The Pomp Podcast - #1408 Phil Rosen & Anthony Pompliano | Bitcoin Is STRONGER Than Stocks?!

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Phil Rosen, the Co-Founder of Opening Bell Daily, and Anthony Pompliano, CEO of Professional Capital Management, discuss bitcoin, bitcoin resilience vs. stock market, inflation, job market, takeaways from presidential debate, and economic solutions to fix the pain American families are facing.  ======================= Buy and sell cryptocurrency in a tax-advantaged crypto IRA with iTrustCapital. Enjoy 24/7 access, lowest fees in the industry, and tax benefits for your retirement. Open and fund an account today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.itrustcapital.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to receive a $100 USD funding bonus. ======================= 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? Today, we have Phil Rosen in the house, and we are going to talk about all the things you guys care about. That's right. We're going to talk about Bitcoin, what's

going on with the price. Why is Bitcoin more resilient than the stock market? How do we know? What's the new measurement that no one's been talking about, but everyone should be? Then we get into inflation, what's going on around the job market? What do we take away from the most recent debate with Donald Trump and Kamala Harris? And then we talk about what's the bull case? If you were either candidate, what would you do? How do you solve the problems around inflation, home affordability, and all of the economic pain that the average American family is facing.

This conversation is fast-paced. It's packed with unique insights. This is information you will not get anywhere else. So make sure that you tune in and then leave in the comments. Let us know what you liked, what you didn't like, and what we can do better next time. We love hearing all of your feedback.

Here's my conversation with Phil Rosen. 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. Today's episode is brought to you by iTrust Capital. Are you buying crypto on an exchange because you're excited about the bull run? Well, I hope you're reporting your crypto gains to the IRS because they want you to pay your taxes.

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Bitcoin has now been available for trading for more total hours than stocks. And this started in 1971 when Nixon moved the dollar off the gold standard, and that initiated what's called the fiat era for the economy and currencies. And right now, stocks have been trading for about 100,000 hours. And even though Bitcoin's only 15 years old, because it's 24-7 markets, it's been trading for 123,000 hours. What do you make of this? So it's really interesting.

Like, first of all, before anyone goes and says, oh, no, the stock market's been trading for longer than since 1971. Of course. But in the fiat era, as you pointed out, since 1971 and the Nixon shock, the stock market has only been open in terms of hours of operations during the week. I always like to point out that the stock market is actually closed more hours a week than it is open. So they got your money and you can't access it more than what they will allow. Those hours of operations prevent you. And so then if you go and you look at Bitcoin, it trades 24-7, 365. Now, one of the advantages is that there's stuff that happens geopolitically or in the

economy all the time. Maybe it happens early in the morning. Maybe it happens late at night. Maybe it happens on the weekend. Bitcoin is always trading. And so you can always access your money. You can always buy or sell whenever you want to. But this idea of cumulative trading hours really is, well, how much is the robustness

of the system? How much has the system been tested? And if you think about this idea of Bitcoin, although in terms of years as a measurement, it's actually younger than the fiat stock market. If you measure it by hours of operations in which it has been open, Bitcoin is older than the fiat stock market. And so what that tells you is that Bitcoin has been tested more than a fiat stock market, which would suggest that Bitcoin is more robust. It also would suggest that actually Bitcoin has more data points. And it also would suggest because of the global accessibility, which the stock market does not have to the same degree

of Bitcoin, that more people are able to use Bitcoin, more people are able to access it based on the measurement of time. And there is the ability to respond to anything that happens in the world at any time, any place. And so when you put those things together, Bitcoin is probably the only true free market global asset. And in a world where investors are becoming more and more kind of aware of these different global events, you need to have an asset that trades 24-7, 365, available to anyone, anywhere, and also is sensitive to these global events. And so if you look at the stock market, the US stock market may not actually move, depending on what happens in the Philippines or in a South American country, or maybe in a random

country in Europe, right? Because the US stock market is focused on the United States. But Bitcoin moves based on a lot of these different global events. And so when all of a sudden we saw Iran shoot rockets at Israel, Bitcoin was very volatile. The stock market was closed. And so if you're an investor sitting at home and you're watching the news and you see that this geopolitical event is playing out, how do you express that in the financial markets? How do you protect yourself? Forget how do you make money? How do you protect your portfolio? The world changed and you can't change your portfolio. With Bitcoin, that's never a problem. You always have access to the market. And therefore, Bitcoin is actually older in terms of time that you could trade it

than the fiat stock market. Do you think that your, I think your take is correct in your analysis, but I think it's reserved for some more sophisticated investors because I'm not sure how many investors are trying to express their view on a global event through their investments. And also, I wonder how much volume of inflows has the stock market seen in the last 50 years versus Bitcoin in the last 15 years, even though maybe the accumulated hours of trading are more in favor of Bitcoin. Do you have any insight on that? So I think that looking at the extreme tells you about kind of the everyday situation. And so, yes, of course, there are only a certain amount of traders or kind of sophisticated financial folks who are going to change their

portfolio based on something that's happening somewhere else in the world. But the market should not determine who has access. The people should determine whether they want to trade or not. And so what ends up happening in the stock market is they prevent you from trading. If you are sophisticated or not, whether you want to trade or you don't, you don't have the ability more hours a week than when it is open. And so what Bitcoin does is it simply says, hey, we're open for business all the time. You can sit on your hands or you can act. It's up to you. We're offloading that responsibility to you to make decisions about your own portfolio. Whereas if you really think about the stock market, it's a gated market. It's only available

to you when the big finance bosses say that you can trade. They're the gatekeepers. And so again, I understand why they do it, right? It used to be very human driven. People want to go home. They want to go to their families. They need to sleep, all these different things. But now we live in a world that should be more global, that should be more technology enabled. And so I do actually think that the stock market eventually will open up to 24-7, 365. A lot of people don't like to talk about this, but the US stock market has an immense amount of overnight trading. And if you look at the financial returns, the returns of stock movements overnight versus during the normal hours of operation, overnight returns have destroyed during the day returns. And so it's

actually been more profitable to simply trade overnight. The problem is that most retail investors or self-directed investors, they don't know how to do that. And so the strategy that they have employed, if they wanted to try to exploit this, is they would basically buy stocks at the close. And then they would sell in the morning. And so that worked for a while, but now with all the volatility and kind of all the funny business that goes on in terms of overnight trading, that actually hasn't worked over the last two to three months. And so it's this weird thing of, you have people trying to hack the system. They're saying, I want exposure to the overnight market. It's not available to me in a kind of a normal trading environment. So instead, what I'm

going to do is I'm basically going to go long right before the market close. I'm going to sell when the market opens. But even in that scenario, you're only holding for what, 12 hours, 16 hours, right? It's not that long, but still you don't have access to the market. So if you buy right before four o'clock and all of a sudden something happens at midnight, you got to wait eight more hours, nine more hours, 10 more hours, right? Depending on exactly when the event occurs. And so that is a problem that can be solved. Just open the market. Let people trade whenever they want to trade and figure out the technology component.

That's a you problem, not an investor problem. Give people access to financial markets. And that access is, of course, what makes Bitcoin attractive right now and other cryptocurrencies. But I think, and you've talked about this a lot, the Bitcoin play is a big play on currency debasement. But I think that is not so easy to understand. Could you talk about that a bit? I think stocks are a play on currency debasement as well. Some stocks go up more than others, but overall, the stock market has the same driver as what Bitcoin is. The dollar is being devalued. Structurally, it does not matter what anyone says. It does not

matter what any politician says, they have to devalue the currency because we have to monetize the debt. And so in that scenario, any asset that is denominated in dollars is going to go up over the long run. And so stocks will go up generally. Bitcoin is going to go up generally. Real estate generally. Now, can you go buy a bad piece of real estate and you bought it and it was overpriced and it goes down for 10 years? Of course. Same thing can happen in the stock market. You could by, let's say, for example, if you bought the all-time high of Bitcoin back in 2021, today you're down, but it went back to a new all-time high and then it came back down, right?

So like market timing stuff obviously still plays into this, but the important part is that if you take the US stock market and you don't denominate it in dollars, you denominate it in gold, it's basically flat since 1971. And so what that tells you is most of the growth, when you denominate the stock market in dollar terms is not because of growth in the stock market. In terms of the companies, most of the growth is being driven by the devaluation of the currency. There's a reason why the stock market goes up to the right at a 45 degree angle. How is it so perfect? It's because it's about the currency debasement, not actually what the companies are doing

in terms of the overall market and its return that it drives every year. That is very interesting. And I think for a business owner, it would be hard to stomach because if they're focused so much on quarterly earnings and improving profits and margins, and then you're saying it's just currency to basement across the board for markets. Well, so there's a paradox here, right? Which is interesting. If you own a business, you got to pay attention to what your revenue is, what your profits

are, your margins, your expenses, all those things. Because ultimately, that is going to drive the value of your individual business, right? As a business owner, but as an investor, especially investors who are not going to take single name stock risk, and they're going to say, hey, I'm just going to buy the index. The indexes definitely are driven by that currency devaluation. And so, yes, depending on who you are in the market depends on how much does an individual company performance versus the overall currency debasement story. But I believe, and I've talked about this extensively, that historical valuations of stocks are important, but they are losing some

importance or they are becoming less reliable because today, given higher degrees of inflation, there's a subset of people who are putting their money into stocks to hide from inflation. Look at the stock market when inflation exploded. The stock market exploded. And so if now stocks serve as an inflation hedge, then you have to say, what is this company worth? What is the stock worth? And then I need to put a monetary premium on top of it.

And so that monetary premium could be 1% or it could be like 7% or 8%. But when you start to look at what is the value of this company, it's higher than the historical norms because of the monetary premium and this inflation hedge now that stocks have become given the higher inflation that we're experiencing. I think that makes sense. And that's a very clear explanation. I do want to pivot to the Trump-Harris debate last night. It was mostly a circus, a lot of political theatrics. Mostly it was talking points that we probably could have

predicted ahead of time. And we heard about immigrants eating dogs. And Trump said Harris's economic plan was four sentences long. And we did not hear anything really about housing $35 trillion in debt or changing tax structures for businesses and households. What were your takeaways from the debate? I agree, circus. I agree, kind of theatrics. I was surprised at both candidates getting caught talking about the past rather than talking about policies and kind of future results. And the reason why I think that is important, if you're trying to win a popularity contest, you talk about what you did, you talk about who you are, you talk about how much people like you. But if you're trying to win a political

campaign, you have to talk about what you're going to do for people. You have to speak to what their outcome is, not your side. And so both political candidates, I think I kind of got caught in this almost like memetic battle back and forth of trying to do that. And at times you could see them catch themselves and try to get back to, oh, let me talk about the people. Let me talk about policy or whatever. But for the most part, across all issues, there was very little talk about the actual policies. Now, what I will say is the most surprising part to me was what was not said in the debate. And on that front, what we did not hear is a specific economic plan from either candidate on what they were going to do to get inflation down, what they were going to do to

make home more affordable, what they were going to do in terms of creating more jobs, what they were going to do in terms of ensuring that we could get the national debt under control, balancing the budget, not having the annual deficit. We just go down all of these economic topics. There was no conversation about that. I am still shocked that neither one of the major party candidates has talked at all. I've not heard either one of them say my goal or my promise is I am going to balance the annual budget. They used to fake it, right? They used to say like, hey, at least I'm going to tell the people that they don't even say it anymore. That is how lost we are in terms of balancing the budget. On top of that, there was no talk about how do you get

inflation down? What they did instead was they were bickering about what the inflation rate was and who was responsible for it. But people don't care. Was it 9%, 11%, 10%, 12%, 8%? Who cares? That was three years ago, right? And whose fault is it? Well, it's probably actually both political parties' fault because they both were voting for the fiscal policy and the printing of money. And so instead, what I wish that we had heard was, here's exactly what I'm going to do to get housing more affordable for Americans. Here's exactly what I'm going to do to get inflation down. Here's exactly what I'm going to do. Now, one of the things that I find very interesting, I recently was doing a phone call with a political candidate in one of the New York races. And this

guy is very astute in politics. A friend of mine knows this guy really well. And he said, hey, you should talk to him. So I called him up and we were just talking through kind of his campaign and various things he was doing. And more so I was just trying to learn like, how do these campaigns work? Why do you guys do certain things? And he told me something that almost made me fall out of my chair. He said, political consultants will tell you, do not put your policies out there. And I said, why do you mean? He goes, because you can be attacked for them. And so I said, wait a second. The people who are consulting the politicians are telling them, don't actually put your policies out there

because if you put your policies out there, you're going to get attacked for them. And this guy to his credit was saying, I'm going to put my policies out there because I feel like people who, if I want them to vote for me, they should know what I'm going to do. But that blew me away.

And so maybe the political consultants are telling them, don't talk about this stuff, but these are real problems for Americans, right? There are families that cannot afford living in the same way that they were three, four, five years ago. And so when you look at this, there's got to be something to be done. And so I'm not hoping that either candidate

all of a sudden becomes like a world-class economist that can solve every problem and they're going to be the person. But you got to acknowledge the problem first. Then you got to be able to come up and say, here are the things that I think we can do that we know we can do. And then even if you just say,

and by the way, I'm going to hire really great people and those great people are going to help me figure out this problem. That's a big problem. And we don't have an answer yet. We don't hear any of that stuff. And so it falls back on, you know, we talked about last week, the political candidates are actually a little bit more similar than people want to give them credit for. And maybe we can throw in the fact that neither one of them has an actual economic plan as to what they're going to do. But I do think it's a big opportunity. If somebody comes out with a real economic plan, not like, hey, I'm going to tax unrealized gains or other nonsense, but comes out and says, here is a

point by point plan of what I'm going to do in order to make your life better as an average American family. I think that that is a huge opportunity for someone to get massive momentum going into the November vote. If you were in Harris's shoes, knowing what the limited policies she's put out so far, how would you package and pitch those to American voters? I think you have to do three things if you're her. The first is, although it is dirty politics, you have to figure out how to take credit for the things that went well under the Biden administration. You have to deflect and negate the bad things. And then you have to put forward a argument that you are going to do A, B, C, and D in order to address these issues. Now, what are those things? I actually think that if Harris came out and said, I'm basically going to let the free market ride, I'm going to put all these incentives in place, and here is going to be the impact. The beauty of the Democrat Party is that they actually have a lot of the media, which is sympathetic to them.

They have a lot of economists, these people who are very anti-Trump. And so lean into that, right? Not necessarily that they're attacking Trump, but lean into the fact that you can get a bunch of economists to come out if you put forward a half-decent plan, and they say, hey, this is a great economic plan, right? Go and use that to your advantage. What I will say, again, going back to the fact that these candidates are way more similar than people realize, Kamala Harris last night was talking about giving tax cuts out to people. nobody is explaining that donald trump wants to give tax cuts and so does kamala harris i'll give you a great example she wants to give a fifty thousand dollar tax break to small business owners that's a tax cut it may not be a percentage in terms of taking the corporate tax rate you know

from 20 to 15 it may not be taking the capital gains tax down whatever but that is a tax break It's a tax cut. She is giving a tax incentive to a cohort of people. Now, I don't think that that's a bad thing. I don't think she should be attacked for that. I actually think that if we want to encourage entrepreneurship, if we want to encourage job creation, small business owners are responsible for 50% of jobs in America. That's a great thing. We should try to get more people into business. We should lean into capitalism. We should go ahead and say, hey, if you want to start a business in America, we're going to incentivize you to do that. But call a spade a spade. It's a tax cut, right? And so if Trump and Kamala Harris both want a Southern wall,

if Trump and Kamala Harris both want to do no tax on tips, that's tax cut, right? If she wants to give $50,000 to small businesses, that's tax cut. So what we actually have done is both political parties have reached an agreement. They've come to a consensus. We must give tax cuts to the American people. It's like being in high school and someone wants to run for student president, they give out lollipops, right? You may give out, you know, bubblegum lollipops. I may give out a different kind, but both giving out lollipops. We're both trying to give the people something so they vote for us. And so when you see these tax breaks, that is what taxes are. They're an incentive system. And so if you want to punish behavior, you raise taxes. If you want to

incentivize behavior, you lower taxes. And that's what we're watching play out here is they may disagree on what the exact policy details are, but they're both going after taxes, and they're saying, I'm going to give you something. Now, to the credit of Harris, on the flip side, she's also saying, I'm going to raise long-term capital gains to 28%. And so she's playing with the incentive system on both sides. Trump, on the other hand, seems to be saying, hey, domestically, I'm going to cut taxes. I'm going to give kind of these breaks. Internationally, I'm going to use tariffs and other things, and I'm going to go and I'm going to implement that globally in terms of maybe using the incentive system in the other way. If you were to make the bull case for Trump

as far as his economic outlook and policies, where would you begin? I'm going to do exactly what I did previously. I'm going to pump asset prices. Everyone should get long and you're gonna have the greatest stock market in history. And he's the most believable person to say that because that's exactly what he did when he was president. Now, the downside to that argument is he's going to devalue the dollar. The national debt exploded. And so although both political parties, Republicans and Democrats going all the way back, they both add to the national debt. They both print money. This whole idea that Republicans or Democrats, there's no difference. if you give people a money printer, they're going to print money.

And so the Democrats, with things like the Inflation Reduction Act, which was inflationary, right, they printed money. And maybe even worse is that during the Trump administration, the Fed was cutting interest rates. They were suppressing them down to zero with two emergency rate cuts, and they were trying to increase liquidity in the market. And so the fiscal policy decisions by Trump's administration and other representatives was in line.

Both the central bank and the politicians were stimulating at the same time. There's a strong argument that Biden's administration was working against the central bank. The central bank was increasing interest rates. It was trying to drain liquidity. It was selling off almost $2 trillion from its balance sheet.

And the politicians were just printing money without any regard for what the central bank was doing. And so the politicians actually made the central bank's job harder. So when you look at that, you say to yourself, if I'm Trump and I'm trying to campaign here on economic policy, it's look, we had this amazing stock market. We had all this stuff. But as you and I have talked about previously, and you did, I think, a lot of data research

on this, Trump and Biden S&P returns are almost identical. And so he gets the benefit of perception. She has to lean into the benefit of kind of Biden's track record. Now, the thing that they will never do is they will never agree to a common ground because the candidate that comes out and says, hey, it doesn't actually matter who the president is. The stock market is going to go up into the right 8% to 10%. That's not a popular talking point. Where they compete is around the edges. And so I do think that Trump's policies are long-term.

The question is how much damage is done if you stimulate aggressively in the short term. but it's very obvious that in the short term, it's positive for people. And so it begins to push this question of if you are a family in America, were you better off 2016 to 2020 or 2020 to 2024? And then if you go and you take a look at kind of the next four years,

do you feel you're gonna be better off with Harris policies or Trump policies? But right now, the most concerning thing is nobody's talking about it. This is not an election on economic policy. This is an election on, are Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio? What's going on with the southern border? That's the topics that people are talking about. Just think about all the topics that were discussed last night. We're talking about what words were used in speeches three, four, five, six years ago. That's what they're debating to the point where both of them were slinging accusations at each other that have zero impact on the future.

And so to me, the maybe most disappointing part is if we are a country where our leadership, whether they win or they lose, are constantly looking in the rearview mirror. You don't know where you're going. You're not looking through the windshield. It's very hard to drive down the road looking in the rearview mirror. And so instead, if we could have both candidates essentially call a truce on the past is the past, what are we going to do moving forward? Now, I do think that citizens and political commentary will say, well, actually, if we

look at what you did in the past, that should give us a signal what you're going to do in the future. So how does that play into it? How do you stand on or critique the past, but yet do it from a perspective of here's what's going to happen in the future? And I think that was maybe the biggest missed opportunity for Trump. He tried to do it because he kept saying to Harris, well, why don't you go down to the Capitol and sign it right now?

But it was such like an insider Washington way of describing it. I thought that instead, if he simply just said, you're the second most powerful person in the world right now. If you want to change something, you can do it. If you say you're going to do X, why wait? If it's so important, you have 50 days, go do it right now. Literally, go right now.

You're the second most powerful person in the world. If you can't get it done as the second most powerful, what makes you think you're gonna get it done as the first most powerful? And if I was Harris, what I would continue to say over and over and over again, which I thought that she was trying to do was create a difference in age,

create a difference in kind of philosophy and perspective. And then she was trying to get to the specificity. The problem is that she kept bringing up certain policies that were not going to have the intended impact that she wanted. So she would talk about home affordability. I'm going to give everyone $25,000 for a first-time home purchase, which is exactly going to drive affordability worse. And so I think that at least she was trying to go in that direction.

It's just really, really hard, I think, to be in their position. And one of the things I was saying to a friend this morning, imagine if you and I, who have virtually no pressure, right? In terms of we're not running for an office, we're not whatever, but if we just went on that same exact stage and we knew that a lot of people were watching and we had to talk about the economy, about immigration, about all these different topics, both of us would say really stupid stuff, right? It would be very difficult to do that.

And so the pressure of that situation, we need a president who can withstand that pressure, who can thrive, right, in doing this stuff. But both of these candidates are not the JFKs, the Ronald Reagans, the people who I think were built for a different era of American politics. And so we kind of have like modern politicians for modern times. And whether we like it or not, this is not a policy competition. This is a competition of like, will Taylor Swift back you? Will the latest, greatest podcast have me on?

who's going to get the most viral clip on Twitter? You know, can somebody screenshot Truth Social so that everyone sees it? Those are the things that these candidates are doing and you can see it. How many pre-prepared zingers did they each have? And when they set them, you could tell they were like, ha, here it comes.

And then they would say it, right? It was like very unnatural. And so I just think if we want to get a better handle on the future, there are things that the moderators could have done. And this may be one of the most important points. The conversation is led by the moderators. Why did the moderators never ask about

what is your specific plan to get inflation down? What is your specific plan to get the national debt? What is your specific plan to get the annual deficit under control? Are you going to balance the budget? Do you commit to all this stuff? Instead, they were asking all kinds of crazy questions. And so is that a representation of what the people want?

Do the people not care about that stuff? Are the people not going to change their vote based on those answers? Or is that not a popular thing to talk about? Because it would force political candidates to get out of kind of the WWE mode and the theatrics and actually start talking about policy. So the quality of the question sometimes can determine the quality of the answer. Did we get good questions last night? I would argue probably not.

And so if you look at the top of the funnel of problems as to why we got what we got last night, it starts with the questions that were asked, and then it leads to what the candidate said in response. And so if you want high quality policy driven conversation, ask high quality policy driven questions and you'll get a better outcome what did you think i do think the moderators could have been better i think they could have been maybe more even-handed um i think it was clear that they were not people that liked trump which is fair you know but they could have as journalists especially maybe hid that a bit better um there were a lot of softball questions for harris um

and they kept correcting trump and you know he was saying some crazy things to be fair harris also said some crazy things they did not say anything or they did not rebut her at all um yeah but like you said it's a very tough job to be a moderator uh it's tough job to be an interviewer with a big audience and when you're on that high stakes stage i'm sure it'd be very easy to fall back on your biases. And there's not really training for that, I don't think, especially for media. You're expected to do the job and be objective or at least fair. But when you have so many eyeballs, a lot of that falls away. I do think you bring up an interesting point where we heard a bunch about the candidates'

preparation. It was said that Harris was literally with method actors, people dressing like Trump, you know, all this stuff. Supposedly Trump was going through multiple campaign kind of prep sessions and all this. We never hear what is the moderator's prep. I'm assuming they're professionals. So I'm assuming that they are, you know, going through prep, they're having meetings, they're doing research, you know, kind of all that stuff to be prepared. But I would love to hear what do they do, right? And whether it's ABC, Fox, MSNBC, CNN, whoever it is, right? Just like, what is the moderator's prep? And are there like almost after action reviews? Are there critiques? In the NFL, there's a governing body of sorts or kind of the referee kind of governance

that if you do a good job, you get rewarded with bigger games. If you do a bad job, you don't. Does that happen with moderators? Like, did they get a scorecard this morning when they walked in, the two moderators? And it's like, hey, you were really strong on this. You didn't do this so well. we here's where you improve you get uh you know b plus yeah i don't know i i think uh their report card is just what other journalists say about them so it's very echo chambery because if you have a bunch of journalists from mainstream production outlets or mainstream news outlets they would all pretty much fall back on the same questions or tactics or biases and um everyone this morning was praising the two journalists that were the moderators last night.

And that's to be expected, I think. But I don't know. I don't know what their prep looked like. I know if you saw zoomed out camera shots, they had tons of papers all over the desk. So even I have a paper right now just for this conversation, but I'm sure it's rigorous, the prep. But on that note. Thank you for your time, Pomp. Thanks for having me. 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. There's a couple things you can do to help the show get bigger, get in front of more people. The first, if you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit the like button. The more likes there are per video,

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