The Pomp Podcast - #1439 Anthony & Polina Pompliano | The Global Race For Bitcoin Has Begun!

Episode Date: November 19, 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 Donald Trump, bitcoin strategic reserve, why the US should print $250 billion today to buy bitcoin, tax cuts, Trump’s cabinet, and future market outlook.  ======================= 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. ======================= Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.xapobank.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠ to join. ======================= 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've got a fantastic episode with Polina Pompliano. We talk about Donald Trump, the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, why I think that the United States should

print $250 billion today and go buy Bitcoin. And then we get into tax cuts. We start talking about Trump's cabinet. And I even explain why little three-year-olds need to go talk to themselves in their room. That's right. You're going to love that part of the conversation. Now, if you like these episodes, please let us know what you want more of. What are the topics? What are the questions that you have. We'll start answering them in future episodes, but here's my latest conversation with Polina Pompliano. 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 markets 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. Today's episode is brought to you by Zappo. Picture this. Every time you trade Bitcoin, the spread determines how much value stays with you. That's why securing top-tier Bitcoin trading fees is key to growing your Bitcoin wealth. But what if I told you that there's a platform that lets you save up to 90% on your Bitcoin trading fees? Now, here's the kicker. Not only do they save that money, they also are dubbed the Fort Knox of Bitcoin.

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All right. Is Donald Trump going to make a strategic Bitcoin reserve? Yes, he's going to do it. And I think that he should do it immediately. How do you know he's going to do it? Because this is the one thing that Bitcoiners are good at. If you say something publicly, we will hold your feet to the fire until you fulfill your promise. And so the problem with campaigning is you got to tell people what you're going to do in the future. And so Donald Trump had to tip his hand and he had to tell everyone, we're going to create a Bitcoin strategic reserve. Now, the one thing that may save him is we already got 200,000 coins sitting on the government

balance sheet. They would sell them, except for Donald Trump is going to say, hey, don't sell those. So we're going to start out with 200,000. Then we're going to have to go and start buying more. The reason why this is important is because the global race for Bitcoin is underway. I wrote five years ago about the fact that there was going to be this global race. Now, after the individuals had the chance to front run for 15 years, corporations, financial institutions, and countries realize there's only ever going to be 21 million. So good luck trying to get your share. And these organizations, these countries, they have lots of money, but the race is underway because if somebody else buys the coins

and they don't sell, there's no coins for you. And so what I think that we are on the precipice of is a full-on panic buying situation. Not in the sense that Bitcoin's gonna go from 90,000 to a million overnight, but what you are going to see is these big monolithic organizations are going to panic internally

and they're gonna say, wait a second, we don't own any, we need to buy some. Now, the thing about institutions is they still move slow, but you're gonna see all of a sudden this feeling of, we don't own enough of this, and we need to figure out how to get more. And so I think that Donald Trump and the United States are going to be the ignition that just, bam, you turn that key, as soon as the United States establishes the strategic reserve, you're going to see all these other countries follow quickly. Now, the true secret, though,

is other countries are buying right now. They're just not talking about it because they are anticipating that Trump is going to be in office and he's going to do this. And so if you think think that you can front run Donald Trump and the United States, you do it. And so my guess is over the next six to 12 months, a bunch of countries are going to come out once they've bought the Bitcoin and said, oh, we own blah, blah, blah, however much Bitcoin. And so the nation states are here now. They're knocking on the door. And that is going to be a persistent bid for Bitcoin for years to come. I think we've laid out the case for why this is important. And, you know, if Donald Trump does this, it'll be good for the industry, the country potentially.

Is there a world in which he doesn't do that or he does something different and then the community is disappointed? What is the other scenario? Live by the sword, die by the sword. That's how this is going to go. If he does what he says he was going to do, the Bitcoin community will support him. If he does anything else, including if he doesn't create the strategic reserve, if he becomes abrasive to Bitcoin and Bitcoin holders, if he starts playing off in shit coin land, he will get absolutely savaged by the Bitcoiners. And so I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just telling you, I've seen this playbook a lot of times where somebody comes in, they get a little bit of intoxication because the Bitcoiners are piping them up, right? They're just

gassing them real hard. And then all of a sudden they start to believe their own bullshit. They take a step off the train or they kind of, Ooh, let me veer over here. Or they take bad advice. And next thing you know, the Bitcoiners are coming for them. And so I think that Donald Trump is walking a very fine line and there's a paradox. As I always say, the paradox rule the world. How's the first pro Bitcoin president also the one who launched a crypto project, Right? There's a lot of nuance here.

And so I do think that if he does not do what he said he was going to do, you're going to see a lot of people become disillusioned from the Bitcoin community. And when I say that they'll kind of savage them, mainly they'll just tweet a lot of memes and mean things online. But I think that he will see that he has less and less support. He may not care because he's not going to run for re-election. But I think it's an important community. It's an important community, but the average American doesn't give a shit about Bitcoin.

right it matters to a certain subset of the population um but that's why i'm worried about like the urgency of this strategic bitcoin reserve like is he really going to do it in the first 30 days given that there are so many other problems i think that he is getting pressure from senator lummis and uh other uh politicians i think that every single person that i have seen that has been suggested for sec chair and treasury secretary are pro bitcoin pro crypto uh and then i think that his family, his sons in particular, are very much kind of pro Bitcoin, pro crypto. And then I think that there's a lot of people who donated a lot of money to him that are very kind of for this stuff. And then his friends as well. If you look at his friend group, there's a lot of people there

that also think that this is really important. And so it's going to be hard for him to say, I'm not going to follow what all these people around me are saying. But again, the question just becomes, when are they going to do it? There's no way that the United States 20 years from now has no Bitcoin in its balance sheet, right? So is Trump going to be the one who gets the claim victory or is it going to be somebody else? And then the big question is, does the United States start to devalue their currency intentionally to buy more Bitcoin? Interesting. That is a very tough decision because basically what that decision would be is it's something called a speculative attack. I think Nick Carter from Castle Island was the first person really to

write about this years ago. A speculative attack basically is you got a money printer. And so you need money to buy Bitcoin. Well, for the average person, how do you get more money? You got to go work, you got to build a business, or you got to raise capital, right? You can do all this stuff. A government can just press the money printer. And so again, how much Bitcoin is actually trading out there. Let's just use easy numbers. Let's say that $1.8 trillion exists for the Bitcoin market cap. Half of that has not moved in two years. So that means that $900 billion is tradable every two years right now. Okay. Well, let's say that the United States simply said, we want to go and buy $100 billion of that. We're sending $100 billion to Ukraine. And we don't even know where

the money goes. The Pentagon can't pass an audit. There is money just flying around all over the place. So $100 billion for a $2 trillion deficit is a rounding error. And so if the United States decided to simply just go print $100 billion and then go buy Bitcoin, the national debt wouldn't increase that much. It wouldn't be $100 billion. They added $850 billion in the last 90 days. Then if all of a sudden they could buy $100 billion worth of Bitcoin and they were sitting on it, they'd look like geniuses. They would be probably one of, if not the largest holder of Bitcoin in the world. And so the incentive is for them to do this. The question is, are they willing to take the political hit where people say you are actively devaluing

the currency, you're increasing inflation in order to do this. I personally, if I was president for a day, I would hit that money printer so hard and I would go buy $250 to $500 billion worth of Bitcoin. And the price is going to run on you. And so that means that maybe Bitcoin at $90,000, you're going to end up buying some at $150,000. It doesn't matter. Because if it's going to millions of dollars a coin, having as much Bitcoin as possible is incredibly important for the future of the United States. And so when you hear that the United States would print 250 or $500 billion, like, oh my God, that's crazy. They added $850 billion to the national debt in the last 90 days. It's nothing, nothing. And so that's the real conversation I think we should

be having. Why is the United States not printing money to go buy Bitcoin? So what do you think about Trump saying that he could use Bitcoin and crypto to pay off the nearly $36 trillion national debt? I don't think that you're going to be able to pay off the entire thing in the short term, right? But how would you even do that? You would just sell it and pay it? Well, the whole question is like,

who do we owe the debt to? Yeah, that's the other thing. And without getting into too much of a rabbit hole around the national debt, basically we owe to ourselves. The way to think about the national debt is- It's not the aliens? Trust me.

uh, not even going to go there. Um, if you think about the national debt, it's not about paying it all the way off to zero, right? But maybe the first thing we can do is can we simply be able to stop the bleeding and then can we start to pay it down a little bit? Right. And so it's less about, are you actually able to get to a zero debt or can you simply generate a surplus? Can you use your balance sheet to start paying this off a little bit? And the way that I think about this is like, think if you had a credit card debt, right? And you owed $25,000 of credit card debt, the odds that you're going to be able to snap your fingers and all of a sudden pay off a hundred percent of it, right?

For the person who got into $25,000 of credit card debt, they probably don't have the cash sitting in their bank account. And so instead, what do they got to do? They got to start chipping away at it, pay off the first hundred dollars, pay off the next thousand dollars, pay off the first $5,000, pay off the next $10,000, right? you just quickly start to try to chip away at this thing. And part of chipping away at it is don't add more debt. And so I think that's where the United States is right now is, yes, putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet would be great. I think that it will appreciate in value. If you

were to go buy, let's say right now, $500 billion worth of Bitcoin. Well, if you have a $35, $36 trillion debt, then if Bitcoin 100Xs from there, yeah, you could absolutely pay off the debt. But I think that 100x would put it at, you know, what would that be? I don't do public math, but I think $10 million a coin. And so is that possible? Absolutely. It's just going to take decades to get there. And so it's just like, are we going to be long-term thinkers or are we stuck, you know, in the present day, short-termism?

And we're worried about, you know, who's going to be upset on the nightly news. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of more Bitcoin, more companies are buying Bitcoin and putting it on their balance sheet. So MicroStrategy bought more, 4.6 billion. Marathon Holdings did a convertible note at 700 million and intends to buy more Bitcoin. And then Similar Scientific added of 215 Bitcoin to its holdings. What do we think about this? Are they just kind of, like you said, front running, trying to get- The world has changed. Your balance sheet is now an offensive weapon. It used to be that you had your revenue and you had your expenses, and you could pull

these two levers and you could try to figure out what am I going to do to become more profitable, the more profit I have, the more my stock price goes up. But there was a couple of companies around the fringes that over time said, well, wait a second, I have a balance sheet. And usually it was things like real estate. So there's a lot of companies over time that would say, hey, we have a certain amount of real estate or we have land on our balance sheet that is appreciated. And so, you know, the net asset value of our business or of our holdings, here's our stock price. And there's many examples throughout history where investors have looked at a company and they said, wait a second, I think the company's market cap is trading lower than the value of the

assets on their balance sheet. Therefore, I'm going to go buy the stock and maybe I'm even activist and try to get them to sell off the assets or generate revenue, et cetera. So that's a story that's been around for a long time. No one has ever in this way used the balance sheet offensively because there has almost never been an asset that has two things, lots of volatility and a day-to-day market value that you can track. So with real estate, It's illiquid. So you got to go do a bunch of work to figure out what's the real estate worth, right? Land, same thing. But with Bitcoin, you can simply look at the asset and you can see what is it worth right now this second. And then what is it worth the next second? And what is it worth

the second after that? That day-to-day marking of the price 24-7, 365 now makes it dead simple for anyone to be able to look and say, what is the value of that balance sheet? Then the fact that it is highly volatile means that you have volatility to the upside. And so if it is appreciating quickly, now all of a sudden people start to give you credit for future growth of the asset. So these companies are trading at a premium to what is the actual Bitcoin on the balance sheet. I think MicroStrategy has something like $30 billion of Bitcoin on this balance sheet. The market cap is like $85 billion. And so you say, well, why is it trading that difference? It's not because of their software company.

That's not worth, you know, almost three times the value of their Bitcoin holdings. And so what people are doing is they are pricing in, I think Bitcoin is going to go up. And so the Bitcoin that is sitting on this balance sheet is going to be worth more in the future. It's the same thing like you say, hey, I'm going to pull forward revenue from the future

and I'm going to give it a multiple today. And so that is why these companies all of a sudden realize, wait a second, if I put a highly volatile asset on my balance sheet, I play offense and it's something that's going to go up a lot in the future. Now I'm going to get credit for that in my market cap. And so it is very rare for a company to dilute itself and have its shareholders cheer them on. But that's what's happening right now. And so the more that these companies figure out how to do this, they are changing the corporate finance playbook.

And by doing so, they are going to usher in a whole new era where now a CFO or a CEO can sit there and say, okay, I got revenue, I got expenses, and I got a balance sheet. Let's go play ball. And I think that the more people figure out how to perfect this playbook, you're going to see this just go absolutely bonkers throughout public markets because they're able to tap capital markets, get debt and equity, then go offense on the balance sheet. And it's dead simple. You don't need a lot of people to be able to do this. And so the fact that you can be so efficient in doing it is also really attractive in an era where people are tired of having thousands of employees all around the world dealing with people problems and issues and all this stuff.

If you can just make one or two decisions a year, and that generates 95% of the value created for your company each year, how many executives are going to start doing that? A lot. And so I think that is going to contribute greatly to this idea of a global race for Bitcoin is if a bunch of corporations, not all of them, but a bunch of them start figuring this out, is only going to push the price of Bitcoin up higher over time. I do remember a few years ago when it was largely just Michael Saylor with MicroStrategy and people would go crazy when he would announce on Twitter that he bought X amount of Bitcoin on the balance sheet. And now it feels like almost every day a company is doing this. So you think it'll kind of, it'll be an avalanche of companies starting

to do this? I remember the first time I ever talked to Michael. He came on the podcast and- Is that the first time you talked to him? We had DM'd, but the first time that we had like a long conversation. And he said, you know, look, when we first decided we were going to do something with the $500 million on our balance sheet, we told shareholders that we are looking at alternative assets potentially to buy and things other than cash. And so they looked at real estate and gold and Bitcoin also. And they had to put it in a filing. Yeah.

So public filing, and they listed a bunch of the assets that they were going to consider. The word Bitcoin was mentioned one time in an obscure company that no one had ever heard of. Oh, you get those notifications. Deep in a, in a filing.

It went viral on Twitter. Yeah. And the story was. And the story was there's this weird business analytics company in Virginia that's randomly worth a couple hundred million dollars, a billion dollars, whatever it was, and they're thinking about putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. And so it just proved Bitcoiners are insane, right? Anybody who wants to plug themselves into the Bitcoin network, the Bitcoiners are waiting to help you, right? I mean, just think about that for a second.

What MicroStrategy basically did is they took their balance sheet and they plugged it into the Bitcoin network. And the Bitcoiners went to work. That's true. And they did a fantastic job. They're like a free marketing agency. Metaplanet in Japan, same thing. Similar Scientific, same thing. DeFi Technologies, same thing. Marathon, HUD 8, all these, they're all plugging their balance sheets into the Bitcoin network. And the Bitcoiners are going to work. Because I used to think that your company had something to do with Bitcoin or the blockchain or crypto or whatever, but it really doesn't. You can.

Anybody can do this. I saw recently that a local small business, now people send me this stuff. And so somebody sent me on Twitter a PR release that I believe it was a chemical firm. And I wish I remembered the name of it, but the chemical firm is now diverting 25% of their profits into Bitcoin.

So every month or every quarter, They take 25% of their profits and they divert it and they put it into Bitcoin. And their whole idea was the CEO in the press release was talking about, we're super innovative. We're constantly on the cutting edge of this stuff. We're always looking for opportunity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Pretty cool. Yeah.

I have a guy coming on the podcast. We're going to record it at the end of this week and we'll publish it next week. He has created an entire bonus system for his employees using Bitcoin. Fascinating. He walked me through the whole thing. The employees love him. He literally has an entire kind of system created where he's teaching his employees,

but he's also rewarding them. Yeah. If you plug your balance sheet, whether it's your personal balance sheet, your company balance sheet, or your country's balance sheet into the Bitcoin network, the Bitcoiners will defend your purchasing power. They will market your business or your country,

and they will go to work for you. And so that is one of the most powerful ideas in business today. And the more that people realize that that is available to them, obviously more and more people are gonna do this. Yeah, very good. Let's talk about Trump's treasury candidate possible picks.

You interviewed one of the candidates. I think it was basically the only long form interview he did. Howard Lutnick, of Cantor Fitzgerald. So he was being considered. Also, Scott Besant. How do you say his name? Besant. Besant as well. So Trump was kind of picking between both. But then yesterday, this New York Times article came out that people were saying that Scott and Howard, it's almost like a knife fight internally, the way they put it. And that now Trump is maybe considering other people, including, I was surprised by this name, Mark Rowan of Apollo. for treasury secretary. So what do you think? And what do we know about Howard Lutnick?

The United States of America is very fortunate that every single candidate that has been floated would be an amazing pick. And I think that from what I've heard, from what I've seen, Donald Trump is much more prepared this time in terms of kind of picking his team. One of the complaints that I think him and his administration had last time was they kind of didn't expect to win. And so when they did win, it was a mad scramble. And so they quickly were like, okay, who should we pick? And there was a bunch of names put forward.

They didn't have a transition team had set up before, you know, all that. And so they just started making picks based on like who kind of the safe people were. Sorry, what does the transition team do? The biggest thing the transition team does is helps to go and find the people who are going to take all these positions.

So think of it almost, they do many things, But like that is one of the biggest things. And so Howard Lautner is the co-chair of the transition team. Him and other people in the transition team have been basically building lists of, OK, we need to fill the defense secretary role. Who are the top 10 candidates for that? Let's go and get information on them. Let's talk to people. Let's figure out who's the right people. Let's go recruit the best of the best to come work here. Now, Trump, very interestingly, set up the transition team months in advance of the election. And so he was preparing. And now he's making a number of these picks. And frankly, some of the picks, people are like, wow, I never thought that person would get that role. But it's because I think Trump now is more prepared. And he's saying to himself, I know what I want to do. I got a mandate from the American people because of the landslide victory in the election. I'm going to put the right people in here, not who is the safe pick, who is the establishment pick. And so I think that's where there was a lot of abrasiveness between Trump and people who

previously worked with him was he felt like, hey, you're supposed to be implementing my agenda, my administration's policies. But he felt like people were working against him. Now, is that true or not? I don't know. I wasn't in the room, right? But that's what's been reported. And so this time, I think what he's looking for is people who are going to go do that.

Now, that's not unique to him. every president, if you go back, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, they're all looking for trying to find people who are going to implement their agenda, right? It's like if you run a company, you don't want somebody who works at your company who's actively working against you. But in this political arena, there's always people who are constantly trying to figure out, you know, how do they advance their careers? How do they implement certain things? How do they look back so that next time when they run for a position, they can say, look what I voted, Look how I did this, right?

So there's a lot of complexity here. In terms of the Treasury Secretary in particular, for those that don't know, it's basically the CFO of the United States. And so the reason why that's really important is because as we are heading into the future a couple of years here, we have very complex problems. We have a national debt, a home affordability crisis. We have a bond market where some of the biggest buyers of treasuries have actually drastically reduced the demand.

There's new buyers that are sprouting up in terms of stable coin issuers, et cetera, but there's kind of movement there. And so people like Howard Lutnick, people like Scott Besant, Mark Rowan, et cetera, these people really, really understand financial markets. And so I think that the whole key is whoever is picked, it's going to be intelligent.

They're going to be hardworking. They're going to have had a lot of success in the private market. They're going to be pro Bitcoin and crypto. And the fifth one, and I think probably the most important one to Trump is they're going to be loyal to Trump. And so I think that those are all the things

he's trying to figure out who is the right person to put in that seat. The short answer is I have no clue, right? I think that Howard would be a fantastic selection. I think that the United States is fortunate that everyone else would be a good selection as well. Let's see what happens. Yeah, the thing that strikes me the most

is like this administration is going to fill a lot of these roles that used to be filled by career politicians with people from the private markets. And I think that'll be an interesting, I mean experiment to see how you run a country like a company in the private market well there's pros and cons right so again one of the things that as I have studied a lot of history you know take for example one thing I could think of right off the top of my head is there have been a number of chief of staffs that have gone into the White House and when they've gone into the White House

Many of them realize that they are serving the president. And so, you know, in this book that there's a thing where this guy, Jim Baker, says the most important word in that title is staff. You're on the staff. You're not the president. So if you're the chief of staff, you have a lot of power because when you talk, people think it's coming from the president. Right. But your staff, you work for them. And so in the past, there have been chief of staff that go in and they basically say, I'm not playing the politics game.

We're going to do things my way. They don't last. Because if you go in and you make enemies, then what ends up happening is everyone's got their knives out and they're waiting, waiting, waiting. And then when they get the opportunity, they get you. And so there's examples where chief of staffs in the past, they were using the Marine One helicopter for personal use. And so then as soon as that was found out, everyone didn't come to their defense. And so all of a sudden they were out. And so I think that the risk with putting people who don't understand politics into these positions is that they come in and we're going to blow it all up. I thought Peter Thiel had a really interesting point. He recently did a podcast and

what he talked about was he said, you don't need to blow a lot of this stuff up. All you need to do is sit on your hands and do nothing and they'll blow themselves up. And his point was, look at many of these cities, look at many of these departments, they all run at losses. And so they constantly have to go back to the federal government and ask for more money. That's why spending has been going up. That's why the national debt's been exploding. So all you have to do is tell them we're not giving you more money. The money you got is the money you got. If you can't run efficiently on the money you already have, we're not giving you more. So if your budget is a billion dollars or $5 billion and you can't run your organization on that, sorry. And his point is

a bunch of these organizations and cities will just end up blowing themselves up because they literally can only operate if the federal government keeps giving them additional money keeps increasing the budgets every year like they're very bloated and so his point was uh rather than do the really impossible task of going and shutting down organizations and like fighting with these people you can almost let them fail on their own by simply saying you're not getting any more. Yeah. Survive or starve, but it's up to you. And the current class of bureaucrats, they couldn't get out of their own way if they tried. And so what they're going to end up doing is they're going to end up thinking it's just, you know, status quo. Let me go back.

I had a $5 billion budget last year. Let me come back for 6 billion this year. And if the government just says, no, you get five, all of a sudden everything starts to break. And these organizations just start failing because they literally do not know how to operate efficiently. You know, that trope and that cliche of, oh, I don't want to go into politics because I have much more influence in the private markets. Why do you think people like Mark Rowan, people who are very well respected in the private markets, would kind of, I don't know, do something that could be a reputational risk and probably maybe not even as effective as they are in the private markets, like why would they take that? Each person I think is different. So

you can't label kind of a generalization as to why somebody would want to do something like the treasury secretary position. I do think that there's a lot of prestige and power that comes with something like that. And so for a certain class of kind of financial elite, that is like the ultimate job is to be selected to do that. If you talk to them, some of them will talk about that they want to serve their country, right? Some of them are being truthful and kind of honest with that. Others are full of shit and they're just saying it because it sounds good. And then I think that there's an element also of not only serving your country, but there are problems. And so, you know, if you have risen to the top of your game in finance, regardless of

how you got there, whether you're on a hedge fund, an alternatives asset manager, an investment bank, whatever, you have a lot of confidence that you can influence change. And the thing that, you know, I think is really interesting about that specific position is that position not only has to understand financial markets, it has to understand human psychology. And it also has to be very, very good at handling crisis. And so there's an intellectual stimulation that comes with operating in that role, I think, for a lot of people. And so the question is just, you know, are you willing to sacrifice the time, the energy, you know, the experiences with your family, et cetera, to go into a role like that? And are you also willing to take on the stress

that is associated with being the CFO of the United States? And there's a lot of people who bow out who probably would be great treasury secretaries. And they say, listen, I understand the upsides, but the downsides aren't worth it for me. And so I think that those are, you know, all considerations is very complex. And so both for the selection of the right candidate, but also for the candidate that decides that, yes, they want to do this. I think that it is, you know, not nearly as black and white as maybe people wish it was. Yeah. And let's talk about who Trump picked to lead the FCC.

Brendan Carr. Savage. So hold on a second. Savage. Good morning and God bless America. Tweets that every morning. Oh, does he really? Hell yeah.

Okay, wait, but it says here that he currently sits on the commission and is a vocal critic of big tech and has said that the agency should regulate the tech industry. but then I read the article and says he agrees that he wants to slash regulation. Well, the bolts can be true. Oh,

I see. I see. Right. Both can be true, but he would go after big tech. Well, there's a lot of stuff big tech's done recently that maybe they shouldn't have done.

Interesting. Okay. So what do you think? Right. I mean, we all forget Twitter now is back in good graces because Elon owns it, but Twitter D platform, the sitting president of the United States.

Right. Right. Twitter suppressed information that ended up being true. It is probably one of the biggest scandals in American history is that big tech colluded with the government, objectively true, that they colluded with the government to suppress things that were true. That is censorship. And so what were the punishments? Who was held accountable? it's just like this big blob or this big machine that everyone says,

eh, whatever. You quote retweeted one of his tweets and he said, we must dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans. Hell yeah. Savage. Good morning and God bless America. Right. Read that again. What'd he say? We must dismantle. Should I do it with fire? No.

We must dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans. This sounds like something you would have tweeted. If that is controversial, the problem's with you, not with him. Elon responded to the tweet, said, based. Think about that for a second. The FCC commissioner is tweeting something that every American should believe. censorship is bad and free speech for the average citizen is good but people are commenting as if this is some incredible revolution or revelation it's like this guy literally had you know moses

come down from high and give him some idea that like all of a sudden oh this guy's the next albert einstein all he's saying is censorship is bad and free speech is good how come i've never heard of him before because he was suppressed by the cartel i wasn't gonna say but you said it um yeah think think about this guy right who is simply sitting there saying the american people should be able to speak freely that should be one of the least controversial ideas that anyone hears but somehow in this country that has become controversial. I will never forget the people on The View. I had no opinion.

I got a lot of friends who don't like The View. I got a couple of friends who like it. The View is a complete joke. I mean, come on. Well, listen, I don't know anything. I never watched it. So I had no opinion. But then I watched after the election,

somebody sent me a clip. And then I even, you know, listen, I like to go find the source material. I didn't even believe the clip. I went and I found an actual video, did my 2x speed, found it, and I watched the whole thing. And these women were sitting there talking about the reason why Kamala Harris lost is because we can't regulate social media. Oh, yeah, I saw that. That's the whole point.

You shouldn't be allowed to regulate our speech. and majority of Americans went into a ballot box and they gave the digital middle finger to all the people who believe that they should be able to regulate speech. And so also one of the most eye-opening things in the world was when Tim Walz sat on the debate stage and he said that free speech doesn't apply to misinformation.

Yeah. Wrong, wrong. because your misinformation that you've labeled over and over and over again over the last five years has turned out to be true. Right. So you don't get to choose what is misinformation. You don't get to regulate our speech. And the fact that you think you can is why your ass got fired and you don't have a job now. And so it comes back to the idea of the greatest asset the United States has is the American people. Let them build, let them be productive, let them talk, let them do what they want to do. The country has been here for a long time and it will continue to

be here for a long time and it will be prosperous if we simply continue to bet on the American people. We just want to talk. Let them talk. I'm going to let them build everything that the American people are pissed off about right now is because they want to do something and the government won't let them. We want to build housing. The government won't let us. We want to talk freely. The government won't let us. We want to transact freely. The government won't let us. We want to buy any asset we want to buy. The government won't let us. Just wait till our toddler finds out about free speech. Okay. She can have all the free speech she wants. she'll be talking to herself in her bedroom um all right clip that and send that to her little

three-year-old ass all right i'm gonna cut it myself i made a clip in years i'm gonna go clip that and i'm gonna show it to her tonight uh let me teach you about free speech i already talked about taxes can i can i just tell the people something funny she said okay yesterday she said something like she was talking to Anthony and she said you don't know anything and he goes

I know more than you and she goes you don't know Bulgarian neither does she yes she does that little kid don't even know English yes she does

I'm already at least one language above her no all right what's your next topic all right let's talk about we could sit here

and roast a three-year-old all day that's fine with me wow I didn't know He was so fired up about this this morning. Let's talk about sitting in cash. Dumb. Okay.

So why? And then let's talk about your tweet about how the Fed has locked us out of the housing market, but Satoshi gave us keys. The whole idea is basically that if you look at boomers, boomers own an outsized portion of the housing market. I think it's around 38 to 40%. And owning housing is really important because it has been a way to essentially save at a higher rate than inflation, because as they devalue the currency, your home equity is going up, but it is protecting you from that inflation. And so boomers who own housing, on average, is estimated between 45 to like 50% of their net worth is in their primary residence. So half of their wealth is in a primary residence that has accelerated in price at a higher rate than inflation. Why is that important? That is a wealth generating asset for these people and

has generated approximately 50% of the net worth. Well, if homes are unaffordable, that means that the entire generation that came into the workforce from 2000 until today has basically been priced out on a very large basis. So if you can't get in the game with a wealth building asset, like a home, all of a sudden you now have a problem. And so the generation before us had housing that generated 50 plus percent of their net worth. And it did a fantastic job of protecting them from inflation. Millennials don't have housing because it's so unaffordable. Home affordability is the worst it's been in 40 years, but millennials have Bitcoin. And so it's the same idea. You don't need a down payment. You don't need to qualify for a mortgage. You don't have to carry in costs

on a month-to-month basis. You simply can take $5 and you can start saving in Bitcoin today. And you can do that with $100. You can do it with $1,000. You can do it with $100,000. You can do it with $10 million. And so an entire generation of people where young people are definitely much more likely to own Bitcoin than not, they are now going and they are using Bitcoin as a digital savings the same way that the boomers use their home as savings. And so this whole idea of the Fed locked us out of the housing market, but Satoshi gave us new keys, is just the idea that you can't live in your Bitcoin, right? And so millennials are the renting generation, but by actually buying Bitcoin, rather than getting priced out of the housing market,

they've been able to insulate themselves from that inflation. And therefore it has done very, very well for the people who bought Bitcoin and simply held it. Amazing. Makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. What else you got? Anything else? That's all I got. That's it? Are you upset that-

That you roasted our three-year-old? It was on her birthday. Have you no shame? Listen, as a parent, your job is to teach your children not be their friend. Okay. And so if you got a kid who lives a cushy life. Oh my God.

They need a little stress in their life from time to time. Oh, she's stressed. Well. You stress her out. That's good. Listen. real world is stressful oh god

just wait till the little boy is old enough to get a little stress I don't know let him be planet is protective of him alright guys thanks so much for watching

we'll see you guys next time