WBD247 Audio Transcription

Has the Bitcoin Bull Woken? With Anthony Pompliano

Interview date: Sunday 2nd August 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Anthony Pompliano from The Pomp podcast. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to Anthony Pompliano, founder and partner at Morgan Creek Capital and the host of the Pomp podcast. We discuss his recent interview with Roger Ver, the economic impact of the coronavirus & the Bitcoin bull market.

“Having the #2 podcast, I learned everything I know about podcasting from Peter because he is definitely better than me and his show is definitely better than mine, and he is really handsome and cool.”

— Anthony Pompliano

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack:  So what's up Pomp?

Anthony Pompliano: Hi guys, what's up man! Peter, what's going on, dude?

Peter McCormack: Dude, what's going on with you? Hey, this is the first time I've seen you since you've been married dude!

Anthony Pompliano: I know, thank you.

Peter McCormack: How did that go?

Anthony Pompliano: It was fascinating. I enjoyed it, I'm excited! We got married in the middle of the pandemic in New York City, and there was just Polina and I. My brother was the minister or the officiant or whatever it's called and he started off the ceremony, if you want to call it that, with, "Family, friends, thank you so much for coming and making the long trek to this momentous occasion."

Peter McCormack: Hey, well, you saved a shit ton of money.!

Anthony Pompliano: Yeah! Oh trust me, we're still going to have a real, bigger celebration. It was going to be small to begin with, only 50 people, so not a huge operation. I've been to weddings that are 400 people, and you're just, "Dude, are you doing this for yourself or are you doing this for the 400 people who are here?"

Peter McCormack: I think they usually do it for the girl they're marrying.

Anthony Pompliano: That's a whole other thing! Because you were married before, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, for three months.

Anthony Pompliano: How did you do the wedding?

Peter McCormack: We had a big wedding in London. Well not huge, 80 people. We got married at Westminster Registry Office where Paul McCartney got married, a really cool place. Then we had the reception at St. Pancras Hotel, which is near King's Cross Station, beautiful place. But that didn't really work out for me. Hey, you might even be longer married now than I was.

Anthony Pompliano: Now only three weeks so far. What are your thoughts on Bitcoin so far? We were recording this on Sunday, I think we're going to release in a couple of days, but last night Bitcoin just absolutely ripping people's faces off and then dumping.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well I thought it would at 12k, I didn't know. I've stopped that whole playing the market thing and trying to tell tops and bottoms. My Bitcoin investment strategy right now is accumulate, hold, and I've said I wasn't going to sell any, unless I had to I'd do, but I wasn't going to sell any for three halvings. We've had one recently, so I've got two more halvings that I'm not going to sell any for. So I've got quite a long time horizon. I thought it might dump at 12k.

Listen, there was a time where I had a fair amount of Bitcoin back in 2017, and I fucked up and lost 80% just by buying mining equipment and trading shitcoins and just been a moron. Then I stopped all that, I sold all my shitcoins and I went Bitcoin only. Then in the last year, I've grown my Bitcoin stack by 40% and that means I've got more than I had. I can't have less. I'm not going to lose any, and therefore, let's see where we are in 10 years. So even though it did dump, I'm cool with that. What about you?

Anthony Pompliano: I'm the exact same way, I only accumulate. I've been saying for a long time, it's just a game of accumulation. It's a fixed and supply asset. How do you think about, not necessarily portfolio construction, but just when you're buying Bitcoin, are you obsessive about, "Hey, every two weeks on this day, at this time, I put a certain amount of money in," or do you just opportunistically acquire more Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: So I only earn it now. I've stopped buying.

Anthony Pompliano: Interesting, explain that.

Peter McCormack: Well Andreas talked about it. He said the best Bitcoin you get is the one you earn. So a couple of things happen, you'll find this quite interesting. So what I do is, with my sponsors I've always got at least one sponsor who wants to pay in Bitcoin and what I used to do is I used to convert 75% to cash to run my business, pay my team, and then keep 25% in Bitcoin, and that's how I was able to accumulate some.

Then about a week and a half ago, when Bitcoin was 9.3k, one of my clients paid their bill and it was a quarterly bill and paid in Bitcoin. I was like, "You know what, I'm going to leave this time for a couple of weeks. I'm going to see what happens." Then obviously we've shot up now. So strangely I'm not thinking, "Oh, I'm going to sell that 75% now," because I'm in profit on that Bitcoin, I just leave it on my balance sheet.

So as I manage my business, I have my cash in the bank, cash out on invoice, and then I have my Bitcoin and I might as well just leave that as Bitcoin on the balance sheet. If that never goes below line below 9,300, it doesn't matter what happens. If we're always ahead of $9,300, that stays on the balance sheet and whether that goes to 20k, 30k, 40k Bitcoin, it doesn't matter. So I only earn Bitcoin. Also, I've earned some playing poker this last few weeks. Have you seen this poker game?

Anthony Pompliano: No, what is it?

Peter McCormack: It's a bunch of Bitcoiners playing poker. Charlie Lee's there, who else comes to play? His brother, Bobby's there sometimes, Luke Martin's there, so every Thursday we play and I think I've earned three Bitcoin.

Anthony Pompliano: What are the buy-ins?

Peter McCormack: It's 0.3 Bitcoin. It's 0.1, but you need to have 0.3. It's a 0.1 sit down, and then you can re-buy. So everyone says to have 0.3. We've been playing for, I think, 13, 14 weeks and I'm like 3 Bitcoin up.

Anthony Pompliano: That's not bad.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. So it's all earned Bitcoin, I only earn Bitcoin now and like I say, I've done about 40% up this year, and that's what I'll continue to do. I thought it would dump at 12k. The 12k seemed a number it would. Also, we went from 9.2k to 12k pretty quick. We were overbought.

Anthony Pompliano: Yeah, well I don't really pay attention so much to all of the underlying daily metrics unless there's something to watch like RSI and all that stuff. So I don't know what all that was showing, but we definitely went up very quickly from $9,500 to $12,000. But look, it's one of these things where there's only so many assets in the world that go up 20%, 30% in a week, literally dump $1,500 in seconds, and then recover $700 in a minute later. It's just, Bitcoin is Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: You can't play that shit. Anyway, listen, I got a question for you. There's something else we should have done before that.

Anthony Pompliano: All right?

Peter McCormack: I want to talk to you about Roger Ver.

Anthony Pompliano: All right, let's do it!

Peter McCormack: Of course I want to talk to you about that. Okay, so firstly, I didn't listen to all of it, and what I did listen to, actually, it seemed okay. It was better than I expected. The reason I didn't listen to all of it is because there was nothing new. So I had it on and I kept going back, and I would say, "Oh, I've heard all this before." So I would give it 10 minutes and come back and it's, "I've heard it all before from him." So I didn't listen to the last half. What did you get out of it?

Anthony Pompliano: So obviously when I agreed to do this and Roger agreed to do this, it's not a secret to him or I that it would be heavily scrutinized and because of that, I took it overly serious, more serious than I normally take things when I do these types of interviews. I reached out to some people, I got some ideas in terms of what I should ask about. On top of that I also got quite a bit of feedback from the audience on Twitter etc and frankly, 80%, 90% of the comments were very much like "Scammer!"

It's, "Oh okay, like fine, if that's your opinion, whatever. But like, why?" And that's what I'm trying to get at was get to layers two, three, four, five of the argument and some people were able to clearly articulate that. So first of all, to Roger's credit, I asked him a lot of questions I think people want answers to, and he didn't not answer them, he answered the questions. So things like his portfolio construction, his thought process behind why he did certain things, what it would take for him to come back to Bitcoin and identify or admit that Bitcoin Cash didn't work, and things that... It's very hard to have a conversation with somebody about what is obviously sensitive topics when you're being combative with somebody.

You know you and I have talked about it a bunch of times before and that's not my style. I'll bring people on, I'm going to be respectful, hopefully they'll be respectful back, or there are times where people say things and maybe I don't push back as much as somebody who wants to be combative will be, sure. But at the same time that's what the audience is there for, is that they'd let people know on Twitter or whatever. So I actually think that my biggest takeaways were, one, you can't deny what Roger did in the early days of Bitcoin and for Bitcoin. Two, he has a very rational thought process behind a number of decisions he made.

What I do think, and I said it to him is, we just have a difference of opinion as to whether that was a good thought process and decision making or not and the part that, again, you got to give him credit for is, at the end, we wrapped it up and said, "All right, there's two views of the world. Here's why I believe my view, here's why you believe yours.

Ultimately, neither one of our opinions matter, the market will decide" and so far the market is deciding that Bitcoin is the winner and will be the winner, and Roger's basically betting on the fact that that's going to change in the future, but understands that that may not happen. So if that is the path we go down, then I think at some point he would he would come back to Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm not sure if he'll come back to Bitcoin.

Anthony Pompliano: I think he will.

Peter McCormack: I asked him that before, and he said he'd probably go off and do something else. I'm not sure he will. Let me go back a step. There's always nuance to some of this stuff, right?

Anthony Pompliano: Yes.

Peter McCormack: And especially when you're doing an interview, and I know what you mean about the combative stuff. When I did the Brian Armstrong interview, I knew there were a group of people who wouldn't like it, and they made the decision to dislike it before it happened and the reason I knew that is there was some really good progress in that interview. What they did is they found the bits they didn't like, picked it out, and just complained about it. So I knew those fuckers wouldn't like it beforehand, and whatever to them, but you have to construct an interview in a respectful way and you want a bit of to and fro, you know it, I know it.

But the thing about Roger is, I actually have some sympathies for him for some old stuff. So I have some sympathies for him, Bitcoin became something that was different from what he expected. But that does that all the time, Bitcoin does that all the time to a bunch of different people, and you just have to accept that and he couldn't accept that. But he was so sold on this idea that Bitcoin is cash, cheap, fast payments, and it just became something else, something possibly far more valuable.

Now, some people who always says that, I think it's disingenuous. If you look at the Bitcoin white paper, if you're going to scream about how great Satoshi is with this gift he gave to the world, I think you have to be honest and look at the white paper, he talked about online commerce, he talked about cash. So I think you have to understand that some people believe that's what they were building, and then perhaps it was both things, perhaps it something else.

So I have some sympathy about that. My biggest issue, and this is actually more towards Roger, is when do you move on from this dude? When do you accept what's happened and just move on, focus on Bitcoin Cash, stop fighting. You're not going to change Bitcoin by shouting at it anymore.

Anthony Pompliano: Yeah, but I think that was when I went into the interview and I talked to him beforehand, before we even did the interview and I think both of us, because we knew we'd be so heavily scrutinized, we both just wanted to feel it out of, are we both going to be respectful here, where do our differences lie, and really just make sure that it would be, frankly, worth our time to record it and also too for the audience to listen.

I think the piece that was very clear was, it's like, when you're a kid, and let's say you've got a sibling, if you're nice to them, for the majority they're going to be nice back. If you go over there with a whiffle ball bat, whack them in the head, you're going to end up on the ground brawling. Especially with the older person, or you're the person who's initiating something. So same thing with an interview. If you get on and all of a sudden you're just trying to get somebody with gotcha questions and poke them and catch them doing things, sure, of course they're going to be on edge, of course they're going to be overly defensive, of course they're going to be a bit more aggressive back.

But if instead you just say, "Look, I just want to go through all of, all of this, and I actually want you to walk away from this saying, 'I was able to put my thoughts and ideas on the record and also be able to hear the other side.'" A couple of times during the interview I literally asked him, I said, "Hey, okay, you just described what you believe and you just described for the, let's say the block dispute, you just described why, if something else happened, what is the argument of the other side of the table? Can you flip around and basically tell me the people you disagree with, what's their argument?"

To his credit he can actually in great detail explain not only his argument but also, he could explain the argument of the people that he disagrees with and I think that is a sign of not only, one, intelligence and emotional intelligence, but also that he understands the problems and that's where I think when people who listened to it, they're, "Wait a second, this is a conversation that Roger hasn't had before of just he's showing that he understands there's two sides to this argument. He's betting on one side, there's people betting on the other side, and the market's going to decide."

So far the market has leaned not in Roger's favour, but I think the other piece that people have to walk away from this, and he talks about it but doesn't quantify is, he says he's a bad trader. So if you back out of that, he lost a lot of money doing this. So his belief in something came with upside and downside and so far he's experienced the downside and to his credit, he talks about that, and he was very transparent about it and forthcoming.

So it's one of these things where people are complicated creatures, we're just human and there's things that you can like about somebody, there's things that you can disagree with or not like, and in Roger's case, I think that there's a lot of people who are trying to put a binary good or bad label on. But if you look at it from the historical context, there's a lot of people who wouldn't be here without Roger's work in Bitcoin.

Then on the same side, there's a lot of things that I asked him about specifically like using bitcoin.com but people buying Bitcoin Cash and he described his thought process as to what they're doing or the logic there, and people can decide whether they think that's an acceptable answer or not. But I think that's the key is just people are complicated figures.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I wonder how it plays out for him. Like I said, I had a lot of sympathy for the early things he did. He did a lot of things to help Bitcoin and I have some sympathies for things not going his way, but obviously a lot of that gets eroded away over time where you just see somebody repeating the same arguments, causing a bit of trouble, bit of mischief etc. But I'm not the type of person who's just going to sit there and just be, "I hate you, fuck you, I want everything to go to shit for you" and I understand why some people have, they've got real PTSD around what happened with SegWit2x.

There was a real fear of a takeover of Bitcoin and Roger's involvement in certain things around that period of time. But I just wonder how it will play out for him because I don't think Bitcoin Cash has much of a future. I think it has a future of something that can be traded, but I think it's very hard to build a cryptocurrency that lots of people use regularly. Bitcoin is amazing that it is used... I actually, strangely enough, I actually do use Bitcoin quite a bit now. I probably do, in terms of send and receive, 15 to 20 transactions a month now and that's actually just using Bitcoin because it makes sense in all of those occasions.

But I don't use anything else, I don't have a need for anything else. I can imagine a very rare scenario where I may use Monero, but just because I'm too much of a moron to use Bitcoin in a private way, but I don't really use other cryptocurrencies. I wonder if people are using, perhaps, Bitcoin Cash a bit out of a desire to keep it going, give it some energy. But ultimately I think it's... Let me add another thing in there Pomp as well. I just did a guest on the show today, they wanted to do a Bitcoin segment and they said could I try to explain Bitcoin and I did the whole "It's just like gold, but digital".

If I'd have been trying to explain it as a way of doing payments and censorship resistant payments, I think I would have struggled because everyone right now can benefit from a digital gold, especially with all the money printing. But do people really care about censorship resistant payments? I think in an ideal world they would have it, but they don't really care. Day to day everyone is just spending money normally. So I think the project's screwed long term.

Anthony Pompliano: Yeah look, I told Roger on it that obviously we have a difference of opinion as to the future outlook of that, and frankly, it's something the market is going to decide, so it is what it is. The part that I think people have to remember is one of the mistakes that many investors or market participants will make is they look at something as a snapshot today.

So this is the Paul Krugman, "the internet will be never be more important than the fax machine type stuff", this is looking at Bitcoin in 2014 in a single point of time and what I think that technology folks are very good at doing, because they've seen the pattern so many times, is, they're able to understand what this thing is today. What are the structural components of it, and what foundation does that lay for it to evolve over the coming 10, 20, 30 years?

To me, we all like to debate the merits of what can it do right now this second, but when you say, "Hey, look, that's not the right conversation, instead it is the structural components", there is nothing more powerful, valuable and exciting, in my opinion, than that structural component of Bitcoin and it really just comes down to three things. One is, it has a fixed supply, which as we talked about, the money printing. Two is, it's fully decentralized, so the decentralization is actually then the...

The ramification of that is censorship resistant payments and the all that stuff, but decentralization is the structure piece. The third thing, and probably the most important in my mind, is it has market adoption and I think one of the key pieces that those who are not students of history on a technology front miss is, the best technology does not win. That is a complete fallacy. It is, what gets adoption? You can go back to the VHS first Betamax, you can go all through history and go through all these different things, but money specifically is a belief system.

It is a network effect business. It's very viral in the sense that you send it to people and kind of do all this stuff and because of that, I think that Bitcoin actually has a much bigger advantage than people realize. Nothing to do with the technology, it is simply the market adoption and that's frankly one of the things that Roger and I kind of came to an agreement in terms of where our difference of opinion lies. He believes that technology is important, I believe that market adoption is important in the early days, and we'll see how it plays out. But that's kind of one of the key differences in opinion.

Peter McCormack: Do you think he got anything out of it? Because I might go and watch the rest of it now, but do you think by the end of it, he left with any change of opinion of his, any potential insights into why he should look at things differently? Or do you think he just came to replay this message and will have left exactly the same?

Anthony Pompliano: I don't think that. Again, I didn't approach it as like, "Let me try to convince you." We were pretty clear during it, in terms of I didn't want to get into some argument or even really debate. It was more of just, "Let's outline 'the facts'" and there were people who scoffed at the idea of facts. But just like, "What do you believe? What do other people believe? Why? Here is the kind of different options somebody has and why do you believe you're right? And why do the other people believe they're right?" I think we did that.

Hopefully, what he got out of it is, one, I think somebody who is in the position that Roger is in, he really believes in the ultimate goal of a digital decentralized currency being adopted globally. The disagreement is on the path to get there, but kind of the finish line, I actually think that Bitcoiners, Roger, and many other people all agree on that and I think that people who are seen as either controversial or just there's a lot of backlash and kind of negative feedback, they just want to be heard. I think that in many cases, Roger, when he's been asked to do interviews or whatever, because of the environment in which the interview gets done, it just turns into this argument and kind of is very unproductive and he's actually not able to articulate why.

That's my biggest hope is that everyone was able to just clearly understand like, "Hey, here's why" and look, frankly, when I was going into the interview, I even told Polina, I was like, "This either goes one of two ways. Either this is going to turn out great or this is going to be an absolute train wreck in terms of people are going to listen to this and be mad at me and kind of do all this stuff." But you kind of know that going into it. You kind of act accordingly and...

Peter McCormack: Well the ones who are mad at you though, they're mad at you before it's done. That's the point of this stuff. Also it's the difference between what is an interview and a debate, they are two entirely different things. Some people want to debate, but they don't understand an interview is about constructing a series of questions to take you through almost like a timeline of a discussion and it's constructed very differently from a debate. But the ones who didn't like it made that decision because you did the interview.

Anthony Pompliano: That was my whole point upfront was there was a bunch of people when I said the day before I was going to do it, all upset and freaking out stuff and I just responded to a couple of them and said, "Hey, just wait till you hear it and then if you don't like it, knock yourself out."

Then, "Yeah, all of your criticism is fair" and again, to some of those people's credit, after they listened to it, they actually were like, "You know what? This is actually pretty good. I actually thought it was valuable and I haven't heard Roger articulate ideas in this way, but whatever." To me, like that's a win and I'm sure there's some people who don't agree with that, but that's fine. You obviously can't please everybody and move on, right?

Peter McCormack: There's times I've thought about interviewing Roger again, and people will listen to this, "Oh, you're just turning it back into a shitcoin podcast" and the point is that I like interviewing a range of people. I like interviewing challenging people, I like interviewing different... I just interviewed Stephanie Kelton who wrote a book about MMT, and she is a proponent of MMT, and that's not a pro-Bitcoin idea.

A lot of people disagree with that, but I really enjoyed doing that. There are times I've thought of doing the Roger interview again. Well, I did a second one once, but sometimes I'm like, "I just can't be bothered to deal with the backlash at times" and I know I should. Most of the time I'm alright, but sometimes I'm just like, "I just can't be bothered to deal with the backlash."

But me as an interviewer, I don't know if you think like this, I try to explain to people sometimes whilst it's a Bitcoin podcast, it's not a podcast just to cheerlead Bitcoin. It's to provide content, entertainment, to challenge, to critique, it's to do a bunch of things. Sometimes you almost want to get on what is considered, I'm going to say "the villain" because the villains sometimes offer a different perspective.

Anthony Pompliano: Again, it goes back to... Some of my favourite questions to ask people are, "What would it take to change your mind on X? You just articulated why you believe X, what would it take to change your mind?" And it literally comes out and did they understand the opposite argument? I think you're right in that when you bring somebody on who has that opposite argument, you're exposing people to a more holistic picture.

That doesn't mean necessarily that they're going to change their mind, but they're now better informed to understand that the counter argument. We live in a society that's so divisive and it's just like, "Hey, let me go in my echo chamber and just kind of yell and scream, that I fear people actually don't have the intellectual rigor to analyze situations because they're not used to understanding the counterargument", and I think that's a crucial, crucial part of really making any kind of analysis or argument.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'll say you just... It doesn't matter what medium you're following content on. It can be YouTube, it can be the news on TV, it could be the radio, the journalists out there aren't just interviewing the good guys. Sometimes they're interviewing the villains, the bad guys, the enemies. Yeah, I think a lot of people would like to hear an interview right now with Ghislaine Maxwell I think.

She's a bad human being. She's most likely an enabler of pedophiles, possibly a pedophile herself, but I think some people would like to hear an interview with her. She's a bad human, but they want to hear her side. But it seems we cannot in this world of Bitcoin, and people don't want to hear from the bad dudes or the people they perceive as bad dudes.

Anthony Pompliano: Completely agree. What have you seen with the podcast during kind of this whole virus situation? Have downloads gone up, gone down, have the guests changed? What's been different for you?

Peter McCormack: Good question. They dropped at first, I had a big drop at the... I think it was... Yeah, I can tell you, I think it was like at the end of February, just when it started to kick off, when it just started to get a bit weird, where just levels I'd seen a year ago. But then, because I couldn't travel, I focused on the podcast, focused on the guests, and then I've seen growth again.

I think a couple of things went on. I think people weren't going to the gym, they weren't commuting and they'll sit and watch Netflix and just kind of just not consume podcasts as much and then I think what happened was life got a little bit back to normal and then I think we got some new people come in who are kind of interested in Bitcoin because all the crazy shit going on. Then also I've just focused on trying to get top guests on as well. Now I got back in growth, I've just done the numbers for last month and it's another record month. I don't know if I'm anywhere near you at the moment because you've been absolutely flying dude!

Anthony Pompliano: Yeah, well we also have different strategies, right? I make no secret about it. Mine is a volume game and I try to have as many conversations as I possibly can because to me the podcast... I think some people would take the approach of, I'm going to make sure that every single episode I do is a hit, meets kind of the standard in terms of the guest and the depth of the conversation, whatever.

I think my promise to the audience is a little bit different, which is I'm trying to learn as much as I possibly can and so my quality bar in terms of maybe audio or some other things may be a little bit lower than others, but it's because I'm replacing with volume.

Whereas if I record an episode and it takes two or three days to edit and get perfect, and if I wanted to do transcripts and show notes and kind of all that stuff, I just couldn't do the volume that I did, or I'd have to have a massive team to kind of crank all that out. I think there's other people who say, "Well I want that stuff" and they're only going to do one or two conversations per week. So ultimately you kind of find the audience that wants what you want, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course.

Anthony Pompliano: I think that's the beauty of podcast is that there's so many different styles, there's so many different show formats and people will...

Peter McCormack: When you rebranded, you started doing a little bit more... You started getting some guests on that weren't even anything to do... I'd say even finance, didn't you have a sommelier on?

Anthony Pompliano: Oh yeah, my friend Dustin! Yeah, but look, part of this is, again, I want to learn. Take Dustin, that's a good example. Dustin is a guy who literally got interested in wine as a server at Ruth's Chris Steak House 20 years ago or whatever, ends up going through the entire process, becomes a master sommelier, works at a number of the best restaurants in the world, and then becomes the wine director at 11 Madison, which was voted the number one restaurant in the world.

Then he left and he started a retail wine business called Verve Wine and now is working on a restaurant and kind of all these other things. But a lot of people are like, "Well what the hell could you learn from that guy if you're not interested in wine?" I think that there's kind of a couple of key pieces, which is, one, every single place that guy's worked for the last 15 years, there's been this obsession with perfection and everything has to be perfect all the time. There's this rigorous process and the way they think about the customer experience and all of that stuff.

Two is, he's a highly successful person. He literally has built a business, he's worked at some of the most successful businesses and so I think you can learn from that. The third thing is, he's just got a very unique view of the world. He's interested in finance and technology and all this stuff, but he operates in a world that many of us don't know and then you kind of overlay on top of all of it, he's one of 200 of the best people at his craft in the world. It's only about 200 master sommeliers in the world and so you look at that and you're just like, "Yeah, I want to talk to that guy."

I cheat because I know him pretty well and talk to him regularly, but when he comes on the podcast, my hope that people take away is not what's his favourite wine, it's all those other lessons. I won't have those people on every day, but to have one on every once in a while, I think provides value, and between you and I and the five people listening to this, I don't care if they don't like it. This is for me to learn and people just go to listen.

Peter McCormack: What's your big plan? Because I know exactly where I'm going. I know my strategy, I know what I want.

Anthony Pompliano: What's your strategy?

Peter McCormack: Well my end goal is just to be able to make any content I want any day and not give a fuck if anyone wants to listen. You know a bit like how Rogan does comedians, he does MMA, but then he'll just do random people, but MMA and comedians is his thing and he does the other stuff, and he just does what the hell he wants? I kind of want to get to that point. I want to interview rock stars, basically, people who play the kind of music I listen to. I've been interviewed a few porn stars recently, they're always entertaining. I want to do more of that. I want to do finance and corruption, really.

Every day, just make whatever show I want. Now I'm making enough money and not give a fuck about what anyone says on Twitter. That's the goal and that's what I'm trying to build towards and I'm gradually getting to... I do the Bitcoin and the finance and the corruption stuff through Bitcoin and Defiance. I'm doing a four-part documentary about a rock band called The Ghost Inside, which starts next week.

They had this crash, it's a cool story, actually. In 2015, they're screaming heavy metal band and they just released their album, and they broke out into the Billboard charts, which is unheard of for that type of band. Then a year later, they're in a fatal bus crash and it takes four years for them to get back to play the next concert because they're so fucked from it.

I'm doing a four-part thing about that. But I'm putting these little markers around of the things I want to do and then trying to get it to all kind of converge. But I know exactly where I'm going with it and what I want to do and Bitcoin is one of those things. But I'm wondering for you, what is your goal?

Anthony Pompliano: I don't know if I'd necessarily have a master plan. I think the kind of guiding light, if you will, is I'm just going to do the things that I enjoy and that I find fun. I joke all the time, but it's not really a joke where I just say, "Look, I create a lot of content and I enjoy doing it. If one day I wake up and it's not fun anymore, I will stop that day." I will not spend a single day doing this if I'm not enjoying it.

So there could be a day in the future where I wake up and I go, "I'm not writing the email anymore, I'm not recording another podcast, see you guys later. It was a great run, I'm out." Look, I hope that doesn't happen because I genuinely do enjoy this stuff. I've learned a lot, I've met some amazing people, but I think that's kind of my first rule is I don't want to spend a minute doing something I don't want to do. 

The second piece is, I think that the world is changing and that change, I think I am one of many people that are kind of living that, you're another, where the brand or the thing that people want to pay attention to is an individual, not an organization. If you kind of see that play out, is that starting companies? Of course. Is that creating content? Of course. Is that kind of doing other things that individuals used to do? I think so.

I just don't have some master plan. I just know that we're moving to a world where people want to subscribe to individuals and all the content stuff definitely helps with that and all the social media stuff helps with that. But ultimately, I don't look at this as a content game. I very much look at it as building a massive, massive audience and then when you have the audience, you can figure out what are the things they want, and how do you solve problems for them and do things like that.

I'm pretty transparent about the fact that there will be companies that we create in the future and things like that. I have no clue what those are today, but I'm not really worried about it until some idea comes around or somebody writes to me and says, "Hey, I really want you to do X," and I can't stop thinking about it and then we'll go do it.

Peter McCormack: All right, let's get into that weird world stuff because I think that's an interesting point because I think we could say we're all... Let's go five, six months back. We were all kind of on autopilot, prior to the pandemic, the world's ticking along and we're all doing our thing. We know there's some problems in the economy, the likes of yourself and Caitlin Long and Travis Kling and Raoul Pal have all been saying the same thing, but I always believed we'd just kind of be okay. Now we're at this moment in time, which is like history is being rewritten.

I told my son, I said, "Look, there's going to come a time when you have kids and you're going to tell them about what happened in 2020 and the pandemic of the world shut down because it's completely unprecedented in our time." But I kind of get this feeling we're not going to come out the end of this pandemic and it's back to normal. I think there's going to be a lot of expectations for a different kind of world. Maybe it will be, maybe it will be a normal world or maybe we'll go to a more authoritarian world, or maybe we'll go to a world of more liberty.

That, I don't know. But I feel like we're living through that moment now. I don't think it's going to be a smooth path, I think a lot of weird and scary shit is going to happen over the next few years and I've got a mixture of fear and excitement about it all. A bit more on the fear side, because revolutions are always bloody, but also a bit more excitement because hopefully we can dismantle... Not we, I mean hopefully some of the bullshit stuff around government and finance and central banking begins to be dismantled. But it's a weird time dude!

Anthony Pompliano: Yeah it really depends on your perspective and the thing I keep telling myself is we live in the safest, most prosperous time in human history, right? Generally, the trend is that that will continue. Are there short periods in certain geographic locations where that's not true or you kind of reverse course? Of course, but overall humanity continues to get better, continues to get safer, continues to get more prosperous. I think that that's one thing in the back of my head that always is just like, "Just chill out. The world's going to keep spinning."

At the same time, I do think that in these moments of uncertainty and chaos, there are things that happened in history that are not just in history books and what I mean by that is I always ask people like, "You've read about the American Revolution, right?" As an example. There was a bloody war and that set up America and kind of freedom and everyone knows the whole story. What makes you think that there won't be more American revolutions in the future? Not necessarily involving America, but that type of situation all around the world.

Again, it doesn't mean that they're all going to happen tomorrow all at the same time, and there's going to be mass chaos and it's going to look like The Purge, but it does mean that history repeats itself. Do you think currencies are going to fail in the future? Of course, we're going to have currencies, which ones, when, all that stuff is hard to tell. These are going to be violent conflict. Of course, where, with who, when, that's all up for debate, that's all up for a lot of kind of people smarter than I.

But I think that even with those things happening, we will continue to live in a better and better world and technology is a big piece of that. So it's one of these weird situations where I don't worry so much about kind of the big picture stuff. I'm aware of it, I obviously talk about it a lot, but when I go to sleep at night, I just worry about myself and when you do that, I think that is a very kind of sobering, calming effect of, "Am I good?"

If I'm good, all right, I'll keep figuring it out for me. I can't affect what a central bank does or what a country does or prevent a war from occurring. If those things happen, they happen, and I'll respond along with everybody else accordingly. But it ultimately, it's just... You're only in control of yourself, so just worry about that.

Peter McCormack: I think I've got a slightly different outlook, and I tell you why, because when I go to bed, I have to think about two little people as well. I've got a 16-year-old who's got two years of school left and he has a choice of kind of university, which I, for obvious reasons, don't want him to go to because he's not going to be a doctor, he's not going to be a lawyer, so he doesn't need to. He's got creative skills. I've got a daughter who's 10. I go to bed worrying about the world, whether they're going to be in, say, 5 to 10 years’ time.

Anthony Pompliano: But can you change it?

Peter McCormack: What kind of...

Anthony Pompliano: When I say I worry about myself, obviously I worry about myself, Polina, my brothers, my parents, there's a small group of people that I include in worry about me, but can you change the world in the sense of reverse course from any of that happening?

Peter McCormack: No, of course not. But there is always that point... I don't vote, I've just got no interest anymore, but people say, "Well, if you don't vote, you can't influence and democracy is based on the fact that enough people do go and vote, and you get that kind of consensus from it." If we look at something like global warming and I'm a huge hypocrite because I fly etc, but if we all do nothing, and if you believe global warming is caused by humans, then it will get a lot worse. If you think I can't individually make a difference.

So you have to do a little bit. I think the thing with kids is not that I think, "Can I change the world and make it a better place?" Obviously I can't, but are there little things I can do to make the part of the world I live in a better place? Maybe that's first starting with the boundaries of my house. Can I do things in that to make the world a better place for my children? Then outside that boundary around my friends and social communities and then, what are the things we can do better?

But I do worry and I do worry for what kind of world we're heading towards and what opportunity they will have and it's multiple things. It's not just... You've got to think about opportunities because of AI and automation, what kind of career should I be kind of nudging them towards, so they have opportunity? What kind of things should I be exposing to them in the world and telling them not to worry about? Maybe just tell them to avoid politics.

Anthony Pompliano: Yeah, but I think that this is a perfect example. So take global warming as a kind of a talking point. We don't know what's true and people get very sensitive about this, but I can show you studies on both sides of the argument. Also I can show you studies that are very compelling from very well respected people that would disprove the other argument. There's tons and tons of data, tons of studies and ultimately, I'm not a scientist.

My ability to sift through all of that and find "the truth" is little to none. What I do think is you can simply say is, "Well, if it's true or it's not, is my life going to change if I basically default to it's true, and I act accordingly", I don't think that, that's going to necessarily be a bad thing.

So I can basically act as if it's true, even if it's not my life, isn't going to materially change and if it happens to be true, then I kind of did my part. Now what is doing your part? I think that this is the kind of that maybe inaccurate thinking, but it's where people, because we're human, they want to feel like they have something to do. So one of the most popular things around global warming is, "I'm not going to fly." Okay, if you don't fly, do you think the plane's still going to fly? Of course it is! So unless you're going to get an enough drop in demand to remove 20% of flights for an airline company, you choosing to fly or not is not going to change anything.

People don't like that answer, because it feels like, "No, I can have an impact", where they were constantly told you can have an impact, you can do something. But I think that where you can have an impact is, it's less about on the micro level for a lot of these world problems. No, you actually can't change an election as an individual, you're part of a much bigger thing. You can't change global warming as an individual by just simply not flying or something like that. If you want to have an impact, I always tell people, stop being on the defensive side and go play offence.

So if you want to change global warming, go build a company where you can get access to lots of resources to actually have a material impact on a macro level. If you want to change politics, voting is something that you are one of millions that are going to do, so actually if you go vote or you don't, it's not going to change the election in many cases. But if you want to change the political thing, then go run or go work on a campaign.

There's almost this feeling of, you've got to be much more strategic and I think intelligent about the impact that you want to have. It's not, did I put things in a recycling bin or not? Because the dent that you can make in the problem is so small. If that's the thing that you really care about, then go actually work on it and the problem with that is one, you find out that if there's more friction now all of a sudden people don't really care!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, they don't care.

Anthony Pompliano: Yeah, like, "Okay, cool, I'll put it in the recycling bin. But if you want me to like go somewhere on Saturday and actually do something that really matters, I don't care about the problem that much." The second thing is, there's only so many problems you can focus on. So if you sit somebody down and you say, what are all the issues you care about? They'll have this laundry list of things, everything from social justice issues to environmental issues, to whatever.

Then you say, okay, but you can only work on one, what's the one issue? You find they actually probably do have the one thing they care about more than everything else. But it's like, all right, then go devote your time, energy and resources to that one thing and actually make an impact rather than trick yourself into having little to no impact on a whole bunch of things. So I think that the focus is a really a big piece of it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, look, I know you're right, I just think about it differently. Ourselves, we're a similar-ish age, we've lived through probably the best time ever, as you said, more prosperous, more opportunity, it's cheap to travel the world. I think I went to 18 countries last year. We've lived in such an amazing time where technology's incredible, it's relatively safe in the countries we're in. I just feel very lucky to do that, but I've got a feeling like definitely the next decade is not going to be as good. There is going to be the sharp economic impact. What was the GDP fall? Like 9%, 11% in the U.S? Annualized?

Anthony Pompliano: Yeah, the drop in GDP for Q2 is a negative -9.5%, which is 32.9% annualized. In terms of how we factor-

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so what was it? The great recession was 6.5%.

Anthony Pompliano: Yeah, but here's the thing, again, this is where you start getting into the nuances all of this stuff is. We had a 9.5% drop in actual Q2 GDP, yet billionaires made over half a trillion dollars in the same time.

Peter McCormack: Yeah of course, but we know why.

Anthony Pompliano: But here's the whole thing is, you can't stick a black and white label on the situation, because if we keep heading in the direction we're heading, it actually will be a fantastic decade for a lot of people, it will be a horrible decade for another big part of the population. So let's just say for the basis of this conversation, it's 50/50 right? 50% of people are going to do fantastic, because they're the ones that own investment assets, they know how money works, all that kind of stuff. The 50% that live paycheck to paycheck, having cash savings, no investment assets, they're going to suffer. You can't say, "Oh, it's going to be a bad decade."

Peter McCormack: I don't think that's going to happen.

Anthony Pompliano: What do you mean?

Peter McCormack: Well I don't think 50% of people are... I know you said for the sake of conversation, but I don't think 50% of people over the next decade are going to have a great time, 50% are going to... I think it's going to be an aggregate drop for most people. So we're going to have a lot of people out of work, a lot of people struggling to get by. We live in a country where, whatever you think of socialism or social safety nets, we have them. We have people who rely on welfare programs and more people are going to be relying on that, but the government's going to have less money and I think we're going to see a lot of social unrest. We're already seeing that, especially in the U.S, so I don't see it playing out like that, that's the point. I am prepared now for a tough decade coming in my mind.

Anthony Pompliano: I don't think that, that's different, that's just a natural progression of a society, which is... So in the United States, for example, 40% of government spending is on people over the age of 65, so kind of a lot of money is spent on an older population. Obviously, the baby boomer generation is going to continue to feed into that and there's many people who think by 2030, the amount of money spent on people over the age of 65 out of the government budget would be 50%. So kind of 25% increase over the next 10 years, that is just natural in terms of your demographics get older, you're a big part of your population.

Now with that said, you kind of have two options, is either one, if you want to continue to have the economic boom that let's say over the last 10, 12 years, but you just moved to a different country, right? So if you get really scared, you can move to a country where the economic prosperity shifts. People will debate what that country would be, but that's fine. Or what you can do is you can understand structurally how it works and if you understand structurally how it works, there are going to be people who do really well.

If you're right in the scenario that you described and I think that's the key piece is, this is not an access type situation, this is simply an education problem, which is, people don't understand what is happening and because they don't understand, they're going to get hurt. If they understand what's happening, they can make very easy decisions to actually benefit from the situation rather than be hurt by it. So if we can change that education, what percentage of the population is educated on this stuff. If you can increase that percentage, you can actually shift it from a negative situation to a positive situation. That's just very hard to do.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I get it. Perhaps I'm just seeing it differently from you because it's little things, like I said about the kids. I'm thinking, I remember I had this agency in London Pomp and we used to put out a... We're talking seven years ago. We put out a new job position and it'd be, say a junior and we get 80 to 90 applications for one role. It'll be people with degrees and a First and Second or Third and I'll tell you a funny story actually. One guy who got one of the jobs just came and knocked on the door and just said, "Look, I've seen the jobs up, can I just talk to you about it?" I was like, "Yeah, of course" and he got the job there.

Then another guy did an application as an infographic who got the job. But the point being is, we've got a lot of applications. We just have that thing in the UK, there was a role for a receptionist that had a thousand applications. There's going to be fewer jobs available, a lot more people go for those jobs. So I'm in that place I'm thinking, "Right, I've got kids leaving school in two years and in eight years, if they're not going into higher education, what are the skills they're going to need to have an opportunity to get an interesting job, a well compensated job, or even a job they just enjoy?" Because it is going to be competitive and the workplace is changing.

Anthony Pompliano: Yes and no, right? Which is, I think that there's going to be less of the same type of jobs, but there's going to be much more of the new type of jobs. What I mean by that is...

Peter McCormack: What are the new ones?

Anthony Pompliano: So think back, there's a point in time in the United States where 98% of people were farmers. Obviously that's not true anymore I don't know what the number is 2%, 5%, whatever it is now. But that's not like all the jobs went away, it's just that those people went and found different types of jobs. So if you look again, let's call it 20, 30 years out, what are the things that are going to be in high demand? Well, obviously anything around technology will be incredibly important.

So you can kind of just go through everything from design to computer science, to analytics, all of that type of stuff. Those jobs, if you go and you talk to companies, many of them will say, we can't find enough people and that's why they're paying them so much money and they're doing all this kind of stuff.

So I think that it's very vertical specific and unfortunately, kind of what you're highlighting is that the people who are out of work right now tend to be service, hospitality kind of lower socio-economic status, the people at the lowest end of a corporate ladder and those jobs are heavily commoditized because, there's a million other people who can do the same job and so you put out a receptionist and you get a thousand applications. If you put out, "I need a self driving autonomous vehicle engineer", you actually don't get any applications and you got to go try to find somebody at another company and recruit them to leave.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Anthony Pompliano: Now it's not fair to say, "Hey Peter, your 16 year old should learn how to be an autonomous driving engineer in the next two years." If he's not, one, interested in it, two, hasn't already spent time doing it, there's challenges here. But I do think what it hints at is, as a society we are going to have to retrain entire generations with new skills for those new jobs. It will happen, it's just how quickly does it happen and who are the people who get retrained versus the people who get left behind. Again, these transitions they just happen over and over again in history, sounds pretty bleak, but that's just what happens.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I guess you're... I won't even say an optimistic versus pessimistic, although I'm being pessimistic. I think you're just saying it's just the way it is, shit we'll figure out.

Anthony Pompliano: It's a thing where I generally believe humans solve the problems that they face.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Anthony Pompliano: That's part of the beauty of the human race. But also I think that we have a lot of recency bias, we always think that like, what we're going through is different than what's ever happened before and there are differences. For sure we've never had a global pandemic when the internet allowed information to kind of be disseminated so quickly and then have a federal government willing to step in and respond with quantitative easing.

So there are nuances in there that are different than any global pandemic in the past, but at the same time there's been plenty of civilizations that have dealt with some sort of massive public health crisis. So what we need to be smart about is learning from history, at the same time understanding what are the unique advantages we have today in a situation. I actually think one of the crazy things is, in past re-trainings of a society, we didn't have the internet, so it's a massive advantage for us.

Peter McCormack: Yep.

Anthony Pompliano: Now, are people going to be self starters? How do we deal with the cost structure for that? How do you get certification if you're not going to a university? There's things that need to be figured out in there, but I generally believe that entrepreneurs will figure that stuff out, they're the people who solve the problems in society. So we should encourage as many of those people to step up and do that as possible. Everything from just emotional support to capital to other things as well.

Peter McCormack: All right man, we need to do some Bitcoining before we finish this.

Anthony Pompliano: All right, what you got?

Peter McCormack: You started there, but I wanted to talk about Roger. No you tell me, what do you think is going on right now? Look, we had a 2017, we had a 2018, we went through some good times then and we have had this bear market that seems to go on forever. Now we seem to be back on the rise. The timing seems right in that we seem to be coming out of a bear market. Also, there's definite signals within the market for why people should be investing in scarce assets. I'll say that broadly, because I still believe gold has a role to play despite what other people think. But what do you make or what's going on?

Anthony Pompliano: Before I answer that and I forget, if you listen to my podcast, you should go subscribe to Peter's podcast What Bitcoin Did. He has awesome guests and he's awesome as you can tell, so please go subscribe and vice versa. If you listened to Peter's podcast, go subscribe to mine. That's the whole point of us doing a joint podcast?

Peter McCormack: No, once you subscribe to mine, you don't need Pomp's anymore.

Anthony Pompliano: Fair!

Peter McCormack: It's so funny, you know I troll the fuck out of you.

Anthony Pompliano: I love it!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but some people don't get it, they think it's real!

Anthony Pompliano: Well you know what you have to say to those people, "Oh, we're having fun you won't like it."

Peter McCormack: All right, can you tell me about Bitcoin? What do you make of everything going on now?

Anthony Pompliano: This was the easiest call in history and I say that half joking, but last year I wrote multiple times in May, June and July, about we are getting near the end of an economic cycle. We've been in this long 10 year bull market, all this stuff and at the end, central banks only have two tools to deal with that downturn. They can manipulate rates or they can print money and I said, "Look, I think that they're going to have to do that. At some point in the coming months, it is likely that it is going to coincide within a 90 day window of the Bitcoin halving."

So one of the things that I wrote was dropping rates, printing money and the halving all occurring around the same time will serve as rocket fuel for Bitcoin. Now there are plenty of people who are going to hear me say this and they're going to be like, "Well, how did you know a global pandemic was going to happen?" I didn't obviously, nobody knew. But that simply served as the catalyst to drive the end of the bull market. So there was already a bunch of issues. You had inverted yield curves, you had all the repo market gyrations and kind of structural issues, you had an all time record high of CEOs leaving their roles, there was a bunch of these issues or alarm bells going off all through the end of last year and into the beginning of this year.

So we were getting towards the end, it was just a matter of what was going to be the thing that accelerated that or caused it to happen. So now what we see is a world where gold, Bitcoin, real estate, are all going to do really well, because you simply can't print trillions of dollars of a currency and have no impact on that currency. So guess what, we're literally seeing the exact theoretical kind of impact of quantitative easing become reality. They printed trillions, the dollar got weakened and when the dollar weakens, asset prices all explode. It's not because all of a sudden the business is worth more money, it's literally because the dollar is being devalued, same with Bitcoin or gold.

There's not much that's changed from June 1st to July 31st with Bitcoin, right? The halving had already occurred, it's pretty much doing exactly what it's supposed to do. What's changing is, one, demand, so there is some change in demand, because of what's going on in the macro environment. But also the dollar is being devalued and that's where you get an explosion price. So I tend to think that that thesis from 2019 of they're going to continue to keep rates low, they're going to print money and halving occurred.

I think that 2021 is going to be absolute chaos in terms of a very high volatile, upward price movement of Bitcoin. But ultimately it doesn't matter, the U.S dollar value of Bitcoin doesn't matter. This is a game of accumulation and it's going to end up being what percent of the 21 million Bitcoin do you own? That's what I think of. I don't worry about the U.S dollar value. All I continue to think about is what is the number of Bitcoin I own divided by 21 million.

When you think of it that way, all of a sudden you start to realize, do I own more or less than I did yesterday? Or the day before? Or the week before? Or whatever. If you have that mentality, kind of a Bitcoin denominated mentality, I think you'll end up doing pretty well.

Peter McCormack: Well yeah, I never think that I've actually got particularly a large amount of Bitcoin. But if I looked at the gold market and my percentage of Bitcoin was in the gold market, I'll be like "Fucking hell, I'm good here!" So this is a bet on that.

Anthony Pompliano: Look, here's what I continue to tell people. Name to me a business that was analogue and got digitized and the digital version is smaller than the analogue version. It doesn't happen. It's because digitization brings all kinds of advantages, it's a market expanding technology. So there are people will debate what the size of the gold market is, but let's just use easy numbers. Let's say that it's $8 trillion, that puts Bitcoin at depending on how many are lost or stolen or whatever, $400,000, $450,000 U.S dollars today. Do you think that Bitcoin is only going to be the equivalent of the gold market? I don't.

Peter McCormack: No.

Anthony Pompliano: Right? It's better, it's going to capture more market. Now when does that happen? That might take 50 years to happen but when you think of it that way, you're like, "Okay!" Again, don't worry about the individual day to day price movements or any of that stuff, just look at the underlying structural kind of foundation and then look at how does technology evolve. This is a technology evolution story, in terms of market adoption and things and we've seen it play out over and over and over again. Airbnb, biggest hotel, doesn't own any hotels. Uber, biggest taxi company, but doesn't own any taxis. We've seen it happen so many times and I don't think it's different this time.

Peter McCormack: What's the equivalent of Bitcoin? The biggest bank that doesn't own any branches?

Anthony Pompliano: Yeah, or in the sense of if you think of Bitcoin as... One day I believe we will say Bitcoin is the largest currency in the world in terms of market cap and it will have no one controlling it. I fundamentally believe! My worry is, I won't be alive to see that day, because it may take that long.

Peter McCormack: That's annoying!

Anthony Pompliano: I'm in my early 30s, let's say that I live a great life, I've got 50 years. Is Bitcoin going to end up kind of ascending to the global reserve currency status in the next 50 years? Will we see it eclipse a 80-$90 trillion market cap? I don't know. But if you said to me, between now and the rest of human future potential or future years? Absolutely! No question in my mind that's going to happen. It's just, will it happen in my lifetime or not? So by the way, if it doesn't happen in my lifetime, still being along for the ride is going to end up being pretty good I think.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because we're along for half the lifetime of getting there. I'm pretty sure with my 10 year thesis, in 10 years time I'm going to be very happy with my investments. I think my kids are going to be even happier and want me to die, because they're going to have all my Bitcoin. But I think we're going to be happy. All right, man. Well, listen, look, what will it take to change your mind? You said this at the start, what is it going to take to change your mind? Are you following the DeFi stuff, or are you like, "Fuck that"?

Anthony Pompliano: All right, so hold on. We need to settle this for a second. I'm not against DeFi at all. I actually think it's going to be super, super valuable. Again, it's like when Roger and I talk about a digital decentralized currency ending up being adopted globally. Super important thing, it's going to happen. That's "the finish line" or the goal or milestone or whatever. It's just, how do we get there? That's how I feel about the DeFi stuff and I think part of my issue with how it's being categorized right now is the Ethereum community thinks that they have a monopoly on that terminology.

They're using DeFi as a synonym for Ethereum and it's not. It's why I say things like Bitcoin is the most valuable DeFi application and they all freak out, "What do you mean by..." Whatever. Decentralized finance, the core of finance is money and the most decentralized, most valuable application that is decentralized is Bitcoin. So it's intellectually dishonest when they say, "No, it's not" and ultimately, what they're saying is that they're upset, that they don't want DeFi to actually be successful anywhere else, other than Ethereum.

So we've made plenty of investments in companies that are building on top of Ethereum, that support Ether, that use some version of a decentralized application or do something. So again, don't listen to what I say, just watch what we do with the money. And we're making investments, so we obviously think that there's value there. But I'm not convinced that DeFi is an Ethereum only thing.

Obviously Bitcoin proves that and so what you end up getting is you end up getting this religiousness about DeFi that completely ignores reality, and also is intellectually dishonest when talking about it. So what I think is going to end up happening is that is going to be detrimental to that entire space. What I hope occurs is that there's enough people who are rational and who understand the structural pieces and that it ends up not actually mattering. But literally, I tweeted the other day and said, "Bitcoin is the most valuable DeFi application," and literally it was a bunch of ETH trolls just being like, "You're an idiot. You don't know what you're talking about." Do you understand what the definition of decentralized finance is?

Peter McCormack: Are you triggering Bitcoiners and ETH heads at the same time now?

Anthony Pompliano: No, because I think that Bitcoin people have this belief that if something came along that had more market adoption and had better core aspects to it than Bitcoin, they want to see a digital currency succeed. So I don't think actually that Bitcoiners for the most part are married to the idea of Bitcoin or nothing. I just think that they're very, very convinced that Bitcoin is the solution and by the way, the market has validated that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay.

Anthony Pompliano: On the DeFi side, many of those people, I do not believe actually are DeFi or bust. I think that they're Ethereum or bust, and I think that's very dangerous.

Peter McCormack: So what would it take to change your mind that Bitcoin is the only king in town?

Anthony Pompliano: I think that there's three key things. So one, is a very serious self-inflicted wound in terms of some sort of bug or something introduced in the development process of Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: No, I'm the other way. I'm saying, what would it take to change your mind that Bitcoin is the only thing you should focus on and put money into?

Anthony Pompliano: Meaning what would it take to convince me to do something else?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, just forget all these shitcoins...

Anthony Pompliano: Oh you're saying, what would it take to convince me that Bitcoin is only thing worth putting money into?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Anthony Pompliano: Look, that's what basically what we do. We hold no tokens from an investment standpoint, other than Bitcoin. The actual investments that we make are Bitcoin. I own nothing other than Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: I thought you were putting money into DeFi stuff. Are you putting into companies building on it?

Anthony Pompliano: Into companies.

Peter McCormack: Okay, yeah.

Anthony Pompliano: Yeah, into companies. So that's my whole thesis is Bitcoin will be the next global reserve currency. I don't know how long it takes, but that's going to happen and then actually the value that accrues is into the infrastructure. So it goes back to the same example of, if you invested in the seed round of Kraken or Coinbase, or any of these companies and bought Bitcoin on the same day, the equity investment actually has outperformed just holding Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack:        Interesting.

Anthony Pompliano:     So when you look at it from that standpoint, it's like, okay, hold on a second here. Now you can invest in 10 early-stage startups and 9 go to zero, and you've got to make sure you're in the one that actually does that. So there's some nuance to it. But it's just a belief that infrastructure is always a very valuable, profitable strategy and then Bitcoin is going to be more valuable in the future than it is today.

That's my belief. So are other things going to go up? Of course. Take Ethereum for example or Ether, everyone's yelling and screaming about how it's going up in value so much. Well yeah, of course, because Bitcoin is going to lead in terms of Bitcoin halving and the money printing and all this stuff will move, and then the...

Peter McCormack: Moves the whole market?

Anthony Pompliano: Well, the smaller market cap assets will just move more in US dollar terms. But I think that what it shows is those people are looking at this from an investment return perspective. I think that the Bitcoin community, like you said, they're not going to sell. A number of Bitcoins that have not moved in over a year is 64%, 65%. It's the highest it has ever been. They're not going to sell, so it doesn't matter what the percentage change is if you're not going to sell, because ultimately, what you're doing is you're denominating how many Bitcoin do I have.

I don't hear a lot of people in other assets in the crypto world talking like that. So what ultimately ends up occurring here, and I think it's very important is when you look at a market, when things go down, the blue chip, large market cap assets move down the least, and all the small caps, they fall really fast. When you then go into a bull market, the large caps, they move the least, and the small caps explode up in value. It's a market cap thing and I think that's what we're seeing in crypto. So if you said to me, am I surprised that whether... I'm not even going to name some of the other ones, but there's plenty of them that are exploding.

Of course, because if I took a million dollars and I put it in that versus a million dollars in Bitcoin, of course I'm going to move the market much more of the small cap asset, because it's simply got a smaller market cap and I think that's what we're seeing play out. Again, not a bad thing, it's just that if you're a student of history, you understand how markets work, not surprising.

Peter McCormack: I think we'll get a new all-time high this year.

Anthony Pompliano: I could see that. I don't know if it's going to happen. Have you said anything around price other than all-time high by the end of the year?

Peter McCormack: No, because it's so difficult. I was having this conversation with my son yesterday. I said, "Look, there's people who think the price can go to $30,000, $50,000, even $100,000."

Peter McCormack: He was like, "Would you sell some?"

Peter McCormack: I said, "Well, that's a really tough thing because you could sell it $50,000 and it goes to $100,000." So I just don't sell. A bit like you said, "What's your percentage?" I just know I need to have as much of it as I need, and then I'll sell it when I have to sell it and that's what I'll do because I have to sell at that point. Until then, I won't. But I think we're going to a new all-time high this year. But I think if it happens, I think it probably happens before the election, which I know sounds soon. But to be honest, based on the previous time we went from 12k to 20k, it was pretty easy.

But I think it happens before the US election because I think the stock market has to stay at a high value for Donald Trump, which means... They're negotiating another stimulus package, so I just think there's going to be a lot more money, trillions more printed before the US election and then I think we'll get a new all-time high before the election because of that and I think people are very aware now. I think the gold price has been very helpful because I've been telling people about the Bitcoin price, they don't care.

Tell them about the gold price, they understand, and then you talk to them about Bitcoin being digital gold. In terms of where it can go, I've got no idea. I don't know what happens to liquidity. So say if Bitcoin is at 100k and somebody thinks" Shit, I've got one Bitcoin", I'm at 100k, and they might want to sell it. I don't know if that people have that kind of psychological reaction to it, and therefore you've got a lot of selling pressure. I don't understand all that stuff. All I do think is I think we'll get a new all-time high before the election. I could be wrong and I think next year is going to be fucking crazy. What about you?

Anthony Pompliano: So the short term stuff's much harder, obviously. The only number that I've said is I do think we'll hit a $100,000 US exchange price or value by the end of 2021. So December 31st 2021, we'll have hit £100,000. Will we still be above it, I have no clue, but that will have happened beforehand. I definitely can see a world where the current administration essentially, and people hate when I describe this way, buys votes by continuing to pump the equity markets.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Anthony Pompliano: Because it's not really pumping the economy. It's the easiest thing they can do, it's the best campaign that they can do, is if you're sitting there and 50% plus of the country says, "I'm getting rich, I like this guy. I don't care about all the other dumb things or whatever everyone's complaining about, my portfolio keeps going up and so this guy is good for me." I think there's a lot of people who disagree with that. They're not happy that people think that way, but at the same time, I think generally people are very self-centred and they say, "Who's going to do the best for me?"

The crazy part of all of that is there's a scenario, again, I'm not necessarily convinced that this is the scenario, but one of the possibilities is they absolutely pump the asset prices going into the election, and as soon as the re-election happens, they basically take their foot off the gas and there's some sort of crash in asset prices. Possible, but who knows what's going to happen?

I think that the beauty here is the one thing we know for sure is that they are only making 900 Bitcoin a day right now, and six months ago they were making 1,800. So demand just stays the same, naturally the price has to go up. If demand increases, the US dollar price has got to go up and if they're going to print money, I think demand's going to continue to increase.

Peter McCormack: Who wins the election?

Anthony Pompliano: I think Trump wins in a landslide.

Peter McCormack: Really?

Anthony Pompliano: Oh yeah, I don't think it's close. Two reasons, if you turn on American television right now, nobody's talking about anything but Trump. It's the exact same thing that he did before. He's just dominating headlines. The second thing is I think that the current democratic nominee is one of the worst people they could have put forward.

Peter McCormack: Oh, he's terrible. You know I've got half a Bitcoin on him losing?

Anthony Pompliano: On Trump losing?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Anthony Pompliano: What's your argument for why he loses?

Peter McCormack: So I've got it at about threefold. I think the timing of the pandemic second wave is terrible for him, I think that's really bad for him. I assumed, I thought the Democratic Party would replace Biden. I just assumed they would, because it's so obvious he's not the right candidate for the job. As everyone has pointed out, he can barely talk sometimes. He's obviously got cognitive issues, so I assumed they'd replaced them.

I thought Cuomo would get it and it's not that I'm a fan of that guy, that's the other thing I have to say to people, I'm not a fan of the Democratic Party. I thought Trump was losing, that's why I'm betting on Trump losing it. So I thought it would be mainly down to a better candidate coming in, Trump having his meltdown and basically the pandemic being very bad timing. I'm not as confident as I was because it feels like Biden's going to get the nod, but I just assumed they would be replacing him.

Anthony Pompliano: I completely agree. Imagine a debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. You'd have to get out the crime scene tape! By the way, that's not necessarily me saying that he's even going to say anything of substance, he'll just bully the hell out of him and he understands how to get the soundbite. People, I think are confused in the debates or things, they think that it's about who has the better policy.

Peter McCormack: It's not.

Anthony Pompliano: That's not what it's about.

Peter McCormack: No.

Anthony Pompliano: It's basically who can literally overpower the other person and can get the soundbite and can make people laugh and be likable, all this kind of stuff. It's absolutely crazy, but that's just the world we live in.

Peter McCormack: I think there's another thing that doesn't work in Trump's favour and I'm not into this whole election manipulation and voter fraud. From what I looked at it when I did my Mnuchin work, there are things going on both sides. I just think people being able or choosing to vote from home or having to vote from home because of the pandemic, that really suits the Democratic Party over the Republican Party.

From everything I've seen, Republicans want to get out and vote in person, and Democrats, you're going to see a higher voter turnout on mail-in votes with Democrats and that's why I think Trump's scared of that. So that's another thing I could throw in there, but it's fascinating.

Anthony Pompliano: I actually think that you're right in the sense of, yes, getting more democratic votes is bad for Trump. I think that I would argue more people will not vote. So here's one of the things, I think the argument is that if you have mail-in voting, more people will vote. I actually think it's the opposite, which is although we all think it's easier to get the piece of paper, fill it out, mail it in, I think there's a lot of people who just want to tell me where to go.

Peter McCormack: Oh no, I'm with you on that. But I think, whilst you might get a lower turnout, you'll get a bigger drop off Republican voters.

Anthony Pompliano: If there's a lower turnout?

Peter McCormack: If it's mail-in voting, it's worse for the Republicans, because Democrats are more likely to still use the mail-in vote.

Anthony Pompliano: Yes, completely agree. So there's a lower voter turnout, but it's skewed in one way. But here's the crazy part is Biden hasn't chosen a VP yet.

Peter McCormack: I know.

Anthony Pompliano: So what I'm wondering is, I don't think it's over yet in terms of their ability to switch him out or to make him the VP. I think Cuomo would be a natural potential person for them to put in. I think that he's got a very, very big problem on his hands though, in terms of there are tens of thousands of people that died in New York because of his decision to send COVID patients back into the nursing homes and I think that the Republican Party is sitting on that. They have not hammered him on it yet and I think that if he gets put forward, they're going to absolutely eviscerate him and say, "There's blood on your hands," and go after him.

The sad part is, why do I think that? Because I think that we haven't seen the mud throwing yet and this is going to get really nasty and when it gets nasty, there's going to be all kinds of accusations. You haven't seen the Bill Clinton, Epstein stuff yet. All of this is just waiting out there. You can see the ingredients, and starting in September, it's going to be game on. They're going to throw everything at the wall, both parties, it's going to be nasty and then we'll get to the line.

Peter McCormack: Well I do hope the planes are flying because I want to be in the US for the election. I want to be there for a few days, I think it's going to be fascinating to watch. I've got a bet, but in terms of if I wasn't having a bet, I couldn't honestly tell you who I would prefer. I'm not fan of either, I naturally feel like I swing Republican just because I like Republican states a lot. When I've been to places like Texas, or I went up to Wyoming, I just really liked it. I felt really at home in those kinds of . But I don't know dude, it will be what it will be.

Anthony Pompliano: I think they're all the same. I literally think they're all the same. What's the difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump?

Peter McCormack: Well it's not in terms of him. I think the politicians are all the same, but in terms of Republican ideals, it's a little bit more like, "Leave me the fuck alone, let me get on with work. That's what I'm going to do."

Anthony Pompliano: Okay, so I agree that idealistically, that is what is happening, but a perfect example is right now we're looking at a situation where the Republicans and Democrats both want to print trillions of dollars in the next stimulus package.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm thinking more like if you ask me, do you want to go live in Portland, Oregon? Or do you want to go and live in, I don't know...

Anthony Pompliano: Austin, Texas.

Peter McCormack: Well Austin has got the same problems. Dallas, Texas, I'll go to Dallas right now. But maybe like Jackson Hole.

Anthony Pompliano: Yeah?

Peter McCormack: I would not want to go to any of these places where these crazy people are losing their shit and rioting every day at the moment, it's a real turn off. I like Portland, I've had a great time in Portland, I like Austin a lot, but I just don't want to be around these places.

Anthony Pompliano: It's surreal in the sense of being a white dude who was born in America, grew up here, was in the army, the whole thing, and then you see the videos. I told Polina at one point, it's almost like you can't believe that that is America. You used to see those videos, I think I saw one from Portland and I'm not an expert by any means on what's happening there, so no judgment in that sense, but what they showed in the video, if it was real and all those things, you would expect to see in a war torn country somewhere else, that didn't have democracy and all this crazy stuff and you're just like, "Man, what is going on?"

Peter McCormack: Well at least in those places, you think you would understand what they want or what they're fighting about. I've got no idea what the hell they want there! Anyway listen, I've got to go and I've got to go make dinner for these kids.

Anthony Pompliano: All right, well tell them I say hello.

Peter McCormack: I will.

Anthony Pompliano:     We should do an episode with your kids.

Peter McCormack: I did a little one on YouTube once. My son, the other day asked to buy some Bitcoin.

Anthony Pompliano: Really?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because he's 16, he's been working, he's earning a bit of money and I was like, "No, mate. You don't need to do that, you get all my Bitcoin." But yeah, he's interested. They understand a few things, they know who Satoshi is, they know there's 21 million, they're interested dude. But they need some dinner!

Anthony Pompliano: That's pretty good that they know all that. All right, my friend, if you listen to The Pomp Podcast, go subscribe to What Bitcoin Did. If you listened to What Bitcoin Did, go subscribe to The Pomp Podcast. Peter's a legend, thanks for having me man!

Peter McCormack: Pomp, always good to see you man. Hopefully I'll see you in New York at some point soon, and say hello to that lovely wife of yours man. Yeah, go listen to Pomp, but just if you don't want to listen to Pomp, just stick with mine because mine's a bit better.

Anthony Pompliano: See you, guys!

Peter McCormack: See you later bro, take care!