The Pomp Podcast - Anthony Scaramucci, Founder of SkyBridge: Politics, Economics and Bitcoin’s Future

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

Anthony Scaramucci is the founder of SkyBridge and the former White House director of communications. In this conversation, Anthony and Pomp discuss the macro economy, the history of money, the current structural issues in America, what Anthony took away from his time in the White House, and why he thinks Bitcoin could be interesting. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO.COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine.  Visitcoinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Anthony Scaramucci, who's lovingly known as The Mooch, is the founder of Skybridge, a global alternative investment firm, and also the founder of Salt Conference. He previously served as the White House Director of Communications for 11 days under President Trump. In this conversation, we discuss the macro economy, the history of money, the current structural issues in America, what Anthony took away from his time in the White House, and why he thinks Bitcoin could be interesting. This is one of the more entertaining interviews I've done, and it is always great to talk to another Italian in finance. I enjoyed it, and I hope you do as well. Before we kick off this podcast, first a word from our sponsor BlockFi.

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Don't worry. Your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and Wi-Fi. All you got to do is go to CoinMine.com. You buy a CoinMine. It's like an Xbox or a PlayStation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. That's right. You purchase it.

it shows up at your doorstep you pull it out of the box you plug it in connect to your wi-fi five minutes or less you're mining bitcoin all you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis kind of like how tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software just you're updating your coin mine consumer mining made easy that's right go to coinmine.com tell them pomp sent you and thank you later Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions

and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. I'm sitting here with Anthony Scaramucci in his office in midtown Manhattan. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this.

Pop, it's great to be here. I got a few questions for you, though, too. Is that okay? You can ask whatever you want. All right. So how did you get so hooked into digital currencies? Like, what was the apple that hit you in the side of the head and said that this is your eureka moment for your life? Yeah, there's a couple of things.

So I've always looked at innovative technology and kind of thought how, when you apply this to certain places, where's the most disruption or the most kind of value capture? And it was very obvious to me quickly that the idea humans are trusting algorithms more than they are other humans. So if you look at Google Maps, you trust more than asking somebody for street directions or Spotify for music recommendations rather than your friend. The idea that we were going to stop trusting institutions and human-led organizations, but would rather trust cryptographically secure technology or algorithms and software

seemed to be a trend that was worth betting on. So, and so the old fogies, I mean, I'm an old fogie. A lot of the old fogies don't like- You look like you're 22. Well, that's Botox and hair diving, man. I'm going to teach you how to do that, okay? Okay, you're too young for that shit right now, but when you get a little older, we'll dust you up a little bit, okay?

So, but the old fogies don't like it. Right. I think that they don't understand it. Right. And so anytime that you have a technology that you don't understand, there's a little bit of fear. There's a little bit of, you know, why do we need something new? What we have already works. But as we know, you know, that's what where the opportunity for disruption is. Well, I mean, but the but the government's hated because the government's like manipulating the currency. You know, the governments have figured out that there's a there's been a 100 year scheme where what they do is they over promise people things like entitlements and social. social welfare payments and things like that and then obviously they can't afford the stuff that they're promising so you're you're under taxing over

promising on services and you're creating these very large deficits and so what the government's want to do is they want to continue to monetize those debts for sure so so why would a government allow a digital currency to come into place that is something they unassailable to that here's the kind of crazy part of this there's no army behind uh bitcoin as an example i'll get to that in a second but for example when it comes to uh the governments right the u.s likes the idea that we can manipulate the u.s dollars the global reserve currency etc but there's a lot of countries around the world that don't like that we can do that if you look at russia china you know other countries they

actually want to get off of the u.s dollars the reserve currency and so if you think about bilateral trade between two countries that neither have the reserve currency i have to trust that you're not manipulating your currency to my harm you've got to trust that i'm doing that in game theory why don't we just trust this thing that we both know can't be manipulated right so it's kind of opt out into a non-manipulated currency okay so but but that could cause again in a modern society i'm going to take you back to the 1929 1933 crisis and recommend to your listeners that they read lords of finance the title of the book lords of finance by lia quad ahmed and basically what happened is everyone was stuck on the gold standard

These digital currencies, because of their scarcity, have an absolute standard. Sound money. Sound money. But sometimes sound money in a deflationary environment or in a tight environment, governments have figured out that they could use levels of laxity in their currency to create slack and feelings of buoyancy in the economy and things like that. How do you do that in a digital currency world? So I think that you nailed exactly what the governments are doing, and I think that there's a large number of people who believe the fiat experiment, if you will, of having it not be sound money has propped up the economy. And every time we get towards these recessive periods, which would be natural market corrections, we just print more, we cut interest rates, we just continue to manipulate. And I think that a growing number of people feel like that is, one, unsustainable, or two, actually net negative over a really long period of time.

Well, no, it's very net negative for middle class and lower middle class people. It's very net positive for elites because when you're devaluing money and you're elites that hold capital inflation hedged assets, you could care less. So if I have a building right here that's worth a million dollars in 1901 and I own it and they deflate or I'm sorry, they inflate the money. And now it's today, and it's worth $30 million. It's still represented a value to me in terms of that transfer. But a person has wages. Their wages have actually declined steadily. So middle class wages are down about 25% as a direct result of this monetization that the Fed and people like that are doing.

If you go back, there's a white paper that the IMF wrote about inflation being one of the largest drivers of wealth inequality. And they basically cite two reasons why that is. One is if you're paid in an hourly wage that has no inflation adjustment on an annual basis, obviously you're purchasing powers, decreasing every year, but you think you're getting paid the same. I'm a lot older than you. I don't want to express cynicism on your podcast, but I want to express realism. I want you to express the truth. These politicians suck. Okay, I mean, let me tell you something.

I have an 11-day PhD now in Washington scumbaggery. Okay, I know what these people are really like. They could care less about these people. Of course. They just want to stay ruling. They don't want to serve the people. It's about how do I perpetuate the ruling class that I'm in and how do I hang out with other clever people and virtue signal to them and make sure that my family is okay. I could care less about somebody in the middle of the country or some middle class or lower middle class family that's struggling. me personally i care because i i came from that and so you know one of the reasons why i wanted to go into the government is i thought you know we got to change these policies and make things

better so so okay so so the millennials you're a millennial you guys are going to change everything then right you're going to bring in a stable currency and then you guys are going to accept the roughness that that stability may present in terms of the potential recessionary cycles which are normal for industrial economies you're you're ready for that so i think that you're willing to handle that what you said in terms of the politicians wanting to continue to perpetuate basically their benefit and they don't care about everyone else um in a normal world what they would be able to do is hey there's a threat right and that threat is is coming and it's a technology it's a company it's a person etc they would regulate it they would jail them they would do

something to stop that threat right from from changing that life um that they're living in kind of the model that they have. The difference is this is a decentralized network that cannot be shut down, right? And so where it becomes is you actually get a clash of the elitism and kind of the current system is going to clash with and try to put all of the normal constraints and regulation and sanctions, et cetera, onto something that can't be regulated away. And you're seeing this in Congress today where congressmen are coming out saying, listen, we can try to go do that it will not be successful we need to figure out something else in order to address this because trying to well the irs is talking about taxing people that are trading in digital currencies

like how are they going to do that well well that's actually what they should do right you know i'm on record as saying the first country to embrace this and say look we want the entrepreneurs here we want the innovation here we're actually going to work with them because it's going to lead to tax revenue we're going to figure out how to incorporate this into our financial markets I think they're going to have a very, very kind of big head start versus countries that try to go in outlawed. One of my closest friends, Norio Ravini, calls it shit coin and they're all shit coins. And what do you say to him? So I actually think that he's doing a lot of entertainment.

Right. But I do believe that he thinks it doesn't have as much value as everybody else thinks. Right. So I think he understands why people are interested in it, et cetera. You have to separate out blockchain technology, Bitcoin and then all of the other crypto assets. all the utility tokens, etc. 99% of the utility tokens and what he's talking about, the shit coins, they're all worthless. So he's actually directionally correct on that. When it comes to Bitcoin, again, we were talking before we started recording, it's an asymmetric investment. So it's non-correlated to traditional assets, which has some benefits to your portfolio. And then on the upside, 10, 20, 50, 100x type upside, there's just not very many assets in the world that can do

that and so i tell people don't buy into the qualitative it's going to be the next global reserve currency forget all that if you look at your portfolio and you put a non-correlated asymmetric asset in it it can change the makeup of your portfolio in a positive way all right well so let me give you my personal odyssey because i think it'll be valuable to you because i'm an entrepreneur i've started two businesses uh sold one business ended up working for the company that i sold the business to uh newberger berman bought my first company oscar capital management then it got sold to Lehman. I was at Lehman for a few years and then started SkyBridge. But for my 11-day odyssey in Washington, I've been at SkyBridge the last 14 years. I built the company

from scratch. Three people in a room. You're sitting in my office now. There's 80 people here and just under $10 billion of assets. We've got four offices around the world. I'm an adaptive guy. I'm willing to embrace change. You can see a lot of young people in this room. I feel you can learn. The young people make a mistake because they think that they're smarter than their parents and their grandparents. And the old people make a mistake because they think that they're smarter than the young people. But at the end of the day, you can learn from me. I can learn from you. We're separated by 25 years of life experience, but you're learning things that I've not experienced yet. And so now I've returned to SkyBridge. I was blown out of my seat like an Austin Powers villain

because I said Steve Bannon was sucking his own dick. I mean, big deal. The guy probably couldn't do that because it's probably the size of an orange Tic Tac. So, I mean, it's like there's no way he could probably do that. But that's fine. My mistake, I own it. Fireball offense. I'm accountable for it.

Move on. So I'm back here in Washington. Did I look like I was having fun? Did you see my press conference? Did you see the press conference? Listen, as an Italian, when I watched you up there, I said that dude's having the time of his life. And then I read an article where, I think the story is after the press conference, you basically walked in and it was Trump and somebody else.

And Trump turned to him and said, you know, tell him what you said. He goes, you know, Mr. Scaramucci, that was one of the best press conferences I've ever seen. Yeah, that was a Naval Reserve kid, Kid Alex. He was serving the president's Diet Coke in the study off the Oval. I just had dinner with Don Jr. last night. I love the president. I think he's an awesome guy. I think he's flawed.

We're all flawed. You've got to watch it with the – he's not a racist, but you can't say racist shit because what ends up happening is you're the leader of the free world. The mantle of leadership requires you to just get as far away from that stuff as possible. If we're having a debate over whether or not the president is racist, he's not racist, and I'll defend him until the cows come home on that. But he can't be saying racist-oriented shit, just stupid. But let's move on from that. And the stuff he's saying about digital currency right now is, to me, I'm a contrarian. So the fact that he's railing on it and Steve Mnuchin's railing on it means, OK, it has arrived.

But I want to explain this odyssey to you because I think it's important. So I come back to my firm. The firm has been wounded by our merger potentiality with the Chinese, the H&A guys. We were great guys, by the way. CFIUS says that we can't sell to them. We're a national security threat. Ha ha. No problem. The deal fades. I'm back at SkyBridge working. Again, no whining, no complaining. Life is what it is. But now I got to look at the world and where the world is right now. Jamie Dimon says that he hates digital currencies and he hates Bitcoin and all this stuff. OK. And then he's got to walk it back because he's got five, six hundred people working for him. And so Jamie, and I have all the respect in the world for Jamie.

He's probably seven or eight years older than me. He's one of the smartest people I know in financial services. And then, boom, he's caught in a generational blind spot. And by the way, same generational blind spot that I would be caught in, same generational blind spot that Yusko, your partner, would be caught in. So now Jamie's got to walk it back. And so I turn to my staff here, my young staff. I said, okay, there's something here. I don't know enough about it.

We have our SALT conference. We're going to bring a group of people from the crypto space, and we tried to get you guys there. Unfortunately, we couldn't connect, to learn more about it. And trust me, I'm 55. There's a lot of 55-year-olds in financial services that know nothing about your space. So I'm going to tell you where I am personally now after evaluating it for a year. I'm still skeptical. I'm not going to say that I'm not.

But I do think it will exist. I think there's value to the notion that I can exchange value with you confidentially, and I can exchange it through a mechanism that looks very secure. Now, those mechanisms will get even more secure in the future than they are today. My issue is a political issue because I understand how governments work, and I'm going to take your listeners through a quick history lesson on our money. In 1929, 1933, we tightened at a time when we needed to loosen. It wasn't until Franklin Roosevelt got the reins in 1933 that he took us off the gold standard and created some slack, which created some relief for everybody.

Now, that's always temporary relief. You know, when they're devaluing, it's always temporary relief. But relief was needed for political purposes. And so you have to be very, very careful with dogmatism and absolutism, because what happens is it's like Mike Tyson said, everybody's got a plan until they're punched in the face. You're the leader of the United States during a recession, and you need to offer relief immediately so you don't have a revolution. You're going to take the country's currency off the gold standard. So it makes me worry about Bitcoin because Bitcoin is a fixed standard. It's a fixed supply, and it will trade relative to what's going on in the world, irrespective of the world and irrespective of governmental manipulation.

Can we both stipulate that? Yeah. So that makes me wary as a practical person because I know what governments will do in times of expediency. George W. Bush said, I'm a conservative. I believe in free market principles. The world was coming to an end. he veered to the left very hard and he sent a trillion dollars to the banking system

through TARP to save TARP What do you think about TARP? Well I think it worked and I liked TARP but it was if they allowed free market principles they allowed Bitcoin-ish or digital currency-like absolutists every bank in the country would have failed

you would have gone to 25-30% unemployment we're not smarter than our grandparents 35% unemployment, you're going to have a revolution here just the way it works so so yeah you had to send the money to torp it got paid back and it got paid back with a profit a lot of people uh you know don't understand that that was valuable to the u.s government but the truth of the matter is that's what governments do in times of crisis they veer very very hard to the left yeah i'm not saying it's right but i'm saying that's what

they do okay so now second problem that i have uh and just quick history on our money so the money's now devalued. We go to war. We have Bretton Woods. We just celebrated the 75th anniversary of Bretton Woods. They fixed the exchange rate mechanism among the Western capitalist powers. We have a Marshall Plan. We put a trade system together that's unfair to the United States to help the rest of the world grow. We have deficits. We want to fight communism everywhere. We run up a big deficit in the 60s to fight a proxy war against communism in Vietnam. We kill 60,000 Americans, roughly. We're running very large deficits.

And so now the price of our currency, which was fixed at Bretton Woods to be $35 an ounce of gold, is released in August of 1971. Richard Nixon says, shit, we got to monetize our debt in order to pay it back. And so therefore we're unclipping our dollar from gold. The dollar is gone from $35 an ounce, 1971, 2019, it's roughly $13.50 an ounce. We crushed our currency. The currency is down 97.5%. Okay, who did that? The Chinese then said, okay, great, we're going to reform our economy.

They linked their currency to our currency. We allowed that to happen because we were fighting the Russians. Nixon opened us to China. And then he said, okay, great, you can link your currency to our currency. even though you're creating industrial factories and a mercantilist economy which should drive your currency upward we're going to allow you to link your currency to our currency which will increase your ability to grow because you're going to be operating in the world stage with a devalued currency which is the united states currency so this works for china they're clipping

off 10 12 15 percent growth they create an economic miracle they go from an impoverished agrarian society 40 short years later to the second largest economy in the world they got problems china i'm not saying they don't but they've they've done that and part of that was being able to hit you know hitch themselves to our currency it's like a rocket ship for them go to the other side of the world okay what do you think that what do you think the uh the germans did germans same thing i said hey man this is great let's link up with all these southern european countries they've got to devalue every five years uh they're swimming naked in the Mediterranean, drinking ouzo, retiring at age 55. Let's link up with them. And if you price the

Deutsche Mark today versus where the euro's trading, it's at about a 22, 23% premium. And lo and behold, the Germans, they reformed their labor market and they create this industrial mercantilist exporting powerhouse, right? They have a very large economy. They have a budget surplus and they're at full employment, all done through currency manipulation, all done through rigging the system to benefit Germany. See, Trump understands that. That's why he's mad at them. So now here we are. The United States is sitting on $22 trillion of debt. We have the largest military. We still have the largest economy. And we're a direct beneficiary of great resources here. And we're protected by two oceans. But political leaders are going to want to annihilate

digital currencies because they will put to risk the manipulation that political leaders have been able to do over the last 100 or 150 years of our manufacturing society so so again i'm not saying it's not going to work of course but i'm just telling you the problem that you're going to have of getting bitcoin to be a major so let me not bitcoin digital currency in general maybe it's ethereum the ones that you like i i don't know yeah so let me uh everything you just said completely agree with right from from a history lesson standpoint um one thing i think a lot about is if you zoom even farther out right the fall of every great empire has been the debasement of their currency right if you go back to ancient athens romans etc when the currency starts to

be devalued away right eventually the currency goes and becomes worthless it does not happen overnight it takes decades if not hundreds of years right what worries me is you think america is going to cheat that system pop cheat that system in what sense oh you have a you have the rise of the american empire starts in 1776 is 243 years old it's the longest standing republic i mean the roman republic probably ended after 225 years so you think we're gonna be able to cheat history my thing is um every great empire falls i don't think that anything um horrific is going to happen in my lifetime i hope it doesn't happen right i actually you know look i was in the army right and and um tend to be a very uh american-minded but at the same time i think that

there's very real risks with um that the structural issues that we're facing um and the part to me that well our political leadership sucks okay they'll they'll blow an unbelievable thing i mean they got handed a unbelievable country uh some of it was luck some of it was our geography and natural resources and after the end of second world war they got handed this unbelievable country when the baby boomers which i am one of okay so i feel grounded in being able to criticize baby boomers when they got handed the baton from the greatest generation the world war ii generation we blew it we fucking suck because we killed a million people in the middle east as you know because you were in the army, 70,000 American servicemen and women killed. You got seven,

I'm sorry, wounded, 7,000 dead. You had 22 dying from PTSD every day. We blew out a $22 trillion debt. We blew up our infrastructure, our bridges, roads, tunnels, airports are crumbling, look like third world countries. Educational system sucks, the K through 12 educational system, totally uneven totally unfair common core is a disaster i don't know anybody that even likes it or thinks it makes any sense you got to put your kids in private school if you're smart now to get them avoid common core and then you got an industrial policy that it's an absolute mess because there's no policy so the political leadership in the country which controls 25 or if you take state and local governments 50 of the country's gdp they suck i mean they

absolutely unmitigatedly suck they perpetuate these false arguments and they gerrymander themselves into permanency in their districts while your country my country the one that we love is is actually crumbling so what would you i don't think we can cheat history unless we have a huge wake-up call okay somebody like you as an example uh it's got to be your generation that does it because my generation sucks and we won't be able won't be able to do we don't have any political leaders in my generation that can do it, but it has to be somebody from your generation that says, okay, this completely sucks. You guys blew it, but we're going to take it over and we're going to not focus on left and right, but we're going to focus on right or wrong. And we're going

to pick policies that are going to work. And we're going to tell the American people the truth. It's going to take 25 to 30 years to fix these problems. It's not going to happen overnight. There's no quick fix, no quick solution. What would you do to fix them? Like, what do you think the solutions Well, I mean, there's hundreds of them, but I mean, you know, and here's the thing. Okay, Bitcoin, okay, could have a role. Okay, it could be another currency, another commodity. It could be like gold is or platinum or palladium. It could be.

Store value. It could be, yes. I'm not disputing it. I'm not Nouriel Roubini where I think it's shit coins. I actually think your generation is embracing it and what you're saying about algorithms and artificial intelligence and the future of what's going to be trusted and what isn't. I believe in all that stuff. But if we can get your generation focused on this and put leadership together, it says, OK, here is the strategic plan for America. We want to cheat history.

we want to return we want to turn a republic that typically lasts two to 250 years into a 500 year republic here's what we need to do we have to invest in our infrastructure and we have to invest in our educational system and we have to right size our deficit now the good news is we can right size our deficit bad news is is that it's uh it's got to be energy related because you know we can take the energy out of the ground we just have to figure out a way to burn it cleanly you know these climate accords and all this nonsense not going to help we have to figure out uh it's a carbon-based world at least for another 50 to 100 years we don't want to coke up the environment we're having like a frat party with the environment right now and then we want our kids to live in the

frat house on sunday morning with the beer and the bongs everywhere the bong water spilled on the rug we got to fix we got to fix the environment right so you're not going to fix it by signing climate accords because no one's adhering to them but you have to figure out if there's a way the same way we desalinate water is there a way that we can burn this energy more cleanly or is there a way we can filter the energy or is there a way to create photosynthesis through technology where you're literally taking the carbon in and doing exactly what a plant or a tree would do and convert it back into oxygen um and again i don't know the answer to that because i'm not a scientist but to me your generation has got to figure that out we have to figure out what yes clean energy

wind and and things like solar and stuff like that but at the end of the day you're going to have to figure out a way to burn carbon more cleanly if you can do that you can solve the deficit crisis because through fracking you know the united states owns i don't know 30 percent of the land you can google it it's probably 28 or 30 percent underneath that land is an unbelievable amount of energy uh trillions of dollars of energy that's owned by the united states effectively so if you look at the u.s balance sheet it's probably got 60 trillion dollars on its balance sheet and 22 trillion dollars of debt look at it from that perspective and so then you need to plan 25 year plan of how you're going to defease that deficit strengthen your dollar by doing that and strengthen

your economy secondary plan you need an educational plan k through 12 you need technical jobs training plan so people don't necessarily have to go to college but they can make high income in a passion that they have that they can learn more about and get technically trained for i mean the infrastructure is a disaster you got water pipes in the city it's crazy they're 95 years old what are these people doing okay i mean what are you doing what are you doing with the money okay how about you have a 92 billion dollar you got a 92 billion 92 billion dollar budget for new york city 200 billion dollar budget for the state that's 300 billion dollars what are you guys doing that's an eight that's eight percent seven point seven five percent of the federal government's budget

to be spent in the city of new york and the state of new york what are you guys doing where is the money where's the audit on the money okay so you need an anti-corruption uh plan you need an infrastructure plan you need an industrial policy plan there's no living politician that wants any of that to happen because they are feathering their beds short term okay to benefit themselves short term and their families and they could care less about the rest of the united states so until you can break that fever and get people in the game that are committed to public service is not going to happen but but you know your your your podcast is about digital currency and so So my conclusion after looking at this thing for a year plus is that I think it's sustainable.

I think it's going to be here. I think it's going to be a future where you know better than me, I don't know which currency is going to be there, but the blockchain is going to get tighter and more reformed and more secure. People are going to have more confidence in it. I don't think it can be stopped, actually. I don't see, even though it's going to upset governments and it's going to upset that whole process that I just explained to you of devaluation and keeping people short-term happy, it's going to be present. I just don't know how big of an impact it's going to have because the players, like the government, again, the U.S. government, $4 trillion budget, they're controlling 22% of the U.S. GDP.

They don't want it. They don't like it. And they're going to do everything they can to disrupt and break it. The last thing I'll say is you said something earlier that I think is the absolute key, which is you, I, others probably even listening to this podcast understand how the game's played. And so we take wealth and we get it out of the currency into real assets. And that actually benefit from the inflation, right? What excites me, I think, about Bitcoin specifically is as a store of value, I think there's a lot of people who they're not investors. They don't understand asset management or portfolio construction or real assets versus currencies, et cetera.

But if there is a store of value currency that they are able to simply park their wealth in, and over time, rather than being devalued away because it is that deflationary model, they actually can preserve their wealth or even increase their wealth. I think that's a really powerful change. But to your point, I think that there's a very, very bumpy road from here to that being the kind of default state. and that's kind of what makes it you know one exciting but also two the unknown yeah well i mean what you just said is uh is is is more i think the future is and and so look i mean uh the bible says the poor always being among us pomp okay but the rich will always be among us too uh what has made the united states so successful is that very thoughtful policy leaders even if they had racism in the country and even if there were bad things in the country

And your Italian grandparents and my Italian grandparents were discriminated against. They created a free market, meritocratic-based system where families could come here from wherever they were coming from and do really, really well. We have to figure out a way to maintain that system. And if we can do that, the future is very, very bright. Now, the great news about us as human beings is that we are constantly innovating. Digital currency is a representation of that. And so if we just stay out of wars, 10, 15, 20 years from now, there'll be vertical farming, there'll be artificial intelligence, there'll be increased automation and manufacturing that will probably reduce prices further. There's a lot of great things happening.

And so I do think digital currencies will be a big part of that future. For sure. The question everyone wants to know is, do you own any Bitcoin? I don't own any Bitcoin right now, no. But that's not to say that I won't. And it's not to say that I'm not open to potentially creating, you know, we're a fund of funds. So if you said to me, could I have a fund of digital currencies, a fund of funds of different funds that trade in currencies? Yes.

I don't own any Bitcoin right now. But if you come and see me, if you invite me back on your podcast in a year, I bet I'll have a different answer. All right. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I know you're super busy. God bless. Good luck.

Keep up the good work. Okay. Make sure you get your name out there, okay? Right now, I don't think you're that well-known yet, Pomp. Get your name out there a little. Be more aggressive with that, okay? Anthony is going to give me all the secrets to... The only thing is, I don't think I could have...

Don't go into the government, though. ...been on the national stage. Although, if you end up in the government, man, I got to tell you, try to maximize it. If you can only spend one mooch, which is 11 days, try to maximize it like I did. You're a legend for hitting the national press with the finger guns. All right, thanks. All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to that podcast. Before I let you go, one more word from our sponsor, BlockFi.

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to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and Wi-Fi. All you got to do is go to CoinMine.com. You buy a CoinMine. It's like an Xbox or a PlayStation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin.

That's right. You purchase it. It shows up at your doorstep. You pull it out of the box. You plug it in, connect to your Wi-Fi. Five minutes or less, you're mining Bitcoin. All you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide, and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis. Kind of like how Tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software. Just you're updating your CoinMine. Consumer mining made easy. That's right. Go to CoinMind.com, tell them Pomp sent you, and thank me later. See you next time on Off The Chain.