The Pomp Podcast - #1452 Anthony & Polina Pompliano | Does Microstrategy Own Too Much Bitcoin?

Episode Date: December 10, 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 MicroStrategy owning 2% of all bitcoin supply, Daniel Penny case, UnitedHealthcare CEO & the shooter, the vibe shift happening in America, politics, and asset prices.   ======================= Ledger has been trusted for 10 years to secure 20% of the world’s digital assets. Their latest devices, Ledger Stax and Ledger Flex, feature secure touchscreens for safer, easier crypto management. Go to ledgerpomp.com to take control of your digital future! ======================= 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. ======================= 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 an awesome episode with Polina Popliano. She's the editor at The Profile. We talk about does MicroStrategy own too much Bitcoin? They now

have 2% of the supply. And should we be concerned about that? And what can you do at home? We then get into the Daniel Penny case. We talk about some politics. We also get through what is going on with the UnitedHealthcare CEO and the shooter. And then we talk about asset prices and the general vibe shift that's happening on a national scale. This conversation unpacks a lot, and it tries to make sense of what's going on in the world, both in financial markets and in society at large. Hope you guys enjoy it. Here's the 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 Ledger. They're celebrating 10 years as the most trusted name in crypto security. With over 7 million users and 20% of the world's digital assets secured, Ledger continues to lead the way in protecting your crypto and digital ownership. Their latest devices, Ledger Stacks and Ledger Flex,

feature the world's first secure touchscreens, making managing your assets easier and safer than ever. Plus, the new Ledger Security Key app offers a secure alternative to traditional passwords, enhancing your digital security. Go to ledgerpomp.com to take control of your digital future. That's ledgerpomp.com. Go check them out today. 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 Lyft 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. All right, Plana, what's the first topic? MicroStrategy just bought another $2.1 billion in Bitcoin While its combination of equity and fixed income security sales To finance this purchase Is drawing increased scrutiny

I want to talk about both But one more stat for the people MicroStrategy holds $42 billion of Bitcoin Which is 2% of the entire network Is that too much? Don't hate the player, hate the game If you think about what he's doing is Bitcoin has a lot of paradoxes in it, right?

It's supposed to be an electronic peer-to-peer cash system. And so what that means is that there's democratic ownership. It's accessible to anyone with an internet connection and you should be allowed to buy as much as you want. That is part of a free market and democratic system. With that said, it goes against the ethos of Bitcoin for anyone to own an outsized portion of it, right? The whole idea is that you want everyone to own.

Does anybody own more than 2%? Well, the ETFs have more. Satoshi has more. So there are some, you know, kind of honeypots of Bitcoin. What I think is interesting about this is, again, there's a lot of paradoxes in this question. And the answer is not as clear as people want it to be. So Bitcoin is supposed to be democratized ownership and decentralized ownership. No matter how much Bitcoin you own, you don't control more of the network. There's no special power from owning a lot of Bitcoin. So whether you own one Bitcoin or you own 423,000 Bitcoin, you get to use the Bitcoin network the same way everybody else gets to use it. With that said, it definitely goes against the ethos of Bitcoin for somebody to own a lot of it.

Now, it's a free market. Everyone should be able to buy whatever they want to buy. And so I think a lot of Bitcoiners are saying to themselves, hey, it's his right to go and buy as much as he can buy. It's his self-interest to do that. But I don't love the fact that somebody owns more than 2%. I don't love the fact that he's probably going to own more than 2% because he's going to keep buying. But, hey, that's the game. So don't hate the player.

Hate the game. Now, what I do think is also another fair point is somebody wrote to me and they said, yeah, but MicroStrategy is owned by shareholders. And so there is some democratized ownership of the company, which then owns the Bitcoin. Similar to how BlackRock has, I think it's something like 500,000 Bitcoin in their fund. but that fund is then owned by a bunch of individuals and organizations, et cetera. And so it's just not black and white. And so the question shouldn't be, does he own too much? It just is a thing. He owns 2%. He's probably going to own more. Instead, what I think people should be focused on are things that they can control. If you don't like Michael Saylor owning

2%, go buy more, go try to compete. And ultimately I think that's what the Bitcoin system does is it incentivizes people to compete rather than complain, which is obviously a much better system. So this is the fifth consecutive week that he has bought Bitcoin in a large amount. Just remind the people, how is he getting billions of dollars to buy? He's raising it. He's raising debt and equity. He's selling shares in his company to get money to buy Bitcoin, and he's raising debt. He's issuing convertible notes, and he's raising that capital. Is there a world in which things go down for Bitcoin as a result? I don't know the exact numbers, man. It sounds awesome to talk about like a risky things with a voice like this

right now. It just sounds kind of like, you know, uh, extra scary. Um, if you think about how much Bitcoin he owns, I think the number is somewhere around 40 billion, 45 billion, 42 billion. Okay. So he's got 42 billion. Uh, I believe that, uh, he has seven or $8 billion of debt, but let's just say it's $10 billion of debt and $40 billion of Bitcoin. Easy numbers. I got a small brain. So if you own $40 billion of Bitcoin and you have $10 billion of debt, people are worried that, oh my God, he's taking on too much debt. Bitcoin would have to draw down 75%. And then if after the 75% drawdown, he sold all the Bitcoin, he could pay off all the debt. So there's this margin of error in terms of how much the Bitcoin is worth versus what the debt is. Now, has Bitcoin drawn

down 75 percent before? Absolutely. But I think what would end up happening is as the price was drawing down, he would be buying more. And so it's very hard to see a world where he owes back money and doesn't have enough Bitcoin on the balance sheet to pay back the debt. Now, that doesn't necessarily address the equity in the company. And that's a whole different kind of discussion and argument around the multiple of which he has, because the company is worth more than the 40 billion of Bitcoin that's sitting on the balance sheet. So he should get some credit for the software company, but maybe that's a billion dollars. And then he's got 40 billion of Bitcoin or 42 billion of Bitcoin. So let's just say it's like 43, 44 billion dollars of quote unquote book

value for all the value investor nerds out there. But it's trading at something like 90 billion dollars in market cap, I think, or maybe 100 billion dollars, whatever it is that. And so people are asking themselves, why is the company trading so much higher market cap than the Bitcoin plus the software company. And really that comes down to there's a premium on the Bitcoin. And then really what I think most people are missing in this

is the market is assigning some sort of multiple on his ability to continue to raise capital and buy more Bitcoin. So they're saying, well, if he can keep doing this and he's doing it to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per day,

well, that looks a lot like revenue. It's just that through the traditional accounting metrics, you can't count it as revenue because it's not booked from a customer. But if it ends up on your balance sheet, it looks like revenue. And so what he's doing is he's continuing

to acquire more and more Bitcoin. They're giving him some sort of multiple for that. The question is, we're in uncharted territory. What is the multiple? Is the multiple too high? Is it too low? There's a lot of questions here. And so what I think a lot of sophisticated investors

are doing is they're throwing up their hands and they're saying, I can't figure this out. This is too new. There's too many kind of, there's too much smoke here. There must be a fire. And so I'm not going to participate. Now, I say that, but then you go and you look at the cap table.

And again, with the paradoxes of this whole thing is like BlackRock and Fidelity and like all these companies, you know, they all own a lot of micro strategy. That doesn't mean it's not risky. It doesn't mean that it's not risky. But I'm just saying that on one hand, you have a lot of smart people who are like, hey, I'm not going to participate. On the other hand, you got a lot of smart people who are saying I am going to participate. And so this is what makes markets. This is why it's so controversial is people are betting on both sides. So far, the people who have bought MicroStrategy stock and been long have been right.

Now, are they always going to be right? We don't know. We're going to find out. But I think that you can't just simply say a company is involved with Bitcoin. They must be good or they must be bad. But I think that's really the discourse right now online is people are basically using MicroStrategy as a proxy for Bitcoin. And so my argument is just do extra work, right? There's more to it than just a proxy for Bitcoin.

And so if you don't like Bitcoin, go and understand what he's doing and figure out whether you agree with it or not. If you like Bitcoin, you still go look what he's doing and see if you agree with it or not. And make sure you don't just make the kind of simple analogy of, oh, if he's involved with Bitcoin, it must be good or bad. Right. And also, I mean, nobody talks about this, but they should. There's key man risk. Michael Saylor, yeah, is the CEO and founder of this company. But what if one day he's not?

Well, he's not the CEO anymore. He stepped down. He became the chairman. Yeah. And I do ask people all the time, you know, when people say there's no risk, I always say, well, who's CEO? And they can't name the CEO. And I say, OK, I literally don't know who the CEO of MicroStrategy. So the point being that Michael Saylor has been one of the best kind of promoters of Bitcoin, microstrategy, et cetera. It's no different than, you know, take a Steve Jobs and Apple, right? Like Steve Jobs was Apple. And there was a lot of a vacuum of value when Steve Jobs died. Right.

So Michael Saylor, he's a relatively young guy. He seems healthy, you know, all those kinds of things. But there's always key man risk, right? There's all kinds of stuff that could happen. So I just think that people who keep saying there's no risk, again, I'm not saying that there is obvious risk. I'm just saying that when you say there's no risk in something, that is usually not a good scenario. Okay. Off of that, there's been a crypto vibe shift. No, there's a national vibe shift. A national vibe shift. But specifically, there's, you know, in crypto markets. Donald Trump has appointed former PayPal chief operating officer David Sachs as his White House AI and crypto czar. It's so funny. I don't know these titles. Another step towards overhauling U.S. policy,

SACS will guide the administration's policies for AI and cryptocurrency. Some of that work includes creating a legal framework for crypto, as well as leading a presidential council of advisors on science and technology. You know David, right? I do. You have interviewed him. I did. And you have spoken to him privately.

I did. Okay. What do we think about SACS being a crypto czar? David Sachs is the icing on the cake of Silicon Valley's infiltration of Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., they thought they were the big brother and that they were going to beat up on little brother Silicon Valley. And they've been coming at them over and over and over and over again. They overregulated them. They debunked them.

They mocked them in the media. They called them stupid. They said they were greedy. They did all these things to them. And Silicon Valley sat there and was a punching bag for a decade. And now Silicon Valley is having the last laugh. Because if you look and see throughout this entire administration, it's like Peter Thiel's entire ecosystem has now successfully penetrated Washington, D.C., and they're in charge. It's like the meme, you know, the I'm the captain now.

That's what's happened. So if you go and you look, J.D. Vance is the vice president of the United States. David Sachs is the AI and crypto czar. Elon Musk is basically like the consigliere to the president, and he's everywhere, right? You just go through all this stuff and you realize, wait, Vivek Ramaswamy, he's running Doge. All of these people, Teal invested in them. They were in the orbit. They were at PayPal, et cetera.

And so what I think has happened is that we have very intelligent people who have been hyper successful. If you look at the cabinet, it's the most number of billionaires that's ever been in a cabinet. That's what I was going to say. This is, I think, another reason for the vibe shift is normally these billionaires, you know, people in the private markets are normally like, oh i can have more control and more influence outside of politics but that's shifted now let me let me i'm going to give a uh an example that people may not like but it's the truth and that's what i i'm going to just say it miami is full of a lot of fake money and in 2021 real money showed up okay all of the billionaires etc showed up to miami and a lot of the like flexing of rented cars

and fake watches and all that shit, it kind of scattered into the corners. It's like somebody flipped on a light and the rats scattered. That's what happened. Because what ends up happening is all the flaunting and flexing and all this stuff, right? Not the true Miamians.

It's like the people who come, they're like, you know, they like come to there because they think that's what is cool. And they all start flexing on each other. And it's all for like Instagram. Yeah. When the real money showed up, all of a sudden those people feel inferior.

if you pretend to be rich and you sit next to a real billionaire it's like dude shut like it's just obvious right that's what's happening in washington dc is there's real intelligence there's real value creation these people have been successful at many things they've done in their life they never cared about politics but now they care and so it's like they've turned their attention and they said, you guys are fucking up. You guys are wasting money. You're creating this huge bureaucracy. You guys are absolutely decimating our country, our society, and our economy. We're coming to fix it. And usually Washington DC could sit there and say, oh my God, the tech people, they are so arrogant. They think they can fix this.

Look at how evil they are. They're billionaires, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. the american people just gave a mandate to the tech industry to go and fix this shit because donald trump won the popular vote and so when you think about that you say wait a second what if everything goes right and they actually can fix it do you think that elon musk can run the dmv better than is being run right now the immigration process just pick anything in the government i bet you that the private sector successful business leaders can run it better and if you don't believe me why is palantir so successful i just think all the bureaucracy is harder to get rid of than we think unless you fire everybody still it's it's a machine that's

so entrenched in unless you fire everybody um wait you want to know what what's actually going kill the bureaucracy what it has nothing to do with the people who are there it's the culture yeah i i keep saying it and i don't want to use names but like i am shocked i had breakfast this morning with a guy who uh worked at a hedge fund super successful went to a very very well-known school um incredibly intelligent said to me that uh yeah he's like i'm surprised how many of my friends don't work hard. I said, well, how many hours a day do you work? He said, I don't know, like 12, 14 hours, right? Like this guy's like super, just hard charging, very successful. Somebody that I would love to come and work at one of our businesses. And I said, well,

what are you going to do next? Cause he just left a very well-known investors family office. He said, I want to go work in the administration. That kid should never, ever want to work in the government until now. Cause guess what? The same people who want to go work at SpaceX and Tesla and Boring Company, Neuralink, et cetera, they now are like, well, maybe I can just go work at Doge and go take a sledgehammer and destroy all this bureaucracy. So I think Doge is going to become a very high status thing. If you can put that on your resume,

that's going to be like you went to Stanford in the 90s or you went to work at Uber in the early days or whatever. And people are going to say, oh, you must be smart. And so what does that do? That pulls in the smart people. And so I just think that people are drastically underestimating what is possible when you bring people who are very focused, who are very enthusiastic, and who are used to getting things done. I also think that it's interesting, especially for Trump and in the whole administration, how J.D. Vance used to be very critical of Trump. He's now the VP. sacks used to not that long ago was very critical of trump if you remember in the all-in podcast

um after january 6th uh david sacks said that trump was trump was clearly responsible for the events of january 6th and that he had disqualified himself from being a candidate at a national level and now he like held a fundraiser for trump two months ago i i think that there's um a lot of change that has happened in the last four years, but definitely over the last eight years. And so I've talked to a number of different people and a few people have said to me, hey, I knew Trump before he was president. I spent some time with him when he was the president the first time. I've never seen him this locked in, focused and serious about this. Right. So let's just say that nobody's perfect, but there's an element of like,

imagine you do a job, then you get a second chance at doing the job. Most people who are idiots would say, I'm better prepared to do the job a second time. And so what I think happened the first time in my kind of analysis and talking to a lot of these different people is that the Trump administration today believes that Trump did not think he was going to win in 2016. When he won, it was basically chaos. And they were like, oh, shoot, we got to put all these people in these different positions. Well, who do we get? And all these names started getting thrown at them from the establishment. And so he just started picking the people that the establishment was telling him were the right people. He ended up firing most of those people.

And so if that is true, then if you look now, there's very few establishment people that he's picking. RFK is in charge of health. Kash Patel is going to be in charge of the FBI. Tulsi Gabbard. I mean, you just go down the line. You're like, there's no establishment players. Do you know why I'm so worried, though? Why? I'm so worried because of the size of the egos of these people all working together.

If you think these people have egos, wait till you meet politicians and government officials. Of course. You ever been at the TSA walking through the airport? I've never seen someone puff their chest out so much to tell me to take my computer out of my bag. Or to ask me six times when I took everything out of my pocket. Well, did you? No disrespect to the TSA. I like you guys.

We're cool, chill. I don't need the secondary search. But I'm just saying, if you think about it, it's human nature. If you're put in a position of power, there's ego to it, right? You want to know another one that's crazy? American Airlines, we can go off on them, too, because they just changed the rules. Now, if you've got a roller bag and you have a garment bag, the garment bag counts as a second roller bag. As it should.

What are you talking about? You get two bags. They're like, no, you get a personal bag. Isn't that a personal bag? No. See, now here we go. How crazy is this? Okay, hold on.

For my entire life, you could easily bring a roller bag and a garment bag. And now these bureaucrats changed it. All right. So back to the billionaires and their ego. How are you going to have people try to get on the plane and you tell them? This literally happened to me recently. But this is serious. This is just becoming a grievance.

This is serious. Go on, go on. Get it out. This is, I just want to highlight this. Like I was standing here, I was standing there in this moment and I said to myself, this is a perfect example of how stupid our economy and country has become. He called me in the moment. I was so mad.

And he goes, I see a woman with a dog over there. No, no, let me explain. Let me explain. So it's six o'clock in the morning. I'm waking my ass up to go to the airport, to go on this plane. I'm going to fly somewhere. I'm going to go to one lunch and I'm going to fly back the same day. Personal choice.

Already. Well, because I love my family and I want to spend time with them. So I'm going to go do this, right? I'm there. There's a bunch of other people. There's only two people at six o'clock in the morning that are on planes. There's families where the parents look like they're ready to jump off the building because their kids are acting crazy at six o'clock in the morning. And then there's business people who are, you know, flying for stuff.

Yeah. So there's a line of all business people. We got our roller bags and then we got our garment bag. Don't ask me why I got a roller bag just for one day, whatever. So I'm in line. I'm the second guy in line. First guy goes. They say, hey, sir, to the guy in front of me.

Hey, sir, you can't bring the garment bag on. You have two bags. He says, what? And they say, yes, that is considered a second bag. And he says, what? So I'm like, ah, that guy must have done something stupid. I go. They tell me the same thing.

There's like six people in a row they say this to. And now they all got us pulled over. Like, we're like speeding or something. They got us pulled over to the side. Speeding with your garment bag. And they want us to fold up the garment bags, put them into the roller bag, go down the little jetway, and then we can take it out. Yeah. So it's like a stupid thing, right?

You did the same with me with my sack. No, no, it's stupid. Okay. While I am doing this, while I have the bag down, I'm unzipping it, putting it in, whatever. Again, it's not the end of the world, but it's just, it's dumb, right? It's like a bureaucratic stupid thing. I swear to you, I saw a woman who was like four or five people behind me walk onto the plane. She got a roller bag.

she got a backpack and then she's got like a uh what do they call like a like a satchel a satchel thing but in the satchel is a fucking dog and i'm like wait a minute that woman has three bags and a pet and i can't bring a roller bag and a garment bag on the plane guys just so you have context for me i'm on the other side of this phone call and all i hear is they're making me shove my bag and that woman has a dog and i'm like what is happening at the airport so my point is it's like like the country for the last four or five years just devolved into stupidity think about what has to happen for a rule to get created that generally the business people fly the most often they're probably responsible for a very material percent of your revenue

the garment bags are not the thing that's taking up size in the, in the plane for you to change the rules and do this type of stuff. It's just bureaucratic nonsense. There's no common sense whatsoever. And so I use that as an example, because if you bring it all the way back to the government, that's in a private company. What do you think is going on inside of these government organizations yeah there is nonsense you ever gone to the dmv and as you go through the process say to yourself this makes no sense um yeah it's like the entire experience makes no sense wait this is this has been the case all u.s airlines count a garment bag as a carry-on and not as a personal item this is back in like 2019 no that's never been the case i don't know the people

in the comments tell us if that's never been the case i don't know crazy because i asked a woman after that it happened a third time by the way this is like now they're like enforcing this or whatever so i asked the one if i said hey listen i the last two times i flew this happened can you explain to me did something change and she said uh uh she said yeah it's a new thing really yeah so american airlines i listen i always been promoting i always say i like you guys i even still liked you when you took the tvs out of the headrest tvs that's all right but listen the garment bag y'all gonna lose me um so back to the egos you don't think that so many billionaires in one room are everybody has such strong opinions such strong i know but like do you not it's better

to have billionaires who all have strong opinions and trying to get shit done than a bunch of npcs who are hiding behind the blob and not getting anything done what is an npc do i know that it's like you know in a video game the the people who no one controls they just kind of move around ah you didn't know what an npc man i don't know i don't play video games move on let's move on let's go to the next video games let's go to the next one anyway all right speaking of nonsense you're gonna get a lot of stuff you're gonna get heat for that one npc non-person what non-player character non-player character all right go ahead what's the next topic god you called me an npc no Oh, okay. Non-player character. I'll think of that. Okay. So, Maureen veteran Daniel Penny

was acquitted by a Manhattan jury Monday in the death of Jordan Neely. Jurors cleared Penny, a 26-year-old Long Islander, of criminally negligent homicide after the caught-on-camera fatal encounter on an Uptown F train last year. Hero. Yeah. Hero. And the thing is that I think more and more people are coming out and saying that how on earth did we try this man for something that is so blatantly and obviously like he did

the right thing and it was not racially motivated or politically motivated or or any like i i think that daniel penny would have done that no matter who was you know my uh my prediction my prediction is uh the united states is going to go back to old school uh ethos we're going to bring back hard work we're gonna bring back not hard work we're gonna bring back uh the fact that if you go somewhere imagine if you went somewhere in texas and you walked into a bar and you started saying i'm gonna kill you you get your ass whooped but for some reason people are like oh if it's on the subway in new york you can say whatever you want right so what's gonna end up happening here is that people who have a proclivity to act this way

are going to start to realize, wait a minute, that's not appropriate. Now, it's a very delicate situation because a guy died and no one deserves to die. But what came out in the trial, which I paid very close attention to, is that the story that was told by the mainstream media is not the truth.

what actually happened is that daniel penny did not choke this man out and kill him instead what happened is daniel penny restrained him had him in a chokehold when the police arrived he was breathing and they did not want to give him mouth to mouth because they were scared they're gonna get hiv which is if you think of the definition of a hero if the police show up to a scene and they don't want to involve themselves because they're because they're scared yeah imagine the self-sacrifice and courage that takes for a civilian to do it the people on the train are thanking daniel penny for protecting them right after the situation but then this guy dies and it comes out in trial that he had a bunch of uh k2 like the

synthetic marijuana stuff. He had a bunch of medical history stuff, all these different things that they think actually led to him ultimately dying. And so again, it's very sad. I don't think anyone, you know, wants to see somebody die, et cetera. But what the media said was it, you, it made it sound like Daniel Penny was sitting there choking him until literally he didn't breathe anymore. And he killed him, you know, with his bare hands, got up and like cheered about it yeah and that's not what happened and so my point all along has been uh daniel penny acted heroically on that subway but the unspoken hero of the story is the jury because there's a lot of pressure to just go with the charade and say well you know they're charging this guy it's

just easier just say yeah just yeah he's guilty uh court of public opinion whatever and the jury was mostly women and come on women women don't want to live in a society where people have a green light to go on the subway and threaten women and children that's crazy that's insane right so the headlines

were Daniel Penny you know kills man on subway why isn't the headline Daniel Penny heroically saves women and children on subway I think same story

whole different perspective i think that the narratives of yesteryear are kind of gone and now people are more back to like common sense even i was looking at twitter and um you know some of the tweets that were like i can't believe daniel penny is acquitted and all this stuff the responses just show that the sentiment is not vibe shocking it's vibe shift because ultimately what people i think realize is hold on a second if you start to implement these crazy policies you are going to inch your way towards the society you don't want to live in so it's all fun and games when you're yelling and screaming about something that doesn't impact you but yeah i said it i said listen if you and our children were on a subway car yeah and some guy gets on there

and starts saying i'm gonna kill people i pray that there's a man on there with enough courage and balls to knock him the fuck out right because at the end of the day what are you going to do You're going to let him actually do something? Yeah, not fun fact. One time, very early on, Anthony and I had just met. So this maybe was like our second or third date. I don't know. I don't know what story you're about to tell.

What? No, no, no. Go ahead. Just go ahead. I'm proud of everything I ever did. No, this is not like that. But we were in a nice Italian restaurant. Oh, yeah.

I know this story. Hell yeah. minding our own damn business is crazy so i'm sitting here anthony's facing me and i'm i can see the door so which i hate back to the door from yeah since then he always has to face the door no i always was like that i just being nice to the lady let her sit in the lady's thing okay well i was in the lady seat and that is that's the lady seat in the bench stop it so then um we just hear commotion then i turn and i see a table flip i see glass shatter everywhere like what is going on people are fighting on tables no there's a knife there's a

hold on a second hold on the there is a guy who's in the restaurant like a like a patron who is fighting the general manager and they are and they're going to the ground and the table flips over etc and what i quickly realize is that the waitress runs around from behind the bar and she grabs a knife off the table and she is going to stab the general manager it was great and it quickly i realized that the patron is her father well you didn't realize i think we learned that no no no they're yelling at each other and she's yelling dad etc whatever and so all this is happening and people in new york they're just eating they don't even they literally don't even stop people next to us kept eating their salads and i was like guys there's a fight going on so

i get up and uh important to note without saying anything to me they were starting to kind of separate a little bit the woman did not stab anyone she's like kind of pulling the guy whatever and so i get the dad and i just take him and i just like kind of put my arm around my amen let's go outside and we walk outside and he's hammered. He's like drunk off his ass. And so, uh, I say to him, I say, Hey, where do you live? And he says some address. I said, all right, man, I think you should go home. And so, uh, I flagged down a cab. Uh, I put them in the car and I say to the cab driver, uh, here's some money, take this man home, whatever he says, just take them home. And as they're driving away, I hear the guy say, nah, I don't need to go home.

and so uh yeah sometimes you just you there has you don't need to you don't need to intervene obviously if it's dangerous etc but it's just like if you want to live in a society of us that where there's civilized people where uh you'd be happy for your family to live in your kids to grow up and etc uh it takes good people to always try to de-escalate and help people etc and so like who knows what's going on in that guy's life. Maybe he had a bad day. Maybe he lost his job. Maybe somebody got hurt. Who knows? Yeah. But he probably is not proud of the fact that at his daughter's work, he's getting in a fist fight with her boss. Right. Shout out daughter who's ready to throw down for pop. But that's a whole different story. Right. Probably not. You probably

don't have a job for very long if you're grabbing a knife on your boss. But it's just like, again, And, you know, you don't need to get involved other than just, hey, man, like, just take a deep breath. Just let's go outside, right? And so, yeah, I don't know. It's just, like, you just got to do the right thing. Yeah, it's just easier to look away. And we've told the story before. I'm not going to get into it again.

But, like, I thought that I was one of the people where I was like, if something happens, I'm there. I'm inserting myself. But, like, no, you freeze when you don't know what's going on. when we were walking down the street, there was a man in the street. That saved two people's lives. Okay, okay. So this guy probably actually,

but he was laying in the street. He was non-responsive. People thought that he had died. So I was like, oh my God, I can't even look. Like I was so, he had smashed his face. It was bad. How are you going to let a man just lay in the middle of the street

with a smashed face? My point is- No, not you. I'm saying all these people are standing around him. There were 16 people around him and nobody was doing anything. crazy um not he was and he was barely breathing and when we yeah when we walked up on this i said what happened everyone says i don't know and nobody was doing no one's calling the police

nobody was doing it they were all just staring at him like we're in a museum it was crazy insane and so it's like yo just hey are you okay what happened whatever go get the police go you know what i mean try to help somebody because i always think about if it was me in the situation would i want somebody to help me and to be honest i haven't said this before but um i think that's why i tweeted about daniel penny is because uh it was by the way it was really bothering anthony for a long time that shit ate at me for like weeks yeah and i and i knew and i knew that most people probably thought the same thing but it's just like is it worth it yeah is it worth actually talking about this thing. And I think what I ultimately said to myself was, if it was me who

was sitting there on trial for something that I shouldn't be here for, I hope people have the wherewithal to speak up. And here's the crazy thing, is when I tweeted that, people saw the public reaction. The private reaction was even crazier. I had people I haven't talked to in years. I had people who are highly successful, uh, that are in the news every day. Like, like just, I had reporters, I had producers at TV stations, all these people reach out to me and say, thank you for saying something. And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, how is it that me with like a little Twitter account saying something and all these people think the same thing, but that's a society that we live in. And so I think it's changing

vibe shift is happening that's good that's healthy um proud of you but there but there's a lot of i mean there's a lot of stuff now here's the reverse the health care killer okay so let's talk about the health care killer this guy so y'all y'all lost your minds talking about this guy on the internet a ceo was shot in cold blood um in front of his hotel where he was going to do like an investor day um united healthcare ceo killed uh straight up in the back crazy video insane um coward shit yeah and nobody they couldn't find this guy for five days nobody was calling in we had his face we had everything nothing nobody was saying who it was we now know it's a 26 year old stanford graduate pen pen sorry my god stanford i'm sorry pen graduate

um named luigi mangione um you want to know something funny about pen no i saw a great meme on the internet they had a they had trump careful no they had trump's uh mugshot and they had luigi and they said the pen to prison pipeline is strong god well wait where was the joke it's funny uh so here's my question so we have luigi he has now been charged but no he has not been charged no no he's been charged did he get charged today what 11 hours and six minutes ago one count of second degree murder how is that second degree murder listen i know before we get to all this first of all this is all led this is all alleged we'll figure out what's going on i mean he has been charged no no it's charged but i'm just saying gotta go to court okay

we'll determine whether you're guilty or not um but i want to specifically two things that i haven't heard people talk about the first if you got a problem with somebody going back to the old school way yeah you show up you would confront them to their face you guys may scrap a little bit you know punch each other whatever you walk away it takes somebody with just absolute complete lack of like what it is to be a man to get a gun and to go ambush somebody yeah and to execute them from behind yeah that you don't like the executing that's like some little just coward stuff right because it goes back to if you're such a tough guy that you think you know you're justified whatever make it a fair fight right but that's not what this is about

it's it's like something different and so um i just think like nobody is really talking about this element of like we've devolved into a society where like this person became judge jury and executioner yeah right versus a different way maybe they were had been handled you know decades ago that's first of all second of all this blew people's minds that it is a ivy league graduate that went to a forty thousand a year you know high school all this stuff now i'm gonna say something that uh i don't like making a lot of predictions but i did tell y'all trump was gonna win by a landslide um and so i'm gonna go out on a limb oh god there's another vibe shift that's gonna happen and it's a great paradox of

our society veterans who have ptsd etc are reporting in large numbers the benefits of psychedelics microdosing microdosing uh ayahuasca all this stuff they got real problems and they found a solution that can help them it was usually like a medical solution somewhere along the way a bunch of rich kids decided that they were going to start to use these to solve their invented problems society is going to turn on all these medicines because what they're going to realize is which the science shows is that they can be triggering it's a small percentage of people but it can be triggering of course it can and can create these you know kind of uh uh manic episodes these like

psychotic episodes etc whatever if you're changing the chemistry of your brain alcohol weed cocaine wait do you remember what the people made fun of me when i said marijuana Yeah, you're a cop. So if you think about this. Not a cop, guys. I do think that there's this very interesting paradox of psychedelics obviously are very valuable for a certain subset of the population, but they may be incredibly dangerous for another subset of the population.

And do we actually know enough to be able to determine the difference? I don't think so. And I think with people with severe depression, like things that are so severe that it requires and intervention. Sure. But I think the ayahuasca trip became kind of like, oh, what are you doing? I'm going on a, you know, it's like. Look, some people come back and they're like, it changed my life. And it was this amazing, positive thing. It's like anything, right? Like some people are like, hey, I drink once a week and it helps me relax, whatever. And some people are like, I'm an alcoholic. Right. So like you can get multiple outcomes from this stuff. But I just

think that if it's a big if. Yeah. If that played a part, which is right now what one of the narratives is if it played a big part in uh somehow you know uh kind of changing the course of this kid's life that led to this thing huge change in life i think that there's going to be a conversation about those specific medicines slash drugs uh that is currently not happening now with that said just one thing before you move on um what do you think about like the tim ferriss's and joe rogan's who are pretty big advocates for this kind of stuff because i think that again it goes back to um i have friends i have very good friends yeah who are like hey look i've gone and done this and i had this massive positive impact and so i think that people have

been very hopeful that these drugs and these medicines could have this like great impact but it doesn't come without risk and so i think that i'm not predicting that hey we're going to go to a society that like bans us i actually think that's a risk in the sense of if people all of a sudden are like, oh, the one out of a million, you know, bad situation, we got to throw it all out, right? That would be overreaction. But I do think that there's now going to be a conversation about, hey, listen, there's positives and negatives. There can be these one in whatever the odds are situations. And so, you know, there's this like cohort of people. And again, We're finding out a bunch of information, but I think a lot about if I was born 10 years later, would I be one of these guys who's running around doing psychedelics, remote working, air quotes, no one's actually working.

Going on retreats every week. In Bali, Hawaii, what's the place in Mexico? Oaxaca. Oaxaca, like whatever, right? Anthony, I don't know how to pronounce that word. But like, there's this cohort of people who are like doing all that stuff. I've seen it. I know some of these people. Some of them are great people. Of course, some of them are psychopaths. Some of them have jumped off the deep end. We know a few. Yeah. And so it's like, again, you go back to you're like, okay, there is some percentage of people who do certain things doesn't affect them. There's some percentage of people who don't. The guy that I had breakfast with this morning, he grew up in New York City.

What was it like? He said, well, it's a very bifurcated outcome. Out of all my friends, they're either hyper-successful or they went to rehab, right? Same city, just very, very different outcomes. And so I think the same thing about kind of this digital nomad, you know, kind of psychedelics, like all this stuff.

And again, it's a generalization because not everyone who does the digital nomad thing is doing the psychedelics, whatever. But like, what I have seen so far is that there's a very bifurcated outcome. Either people are like, I've never been happier in my life. And this is amazing. And that's the story that gets told on Instagram, etc. Or people go crazy. Yeah. And that bifurcated outcome is not the story that's being told. My thing is that it usually kind of consumes your whole life. Once people go down that path, that's the only thing they talk about.

And it's not like, oh, I'm a serious person with a startup and I do that on the side. It's like that becomes the story with a side of, and I work sometimes. Well, it's kind of like, how do you know someone does CrossFit? Yeah. They'll tell you. Or veganism or whatever. How do you know someone's into Bitcoin? They'll tell you.

How do you know someone's a vegan? They'll tell you. How do you know someone's a digital nomad? They'll tell you. Let's talk briefly about the sentiment, the vibe, if you will, online around this killing. It's disgusting. Yeah. Right?

There is no critical thinking left in a conversation like this. I think that there are a number of people that I've seen who have said just absolutely vile, disgusting things where they're basically celebrating the death of the CEO. um and what i try to remind people is like this guy's a father of two kids uh if i understand correctly two boys like you know he's running a business that business uh they get some things right they get some things wrong and people will always focus on the uh loud minority right who is upset but if i and i want to be careful i don't get the data wrong so i think that the number of claims that are um uh denied is something like 30 i don't know which all if that number is true united healthcare you mean means that majority of them are approved right

and so you look at these businesses you're like they provide tons of health care services and insurance to millions of americans but if you don't do it for 100 of people there will always be someone who is upset disagrees whatever let's just let's just say it how it is just because you're upset that an industry is broken or bad or whatever does not give you the right to take somebody's life of course in cold blood well of course and if you celebrate it then you're only perpetuating a conversation um that again it's just vile and disgusting there are people with influence and power and followers who go on national television and say i like many americans felt joy watching that video like how stupid do you have to be to say something like that well

lacking brain cells certain people are dumb but i think that um yeah i just i think there's another part of this story which is um if you want change if you want um some sort of uh uh you know improvement compete. Imagine the story of a Penn graduate who's a valedictorian of his high school who got a master's in computer science and who took the time and energy to go and build the next great insurance company that took down the big bad evil corporations. Do you think that would have better impact a hundred percent and so what i fear is that there is disdain um there is uh this upsetness disagreement whatever with something and if we become a society where we basically throw our hands up and say we can't do better then you resort to this

but america was built in a way where compete use capitalism use economic incentives go build a better insurance company and you will put them out of business and you will provide health insurance for tens of millions of americans so it's it's like um it's very short-sighted to pursue violence if what you really aspire to is to affect change and it's not going to be easy it's not going to be overnight but that story is not only one much more heroic but it is also much more impactful and so it kind of goes back to this game of like again if people are upset or whatever okay but it is the output the the action taken is wrong and so if people can't see that it's kind of crazy i think i think they just uh the memes

on the internet are more important than somebody's life to some people well we're gonna figure out what uh uh if he actually did it or not well also why second degree try i need to look into this it you legal scholar it was clearly premeditated guys i know more about luigi than i know about myself at this point so i'm just reading all right that's all we got today all right guys see you next time