The Pomp Podcast - #1436 Anthony & Polina Pompliano | Bitcoin $100,000 Coming Soon?!

Episode Date: November 12, 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 bitcoin hitting all-time highs, where it is heading, Elon Musk, Trump tax cuts, balancing the budget, Kamala Harris campaign spending, Gary Gensler, and regulatory environment.  ======================= The future is being built today and the future of currency isn’t dollars, euros, pounds, or yen, it’s crypto. And Gemini thinks that’s a great thing. Because a future where money is decentralized, inclusive, and globally accessible, that’s a future that we are anxious to be a part of. Go where dollars won’t. ⁠With Gemini. ⁠ ======================= The Pomp Podcast is powered by BetOnline.ag, the premier crypto-friendly place to gamble on politics and sports, casino, poker and horse racing. BetOnline.ag gives you the ability to use Bitcoin and more than a dozen altcoins to make deposits and withdraw your winnings. There are no crypto transaction fees, and processing is instantaneous and secure. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and use PROMO CODE: POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline.ag is available in nearly every country around the world, making it the top global gaming destination for crypto users. ======================= 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 going on, guys? Today, we got an awesome episode with Polina Pompliano. We talk about Bitcoin, the new all-time high, where prices are going, and why Bitcoin may be telling us something that no one is talking about

yet, but everyone should be. Then we get into Elon Musk, how he made $70 billion since Donald Trump's been elected, why that may not be enough money, and how is Elon Musk possibly underpaid? A lot of unique thoughts that you're going to want to pay attention to on that one. Then we get into Donald Trump's tax cuts? And can he actually balance the budget? What's going to happen in the United States? And should you pay less taxes or not? We then talk about Vice President Harris and all the spending of her campaign, how she went into debt, who she paid the money to, and why there are so many issues on that front. And lastly, we finish up with Gary Gensler, the SEC and the regulatory bodies. There's lots of questions about who is going to run

these organizations in a Trump administration. And we get into all the details. Today's episode is packed with tons of insights. I promise that you will learn a lot if you watch the full thing. And then when you get done, go into the comments and let me know what you agree with, what you don't agree with. I'm always trying to learn. Here's my latest 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 Gemini. The future is being built today and the future of currency isn't dollars, euros, pounds, or yen. It's crypto.

And Gemini thinks that's a great thing because a future where money is decentralized, inclusive, and globally accessible, that's a future that we are anxious to be a part of. Gemini teamed up with futurists, technologists and designers like award-winning artist matt griffin known for his illustrations for dune to craft a vision of the future with crypto at its core the creative theme go where dollars won't emphasizes exploration growth and the crypto market's limitless potential

whether it's going on that martian safari to capture an unforgettable photo of a herd of woolly mammoths grazing the red planet or using bitcoin to pay for your lift pass to go strata skiing down the mountain peak of a breathtaking comet whatever adventures we'll be living one thing is for sure. In a future this fantastic, the limits of traditional currency simply cannot keep up. Financial innovation will usher in this new frontier. And so go where dollars won't with Gemini. Go check them out at Gemini.com slash go where dollars won't. Again, go check it out at Gemini.com slash go where dollars won't. This episode is brought to you by Bet Online. Do you like making a profit from sports betting? Well, set yourself up to take home the most profit

possible using crypto to fund your sports betting, casino, and poker account at betonline.ag. You can avoid costly transaction fees, get your payouts lightning fast, and do it all securely and anonymously with the highest deposit and withdrawal limits in the industry. If you want to get in on the action, do it the smart way with crypto at betonline.ag. Head to the website, sign up with promo code POMP100 to get 100% bonus on your crypto deposit today. If you go and you deposit, they'll give you 100% bonus if you use promo code POMP100. BetOnline. The game starts here. BetOnline.ag. Go check them out today. All right, Plana, what's the first topic you got? All right. We got Bitcoin at an all-time high. It was trading just shy of $90,000 yesterday

after breaching 80,000 just a day earlier. It feels like everywhere you turn, Bitcoin just goes up. What's going on? I told you so. Oh, come on. I told you so. When?

I told you guys a couple of weeks ago, sideways summer is over. We're going to come out of hibernation. Bitcoin will start going up in the next couple of weeks because it is time. I talked about how the halving occurred earlier this year. For about six months, we go sideways. And then this thing wakes up and up we go.

And guess what? That's exactly what happened. Not because I got a big brain. We all know I got a small brain. But because if you look at all of the market cycles before, it takes about six months for that supply shock to kind of work its way out. And then you start towards the end of the year, getting this demand increase, which we're seeing right now. And then it happens to overlay with a easing monetary policy. Of course, the asset is going to go up. And so predictable. Now, what is most fascinating to me is I am shocked at how fast it is going up. So I went back and I looked in 2020 and I said to

myself, I remember that Bitcoin went up in November through March of 2021. And I said, but I don't remember the numbers. Let me go do some detective work. Bitcoin in the first week of November was about $15,000. By March of 2021, Bitcoin was at $64,000. That is massive appreciation in five months. And so I said to myself, well, what happened between the first week of November and the end of the year. Hmm. Bitcoin went from 15,000 to 30,000. So Bitcoin's price doubled in the last two months of the year in 2020. I think that at the current pace, I extrapolate out with my little math on my Excel sheet. Bitcoin is actually on track if it continues on this path to double by the end of the year. I'm not saying it's going to happen. I'm just saying based on

the first 10, 12 days of the month of November, given the price appreciation we've seen so far, that is the trajectory it's on. And so what ends up becoming really interesting is that these candles, these days of appreciation, Bitcoin was up yesterday, 13%. We're not talking about a hundred million dollar asset. We're talking about an asset that is worth more than $1.5 trillion dollars is up 13% in a day. And the craziest part is there was no news. It's not like somebody that no one had ever heard of before was announcing they bought Bitcoin or the Bitcoin corporation was coming out and announcing earnings or anything like that. Instead, this is simply Wall Street realizing that they are under allocated to Bitcoin. And so they start buying.

As they buy, it brings more attention. Bitcoin was the number one story on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, et cetera, yesterday. And so I sat down last night, I said to myself, this can't all just be Wall Street saying I'm under allocated. They've known about Bitcoin. The ETFs got approved almost a year ago. What the heck is going on? And then that little brain of mine all of a sudden had a stroke of an idea. Oh, thank God. A little lightning flash went off. And I said to myself, Bitcoin is speaking to us. Why are we not listening? Bitcoin is not telling us anything about Wall Street. Bitcoin is yelling and screaming. It's setting the alarm off. It's calling the bluff of the

politicians. The politicians have accelerated their spending. The national debt has exploded by $850 billion in the last 90 days. These people are spending faster now than they were 90 days ago. Bitcoin is telling us, pay attention, the politicians are destroying the future, and that's why it's going up. And so during that same three-month period where the politicians have added $850 billion to the national debt, Bitcoin is up 44%. Bitcoin is telling on the politicians, we're just all being too dumb enough to listen. Now, do we not think that this price increase has anything to do with the fact that Trump was elected president? Of course it does. Donald Trump has a reputation for making people rich. There are plenty of things

that people don't like about Donald Trump. There's plenty of things people like about him. I'm an independent. I don't give a hell about your tribalism. Whatever side of the aisle you're on, knock yourselves out. I don't care about that. I just call it how I see it. When Donald Trump walks in the room, a lot of people think he's going to make money and so am I. And so when Donald Trump got elected, asset prices took off. The stock market went up. Crypto went up. Many, many other assets all go up. Why is that important? Because if Donald Trump walks in the room and says, I'm going to the White House and everyone thinks this guy's obsessed with the stock market. Well, if you put a president in the White House who's obsessed with the stock market,

the stock market is probably going to go up. That's his metric. That's his KPI. What you measure is what you move. And his measurement is the stock market. So he's going to move it higher. And so if the stock market goes up under Donald Trump, it reinforces the reputation that Donald Trump makes the stock market go up. And so investors are saying to themselves, I previously was operating in an uncertain environment. I did not know whether the executive branch was behind me or in front of me. They were a threat to my capital. They continued to talk about raising the tax rates. They continue to talk about implementing unrealized capital gains tax. They continue to pursue policies that hurt my portfolio. Despite that,

the stock market is still at or near all time highs. But now somebody is walking into the White House who is pro-business, who is pro-investor and has a reputation for making the stock market go up. And investors now feel safety and they are allocating capital and going risk on because they believe that Donald Trump is going to make the stock market go up. It's already happening. He hasn't even assumed office yet. Imagine what is going to happen for the next four years. Yeah. Speaking of the lack of clarity around the regulatory environment, the CIO of Bitwise, Matt Hogan, I think is how he pronounces his name. He said, that's just shifted 180 degrees. We're now in a positive regulatory environment.

We now have tailwinds from that. And that comes in the case of a market that was already in a bull market. So that's going to push us higher. There's a difference between bureaucrats running the place and market participants run the place. And there's a lot of people who critique having a market participant in the White House and making the decisions of who's going to run these regulatory organizations. But what we know is that the market participants are going to be much more pro-market than the bureaucrats. When the bureaucrats get in there, look across all of these regulatory bodies, look across the administration. There's a bunch of people who have never operated in the actual market. And so when you go and you listen to what they're

saying, they're basically operating on academic theory. But when you go and you talk to a market participant, they tell you how it actually works. And so what always cracks me up is take, let's say bond trades in America. I forget the exact statistic, but it's something like over 80% of bond trading in America still happens over Bloomberg terminals in the chat function or over the phone. An academic will sit there and say, well, obviously technology has been created and we're going to be able to trade these much more efficiently over the whatever. It's like, no, you go talk to the person who actually trades bonds on a daily basis. And they're like, we use Bloomberg chat or use the telephone. There's no reason in the internet age that

those are the two things that they would use, but that's what they use. And so understanding the nuances of the market is really important because if you don't understand the technology, if you don't understand the assets, if you don't understand how the markets work, how do you regulate them? And so there's always this balance, right? You don't want to just put a bunch of industry insiders into regulatory bodies, and then they basically help out their friends. But you also need people who have an understanding of the market that can use the nuanced knowledge to be able to create rules that make sense. And so I think that right now we have never seen in my lifetime the American people as excited about government waste as we do

right now. The fact that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, is teaming up with Donald Trump and a whole bunch of other people, and he is saying we are going to slash government spending. There are people who don't even know how to spell government spending, and they are on Twitter right now saying slash the spending. We've never seen this before. And so my guess is that you're going to put people in a room with the mandate to slash government spending and they're going to do it. Then you're also going to see people who are saying, hey, we voted you into office because we want inflation to come down. We want housing to be more affordable. We want stocks to go up. We want you to protect our right to own Bitcoin and to self-custody it, et cetera. And I think that

the administration, based on a number of different moves that they're making, a number of the people that they're putting into certain places. They are taking that mandate very seriously, and I hope that they deliver on these promises. And no matter what happens, I feel like it's good for Bitcoin. Bitcoin's going up regardless of who became the president. But Donald Trump definitely is going in there saying, I'm going to be the pro-Bitcoin president. The big question right now is, will he actually deliver on the promise to establish the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve? The Bitcoin Strategic Reserve has a bunch of different policies for it. But the idea is a central bank or a sovereign wealth fund. They hold different assets. And so central banks

have been buying a lot of gold. Gold's up 30, 35% this year. So why is that happening? Well, big pools of capital like central banks are buying gold. They're using it as part of their reserves. How are they actually going to store that wealth? None of them, for the most part, are using Bitcoin. And so this idea of a strategic reserve of Bitcoin is if Bitcoin is going to be really valuable, and there's only 21 million of them, the United States should own some. Today, we have about 200,000 Bitcoin or so that we've gotten through seizing from different criminal cases, et cetera. And so Donald Trump made a promise that we were not going to sell any more of that. So that could be the establishment or the start of a strategic reserve. That strategic reserve is just Bitcoin

is held on the United States government's balance sheet, and we don't sell it. If it goes up a lot, great. If it doesn't, that's fine too. We already have the Bitcoin, just don't sell it. Now, somebody like RFK Jr., he made a promise that he actually wanted to implement a plan to buy more Bitcoin. If you look at Cynthia Lummis, Senator, she has come out and she said, well, hold on a second. Why don't we buy 1 million Bitcoin? And we can do that over the next five years or so. Here's how much it's going to cost. Let's go not just keep the Bitcoin we have, but let's actually go buy Bitcoin, put it on the government balance sheet. If the United States goes and establishes a Bitcoin strategic reserve, it will kick off a

global FOMO like we've never seen before. Because every single nation state will say, if you're going to buy it, if you're the biggest economy, if you're the one who is the global police and you got Bitcoin, I better have some too. And so it's fun and games when you've got individuals fighting over Bitcoin in circulation. It's even funnier and more interesting when you've got corporations and financial institutions. But the final boss is the central banks, is the sovereign wealth funds. And when you have people showing up with trillions of dollars in assets and they say, we're going to buy this asset, this thing will skyrocket. Now, the question is, are the cycles over? Are we going to get these massive increases in price

and then these big drops? If you would ask people over the summer, they would have said, no, I think that we just kind of grind up slowly and there's not kind of these big blow-off tops. Based on the price movement of the last two to three weeks, there may be bigger blow-offs in the future than there were previously. And so if you get these blow-off tops, you still are going to get market drawdowns. But I was asked on Fox a couple of weeks ago, they said, you know, what is the headline in 2026?

And I jokingly said, Bitcoin crashes to 100K. Because that was like a dream of people when Bitcoin was at 20K. I mean, I remember how excited everybody was when it hit 30K. And so if it runs up and then it crashes to $100,000, people will be like, oh my God, you know, it's so much fear or whatever.

It's not even there yet. But that's the type of thing that has happened in this market. And so I don't know how the future will play out. But what I do know is that the United States has an opportunity to be the leader on a global stage when it comes to Bitcoin. There's plenty of people who don't like Bitcoin, but I believe that Bitcoin will continue to be the best store of wealth available to anyone in the world. And so if that is true, and the United States needs to store its own wealth the same way

that its people need to store their wealth, companies and financial institutions, then the United States should establish the strategic reserve. they should buy it, put it to the side, forget about it. Don't touch it. Don't trade it. Don't try to get cute with it. And instead, let's go operate. Let's go deregulate the energy industry. Let's go build all the things we need to do to make the United States this amazing place to live and to be prosperous. And the Bitcoin will take care of the Bitcoin and we'll be fine in the future. So the government needs to be diamond hands, not scissor hands. The United States is amazing at being bureaucratic. And so when you're bureaucratic, you have this deadlock or this

gridlock that makes it very hard to make decisions. And so the same way that the United States is slow to make certain actions or kind of make certain decisions, once they buy the Bitcoin they put in the strategic reserve, I would not bet on the United States being effective enough to actually make the decision to sell it. And so my general thought process is the setting up is way more important than anything else, because once it's set, it'll be very hard to kind of stop the government from the direction of travel that it is, which is just simply hold the Bitcoin. How come nobody says diamond hands anymore? They do.

Oh, they do? Yeah. It's just on the internet. Oh, okay. It's not cool yet. When you hear the media talking about it, then you'll know, you know, hey, things are getting frothy. But it's not scissor hands. What is the one? I don't know. I don't know where that came from. No, the one that-

Paper hands? Paper hands? Yeah. Diamond hands and paper hands. Oh, that's what it is. Yeah. They say Dave Portnoy is paper hands. Sorry. Somebody else said something else. And I was like, I don't think that's it. Okay. Elon Musk spent at least $130 million to help get Donald Trump elected. That obviously paid off because now Tesla's skyrocketing, and he is about $70 billion richer on paper

because of Tesla stock. But what do we think? I mean, Musk, I feel like everything he touches just explodes. I think that Elon Musk realized there was an existential threat to the United States in terms of the woke agenda, in terms of the lack of free speech, in terms of the unsecured border, et cetera. And he decided that it was important for him to participate. Because he did not participate in this way

in the 2016 election. Elon Musk is the type of person from what you see, what he works on, et cetera, he don't give a shit about politics. Yeah. Right? But politics cared about Elon Musk. That's the difference.

Elon didn't care about it, but he ran into a roadblock. And so a lot of people don't realize this, But let's say as an example, Elon, there's this famous story. Elon was sitting around and they were talking about building tunnels. And he said, maybe we should like get good at building tunnels. And there's a speculation as to why they want to build the tunnels, whether they're practicing for Mars, whether they want to do the kind of hyperloop stuff underneath the ground, whatever. But we should build tunnels.

And it was on a Friday. And they were sitting in the conference room and he asked the team, he said, how long will it take you guys to get the equipment to start trying to dig a tunnel? And they basically were like, we think we can get started by like, you know, two weeks from now. And he said, why don't you go rent the equipment right now and go to the parking lot and see how far you can get by Sunday.

Let's start right now. And they were like, okay. And so they went, they moved all the employee cars and they started digging that day, right? Like that is Elon's whole attitude. It's just like, do it now. And so he ran into a roadblock. Imagine, and he started to talk about it publicly.

Imagine being told you're trying to create reusable rockets to help to settle Mars and they want you to kidnap a seal and do testing on the seal's ears. Again, I'm not saying that you shouldn't pay attention to the environment. What I am saying though, is that's pretty insane. And so when he ran into that political kind of situation,

he said to himself, I got to solve the problem. And so Elon Musk actually is not eligible to be president of the United States, right? He was born in South Africa. But I saw somebody online say, Elon did the second best thing is he got the president elected. And so he went, he spent $130 million.

he got Trump into office, and now he is heavily involved in creating efficiency in the government via this Department of Government Efficiency. What I think is probably the most interesting part of this entire situation is that people drastically underestimate how much Elon Musk has become a role model for young men in this country. Everyone wants to point at Elon Musk and all the adults want to yell and scream about political stuff or free speech or they don't like them or they like them or whatever. Young people don't care. Young people see a guy who's the richest man in the world, who is shit posting on Twitter, who runs five different multi-billion dollar companies, and he's doing cool stuff. He's launching rockets. He's putting computers

in people's brains, right? He's got Tesla and self-driving cars, all this stuff. He's cool. And so to the younger generation, they all look at this guy and they're like, man, Elon Musk is who I want to be. And so when Elon came out and he said, this is a battle worth fighting, I'm going to go spend my time and money on doing this. There's a lot of people who I think said, hey, that's important. And they went and they followed him. And so when we go and we look at Elon getting $70 billion richer, I think that's not enough. And people don't understand in a capitalist society, the person who creates the most value should get the most money. That is how capitalism works. Name somebody who has created more value than Elon Musk.

You can't. And so Elon deserves to be the richest person because he created the most value. The question is, is he actually getting paid enough for the value that he's being that he's creating? My argument would be that if Elon right now was worth 500 billion instead of 300 billion, the world would be just as good off. And it probably would be much more, you know, kind of indicative of the value that he's created. And so when people look at that $70 billion, they say, hold on a second here. Actually, we should be having a conversation about

is Elon Musk underpaid because of the value that he's created, right? And you can kind of go to this, the best entrepreneur in our lifetime, how much is he worth? Yeah, I also love that he's an immigrant from South Africa and he came and built all this value in America. It's like the ultimate story.

And he's proud to be in America, which I think is an important part is, you know, there's a lot of other places around the world that he could build certain products and services, but he does it here in the United States. And again, he, I think, took immense personal risk. If Donald Trump does not get elected because he threw so much weight behind him, if you're Elon, do you think that the next government would mess with your companies? Do you think that they'd come investigate you? Do they think that they would personally come after you? probably they were already doing it before the election. Yeah. And so it just goes back to this idea

that we need as much free competition in America as possible, right? We cannot have bureaucrats playing Caesar and basically thumbs up, thumbs down in the success of a company. That is not how the free market works. And so do we need certain regulations? Of course.

Do we need as many regulations as we have now? Absolutely not. We have to get back to that free market capitalism. him. And somebody like Elon, I think is like a sledgehammer. He walks in and he just breaks down whatever's there. And that ultimately is what unleashes what America really was built on. Yeah. I think you and I always talk about like, what if the government was run by entrepreneurs and now we actually get to see that. So I think that'll be an interesting experiment in the America story because he surrounded himself with people who run companies. So running the

government as a business will be an interesting experiment. The ideas have always come from the private market, right? What a lot of people don't realize is these politicians, they spend immense amount of time talking to the private market and the private market. They don't want to go be a politician, but they make suggestions. You should do this. You should do that. You should do this. Now, what Trump is attempting to do, we don't know if he's going to be successful or not, is he is trying to bring those people more into the government and say, listen, I'll create new things that you can operate where you don't have to have a dot gov email. You don't have to work here. Just give us the answers. We'll go implement it. And so I think that's people like Howard

Lutnick, Elon Musk, etc. They're all saying, I don't actually work in the government, but I am going to help you get the right ideas, get the right people in the places, get the actual funding, and then let's go and execute all this stuff. Do you remember in 2016, he tried something like a founder roundtable of advisors? CEO roundtable. CEO roundtable. But then Trump became toxic and they all quit. so there's a lot of ceos who i remember the very first one rex tillerson uh he came out of there i think it was steve schwartzman elon was at it uh etc and they all they were doing like post-game interviews where they walked out right the media was asking a bunch of questions and they all were

like you know very very positively speaking about trump and then within two or three years basically all of them i think you know kind of felt like hey uh maybe this isn't the thing that i should be associated with and so they started to back away interestingly almost every single one of those people, not all, but almost every single one that was in that original group endorsed Trump for president this time. And so they kind of, you know, they saw the kind of direction that we were headed and they said, no, actually that's the one that we should go with. I was going to say, instead of a round table this time, he's actually like moving them further, more intimately into the administration.

I've seen multiple pictures of Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago, like in meetings. Yeah. Right. And so when you see that stuff, you say, okay, if I am an American citizen, what team do I want to hire? I want to hire the best. Elon Musk is probably better than most people, regardless of the problem. Yeah. Think of a problem the government has and think whoever is currently working on it or Elon, who's more likely to solve the problem. Yeah. And not just that. One of our friends said this a long time ago and it remains true. He said, think about your smartest friends. How many of them are going into politics? Your smartest friends are probably

going into starting companies or finance or something like that. Very few of them are like, I'm going to be a politician. I think that this is slowly starting to change. You see people like JD Vance. You see people like Vivek Ramaswamy, like a couple of these folks. But I think they got inspired because of. 100%. But you see those people and now you're like, oh, wait a second. Regardless of whether you agree with them or not, pretty objectively, like these people are intelligent, right? They are good when they talk, right? They communicate well. They do all that stuff. I think part of the challenge for the Democrat Party moving forward is going to be, where are your young stars? And so a lot of the young stars that they previously kind of,

I think we're betting the party on, were very far left. And America just gave a mandate that said, we don't want that. And so there's an opportunity for the Democrat Party to go find those young stars and go and put them up on a pedestal and say, here's our answer to J.D. Vance. Here's our answer to Vivek. Here's our answer to whoever. We've got our own stars. But right now, it's a question mark. We don't know who those people are. And I think some of them will emerge. Right. And part of it is the party saying, hey, we want you to be the young star. Some of it will be young people will be inspired. Right. Who kind of lean left and say, hey, hold on a second here. I saw what happened. We got to go fix this. A lot of their young stars turned Republican. Well, that's a whole different situation. OK, let's talk Trump tax cuts. So I found this personally very interesting. So Trump has promised much more to both individuals and businesses on tax policy, tax cuts on tip to income, overtime pay, some Social Security taxes, tax cuts for first responders and the military and Americans living abroad and deductions for auto loan interest, among others. But then the, you know, I was like reading more and the head of, you know, this expert on tax legislation said conservatives don't have the stomach to do all the 2017 cuts and keep campaign promises on the deficit.

So what do you think? Like, can he deliver on all of these tax cuts without increasing the deficit? It's very hard to do. Think of if you cut taxes, you have to cut spending more, right? If you want the deficit to come down. You also have the option to increase revenue elsewhere. And so things like tariffs, things like monetizing the balance sheet, et cetera, are all potential options.

But I do think that although it would be unpopular, I think that there is probably somewhere between 60% to 80% of the government budget that you could slash and the government will continue to run. Doesn't mean it'll be easy. It'd be rocky to do it. But I do think that the government can run with a 60% to 80% reduction in spending and be perfectly fine. Anthony had a debate with someone on this recently. What was your example? Of? You said, think about like the, not DMV, maybe the post office. What was it?

Well, just think of any government thing that you engage with. Right. 10%. It is not. Here's a good example, right? I'll give you two. When Bill Walsh was hired by the San Francisco 49ers, he came in, they were the worst team in the league. And he wrote this great book that's called The Score Will Take Care of Itself. And when he walked in the building, he's a football coach. He's coming into a horrible organization. The first thing that he did is he went and he spent time with the receptionist. And he sat with the receptionist and he said, I'm going to teach all of you how to answer the phone. You're the head football coach.

You're supposed to be doing X's and O's and finding the right players and doing stuff on the field. He said, no, the culture of this place is going to be set by the receptionist because they are the first line of defense when somebody interacts with our organization. The first interaction that you have with the San Francisco 49ers is, if I am the head coach, is you call and the receptionist answers the phone.

How do we do that in an excellent manner? There is no excellence going on in the US government. There is no standard that they're being held to, right? Go and look at the TSA. Just go to the airport and watch what people are doing. If it was a for-profit organization that was actually trying to achieve excellence, they would be monitoring, what are our employees doing? How are they treating the staff? How are they actually pushing people through quicker?

How the heck is it possible that you have sometimes 20 different TSA agents and you've got a backed up line? It's not excellence. And so the reason is they keep throwing more and more people at these problems. And then what happens is they get this bloated. More and more not excellent people at the problem. People are not excellent or not excellent. You can take any group of people and make them excellent if you have good leadership. But instead, what happens is the TSA goes and they hire a bunch of people.

So they say, okay, now we have 10 people here. They're all going to work at this one station. So we got two people up the top saying, take your socks and shoes off, take your belt off, take your, you know, okay. So you got one person, that's their job. They're going to make sure everything gets put correctly on the belt. You got somebody who's monitoring. And you got somebody who's patting down, right?

Then you got somebody who's going to do the extra bag checks. Like, oh, I mean, there's like 10 people for a single lane. But then the TSA says, oh, if there's 10 people, we need a manager for those 10 people. And then the manager for each lane, we also need someone to do this whole gate. And so all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute, there's like 50 people working at this one TSA gate. And people are still missing their flights. And then they say, okay, but now there's four gates at the airport. So we also need to have somebody who manages all that. Next thing you know, there's like seven layers of bureaucracy at one airport times every airport in the country. And that's just the TSA. And so you say to yourself, hold on a second. If you were to go in and you were to design this

from scratch, zero-based budgeting, and you were to say to an entrepreneur, you get X dollars per year to do this, you think they could do it more efficiently? Of course they could. And so it goes back to this idea of what we have done is we've just put bureaucracy on bureaucracy on bureaucracy, and then we have basically fulfilled all these roles with people, they can't get fired. The reason why people want government jobs is because it's incredibly difficult to get fired from them.

If you have a job where you can't get fired, a lot of people don't try hard. A lot of people don't pursue the standard of excellence. And so you have to change that stuff. You have to say, we are going to go back to an area where we need to be efficient. We need to deliver on the service that the American people are paying us.

And we need to do it in a manner that is not wasteful. But right now there's no incentive to do any of that stuff. And so this is a deeply, deeply seated problem. It is incredibly difficult because basically you got to go to the government. You got to say, we need to be able to fire people. Well, guess what happened? There's unions, there's government workers.

There's all these, they fought so hard so that you can't fire them. So what do you do? Somebody has to go in and smash the incumbent kind of structure. And it may take an executive order. It may take whatever. Yeah, but yeah. But that is the only way that you break this stuff. Here's the problem. Trump has four years and four years only. Like, that's it. Can he really, realistically, if you're honest with yourself, do all of this, dismantle all of this? And like,

it's just... You don't need to do it in every single department. What you got to do, right? If I was Donald Trump walking into office, 30 days, we're doing it to one department. In 30 days, we're going to transform one department and we are going to tell the American people, here's where we started and here's where we ended. We had X number of employees, now we're down to this. We've increased the time that you stand in line at the TSA from this and we've dropped it down to this. We've increased the number of positive interactions. Our NPS score went from that, like that's what you do. And you do it in 30 days and you do it so swiftly that

people don't even believe that it was possible. Elon Musk fired 80% of the Twitter staff in like three months. He did a massive cut. He was like, okay, we still have too many people. He did another one and I think he did a third one. So if Elon can do that, and it's not like there was, you know, 500 employees. I think there was thousands of employees there that he was able to go and do this to. You can absolutely do it in an organization. And maybe something like the TSA is too difficult to start with. It's very big. It's very fragmented. You've got the interaction with the American people on a daily basis. So it's very painful if it's understaffed or whatever. But there's plenty of other things that you can do. I also think that the current

administration should create a website and they should basically keep a scoreboard of how much money they create of new revenue for the American people. Selling off buildings, leasing things, driving money through tariffs, et cetera, and run that scoreboard up as much as you can. And every time someone says, what are you doing for me? I'm paying you taxes. Where's that money going? You point to the scoreboard. You show them we're cutting this. We're making money here. Those are the things that all of a sudden people start to say, you know what? Maybe I don't like all your policies or whatever, but you're telling me, you give me a report. The problem is that politicians have always hid behind the fact they don't want to talk about the details because when

they talk about the details, they can get attacked. But Donald Trump knows he's only got four years. He can't be president again. He's 78 years old. Go for it. Do we think J.D. Vance runs for president? J.D. Vance. Somebody left a comment on Joe Rogan's interview with J.D. Vance. They said, man, that's wild. You had the 47th and 48th president on your podcast in the last week talking about J.D. Vance being the next president. I don't know. It would be interesting. He probably wants to be the president um but let's see how this goes yeah there's a world where maybe the current administrator the incoming administration completely fumbles the ball yeah right and it's just horrible well the american people probably are going to say well we don't want that and so

you don't you don't get the kind of free pass of if you're the vice president you're going to be the president it depends just found out instead it's all about or your policy is actually the thing that the American people want. All right. Kamala Harris, her campaign team raised a billion dollars and somehow ended up in more than $20 million in debt. Guess how that happened? Oprah, her endorsement cost a million dollars. The concerts were $20 million. The influencers were $4 million. And then the Call Her Daddy set was $100,000. I mean, there's got to be more spending here that but just just that alone is a lot of money let me give you a couple of details i know someone who got approached for uh to make videos for kamala harris this person's

got nothing to do with politics like an influencer yeah he's got a big audience they're outside of politics the whole thing and uh they were shocked they didn't even ask how much money they said i'm not doing that i'm not voting for this person i'm not doing that but do you know how many people probably said, well, how much money? Actually, give me some more, right? The difference is that if you want to see why Donald Trump won, it's because Donald Trump probably had more videos created for him than Harris did if you actually went and looked at the numbers and he didn't pay for a single one of them. It's the difference between a true authentic fan base and then people who are being paid to do it. And so if you look at those rallies, imagine spending all the

money to set up the facilities, do all this stuff. And then you're paying five, 10, $20 million to people to come perform. Yeah. Obviously these things explode in cost, right? If you pay them a $5 million to show up your entry price for this event before you set anything up as $5 million. Yeah. And then you've got all of the other things that go into it. And so I think that we are now entering an age where the bureaucrats will continue to leverage using money. It's kind of like a startup that doesn't have product market fit. They keep spending money to try to say, hey, look, we're having people are coming to our website. Instead, the company that has product market fit, they do no marketing. Tesla doesn't do marketing. The product speaks for

itself. But a lot of other car companies, they're spending immense amounts of money. And so that is the difference here is that Trump had product market fit. He didn't need to spend any money. But on top of that, I saw a statistic. The stat that I saw was that Harris spent $500 million on her team, whether it's 50 or 500, Trump only spent $10 million. And so if Trump spent 10 and Harris spent five or 50 X more, that alone shows you that it's just a different way to actually look at how are you going to use money? And it goes back to this idea that when you've run a business before, when you understand how revenue and expenses work, you have a very, very different approach. And ultimately it goes back to this idea of,

do you respect money or not? If you talk to an entrepreneur, a small business owner, anyone who operates, they will tell you, I respect money because I know how hard it is to get it. And I know how quickly you can lose it. And they respect the dollar. And so they don't spend it as if it's never going to end. But if you're a politician, especially a career politician, and it's not your money. Yeah. You just spend everybody else's money like it's never going to end.

Wait, just a really quick aside. But you know what I just thought about? People normally, when they have a product and then they find out that the founder has a certain point of view that they don't agree with, they're like, I'm never shopping from X again or from this again. But I have not seen anybody say,

oh, Elon Musk has aligned with Trump. I'm going to boycott his products, maybe, but a lot of people are still buying Teslas. There are a lot of people still buying Teslas. There are some people who said, hey, I'm not going to buy Teslas anymore. I saw a couple of people who said, I'm selling my Tesla or whatever, but not anywhere near a big number. My favorite is the people who have bumper stickers that say, I like the car, not the guy who built it. Oh, I have not seen that. And they put those on the Tesla, right? But see, it's a product that's so high quality

that is just like. Of course. And so just think about if you could take that same thing where there's such great product market fit that even though people don't like you as the creator, they still buy it. Imagine if we did that to education in this country where parents were like, I don't even like the current administration, but the school is so good in the public school system that I got to send my kid there. Yeah. Right. That's not what we do. Instead, we take this approach of do the bare minimum. And when you do the bare minimum, the problem is that you then have people who don't actually hit the bare minimum your goal was the bare minimum but they under deliver and so it ends up being worse i saw a statistic you should google this i saw a statistic

on the national literacy rate that is it was shocking to me in the u.s in the u.s i the stat that i saw if i remember it correctly was something like 25 of americans don't meet the like standard literacy rate is there a number wow um 21 of adults are illiterate there you go 54 of adults have a literacy below sixth grade grade level think about this for a second we are a country that provides public education with u.s taxpayer dollars to our population so more than half of adults 21 of u.s adults are illiterate how is that possible we're not talking about hey there's a big S.A.T. word that I don't know how to read or pronounce. They're illiterate. One out of five American adults is illiterate. But again, over half, one out of two cannot have a literacy rate

higher than sixth grade. What are we doing here? Take a sledgehammer and destroy the incumbent system and rebuild it so that you can build something that can actually benefit the people. If you had a product that promised something and one out of two of every customers that came through and use your product did not get the desired outcome, you'd be out of business. Yeah, it is insane that the most prosperous nation in the world has one out of every two Americans that cannot read above a sixth grade level. What are we doing? And that rage, that just complete discomfort, that disapproval of the system is why Donald Trump won the popular vote is because people win that ballot box. And they said enough is enough. I don't even know if this guy actually is the guy who can solve it. But what I know is that the people within the system are not going to do anything different. And I think that is why this was such a landslide. Yeah. Okay. Gary Gensler is likely to resign. And there's some possible candidates who could take his place. Do you have any that you think would do it? Let's fast forward 10 years from now. I think that Gary Gensler's reputation-

He's the SEC commissioner. As SEC chairman is going to be much more positive than people believe it to be today. If I go and I poll all of my friends in the crypto industry, a lot of them will express unhappiness with Gensler and his administration. I think that's well covered in the media. But I always go back and I look at George W. Bush. George W. Bush was not very popular because of the wars. George W. Bush paints. He's friends with Michelle Obama today.

And people actually have a much better view of him 15 years, almost 20 years after his presidency. The more time that passes, the more nostalgia kind of sets in. People are able to kind of evolve their reputation, et cetera. I think that Gary Gensler is going to be able to hang his hat on the fact that he approved Coinbase's IPO. He approved the first ever Bitcoin ETF in the United States, and he approved the Ether ETF in the United States. Coinbase's IPO. Yes. Coinbase went public with Gensler as the SEC chairman, I believe, if I remember the dates correctly. And so when you look at that, you say to yourself,

okay, regardless of the abrasiveness, the infighting, the debates, all this stuff, the results are going to end up being the resume. And so it's very hard to see today with people in the crypto industry, but I do think that Gensler is going to have a very different reputation than maybe he has today. We'll see. But it's not unnormal for these regulatory body heads to either resign or for the new president to come in and switch them out. That's kind of a normal thing. And so I think that people are kind of grasping at straws to kind of tell a story of pro-crypto, anti-crypto, whatever. If you take the crypto topic out of it, I think that most of these regulatory body kind of leaders would change over anyways. And so it's probably less of a story

than maybe people want to make it. Yeah, I do think it's interesting. Like, this is, again, one of those like political things where Trump has promised the American people that day one of his administration, he's firing Gary Gensler. Technically, he can't do that. It says that he can't remove Gensler without cause until his term ends in 2026. But people think that Gary will resign himself. You just gave the answer. What? Without cause.

Yeah, what's the cause? Listen. Listen. You have to remember, if you put enough smart people in a room and give them that challenge, they'll create a cause, right? They'll figure out a way to do it, right?

And so it comes back to this idea of yes, are the technocrats. It's like Jerome Powell, right? They said, if Donald Trump asked you to step down, will you? He said no. And then he basically insinuated that he would go to court to fight Trump. Who do you think is going to end up winning there? You really think that the Federal Reserve chairman is going to go to court and be able to resist the full power of the executive branch to stay in power? Right. Come on. With an unfriendly president to you. Well, and then there's always the question of like, from a reputation standpoint, point, do you really want to be the one who did that? Or do you just say, hey, look, you can't

fire me, but I'm going to resign? Yeah. Right. It all comes back to kind of like, what are you optimizing for? And some people may dig their heels in and, you know, kind of fight stuff. But for the most part, I think people generally, you know, there's kind of this practice of new president comes in, a lot of people resign, new president, you know, is able to then put in their people. The two candidates that I have seen floating around are Dan Gallagher who previously worked as an SEC commissioner and is currently the chief legal compliance and corporate affairs officer of Robinhood Markets. Gallagher has criticized Gensler SEC and asked for changes to the way the agency approaches crypto regulation. The other is

Paul Atkins who was part of Trump's 2016 transition team and also previously served as an SEC commissioner. He is currently the CEO of consultancy Potomac Global Partners. Since 2017 he has served as a co-chair of the Token Alliance, which is an initiative of the Chamber of Digital Commerce. So I think it's interesting that kind of like the sticking point or the issue is the crypto issue with the SEC. I think it's a big one. I do think that a lot of people are interested in it.

Another name that I would love to put out there, I don't know if he would want to do it, but Christian Carlo. He previously ran the CFTC. I think that he could be a pretty interesting one. He's known as kind of crypto dad. He's a very good lawyer. My crypto mom is... Hester Purse.

Oh, right, right. And so, you know, either one of them would be great suggestions as well. But usually when you hear kind of like, hey, here's the rumor, it's pretty much like the administration has already narrowed it down to two or three people. Very rarely do you at this point in the game, when you already have the transition team in place, you already know who the president is going to be, etc. Is there kind of a surprise appointment? It happens from time to time, but if the names are being floated, it's probably because they've already said, hey, it's going to be one of these two or three people. I have a question. If the SEC chair is somebody who's very crypto friendly, right, isn't there a risk that the fraud and the riffraff of the crypto industry will kind of not be regulated as much?

No, because most of that stuff has happened offshore. So what you do is if you stamp down so hard in the United States, you push a lot of it offshore, which sounds great. But because we live in a digital age, people can still use all those products and services, right? So if you look at something like FTX, it didn't matter. Instead, if you bring them into the regulatory fold and you say, hey, here's the rules, we're going to have oversight, right? You can actually probably catch things before they actually become a problem. And so remember, there's fraud that happens in the US stock market, right? It's not like there's some magic solution. But I do think that the general goal here is you want to have deterrence, and then you want to be able to catch some portion of things before they actually end up hurting investors or whoever. It's just really hard to do that if they're outside of your purview. The SEC doesn't have jurisdiction everywhere.

And so I think that part of the argument people have had is like, we want to work with the regulatory bodies. We want to do this in America, but there's got to be some sort of understanding of how we're going to do that. And that's ultimately what people are trying to figure out. In an ideal world, what is your view of the SEC? How should it operate in a perfect world? People smarter than me will figure that out. I generally think that you want smart people who understand the various financial industries. There's a whole range of complexity. Some things are pretty straightforward. Some things are very, very complex. You get into all kinds of derivative and financial products and instruments and stuff, things that I might not even understand.

right? It's hard to create these rules. And then I think that you want people who have a good understanding of the law. Do you want people who have a good kind of network of market participants that they can draw on? And then you want people who genuinely care. And I think that's actually very underrated is if you have people who care about the market being successful, about creating an environment where people can come in and participate in a safe and fair way without having kind of too much of a regulatory burden, et cetera, I think you get a better outcome. And so to me, it's not about any one decision as much as it is like, do you have the right people in the room and do they have the right kind of evaluation and decision-making process?

And if you can get those two things right in terms of people in process, then you're likely to get good outcomes regardless of what the topic is. And really, I think as a market participant, that's all you can ask for, right? Is, hey, do you have the right people in the room? Do you have a good process? Most of the things, Hopefully our common sense kind of outcomes every once in a while, something might not go our way. That's okay. But at least there's some predictability. There's some confidence in this process.

And it's not to say the SEC doesn't do that now, but it does mean that you got to kind of constantly keep improving and trying to deliver that message to the market. Great. Do you have any final thoughts for Bitcoin, for anything? Higher. We're going higher. Let's see what happens. All right, everyone. Talk to you next time.

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