The Pomp Podcast - #1571 Anthony & John Pompliano | How Bitcoin Conquered Wall Street

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

Anthony Pompliano and John Pompliano discuss everything that is happening with bitcoin, why bitcoin ETFs are making more money than S&P EFTs, US dollar collapse and what that means for asset prices, why Elon Musk wants to start a new political party, and how this all affects your portfolio. ========================Core is the leading Bitcoin scaling solution, enabling you to lock in yield by locking up your Bitcoin. Simply lock it on the Bitcoin blockchain to secure the Core network, and get rewards. No bridging. No lending. Just holding. Still your keys. Still your coins. Now your yield. Start at https://stake.coredao.org/pomp========================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.=======================Invest as you spend with the Gemini Credit Card® (https://www.gemini.com/pomp). Sign up today and get approved by 6/30/25 to earn a $200 Bitcoin bonus. Terms apply (http://gemini.com/legal/credit-card-intro-promo-terms). The Gemini Credit Card is issued by WebBank. See rates & fees (https://www.gemini.com/legal/cardholder-agreement) for more details. Some exclusions apply to instant rewards in which rewards are deposited when the transaction posts. This content is sponsored by Gemini, but my opinions are my own.=======================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/

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on, guys. Today, we've got a great episode with John Pompliano. We talk through everything you want to know about. BlackRock's got a brand new data point out about the Bitcoin ETF and how it's making more money than the S&P 500. Talk about why fiat is broken, what's going on with the Federal Reserve, what's happening to the stock market. And also, Elon Musk started a new political party. What does that mean for economics, the financial global system, and why is so much of politics becoming a distraction for investors and how can you avoid it? We get into all of that and much more today in my latest conversation with John Pompliano. All right, John, what's the first topic? All right. BlackRock's ETF. Their Bitcoin ETF is earning more than their S&P 500 ETF.

Obviously, their Bitcoin ETF is much newer. Why? How? Who's buying this? What is going on? Well, the first thing is that Bitcoin has now assaulted Wall Street. And Wall Street, this is their full undivided attention and focus, is they realize that if you embrace Bitcoin, it brings you new customers, new assets, and new revenue. And if there's one thing that Wall Street likes, Wall Street likes growth and Bitcoin brings growth. And so you are about to see a ton of Wall Street products rolled out with Bitcoin touching them, in them, around them, related to them, et cetera. Now, this is very interesting because it's not just about, hey, we have some growth. It's all about relative performance. And so I think that there's like $6 trillion

or some crazy number in the BlackRock S&P ETF. And in that ETF, they charge like 0.03%, right? Well, if you go and you take a look at what the Bitcoin ETF is bringing, they're charging, I think it's like 20 basis points or 25 basis points. And so they're just charging way more. And so you can have less assets in there.

Now, they don't care if they make money because of high volume on assets and a really, really low fee, or if they make it on smaller set of assets and just a higher fee. They actually would prefer to have the higher fee because guess what's going to happen? Right now, the Bitcoin ETF just eclipsed

the BlackRock S&P ETF. Guess what's going to happen as more assets flow into Bitcoin and Bitcoin's price goes up? I expect actually that the Bitcoin ETF is going to be two times the amount of revenue that the S&P ETF throws for BlackRock. Everyone else is paying attention.

All these other asset managers are like, wait a second, why aren't we doing that? That seems like a pretty good deal. And sure, maybe we don't get as many assets and maybe we can't even charge as high of fees, but it's better than zero. And so that's where you're going to see this all. So my takeaway is not so much that, yes, the Bitcoin ETF earning more is kind of like a shot heard around the world. I was like, oh, wow. But it's actually the second order effect, which is then all the other funds are now scrambling to figure out how do we play in this space? So it brings up two key points, I think, which is one, Wall Street seems to be chasing the

fee. Would you agree with that? That if there's money to be made, they're going to go find that corner of the market and do that. And then the second thing is, is there a race to the bottom with fees for the ETFs, right? Obviously, we saw the big launch last year with a bunch of different ETF providers being approved and starting to accept funds. Is there a race to the bottom with fees? And it's just basically as a retail investor, I want the lowest fee. Well, Wall Street's whole business for the most part is how do I make money and not take risk, right? That is these large institutions. Now there are risk takers within these firms that also are balanced by people who take zero risk. And so you end up with kind of lower degree of risk and the firm overall

performs. Now, what you see is the asset management business is amazing because guess what? People put money in, they rarely take it out and they charge a fee to it. Makes sense as to why they're doing what they're doing. Now, with that said, what I also think is pretty interesting is that we are likely to see compression on fees, but the compression on fees is not necessarily from the ETF providers because there are people in the market with lower fees, but they don't have as many assets. So it's still a distribution game, not just a fee game, but it's distribution plus fee. And so, yes, there will be some kind of compression there. I actually think the bigger thing that is coming into the market is Bitcoin treasury companies in general, because those

bitcoin treasury companies uh the ones that are operated correctly they actually are able to grow bitcoin per share so the way to think about uh from a public market investor or somebody who's accessing the public markets and wants bitcoin exposure you can buy the etf you get direct bitcoin exposure right uh if bitcoin goes up 2x you get 2x increase in price as long as the etf tracks bitcoin correctly with the bitcoin treasury companies take a strategy or a meta planet uh what they've been able to do is grow the Bitcoin per share, meaning that if you started out and let's say that you had exposure, one share is 0.1 Bitcoin. Well, if they do it correctly, then eventually one share gives you exposure to 0.2 or 0.3 Bitcoin. They're growing the amount of

Bitcoin. It's this kind of idea of Bitcoin yield. Now, I don't think that investors overall can be treated as like a single group of people. I don't think they're all going to go into ETF. I don't think they're all going to go get spot Bitcoin in self-custody. I don't think they're all going to go and buy Bitcoin and hold it at a third-party custodian. I don't think they're all going to go buy Bitcoin treasury companies. What we have watched over the last 10 years or so is we have drastically opened up the aperture of access by now giving people many different ways to get access to the asset. The beauty of doing that is you now are able to attract more and more capital pools. You are able to introduce Bitcoin as a different tool. It's kind of like if I give

you a hammer and you're somebody who all you do is roofing, then you only use the hammer for roofing. You don't know what else to do. But if I take that same hammer and I now say, oh, by the way, maybe you are somebody who you hang art. Well, you're going to use the hammer in a different way as somebody else. Maybe you do construction, somebody. Right. And you start doing it's the same tool, but you actually don't need the hammer for roofing. You need the hammer to be able to hang the art. And so that is really what Bitcoin now is doing is it's now being able to be used by people who use it for different things. Some people are using it for diversification. Some people are using it for hedging. Some people are using it for asymmetric exposure. Some people are

using it as a way to actually increase the Sharpe ratio in their portfolio. Some people are using it as like some sort of calamity or chaos insurance, right? All kinds of different ways that people are using it. It's simply a tool that exists in the market with many different ways to access it. And when you give people different options, different people, the world's a big place, right? There's trillions of dollars of assets floating around. They're going to figure out different ways to use that. And that I think is really the story of the last 10 years of Bitcoin is we have transitioned from a contrarian asset with very limited access to now we have something that has incredible access, both really hardcore Bitcoiners in terms of on-chain or self-custody

or whatever, all the way to things that frankly aren't very aligned with many of the Bitcoin ethos in terms of Wall Street's holding your Bitcoin, right? But also what we have seen is it has transitioned from that kind of contrarian type asset to now it is a mainstream adopted asset, which means we went from contrarian to consensus. And once we got to consensus, mass adoption, everything that people always wanted, like it is here. We were watching it play out. And what's pretty cool is like, they're going to write history books about this. Like the rise of Bitcoin is going to be well-documented in history. And we all are fortunate enough to live through this time. When you think about it through an investor's lens here, there's so many

different products now, right? You can do the Bitcoin treasury companies, you can do the ETFs, you can go buy it yourself, cold storage, right? Obviously, the main thing with Bitcoin has been not your keys, not your coin. How do you think about an investor's lens of which product to get attracted to? And I assume that means based on what their goals and what their current situation is. That's the question always. What are you optimizing for, right? I like to rail on the financial advisor sometimes just because they can't really fight back. But there's some very good ones out there. And if you go and you talk to them, you say, hey, how do you talk to your clients? Teach me. I'm not a financial advisor. I don't know how this works. One of the things

that you'll learn is part of the difficulty of their job is actually understanding who am I talking to? What are their goals? What is their risk appetite? And what are they trying to actually avoid? So for example, there are certain clients that may talk to a financial advisor. Let's say somebody is older, they're much more worried about cash management, about yield, about being able to actually use their investment portfolio to live on. That's very different than a 25-year-old who's like just, you know, naked long, let's just make as much money as we possibly can in my portfolio, right? Very different risk appetites, very different liquidity profiles, and also very different volatility appetites. And so I think that's the type of stuff that, you know, really

is hard to answer. And so as an investor, you got to ask yourself, what am I optimizing for? And then another input that people usually forget is like, what else do I own? And so what you're starting to see now is there is more coverage of people who are showing up that are saying, look, I own other assets. How does Bitcoin fit into that portfolio? Historically, whether people want to admit it or not, most people who bought Bitcoin, who were early adopters, they kind of like the mind virus got to them. It infected their brain and they all had way more Bitcoin exposure than anyone wanted to admit publicly, right? I remember getting clowned on national television

when I told Kevin O'Leary I had more than 50%. And frankly, I had way more than 50%, but I just felt like 50% was like somewhat of a more conservative number to tell him so he wouldn't freak out further, right? But that was really a lot of the early adopters. Many of my friends, like it was pretty much like once they found Bitcoin, they understood Bitcoin,

they allocated immense percentages. Percentages that would make a traditional financial advisor cringe. Now you're starting to get a lot of people coming in there's still some of those people who do that stuff that are net new, whatever. They tend to be younger people or whatever. But most people, they're showing up and they're saying, well, maybe I should actually have a percentage, 3%, 5%, something like that. I'm not going to go all in 50% or anything like that, but I also don't want to put 100 bucks in. It needs to be material

to my portfolio. Speaking of, one of the developments that happened over the last two weeks I thought was really meaningful, I wrote about it, but I don't think it's still got enough attention is rick edelman rick edelman is in the hall of fame of financial advisors that's a real thing uh incredible he's had an epic run um he came out and for the first time i believe uh in his career he has now made a quote-unquote recommendation he his recommendation not mine his uh of what are the percentages that someone should allocate to uh bitcoin and cryptocurrencies If I remember correctly, the lowest percentage was like 10%. I didn't really pay attention to the low percentage, but I know the high percentage was 40%. And so this is somebody who, he's not like a luddite Bitcoiner. He's not, you know, somebody who's like cheering on the demise of the dollar or, you know, doing anything that people would say is kind of like off-putting or quote unquote, like extreme. he's somebody who has been very well respected for a long time at looking at new technologies

understanding portfolio construction understanding risk management building a firm managing the relationship as a financial advisor like all the things that really kind of go back to like professionalism and risk management and he's now saying for the most aggressive people 40 40 40 percent of their uh allocation to bitcoin and crypto and that's just a monster number and so even if people, they read Ford and like, I'm uneasy with that. If somebody in the financial advisor hall of fame is putting a number out like that. And let's say that his most conservative number was like 10%. He's pretty much saying that everyone in the world should have at least 10%. That's a way bigger number than people saying one or 2%. Right. And so I think that's kind of

where this is all headed is more and more people that maybe they were like curious. Maybe they're even skeptical of Bitcoin five years ago. We know a lot of these people. I've interviewed these people. I've, you know, I talked to them privately, et cetera. They're now all kind of like, yeah, of course our clients have exposure to Bitcoin. It's not 50%, but everyone in our portfolio has got three to 5% or something, right? Like that is part of the mass adoption. That is really what's driving a lot of this. And I think that the percentage and how you access the Bitcoin really depends on who are you talking to. Yeah. It's interesting because over the last few years, you would think that a lot of people's portfolio,

that small percentage they had into Bitcoin actually grew over time. Well, that also, that also. They had 1%, now it's 5, 10%, right? Just given like the natural price movement of Bitcoin. Well, think about people who in 2022, in November, December timeframe, you could have bought a Bitcoin for like 20K, right?

You know, somewhere between 16 to $20,000. Now, really hard to do. There's going to quote, unquote, blood in the streets. Like all, you know, emotion, sentiment, I mean, all that stuff is working against pretty much everyone in the world. Asset was down 80%. Doesn't feel good for anybody. You're like watching the news, headlines, companies are blown up.

I mean, all the things that make it difficult. But we're talking about three years ago, right? Three years ago, you could have bought the thing for 20K. Now it's back up over $100,000, right? Or it's over $100,000. And so that's not unique to Bitcoin. There's a lot. I mean, think about in the stock market.

Stocks were down in April. three months later we recently published an interview with ryan dietrich right on uh on from the desk and uh ryan talked about the stock market is up 25 percent from the april lows in three months so everyone's like oh bitcoin this is like that seems like a lot of volatility to me in four months if you go from you know or call five months from the peak to the uh trough back to all-time highs in five months? Come on, stop it. We're going down double digits. We're going back up double digits, down more than 20%, up 25%, whatever. That's crazy. So actually, some of this is a Bitcoin story, but I've said it before. I think I even wrote about the idea of

we live now in a volatility generation. There's two types of investors. One type tries to avoid volatility, older, less risk appetite, all stuff. What do they want? They want bonds. They want all that. And you see this stuff, right? There's all these like new ETFs that have come out where there's like downside protection. Uh, there's these like income type funds where you can like generate yield on single name stocks or on indexes, et cetera. Um, but then also there's a second group of investors that are like max volatility. Uh, you know, what's the saying? Like, uh, volatility is vitality, right? It's like, you know, things not alive unless it's running around all over the place. I saw recently Dave Portnoy bought $10 million of Tesla stock,

right? And he was like, I think we had 10% bounce in two weeks. That's the thought process, right? That is kind of what people are thinking now. And I just think that that volatility in a world where the dollar is getting hurt, inflation is higher than people expected, and there's a lot of challenges and quote, unquote, keeping up. Volatility actually could be a potential solution for a portfolio and things like Bitcoin, stock market, et cetera, are kind of bringing that into the portfolio. All right. Speaking of volatility, the US dollar has been quite volatile over the last few months. It's had its worst start to the year since Richard Nixon was in office. What's going on? Does anything stop this train? Well, there's two different things

that are happening, right? So there is the like national debt and dollar debasement, which is more of like an aggregate measurement. So if you go back to 2020 till today, the US dollars lost like nearly 30% of its purchasing power in five years, right? Horrific for anyone who has been saving in dollars. A lot of that because we can't stop printing money. The national debt continues to explode. We're addicted to this system. Interest rates now or interest payments are on more than national defense. All these things people have heard. We have to continue to print money. I was very optimistic that we're going to be able to balance the budget. Take that idea, throw that one out the window, put back on here. You know, nothing stops this train hat. We can

print until the sky, right? It's going to happen under Republicans. It's going to happen under Democrats. We can yell and scream all we want. We ain't going to change nothing. So either you position yourself to benefit from it or you're going to get hurt by it. Now, that is a dollar dollar debasement story. And that has been very detrimental for people holding dollars. Asset prices, obviously, that are priced in dollars, those have gone up. The dollar strength or the thing like the dollar index is a relative comparison to other currencies. So now you're getting into, well, are we getting better or worse than these other currencies at a faster or slower rate, right? Are we strengthening or are we weakening? The dollar has been getting

its butt kicked in terms of it has been weakening against these foreign currencies. And so that's where you see that it's down 10 percent. Right. It's kind of losing strength. Now, one of the things that's very interesting, again, I wrote about this a couple of days ago, is this idea that the U.S. dollar has basically been trading within a what they call ascending channel. I don't know anything about technical analysis. I don't pretend to know anything about that, but somebody smarter than me said ascending channel. I said, okay, it's an ascending channel, right? Basically it goes up, but it's a band. And what you see is that when the dollar hits the upper end of the band, that's usually when it peaks in strength, it tends to fall over time to the lower end of the band. Well, right now, worst time in history, worst start to the year, 10% to start it, whatever. We just hit the lower part of the band. And so what has happened

in the past doesn't mean it's going to happen now but what has happened in the past is actually now the dollar historically has kind of u-turned and started to strengthen against the other currencies and so that's pretty interesting because when everyone gets max bearish like right now in the market everyone's like of course the dollar's going to keep getting crushed it's going to be horrible all the stuff well on the debt and debasement side yes but on a relative basis maybe not maybe actually his history would tell us that it now will strengthen and it will kind of violently turn the other direction. Let's see what happens. But I think that is a big part is understanding that it has been in this six month kind of very negative position, worst start to

the year. But right when everyone is convinced that the dollar's done, it's over, everything's horrible, maybe actually take the other side, right? What if now is the time when it turns around? I'm not saying that's going to happen. I'm not saying it's not going to happen. But I am saying that historically, if it was going to reverse course and we were going to enter into a dollar strength, right now would be a pretty damn good time based on historical data for that to happen. And so I just think that you have to always question the mainstream consensus. And right now the consensus is the dollar is going to continue in the direction that it is. I wonder if everyone is so convinced of that, maybe actually we're going to head the other direction.

Yeah. The consensus was also that we had a lot of uncertainty going on too, which doesn't help the dollar strength. One of the things that we just got certainty on was the big, beautiful spending bill that just passed on July 4th. I don't think that's the name, but yes, it's the big, beautiful bill. It's the nickname. Yeah, it is the nickname. It's the nickname. So what do you think about the bill? Obviously, the big talking point here is that it's going to add over $3 trillion of debt. What's going on? We just keep spending?

Well, there's actually one of my biggest takeaways. It's not even in the bill. It's the conversation around the bill. So if you listen to the critics, it's going to add $3 trillion to the debt. It's this, that, bam, bam, boom, bam, bang, boom, whatever. They all got all these complaints. if you go talk to people uh in the white house in washington dc who uh have this kind of economic policy etc they're going to tell you it's going to add zero spending it's not like hey we're debating you know rounding pennies here one says it's going to add trillions the other says going to add zero okay i talked with them i interviewed uh stephen myron um i talked with a couple of ross uh russ vote a couple of these guys right and my takeaway is that they actually believe the cbo congressional budget office whatever it is uh the metrics are flawed so what the administration's viewpoint again you can decide at home whether you agree with this or not but

what their viewpoint is is that the cbo is essentially saying if this passes there are going to be these tax cuts. These tax cuts then will lead to a higher deficit. I think what the administration's response is, is those tax cuts are already in place for the most part. We are just extending the Trump 2016, 2017 tax cuts. And therefore, actually, it's not a change. It's just a continuation. If we don't extend them, then actually it'll be this massive tax hike for people who now are enjoying the tax cut. So that to me is actually one of the most interesting parts is immediately you cannot believe the public discourse around the bill because you essentially have two groups of very smart people who are so polar opposite on their conclusion as to what the

bill's impact is that you immediately have to question everything. What it forces you to do is either just wave your white flag, say, I don't got the intellectual horsepower nor interest in this. I'm going to walk away and I just don't give a whatever. I'm going to go focus on my portfolio. Or you can go and try to understand it. And my conclusion, and I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I spent enough time trying to understand it and learn about it, talking to people, is that both sides are right. And everyone hates that answer. But that's actually true. A lot of the bill is extending existing tax cuts that are not going to add to the national debt. Then there are things like no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, things like that,

that were going to drive government revenue that now are going to get passed. Now there's offsets in the bill. And so you kind of get into this whole thing of like, there is this like murky middle where actually the truth lies, which is there is probably more spending than I would want to see.

And maybe even actually the current administration would want to see. But at the same time, there is not the like craziness that everyone else is yelling and screaming about. So it is a spending bill. There is increases in spending. But I think that the policy change now

went from we're going to balance the budget to you saw this pivot, which is now we are going to grow our way out of the problem. Well, how do you grow your way out of the problem? You stimulate the economy. How do you stimulate the economy? You only got two tools. You pull the monetary policy tool

of let's lower interest rates or get that money printer, start putting money in the economy in all kinds of ways, right? And so that's what we're seeing. And again, we're addicted to it. And so the conversation around this bill has reminded me that everyone's crazy. They're all crazy, right? On every which side of this thing, they all have some agenda. And if you are trying to be unemotional about it, if you are trying to say, I don't care about political affiliations, I don't care about it. I just want to try to find what is actually true and what is going to happen it is becoming increasingly harder because pretty

much anything you read online has some degree of bias that makes it very difficult and unless you're willing to sit and read i don't know how long this bill is but thousands of pages right unless you're going to go sit and read the whole thing good luck and so i don't think that many of the politicians signing it read it i don't i think single digits read it i don't i would bet you that there's not a single politician who voted for this thing that read it front to back yeah right now the same thing happens where um there's a lot of documents that people use in their personal life and you know one of the things i always joke with people is like uh how many people in america have a mortgage how many people who took out the mortgage actually read every single paper

stop there's no way right and so uh it's not a thing where like the politicians don't want to know everything it's just you have a document that's thousands of pages right uh and it's constantly being reiterated and all this i think one of the bills a couple months ago was like 25 000 pages we're not even talking about like okay i'll dedicate two days on the weekend to read this right we're talking about like it's humanly impossible to read the bill from the time that is presented to the time that you vote on it right um and so there's staffers and there's all this stuff and what i think ends up happening unfortunately it's just politicians end up deciding you know what i'm gonna care about three things these are my three you know issues that i

care about in this bill i want to see these three things done other places you know what uh i can't fight every battle doesn't make it right doesn't mean it's good for the country but i do think that there is some element of like there's like the academic component of every politician should read every bill with the reality of like, they just can't. And so the real solution, which again, people don't like, it's just like, make them shorter. What if all of a sudden no bill could be more than a hundred pages? Every bill that wants to be passed, you can't be longer than a hundred pages. Simplicity is king. Well, you could pretty much sit down and someone could read it in three hours, right? So that means that they can put their kid down to sleep and read before they

go to bed that means they wake up early in the morning they can read it right that means that you know over a long lunch they can read it there's a lot of nuances in these things which is why they're of course they still need their staffers they still need whatever but like if it's 100 pages or less it's readable and now all of a sudden what you do is you start to strip out all the nonsense language right and you just get to the matter of fact which is what is in the bill and to me that is um you know it's difficult i don't think we're going to get 100 page bills But that is probably one of the big takeaways. Now, what I think is going to happen, asset price is going to go to the moon.

It's just like if we're going to spend, if we're going to drop interest rates, we're going to do all this stuff. Dollar strength, like everything is going up into the right because everything is denominated in dollars. And they're going to let it fly. And they're telling you they're going to let it fly. the number one thing in this administration that i think people have not got comfortable with because there's a political like um uh what do you call it like um controversy right people like they either like the guy or they don't like the guy they like the administration they don't like the administration the people who don't like them don't believe them so if you look now they change

what they say but more so than most administrations they're pretty open they hold press conferences they're constantly answering questions like all this stuff right much more transparent transparency is always this like weird thing just because you answer questions doesn't mean you're being transparent but like the access is there right and i do think that they answer a lot of questions uh people may not like the answers people may not like the questions but like it is more uh kind of what the american people need than anything for the most part what i have seen they do what they're going to say now you may not like what they say you may not think that what they're saying is the right thing to do you may not

think that they understand what the implications of what they're doing are like there's a bunch of critiques but i do think that one of the things that investors uh who have been kind of disappointed in their investment performance they are not believing what the administration is saying so even look at the terrorists they told you they're gonna put the tariffs on there's a lot of people ah they're not really gonna do it it's posturing but they put them on right then they said we're gonna hike them up ah come on they're not really gonna hike them up right they hiked them up right then they came out and they said we're gonna drop them and then people were like ah come on i don't know like now we're in chaos land like this uncertain then they dropped

them doesn't look like by the way if you don't go in the do what we say you know in the deal we're gonna hike them back like again it's chaotic because it's uh it changes fast but they actually do end up following uh through a lot now the like um uh you heard the taco trade trump always chickens out everyone kept saying that right and then i mean in probably one of the most ridiculous it's still crazy how precise this whole uh iran bombing thing from what i understand they dropped a bomb or a bunker buster into a ventilation tube. And then they dropped a couple more in the same hole, from what I understand. Are you seeing the new Top Gun movie? That's what I was thinking of. I'm like, wait, man, how do they get the plans out to the movie theaters before we ever used the

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Go to Gemini.com slash card for more details. That's Gemini.com slash card. Go check them out today. You're telling me Hollywood somehow knew that we had the capability to flip over upside down, go in this U, drop a button. Come on. your greatest imagination could not be we can drop a buster a bunker buster bomb into the hole that by the way if it was a jailbreak people would have a hard time getting

out of the hole right i mean think about a ventilation like there are movies where people get stuck in the ventilation and so we were somehow able to drop a bomb in there it's crazy to me that hollywood had the had the blueprint before we ever uh used it so somebody leaking somewhere uh but it goes back to again it's like they kept saying you can't have this you can't have this you can't and they did it now again are there times where they don't follow through of course right um big controversy right now the videotape of the whole epstein thing supposedly from what i've seen i have not watched all 12 hours or whatever was released right supposedly there's one minute missing i i don't know they say they had the list now there's no list right

So I'm not here to comment on anything other than economics. But when it comes to economics, I think that most people have basically said, I don't believe them. And actually, the people who have said, I just believe they're going to do what they say, regardless of whether I think it's the right thing or not. Those people have done much better than the people who have not. And it's not a political thing. Like, I think people at this point pretty much know, right? I don't care what political aisle you're on. all i care about is what are the policies when it comes to economics and from an economic standpoint

what are the things that you're doing to actually help people right now here here's a mind bender jerome powell is part of the trump administration now he's supposed to be independent he says that whatever donald trump is the president jerome powell is part of it jerome powell has interest rates held i believe artificially high he's punishing the american public by doing that They don't have access to cheaper capital. Mortgage rates are higher. Homes are more unaffordable. You know, all these issues. Whether the president and the administration agree or not, it is part of their administration. So now you get a thing where you actually have folks who are doing things that even the administration obviously publicly are saying they don't agree with, but it still falls under that, right? And so it's like this weird dynamic of when you put the political overlay, everyone wants to point fingers about this policy, whatever. At the end of the day, we're addicted to cheap money. We got to print money. So guess what they're going to do? They're going to print money and interest rates are going to go down over time. When they do that, guess what's going to happen? Asset prices are going to go up. You can sit around and you can pontificate with your friends while you drink a beer and smoke a cigar as to who politician this, that, whatever, or you can go make money. and what i think is now happening is uh there was like a whole twitter generation who didn't care about politics politicians and regulators like tapped on their door and all these people

i gotta pay attention to this now right and some group of them they're addicted they're like i'm deep down the politician rabbit hole i this guy this guy's like a soap opera right i gotta focus and all this stuff whatever another group of people say just let me operate my business right whether they're in crypto or ai or you know psychedelics we go through all these like emerging things all the way to even space right i mean i'm an investor in a company called varda it's a private uh company they basically put a manufacturing uh like physical hardware into space they manufacture uh pharmaceutical drugs and they bring it back down at one point i think definitely the last two years they had one of their first devices was stuck in space they

couldn't bring it back because the regulators wouldn't let them so guess what they did they said okay well we're gonna have to work through this process but then they also went i think it's australia gave them the thumbs up hey you can come launch here we bring stuff back what are you we're commercial now all of a sudden my understanding is that they got a lot more uh you know uh kind of uh uh collaboration with the u.s government because competition entered right so it's not just a bitcoin thing it's not just whatever um but i do think that we are uh bifurcating where like if you get addicted to the soap opera of politics you won't have a very hard time looking soberly at the market but the people who are able to understand what's happening but

frankly not care and just say what are they saying they're going to do do i believe they're going to do it or not if i think they're going to do it what are the implications whether i think it's a good idea or not. That is a much different analysis than saying, I don't like them. I like them. This is good. This is bad. I would do this other thing. You're not the president. You're not the commerce secretary. You're not the treasury secretary. You're not the head of the federal reserve, right? You're the investor. So do investor things, which means allocate your capital based on what's happening in the world, not what you want to happen in the world. And I think that there's just a lot of people who kind of forgot that. And so I can speak for me personally. I look at

the world, the number one thing that they are going to do is they are going to debase the US dollar. When they debase the US dollar, asset prices are going up and to the right. And I think that Bitcoin will be one of many assets that do very well. I think that Bitcoin probably will do much better than many other assets. And so I've been focused on it for a long time. I'm going to stay focused on it for a long time. I think that it's pretty much the conviction test of our generation is if you have an asset, which mathematically has now been proven to be the, I believe the words that Lynn Alden and Sam Callahan use are the barometer for global liquidity. If you think global liquidity is going up, guess what else is going up?

Not that hard. And so I just think that it's why I've come to the conclusion that Bitcoin is the new hurdle rate. If you can't beat it, you got to buy it. And there's a lot of people who they can't beat it, but they ain't buying it. I know the first time you heard Varda and you were like, Wait, y'all are manufacturing drugs in space? You probably did some due diligence, but that was probably a vibe investment. At first, no. At first, they weren't doing drugs at first. They were trying to figure out what they were going to manufacture.

There's a lot of different things that they were thinking about. But no, it's interesting because that investment in particular had two intersecting things. Delian, who's at Founders Fund, who's a friend of mine, he's just the type of person. like, I don't care if he told me he's going to create lemonade stands. I'm in. Right. Cause guess what? He going to take over the lemonade game in New York city within weeks. Right. He'll figure it out. Like, I don't know. It's just like the guy's going to figure it out. So when he said he was starting a company, I actually don't remember if I asked him what it was or not. I'm pretty sure that either he told me like the one-liner or he was like, I'm sorry to call it.

I'm in. Okay. What are you doing? Right. But like, it did not take a lot of convincing. I didn't need to like see the financial projections of his company or anything. She's like, I just want like, one, he's my friend, but two is he's the type of person that you wanted to give money to and he'll figure it out, right? The second thing is, he's like, yo, we're going to space. That's cool. And what I've learned in life is when you have somebody who can figure it out and they're doing cool things, invest, put the money in.

Now people will hear that and be like, I'm doing this cool thing. I'm doing like, it's probably not that cool, right? Twitter DMs are open, by the way. But like their whole thesis was, why don't we go to space? But rather than go to space to get to Mars or go anywhere else, which, by the way, is a very admirable and commendable thing to do, why don't we use space to benefit us here on Earth? Kind of different way to think about it, right? Now, that's actually been the winning theme so far. If you think about Varda, if you think about Starlink, if you think about a lot of this stuff, GPS, all this stuff is we're using space around Earth to benefit us here on Earth. That has been the theme. um and so um i think there's a lot of companies uh like that that are out there it's just back the right person doing cool things um and like what better job to have than make money backing your friends doing cool things like that's like a dream job for most people

that is um let's talk about something let's round up here with something that i think encompasses everything we've talked about today which is bitcoin which is space which is politics which is elon uh elon's creating a new political party um a lot of people have tried this he's probably one of the guys that has the financial means to make a significant push but one of the things that was interesting was someone tweeted at him and said will the american party embrace bitcoin elon's response fiat is hopeless so yes what do you what's your takeaway from this well i don't know who's running the twitter account of the america party um so maybe it's elon maybe it's somebody else um but uh are they wrong it kind of goes back again i i don't subscribe to

republican democrat america party or anything else i'm an american but the party affiliations i don't care about those right everyone could choose their own thing um but who doesn't believe that right like if you think that fiat currencies are the path to financial security then put a hundred percent of your money in um in it or put majority of your money every rich person i know They have majority of their money not in it. Right. And they're using the debasement to their advantage. And so I think that it is it's not even like controversial. It's like a duh. It's like saying like the sky is blue. Right. Like, yeah, of course, the sky is blue. Of course, fiat is hopeless in terms of its ability to store wealth over a long period of time. Remember the U S dollar has lost about 30% of its purchasing power in five years. It's crazy, crazy, right? That's not like a, Oh, I talked to my grandpa and he told me, you know,

a Coca-Cola used to be 5 cents and now it's a dollar 20, right? Cause you're like, yeah, grandpa, we got it. Right. That's not like a, Oh, back in my day, I got to buy a house for $25,000. Now it's worth a million. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Grandpa, we got it. That's like, yo, So five years ago, I personally had way more purchasing power than I have now. Or I went to buy a home and it was $250,000. Now it's $500,000. And now grandpa is telling people like a little squirt.

Now you see what I've been saying, right? So I think that is kind of a no brainer. On the political party stuff, I do think that having multiple political parties is better than having one. duh right having three is better than two having five is probably better than two i don't know if it's actually helpful to have like 20 so there's some magic number between probably like two and i don't know eight or something where you have enough competition but you don't have such fracturing that like there's just constant fighting all the time right um and so having a third one is probably uh a good idea um it doesn't mean that this one is

the right one doesn't mean this one's going to be successful it's very hard a lot of people have lost a lot of money doing it um but if there's one person who could do it it's the guy who's averaged a multi-billion dollar company every five years for now 35 years like the guy just don't bet against them that's why i was so bullish about the doge thing and so i think that they ran into a lot of brick walls that were insurmountable i you know what is it like uh the people who are the best at something the odds that they lose one match you know like let's say in sports is usually pretty low the odds they lose two matches in a row is like near zero right i wouldn't bet against them but i think it's very hard and i do think that um he may become

frustrated and realize the political stuff is less of where he can have impact the better thing obviously is uh you know building the companies and again like look he gets a lot of uh critiques um i think he's the first one he said it publicly right you know my favorite eline uh quote of all time you see all these like motivational quotes you see all these like instagram things youtube videos people tweeting all my favorite line elon's ever said is the opening of snl when he hosted it and he says uh i'm trying to go to mars did you think i'd be normal right like or whatever like whatever the the paraphrase and it's like yeah like he is self-aware right um doesn't mean he's normal doesn't mean that he's gonna change whatever but like he is self-aware and so i just

think that these political party stuff is much harder. But having a political party also requires you to have candidates that can win. And what I again, very cursory reading is he is trying to pick a couple of House and Senate races, a very small number where he can go and basically win and have his candidate be successful. And if he does that, then he's basically able to insert himself into these very contentious votes where now all of a sudden those candidates that they've been able to flip uh are like the deciding votes so again makes sense um just very difficult to do yeah all right thank you all right thank you guys so much we'll see you guys next week