In this inspiring Speak Up conversation, Anthony Pompliano shares key lessons from his new book: How To Live An Extraordinary Life. He and Anthony Scaramucci dive into how to take control of your life with agency, optimism, and a winning approach to Bitcoin and crypto. The multifaceted Pomp, an entrepreneur, CEO, and founder of Professional Capital Management, explains how mindset is essential in building wealth, breaking negative cycles, and embracing new opportunities. In addition, they discuss how Bitcoin plays a key role in long-term financial security and why it’s central to a resilient future.
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Anthony Pompliano 0:00
Just because you grew up in a certain environment, just because you were surrounded by certain people, you can still love your family, but understand that you want a different path, or, you know, you want to be the one to break the cycle. You do have agency. You can, you know, change your life. You can, especially in America, where economic and social mobility is possible, really, you know, kind of end up on the right side of this system, you just got to kind of act.
Anthony Scaramucci 0:31
Welcome to speak up. It’s your favorite host, Anthony Scaramucci, but I have your favorite guest on, okay, back by popular demand, and now a best selling author on top of everything else, is Anthony Pompliano, also known as the pomp Pomp is the founder and CEO of professional Capital Management, entrepreneur, investor, Blockchain explainer, Blockchain investor, venture capitalist, and the title of The new book is how to live an extraordinary life. And pop. First of all, I love the cover, but secondarily, I read the book. It was a very quick read, by the way. So for those of you that are listening, the book is an easy read, lots of great information, lots of lessons. And pop, there’s a lot of different things I love about the book, but I one of these I love the most. You can start anywhere in the book and go anywhere in the book. And so I think you wrote a book for our time, which is basically, people have limited attention spans, as we both know, and you’re like, how am I going to get people content that they’re going to digest quickly? And that’s this book. So I want to start there, if you don’t mind, and then we’re going to go into some other things. Why this book? Why now? And let’s start there.
Anthony Pompliano 1:48
Well, I’ll tell you the true story. Why I wrote the book. Everyone else you know, I tell them I started writing the letters for my kids. One turned into two, turned into four, turned into eight. Next thing you know, I was like, I should publish this as a book. But obviously the reason why I wrote the book is because my wife wrote a best selling book, and I need to sell just one more copy than her. So anybody who you know feels bad for me should go buy the book so I can accomplish my mission of selling one more than Paulina. Sold
Anthony Scaramucci 2:14
a lot of books. She also wrote a great book, and I interviewed Paulina. I
Anthony Pompliano 2:18
know that’s why I’m on here, is because you helped her. So now you got to help me, yeah,
Anthony Scaramucci 2:21
but no, I don’t need to help you, Papa. You’re, you’re doing a great job selling these books. You know, my my staff gets mad at me when I say, I buy my own books. But that is partially true. Let’s put it that way. But no, I did sell some books as well. So there, there are basically 65 letters in here, and you’re saying that they’re letters to your children. But I felt like it was a letter to me, and so I felt like I was reading the book, and said, Okay, this is something I need to to know. And behind you are two busts of Warren Buffett and the reincarnation of Benjamin Franklin, Charlie Munger. So a lot of this is Ben Franklin esque, and so, have you read his autobiography? Ben Franklin’s autobiography? Where does a 36 year old guy get this depth perception? Because I there’s no way I could have written this book when I was 36 I mean, I’m I’m probably closer to writing this book as I turn on my way to 70. But this is a book that an older soul has written. So tell me a little bit about that.
Anthony Pompliano 3:24
Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of insights or learnings in life come from different experiences. And you know, whether it was intentional or not, I’ve had the good fortune of having many different experiences, everything from, you know, playing sports in college, serving in the military, building companies, investing in companies, traveling, having a lot of different relationships, meeting a lot of people, interviewing a lot of people, you just kind of pick up, you know, different lessons. And one of the things I say in the book in the beginning is, you know, when I was growing up, I for whatever reason I ever thought I was going to live past the age of 35 and I think it was just I kind of lived, you know, fast life. I was a young guy who was having a lot of fun, and I just felt like I’d cram a lot of stuff into the beginning of my life. But also I began to realize that kind of no idea is new. And so if you just listen, you get to meet all these great people. Just listen to what they say and write some of it down. And so many of the letters, almost all of the letters, came from I have an apple note on my phone, where, when I would learn something, I would just write it down. And so over time, it became obvious, you know, Hey, how did I learn this thing? How do I apply to my life? And, you know, hopefully I can pass it on to my kids or other people, but I really just look at myself as kind of a vessel for that idea who, you know, somebody told me. And so how fortunate Am I to be able to go tell
Anthony Scaramucci 4:42
somebody else you see? So it’s, it’s, you know, it it’s interesting. When I read the book, I was thinking about what I say to my kids, and so there’s only two things that I can say to my kids, and I have five of them. I think you’ve met some of them. No. One, and this is on page 95 of your book. I dog eared it because I think it’s so seminal, is that you have to share in the success of your friends, and that you want to be the first call. So if someone gets into Harvard and after they get done calling their mom, you want to be that second call, or if they’ve made a billion dollars on a recent IPO, or they’ve they’ve done something, they scored a Nobel Prize. I don’t know what it is. Whatever it is, I tell my my kids, you want to share the successes of your friends, and you want to be there for them in good times and bad. It’s hard for people, sometimes, you know, they there’s an envy gene somewhere in our personalities, you know, it’s like, maybe it’s primordial. You know, we saw somebody with a bigger cave. We want to go over there, hit him in heaven, a rock, and take the cave, right? And so it could be primordial. But if you can transcend that, you can be very, very happy. You write that on page 95 The other thing I tell my kids, I can’t tell you what to do, and I certainly don’t want to impose what I like doing on you, but you better find something you like doing and just go do that. You know that that’s the key, because then you’re never working a day in your life. And so you got both those things. Where did you learn that from? Is that something that you knew intuitively, or is that something that your mom taught, told you, or your dad, or where’d you, where’d you get that? No, I
Anthony Pompliano 6:23
think in terms of, you know, my dad used to say some version of, like, look, I don’t care what you do, just like, make sure you work hard at it. And, you know, tangential to that, I remember my father always telling me, and all my brothers, you know, you can literally do anything you want in the world. Kind of this idea of, I recently saw somebody, somebody tweeted and said, I recently learned you can just do things in life, like you just decide to do it and you just go do it. And so I think that that is, you know, an important lesson. But, you know, somebody recently was interviewing me, and they asked me, what is the common theme throughout the book? And it made me think, you know, I didn’t kind of set out with a master plan of all the different letters, but the thing that I think is shared across the mall is just, we have agency, and I think we live in a world where we’re constantly being told the world is acting upon you. You know, there’s this, like, victim kind of mindset people you know, are always thinking about, woe is me, or I can’t, you know, control my own life. And a lot of the letters just feed back into this idea that, like you do, have agency. You can, you know, change your life. You can, especially in America, where economic and social mobility is possible, really, you know, kind of end up on the right side of this system. You just got to kind of act. And so if a couple people take that away from the book, that would be a, you know, a great success, in my opinion,
Anthony Scaramucci 7:41
Tom, you’re an optimist. You’re a congenital optimist, though I feel like you were born optimistic. What do you? What do you and if I’m wrong, tell me I’m wrong. But what do you say to somebody who I don’t know? Maybe they grew up in a family where everybody in the family sees the glass half empty. And so they’re walking around in life where the glass is half empty to them, because maybe they got born into a family like that, or maybe they’re genetically predisposed to that. You know, sometimes pessimism is also a survival mechanism, right? People worry about what, what could happen, and they try to prevent it from happening. Um, but you, you don’t. I correct me if I’m wrong, but I read your book. I interact with you. I see a congenital optimist. But what do you say to somebody that isn’t
Anthony Pompliano 8:31
break the cycle? You know? It reminds me of the story. There’s a alcoholic father, and he has two kids, one’s an alcoholic and one’s not. And they go to the alcoholic son, they say, why are you an alcoholic? And he says, because my father was and then they go, the second son who doesn’t drink, and they say, why don’t you drink? And he says, because my father was an alcoholic. And so, you know, just because you grew up in a certain environment, just because you were surrounded by certain people, you can still love your family, but understand that you want a different path, or, you know, you want to be the one to break the cycle. And that’s true. I think, of pessimism, of poverty, of many things. But, you know, frankly, it takes somebody who’s courageous, it takes somebody who is resilient, and it takes somebody who, you know, is okay, trying to do things when the people they care about most probably are going to give them a hard time, make fun of them, you know, tell them that they’re being stupid or unrealistic. And so that’s why it’s so rare, right? I mean, how hard is it to, you know, be successful in life and then do it while the people you care about, you know, are basically teasing you or taunting you. It’s very, very difficult. And so people who are in that situation, I don’t envy, but I do think that, you know, it is possible. It just takes somebody with the the courage to do it. So
Anthony Scaramucci 9:37
So pump embedded in all that, though, is being able to take risk on the future, right? So, you know, I’m 24 years older than you, and so I’m on I’m supposed to be this old fuddy duddy. You look 15 years younger than me. Well, there’s a lot of Botox on my four. Red and pop. You could use a little bit of my, my hair tonic, which we’ll talk about offline, okay, I could, I could straighten that whole thing that’s going on. You know, you don’t want a five head pump in life. Just remember that. Okay, you want to keep it in a four. Okay, just remember that. Okay, we’ll talk about it offline, but, but, yeah, I got a lot of tricks that way pump. You know that, but, but my point is, is that you’re there’s a young man who sees the world as it could be, and you’re willing to make investments towards that end. Okay, you got the Bitcoin, I don’t know, five, six years before I did, um, what do you say to somebody that has a hard time with that? What do you say to somebody that is resistant to change or is resistant to investment? Thematic change sees Apple, uses Apple every day, but can’t bring themselves to buy Apple because it’s a tech stock. They use Microsoft’s operating system every day at the office, but yet they don’t own any of it in their personal account, or they see something like Bitcoin, this incredible technology that you and I both think are changing the world on its way to changing the world, and they say, oh, you know, it’s worthless. It’s useless. What do you say? How do you break them from that? Well, I think
Anthony Pompliano 11:15
one is, you don’t try to convince anyone of anything they don’t want to do, right? You kind of get the results that you deserve. And so if you take action and you’re right, you’ll be rewarded. If you don’t take action and you’re wrong, then you’ll get punished. And that’s kind of how markets work in general. But also I think that the people who end up, in my opinion, being most successful, investing, building and creating, kind of their own version of what their extraordinary life is, are people who they never get mentally stuck in hardened concrete. They’re constantly changing their mind. They’re constantly looking for more information. They’re constantly curious. And so, you know, we’re having a conversation in the office recently where I explained to someone, hey, I read something in the news. I thought it was true for years. Somebody told me that it wasn’t. And so I went on this, like fact finding mission. I went and I tried to read as much of the source material as I could, and I was blown away by what I read. And you know, what ended up happening is the news was partially right, what the person that told me was partially right, but it forced me to go and learn for myself. And so I think that, you know, there’s kind of two different types of people in the world. There’s a famous chess player, Josh, I think his name is Wade sick, who is thought to be kind of the next Bobby Fisher, right? Yep. And he wrote this great book called The Art of Learning. And in the book, he talks about something called entity intelligence, and iterative intelligence. The idea of entity intelligence is basically your parents tell you you’re winning chess games because you’re smart, you’re winning chess games because you are good at chess. You’re winning chess games because you are a winner. But the problem is that when you lose, you then say to yourself, I’m a loser. I’m dumb, right? I’m not good at chess. And so he says, those people end up not going very far in life, because when they’re met with adversity, they they cave instead. The idea of iterative intelligence is when you’re winning a chess game, your parents tell you you’re winning because you worked hard. You’re winning because you put the effort in. You’re winning because you practiced and you positioned yourself correctly and you did all this. So when you come to a loss, what you say to yourself is not I’m dumb. You say, I need to work harder, I need to put more effort in, I need to be better prepared next time. And I think that in life, you come to the iterative intelligence one of two ways. It’s kind of nature versus nurture. You either kind of born that way and you happen to be in the right environment all that kind of stuff, or you got to work really, really hard to learn that. And both can work. You just kind of kind of figure out, like, do I have the entity intelligence, or do I have the iterative intelligence? If I don’t have iterative intelligence, I gotta, I gotta start working that way, right? And the beauty is that with the internet and, you know, kind of all the access we have to information and people today, you can do that. But it goes back to this idea of agency. You know, how many people really think through, do I want to change anything about my life? Do I want to improve anything about my life, and then have the discipline to go and act, not very many people. And so I think that, you know, it’s why we as a society celebrate or kind of look for these stories where people have had extreme economic and social mobility, or, you know, radical change with health transformations, etc, is because it’s so rare and a lot of people want to have that they just don’t want to do the work to to get there. Alright,
Anthony Scaramucci 14:23
we’re going to open it up to questions here in a second, but I’ve got three quick ones for you, and so you can answer these in rapid fire. Okay, you ready? Let’s do it Fed rate cuts. Do you? Do you? How many you see coming?
Anthony Pompliano 14:37
I think the consensus is two more through the end of the year, 100 basis points total. So 50 is already done. 25 more, twice.
Anthony Scaramucci 14:47
That’s it for the cycle. 100 basis points for the whole cycle. No,
Anthony Pompliano 14:50
no. Just through the end of this year, I don’t know, somewhere probably end up between like two and a half and three and a half percent and. The overnight rates would
Anthony Scaramucci 15:01
be between two and a half and 3% which implies another 225 basis points of cuts, something like that, probably under it to 200 Okay, all right, I’m in your camp on that. Okay. Recession coming.
Anthony Pompliano 15:14
No recessions have been outlawed. We had a recession, and they refused to acknowledge it. And so no matter how many recessions we have in the future, they’re just going to print money suppress interest rates, and a random fake nonprofit is going to determine whether it’s actually called a recession or not. So I’m out on recessions for the foreseeable future.
Anthony Scaramucci 15:35
Okay, so we have a tendency to use the money to sugarcoat is what you’re saying, Yeah, which speaks to Bitcoin. Let me be the bear for a second. Okay? And obviously I’m bold, but let me be the devil’s advocate. I bought my bitcoin in November of 2021 pumps, and I paid $67,000 for it. It’s three years later, and it’s at 63,000 so am I a bear? Am I feeling bad about myself or Well, I, of course, I didn’t buy my bitcoin then. So I’m actually feeling good about myself, but I want to be devil’s advocate. I purchased it at the high in 21 so how should I be feeling about Bitcoin? I think there’s
Anthony Pompliano 16:21
a couple of things. One is, if you made one lump sized purchase, you know, if you want to see the kind of optimistic perspective, Bitcoin stored value for you better than the US dollar did, right the dollar has been eroded more than even bitcoins price over those years. Two, I think, is if you dollar cost averaged into Bitcoin, and you started buying right at the top of the last bull market, you dollar cost average all the way through the bear market, till today, you’re up significantly. And so, you know that lump sized purchase versus $1 cost average obviously has different results. But more importantly is, you know, I think of Bitcoin as a savings account, right? I you know, one of the things I tell people now is, like you got a checking account and a savings account. I think Bitcoin is your savings account. I think that these stable coins, or digital dollars, are gonna be your checking account. You’re gonna wanna spend the dollars, gonna wanna save the Bitcoin. And so sure, it’s nice when Bitcoin goes up in dollar terms, but I very much think of Bitcoin today as 20 years from now, will it be at least worth what it is today in purchasing power terms, if not more. And if it accomplishes that, it’d probably be one of the only assets that will do that. There’s even been periods over the last five years where gold has lagged inflation. And so I do think that there’s this very interesting dynamic of the promise of Bitcoin being the protection of your purchasing power. Now that doesn’t help. When you look at your you know, brokerage account or your Coinbase account, you see that the dollar price is down. But, you know, let’s see what happens. 90 days from now might be a completely different story. Okay, let’s
Anthony Scaramucci 17:49
go to audience questions. And you know, I love your answer, by the way, best advice that you would give to your younger selves. So I’ll go first, okay, palm because I’ve got a little bit I’ve got a generation of perspective. I would say I needed to pay more attention to the laws of compound interest, and I would have better served myself not to be impetuously investing, but just buy a handful of incredibly good assets, whether it’s Bitcoin, Nvidia, Apple, you know, you pick the assets, whatever they may be, ask their labs, and just hold them. SpaceX, and just hold them and not think about them anymore. You go,
Anthony Pompliano 18:36
I think that it is twofold. You know, in the book I write about luck is not real, which I think is, you know, again, reinforces that agency idea. But for those that don’t know if Anthony and I are both walking across the street, we get hit by a bus, and we both lose our leg. If you go and you talk to him in the hospital, he may say, I was so unlucky to be walking across the street at that moment. But he may then come talk to me, and I may say, I’m so lucky to be alive. It’s all about perspective and so luck, you know, really being controlled by your psychology more so than the laws of the universe are important. But in hand with that, I think that fear is also something that is a mental thing. It’s not a real thing, something that we invent in our head. And so when you can get over fear of doing anything, fear of being embarrassed, fear of something not working, fear of your friends making fun of you, fear of losing money, whatever. It then empowers you to take action. And so once you know that luck’s not real and fear is something that’s invented in your head, I think it again, just puts you in the driver’s seat and says, Hey, you know you can determine your outcome based on your actions. Okay,
Anthony Scaramucci 19:43
let’s go to the next question. Great, great answer. Do you believe we’re approaching a critical point for Bitcoin adaption, or is it too early? Manuel from California, pump. You take that one. No,
Anthony Pompliano 19:57
I think that Bitcoin is following kind of a traditional s. Curve adoption, which zero to 10% adoption happens in the first decade. Now we’re kind of in the 10 to 90% growth in the second decade, and then at some point, we’ll reach some sort of mass adoption that the growth rate will Peter off. But one of the best signals of adoption to me is all these Wall Street firms participating. Bitcoin is a bottoms up adoption story where normally it is kind of the militaries and nation states adopt technology first, and then it trickles down to the people, but the people adopted this asset first. And so to see Wall Street now starting to come in, see some nation states early on coming in is a pretty, you know, I think compelling and encouraging story. So I don’t know if it’s a critical point, as much as it is, we’re just following exactly what you would expect or predict if bitcoin was to reach, you know, kind of global adoption. What do you think?
Anthony Scaramucci 20:48
Well, yeah, I mean, I think it’s early, and I think that, you know, it’s going to get, you know, Yogi Berra had a great line when they put he was a catcher. His whole career was he got older, they put him in left field, and he was making one error after the next, and he said, you know, it gets late early out there. You know me, because he couldn’t, he couldn’t catch the shadows. Okay? And I’m gonna say something to you about Bitcoin. It’s the adoption is gonna happen, but you’re gonna blink and you’re gonna like, Okay, how did it go to 150,000 and it’ll be because there was a series of decisions where people said, Okay, I have to own this in my portfolio. You may have seen this Blackrock piece that’s out there just talking about it being a huge diversifier. I don’t know. I think it’s going to get late early, meaning it’s going to be adopted way more quickly than people think. And it’s going to happen like that. Happen like that. And if you’re not invested, you’re going to miss it. And I remind people, if you’re out of the markets for 10 of the best days of the year, you’re getting a T bill rate of return, you have to stay in something and stay patient. Okay, let’s go to the next question. What’s your take on the impact of CBDCs on the future of decentralized currency? That’s Alex from Australia. Go ahead, Anthony,
Anthony Pompliano 22:08
CBDCs, I am not a fan of very, very scary to me. People have obviously talked at nauseam about the surveillance of these assets. I’m more worried about things like personalized monetary policy. You know, everything in our life is personalized. And so how Google Maps directs your route, the music you listen to, your Google searches, all that stuff is personalized, if they have the ability to personalize monetary policy. And the fact that, you know, maybe Anthony Scaramucci, inflation rate is set at 2% but mine is set at four or maybe there is some degree of devaluation, or there is, you know, other aspects of personalization. I think that that while they may see it as economic solutions for problems, I think of it as kind of opening a can of worms that could be quite scary.
Anthony Scaramucci 22:55
Well said, Let’s go to the next one. Do you think markets will keep rising as rates fall and deficits worsen. Well, inflation and asset prices also rise. Central question from Dennis in Texas,
Anthony Pompliano 23:08
I mean, that is what history suggests anything can happen. You know, we’ve seen over the last three or four years times where bonds and stocks both went down at the same time. So you can’t use history as a perfect guide. But if they are going to lower interest rates if they are going to increase the debt, expand m2 money supply, you would expect asset prices to go up, and we’re seeing that already. You know, they call it stimulus for a reason. It stimulates asset prices. It stimulates the economy. But you know, again, if you just blindly follow history and don’t account for new information or kind of nuance and edge cases you can get in trouble. So I think directionally, that’s probably right, but let’s see what happens. What do you think?
Anthony Scaramucci 23:49
You know, I want to, want to, I want to think about it for a second. I think it goes up, but the stock market adjusted for inflation, from 1968 to today, Anthony is up 600% okay, it’s up 6800 but it’s up six times inflation adjusted. So yes, the assets are going to go up because there’s lots of inflation and a lot of monetization of debt. The question is, what is the real value? How much is the real value going up? That’s one of the reasons why I’m a big bitcoiner, because I believe that Bitcoin is a hard asset, and as this stuff starts to accelerate, lots of money will be migrated into hard assets. There’s a reason why gold, in the last year, has added $5 trillion to its market cap. And of course, a Bitcoin added $5 trillion to its market gap. This year, it’d be at 300,000 a coin. And I’m saying it’s still early for Bitcoin, but my point is, there’s a very large group of investors that are saying, okay. A Yes, this stuff’s going to go up, but is it going up fast enough on an inflation adjusted real value basis, and and that’s the issue that I’m worried about. Let’s go to another question. The dollar headed for a crash? What are safer investments? If it does, I’ll go first on this one. I don’t think the dollar is headed for a crash. There’s too many dollarized assets around the world, and we’ve done too much on this show explaining that to people, that dollars are everywhere. They’re all owned everywhere, and they’re effectively still the reserve fiat currency for the world. But I do think that Bitcoin is a good hedge. Gold is also a good hedge. I’m not saying that it isn’t, but you need to have other assets besides the dollar. But I don’t think the dollar is going anywhere. What’s a U bomb?
Anthony Pompliano 25:48
I completely agree. I think that the dollar is actually getting stronger in terms of adoption. Globally. People in weaker fiat currencies want dollars. Purchasing Power, obviously will be degraded and things like that, but I don’t think the dollar is at risk in the short term. Okay,
Anthony Scaramucci 26:04
next question, how can everyday investors best protect themselves from inflation using crypto? And is crypto? Is Bitcoin truly the best Priya from the United Kingdom? I
Anthony Pompliano 26:16
don’t know anything better, but you know, again, we can only look at what we have today, I think that there’s a monetary revolution and a technology revolution going on in crypto. Bitcoin seems to be the winner in the monetary revolution as a store of value. There’s plenty of things that are trying to win the technology revolution, smart contract platforms, nfts, many other things, but when it comes to protecting your purchasing power as an economic asset, I think that Bitcoin, you know, seems to be the the winner there.
Anthony Scaramucci 26:43
All right. Next question. See, see pomp everybody at the end of the day, it affects everybody. Pump, okay, so can I tell this story? Okay, my brother is literally got like a monk spot on the back of his head. It’s literally like an alien landed there and burnt it up and created a crop circle in the back of his head. Of course. You know, I love that, because he’s my older brother. He didn’t listen. He could have gone in for the PRP and which is like a sod replacement program, and it would have been fine, but he didn’t listen. So pop maybe the next book we could team up together, we could write not how to live an extraordinary life, but how to look younger than you actually are. With tricks pump, with tricks that like, I can’t I could like when I travel, I can’t have a carry on. I would I need the my hair and beauty products. I mean, what am
Anthony Pompliano 27:34
I going to do? Right? Listen, I think there’s a lot of people who would, who would buy that. You know, you look like, you’re like 19 years old, maybe 21 at the hold
Anthony Scaramucci 27:41
it up. Flattery will get you everywhere. Okay, that should be another letter to your two children. Flatter the mooch. Get on a show every day. The title of the book is how to live an extraordinary life. It’s by Anthony Pompliano. It’s a best seller. It’s out recently. Go buy the book. A great book, and by the way, okay, this is a book that I’ve got a stack of them in my office. I hand them out to young people, and I really applaud you for writing it. I look forward to the next one. I
Anthony Pompliano 28:12
appreciate it very much. Thanks for having me.
Anthony Scaramucci 28:14
If you like this video, you’ll like this video as well. Check it out.
