The Pomp Podcast - #1411 Polina & Anthony Pompliano | This Bitcoin Data Will SHOCK You

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Polina Pompliano, Author of ‘Hidden Genius’ and Founder of The Profile, and Anthony Pompliano, Author of ‘How To Live An Extraordinary Life’ and CEO of Professional Capital Management, discuss comments made by Vice President Harris on digital assets, why she has an advantage for crypto voters over Trump, why investing at all-time high prices is actually a good idea, housing affordability, President Biden attempting to ban software from certain countries, Anthony’s new book, ‘How To Live An Extraordinary Life’ and more.  ======================= Buy book: https://www.amazon.com/Live-Extraordinary-Life-Anthony-Pompliano/dp/0857199927/ ======================= CrossFi is the Apple Pay for Crypto. For the first time in history, anyone with a web 3 wallet like Metamask can spend crypto through a physical or virtual visa cards anywhere in the world where Visa is accepted. Be one of the first to get your hands on a CrossFi card and a prize pool of $3 Million Dollars by joining and participating in their testnet today: ⁠https://xfi.foundation/users⁠ ======================= Wondering where to go for financial advice? Domain Money makes financial planning simple. No hidden fees and no sales pitches - you get a personalized roadmap to your goals, from dream vacations to retirement. Flat-fee advisors create a plan tailored to you, with zero pressure to invest. Don’t be like most people who’ve never had a real conversation about their financial plan. Book a free strategy session today at ⁠⁠⁠https://www.domainmoney.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠While I'm not a Domain Money client and they are paying me, I've seen first hand the value of their service through the free plan they did for one of my brothers. Yes, I might have an interest in promoting Domain Money, so just like any major financial decision, it's important you understand what the service is and if it's right for you so make sure to see important disclaimer at ⁠⁠⁠https://www.domainmoney.com/t/legal⁠⁠⁠ ======================= 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 is a great episode. We've got Polina here and we've got some hot topics to discuss. First, we have Vice President Harris and her recent comments on

digital assets, why she has an advantage for crypto voters over Donald Trump and what Trump could do instead. We then get into why investing at all time high prices is actually a good decision if you go and you look at the data since 1988. That's right. That'll blow your mind. Then we get into housing affordability, why it has eroded so much, why you actually should care more about who is sitting on your city council board rather than who is in the white house and then lastly we talk about president biden his recent decision or opinion to go ahead and try to ban software from certain countries that are inside of our cars what it means and why the media may be trying to feed you one line but you should be looking at the other side and understanding what's really

going on with terrorists and all sorts of national security concerns and we end up with a couple of little funny anecdotes about the book that i recently released this week polina holds nothing back. She roasts me, but she also tells you guys some cool little facts that I think you'll enjoy as well. 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.

Today's episode is brought to you by CrossFi. CrossFi is the Apple pay for crypto. For the first time in history, anyone with a Web3 wallet like Metamask can spend crypto through a physical or virtual Visa card anywhere in the world where Visa is accepted. No more exchanges or middlemen. Just link your wallet, get your card and start spending today. CrossFi card transactions have already been successfully processed in New York, Los Angeles, London, Dubai, China, Japan, and over 20 other countries. Be one of the first to get your hands on a CrossFly card and a prize pool of up to $3 million by joining and participating in their testnet today. You can go to xfi.foundation slash users. Again, that's xfi.foundation slash users. Go check it out today.

Today's episode is brought to you by Domain Money. I love talking about money, but I'm not a financial professional, so I don't offer one-on-one coaching or advising. But in order to get ahead, you need someone with expertise to work with you one-on-one and provide personalized advice. The decisions you're making now will significantly impact the rest of your life. The more time you waste not taking the steps to get a plan for your money, the harder you make it to achieve your goals. That's why I've partnered with Domain Money to pair our community with flat fee certified financial planners. That's right, They are CFPs.

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Go check them out. And just like any other major financial decision, it's important you understand what the service is and if it's right for you. So make sure to go see the important disclaimers at domainmoney.com slash legal. That's what the lawyers told me to say. Now, go check them out. DomainMoney.com slash POM. All right, Plina, what's the first topic?

All right. So Vice President Kamala Harris finally addressed crypto for the first time on Sunday. Kind of. She said she would, quote unquote, encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets while protecting consumers and investors. She has yet to publicly discuss crypto at length, but her advisors reached out to companies including Coinbase and Ripple to reset relations. I wonder why. Is that because of like regulatory things that are going on? Look, there's a lot of complexity here and there's a lot, obviously, of tribalism and there's a us versus them mentality. But I do think there's a couple of key components that are pretty important. The first is why does the Bitcoin and crypto community feel like they're under attack?

Well, it's because they have been. It's very obvious that whether intentionally or not, there is an apparatus that comes from the government, from banking regulators, from securities regulators, from politicians that has been best skeptical, at worst, nefariously kind of abrasive and punitive against the industry. And so if you look at that, when people say, why are they not talking about this? There's X number of people that hold this. There's Y amount of value. It's because it doesn't matter. nobody is going to win or lose the presidential election based on what their stance on crypto is.

It is a massive echo chamber. Think about how crazy this is. They're not talking about it, yet the crypto world has put together the largest money packs and donations of any industry. Is this why both parties are kind of catering to the crypto demographic? I don't even think they're catering to it, right?

I mean- If you know, but here's the part that I don't think people really quite understand is if you look at Trump, Trump is saying a lot of the right things and everything. He was in office. He didn't do any of this stuff. And so now he's saying, hey, I learned about it. That is a natural progression of a Bitcoin or of somebody in the crypto industry. OK, got it.

But he's at a disadvantage. He cannot do anything right now. All he can do is make promises. But Kamala Harris actually has the advantage from a position standpoint in crypto. If she right now wanted to win the crypto vote, she could easily do two or three different things like action, like she could issue a statement that calls the dogs off of the industry, says, hey, everyone, leave this industry alone. We need to treat them just like everybody else.

She could go and she could actually through some sort of executive order in partnership with Joe Biden, say we're going to make certain decisions. We're going to advocate for certain legislation to be passed throughout the legislative process. She is doing something. She's resetting relations by talking to these companies. That doesn't count. The words don't matter. Right. Again, some people look at it and they say, oh, if you're the existing administration, you're in a disadvantage. I actually think it's an advantage because you have the power to do something right now. And so if they want to actually win the crypto vote, meaning the Democrats and the Harris administration, they could act right now. They have, what, 35, 40 days left. If they do something, they will win a big portion of the undecided and even potentially the single issue voters because people say, oh, they're serious.

It's not words, it's action. Trump doesn't have any advantage right now. He just can make campaign promises and you have to evaluate. Do you believe him or do you not? Now, here's what I do think is really interesting. Why does the Harris campaign not do anything? Because it doesn't matter. It does not matter towards whether she's going to win or lose. The crypto crowd can all go towards Donald Trump. 100% of them can go vote for Trump. And the Harris administration obviously thinks they can still win. And so what Trump is doing, which is very interesting, is he is obviously much more sympathetic. He thinks that that crowd of people is very strategic.

That's why he's spending so much time on this. But there is a kind of 1A component to what Trump is doing. Trump is not only saying stuff on the campaign trail, but he's also built a business within the crypto industry. Why is he doing that? Why is he building a business? Well, so he's got the Trump trading cards. They're very, very popular. Trading cards.

Trading cards. They're selling out some of these drops in hours. I mean, this stuff is very popular. And for those that haven't went and looked at it, I've talked to the team that helped him do this, right? And I've really tried to understand, like, why is this working? Because it's not just crypto people buying it. They didn't launch NFTs in the sense of like, look at us.

We're in the crypto echo chamber. We're launching NFTs. They launched Trump digital trading cards and a huge hack that they had in terms of virality and really optimizing for selling out is you can buy with your debit or credit card. So you don't need crypto. So if you're Joe Blow sitting at home and you are a Trump fan, whether because of his politics or just for you've been a fan of him for a long time because of the apprentice or whatever, and you say, I want to buy a collectible or similar to the sneaker flipping culture, I'm going to buy this whole day. It's going to go up in value and I'll sell

to somebody else later. You can just whip out your debit card or your credit card and you can buy it online the same way you'd buy something from Amazon or Shopify. Yeah. And then you now have this digital trading card. It's not a crypto product in the sense that the crypto people think about it. And so what we're watching happen right now is the crypto industry was the pirates. They were the kind of challengers. They were growing very aggressively. And you had to be very native to the technology. It'd be very technically oriented. You had to really, really believe even this contrarian thing that was kind of outside the norm. Today, those people, if they get ossified and kind of like dried cement

in the hardcore crypto industry, they are going to get left behind because the future of the industry is how do you cross over to create products and services where people don't know crypto rails are involved? So, for example, the crypto audience will say, blah, blah, blah, stable coins. but actually the future products that are going to be successful are going to talk about blah, blah, blah dollars. When I say dollars, you don't say back to me, are you using HTTP electronic money on, you know, X rails that settles through the fed? It's just dollars. I don't care if it's a physical dollar in my pocket or it's an electronic dollar in my bank account. It's

dollars. The same thing is going to happen to crypto, the rails, the infrastructure, all of the nerd stuff is going to get pushed into the background. And there will be people who build that stuff that care, but the average user outside of the hardcore crypto crowd, they don't care. All they want to know is, are you selling me a product or a service that gets the job done?

I use technology every day that I could not describe to you how it is built. The internet. I don't care. All I know is that I can go to google.com and I can type in a question and it gives me links to go check it out. I can go to perplexity

and I can type in a question and it gives me an answer. I can pull out a supercomputer from my pocket. I can press a glass screen and magic happens. I don't know how the glass screen works. I don't care. Let me use the products and services and just get out of my way. That is the maturation that crypto is going through.

And so if you bring this back, if founders, entrepreneurs, people who are building the industry start to realize that, those are gonna be the people that win. if the investors realize investing in this industry is no different than other industries. You're now looking at a global portfolio and the politicians are realizing, wait a second,

this group is important in the sense of size, but it's not actually going to win or lose Harris the campaign. And so I think what Trump is trying to do is he's looking for these areas where he can gain an advantage, where he can gain an edge. He's the challenger. He doesn't have the benefit of the media saying, great job.

He doesn't have the benefit of Oprah saying, hey, come sit down and do a talk with me. So when you are the challenger, when you're the upstart, when you're the startup competing against the incumbent, you have to take a little bit more risk. You got to go and find the things on the edges where you think that you can get a mispriced opportunity. And he thinks Bitcoin and crypto is one of those things. Yeah. And like you said, like Harris's team is kind of making these broad statements and grouping

digital assets with AI. They're just seeing this as like frontier tech versus being like, we're going to put skin in the game and start a business. And Trump recently went to the Bitcoin bar in New York City. So it's like he's putting some skin in the game to say like, this really is important to me, whether it actually is or not. And you actually went to the bar where Trump was. Do you want to tell us your impression? Yeah. I mean, the first thing was forget any politics, whether you like the person or you don't like the person. I think most people who watch this show know I'm a fairly independent person. I think that there's things that are positive about both candidates. There's things that are negative about both candidates. I take great pride in trying to evaluate each one of them independently on each topic. And I come to a conclusion as to whether I agree with him or I don't. All that said, when Donald Trump walked into that bar, the first thing that I said to

myself was this dude's swag is on a thousand. Okay. I don't know about swag. I'm telling you, it is hard to describe until you see him walk into a crowded room. Now, again, people are there to see him, right? So there's an element of it, but I have met thousands of people in my life. I mostly for my career as an investor have invested in private companies where my entire job is to walk in. And in 30 minutes, I need to make a decision whether I'm going to give a person a lot of money to try to go build a company. What are they like? What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? What type of person are they? Can they inspire other people to do stuff? Can they go close a deal? Can they raise money? Can they do all this stuff?

I don't have the best measurement of people, but I got a pretty good one that's been honed over a long time. Did I have swag when we met? Yes. I literally, we met in the morning and then I said to you, we should go to dinner tonight. Because I had swag. Yours was on like 500. His was on a thousand, but it's okay. Well, you walked in, you know, you were, we won't tell the whole story. And so when he walked in that bar, that was my first thing, right? Whether people agree with me or not, that was, that was the first thing that I noticed was this guy, you want to call it aura. You want to call it swag, whatever you want to call it. It's just, some people got it. Some people don't, he got it. And I started, I mentioned it a couple of people and they were

like, yeah, a hundred percent. First time I ever saw him was today. I completely agree with that. Can we just, is it because he like warmed people up? Did he make a joke? Like, is it, is it just the way he walked? It's kind of like, um, if you're, if you're a guy, right. If you're a guy and you walk into a room and let's say that you walked into a bar and there's a tough guy in the corner, you just know, I'm not messing with that dude. That dude seems like a tough guy.

There's just a, an aura that there's a vibe to them. Whatever words you want to use. you're just like that guy seems like somebody that nobody wants to mess with he didn't say anything he didn't even move you just know the way they look the way they feel like all this you're just like got it then there's other people that you look at and because of human biology and the way that we have developed you look at and you're like i would whoop that dude's butt he didn't say anything he didn't do anything or what right it's just it's just you you start to learn this stuff and so i think that trump that was the first thing the second thing is um

I got the sense that he was interested in what is this stuff like how does it work but by no means do I think that if you said to him hey go right now buy bitcoin move it between wallets then go and set up a node like he's not going to be able to do that stuff the guy's almost 80 years old right so like let's call a spade a spade on that uh you don't need your politicians to be experts on everything it's impossible for them to do that but the fact that he's trying to learn i thought was pretty positive the third thing he's a showman right and he walked in he's signing stuff he literally is handing out burgers doing all this stuff uh and associated to that is like the bitcoiners can't help but give them material so at one point he said the crypto burger and just

like classic bitcoiner from the back it's a bitcoin burger and he was like okay crypto burger like he didn't even realize that they were correcting him he just thinks that you know crypto and bitcoin are probably the same thing whatever and so um all of that said i think that you have to look at he went to a bitcoin bar he is the first former or current president to do a bitcoin transaction and again this probably doesn't matter it's just great marketing it was all over the news and it was live streamed we saw anthony on tv i i was i did not know that i was going to be in the video shot. And all of a sudden my phone started blowing up with people being like, you're on MSNBC, you're on Fox, you're on this. Okay. But here's the other thing is that everyone

wants to know like Donald Trump. I actually think that the people at PubKey, Thomas and that whole team there is the bar that they went to that whole team. Wow. What an incredible job, right? Imagine what it takes to get somebody of that stature, that busyness, et cetera, to come there, to get him to do the transaction, to get him to participate, answer questions, do all this stuff. Incredible effort from the entire team at PubKey. I know that David Bailey at Bitcoin Magazine, he was there. He was probably heavily involved in helping coordinate a lot of this stuff, but just like

excellent effort from the Bitcoiners to do this. And frankly, it was kind of a surreal moment of just like, I remember in 2016, 2017, 2019, people laughing at this stuff. That was a former president who literally everyone is live streaming him doing a transaction. It is kind of crazy. Insane how quickly this is accelerating. So with all that said, if we go back to Trump and Harris, I think that another component of this that's really important is that these technologies are starting to seep into regular Wall Street.

And so now what you're going to have is everyone wants to talk about like the big Wall Street firms are adopting the assets. And so volatility is going to go down. The other thing that's going to happen is that you are going to see a dissipation of the tribalism. So when you're, you know, if everyone is like in their own fiefdom, think of it like in a kind of, you know, hundreds of years ago, I have my team, you have your team. We live in our village, you live in your village.

I want something, I come and I literally try to kill you to get that thing. That is the brutal world that humans have evolved through. Today, although there is still brutality, although there is still violence in the world, we are a much more peaceful nation and also country. And so you've gotten some of that taken off. Now that doesn't mean that it doesn't still happen elsewhere, but it used to be every day, all day long, right? All this stuff, the same thing's going to happen in crypto,

which is all that tribalism, all that stuff. If you're still caught in the tribalism, you're going to get left behind. And so do you think that Larry Fink has some insanely strong feeling about Bitcoin versus Ethereum? No, you know what they think? We got a Bitcoin ETF, we got a Ethereum ETF. Whatever you guys want to buy, we're happy to serve you, right? And so they're going to continue to bring more and more of these assets in.

And then they're going to say to their clients one day, I don't care if you buy US Treasuries, if you buy Bitcoin, or if you buy a stock, I'm here to serve you. And so Wall Street is all about show me the money. And right now there's a lot of revenue that's up for grabs on Wall Street. They are not going to be Luddites and saying, I'm super religious about something. They simply are going to say, whatever the market decides is where we will go. And that is a mature experience perspective. Whereas in crypto, because everything was so asymmetric and there was so much risk,

if you were wrong, an asset could go to zero. You had to be tribalistic. And in a weird way, because what asset you held that caused you to then go on the internet and defend the asset, that stuff's going to start to go away. And people are going to just say, hey, look, this is a whole investing ecosystem here. Where am I going to put the money? And so as that dissipates, politicians also, I don't know a single politician that says this asset over another. They just say, hey, this whole industry. And Harris is taking it even wider. She's saying AI, crypto, all this stuff together. And I think that it's because

they realize that the, although it's a loud audience, are the crypto people really going to decide the election? How many debates have we had? They've never even talked about it. Obviously the journalists don't think it's important. Neither candidate thinks it's important. Actually all three of the candidates don't think it's important because Biden never brought it up either. Well, these are the debates, right? These are supposed to be the issues of the american people they want to know who am i voting for it's not like oh it only had one minute out of a two-hour debate it was never brought up in any debate and so it signals to you that although we care about it the average person doesn't care and actually if the average person was to be asked

are you voting according to whatever the crypto you know perspective is i think a lot of them be like is crypto still around like they don't even know what it is they're completely oblivious to it yeah well we'll see what happens i think uh i think for the first time there is some like importance put on it by the candidates so that's interesting okay investing at all-time high prices has historically been a better investment than investing on any other day in the market this makes no sense to me. Can you explain that? It makes all sense. No sense. Things in motion stay in motion. So let me give you a great example. There's a chart that we'll pull up that from January 1st, 1988 until today, you can see that if you invest on the day of the all-time

high and you look at one, three, and five years, you outperform by hundreds of basis points compared to investing in that same S&P 500 on any other day in the market. How is that possible? Because if I invest any other day and hold it, I would make more money. This year, I think that there has been something like more than 30 days already, just we're only in September, 30 days of new all-time highs. So in some months, there's multiple new all-time highs. So you hit a new all-time high, a couple of days later, it goes higher.

It's a new all-time high. And so what we have is we are in a bull market in equities and they continue to hit higher and higher prices. And so again, things in motion tend to stay in motion. What is interesting about this is that it is simply momentum investing, find the things going up, they're likely to keep going up, find the things going down, they're likely to keep going down and simply ride the trend. Wait, I just want to understand this.

So if you and I invest me at a lower price and you at the all-time high price and we both hold it, how would you make more money than me? Because let's say that you invested in, let's say I invest at an all-time high price on March 1st, 2020. Okay. Right? And it's going up. I don't remember if that was an all-time high day, but let's just say it's going up.

And then COVID starts happening and then you buy when prices are down, like the prices start to go down look that you that situation in particular was unique because it recovered so quickly but on average since 1988 you have a lower probability of seeing outperformance compared to me buying at the all-time high price because what usually happens is if you are buying when the prices are going down yeah they may go lower they may go down right and so it's this weird thing where all time high prices is a signal of momentum. And so it's all about time preference. Right now, there's a ton of people saying, are equities overvalued? The more people talk about equities being overvalued, the less likely they're overvalued, right? The more people talk about a

recession, the less likely a recession is going to happen. The whole point of a recession or of a market downturn, et cetera, is people aren't paying attention to it, right? The global financial crisis happened because no one saw the risk. The big short, it was a couple of people figured it out and they shorted the market. But what we are watching right now is asset prices continue to hit these highs. So every single person is like, oh my God, here comes the big crash. The economy slowing down. Like the Fed is just stimulating. They're cutting interest rates, right? M2 money supply is starting to expand. China is now pumping liquidity into the market. And so whenever you have that, again, it just looks at since 1988, if you buy all time high prices out one, three and

five years, there's outperformance compared to other dates. And so I think that that is a non obvious data point that becomes really interesting because what it tells you is regardless of prices up and down if you have a 10 plus year time horizon just keep buying there's this great book um that this guy uh wrote uh nick um and when he wrote the book he literally just titled it just keep buying in holding well just keep buying like like if you have a 20 year time horizon is bitcoin's price going to be higher or lower tomorrow i have no clue a year from now i don't know but 20 years from now the probability not guaranteed but the probability that bitcoin is higher is very high same in the stock market same with real estate etc and so if you have a long

enough time horizon you should just continue to accumulate and not try to outsmart the market by trading around selling because you think the market's overvalued buying back any of that stuff This is good advice. Okay. The U.S. home price to median household income ratio is now at 7.2X, a new all-time high. In other words, the average single family home in the U.S. now costs more than seven times the median annual household income. That's pretty wild. Housing affordability is a horrible thing in this country. And a lot of it, people want to point to uh, inflation that is part of it. But, um, if you really try to do the old, uh, Toyota five wise, so those that don't know, um, Toyota created this, uh, whole system where if there's a problem,

let's say something on the conveyor belt broke, say why? And he's like, well, the conveyor belt stopped. So then you'd be like, okay, well, that's not an answer. Why? Like, oh, uh, the power, uh, went out on the conveyor belt. That's what caused the stop. Okay. Why? Oh, the, uh, power of the building you know got rerouted because there's a blackout okay why and you can basically go and what you're trying to do is trying to find the root cause our two-year-old puts us to the test with that every day and so um if you come and you look at the housing stuff and you do kind of you know why why why why what you realize is that it is some hey they're debasing the dollar so obviously home prices will continue to go up uh it is some that we don't have enough supply there's

estimated between 1.5 to 3 million homes are missing in the American economy. We need that to get back to an affordability. And so we've got to catch up. And then some of it is regulation, right? There's people who want to build homes, but they can't build the homes. And then if you look at things like income, people's productivity has continued to go up into the right since 1971, but their pay is actually stagnated. And so in real purchasing power terms. They're getting paid less money. And so you put all these things together and you're like, yeah, home affordability gets eroded away. What this metric is looking at specifically is your income to the home prices. And so that ratio, as it gets bigger, that is just telling

you it's harder to buy a home. And so we have a nation where it is increasingly difficult to own a home. I would argue that that is one of the core tenants of America and kind of the American dream is you can come here. You can own a home. You can build a life of wealth and happiness. You can have a job. There's economic and social mobility. Most people who own a home, a very big portion of their net worth is tied up in that home. And so if you can't own a home, you are actually making it harder for people to build a net worth. And so if the asset that makes up a very large portion of people's net worth is no longer able to be purchased, what do they do with their money?

Where do they go and actually deliver economic return? And home buying, what's so interesting about this is that it's usually a levered trade. You borrow money to buy the asset. And so you're building equity over time in the home. interestingly almost 40 i think it's 39.7 percent of homeowners today do not have a mortgage they are debt-free on their home it's an all-time high now why is that an all-time high a lot of it has to do with the baby boomers are just getting old enough where they've paid off their mortgage they bought the homes when they were 25 or 30 years old guys and now they're 55 60 65 70 years

old and so they just don't have a mortgage anymore and so it's more of a demographic shift than anything. And so it goes back to this whole idea of just like- Are millennials still just renting? Millennials do rent quite a bit, but also I think that there's plenty of people who are millennials who want to buy a home. Yeah, of course. And if you look at this, you're just like, okay, again, Toyota five wise, where do you get? The money is broken. They continue to spend. And if they continue to spend, they will have to devalue the currency in order to monetize the debt. That is the trade of our

generation, and it affects everything from our food supply, to our homes, to our investment portfolios, all the way even to our institutions across religious, societal, and economics. And I think that is really why so many people are sympathetic to Bitcoin. Yeah. Because they see Bitcoin as a root cause solution to the problem of money. I thought this was really interesting that the home price to median household income ratio is actually higher at 7.2x than the 6.8x seen during the 2008 housing bubble. That doesn't surprise me.

Why? Inflation, underbuilding of homes, regulation, and incomes not keeping up. Yeah. And I will say, I think definitely Harris, I think Trump, they both discussed this during the debate around home affordability and building new homes and increasing the supply. So do you buy that do you buy that get it we obviously need to build we obviously need to build more homes um the challenge is that the president of the united states has very little power when it comes to local regulation and so as an example uh the president can't make people build more homes in san francisco because the san francisco regulation which is overseen locally will not let people

build up in most of the city. And so it's why I constantly say for most people, who's on your city council is more important than who's in the White House. Because that one decision has a massive impact. Who sits on that city council depends on your local crime. It depends on the local economics. It depends on the local housing regulations. It depends on public transportation. all these decisions are made by local leadership not who's in the white house national politics matter big legislative decisions matter but most of the things that affect the everyday person in san francisco is not coming from the white house coming from their local leaders you know i wonder if there's a trend where local media has largely died and therefore

all that like power has kind of um consolidated into like the big media therefore people think that like you know who's the president is such a massive whatever versus who's leading their local communities i would guess i don't know for sure but i would guess most people can't name two people in the local city council yeah now just because you can't name them doesn't mean you agree or disagree with them, but it just means people aren't paying attention. And so if you're indifferent, you then can't be surprised

when you have criminals running around or you have no housing being built or public transportation is broken. Some of these budgets for cities or local communities, counties are billions of dollars. And so another thing that I always point to is there are a couple of places that I've lived throughout the years

where I've then gone back afterwards after I started thinking about this and just looked and be like, how big was the budget? What are they spending on? Who's on the city council? There weren't many people who knew anything about billion dollar budgets

sitting on the city council. And so look, they have consultants, they have staff, they have all these people or whatever. And I don't even know if you could really argue some Congress folks and senators know that much about billion dollar budgets

or trillion dollar budgets either. But it leans back to this idea of who the president is definitely matters on some things of course on many things it doesn't matter and so it's just big names it's the most popular it's the you know it's where the national media all that stuff but i thought what you were going to say about the local media is by consolidating in national media the local politicians get away scotch free no that's that's what i mean and nobody critiques them and they do a bunch of stuff that's probably some of it may be corrupt and nobody's checking that power, therefore all these decisions being made. Also, it reminds me

of when I was in college and working at my college newspaper, I remember when I was a senior and younger reporters were asking me, why is the administration at the university doing this? And why is it doing that? My answer was always just follow the money. It's kind of similar to the Toyota thing of like the whys. It's like, if you follow the money, you will probably find why that decision was made and how it kind of trickled down to you. But like you said, these massive budgets are actually on a local level. And I mean, yeah, I think that there's a lot more things that happen in smaller towns and smaller communities, where if the power was checked um you could you know there could be more change than national i also always wonder um

what person wants to run for their local city council or political position well i think well first of all i know you're gonna say like somebody power hungry or whatever but i do think there's people who want to make a difference in their community and then there's also the power no no i agree people make a difference i'm just saying um have you ever gone to a city council meeting No, I've gone to probably two or three of my life. So small sample size. It's like bashing your head against the wall. Citizens come up. They some people support the thing. Some people don't support the thing. There's, you know, all this posturing. One of the biggest things I have a city councils is all the real estate people show up and they're all trying to get votes or regulation or, you know, permits and all this kind of posturing, whatever. It's not the like super sexy stuff. Like, let's fix the local bus system. it's things like like permits on wednesday or thursday should the trash cans be rolled out right right is there a fine if you don't bring the trash can out and i think that there's a lot of like pretty smart people who just say to themselves can we always be like just bring

your trash on the day they tell you bring for example you and i lived in a community and i think we would get mail from there was like there were there were disagreements and battles and whatever and we needed to vote whether there needed to be signs what was it no no the best one was uh they wanted to have 24 7 police uh presence that's what it was or was it only going to be like 12 hours a day and uh they were going to have to quote unquote increase taxes right if uh you wanted 24 hours to pay for it and taxes but hoa or hoa yeah what maybe it was hoa and i remember uh asking one of our neighbors i said uh what is the increase yeah yeah and he said something like ten thousand dollars and i said oh that seems like a lot he goes no no ten thousand

dollars for the whole neighborhood right it was like a hundred which was gonna be like a hundred dollars a year yeah but they would have 24 7 police to protect a lot of people in the neighborhood yeah yeah yeah and i remember saying to myself like who would vote no yeah just what is the thought process here and and look there are arguments as to why somebody did maybe they say oh you're gonna ask for a hundred dollars now then the next thing's gonna be another hundred dollars and next you know we turn around we spent thousands of dollars that's true right so like there's arguments that are i think are rational and sane as to why you might vote no and also the security it was a little yeah but but i think that when you look at it from that perspective

you just say to yourself like again um one neighborhood trying to govern itself essentially and there's disagreement yeah now extrapolate that to a city no it's crazy than a county than a state than a country this stuff's hard yeah but in terms of impacting people locally your home affordability mortgage rates matter monetary policy matters but one of the biggest inputs is literally who sits on your city council and will they let builders build can you go up in a lot of cities you can't how many people are advocating for that multi-family apartment complex not to be built on the street corner yeah how many people say you know what if you let that multi-family complex of affordable housing go there

some dicey character is going to move in i don't want to be living near that that's the type of stuff that happens in these communities and it really prevents the building of housing, which then leads to higher home prices. Interesting. Okay, next topic is that Biden is proposing a ban on Chinese and Russian software to be used in US cars and hardware and software in internet connected vehicles in the US citing national security concerns. And the proposed ban is intended to safeguard cars that can communicate externally, providing a route for U.S. adversaries to access and collect data and remotely manipulate cars on American roads. This is the last thing that I want to worry about right now, but it is a concern, right?

My general take on competition is that if we're going to be a free market capitalistic society, competition should rule the day, generally. Except for a couple of different instances, and one of them is national security. And so if it's, hey, we don't want X in our cars because it gives a car maker internationally, you know, an advantage in pricing over here or something like that. Again, we can debate the merits of why they're doing it. But I got a pretty hard line in my head where I don't have all the information. I don't know what the threat is. Maybe they've actually identified car companies or technology companies doing this.

Like, you know, one of the things about critiquing policy is you didn't get the briefing, right? if the briefings behind closed doors, you don't know what they know. It's really hard to second guess what they're doing. But if it is true that technology is being put in the cars, it can be remotely accessed by either again, in a pleasant way or competition in a negative way or adversaries. And they are able to remotely control the car,

gather data, surveil our roads, cause a car. I don't worry about causing a car crash. Like sure. There's the like, you know, armageddon situation where they make all the cars crash into each other that's what that's what

they're saying they're saying to there's a concern that they may take simultaneous control of multiple vehicles causing crashes and blocking roads so so they could do it right but that is like a pretty extreme thing something that would be more benign but still very concerning is if they have access to all of the uh audio and video and they're able to map american streets if they're able to basically drive down the road and while your car's driving down the road all of that data that is being collected especially with self-driving cars and all the cameras

now and all this stuff and they're basically feeding it back to a country where they're mapping these roads again could they do something nefarious with it could they not it would be different if it was like hey Canada's doing this there are big adversaries of ours and they just cross over the border and you know invade us

what we're really talking about in a lot of these situations is we don't know what they would do with it. Right. And so I think that's where national security is one of those kind of like hard red lines for a lot of people, not just me, but it's like, okay, maybe we should, you know, abandon the free market, um, economics that are associated with that specific, you know, risk. The question then becomes, can American companies build just as good or better? and if they can awesome if they can't for whatever reason then it becomes a question of what is the degradation of technology service and quality that the american people are going

to be willing to put up with in light of national security yeah it's like tiktok there's a lot of people who say look i get the whole national security stuff but like i love it these videos are cool not me people say they love it yeah they're like these videos are cool um so could there be something deeper here i i read this term and i thought it was interesting a digital iron curtain so do we think that this effort drops a digital iron curtain between the two the world's two largest economies with china um and also biden this year announced 100 tariffs on chinese electric vehicles so it's only wait say it again what do you do what what did biden do Announce 100% tariffs

Oh so the current administration is using tariffs Oh Oh okay that's interesting It's almost as if they're just a normal economic Tool that's used by both Republicans and Democrats I did not mean for this To get political but No no but hold on this is important

It's not a political thing that's the point Is right now there's a lot of Mainstream media that is trying to Prey on the uneducated When it comes to very very complex thing. They're very complex economic tools, procedures, implementations, et cetera. And so a great example, which again, Trump said some good things in the debate. Trump said some bad things. So did Harris. But one of the good things that I thought that Trump said in the last

debate was he said, you all keep yelling at me about the tariffs, but why then did you keep the tariffs that I put in? If they were so bad, shouldn't you have rolled them back? Shouldn't you have eliminated them. So I put something in process. You've been there for three and a half years and you didn't take them away. How are you now going to tell me that they're bad? Because you could take them away today. You could at one point, you can go down to Washington, D.C. right now, sign a piece of paper and tariffs are gone. Yeah. But you're not doing that because you realize that this is a great campaign talking point, but they work. And so Biden putting 100 percent tariff on chinese cars it's an economic tool of course and so i think part of what is

frustrating about american politics today is that both sides try to hammer the other side and they blatantly know that they're lying or they embellish no no no lying lying you call what it is it's lying on both sides they do this and i'll give you a good example another one that i recently saw is that uh there was multiple people who were either on television or running commercials for democrats talking about project 2025 again it actually is like such a stupid point but the fact that they keep hammering it project 2025 because i had to ask i didn't know what this was the republican party uh or really uh donald trump and jd van said hey look we're not involved in this. We've never talked to this person. We're not involved in this. Somebody created

something. Somebody created this thing. And I haven't read it. So, you know, I'd be careful about critiquing it in whatever way. But obviously, the Democrats believe that if you read it, you're going to be worried. And they think that is a great campaign point. And so they're hammering it. And in a weird way, I can critique them because it's like, look, they know that they're not involved and they're still saying it. That's bad for the political environment. But if you look at it as a pure mercenary, how do I win the election? It is a fantastic campaign strategy to find something that, you know, gives you an advantage and to just keep hammering it over and over and over again.

The Republicans do the same thing. There are certain things that they are going after the Democrat Party on that probably you kind of look into and you say, ah, again, I know why you're doing it as a great campaign strategy, but it's probably something that you guys know is not true. and so you have to chalk it up to like that's kind of politics it's this like toxic behavior of your you're trying to win um but i do think that the tariffs are a great example where republicans and democrats put tariffs on other countries and so the like uh fear-mongering around them is kind of crazy yeah and the last thing that i'll say about um specifically these

cars is a lot of people don't know this but there's a chinese company that has software that has been uh installed in a lot of the cranes in the ports that is remote access uh accessible that's kind of concerning there's other countries that can access the cranes that take the goods off of the ships yeah but it's just like we're in such a global world what are we supposed to do are we we are well is there american technology in the chinese port cranes maybe maybe i don't know but it's a good question i do know one thing tiktok is here facebook ain't there instagram's not there twitter's not there so in a weird way there's technology being exported

from china to the u.s how much technology is being imported from america you mean the opposite no imported to china yeah exported to china but yeah it's okay i got you china's exporting technology how much are they importing i got you right again there's some but it looks kind of uneven and i think that is where um we have to figure out the details but it goes back to who's at an advantage i and i think it's all about framing right the way that these articles were written is biden proposed a ban on chinese and russian software in u.s cars to protect us from espionage or whatever that sounds like a great idea great idea it could have also been written that biden is cutting off relations with one of the world's you know the the largest economy

in the world second largest is the second largest uh it could have been written that way but i think i think as a voter and as a thinker you have to evaluate these things and really really read the details and be like i wonder why it's written this way and also is this good or bad for the country I agree okay let's end on a high note okay what's the note your book came out this week

oh that is true yeah that is that is a good note that is a great note yeah it's called How to Live an Extraordinary Life and

it is dedicated okay are we talking about the book or is it just the dedication no tell us about the book 65 letters that I wrote to our children and it is life lessons that I've picked up

over the years If somebody reads it, they will get insights that I've procured over the last 35 years on money, investing, relationships, work, health, happiness, and much more. And it's written in a way that I think most people would say is like very simple, plain English. They're pretty short chapters. There's 65 of them, but they're fairly short. And each one of the chapters you could read in a couple of minutes. You can open the book to any page, start reading the letter and you're good to go.

The audio book, I tried very hard to do it in one sitting very efficiently so that people weren't trying to listen to a 10 or 12 hour audio book. Instead, on a long drive, it's about three hours. You can get the whole thing done. I talk fast, but also efficiently and clean. Very nice, very nice, they said.

They also told me they'd never seen anyone ever, ever do that in one sitting. Thank you very much. and on top of that the book is written in a way where each letter you get the lesson that I learned I tell you how I learned it or where I like what I did in my life to get that lesson good or bad and then I say something about here's how you can apply it right and it's addressed at our kids but it's for anybody adults can read this kids can read this anything and my hope is that people take one lesson. That's it. And the way that I've thought about this is the book,

depending on where you buy it, whether you get a Kindle, you get an Audible, you get a hardback, whatever, is anywhere between $10 and $30, depending on the platform and the format. I promise you that if you read the full book from cover to cover, read every single letter, you will get at least $30 of value out of the book. You will. so it's basically a roi positive purchase because you only need one idea that's how i look at books if you buy a book and you get one idea it was worth the price of admission totally this book you get one if you get two you got a great deal if you get 65 you stole from me you stole from me

i spent two years writing this and you ain't you only gave me 30 that's great you didn't give me $30 by the way, the way book sales work, I get like $3. Can I go ahead? Can I share some behind the scenes things? Sure. So tell me how you wouldn't write the letters for me. Yeah, I know. So the, the thing that's funny is there's two things. One is that, um, a lot of times when he finished a chapter or a lesson, he would send it to me so I could edit it. And you know, we could, it was like a living document. So, you know, we'd be going about our day, maybe get into a little kerfuffle maybe i would get a little bad man you guys know how that goes ain't your fault kerfuffle and then and then an hour later i get a text with a google doc that's the lesson is

how to keep your emotions how to keep what is it stay level i wrote one i wrote one that didn't make it in the book how to deal with your wife when she's giving you a heart not playing no but I was like, is this a subtweet via book? This is wild. I'm learning every day out here. The second thing you'll notice in the book is, well, I notice is the way people write is very reflective of how they think. So you will see that Anthony is very succinct, very straightforward to the point.

There's not a lot of fluff at all. Very simple sentences. But also when I was reading it, it's interesting because the way I write, there's a lot of like nuance so so for example if i'm mad i would say i was so infuriated i was seeing red my blood was boiling my blood pressure was high blah when i read his book it was i was mad i was mad and then i was happy i was like you literally your emotions have no depth it's just literally just you were mad therefore you say i was mad i'm asking people to spend their time their most valuable resource. You got to paint the picture. No, there's no paint in anything. I am trying to

take information from my head and download it into their head as quickly and efficiently as possible. Yes, it's very good. And so I want someone to sit down and they say, I'm going on a long drive, bam, book done. They feel like they accomplished something today and they move on to the next one. I also want someone to sit down and say, you know, it is a couple hours before football starts on a sunday i think i could read this book bam done for the day feel like you got some smart stuff in before you go and get some entertainment right i want someone to say i was gonna go out my friends tonight we're gonna go to the club we're gonna have an amazing time but you know what i'm gonna be a little bit more mature i'm gonna sit at home and drink some tea i'm gonna

relax turn on the fireplace get a little blanket and then i'm gonna read this book and if any y'all didn't notice for somebody who's supposedly so succinct i was just gonna say that was some pretty flowery descriptive language there um but they could get the whole book read in a single city can i share can i share my favorite lesson sure that i think we talk about all the time and you include it in the book chinese farmer chinese farmer do you want to tell it tell the tale chinese farmer is a uh parable about a chinese farmer hence the name chinese farmer very creative. And Flynn and I throughout our lives will constantly utter to each other, Chinese farmer. And we try to do it where no one else can hear it because that'd be weird. They'd be like,

what are these guys talking about Chinese farmers for? I don't know, one time he said that to me in an elevator with other people in there and I was like... Well, it was a Chinese farmer situation. But a Chinese farmer situation is because of this parable. The parable is there's a Chinese farmer, he's got a bunch of horses. One day he wakes up and the horses ran away. And his neighbors come over and they say, wow, you are so unlucky. He says, maybe. A couple of days later, a bunch of wild horses run onto his property and hang around. So the neighbors come over and go, oh my God, all these wild horses ran over to your property and they replaced your old ones. You are so lucky. And he says, maybe. A couple of days later, he's got a 12 year old son,

that 12 year old son's on the horses. He's out riding in the field and he falls off and he breaks his leg. And the neighbors come over and go, oh my God, that's so sad. I can't believe your son broke his leg. That's so unlucky. And he says, maybe. Then a couple of days after that, the army breaks out into war and they come to draft his son to come fight in the war. but they can't because the leg is broken. And so his neighbors come over and say, oh my God, they drafted all of our children, but yours didn't go.

You're so lucky. And he says, maybe. And so the whole point of the parable is you never know whether something is good or bad until you have the hindsight benefit. And so even when something is bad, you didn't win a deal. You didn't get this thing done.

You thought you were going to get a job, whatever. How many people years later, months later, weeks later say to themselves, wow, I dodged a bullet. And the same, unfortunately, can be true of positive things. I have way too many friends who sold a company. And when they sold the company, they thought they were going to make a lot of money or they did make a lot of money. And then they changed their behavior.

They started spending money. They became addicted to drugs or whatever. And their life spiraled out of control. So that positive thing in their life actually ended up leading to a negative outcome. And so you just never know. And it's a way to kind of keep even keel. It's a way to constantly say to yourself, maybe, maybe this is good. Maybe this is not.

But whenever the situation pops up, I think the reason why we just say Chinese farmer is because it reminds us you never know until you have the benefit of hindsight. Perfect note to end on. Go buy the book. It's great. Link in the description, link in the bio, link in the comments everywhere. I love you all. Thank you so much.

See you next time. We'll be right back.