The Pomp Podcast - This Bitcoin Bull Run Trigger JUST Happened | Anthony & John Pompliano

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

Anthony and John Pompliano break down today’s markets — from DeFi and stablecoins reshaping finance to the U.S.–China trade deal and its impact on investors. We also discuss why sentiment is turning bullish, how to think about bitcoin and gold heading into year-end, and what White House Asset Management’s moves signal for the market.======================Check out my NEW show for daily bite-sized breakdowns of the biggest stories in finance, technology, and politics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://pompdesk.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠======================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.======================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======================Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro0:32 - What is the DeFi Mullet?9:38 - Centralization vs decentralization12:59 - Stablecoin competition (USDC vs USDT)25:37 - Bitcoin vs gold setup for end of 202531:11 - US – China trade deal and impact on markets38:43 - White House Asset Management

What's going on, guys? Today, we got a great episode with John Pompliano. In this conversation, we get deep into the details of what's going on with the DeFi mullet, how stable coins are taking on the traditional financial system. We talk about the U.S.-China trade deal and what's going to happen when Scott Besson, Donald Trump, Howard Ludnick, and the entire administration get that deal done, why investors are becoming very bullish, how you should think about Bitcoin and gold and the relationship of a Bitcoin bull market going into the end of the year. And then we end up talking about White House asset management and how they're very active in the market, what that means for you as an American, and what it means for markets.

All that and much more in my latest conversation with John Pompliano. All right, John, what's the first topic? All right, you had an excellent piece this morning in the Pomp Letter about the DeFi mullet. What is the DeFi mullet? Well, I can't take credit for this. I recently did an episode with Max Bramsberg, who is the head of consumer business products at Coinbase. And I was looking forward to the conversation, but then he dropped this line on me.

One, it just is very memorable. It's kind of visually, you can see like a mullet, which is cool. Anyone who's got a mullet usually is a pretty cool person, cigarette at the side of their mouth. But when he was talking, he basically described it as the easy Coinbase experience on the front end, the interface, the thing that you use from a technology standpoint, but DeFi in the back. And what it got me thinking about is kind of the collision between this crypto world, you know, Bitcoin, stable coins, all this stuff with the traditional financial system. And historically, I think that Bitcoiners and kind of crypto community thought that these were parallel systems. And in some way, they have been until recently. But now what we're seeing is the convergence.

And actually, what we're finding is that convergence between these two systems means that, one, the crypto industry is dead. It is RIP, see you later. Within a decade, you're not going to be hearing people talk about crypto. Instead, what you're going to start hearing is people talk about finance. And my example that I used is, let's take, for example, BlackRock. I keep saying, is BlackRock a Bitcoin company? No one's describing it as that. They're just a financial institution, right?

Is Robinhood a crypto company? Well, nobody describes them that way. They would talk about a fintech, a neobank, a brokerage business, whatever. But they're starting to incorporate all of this infrastructure. They're looking at stablecoins. They're going really hard in tokenization, right? Prediction markets are kind of crypto adjacent. All that stuff is coming.

So my point being that whether you are a hardcore crypto company or a crypto native firm like a Coinbase, Kraken, a Gemini, a Binance, whatever, you're trying to get the legacy assets onto your platform. So now you're looking at tokenized securities and stuff like that. If you're one of these fintechs, what you're trying to do is you're trying to sit with, we want a digital native experience for people who want to use these kind of new types of products, but we also want the legacy system. We want crypto assets and public equities and prediction markets all to sit in the same

place. The legacy guys are the most interesting to me because they have really big customer bases. They have trust. They're not new. They've been around for a hundred years, some of them. And then because of that distribution, they can rip out their plumbing, change it into this new decentralized or kind of crypto centric stuff. And if the interface stays, you know, business in the front, party in the back, the business in the front, the interface stays the same. People don't even know. And so if you really think about use stable coins as an example, to use a stable coin today, you have to understand what a wallet is. You have to understand how wallet addresses work. You have to, in most cases, copy and paste a wallet address, check it. Your heart pumps a little bit. like, let's make sure I don't mess this up. Maybe send a test transaction. Sometimes you have to

decide which network am I going to send it on? Am I going to go with Ethereum or Solana? Am I making sure that the wallet matches the blockchain that I'm going to use? That's insane. That's like dial up internet stuff, right? No one is going to do that. There is nobody in the real world outside of the crypto industry that wants to do any of that. What they want to do is they want to send, receive, and hold dollars. I don't want to hear about stablecoin. I just want to know dollars. Guess what? Nobody calls them electronic dollars in your bank account. They just call them dollars. There's no delineation between physical dollars and electronic dollars. They're just dollars. Right now, we still have a delineation between electronic dollars and digital dollars or stable coins. So if you go all the way back to 2017, I used to say two things that I said a lot, and then I realized it was gonna take a lot longer. But I now think now's the right time. Let me bring it back from the archives. I used to say tokenize the world. And people would be like, what does that mean? It's all Bitcoin. And my point to them was Bitcoin is the first asset from the legacy system that we have tokenized.

Now, it is a crypto native asset because we didn't take like gold, put it into an SPV and tokenize the shares in an SPV. All we simply did is we said, we're going to create another asset that is digital native that has sound money principles. Outside the system, no one can create more. Gold, bam. Bitcoin comes along, two, $3 trillion asset, we're winning. Great. Second is now stable coins. nobody thinks that stable coins are controversial in terms of violating the ethos of bitcoin right

i don't hear anyone being like all these shit coins all they're talking about is stable coins so we took dollars and we digitized them if you look at the transformation of financial markets we had analog assets we had physical dollars we had physical stock certificates we had physical deeds to your home right we had physical bonds you just go used to literally right it used to be a thing. You would put it in your filing cabinet. It's crazy. Then we transitioned to an electronic world and every physical asset became an electronic Q-SIP. Those electronic Q-SIPs now get whipped around these centralized databases. And that is what we know as finance today. So there was an analog era that transitioned to an electronic era. If you go back and you look

at things I wrote almost a decade ago now, I talked about, we are on the precipice of a change where we went from analog to electronic. We're now going to go from electronic to digital. I was really off on the timing. I thought that stuff was going to happen in like 2018, 2019, 2020. It's now 2025 going into 2026, and we're now just starting to see early signs of it. So it took almost a half decade longer than I thought, but it's okay. It's here. And so what we're now going to see is every single one of these electronic assets is going to transition into a digital asset. So you're going to see stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities all get tokenized. But the thing that people don't realize coming out of the hardcore crypto world,

where there's lots of tribalism and controversy and shit coining and all that kind of stuff is this is just taking the exact same asset that already exists. And it is just changing the form factor someone's going to hold it. So rather than have a physical stock certificate or an electronic stock certificate or a share,

you're now going to have a digital one. It's still a stock certificate. So you have to underwrite the underlying asset itself. Is this a good company? Is it a bad company? Am I being diluted? Do I have a claim on cash flows? Am I going to get dividends or not?

all that stuff is actually the analysis. The problem with the like shit coin world has been that you had the new technology, the new form factor, but the thing that was underlying it really didn't have any value. And so what people were doing is they were getting excited about the technology and they were forgetting to analyze the underlying value. Well, if it's valueless, then it doesn't matter what form factor, right? If you put zero plus zero, still zero, right? And so I think now what we're seeing is real assets, right? Things that actually have value that have been determined by the market, stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities,

they're going to get digitized. And so you go back to this idea of this DeFi mullet. What you're going to see is you are going to see an explosion of these assets on your traditional platforms. So you use Charles Schwab, you use Vanguard, you use Robinhood, Public, Webull, eToro, you use Coinbase, you use Venmo or PayPal, you use Cash App, name your service.

You are going to start to see these companies make announcements about embracing stable coins, tokenized securities, tokenized bonds, all that stuff. But the actual experience for the user is not going to change. And that's a good thing because that is really means that the technology is working, right? If we are still describing the crypto industry in 10 years, we didn't make progress, right? What we need is we need the crypto industry to infiltrate finance and it just needs to be finance. It needs to be exchanges. Coinbase in the interview with Max, they're talking about being the everything exchange. Amazon, the everything store, these guys want

to be the everything exchange. They want to be able to trade public stocks, crypto, probably want to do real estate stuff, tokenized assets, whatever, prediction markets. Everything gets traded on one exchange. Guess what? ICE, New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, CBOE, all those guys, what do you think they want to do? They would love to be able to do prediction markets, tokenized securities, traditional securities, all the bonds, crypto. That is where everyone is headed. And so I think that we are going to go through a complete revolution in really boring nerd infrastructure. I think for the consumer, all they're going to see is things got faster and cheaper. That's how technology adoption works. And I think we are like right on the edge. Now

you're going to start seeing some of the stuff hit. And as it hits, you're going to start realizing, wait a minute, I can get higher yield. Wait a minute. I can trade on weekends. Wait a minute. I can actually be outside the United States without a bank account, and I can now start to earn yield via a yield-bearing stablecoin, right? Wait a minute, I can store my economic value in an asset that has sound money principles that seems to benefit from the debasement of the currency, aka Bitcoin, right? That whole transition over the next 10 years or so means that the digital natives, they're just early to what the rest of the world's going to be using. And I think it's very, very bullish for the companies that are embracing this stuff. So you had another line

in your letter about the idea that like people won't know the difference between centralization and decentralization moving forward. What did you really mean by that? Well, right now, Coinbase, I just use them as the example we've been talking about. Coinbase has a centralized exchange. They also have centralized services, right? Things, lending, et cetera. They are simultaneously embracing decentralization. And so in the Coinbase app, remember DeFi mullet, business at the front, party in the back. The business at the front is the interface is Coinbase. If you trust Coinbase, you trust it regardless of what service you're using on there. But on the back end, the quote unquote party, they may be having

a centralized infrastructure for some products. They may have decentralized services or infrastructure for some products. They may actually offer the same service and there's a centralized version and a decentralized version. And you may not even know what the difference is other than they tell you, well, you can earn 3% here or you can earn 5% here. And the way that they're getting And the 5% is because there's decentralization, there's lower costs, there's more liquidity, whatever, right? So that to me is why people are ultimately

not going to even know whether it's centralized or decentralized. A great example is how many people use the internet every single day and could name the four or five protocols that make the internet work? Maybe someone, if you went to like a bar, right? And you do like on the street interview

and you ask people, what are the five protocols? Maybe somebody could pull out of their head. Some nerd. Or HTTP, right? Maybe, because they typed it once or twice in their life, right? But outside of that, like it's just not something that people understand. They don't need to understand it.

All they need to be able to do is go to google.com and type in a box, right? And eventually they're going to have a computer in their brain where they just think about it and they get the answer. They don't care about protocols. They don't care about infrastructure. They don't care about all this stuff. Let somebody else solve that stuff.

Just get me something that's better, cheaper, and faster. And that's what's going to happen in finance. I'd be I'd go far as to say that if you ask people what www stood for most people wouldn't know I think people would just be like oh yeah I agree today's episode is brought to you by bitcoin ira are you a crypto investor with a retirement account but don't have any crypto in your retirement account listen up this is for you bitcoin ira is revolutionizing the way americans save for retirement by helping smart investors diversify their savings with access to over 75 cryptocurrencies. With world-class customer service, military-grade encryption, and a

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Americans on their journey to upgrade their retirement. That's Bitcoin IRA.com slash pump to upgrade your retirement today. Let's talk about the difference between the stable coins themselves. So there's USDC, there's USDT, and there's a few other ones as well. I have noticed through talking with different people that USDC extremely popular domestically, USDT is actually extremely popular internationally. Why is there a difference? And like, should there be a difference moving forward? And like, how are people thinking about this? Well, I think that in most industries, what you get is when there's competition, people take different go-to-market strategies. They position themselves differently. They try to go after different customers, right?

It's all kind of a corporate strategy at the end of the day. And honestly, some people are optimizing for different things, right? Some people may be optimizing for profits today. Other people may be optimizing for equity value. Some people may be optimizing for short-term versus long-term, right? This is kind of classic corporate strategy competition in the business world. I do believe that Tether is the king and will remain the king for a very long time, right? So I think that USDC is a very formidable competitor in terms of coming onto the scene and being able to build a business and use kind of their strategy. But Tether was first, that first mover advantage is really hard to unseat. And also, frankly, I don't think that

people really give enough credit to Giancarlo, Impala, and the team at Tether. These guys are the definition of competitors. And it's not just about were they early, were they the first to find product market fit, but they have kept their foot slammed to the gas pedal and they are not going to relent. And so it's really hard to compete with somebody like that. Now, I do think that generally, what you have seen is USDC has said, well, we're going to go and be a highly regulated, domestic-based, domestic-serving stablecoin, USDC. Now, what they did to do that was they created a stablecoin, and then they struck a partnership with Coinbase. And they basically said, why don't we get mass distribution via partnership? Well, if you are going to partner

with somebody in that way, you've got to give up some of the economics. And so I forget the exact split between Circle and Coinbase. But if I remember correctly, I think actually Coinbase takes more of the economics than Circle does on the interest that comes from USDC, or it's at least close. Tether said, well, the world's pretty big. There's only 330 million Americans. There's 8 billion people in the world. Why don't we go and find the people where stable coins can have the biggest impact? So if you think of the United States, the dollar works pretty well. If I go to the ATM, I get my money out. If I want to send a bank wire, it's annoying. It costs a little bit of money, but I can get it done. I can do an ACH, direct deposit, all these things, right?

It works to a general sense and I have access to dollars already. So all you're doing is you're making a slight upgrade and the delta between using the legacy system versus the new system, there's a delta. It's just smaller than let's say somebody who has no access to dollars at all. If you're in Turkey using the Libra. If you're in, name a country. If you don't have access to dollars, getting access to dollars is usually a pretty good upgrade. That delta is pretty fat, right? And so that's what Tether's main strategy has been is they have ran around the world and they have basically said, we have US dollars and put on these digital rails, we can have a massive profound impact

on your financial life. And the market spoke. I think the latest numbers are Tether has more than 400 million people that use Tether and they're growing at something like 30 million new users per quarter, right? I mean, that is bonkers numbers, right? That would put you on par with something that like, I don't think it's growing quite as fast as like an open AI with chat GPT, but it's like up there with that level of growth. 100%, right? Like social networks would be jealous of that type of growth. And so when you see that, you say, okay, like Tether has product market fit and do they have some distribution stuff? I'm sure, but they don't have like one main distribution partner where there's a big split of economics and things like that. So they

have really gone for, let's go outside the United States, let's go find where the biggest delta is, let's serve those customers and have this kind of financial inclusion. Now, from a United States standpoint, we should love Tether, right? I've said multiple times that I think that the guys at Tether, they're essentially American heroes. Who else do you know who has gone around the world and created more adoption of the US dollar, has extended the American's way of life as having the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency in the way that Tether has? Almost nobody, right? And so from that standpoint, that is, quote unquote, heroic for America, for us to continue to have dollar dominance extended in that manner. So I think that's great. I also think that USDC,

there's USDE, right? There's all these different things. Now, what I do find very interesting is all of a sudden the government gets involved and the government has now created via the Genius Act regulation most people know i'm not the biggest fan of the government doing this they're interfering in a free market right and they're saying we have to create rules so the idea originally was that this regulation was going to king make some people and it was going to hurt other people thankfully because of the way that the system goes both the domestic and the international type players all came together and they were able to work through that system there was you know pretty uh tough conversations there from what i understand i mean there's a lot of jockeying who's

gonna get what rules written in whatever but i think we got to a pretty good place i think everyone's like okay with where it is i don't think anyone walked away and was like i got a great deal i don't even walked away and was like i got screwed right um what we see is the u.s based regulated stable coins they kind of fit within that box so they're already kind of ready to rock and roll now what we're seeing though is let's take something like aust which is tether's response to that regulation. They're launching an American-based version of the stablecoin. And they went and they got Bo Hines, who was the crypto czar inside of the White House. And they said, why don't you be the CEO? Again, go back to these guys aren't playing around, right? This is

like a full-throat competition. And so what I do think is a part of this conversation that a lot of people are not yet kind of ready to talk about is today, everyone is looking at stablecoins and they're like, tether, amazing business. The profit per employee is like the highest ever, right? These guys are awesome. All true. But if you want to compete, guess what you have to do? You got to give up some of your economics.

You got to pay your way into the market. And so you start to share those economics. Now, all of a sudden your margins get squeezed, right? And I'm not going to say it's a race to the bottom, but it's definitely a degradation of economic value that can get captured by the stable coin provider. So now what you're seeing is a V2 of the competition where every single stable coin provider

is now running around saying, wait a second, if we're going to have a degradation of economics at the stable coin level, let's go compete at who can actually own the chain that these all are transacted on. And so if you look, just look over the last three or four months,

Stripe announced Tempo, Circle announced ARK, Tether announced Plasma and many other investments that they made. Game on now. Now we're going to have a blockchain war over who can have the blockchain for stable coins. And so why do they want to do that?

Well, there's economics to be captured there. And so maybe actually what happens is what if you could just give away all of your economics from the interest that's being earned off of treasuries and instead you make money by owning the chain? I'm not saying that's going to be the final business model, but like this is what's happening. This is in real time, all evolving.

And so it kind of comes back to this idea of, okay, stable coins are going to be this crypto native thing. Amazing. We're going to see that battle play out. But guess what? Now it's like a bunch of the children were all arguing with each other. Now the adults showed up and they're standing there and they're saying, what y'all playing?

Maybe we should play over there. Y'all want to come be on my team? And now all of a sudden the adults are drafting the kids onto their different teams. Like Thanksgiving, you go play backyard football, right? All of a sudden the dads start playing and they start picking which kid they think is most athletic, right? Well, same thing's happening now because now Citi, JP Morgan, Bank of America, all these guys visa they're all saying whoa hold on a second we're not going to get left out of this

right and so as that starts to play out you just saw coinbase announce a partnership with city in that partnership uh they basically are saying we're going to make it easier to on and off ramp people to uh for institutional clients to get in and out of crypto makes sense right aust right they've kind of talked about this whole idea of can they go partner with different financial institutions uh i think you're going to see circle go directly make these partnerships as well and so what you are watching is you are watching the like tectonic plates of finance shift right now and everyone's trying to figure out where are they going to end up and there's a little bit of musical chairs like everyone grab a partner right but there's also a little bit of direct

competition and there's also some business strategy into it so it's fascinating the reason why all this is happening is because there's probably in my estimation about a trillion dollars of value up for grabs who wants it everybody wants it and that's why you're seeing you know kind of the competition and the developments that you're seeing and so it just goes back to defy mullet right you are going to be using stable coins at some point in the next 10 years you're not even going to realize it all you know is you're moving dollars and that's actually probably a good thing that that is how the technology gets adopted it is not like all of a sudden we go teach grandma how to you know buy a coffee with a stable coin grandma don't

even know how to spell stable coin she's like we all talking about all she's saying is i want to use dollars stop talking about all this technology stuff right that is where the world's headed and I think that the people who have that interface and have the trust and the connection with the user, they're the ones who are going to end up having a big advantage. I'm glad you ended on that point because I have a quote from somebody that I want you to hear and I want your reaction to it. Oh, great. So the Western Union CEO, we all know Western Union, that held the funeral forum. Sure, he's a nice guy. Yeah, I'm sure. He said, last I checked, you couldn't spend stable coins if you wanted to buy a Coca-Cola. So what is the real use case? Repeat that again.

last i checked you couldn't spend stable coin if you wanted to buy a coca-cola did paul krugman say that you know who paul krugman is paul krugman is a famous economist who's been really wrong this whole career but uh paul krugman uh is famous for saying uh the internet doesn't really have any use cases more than a fax machine right he's like yeah he basically dismissed it in uh like late 90s looks like i'm just absolute like one of the worst takes of all time like uh you know the cold uh freezing cold takes like this like paul krugman is in the hall of fame for that one um i'm sure he's a nice guy no disrespect uh but uh this guy i think this guy's name is uh devin uh like uh something um so do you remember in 2021 you me and our brother joe we held that

a funeral for western union for for the ogs out there who've been watching our content for a long time we held a funeral for western union and you know every once in a while i don't like to dance on graves. I don't like to take a victory lap, but I'm going to do it right now. That funeral, if you go and you look at the five-year performance of Western Union stock, bam, down 54%. I'm not saying, but I'm saying, I mean, we pretty much nailed it, right? Now, we probably were having a little bit of fun and just a tiny bit of analysis back then, right? But it was very obvious, Like you have this legacy world with legacy technology that is oblivious to what is happening. Now, again, I do know that Western Union CEO has also said they see stable coins as an

opportunity, not a threat. So it's kind of like you're talking out of two sides of your mouth, right? Is it an opportunity or do you think no one uses it to buy Coca-Cola? Because it can't be both, right? Either you think it's an opportunity or you don't, but you sound like Paul Krugman on one side. And then you sound like somebody who's got a 16-year-old kid who told you, hey, you start talking good about stable coins, maybe the stock price will recover, right? You got to make a choice. And I find that when people have one foot in, one foot out,

they screwed. So if you're down 54% during one of the most historic stock market runs in history, what do you think is going to happen? It's probably going to keep going down. Those businesses are in big, big trouble. And it's because they were very extractive. They use antiquated technology and this new technology disrupts them rips them out of the system is it a direct tack on their uh revenue and you have people who don't understand the importance of the technology it's classic innovators dilemma and so my guess is that western union we can have like a reincarnation funeral for them because they if we talk about this in five years they're probably gonna be in a bad situation then too yeah let's switch gears a little bit talk about

Bitcoin. Vance Spencer had a great chart on Twitter talking about the idea that as gold runs up, Bitcoin stayed flat in 2020. Gold obviously saw a drawdown there, and then Bitcoin had a massive run. We're in a similar setup here for 2025. Do you see something similar happening moving forward? The data is not perfect, but 2020, just for people to understand, gold basically peaked, and then it cooled, right? So gold had this big run-up, kind of ran first. and if you remember let me set the scene in 2020 um if you go back to march of 2020 uh asset prices sold off aggressively because there was a liquidity crisis i think march 12th was the big day that bitcoin went down 50 percent and i was curled up on the couch i just don't feel too good uh but

then all of a sudden here comes the monetary bazooka right trump was out there posting away on social media you had the fed stepping in you had a fiscal policy they were printed trillions of dollars. I remember tweeting saying, you can't print trillions of dollars and not get inflation. And people were like, you're an idiot. You don't know. Inflation is transitory, all this stuff, right? Obviously, what happened is we got this massive recovery and everything took off. Now, when that occurred, gold actually was the global alarm system. Gold ran first. And you can pontificate as to why. My guess is probably people were trained, hey, money printing, gold runs. but there was two people who came out in 2020 and they pretty much started the wall street

adoption of these assets uh stanley druckenmiller and paul tudor jones they both came out and at different times said some effect of we out we like it and we own it talking about bitcoin two legends two legends right and if i remember correctly stanley druckenmiller said that in 2018 uh he called up ptj and he basically uh they were talking i can't remember who said it to who but One of them said, yo, you know, these maniacs, 85% of them that owned it at $20,000 a coin, they're still holding it at 3000. And I think it was like PTJ said that to Druck and Druck was like, I'm buying. And he just, you know, he just went in. He was like, yo, these guys are maniacs. I'll continue to say Stanley Druckenmiller is my favorite investor. Why? He's basically a retail

investor just with the goat track record, right? Like the guy he buys, then he researches, right? If he's got conviction, he goes all in, right? And so he ended up buying. Now, it waited until 2020, and then he came out and he said he owned it. Paul Tudor Jones was on CNBC, and he had a famous line. He said he believes Bitcoin's going to be the fastest horse. That got a lot of headlines. That got a lot of attention, whatever.

Gold runs first. Bitcoin kind of hung out around $10,000, $8,000, somewhere in that range. All of a sudden, the gold run got exhausted. There was now not as much demand because so many people have been buying gold, and you had gold kind of turn over and cool off a little bit. still great, right? It was good inflation hedge. But once that turnover happened and you start the cooling off of gold, Bitcoin, then that was pretty much the inflection point. Bam, here we go. And we went from 10,000 to 64,000 in less than six months. Game time. It was awesome. We all had a

lot of fun. Now we have a very similar setup. Gold is up significantly. It's up over 50% in 2025. People are like, wow, that was crazy. But it looks like it's peaked and starting to cool off now. And all of a sudden, you're now starting to see Bitcoin get a little bit of momentum to it. And so the question is, or what people are insinuating, is, is there some relationship where once gold runs first and then it peaks and starts to cool, is that the catalyst for the Bitcoin, right? The great rotation from gold to Bitcoin. Um, I did hear a pretty interesting anecdote. Um, I, uh, I have heard, I don't know how to confirm this, but I have heard that, uh, there are people who are showing up in like the diamond district here in New York with all kinds of jewelry and stuff that like gold jewelry, because now all of a sudden it's, you know, $4,200 an ounce and they're just turning it in and there's like lines and stuff. I don't know if this, you're like, we'll have to find somebody

to try to confirm this, but that would signal to me the gold run, you know, people are like turning in the gold, right. In order to get dollars, then you basically just get the satisfaction of the demand. And so if that's the case and Bitcoin runs from here, it'd be a repeat of 2020. I don't like to extrapolate off of, you know, kind of one single data point. But when you line the charts up, it looks awesome. Like, you know, it looks like Bitcoin will go up. So let's see what happens. 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

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Bitcoin DeFi. Get off zero and start earning yield on even just 1% of your Bitcoin by going to stake.cordow.org slash pomp. Again, that's stake.cordow.org slash pomp, or go click the link in the description. Okay. Well, it looks like everything's about to go up given that Trump and the Chinese president Xi Jinping, I think I said that correctly? Nah. Nah. How do you say it? Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping? Yeah. All right. Well, Xi Jinping and Trump are going to meet in South Don't upset him. Later this week. Oh, I'm definitely not trying to upset him.

Market supports go up given that the uncertainty is kind of settling down. The tariff wars are kind of settling down a little bit. Do you generally agree with that sentiment that as they meet, trade negotiations are kind of finally settled, markets should go up? Well, there's a couple of things that are worth talking about here. So one, investors like clarity, right? It's kind of like, you know, in entrepreneurship, I always say entrepreneurs, they care what the rules are, but more importantly, they just care that you tell them what the rules are, right?

If you tell them what the rules are, then they can figure out what they're going to do, right? Entrepreneurs are problem solvers. Give them a problem, tell them what the rules are, they'll go and they'll try to solve the problem. Investors are very similar. They have a preference for what the environment will be, monetary policy, interest rates, geopolitical trade, you know, negotiation outcomes, all this, like they have a preference.

But if you just tell them, here's what it's going to be moving forward, then they can adjust their portfolio. What is really hard for an investor is uncertainty. So is the US-China trade deal going to get done? What are the details, right? Are we going to get 100% tariffs left? I mean, as soon as you get into the uncertainty world, it's really hard to invest. And so you end up being a little bit gun-shy in deploying capital.

I do think that there is a very interesting dynamic where it makes great headlines. talk about the decoupling. China and the U.S. are going to lessen dependence on each other. But get out of here. The United States needs China. China needs the U.S. Now, that may change over time. Both countries would love to decouple. These guys are working their butts off to try to decouple, right? America, we want to reshore. We want to bring back manufacturing. We want to lessen our dependence on China. We think that their shipbuilding and their rare earth controls and all this, we are at their throats in terms of our dependence and how do we get some sort negotiating leverage. By the way, they're the same. They have been heavily trying to lessen

their dependence on us as consumers. Now I think it's like 14% of exports out of China come to the United States. So call it 85% or so of all exports are not coming to the US. Rare earths, they knew that was going to be a big trigger. They pulled that lever and all of a sudden, now here we are. The second thing is people forget that there are people involved in these negotiations. This is not like two AIs negotiating with each other. So there's now this famous interview that Scott Besson did, where he talks about, I think the guy's name is Li Changpeng. And that's like one of the lead negotiators from China. It's safe to say Scott Besson and Li Changpeng, they don't get along. They're not boys. These two dudes, they are at each other's throats. And so I think

Scott Besson described them as like a low level, you know, Chinese official who made a miscalculation or something like that. He was very dismissive and was talking down to this guy. Well, a couple of days later, it comes out that Li Changpeng may or may not have in a negotiating session, sitting at the table with Scott Besson, they were going back and forth and Besson threatened something or whatever. And Li Changpeng pulled up the phone and he called somebody in China and told them to open an investigation into anti-monopolistic or into monopolistic behavior and antitrust investigation into NVIDIA. That's what's going on in these negotiations. These dudes are messing with each other and so the second you get scott besant who by the way there's

reports that he's punched people he went toe-to-toe with elon musk like i wouldn't mess with that guy right he's sitting down with lee chang pang who i'm sure is a tough guy himself and he's ordering investigations into american companies and stuff that is kind of the cutthroat negotiating that's going on now what gets reported is a scott besant lee chang pang they're different delegates they come together. Kumbaya, we're going to get a deal. Okay. Well, guess who's got to sign off on the deal? The big dogs. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, they got to come together. There's going to be this summit. They got to go. There's a lot of negotiating just on the summit itself. Where does it happen? Who shakes whose hand? Who greets who? Where do they meet? Where do they wear? Who's

going to say what? Who gets to talk? Is it in Chinese? Is it in English? How are you going to do this? What reporters are there? All that stuff is going on, right? Deal's going to get done. They now claim that they've got a lot of agreement on important things. Rare earths, fentanyl, ship levies, right? This is a very wide encompassing thing. What I do think is interesting is Scott Besson has now come out and he said, I do not believe the 100% tariff is going to be, you know, it's pretty much off the table. We're not going to get the 100% tariff. Okay, great. The polymarket odds are saying 25 to 40% tariffs is the range where people think it's going to end up. I spoke to Jordy Visser this weekend. He thinks that there might not be any

tariffs, which would be like max bullish, right? Imagine if we get to a point where there's no tariffs. Now people are like, ah, you said tariffs are good, but what? Shut up. The whole idea here is you actually want true free trade, right? You do want free trade where both countries are allowing their producers to engage in consensual free trade. The problem has been that one side of the trade equation has not been doing that. So Canada, Mexico, China, all these guys, they're manipulating the trade. We go into it thinking that we're operating on a free trade basis. They're not holding up their end of the bargain. That's why the tariffs have been important because it levels the playing field. So if China was to agree to stop subsidizing

their producers, stop tariffing all the American goods, stop messing with the supply chain, stop trying to actually take away free trade and actually enter into true free trade, Great. Let the market figure out where it's going to go. But that would be very bullish. And a huge reason is because certainty is important, but also is people want as an investor, they want to have the government involved as least as possible. Because now you can actually look at a market. You can understand incentives. The problem is when the government intervenes, you got no clue. You have no clue what they're going to do, right? Think about a local housing situation. Home affordability in America is horrible,

right why i would argue that a huge reason not the only reason but a huge reason is because american citizens are being held hostage by their local city councils point blank period that that is a huge reason sure do we need to uh you know get uh home uh costs down in terms of uh monetary policy absolutely do we have to be able to import certain things to build a home absolutely are there are labor issues that are going to play into this? Absolutely. But a huge reason is because you have local city council members who have over-regulated the building of homes in America, and they will not allow people to build certain types of homes in certain areas. Okay, well, how do you get home prices down? You build more supply. This is like economics 101, right? I'm

pretty sure I could go to somebody in a kindergarten class and ask them, and they probably would come up with the answer. If you want prices to go down, you build more of it. The problem is that they're being held hostage by the local city council, and you can't predict what they're going to do. You have no clue. Economic incentives. How many times in America has this local city council member gotten in trouble for corruption, right? Of course, there's all this stuff playing out. So the less that the government is involved, the more predictable it is, the more predictable it is, the better it is for an investor. And so I think on now extrapolate it back to the US-China trade, like obviously having the government less involved is better for asset prices and it's

better for investors. The question is just how much are they going to be involved? And then I saw our friend Matthew Siegel over at VanEck. He had a banger, banger line. He said he was on an earnings call, I think, or on like an analyst call. And somebody said, I'm going to paraphrase, but they said, White House asset management is still very active in the sectors we care about. And it took me a second. I said, wait, what? White House asset management is basically like you know, America Inc, right? They're playing in our sectors. They're buying stakes in rare earth companies. They're looking at quantum. They're looking at Intel. They're like, again, the government is doing this stuff. Now there's good reason in some cases for national security

or, you know, trying to reshore things or whatever, but also it's unpredictable. White house asset management, you don't know which direction they're going to go. And so I think that what you find is once people get clarity, once people knew the white house is going to make an investment in Intel, what happened? Bam. Intel takes off. Why? Some of it. Yeah, of course. Like they're going to get more contracts, all that stuff. But a big reason is now people know that money going from the government is going to this company. We now have clarity. I can go put my money in Intel because I'm ready to rock and roll. Right. And I think you're going to see this play out over and over again, whether it's at the trade deal

or White House asset management, which we need to figure out who the CIO is. I need to know who's pulling the trigger. You know, is it Lutnick? Is it Besson? Is it Trump? Is it Barron? Right. I I don't know. It kind of depends. But I think that White House asset management is, you know, just as important as Li Chengpeng and Scott Besson, you know, calling each other on the phone and playing around. You let me know how I invest in that asset management company. I mean, look, you know, here's what's crazy is if you think of most other countries, they have a sovereign wealth fund. Right. And the U.S. has talked now about the sovereign wealth fund. And I mean, you know, Howard Lutning sat right in that chair and he told me that we should monetize the balance sheet and we should use it as an offensive way to drive revenue and all this stuff. Makes sense. Now, the counter argument to that, and I try to be pretty fair of looking at both sides.

The counter argument is, well, the U.S. is broke. We don't have we don't have any money for a sovereign wealth fund. We don't got wealth. We got debt. So unless you want to have a sovereign debt fund, I don't know where you guys can come up with the money. Now, if you look at the Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin Reserve, well, basically, we're just going to take it from people. Right. So like, again, I think that there is this like gray area of like, how are they going to do some of this stuff? But yeah, in a way you are invested in the White House asset management firm, right? Is they are taking care of taxpayer money and they're taking care of the country's balance sheet and they're taking care of, you know, you can think of the financial future of the country. It may not be a direct thing where you get a K-1 and a distribution statement, but if they do a good job, then you should see the benefit to it, right?

And the question is just, what does that game look like? I think we're still figuring out. I think that they would be the first to say they're still figuring it out. But Scott Besson, he looked a little crazy when he was putting $20 billion in Argentine pesos. um i i even said you know i saw somebody tweet and say uh man damn the united states bought pesos before we bought bitcoin that seems kind of crazy and peso's up 10 scott benson looking like a genius right now helps that malay you know one down in argentina uh helps that um you know the the kind of recovery of the u.s strength behind it you know there's a lot of things that play into it

uh but i do think that uh white house asset management you know that they're uh that they're making some plays and I'm glad that they're on our side. Awesome. All right. That's all I got for you. I'll see you guys next week.