The Pomp Podcast - #1578 Polina & Anthony Pompliano | Trump Company Buys BILLIONS of Bitcoin

Episode Date: July 22, 2025

Polina Pompliano and Anthony Pompliano discuss what’s going on with bitcoin, new regulation coming out of Washington DC, the rise of self-directed investors, athletes being paid in bitcoin, and why retail continues to beat institutions to various investment opportunities. ========================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========================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.========================Polkadot is a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain technology aimed at creating Web3. Created by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot empowers users to build decentralized applications with ease. Backed by industry leaders, making it a preferred choice for big names, Polkadot stands out as a leading choice for investors seeking a reliable, future-proof solution in the growing world of Web3 technology. Learn more at https://polkadot.com/.=======================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. 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. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great episode with Polina Pompliano. In this conversation, we talk about what's going on with Bitcoin, new regulation coming out of Washington, D.C., the rise of self-directed investors, and why professional athletes seem to be so enamored and successful by investing in Bitcoin. This conversation covers a lot of unique thoughts that talk about the long-term trends as to how we are watching capital flow in the market and why I think that retail investors keep

beating institutions to various investment opportunities like Tesla, Palantir, Bitcoin, and others. Here's my latest conversation with Polina Pompliano. All right, Polina, what's the first topic? Bitcoin is at $118,000. It's holding steady. Trump media bought $2 billion worth of Bitcoin, showing more support from the administration and making them the fifth largest Bitcoin corporate treasury. Interesting. And then SEC Chair Paul Atkins said on CNBC on Monday, it is encouraging to see public companies adopt bitcoin and crypto as treasury reserve assets what do we think well the trump media company uh which has trump's name on it but i don't think that he is heavily involved i think he's like indirectly uh financially benefits from it but

um i don't think that people should be surprised they raised billions of dollars to go buy bitcoin and then they went and they bought the bitcoin i was like oh my god they bought like what did you think they were doing? They told you they were raising the money to do it. Now, I think if I understand correctly, when they raised the money versus when they bought, it's a pretty big price difference. So I think they actually raised the money when it was closer to like $100,000, $105,000. Now they got to buy at $115,000, $120,000. So look, Bitcoin is a game where the longer you wait many times, you can get punished. But also it's a public environment, right? That there's certain rules, regulations, things in terms of the fundraising details, all that stuff

plays into it. But I think that there's a lot of companies right now that are learning. If you raise capital and you do not deploy it into Bitcoin, sometimes you will have to pay for that later on and you end up with less Bitcoin because the price can obviously move very quickly in a very short period of time. Great. Last week was dubbed Crypto Week because we saw an unprecedented three crypto bills being signed. The first is the Genius Act, which creates the first ever federal regulatory framework for payment stable coins. Then there's the Clarity Act, which helps determine whether digital assets are securities or commodities, resolving longstanding jurisdictional confusion around SEC or CFTC. And the Anti-CBDC Act, which bars the Federal Reserve from issuing

a central bank digital currency, which addresses concerns about privacy and government oversight. If I understand correctly, one of those got signed, the other two got approved in the House Now they go to the Senate and then the Senate has to approve it. And then there'll be only the genius act, the genius act. Now I will say, look, I don't care if you like Trump or not. If you're a 12 year old young man and you have to go up on a podium in front of a room of people and talk about something called the genius act. Yeah.

The like layup finger roll joke is to be like, they named the bill after myself. Oh Lord. He said that. So again, I don't care where politics are like that. was like just like layup city and he did it uh which is pretty funny uh now with that said i thought it was very interesting obviously the bill getting approved all that signed great uh the white house held an event what i found very interesting was uh they called out by name a number of entrepreneurs who run companies in the bitcoin and crypto industry okay um including paulo the

tether ceo was there and so this whole like fud of the largest stable coin in the world is complete nonsense like he's in the white house getting called by name by the president of the united states and they're talking about stable coins are going to increase dollar dominance globally stable coins are going to drive adoption of the u.s dollar globally stable coins are going to become an important part of the traditional financial system stable coins are the future Stable coins are cheaper and faster. All these things they're saying. And they got the guy who is running the largest stable coin in the world, which is probably the single most profitable company in human history based on a EBITDA to employee ratio.

So all the FUD, all the nonsense. Like Tether is winning. Now, that doesn't mean that Circle or any of the other stable coins are not doing well also. They're growing. They're getting adoption in their own areas. But I think that what we have seen historically is there have been people who have tried to say, oh, there's kind of an unregulated world, and then there's a regulated world for these stablecoins.

What we are now seeing is, no, there's a stablecoin world. And as we get clarity through this Genius Act, as we get the traditional banks start to participate here, it is game on. And I go back and I continue to remind people, the US dollar is one of the best product market fit products ever created. Everyone in the world wants dollars. And so what you are going to watch is you are going to watch all of the challengers, Tether, Circle, et cetera. I'm not going to go name all of them. They have a head start because they got to get started sooner, but also they have momentum, they have assets, and they understand the technology because they've

been building with it for a long time. The banks are coming. You are going to see JP Morgan, bank of america city all of these banks that's because there's now regulatory clarity they could have done it before but now it's like they're getting hit over the head by a two by four saying hey geniuses get in the game or you're going to get disrupted now right and so i actually think the regulatory clarity helps the challengers more than it helps the incumbents now some people disagree with me on that but it is now clear that the u.s government is not going to stop these challengers. And so they have a massive head start and the banks are going to try. Now, if you're the bank, don't try to compete with the stablecoin in the areas the stablecoins

are winning. Tether has run all around the world and gotten emerging market adoption of US dollars via these digital rails. Great. If you're JP Morgan, what are you going to do? You're going to go to Rwanda and try to get people to adopt a dollar? Are you going to go to some obscure city or region in the world and try to get bottoms up adoption from people who, frankly, you previously have not banked? No. What you're going to do is you're going to say, we're going to sit in our fat cat ivory towers in Wall Street, New York City, and we're going to figure out how to use our size, our scale, our relationships, our customer base, and the current assets we have to carve a lane for ourselves. So the first thing that we're probably going to do is probably going

to roll out stable coins to our existing customers who happen to be quite wealthy compared to the average person around the world, right? It's something like if you're in the United States, I think that you are considered, if you live in the United States on a global basis, I believe that the average American is considered in the top 1% of the world. And so if you look at the customer base

that these banks have, like they on a relative basis have a very wealthy client base, even for people who in the United States, you may not say, oh, they're super wealthy. So if you go and you roll out this product to them, now all of a sudden, every bank wire, rip that out. Why don't we use stable coin?

Every single kind of money transfer, rip that out, replace it with stable. Like that's the opportunity set here. And guess what happens? If they're able to drop the cost and increase the speed of those transactions, people will probably do it more. And so that's where I think this is going is the banks are going to lean on their advantage. The challenges are going to lean on their advantage and they're going to meet somewhere in the middle. And that's where you're going to start to see M&A. That's where you're going to start to see like Tether is going to put a bank out of business.

somewhere in the world because tether is going to be able to go cut off their potential customer base and they are going to start to use these rather than have a traditional bank account this is the future where this is all going it is going to be hyper competitive i would even argue might even be cutthroat and part of the narrative against some of the stablecoin challengers was the big players trying to play dirty games and say oh they're unregulated oh they're breaking the rules all that kind of stuff but now that these companies have size scale and momentum well what happens when they start going after the bank's clients and i think that's what you're going to start seeing now is you're going to see everyone and i talked about it on a recent episode

with the winter mute ceo everyone it's like elementary analysis the big financial institutions are going to come into the digital asset space great you know what a big theme is going to be over the next decade and is not a lot of people talking about these young challenge uh challenger companies the crypto companies the bitcoin companies they're coming to eat the lunch of the traditional firms and guess what some of the big firms will take business from smaller firms and use it as a growth path but some of these challenger firms are going to disrupt and probably put out of business some of these legacy firms but that's how the actual disruption occurs is you get them fighting with each other. Everyone's talking about the big guys going into the digital asset

space. Not a lot of people talking about the digital asset guys going into the big space. And if that starts to happen, you're going to see a lot of backlash. You're going to see a lot of dirty games get played because no one wants the crown jewel, the mothership of their legacy business put at risk. But here they come. The cavalry is coming now and their businesses that they've enjoyed for a long time, they're going to come under pressure because the challengers have better technology. It's very obvious that users around the world, that's what they want to use. They'd rather do that than do wires or any sort of bank transfer. That's really interesting. And the, what I find fascinating about these acts is that they're like widely, it's bipartisan

supported, right? Like, of course, like I said it on CNBC a couple of weeks ago, politicians are not dumb. They play dumb. Sometimes they play dumb. Sometimes they pretend like they don't know what's going on, they understand that the will of the people will eventually be heard. Are you really going to be a politician who expects to be around for a long period of time? Now, if you're an older politician and you got a kind of cemented base and you live in an area where it doesn't matter who shows up, you're never going to get voted out, do whatever you want. Of course, you could be anti-Bitcoin, crypto, whatever. But if you're relatively young, middle-aged or below, and you want to have a long career in politics and you're on the wrong side of this topic, it doesn't take

long. Look at any survey. Young people and American citizens want these technologies. If you want to have a long career, you better not attack the area that not only people want the technology, not only is growing very fast, but guess what? Whether you like it or not, these people have money and they sort of put the money to work. Go look at what Fairshake, this pack that they put together. It's like one of the largest packs in all of politics. The president of the United States ran and one of his key components of his entire approach was, I'm going to protect your right to participate in this industry. How many companies, corporations, et cetera, now are pouring resources, time, money, energy,

employees, strategic kind of initiatives, et cetera, into an industry that they previously thought the regulators were preventing them from participating? This is the game going forward. And so if you're a politician, you're looking at the data. You understand, I got to be on the right side of this thing. And that's why you're getting the bipartisan support. And let me ask you this. Trump said that crypto has, quote, made our dollar look really good and strong and powerful.

It's good for the dollar and it's good for the country. What does he mean by that? Just because like people are going to be using stable coins to transact. Here's a real example. Let's say you live in Lebanon, right? Or any other country that has experienced the devaluation of their currency. Sometimes it is market based where over time people just say, hey, this is not nearly as valuable, et cetera.

Other times there are literally policy decisions where central banks or governments will intentionally devalue their currency themselves. How many stories do we have to read about somebody goes to sleep, they wake up and all of a sudden their currency is 30 percent devalued and they literally saw one third of their savings disappear overnight. Yeah. Right. So if you live in that country, you say to yourself, well, I, in the Western world, in the United States, I have a savings account. I have a checking account. I have a brokerage account. So guess what's going to happen in the digital world? You're going to have the same thing. Some of your money is for saving. Some of your money is for spending. And some of your money is for speculating. In that world, Bitcoin has done a fantastic job of becoming the savings

technology, the store of value. You buy Bitcoin, you don't sell it. Bitcoin over a long period of time continues to go up and for the foreseeable future that will continue the brokerage equivalent the speculation you can go buy stocks you can go buy all these crazy coins what like there's plenty of speculation going on including to the fact that i think the market maybe has become somewhat of a casino but what is the asset that i can buy in the digital world that i can use with the same speed and cost of digital assets but i should use for spending well i don't want to spend my bitcoin because Bitcoin's going to be worth more in the future. Why would I spend something today

that's going to be worth more later? The economic incentive is against me. I'm incentivized not to spend my Bitcoin. So it's a savings technology right now. The spending is I want to spend something that'll be worth less in the future. So why don't I spend dollars on digital rails? And that's what you're seeing

is people are adopting this and they're saying, well, it's better to hold some cash than it is to hold my local currency because my local currency is losing value at even faster rate than the dollar. And so what you're seeing is you're seeing the dollar and Bitcoin both rise together simultaneous, but you're seeing the local weaker fiat currencies all fall to the wayside. And so ultimately, what does that mean?

Well, there's plenty of headlines talking about the de-dollarization, all these countries trying to get off the dollar and the brick countries and all this nonsense. The people are saying, I want dollars. And you see this around the world and you look at like, again, Tether, the latest numbers I remember are, I think they have 400 million on-chain users and they're growing something like 30 million users per quarter. That is insane. But if you think about that, that's only approximately what one 16th of the global population. Like they're not even at 10% yet. But the US dollar is nearly 50% of all global trade transactions. So there's this massive gap between the dollar usage and stable coins as the form factor for the dollar usage. And I think

that gap is going to close over time. You're going to continue to see the dollar become more and more popular on the global trade perspective, but you're also going to see stable coins take on more and more of those transactions. And so it sounds crazy to sit here and usually talk about Bitcoin and be like shilling the U.S. dollar. But I'm just looking at the data and I'm telling you that stable coins are going to become a bigger part of the market. The beauty is that that is very bullish for Bitcoin, because if I have electronic dollars in my bank account for me to buy Bitcoin, I have to take those dollars and I have to move them somewhere outside of the bank. what let's say i go onto a crypto exchange i have to go from dollars wire it into a crypto exchange

then i have to turn that into a stable coin i have to buy bitcoin well if i sit with the dollars in bitcoin in a stable coin i just press a button on my phone and i can change back and forth between dollars and bitcoin so what that does is when you reduce friction it increases velocity and when you increase velocity that means more and more capital will end up in bitcoin that is where this world is going and there's a whole lot of financial institutions have been sit on the sidelines. And now they realize we better get in the game. Well, let's talk about the institution sitting on the sidelines. So retail investors bought the dip and believes that the market would come flying back while Wall Street stayed on the sidelines and continued to

play defense. Now, while you were talking, I was trying to look this up really quick and I still don't know what's going on, but what is happening with Opendoor and this guy, Eric Jackson? and let's talk about a retail investor okay is that there is a thought process on wall street that the institutions are smart and retail is stupid retail being individual people who individual and buy stocks but retail is thought of as somebody who's like sitting in their mom's basement with ten dollars on robin hood okay they don't know what they're doing and they're just punting the money around. Do some of those people exist? Of course. Is that the majority of the market when we're talking about retail? Not at all. What has happened over the last,

I don't know, probably decade, but really I think has kind of exploded in the last seven or eight years is the rise, not just of retail, but what I would consider and clarify as the self-directed investor. The way that a self-directed investor works is they go on the internet and they use x or twitter reddit podcast youtube newsletters all that stuff and they learn and usually they are learning from other people who are putting money in the market i write an email every single morning i don't know if anyone actually learns from it but i'm putting my personal views out there and my views tend to align with my portfolio and if i am right i make money if i'm wrong i lose money then there's hundreds if not thousands of other people tens of thousands of people who are

putting all this information out there so on wall street one of the reasons why people like the bloomberg terminal is because there's a chat function i'll be sitting in there talking in some of the chats you can talk one-to-one some of them are like anonymous chats all kinds of stuff i didn't know that there's anonymous chats it's like a soap opera season um finance um but x is the world's group chat when it comes to finance you can go on there and if you want let's say you find a company and you want to find great analysis type the ticker in on x and you'll find someone talking about it now is it super obscure small i mean just a million dollar market cap company never mind probably not but there's all kinds of these amazing retail analysts now

here's what's interesting to me if you get your information online then you don't normally use your information source of the mainstream media so already there's a direct connection i don't need a reporter to tell me what the analysts are saying. I can just go read from the people who are publishing their work on the internet, whether it's podcasts, YouTube, newsletter, tweets, whatever. Okay. So now I got my information. Now I'm more informed. As a self-directed investor, I have access to more source material and more material. Do you have the source material on the material, but do you know how to analyze that source material? You're reading somebody else's doing the analysis, the same. By the way, guess what happens on Wall Street? There's all these

research, buy side and sell side research, et cetera. Somebody's doing a bunch of analysis. They're sending it out to people and they're trying to convince them of some viewpoint. Same thing's happening on X, but the hive mind, the group or the power of the crowd is actually more valuable. So guess what people on Wall Street are doing now? They're sitting on X while they're sitting at their desk and they're learning as well. And so ultimately there's an idea generation, there's an analysis, there's all this stuff that's on. So now if I, as an individual have access to more information and I don't have to spend $25,000 a month on a Bloomberg terminal, then I am actually able to use that information.

Now, what did I historically do? Well, I need to go to my stock broker or my financial advisor. Now, all of a sudden I don't need those people, right? Not because they're not helpful, not because a financial advisor can't help when it comes to estate planning or maybe getting me access to certain investments, or maybe even just helping me think through how to create a portfolio. But in terms of actually executing a trade, I now have technology available where I can go direct to the market. So I may have direct access to the market and still choose to use a financial advisor for certain reasons. But increasingly, there's a group of people online who are informed by the internet, and they directly access the market on the internet,

they do not use the financial advisor, they do not use the stockbroker. So what does that mean? That means that you now have an entire generation of these people who are showing up in the market. They're sophisticated, they have money, and they are deploying that money. And so it goes back to this idea of retail. Well, why was retail right and the institutions were wrong in April? Remember, the stock market went down about 20%, is now up over 30% off the April lows. Institutions, hedge funds, financial institutions, all these guys are all sitting on the sidelines. Remember all the doomsday predicted

and they had all their little spreadsheets and models and all this nonsense that they were all predicting the shelves were gonna be empty, the Great Depression was coming, all this craziness. Guess what retail did? They said, I've seen this before. Five years ago, the market crashed really fast and I bought and the market came back really fast.

Buy the dip and guess what retail did? We have the data, it's conclusive. They bought the dip and guess what? They were right and the market came flying back. and people say, oh, because the tariffs are getting implemented. Right now in the United States of America, there is a 10% blanket tariff on all U.S. imports. So this whole idea of like the tariff or whatever, no, certain countries, we had really big numbers and then we dropped them down. There's still like a 35% tariff or something like that on China. That wasn't there

before. So just because there was big numbers and then we ended up in a different place, we absolutely have a lot of tariffs. Go look at the tariff revenue charts. They've exploded. We are collecting tariff revenue, right? And so the tariffs got put in place. The inflation didn't show up in the way people thought it was. There wasn't this doomsday scenario. Retail bought the dip, and now they're getting rewarded for it because the stock market has come back in a major way.

It's a three-month historic recovery for the stock market. Never really seen this before in history. Institutions thought they were smart, and they sat on the sidelines. So it begs the question, who is smarter? Do you want to be right, or do you want to make money? And the retail investors, I'm not talking about the people who are punting on penny stocks and have $5 on Robinhood and sitting in their mom's basement. I'm talking about the sophisticated, self-directed investors. They are making a lot of money. And guess what? If you go and you look at

the distribution of ownership, retail was right about Tesla. Retail was right about Palantir. Retail was right about GameStop. Retail now seems to be right about Opendoor. Retail was right about Bitcoin. We can just go down the line. All of these different companies or assets where retail investors, they started to buy. Institutions were either negative or neutral. And then the institutions capitulated over time and eventually said, you know what, you're right. So if you go back and you look, why are there these cult followings around Bitcoin, around Tesla, around Palantir, et cetera? Because retail bought at very low levels. And then as the stock price or the asset price rose, they were making money. They got excited. If you bought Palantir and it was low,

and now Palantir is high in the stock price, you love Palantir. You want to kiss Alex Karp. Your family is talking about how crazy you were to be buying the software company stock, and you're sitting there counting your pennies, laughing at them. Bitcoin, same thing. Tesla, same thing. Just go down the line. How about the early investors in MicroStrategy, now known as strategy. How about the early investors in MetaPlanet? You just go down the line. That's why these cult following started, because people figured out that they front ran the institutions. And so it goes back to the idea, does retail get it right every time? Absolutely not. Does Wall Street get it right every time? Absolutely not. No one's batting a thousand. But the major

stories in finance of the last seven or eight years, retail has beat the institutions to those themes. Now, does that mean that the institutions are all sitting there with no exposure? And hold on, hold on. Why do you think that's happened? Because what you now are getting is you're getting a confluence of trends. You have access to information in a way that retail previously didn't have. The second thing is that retail actually can take more risk because they're not managing other people's money. One of the things that people don't understand about the traditional financial system and the firms in particular, and the hedge funds, et cetera, it's all a relative performance game. If everyone else

is up 5%, you're content with being up 8% because you just beat your peers. Yeah. But if the market is up 20, are you actually winning, son? Right? Today's episode is brought to you by Core. You can earn yield on your Bitcoin by just holding your Bitcoin. It's simple. Core, the leading Bitcoin scaling solution will reward you for not selling your Bitcoin. It's not magic. Here's how it works. Core is a protocol secured by elected validators. You can help elect validators and secure the network by simply locking up your bitcoin on the bitcoin blockchain no bridging no lending and just holding when your validator secures core it earns rewards fueled by network activity and passes them back to you as yield with a minimum lockup of just one day when the

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oh, that's scary. Well, if you're taking risk with a hedge fund, because you're managing other people's money, now all of a sudden, they really care about what is your risk adjusted return? They really care about what is the portfolio construction? What are your risk limits? What is this? But all this stuff, right? That's why these multi-strat hedge funds, like their goal is to return like 12% a year.

If they can consistently return 12% a year, 13% a year, and do it with minimal risk, home run. Because the institutions, that's what they want. But the individuals go out there in the street and talk to retail investors. If they got 12% a year, would they be happy? Hell no, right? What they're looking at is they're trying to figure out, how do I create wealth?

A lot of these institutions, a lot of these financial firms, they're trying to protect wealth, right? That's not what these people on the internet are doing. They're trying to create wealth. So what do you do? You're on a more concentrated portfolio. You take way more risk. You're looking for more asymmetry.

You do take more risk. And you seek out more volatility. But I would argue the things that are positioned as the safest things in finance are actually the most risky. holding bonds losing strategy holding dollars losing strategy so you look at it and you say the average financial advisor would go tell someone to create a 60 40 global portfolio 40 of your portfolio is an l right over time it gets devalued you just are getting crushed what bonds in a traditional 60 40 portfolio what are you going to go hold tlt and just watch get

your face ripped off, right? So what ends up happening is that you see an entire generation saying, wait a second, why would I put that stuff in my portfolio? Maybe I'll do 60% stocks, 40% Bitcoin. That's the type of stuff that you're seeing. So I think that there's this whole trend of these self-directed investors. So now it leads to Opendoor. When somebody says, oh, Opendoor is becoming a meme stock. I knew it. What? Oh, no. I just thought that. that it was becoming a means yeah you saw people talking about it online i was like 800 well here here's what ends up happening so i forget what the peak of open door was but it was

like tens of dollars yeah and it dropped all the way down to like 50 or 60 cents yeah destroyed from a stock price standpoint and all of a sudden there's this guy eric jackson i know eric um he's invested in companies i've been involved with before he has a hedge fund that hedge fund uses He'll say AI models. I don't know exactly what that means, but basically they're doing data analysis and they're looking for little signals in terms of what is likely to lead to future price appreciation. Now, in the Opendoor situation, my understanding is that this model picked up that there was

a spike, an abnormal spike in trading volume of the stock, started paying attention. Now, he previously, my understanding is, had been an investor and actually lost money, if I understand correctly, in Opendoor before. So he liked the story. He thought it could be a good business, but it kept falling, right? And he didn't work. He comes out and he says, well, hold on a second here. The stock is trading at 60 cents, let's say. And he said he thinks it can trade at $82. People are like, well, that's crazy. His point being that if you actually go and you look at the revenue and the business model, the cash the debt all this stuff the business right now is not trading at a very big multiple

compared to where he thinks it should trade okay well if you think that nothing has to change with the business it gets repriced as long as people realize it's trading such low multiple plenty of people have made money doing that but his point is if you look forward based on the company's guidance in terms of what they're going to do in the future based on revenue and profits etc then you assign a multiple that would be appropriate that's how he starts to get towards this $82. Is he right? I have no clue. But you know what I do know about Eric Jackson? He's been right before. He's been wrong before. But there are enough times now where he's pointed to things and he has claimed that they were going to appreciate significantly, kind of this

asymmetric thing. He says that his focus is to find 100 baggers. Is Opendoor a 100 bagger? I have no clue. But I know that it went from $0.60 to whatever it was, $4 recently. And so from that standpoint i think that you now get a bunch of retail investors and these self-directed investors and they see some guy come out with with this guess what it does it brings attention then they start swarming some of them are buying merely because it's a meme stock they just say hey game stop i saw i happen to bed back beyond whatever let's go buy some portion for sure but there's also people who say wait a second they go and they read eric's analysis is, you know what? I think he's right. I think that this is underpriced. And they go and they

buy it. Now, you can't decipher the difference between those two people, right? All you know is that there's a lot of buying. I think that they, one, they created a gamma squeeze. Two is they've now been halted multiple times this week in terms of so much volatility. And three is I think they smashed the trading volume record for open New York. But it's because you have to hive mine online. And once these people start to realize it. Now, one last thing I'll share. What I suspect is going to happen here is that the Opendoor team is going to say, huh, thank you, Eric Jackson. We appreciate you bringing so much attention to our stock. Oh, all these investors, you guys are creating a lot of trading volume in our stock.

Maybe we should raise money. Having more money on our balance sheet probably isn't the worst thing in the world. It may even help our business. And so I expect that Opendoor is going to raise capital either through an atm some sort of share registration a private offer they'll do something to convert the enthusiasm and trading volume into capital on their balance sheet that's what they should do but the question becomes how many of these people are buying it and going to hold the stock because they believe that it needs to be valued higher or how many people are short term speculators are going to buy it today and sell it tomorrow my guess is that people are actually underestimating what I would consider more real trends that are at play here versus

people just thinking like, oh, this is some meme stock, whatever. I think that you're now starting to see that when somebody finds something, and in this case, it was a very heavily shorted stock, plus it had all of these elements to it, and they're able to yell and scream to the internet and say, hey, look what I found. You're now seeing people run over who are very sophisticated with a lot of money and guess what the financial institutions they're not dumb they've got social listening tools they're looking at the conversation online they're seeing the momentum they're seeing the trading volume all that stuff you think that uh in the last two days when uh we saw the stock go i think it closed on friday at like 220 230 a share to all of a sudden it was

trading at four bucks you don't think institutions were also in there you don't think that they're plowing capital in right alongside retail of course a lot of those portfolio managers they're on the internet. They know what's going on. Right. And so I think that that's where you're starting to see this graying of the line where the institutions in some cases follow retail now because they realize that retail has the ability to do this stuff. And we saw it with Bitcoin institutions are following retail. We've seen it with Tesla, Palantir, et cetera. And now we're seeing it with Opendoor. And so I don't own any, I was very tempted to buy some just to be along for the ride. If I had bought some Opendoor and tweeted out $82 a share, let's ride, that would

have been a pretty good tweet. But I feel like if I want to be able to talk about this in a fair, may I say balanced way, I shouldn't own any of the shares. And so I'm fascinated by this. And I think that the Opendoor retail holders are probably, on a probability basis, they are more likely right than wrong and do you think that something like this like if a company stock becomes a meme stock is good for the actual business long term because i just looked up game stop it was trading at a dollar in 2020 before the boom and then it went all the way up to 50 in march of 21 so retail was right and then it went back down and today it's currently trading at 24 but it's still up from the it's up 24 x in five years yeah and they have nine and a half billion dollars on their

balance sheet but it's important to say that it's risky involved and and they got ryan cohen to come in and be the ceo so you look at it is gamestop better off today than they were five years ago hell yes retail did that now here's the secret a bunch of institutions were also fueling the rally as well yeah right what's the market cap on the business if you look hold on remember they got nine and a half billion dollars on the balance sheet alone market cap market cap hold on i looked up share price if you look up the share price you should see it right underneath on google finance oh it's 10.75 billion so think about that for a second so they're valuing the business approximately at a billion billion two and they have nine and a half billion on their balance

sheet. Okay. Let's say the business is free. They just, you get zero credit for the business. It's still a nine and a half billion dollar company just based on its balance sheet assets. Right. And so when you look at it from that perspective, that's the type of thing where it kind of doesn't matter about the business in the sense of they were able to raise capital and fortify the balance sheet. That company will likely never be in trouble. If I remember correctly, I think that they have something like $8 billion or $9 billion, whatever the number is, sitting in treasuries. Well, if you're earning 5% or 4% on treasuries, and you happen to be doing that on $8 or $9 billion, guess what? You're doing okay. You got a couple hundred million

dollars of revenue that all of a sudden came out of nowhere. Now they're profitable on a single store unit basis there's still a lot of questions there they're working hard right i've talked to ryan cohen about the business one of the most interesting things to me as a kid gamestop they sold video games right you would go there you could buy everything from a playstation and xbox sega genesis for those of you back there nintendo 64 all those stuff right but they sold games for the most part gamestop great name now guess what one of the fastest growing segments for them is my understanding is that it's like a Pokemon cards and stuff. Right. So you start to figure out like, again, I, he didn't say this to me,

but I got to imagine Pokemon card, pretty small, pretty light, got a big store. It's easy to put in little places right now on a per square foot basis, the revenue you could drive in the store probably increases. Like that's the type of thing where when you take a business, it's got attention on it. You put capital on the balance sheet and you bring an entrepreneur in to run the company. Hey man, crazier things have happened. That's true.

So if you look at it from that perspective, do I think Opendoor will be better off for this? 100%. Interesting. It's just that the public narrative is, oh, look how stupid all these people are. You know what I always say? If the critics are so smart, why aren't they richer? Let's see how it shakes out. But I want to talk about, it's kind of off of retail investor, but one type of investor that a lot of people don't take seriously, in my opinion, are athletes.

Everyone's like, oh, athletes, they just put their money wherever people tell them. they don't really know what they're doing but there's one exception to this and i think now there's a lot or not a lot there's numerous exception to this uh but one of them is saquon barkley who's like the star running back for the philadelphia eagles you see how i know that um he won a super bowl and he used sports yes um he used to play for the giants when the giants were good yeah okay okay you just have to throw the salt in the wound go ahead all right it's okay we're still giants fans right well i am i don't know oh i don't know what i am um but but saquon has surrounded himself with some great people and having a great day advisors some great advisors

anthony's friends with saquon they talk regularly um and he made news in 2021 because he said that he would take part of his like marketing and endorsement dollars used strike to convert it to bitcoin um and i think he took it was like 10 million dollars which today is worth like 36 million so they he just did an interview and they asked him if he regrets not putting his whole contract um taking it and taking his whole contract into bitcoin if he could go back and he goes of course i do like of course i would but i think everything happens for a reason and i'm glad and i'm glad i didn't because you know it's volatile i panicked a lot when the up and down and whatever um so yeah so i think that's interesting why are you seeing more and

more athletes doing this well first of all um the og russ okong right um russ will never get the credit he deserves um he's great he was the pioneer of of thinking through this and the thing that um i think people should give kind of russ respect for he didn't do it from a speculative standpoint right and say like hey i'm gonna buy this or i'm gonna take part of my contract in bitcoin and uh i'm doing it because i got some crazy price target russ really understood the economics yeah he understood the basement of the currency and i think he'd be the first one to say he started out he didn't know a lot he knew he said he started off as a critic like he didn't believe yeah but then he started to learn he did the work he started talking to people all this

stuff right and at some point he gained the confidence where he said i think that this is a long-term thing and he's very family oriented um and i think that you know he's never told me this but uh i think that probably family played a big part into it like what do i want to do for my family in the future um a lot of these guys talk about generational wealth which plays into that if you are a young man regardless of whether you grew up rich or poor whether you went to public school or private school whether your parents had some white collar job or blue collar job whether you were born in the united states or not what language you spoke growing up any of that stuff the athletic field is an equalizer and if you are at the top of your game and somebody comes

you and says, I will pay you tens of millions, hundreds of millions. In some cases, some players have been able to sign contracts consecutively worth over a billion dollars. Wow. Then you have a responsibility to say, I've been given this opportunity. I don't want to squander it. And there's story after story after story of people squandering it, right? And so now, again, with internet, they understand I have the opportunity to create this generational wealth. And look, if you go talk to anyone who makes money, do they waste money? Do they buy dumb things? Of course, they want to enjoy it. If you are a professional athlete at the top of your game, you think that you're not spending money here or there? Of course. Now, with that said, that doesn't mean

that one of the very simple things that sports agents and financial advisors try to get through to many of these athletes is do not touch your contract money live off of your endorsement yeah yeah so all that contract money should be put to the side and let's invest it and that is the nest egg yeah knock yourself out you you want to go to the club and throw ten thousand dollars around knock yourself out you want to buy a bugatti knock yourself out you want to do that do whatever you want with the endorsement money don't touch the contract money and so i think that's what's starting to happen here now contract money and so i think that's what's starting to happen here now Bitcoin, if you're a professional athlete, you tend to have a certain type of personality.

You tend to be competitive. Yeah. You tend to want to win. You tend to, like all these things, right? And so from a personality standpoint, the idea that you can do work, practice, some may say, intellectually. Yeah. Learn something, figure it out before everyone else. Where you're not trading your body for.

Correct. buy an asset that on a competitive analysis wins and outperforms all these other assets yeah not all of them but a lot of athletes are drawn to it and so i think that that is um also by the way why a lot of what i would call you know saturday athletes not because they're playing college football just playing with their kids in their backyard or whatever no just like dads moms whatever just you know saturday athletes i'm more of a sunday athlete yeah they're drawn to the same thing right if you're competitive all this kind of stuff so i think that it's just again it's the confluence of they have a need yeah they have a certain type of

approach they put the work in they get an answer and they go and they do it um i was i was recently talking to a former nfl player and i was asking him whether like some of this is like the culture like part it's like now cool to talk about investing and he said that it used to be like in the locker room you're talking about like what apartment you bought or what kind of car like that was the cool thing but now he's like you know looking at your cap table or like looking at how up you are on your investments like that's the cool thing to do and i think it goes back to like the competitive nature of a lot of these athletes if one is doing it the other one kind of wants to Well, it's competitive. They've all gotten smarter right now. The leagues also, they probably don't get enough credit. They've done a good job of explaining to these athletes when they come into these leagues. There's a long history of people losing all this money, right? Don't screw it up. And look, there's modern examples of it, right? I mean, how many times do we have to see a professional athlete file for bankruptcy or be in trouble or whatever, right? It's like all that stuff still happens.

um but i think also uh take ross take saquon take you know a lot of these athletes like they also probably don't get enough credit for sharing what they learn with their peers they really do although saquon has said that a lot of the younger athletes don't go to him for you know maybe they do maybe they don't i don't know but it just feels like um many of them are uh they're willing to talk about it if somebody wants to listen right and i think that what you find again is whether you're a professional athlete you're a janitor you're a doorman you're a taxi driver you're a mid-level accounting manager you're a finance person or you're a tech bro all of those different things end up coming back to one thing which is an education and knowledge yeah and if

you can share education and knowledge then ultimately what you're going to end up finding is that people who are informed will end up allocating their money directly in this rise of the self-directed investor and bitcoin is a big winner in that but also there's a number of other assets where kind of quote-unquote retail investor has been right and institutions now are realizing maybe they should pay attention to what retail is doing and whether it is bitcoin open door or anything else i think there's a lot of opportunity out there and maybe the single most important aspect to me is we used to live in a world where it was thought that scarcity was dominant. There's not that much money out there. There's not that much opportunity to

invest my money also. We live in a world today of abundance. There's money sloshing around the financial system. There are investment opportunities at every corner. And it really just comes down to, do you do the work right i don't know that many people who got rich who didn't inherit the money right by accident and you can say like oh i know a lot of dumb rich people sure but sometimes the simplicity is actually the thing that works and so from that standpoint i think that's what you're seeing is these people are being successful because they are figuring things out that maybe otherwise they wouldn't have paid attention to previously great that's all we got today all right guys thanks for watching