The Pomp Podcast - #1399 Polina & Anthony Pompliano | Bitcoin Will Go Up, Interest Rate Cuts & Taxing Unrealized Gains

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

Polina Pompliano, Author of ‘Hidden Genius’ and Founder of The Profile, and Anthony Pompliano, CEO of Professional Capital Management, discuss the US economy, interest rates decision, taxing of unrealized gains, arrest of Telegram CEO, the impact of the two astronauts stranded in space, and more.  ======================= Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit ⁠⁠https://www.xapobank.com/pomp⁠⁠ to join. ======================= Gemini is the safe and secure way to trade crypto. Gemini is offering eligible new users the opportunity to earn $100 in BTC when they trade $1000 in crypto within their first 30 days of signing up. Head over to ⁠https://www.gemini.com/partners/pomp⁠ and start trading crypto to earn $100 in BTC. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's up, guys? We've got a special episode for you. Polina, my wife, is back one more time. And in this conversation, we talk about what is going on with the U.S. economy,

federal reserve interest rate decisions, how you should be thinking about the new economic plan put forward by Vice President Harris and their taxing of unrealized capital gains. We then get into the recent arrest of the Telegram founder and CEO, what's going on in France, how you should be thinking about that situation. And then lastly, we cover it up and end talking all about the two astronauts that are stranded in space and why the difference of cultures at Boeing and SpaceX may tell us much more about the current state of engineering firms in the United States than you realize. I'm really enjoying doing these episodes. Hopefully they are rational views that are much more moderate conversations that try to get into the nuance of these topics. If you enjoy these,

please, please, please leave a comment. Let us know any feedback you have. What do you like? What do you not like? What do you want to see more of? If enough people leave positive feedback, we'll continue to do these. So I hope you're enjoying it. Here's my conversation with Polina Pompliano. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

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I've seen a lot of commentary online, but I feel like a lot of people are kind of uninformed on what that means. Can you tell us what it actually means? Well, there's a whole bunch to unpack here. The first thing that I'll say is taxes are collected to pay for things that are supposed to be for the collective good. And so if you think about the more we spend, the more the government says we need to collect more taxes. So they are constantly in search of these creative ways to drive more tax revenue because

we operate at a deficit, which means that we're spending more than we're taking in. And we have a national debt that's $34 trillion and only growing in size. And so if you want to solve a lot of problems, it's not to take in more tax revenue. It's actually just stop spending so indiscriminately. Stop spending like a drunken sailor. But that's not going to happen. It's very hard to see a political candidate getting into office and actually balancing the budget. It's been over 20 years since we've had a balanced budget.

neither one of the candidates are running on a truly balanced budget. Wait, just really quick. Why was that such an important thing back in the day to run on? I'm going to balance the budget. And now it feels like they don't care about that anymore. Well, to be fair, I think that, you know, take President Trump is running and he's saying, look, we are spending too much. You know, there's been talk of a government efficiency committee and things like that. And so on one hand, there's this idea of like we should be spending less, but that is kind of a watered down version of what is now an extreme view, which is we should actually have the balanced budget, right? And so we've gone from kind of

the metric of success in the campaign as a balanced budget to simply now just like, let's spend less money. Like that is okay. You're checking the box as a candidate. If you say we should spend less, whereas it used to be, you check the box only if you commit to a balanced budget. But again, for over 20 years, we haven't had that. Now, when it comes to the spending problem. Well, if you're not going to stop spending, then you do need to collect more tax receipts in order to be able to fund that, or you've got to increase the debt. And so they're looking for all kinds of different things. I've talked, you know, quite a bit throughout the years about New York City. So at the city level, not at the national level, but at the city level

was going to be the first to introduce this congestion tax. And the whole idea was if you drove beneath 59th street during work hours, Monday through Friday, they were essentially going to hit you with anywhere between a $12 to $22 tax. An Uber driver warned me about that and told me to walk. So that was the thing. If you live on 60th, 61st, 65th, maybe you would actually walk below 59th and then get the Uber. So why were they doing it? They're looking for a creative way to drive more tax revenue. And obviously, citizens want certain services, but they don't want to pay more tax. Taxing unrealized capital gains is a similar type of thing. It is looking for some sort of creative way to get more tax revenue. So you've got to understand the problem that the

politicians are trying to solve in order to start to unpack what actually is going on here. Now, taxing unrealized capital gains, this is not the first time it's been suggested. President Biden has previously suggested it. Some others have as well. Every time it's suggested, it just spreads like wildfire and people go crazy. It's a very controversial idea. Now, what I will say is because this has been suggested so many times, the idea has been, quote unquote, improving. And I put improving in quotes because what they really are trying to do is they are essentially iterating every time it is suggested to offend less people, but still get it passed. And so when it first was suggested, it was suggested as we're going to tax unrealized gains as a broad-based application. Yeah.

And so the problem with that would be that every American who owns a home, if their house goes up in value, they owe taxes on the appreciation of their home. So immediately, why is it controversial? Because a bunch of people raise their hand and say, well, wait a second, how are you going to appraise the home? We can't even agree on what the home is worth. So how are you going to be able to do that? Now, they do do property taxes and things like that. So there are a pathway there. The second thing would be, well, most American families don't have the money to pay the taxes on the potential appreciation of their home. So are they going to have to sell their house to be able to get the money to pay the taxes? That kind of defeats the purpose of owning a home.

then the third thing was well that's when a home appreciates but what happens if a home depreciates do you get a tax refund or a tax credit right so there's all these different components that kind of feed into it and so people basically came to the conclusion this is a horrible idea politicians went away and they didn't try to pass it and they came back and they said you know okay we're gonna now suggest it again this time it doesn't include your primary home but then people said, okay, well, does that mean that if I'm a startup founder and I create a company that if the company goes from being worth $5 million to $25 million, I owe taxes on the $20 million markup of which I don't have the liquidity for? Are you then, if the company goes to zero,

going to refund me that money because I went from 25 million down to zero? How does that work? Am I going to have to sell my company essentially to the government? Is the government going to nationalize my company because they're going to keep taking this tax. Right. And so, again, the politicians said, oh, that's a hot topic. That's controversial. Let's go away. And they came back. And now the latest proposal is if you have one hundred million dollar net worth or more, you are subject to this idea. So if you're below one hundred million dollars, all of a sudden they've absolved you from caring. Right. Or complaining about this. So there are a lot of people who i saw online saying well why are you complaining about unrealized capital gains this

is applying to a very rich people i'm not i don't have 100 million dollars like i don't care yeah so on from that standpoint it's actually pretty smart i disagree with it but it's smart strategy from the politicians the second thing is they said that uh 80 percent of that 100 million dollar or more net worth has to be liquid tradable assets so if you're worth 100 million dollars but it's all in private illiquid startup stock, you weren't subject to this either. So it then says pretty much you gotta have cash, you gotta have stocks, right?

Or maybe some sort of commodity, et cetera. So it comes down to, I think the number I saw was somewhere between nine to 10,000 people in America of the 300 plus million Americans would actually be subjected to this. And what is hilarious to me is that maybe all of the tax revenue could fund the US government for like 24 hours.

So again, we've spent all this time, energy, you know, et cetera, going after this. It doesn't even solve the problem that they're trying to solve. And so the worry is that you start out with people over a hundred million dollars with 80% liquid assets, kind of all this stuff. Income tax at the federal level in the United States originally started out to pay for war and it was first implemented. And then many people don't know that it was actually ruled after that to be unconstitutional. mm-hmm then there was another ruling that said well actually it's okay it is constitutional to

in uh put the federal income tax that federal income tax first started out as something that targeted uh there's debate at the time as to the population size somewhere between one to three percent of all americans were subject to federal income tax and then the percentage that they had to pay of their income was around one percent so one to three percent of all americans originally were taxed at a 1% rate. Doesn't seem that crazy. 99% or 95% of Americans don't care. They're not trying to tax me. They're trying to tax the wealthy people. Today, more than 50% of Americans pay income tax and the tax rate can be as high as more than 50% for some of those Americans. And so the fear of introducing the idea of taxing unrealized capital gains is that you go from,

hey, we're just targeting these 9,000 to 10,000 people, to eventually you're targeting 100,000, then a million, then 5 million, then 20 million, then 300 million Americans all get targeted with a stupid rule. And so that is the progression where some people are looking at it as a static state idea saying, oh, it's not that bad. It only targets the small amount. It's only according to some of these criteria. But there are other people who are saying, I'm not worried about the static state. I'm worried about the direction of travel here. And that's concerning. And I actually think that that is the right way to look at it is by introducing something that becomes a rule. It is much easier to tweak the rule than go from the rule doesn't exist to the rule exists.

And so if you are going to resist or as a population, have your voice heard, now is the time to remind them how unpopular this idea is versus, oh, it's just targeting of these 9,000 people, and please don't make it go from 9,000 to 100,000. That's much harder to stop. Yeah. And I just, I don't know, to me, it just feels like this would be a huge philosophical departure from the, of the United States on how, because they've never taxed this before, but also just personally, I feel like it's wrong to tax people on money they don't have. Well, it's money that you don't have, which I think is a very fair critique of this. But also, when you start to introduce taxation that only works in one direction, it causes a lot of

complexity and introduces kind of volatility and unknown chaos. And so the best example would be if I spend $100 at the beginning of the year and I buy a stock. And let's say that that stock goes from $100 to $300. It's a great year for the stock. That $300 has $100 cost basis, so there's $200 of profit. If they're going to tax me at, let's say, 25%, then I don't do public math, but I'd owe $50, right? Because $200, 25%, $50 tax. But if all of a sudden I pay my taxes at the end of the year, and the next year the stock goes from $300 back to, let's say, $100, there is no part of the plan where they give me a tax refund or a tax credit so what you really are doing is you are essentially taxing things that go up in value regardless of whether people make

the money or not and so historically the only time that you get taxes when you sell right which is what we want to incentivize taxation is this very weird dynamic where many people look at it as a zero-sum game either you get the money or the government gets the money while i do think that that is true. The more important analysis is what is the incentive that they are introducing into the market? And by introducing a tax on unrealized capital gains, you are introducing an incentive that would force people to sell assets. For a economy, you actually want to incentivize long-term holding of assets. You want people to hold stocks for the long run. You want people to hold real estate for the long run. You want people to be invested in the future.

if you introduce taxation that forces people to sell assets, you are essentially forcing the population to go short on the future. And so that is a destructive policy for the future of America, because now what you are doing is you are punishing success. You made an investment. It started to work in your direction. We immediately are going to take stuff regardless of what the outcome ends up being. And so I think that people are stuck on the nuance and the details of the policy. To me, the bigger challenge here is you are essentially taking something where the US government and their tax policy today incentivizes investment, incentivizes long-term thinking, right? There's literally a difference between short-term and long-term capital gains

rates. You're incentivizing people to kind of continue to build and allocate resources with this long time horizon. And if you switch it to a short time horizon and you switch it to something where you disincentivize long-term holding, that is something that I think actually pushes the country in the wrong direction. And so I don't think that this will get passed, but I think it is a fantastic idea for them to keep suggesting every couple of years because people get more and more desensitized to it. And also it creates massive chaos and controversy, which then has this Streisand effect, which now everyone is talking about Harris's economic policy. And regardless of whether they're good ideas or bad ideas, people are talking about her.

People are talking about the policy. And there's a lot of studies that show the Streisand effect actually can help a politician, regardless of whether it's good or bad talking, they're talking about you, which is maybe something that she's actually trying to accomplish right now. I do wonder how much of it is, let's throw this idea out there again and see like how people think about it. And both politicians do it, right? You know, we've seen many ideas come from President Trump where he has suggested something,

he sees the crowd reaction, and then he goes and he keeps hammering on that talking point, right? You know, in a weird way, no tax on tips. Now, both politicians are claiming that they are going to implement no tax on tips. Trump told a story where I think it was he was at a restaurant or a hotel and the waitress suggested it to him. And then he went and he told the story and the reaction obviously was incredibly positive. And so he realized, oh, the people want this because one of the interesting things about

politicians is, you know, everyone is always worried about, you know, what is your thought process in a weird way? The politician is actually the representative of the people. And so the politician should be asking the people, what do you guys want? I'll go represent your wishes. But if you actually look at the critique process, the campaign process, a lot of people ask the campaign or the politician, what is your belief on this topic? And so I always have thought that politicians kind of paint themselves in the wrong corner where they constantly want to say what they believe. But the true test of leadership would be, can you represent the will of the people, even if it goes against what you personally believe?

That is your job. It's a tough thing to do. Nearly impossible. for a politician, especially in today's day and era. Yeah. Okay. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell laid the groundwork Friday for interest rate cuts ahead,

likely to happen in September. It's the clearest indication yet that the Fed is on track to cut interest rates next month for the first time since 2020. I remember those cuts. His worries about the health of the economy mount. Powell said the time has come for policy to adjust. The direction of travel is clear and the timing and pace of rate cuts will depend on

incoming data, the evolving outlook and the balance of risks. He also added that inflation has declined significantly. The labor market is no longer overheated. Is this true? And conditions are now less tight than those that prevailed before the pandemic. Supply constraints have normalized and the balance of the risks to our two mandates has changed. So it's definitely true that the economy is cool, that many of the metrics that they're looking at suggest, you know, now is the time. They did their job. They did their job. Right. And, you know, the Federal Reserve will always kind of be behind the curve because they are looking at data and metrics that are backwards looking. You know, you get the inflation number after the month has expired. You get the consumer

spending number, not in real time, but after the people have spent money. And so they're looking at backwards data, trying to make a decision today with the prediction of the decision that's made today, how it will affect the future. So backwards data for a decision today on how it impacts the future is a very hard task to do. And so they will always be behind the curve because of that backwards looking data. Now, there are many people who criticize the Federal Reserve, including myself. I think that they have made many mistakes throughout the years.

And you could even argue that maybe the human intervention of monetary policy is not the right way to set up the system. But if you are going to criticize them, you also have to give them credit when they do something that is right. And the one thing that I think that they have done very well is they went from a high inflation environment where they essentially had exhausted all of their stimulus tools. They printed trillions of dollars along with fiscal policy decision makers, and they had suppressed interest rates down to zero. Inflation took off. They have been able to bring inflation

down. I won't argue about the exact data point of the official metrics versus the unofficial, but inflation has definitely come down or the rate of change. And they were able to essentially reload their ammunition. And so if you think about it from the sense of, you know, they were fighting the economy. The economy was slowing down and so they wanted to stimulate it in 2020. And so they came in and they shot all their bullets. Well, the economy took off. And so the bullets worked. But now all of a sudden, you've got a Federal Reserve that's shot all their bullets.

If all of a sudden you need to fight again, you don't have any ammunition in the gun. And so what they have done from 2022 until today is they reloaded. They literally went and they were able to get interest rates back over 5%. And they were able to sell about $2 trillion of assets off their balance sheet in the last two years. So now if there is some sort of economic slowdown, a market downturn, or even a recession, the Fed can step in and they've got all these bullets they can fire again. They could go cut two or 300 basis points of interest rates and still only be at two

and a half percent interest rates. So they have a lot of room to work with there. Also, they haven't been stimulating the economy. And so they could go print a couple trillion dollars and they would just get right back to where they just were in 2022. in terms of their balance sheet. And so what's interesting to me is people don't want to give them credit for that reload.

Everyone wants to yell and scream about what happened in 2020 and 2021, which rightfully they should be criticized for. But to give them credit, they have reloaded successfully. The economy did not crash. It is now starting to slow. And so they're ready to stimulate. And so then you go and you look at,

okay, he's hinting at stimulating in September. He's going to cut interest rates. what is telling or noteworthy about that is that right now stocks crypto and gold are all at or near all-time high prices because they are yes because stocks crypto and gold are at or near all-time high prices and the fed has not been stimulating the economy that would suggest that when they start to stimulate the economy that asset prices are going to continue to grow they're going to take off because you're going to get interest rates going down. So cheap capital will start to flood into the market. And then on top of that, you also likely are going to start

getting some quantitative easing measures on the fiscal side where they're going to print money as well. And so one of the other data points that then enters into this is how much capital has gone into treasuries and other money market funds, et cetera, because of the high interest rates. So once interest rates got over 5%, what we've seen is take money market funds. Money market funds have hit over $6.4 trillion in terms of assets in these money market funds. That is an all-time high. So investors took all this cash and they put it into money market funds to get a higher yield. Well, when interest rates come down, those people are going to say,

I liked it when it was over 5%. If it's 3%, it's not really worth me leaving my money in a money market fund. So that capital is going to leave the money market funds and go into equities or other assets. On top of that, we have seen countries around the world, people like China and others that historically have been very large owners of U.S. Treasuries. At one point, China and Japan alone bought over 20% of all U.S.

Treasury issuance. Today, that number is closer to 6% or 7%. They have been offloading their treasury ownership. Now, why is that important? The central banks historically have actually been non-economic buyers of U.S. treasuries. They didn't care where interest rates were. They weren't buying it for the interest rate. They were buying it for the safety net of treasuries, the full backing of the and full

faith and credit of the U.S. government. But they have been selling. Who are they selling to? They are selling to financial investors, large financial institutions, et cetera, who are very sensitive to rates. So what I think is going to happen here is they're going to start to cut rates, equities, crypto, gold, etc. is going to start to take off. Then everyone holding bonds is finally going to get punished for the stupid decision of allocating to an asset that is only guaranteed to lose value over time. And then you're going to have that interest rate coming down, which means yields come down. And as yields come down, you're going to see money flow out of money, market funds, treasuries, et cetera, which will accelerate the decline of bonds and will then start to beg the question of who is going to be the net new buyer of treasuries for the U.S. government.

Because if they are going to start spending, they need someone to buy the debt. And so it's the whole complex system that kind of reinforces itself, where when they cut interest rates, asset prices go up. But also there's going to be negative side effects to the treasury market, which then will introduce the kind of reinforcement of capital fleeing out of treasuries into these assets would push them higher. And so him returning to kind of an easy money policy is great from a financial standpoint, if you are long. The one thing I will call out that is also coming, if he cuts in September, you are going to hear yelling and screaming from the Republicans because they are going to claim election interference. They are going to say, you have kept interest rates high throughout much of the last two

years. You did not cut in Q1. You did not cut in Q2. You waited till we were within 100 days of the election. And then you started to cut interest rates and push asset prices up so that people feel like things are going well under the quote unquote incumbent. And so therefore, you are actually helping the Biden Harris administration, which really is the Harris candidate. it. And so Trump has already called for saying you should not cut before the election. But we also don't want the central bankers making monetary policy decisions because they're looking at an election calendar. Right. So regardless of whether they are actually doing it because of the election or not, the Republicans are going to criticize them because it is so close to the election. Yeah. But it's like damned if you do damned if you don't, if they cut it now,

if they wait until after the election, if it's Trump and then it's just it's the whole thing. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, is the life of a central banker. That is the motto of that role because many times you are facing a lose-lose situation. If you cut, you get criticized. If you don't cut, you may push the country into, you know, kind of a bad economic situation. And so if you're facing that decision, if you're Jerome Powell, you have to be okay if one political party attacks you because ultimately you're going to be judged on the success of the economy, not on whether you have friends in the Republican Party or not. Interesting. And what does this mean? Is this good news for people

who own or want to buy Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and alternative assets like that? Having cheaper capital entering the market will always be good for investors structurally, right? It means that you can borrow more money. It means that people are investing more historically. it means that asset prices are going up, et cetera. Now, the caveat is if you invest in a bad company, it can still go to zero, right? So it's not just like, oh, indiscriminately, you know, go and put money everywhere. But also what I think ends up being a reminder to people is from a structural standpoint, if you hold cash, you lose purchasing power. If you invest in investable assets and wait, the central bank will do your job for you. They will devalue the

currency. They will push asset prices up. And over a long enough timeframe, stocks always go up. Bitcoin always goes up. Gold always goes up. Real estate always goes up, etc. And it is because that structural advantage where these assets are priced in dollars, the dollar gets devalued, And somebody who is going to buy the asset from you in the future needs more dollars to buy it from you than what it would take today. And so that is the best argument that someone can make for why we need to become a nation of investors, not a nation of savers. The challenge historically has been that most people who are, let's say, under the age of 50, if they were to ask their parents or their grandparents, what should I do financially? Their grandparents would say, save, spend less than you make and save. and people will critique them and say, that's bad advice. But the nuance is that's bad advice today. That was great advice in the forties, fifties, and sixties, because you could save your way to financial security today. You can't do that. And so who you get advice from sometimes

is more important than the advice that you get. Cause like maybe our generation will be telling our kids and grandkids, you've got to invest. You got to diversify your portfolio when maybe in reality, they should be saving in the future. Maybe there's a different strategy, but the structural setup of the world that we live in today is very important to understand. And so blindly just saving is actually a guaranteed way to lose purchasing power. Investing obviously is what can protect and grow your purchasing power. Fantastic. Some really good stats in there. I got the Telegram CEO was arrested in France. Pavel Durov, the Russian-born billionaire founder and owner of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested in France shortly after landing on a private jet late on Saturday and placed in custody.

So I thought it was interesting here that it led people like Elon Musk to say that free speech in Europe was under attack. Lex Friedman also tweeted that his arrest was a disturbing attack on free speech and a threat not just to Telegram but to any online platform. Governments should not engage in censorship. This is a blatant and deeply troubling overreach of power. I thought it was interesting that all these people kind of jumped to the conclusion that it was over free speech. Like, why? Well, this may be one of the most complex topics that I've seen kind of play out in the public in a couple of years.

I think your concern about everyone jumping to conclusions is valid. I actually think it is dangerous when an event occurs and it's kind of like there's like a social media Olympics who can have the hottest take, who can be first to kind of put forward whatever the latest conspiracy theory is so that they can get the retweets, the likes, the followers, etc. Um, and so if you can take that, you know, kind of concern and say, okay, let's put it to the side and say, we know that there's overreaction. We know there's a lot of, uh, kind of information that's spreading that's on, uh, confirmed, et cetera. The reason why I say this is so complex is because there's actually a hint of truth in a lot of what people are saying, even though these people are all disagreeing with each

other. So let me give you a couple of examples. There are people who are arguing that this is a free speech issue. To a degree, it is. France is allegedly coming out and saying, well, you own Telegram. Telegram is not moderating speech. It does not have certain security backdoors and it is not complying with the rules that we have implemented. And therefore, because you are doing that, you are allowing terrorists, drug dealers, bad, nefarious, malicious people to do things. And so you are helping them. You are conspiring to participate. And therefore, we're going to arrest you now.

Sorry, but are terrorists not using other messaging apps? I saw a fantastic meme on the Internet. And, you know, I think memes are one of the best ways to communicate ideas in today's society. And it said that France must be looking for the BIC, B-I-C, the pen owner, because terrorists obviously use a pen to write untraceable messages to each other that are done offline in a secure, anonymous way. And so if we're going to go after Telegram, are we going to go after the pen manufacturer next? Yeah, it kind of reminds me of like when that narrative of only criminals and drug dealers use Bitcoin, because actually they probably use cash. Of course. So I think that that's like one piece. Yes, there's a free speech thing. Now, there are a lot of questions here. Right. And so on one hand, Pavel is actually a French citizen. He's a UAE assistant of the UAE and the France. uh i will get all of the details uh in act you know uh inaccurate but um for those that don't

know pavel is a uh from russia he built the russian facebook he then sold that he made a couple hundred million dollars off of the russian facebook and he fled russia why did he flee he's told the story a couple times and i don't want to kind of uh misquote him but essentially there was pressure from the russian government and i think that he was fleeing for um the avoidance of some of that political pressure uh and also kind of this belief that uh maybe somewhere else he ended up settling in dubai may be better for him kind of what he wanted to do in the world etc so there's this like backstory here which is uh pretty interesting now to make it complex somehow telegram is either one of if not the only messaging app available in russia

And so there are people who critique Telegram and Pavel and they say, hey, well, we think you struck a deal with the Russians where you have given Russia backdoor access to a lot of the messages. Now, that brings up and again, I'm not saying that that's correct. That's just the theories that are floating out there. Now, in order to start to unpack some of the complexity here, we need to go into some of the technical architecture of Telegram. And so I'm going to present this in kind of the simplest way possible. And I can only do this because Ben Thompson of Stratechery, he did a great piece where he basically laid out some of the architectural differences between iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram. Now, one of the things you will hear in this conversation is this idea of end-to-end encryption. And so end-to-end encryption, I'll explain in a second, but that is a new phenomenon. Historically on the internet, the way that you secured messages is you had your device,

your phone, and the server. And what you would do is from your phone to the server would be encrypted. So if I texted you. Your message would go to the server. Yes. From your phone to the server, it is encrypted. it. No one can read that message. It's like scrambled. It's like, but when it gets to the server, the company, let's say telegram can read the message. And so on their servers,

they can read those messages. So what's the point? So because you have done that, they then can send that message to me. And again, they may encrypt it from their server to me. And I get the message that you sent, we can read it, et cetera. But there is the server. There was an unencrypted message that the company has access to. Now, people would say, well, that sounds crazy. Why would we ever do that? The reason is because the other option would be end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption means that from you to the server to me, the message is fully encrypted. Somebody like Signal, which is considered the most secure, if the government comes to them and says, let us read the messages, they say, we can't. It's end-to-end encrypted. We literally

cannot read the message the problem is that it is very unscalable so telegram has found product market fit by creating broadcast channels and very large group chats you can put i think up to 200 000 people in a group chat by the way i keep getting put in these like spam group chats i'm like get me out of here of course they're spam but what it allows for is this very scalable you know kind of use case so crypto has flocked to this there's a lot of companies right they these broadcast channels, et cetera. The reason why from an architecture standpoint, telegram can do that is because they don't have the end to end encryption of the message because in end to end encryption, whether it's on iMessage or signal, when you send a message

to a group chat, let's say that there, I think on signal, uh, or I'm sorry, on iMessage, you can put up to 32 people, Ben said in a group chat, you are actually sending 32 separate text messages in that group chat. So if you have 200,000 people in an iMessage chat, you can't send 200,000 messages every single time that you send a text message, right? So they limit the group to whatever, 32 people. So that end-to-end encryption is really far.

If you think of it like a sliding scale, very secure, not very scalable. Right. What Telegram did is Telegram seems to have given choice to the user. They said, look, we have end-to-end encryption available. in a secret chat. So you can turn it on essentially.

But the default is not end-to-end encryption. So it's up to the user to change them. The critique of Telegram is that they present it as a secure service and it leads people to believe that it's end-to-end encrypted, but actually the default is not. And so what they got as a trade-off

is this scalability. Now, the reason why that becomes interesting in the conversation with Pavel in the arrest is there are messages sitting on the server that can be read so if a government goes to telegram and says give us the messages and somehow is able to convince them to turn them over they can do that with signal they couldn't even after it's been encrypted and sent to the other person um i don't know exactly when it gets deleted etc but i'm sure it sits on the server for some period of time and they probably are you know uh kind of erasing things for storage

purposes whatever um but that is one of the reasons why pavel may be an easier target than let's say tim cook now the other thing is uh pavel comes from russia i would not underestimate the that detail being important given the current uh environment and conversation around russia Let me just add some context to that. The app has close to 1 billion users, and it's particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine, and the republics of the former Soviet Union. It is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, and WeChat. Now, what's funny is that Russian politicians are using Telegram, but also Macron. I think that's how you say his name. How do you say it? I don't know, Emmanuel Macron. Macron, which kind of sounds- Can we just butcher that?

Yeah, whatever, it's fine. I took French for 70s, it's embarrassing. Oui, oui, we're good, oui, oui. He is also reportedly a Telegram user. What? Maybe he doesn't know because maybe he got put in that spam chat like me. So it would be very, very interesting.

And now we are going to leave reality and head towards conspiracy theory land. Wait, okay. But it would be very interesting- If actually there is some information that Macron has been using on Telegram or sending or participating in that now is being realized, it is not end to end encrypted. And if somehow Russia or another country or another intelligence agency is able to get that information, my question is, are we actually just watching spy games play out? Are we watching countries all competing with each other on a geopolitical chessboard that we as citizens are unaware of a lot of the details? But I feel like if that was to be true, making such a big public spectacle of his arrest and you want to, let's say, hide something or whatever his messages, I don't know.

They didn't make it public. Like, what's interesting is he flew into France on a private jet. He was arrested on the tarmac, according to the reports. The French government didn't say anything for a number of days. That's true. The Russians and now UAE has written a letter and said, hey, he's a UAE citizen. What is he charged with? Why do you have him?

Because they wouldn't even release the charges necessarily yet. At first. Now they have released them. and so there's a world where they were detaining him no one even knows it happened but instead the internet got a hold of it and it exploded

now I want to make this a little bit more complex every great man's fall can be traced back to a woman oh come on incentivizing them to do something oh come on

we're about to get an argument on air and so Pavel who supposedly has again this is a conspiracy no this is this is fact oh this blonde woman who he has been traveling around with i was ever referred to as that brunette woman go on i i don't remember her name um but he's been traveling around with her they were uh in a number of different countries and um there are some accounts on twitter that come from the intelligence world they're now private citizens but you know very quickly he took this picture and posted it on

the russian facebook account she took the exact same picture around the exact same time well whatever but they're dating they're excited of course she was also taking pictures and posting them with geolocation she was posting from the private jet she would say where they were headed beforehand you not know about in some of the pictures encryption well if you're simply just posting it publicly right and so there then is a question of where the french authorities alerted because she was posting on the internet pictures like there's a picture i saw which is like heading to france right but how would they know that he's about to get arrested they don't but but the french authorities are probably paying attention they're saying hey if we want to know

where this guy is and what he's doing it's not the girl's fault seems like this girl is posting quite a bit about their travels now the reason why that is an interesting you know kind of addition to the complexity is that reports came out that pavel had been avoiding france because there had been an arrest warrant out for him and so is there a world and again it's a question it's definitely not a fact but is there a world where she basically said i want to go to france and he said let's go to france there's no way that they're actually going to arrest me and then when he landed he was arrested and so again i somewhat jokingly say the fall of every great man is kind of uh can be traced back to a woman but there is a degree of truth to that there is also a story

if we want to kind of pull on this the geopolitical impact around the world is more influenced by the relationship between men and women than people want to give it credit for i saw a article that came out recently bill clinton and hillary clinton did not talk for reportedly eight months after the monica lewinsky story came out who said this there's an article you can google it the first time that they talked reportedly hillary clinton called bill clinton and said you need to bomb a specific foreign nation oh my god we're getting into looney town that country was bombed within 24 hours. But we need to find the source on this.

We can find the source. Okay. If that story is true, it is a good example where, whether it is Bill and Hillary Clinton, whether the reports of Joe and Jill Biden and her massive influence into certain decisions

that are being made in the White House, Pavel and his girlfriend, or many other foreign leaders, there is more to the story than is always kind of meets the eye because you don't understand the interpersonal relationships that people have and who they're influenced by i actually agree with you that relationships drive a lot of things but i think it goes both ways that you could say the downfall of hillary clinton was bills 100 100 um a few more like facts out there so the french government did come out and and make a statement macron said france is deeply

committed to freedom of expression and communication to innovation to the spirit of entrepreneurship it will remain so he said that the arrest is part of an ongoing judicial investigation and it is in no way a political decision they have this like judge system that will rule on the matter the paris prosecutor said that the arrest was part of an investigation opened on july 8th against person unnamed on a rap which is on a raft of potential charges including complicity complicity complicity is that a word yeah complicity in the distribution of child pornography and selling of drugs money laundering and a refusal to cooperate with law enforcement so this could be a again we don't know so it could be part of a much bigger investigation

that pavel is under true um which i think it goes back to like everyone jumping to the conclusion that it's just merely a free speech thing um my guess is that uh the reports that he had been avoiding france he was aware of the um arrest warrant etc are probably false the way that that makes it sound is that there was an arrest warrant out for you know less than 60 days and uh he probably didn't know he probably went there he's a french citizen arrested on the tarmac he was surprised right and now he's become kind of this political pawn and tell me what you were mentioning about mark zuckerberg kind of being under political pressure like this is not something that would be totally out of left field well mark zuckerberg in the last couple of days wrote a letter

to a political committee and he essentially said listen we were pressured by the biden harris administration to censor speech sometimes even satire and comedy we were pressured to take down certain information during COVID-19. And we were pressured to derank or prevent the dissemination of the Hunter Biden laptop story. And hold on a second. Them being pressured, I understand. I'm sure it happens. But Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Meta. He is the ultimate final, like the buck stops with him. Why could he say no? Couldn't he say no? It depends. If he really wanted to say no, he could sue the U.S. government. He'd go to the Supreme Court. There's certain things that could happen. But I think part of what I took away from

the letter was his conclusion. If he had to do it over again, he wouldn't have done it. But they didn't know what they didn't know at the time. So if the U.S. government comes to you and they say, hey there's this laptop story it's fake here's 51 intelligence officers that are saying it's fake it is disinformation it is you know uh potentially russian propaganda whatever if you take the word of the person talking to you and you don't you know think kind of critically you don't come at it from a degree of skepticism facebook is not an investigative journalism organization what they said they did is actually they took the information they sent it to a group of fact checkers. And in the meantime, they deprioritize that content on the platform in

the meantime. And then the fact checkers came back and the fact checkers actually said it is fake. Yeah, it turns out it wasn't fake. And so now one of the rule changes that Facebook is making is that if they receive information that is supposedly fake or disinformation, etc, they will not deprioritize it while fact checkers are looking at it. And so he's making these changes internally. But the more important thing is Mark Zuckerberg was issuing a warning to politicians, very soft power warning, but a warning saying, I won't be bullied anymore. You are not going to come tell us to censor Americans. Enough is enough. Yeah. So he said it very diplomatically. He said it, you know, kind of eloquently. But if you read into what

he's saying in there he's putting his thoughts on record saying enough yeah you did it to us before it was wrong we're not going to be complicit in this in the future um and so pavel mark zuckerberg elon musk you're very quickly starting to build a a coalition of the owners of these properties who are saying different countries different governments different manner reasons why different stories the governments are pressuring us to censor you all that shouldn't be

a surprise to us of course governments all around the world don't want people criticizing them you know spreading what they mean misinformation America America does a fantastic job of publicly presenting a

very clean cut cologne filled beautiful perspective ford models but there are plenty of examples of america unfortunately and i say this as someone who loves this country things that we've done that maybe we gave ourselves a black eye things that maybe if we could go back we would have done differently at the end of the day a government is just made up of people yeah people have to make decisions and if you think that people in the government aren't susceptible to fear and greed and personal incentives and

ego and you know all these different things you're crazy of course they are and so if you give power to those people of course they're going to use it and so it then begs this question of if you're running a social media platform or a messaging platform what should you do and if you kind of bring this full circle one of the best things that you can do for some mainly the messaging is build end-to-end encryption. Because now when they come and they pressure you, you say, I can't stop it, right? It is the entire argument for Bitcoin.

It is the entire argument for decentralization and crypto is rather than build these centralized services, which you got speed and performance and monetization and all these amazing, you know, kind of benefits for a corporation. We may be entering a time in history where decentralization is really important because we need to be able to resist

the pressures of the state or anybody who is trying to pressure these companies. Yeah. And because it is so hard to say no, you have to almost be able to say, I can't. It is impossible to be able to do that.

I just think that, I mean, stating the obvious, but I think it's just very, very hard for one individual to go up against a government and say no, or say I'm not going to do that, or I'm not going to reveal my sources

or the messages or whatever you know in the united states there have been cases where journalists the government wants their sources the journalist says no and then they're held in contempt of court they can go to prison so it's like it's things like that where it's like i got respect for those people yeah it sounds it sounds really like oh of course i i wouldn't give up my source and then you're in the situation i forget the um the name of the movie yeah but uh there's a movie i think it's about the valerie plum uh cia uh case and for those that don't know valerie plum i believe was um a she was a cia operative but she was also a source for uh a article the journalist actually went to jail uh so if you think about it again certain states have

sunshine laws that protect journalists but the federal government does not so you know again let me take off my proud american hat and put on my uh critiquer of the american government if somebody in another country was to write a headline of that and they wrote america jails journalist right the perception would be oh my god there's no free speech there's no protection of the press there's all this kind of stuff now again the details the nuance of the case and and the court and contention. It endangered the CIA operatives life. All of this stuff, right? It makes it very, very complex, but that is why headlines are so dangerous and actually looking at the facts. But I think that the reverse is true. Many times we

will read the headlines from other countries, but we don't have the information yet. And so again, if I was a betting person today and you put a gun to my head and you said, what is the powerful situation based on what we know now, there's probably something around. He's not giving up information. He's not cooperating. He's not willing to violate kind of the free speech of his users. And so that is why they're detaining. You do think that based on what we know, that's the higher probability, but I would not count out all of the other complexities playing much more of a role than probably it appears on the face. And the reason why I think that is because macron wrote like a two-page defense oh i just saw that one of france saying

this is not a political decision this has nothing to do with politics this is what you pretty much only write that if that's exactly what it is you are a politician but you only feel like it to me when i read that yeah it makes you more skeptical you're projecting your insecurities around what you're actually doing but but wouldn't you say the same if it really wasn't a political situation and he's trying to say it is not like no because if it's such a ridiculous theory you wouldn't even feel the need to address it now here is uh what is funny to me the french government has been spending a lot of time money and energy doing outreach and marketing to try to turn france into a startup hub of Europe.

What startup founder wants to go build in a country where they are arresting the founder of a technology platform that will protect users? But again, we don't know that yet. So it could be something else. Perception is reality in that case because when you are playing a global competition game for startup hubs,

you don't have the luxury of people learning the facts they only look at the perception unfortunately and even if everything that the french government is saying is true from a national perspective an interesting question would be is it worth arresting pavel and shutting down telegram if it costs you all future startup growth in your country i don't know i'm not muckerel i'm not either but those are the questions that if politicians really are involved in this stuff begin to enter into the equation because now you're doing a calculation on job growth gdp growth tax revenue right innovation all these things that really are long-term thinking and long-term benefit for what is the expectation

Right. Like, again, if you were to go and you were to talk to the people arresting Pavel, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think you're going to shut down Telegram? Do you think that you're going to if you jail Pavel, do you think Telegram goes away? I don't know what they think, but it is unclear. But again, nobody is above the law. If he genuinely did something bad, should he not get arrested? From what I understand from even the charges, if you take everything as to what they're saying, they're not saying that he actually participated in this stuff. They're simply saying that you created a platform that allowed people to have these conversations.

But again, the meme is the message. Then should you go arrest the Bic Penn CEO because he created a piece of technology that bad people are using to communicate with each other? I think we wait and see kind of what comes out of it. And then we'll have more informed opinions. I think that's fair. And leave the blonde lady out of it. So let's get into the astronauts who are stranded in space. This is like my worst nightmare.

Like of all the places to be stranded. Before you go any further. They are not stranded? No, they are stranded. I want to give a shout out to Delian Asparov, who is from Bulgaria, who very early on called out and said. There are two astronauts stranded in space. He was actually community noted. Oh, really?

On Twitter. And NASA's official position was they're not stranded. It's just delayed for them to get back. OK. It turns out they were stranded. What is the. And again, if you approach the news with an eye of skepticism and you're willing to do critical thinking and independent thinking, you probably would have realized earlier, maybe not on day one like Deleon, but earlier than now. I think there's two astronauts stranded in space and we can't get them back right now.

It's crazy. So what happened was there were two astronauts who were supposed to be there for like a test flight mission for eight or nine days. And then they ended up staying for eight or nine months. They're going to be coming back in February as of now. um boeing will return its starliner capsule did already return it from diocese without them uh that it delivered to orbit yeah the test flight was originally intended to last about eight or nine days they've been there since june but let's talk about uh boeing for a second okay there's a gentleman porter stansberry who wrote a piece um maybe now two years ago i mean you know much earlier than the planes falling apart. And in that piece, he essentially was criticizing Boeing. He was calling for a decline in their stock price.

And what he said, which I found very fascinating, was Boeing used to be the pinnacle of American engineering as a company. It was all about engineering excellence. But leadership is no longer full of engineers. It is now full of financiers and MBAs. And so it has become a business that is run by spreadsheets, not by the engineering excellence. And therefore, when you run a business by a spreadsheet, you're constantly looking to cut

costs. You're constantly looking to strip things out. You don't care as much about the excellence of the engineering or the culture of the business. you are trying to extract value from it for shareholders and and that becomes dangerous when your business is an airline for some businesses you can get away with it but when you are an engineering business if you do not have engineering excellence it leads to problems and so it's very apparent what's been happening in commercial airlines scary when it comes to space spacex was laughed at for two decades but now spacex who pioneered reusable rockets who is

sending all sorts of things into space at a lower cost who is scheduled for the first private spacewalk coming up here in the next few days i thought they canceled it they pushed it back two or three days because of a helium leak right and that's one of the things that's wrong with the Starliner. And so Boeing, the pride of America, this great American engineering business cannot bring them back from space. SpaceX is going to go up. So this is a prime example of the incumbent had the contract. The incumbent had the job. They can't do it. So now the challenger, SpaceX is going to go get them. And what we are watching is we're watching a shift Because SpaceX is an engineering company. SpaceX does pursue the excellence that Boeing used to. We are watching the innovators dilemma play out. Boeing is eating itself and falling apart while SpaceX is accelerating and becoming a bigger, better, faster, better economic choice for the government.

And so as that shift occurs, you're going to see more and more SpaceX wins, Boeing loses. But also, the game is already over. People, if you look at it at a static point in time, you might say Boeing is a big company, SpaceX is whatever. It's over already. Because the direction of progress, the trend for both of these companies, Boeing has now entered into a phase of their business where it is nearly impossible to turn around. When you go from engineering to spreadsheets, the spreadsheet people will never hire an engineer to run the company.

Yeah. And I think, I mean, just from a marketing perspective, I think if you ask a person on the street who is the CEO of Boeing versus who is the CEO of SpaceX, they're probably going to know SpaceX. I think in terms of the public perception of the company. You don't have to go out on the street. I don't know who the CEO of Boeing is. I don't either. Right? I think I used to, but.

But again, it's about engineering versus financial engineering. And the true engineering that you would think of when you're building rockets and space vehicles, etc. That is what you need to be able to do this successfully. You don't need the financial engineering. And so what is interesting is that if you go and you look at GE over the years, Jack Welch is considered one of the great CEOs of the past couple decades. He was the first kind of celebrity CEO. He also probably destroyed the company. But then his successors were kind of blamed for a lot of the missteps that... He was fantastic at financial engineering and he was able to get the stock price to go up. And so Wall Street celebrated him.

But if you strip away the soul of a company as you pursue that financial engineering and then you hand the bag to somebody else, it's not the greatest legacy. I think Jack Walsh has incredible leadership lessons, but it's very hard to argue that long-term thinking was not part of that strategy in what they did with that business. Boeing appears very similar. And so maybe the last thing that I'll say is SpaceX, the best data point you can see

where SpaceX continues to be long-term thinking is a company that has been around for 23 years and it's not public. it's a private company i was gonna say there's a public private narrative here too as a private company now there's a lot of capital available to them they're one of the most popular private companies in the world they have a line out the door of people who want to invest in the company but to stay private for 23 years is a testament i think to the long-term thinking to the pursuit of engineering excellence not financial engineering and so um you know we should say that hopefully the astronauts get back safely. We should also start asking questions

about if we have companies that are responsible for the manufacturing and engineering of commercial airlines and many other products, and we know that their cultures have been eroded away, the engineering excellence may not be there, and other things have degraded at the company. How do we create oversight? How do we check? How do we ensure instill confidence in the consumer to get on a Boeing flight? I don't have those answers, but it would only take one plane crashing and people dying for there to be a massive controversy and people trying to figure it out. And so, you know, I hope for the sake of Boeing, their shareholders, their employees, you know, their investors, the people of America, people who use their products that Boeing can turn

around, I just wouldn't be willing to bet on it because I think an engineering company who loses its way on engineering, it is very, very hard to reinstill that. You don't think it's possible for somebody to come in and say, we're putting a premium on engineering. We're going to, it's always possible, right? You know, nothing is impossible. And if you had the right leader go in and they were able to kind of, you know, fully implement their plan, their plan, all that stuff, It's possible. It's just, um, you know, think about, uh, if you take an engineer and you put them in a room of MBAs, even if the engineer is the CEO, but they're surrounded by MBAs on the board and all the committees, their direct reports, the MBAs will make sure to eat

the engineer because the engineer represents a threat to them and their ability to continue working at the company. Now, again, it's an overgeneralization to engineer an MBA, but the spreadsheets versus the mechanics, those two people can't coexist in the boardroom. It's very difficult. They have different ways of looking at everything. They actually think each one of them is not as valuable as they think the people similar to them are. Question for you. What would you do if you were stranded in space? I'd be calling Houston every day, multiple times. I think that they're probably doing their jobs. Yeah. I mean, what can you do? Have they said anything?

I think that NASA probably does not want to popularize the idea that there are two astronauts stranded in space, hence the community note, hence the kind of NASA position that OSHA is a delayed situation. I'm going to be so pissed, guys. Eight days versus eight months is a big difference. I mean, it's probably not the first time. hopefully it is the last time but you know just given the number of trips that people are taking

you know it's kind of this very weird situation but thankfully Elon Musk and reusable rockets will go and get them yeah

that's great that's all I have for you today thanks so much for everyone watching wait I want to say something to the people so this is our second episode the last one we asked you to leave a comment

if you enjoyed it and whether we should continue recording this we got like 500 comments, which was insane. I read every single one. So thank you. What I want to ask people is, as we're kind of still, you know, making sure this is valuable content, can you leave a comment with feedback and suggestions on what you want to see more of? We're kind of both doing the topic selection throughout the week. But if you have certain topics in mind that you think should be covered more, let us know in the comments.

I like that plan. See you guys next week. All right, guys. I hope you enjoyed that episode. That was one of my favorites. Now, we got a lot of things to talk about because I spent a lot of time making this podcast or these videos, and now I need your help.

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