people would rather have the 85 than the zero 100 um let's talk about another bitcoin buyer which is djt they announced that they're gonna buy 2.5 3 billion dollars worth of bitcoin uh what are your thoughts around trump's organization or at least that djt entity buying more bitcoin and then doing it in such a large volume amount yeah look i think that um anytime that you have a company where the

stock is trading at a very high premium to what would be considered like book value then it is the duty of that executive team to figure out how to sell shares and raise capital right any company i mean warren buffett right if we're overvalued we should be raising capital if we're undervalued we we should be buying back shares. That's kind of a traditional capital market exercise. I think there's a lot of people who look at that company in particular. I've never talked to the team there or anything, but just from what I read online, it seems pretty overvalued given what their financial performance is. Now there's reasons for that. There's obviously a very kind of engaged shareholder base, like all the things that people will analyze. But if you just

look at how much revenue, how much profit, what's the market cap, big gap, raise capital. right so like it's a very rational thing to do now raising capital you can do a lot of different things you can go buy companies you can reinvest in your business you can go buy bitcoin whatever and so there uh it seems like from the report it's going to buy bitcoin um and so if you go when you buy two and a half billion dollars worth of bitcoin um my guess is that that's probably over a long period of time as long as you hold and you don't do anything crazy uh it'll be worth more in the future and so i think that that's what you're starting to see a lot of folks say to themselves is wait a second if i can use the public capital markets i can raise capital

and I can then deploy it into an asset that seems to be very resilient and long-term seems to be very attractive. What is the difference between if I said to you, you know, hey, they went and they raised capital and they're buying a business. The business has no cashflow, right? It's not losing money though either,

but it continues to compound its equity value at, you know, 60% year over year. And it's done that for a decade. You know, that's pretty interesting. Even if it comes down to 30%, it's probably still pretty attractive. Can we beat that hurdle rate? right can we do better than 30 40 50 60 compound annual growth rate uh that's really hard to do

and so i think that's what you're seeing a lot of these public companies go through now of course this is going to get a lot of attention because of the relationship or kind of correlation with with trump and his name and so i'm not clear on what his actual ownership is or his relationship whatever i'm assuming he owns equity um but i'm not sure also like how involved he is in the management decisions like you know is he calling and he's like uh you know in the big short he's like bye here i don't know he was tweeting bye right to uh to the people um and was uh uh eerily accurate in uh in doing that it helps if you can uh tweet by and then strike a deal and announce it a couple hours later um but i think that it's again it you know it will get a lot of attention

but this is just kind of a rational position for uh a company like that to do but also i think that a lot of people in the market. Again, I keep saying, if you can't beat it, you got to buy it, right? And I think that that has been true of the S&P 500 for a long time. People said, hey, if you can't beat it, you got to buy it, right? Okay. Well, same thing here. I think for this whole new generation, kind of the internet age, this is the benchmark. And you're going to continue to see people say, hey, if I can't beat it, then let me go and put some on the balance sheet. At what point does that capitulate though? And people are like, okay, I have to buy Bitcoin because it still is a contrarian idea for most people

and for most institutions. So like there is a tipping point there, right? If it goes on another 20 year bull run where we're up another million percent over the next 20 years, like people are, you know, is that the new benchmark? And like, when is that seen as the new benchmark versus, you know, traditional called ETFs, S&P, VOO?

Well, let's flip this a little bit and talk about it from a different perspective, which is, what's the risk here? Nobody wants to talk about the risks, right? I do believe that a number of these companies are going to get over levered in a way where they are going to basically spit back out the Bitcoin. So you think about it, they're all sucking in the Bitcoin, right? But there's leverage.

And so people do all kinds of calculations and they'll say, ah, you know, we need the Bitcoin price to go to X and then we would be in trouble. But X is a really low number. Or they'll say, oh, our leverage ratio right now is only 5% or 10%, whatever, right? People are way smarter than me are analyzing this stuff. All I know is I'm a pretty simple guy. If you have an asset that is highly volatile, and in history, multiple times has drawn down 80, 85%, and there's leverage involved, at some point over the next three to four years,

dead bodies are going to float to the water. right they're gonna float to the top of the water there who is it gonna be i don't know somebody smarter than me will figure that out how is it gonna happen i don't know somebody that's smarter than me is gonna figure it out but what i do know is if you are going to do this you better do it with a minimal amount of leverage because that is ultimately the safe way to do it now of course it's like anything if i tell you hey um we can earn five percent somebody else shows up say we can earn 6%. Somebody else said, I can earn 10, I can earn 15, I can earn 20. Where's the line? We don't know. But I do think that being prudent in the public markets with this type of strategy

will be a very strong, positive, kind of a creative thing for shareholders. But there will be companies that take it too far. They get over levered, they become undisciplined, they don't know how some of the instruments that they're using actually work. And that's where there will be some issues. So I don't know who it ends up being. I kind of think of it like if we're all walking across a field and there's some landmines planted, at the end of the field is the next bull market. Who's going to make it, right? My guess is it's not going to be 100% of people. But also, look, I think that the public markets also bring a lot of scrutiny. One of the things that people don't give credit to the public markets is the public markets are pretty good about sniffing out

kind of things that don't work, right? If you remember, WeWork, when they got their S1, they put it, public markets basically rejected it. It said, uh-uh, you ain't bringing this here at that valuation, et cetera. If you go and you look at, I saw my friend Austin Reif, he's retired right now. So he's got a lot of free time on his hands. Co-founder of Morning Brew. He's on Google Finance, just Googling every company he could think of, I guess, because he was showing, rent the runway is down like sub $25 million market cap, all birds down, whatever, significantly, $30, $40 million market cap. And all these brands that really came from the last decade or so got to the public markets and just got hammered.

Now, some of them are probably getting hammered in a way that isn't fair to them. But a lot of them just weren't that great of companies. And so you can build a great product, not be a good company. You can have all kinds of issues around capitalizing your business or the returns that you drive, whatever. So I just think that public markets in general are very, very, very good at scrutinizing companies. And I do think that the efficient market hypothesis is nonsense. I think there's a lot of asymmetry that ends up being available in public markets at certain times, but over the long run, usually public markets will get it right. And I think that that's why you continue to see certain companies do incredibly well in the public markets and other companies

basically just get chewed up and spit out. And let's see what happens with these Bitcoin companies. But right now, the market's very excited. And they think that this is a strategy that is going to deliver at least short-term shareholder returns. And so far, they haven't been wrong. Correct. Let's talk about public markets. And I think a big driver of the volatility that we have seen is obviously what's going on with the government today, both with Doge and just kind of like, what are they thinking about? Are we just going to keep printing money? Or is there no balanced budget and we're just going to continue to print and asset prices will continue to go up over a long period of time? Is that kind of what your consensus is? Well, let's take a step

back here for a second, right? So I think there's a lot of folks who were very excited about the current administration going into the White House. Now, if you remember, I called out throughout the entire campaign season over and over and over and over and over and over again that it was a shame that neither candidate was promising to balance the budget. And I said to myself, it used to be during my adult lifetime, you pretended. I promise I'm gonna balance the budget. Yeah, I'm gonna give it a good try.

Whatever you get in the office, you don't do it. So on one hand, I was like, well, at least they're not lying to us on this one, right? They know they can't balance the budget. On the other hand, like at least pretend, right? At least pretend you care. So when Trump got into office and he started talking about balancing the budget,

I actually got really excited about that. I said, man, he's going to take a run at this. Maybe he actually didn't talk about it on the campaign trail because he knew that no one was going to believe him. But now that he's in and he's got this mandate and his landslide victory, he can go and he can really make a lot of change. And then he was like, I'm going to recruit an all-star team.

I got Elon Musk, the slasher of waste in all these companies. He's going to come in and Elon's going to bring all the super genius kids and he's going to bring, you know, the co-founder of Airbnb and he's going to bring that. And I was like, dude, let's go. Silicon Valley is going to Washington and they're bringing their scissors and we're just going to, we're going to cut all these things. So it was exciting. And the other thing that they did, which I thought was really important is they essentially figured out how to make it a high status thing to go work in the government. I, how long have you heard me say

that none of my smartest friends want to go work in the government that changed over the last 12 months. A lot of my smartest friends went to go work in the government and also wanted to go work in the government. So I think that was like a very new thing that happened. Fast forward. Now we're in May. They got into office in January. White flags out. I hate to see it. I don't like it. White flags are out. And my assessment of what has happened is that the doge and cost cutting measures ran into two things. One is the brick wall of bureaucracy. It's just like, it's a blob. It's a faceless, big brick wall of bureaucracy. There is no thing to, you can't get to it, right? And so the blob continues to win. It's like a bubble boy. Remember that movie, right?

It's like we put the government spending in this big bubble thing. Nothing can get in. you got a biological attack not getting in you got uh cost cutting is not getting it just whatever you try you're gonna run into a roadblock bubble boy is protected right the the budget is protected the other thing they ran into is they ran into the system now the bureaucracy to be clear is not only the the politicians the politicians do you remember the videos of them showing up outside of the government buildings demanding to like see Elon or being like what do you mean you're gonna cut the whatever and these guys were just tweeting like absurd things every day it got to the point they were tweeting things you're like that can't be true there's no way that nobody

with half a brain previously allowed that to happen and then it comes on it's like that is true like these people are just blowing cash all over the place and a lot of it was waste abuse fraud, I think was the terminology that the administration used. I would argue there's a lot of people on the internet who were like, you should put that in the translator on Google Translate and actually translate to corruption. Whatever words you want to use, that was what was happening there. But they also got fought by the media at every single step. And so what we had was we had a part of the equation or part of the conversation that did not have the American people's best interest at heart. Instead, what they said was anything that our political opponent

does, we are going to fight back against. And whether people like it or not, the media is very left-leaning, right? There are certainly pockets where people are kind of fair and balanced, or they are kind of not on either side. One of the terms that I hear reporters use a lot is they call balls and strikes, kind of like an umpire. Some of them do that. A lot of them don't, right? So there's some good ones, obviously. There's plenty that are just like mouthpieces for left-leaning causes parties etc right-leaning as well too right there's some but definitely the media skews to the left i think that that's kind of an objective fact we look at donations we look at coverage all this kind of stuff so again it's important to have both i think you should you want

left-leaning you want right-leaning yes you want independent you want kind of a full slate you want to give people choice you want to inform people whatever right but if you go look and just objectively look at the coverage the doge effort the cost-cutting effort got fought every single step of the way. And so instead, if we had a bunch of people sit down and say, hey, what's best for the American people? Cut government spending. Great. Let's do a group exercise. We're all together going to go cut this spending, right? We have the media, have the politicians, have Elon and Doge, everybody sit down. And that was the objective. I think that we could have made progress. The problem is that multiple people sitting at that table, that wasn't their

objective. Their objective was drive clicks, fight against the people they didn't like, claim victory right all these other things come into play and then of course there's the incentive like a lot of these people are benefiting from this stuff right and so you say to yourself okay well if people are handing out money there's a lot of folks interested in that not getting shut off right and so i think that was one huge kind of brick wall of bureaucracy media and politicians all get put in there the other hand is the system and the system it's kind of like uh if you got a car right it's low and run it's uh running low on gas you got to fill it up if you don't fill it up what happens? It stops running, right? Well, have you ever been in a car when it runs out of gas?

What does it kind of do? It's like gasping for energy at the end, right? It's gasping for the last couple of drops of gasoline that it can use, right? Well, that's basically what started to happen here was they started shutting things off and all of a sudden you could kind of feel the, we're running out of gas, right? And so naturally there's a lot of things in terms of the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, the politicians, the president that said, whoa, hold on a second, I want to run out of gas here. And so because of those two things, we've waved the white flag. And all you got to do is just listen to what they say. That's the beauty of I think right now in modern politics and modern kind of monetary and fiscal policy. Just listen to what they say.

That was true of the Biden administration. That was true of the Trump administration. They went from talking about saving, cutting, waste, abuse, fraud, all the terminology to now Elon's out there tweeting. He's talking about, I think we got to grow our way out of the problem. Besant, he's on TV. He's talking about, we got to grow without increasing the debt, right? Everyone now, it's like a memo went out and everyone's like, stop talking about cutting, start talking about growing. Well, when I hear growth coming from Washington, DC, what i know comes next is printing to them growth is printing printing is inflation if inflation comes what i'll predict it right now you're gonna see headlines inflation is gonna come back and it

may not go to you know eight percent nine percent whatever um but maybe it ticks up to two and a half three percent right three and a half percent whatever the number is a bunch of these uh smooth brains on the internet i think it's the right term they're gonna add the tariffs the tariffs Just look at the tariffs, right? I'm calling it right now. There's a line in the sand. We change strategies, right? As a country.

I don't agree with changing the strategy. I don't like it, but that's what just happened. And so now I'm going from telling you that tariffs are deflationary, which inflation fell off a cliff since December of last year because of all the tariff stuff. Everyone's worried about this economic slowdown,

all this stuff. I'm telling you right now, we're going to regime change and now we're going the other direction. Inflation is going to come back and it's because they're going to print money. Milton Friedman, famous economist, great guy. What's he say? Inflation is only created in one place, Washington, D.C. If they print money that leads to inflation, they're going to print a lot

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

here is you're going to see that. And so ultimately it concludes with one simple thing. We're going to go back to this only intelligence test that matters for people in their financial life. Are you a saver or are you an investor? If you're an investor, you're going to be a winner. If you're a saver, you're going to be a loser. Look, I just shoot straight as blunt as I can put it. If you are sitting there, which something like 50% of Americans are sitting there with no investment assets and you have a hundred percent of your wealth in dollars, you're going to get crushed. I don't want you to get crushed. You don't want to get crushed. I wish the system wasn't built this way i wish that what incentives weren't in place i wish they weren't going to

print money everything we could talk about it ain't going to change the fact that you're going to get crushed if you're sitting with 100 of your wealth sitting in dollars and that's at least a very big percentage if not 50 of the country the other 50 come on you see the article in the wall street journals i think it was when new york times talking about uh how much it costs to go to the hamptons no you're gonna see a lot sure you're gonna see a lot more by the way it's not what you thought it was. Hamptons is overrated. They followed like a group of women that went to the Hamptons. I think they said like the bill was like $3,500. I said, I don't know where y'all going in the Hamptons. I saw that actually. That seemed low. That's what I'm saying. They

must have had one meal the whole weekend. Yeah. Eat one meal, you know, go to the beach in the public free zone, right? The Motel 6, yeah, 3,500 bucks, right? I don't know anybody that is going out there in the way that they were describing their life that spends $3,500. There's going to be a lot more of that. You're going to see 2021, that was a warmup. That was like going to the batting cage and being like, one day, I hope I can go to the big show, right? And you're hitting the 95 mile an hour fastball. Nah, we're going to the big times now. They print this money because now psychologically people, they've seen it before. They know, right? It's why all recessions have been outlawed in the economy is because as soon as the central bank sees recession coming,

What did I tell you? Everyone was just talking about recession three, four weeks ago. What are they going to do now? Cut interest rates, print money. It's the playbook. Recessions are outlawed and they're going to bring the heat now.

And so when they do that, spending all this stuff is going to push asset prices, it's going to put liquidity in the market. You're going to see the velocity of money really take up. Business owners, asset owners, those people are going to do really well. What do they do when they do really well? Get on the planes, get on the trains, get on the yachts.

right? Go to different things, spend money, consume, do some party. And so I think that's where we're headed back to. And so if you think about investment assets, anything that's liquid and denominated in dollars, probably going to do pretty well. Public stocks going up, Bitcoin going up, gold going up, certain real estate REITs, things like that going up. If his liquid is denominated in dollars, five years from now is going up, right? And so the question then becomes, well, what about the private market? And my guess is that's also going up because you're gonna have more liquidity chasing all this stuff um and so 2020 2021 go study that if they print money remember in april when prices were down 20 remember that everyone

was moping around everyone was all sad on the internet saying the recession people talk about the great depression and all this nonsense i you ever seen the meme where that guy stands up in church by himself and he's like the lone voice and i kept saying all-time highs before the end of the year, get a cigar ready. When that thing's hit his new all-time highs, I'm going to hit you with the security guard shrug from the Michael Jordan documentary. I told you, what do you guys want? The faster it falls, the faster it recovers. They're going to print money. They're never going to let us get into a recession. And here we go. I mean, the correlation between M2 Money Supply and Bitcoin and pretty much every asset across the board for investors is a positive

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

you. Because guess what? Inflation is going to be a structural tailwind for asset prices. And therefore, if you just buy assets and chill, game on. Let's end on this. So obviously, if there is a influx of new capital into the market uh one of the big drivers i think of the bitcoin price and correct me if i'm wrong is uh bitcoin treasury companies what is the appetite for bitcoin treasury companies and how much can it get diluted over you know then if the next year we see a thousand bitcoin treasury companies come on and they all bought you know 10 billion dollars of bitcoin obviously there would be some price movement there um but is there an appetite from investors that want that versus just going off and saying hey look let me go buy this asset

myself um because there are some you know custody concerns and some other things going on there i don't want to get into all the details right now but um many of the investors who are investing in these things uh they're not just buying it for bitcoin exposure they can go buy bitcoin right um these people are very intelligent they are very sophisticated uh they have a lot of money and what they're not trying to do is they don't need to make 50x their money if they they can pick up a couple of percentage points here and there on a lot of money that's good that's good enough for them right and so um i will give you um maybe one example that would be helpful there's a lot of people who are investing in these things as a way to arb the

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

to kind of risk-mitigated drive returns than just like, oh, I can't figure out how to buy Bitcoin, so let me go buy it over here, right? Yeah, I feel bad for the day traders right now. Why? Just so much volatility, so much uncertainty. They need volatility. If you're a day trader, if you're like a legit,

not like, hey, I look at the market, but if you're like a legit day trader, you need the volatility, right? If it just goes sideways every day, then you don't make any money, right? So, so don't feel bad for them. They, they, they're thankful for it. I think the people who hopefully are, you know, you send this stuff to your friends, right? Send this video, explain to people, listen, you got to understand what you're buying. It's true of every asset class

go and figure out if you're going to buy a stock, explain it to me. Can you explain the stock to me better than I can explain it to you? That's probably a pretty good spot to start with. Why are you buying this thing? Right. I always loved the, the idea of like, if you're going to buy something and not hold it for two, three, five, 10, whatever your timeframe is, then why buy it for five minutes? All these different things, it just goes back to timeless investing principles do not change. You can take those timeless investing principles if you are smart, take the time to learn them, implement them, et cetera, to new industries. But the timeless investing principles, they're timeless for a reason. And so I think that that's a huge piece

of this is if you think that you're the next Warren Buffett or George Soros or Steve Cohen or whatever well one odds just given the probability you're not right but somebody is right okay well take the things to learn from these people and apply it in new areas right there's a reason why they've been successful don't just i always laugh when i hear people be like uh oh they're dumb like well uh objectively they're not dumb right actually they're objectively smart um you may not like what they do you may think that you can do something better or different or whatever, but learn from them and then make it your own. I think that's a huge piece of this is people want to operate in a black and white world, but the gray area is, can you explain to someone

why was Warren Buffett successful? Why was Steve Cohen successful? Why was Paul Tudor Jones or Stanley Druckenmiller? Just go through all of these folks, take the lessons from every single one of them, and then say, from these lessons combined with what I am uniquely good at or interested in? How do I apply it to a new area? And then that's your domain. Go play in that domain. And I just think that not enough people are doing that yet. And so I hope that people who come into Bitcoin understand Bitcoin. Go read the white paper. There's a gazillion hours of podcasts or articles to read or tweets or whatever. Go learn. As you learn, implement best timeless investing principles and you'll be fine. Just let the market do its thing.

there's 1500 episodes of the pump podcast that could go listen to i don't know if you want to do that that would take a long time and you probably get tired of hearing my voice but 2x speed that's true that's true well you talk a little fast for 2x speed i probably yeah by the way people always uh say when they meet me in person they're like oh you talk faster in person right i try really hard to slow down whenever a microphone's in front of me but you know it's not really that easy because i could talk like this and then people are like wait what the hell he's talking so fast like well i got a lot to say and you know let's just be more efficient here there's nothing worse than sitting down in a meeting and the person starts talking dragging it

like this you know oh man i love you but i got time for this we got to hurry up like what just tell me to spit it out let's go what's the thing you got to do um and so uh you know this is what it is all right all right appreciate you all right thanks everyone for watching talk to you guys next time.