The Pomp Podcast - #1465 Anthony & Polina Pompliano | Bitcoin Has Entered A New Era

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

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 why bitcoin is coming to every single corner of the financial market, Mark Zuckerberg and META committing to free speech, why he is moving some of his teams out of California, why you have to pay attention to the congestion pricing in New York City, Justin Trudeau, and how the media is evolving over time. ======================= 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. All right, guys, what's going on? Today, I've got an amazing episode with Polina Pompliano. She is the founder of The Profile and the author of a great book called Hidden Genius.

In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin. It's back over $100,000. And I explain to you why Bitcoin is coming to every corner of the financial system and what it means for you and your portfolio. Then we get into Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. He just came out with a brand new video where he recommits to free speech. He's moving some of his teams out of California. And he talks about what he thinks content is going to look like in the new era of Donald Trump as president. On top of that, we then get into congestion pricing and this new tax that was put in in New York City. Why you need to pay attention is because this tax is coming to a city near you, and it's ultimately another insane move by the government to take money out of your pocket.

And then last but not least, we finish up with Justin Trudeau and what's going on in Canada, why weak leadership ends up leading to bad situations. And then we even talk about the media and how the media is evolving over time and where we think that's going as well. This conversation is packed with tons of insights and a few hot takes that you may or may not agree with. So we'd love to hear what you agree with and what you don't. Leave a comment or let us know on Twitter.

Here's my latest conversation with Polina Pompliano. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment

or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. alternative to traditional passwords, enhancing your digital security. Go to ledgerpomp.com to take control of your digital future. That's ledgerpomp.com, L-E-D-G-E-R, pomp.com. Today's episode is brought to you by BitKey. They are the hardware wallet built for Bitcoin. They're made by the team behind Square and Cash App. BitKey makes securely managing your Bitcoin absurdly simple. BitKey is integrated with partners like Cash App, Coinbase, Robinhood,

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That's $51 off the normal price. Get yours today online at Amazon, Best Buy, or BitKey.world. That's B-I-T-K-E-Y.world. Go check out BitKey today and start securely managing your Bitcoin in an absurdly simple way. Bitcoin is over $100,000. MicroStrategy is buying more. and you said that the Bitcoin, the Bitcoin, you said Bitcoin is the new S&P 500. We're back. Everyone who thought Bitcoin was over and it peaked, the bull market was over,

they're wrong and we're back. Already back over $100,000. $100,000 is a very important threshold because it's a psychological thing. Below $100,000, the number is just smaller than what is over $100,000. And so I think that whenever we are over $100,000, people get excited, they realize Bitcoin is winning. Now, the most interesting part to me is, yes, I do believe that Bitcoin is the new S&P 500. The S&P 500 is benefiting from a lot of nonsense, but it's not even outperforming gold. And so anytime that you have a benchmark that can be outperformed by a commodity with no cash flows, it's probably not a good benchmark. The reason why all of the hedge funds like to pick the S&P 500 is because they think that they can beat it. But most of them

don't. There's only a handful of hedge funds that actually beat the S&P 500 every year. Nobody beats Bitcoin. There's not one hedge fund that beat Bitcoin. So if you can't beat it, you got to buy it. That's my general philosophy. Now, here's what I think is the most interesting part about Bitcoin right now, is we saw the adoption of Bitcoin start with individuals. Then we got the financial institutions started to come in and the public corporations. Everyone knows that whole story. Obviously, the ETF is the greatest product launch in Wall Street history. Michael Saylor, Michael Strategy, many of the copycats, they're all buying Bitcoin as well. but most people are not yet talking about this idea of taking Bitcoin and it infiltrating into

the corners of traditional finance. What I mean by that is the Newmark CEO came out. He said, look, we're going to offer a brand new type of mortgage on real estate that allows you to, rather than cash out in dollars, what we are going to do is we are going to give you the money, you pay off your old loan, you now have our new loan. Any additional money can be either used to improve the property or to buy Bitcoin. And that Bitcoin becomes part of the collateral package. Now, all of a sudden you have real estate and Bitcoin coming together. A second example, you have Grant Cardone. He recently launched a Bitcoin real estate fund. He said, I want to buy a piece of real estate. You guys are going to give me money. I think it's like $87 million.

I'm going to buy the real estate, which is like 70, $75 million. The rest I'm going to put in Bitcoin. And then the cashflow that comes off of this property, I'm going to buy more Bitcoin inside of the fund. Rather than pay out as a dividend, I'm going to get you more and more Bitcoin exposure. Interesting. Then we can go and we can look at something like Michael Saylor's brand new perpetual preferred equity. What that means is basically it's a new type or it's an old type, but it's new for MicroStrategy, a way to get different type of investors to invest in these companies. So insurance companies, for example, really like these ideas because it's a perpetual offering that has yield etc next we can then go to blackrock blackrock took their

fixed income fund they call it the strategic income opportunities fund or something which is just traditional fixed income and they got approval and then bought bitcoin inside of that fund so you take fixed income you take bitcoin you put those two together now i think the bitcoin allocation is small it's like single digit percentage but if you're competing with all of the other fixed income funds and you had a little bit of bitcoin you're likely to outperform so now you have the best performing fixed income fund next you have meanwhile a company that is a private startup they're doing a bitcoin life insurance so the policy and the payout is denominated in bitcoin now why do i go through all those examples it's because what we are seeing is

that only a certain percentage of people are going to buy more than one to five percent of their portfolio in bitcoin most people are just going to buy between one to five percent or say hey i got some bitcoin it sits over there uh i don't do anything with it i just hold it one to five percent but if bitcoin wants to continue to get more and more capital inflows sure there's large pools of capital that just buy direct but i think the next big big leg of capital to come into bitcoin is actually through these other types of products so a lot of people have more than five percent in real estate a lot of people have more than five percent in fixed income a lot of people have more than five percent in their life insurance policy and so what's going to happen is bitcoin is going

going to infiltrate into these corners. People are going to be buying life insurance, fixed income, real estate, et cetera. But they're going to be getting kind of indirect exposure to Bitcoin. When that happens, I think that that will be a massive inflow of capital for Bitcoin. There's only 21 million. It's a finite supply that will continue to be this persistent bid for Bitcoin. And the price will continue to go up over the coming years. Very interesting. What do you think the next psychological threshold is? A million dollars. Oh, really? Not even like 500K?

No. Oh, interesting. You got to put a zero on it. And so we're going to a million dollars. I don't know when it's going to happen, but I do think that Bitcoin will hit a million dollars one day. And when you think about that, look, it's 10x from here. A lot of people get excited about 10x. A lot of people don't get excited about 10x. It depends on what the time frame is. And one of the things that I think Bitcoin investors are really good at is seeing into the future what they're probably really bad at is doing relative comparisons. And so if Bitcoin takes 20 years to get to a million dollars, that's obviously not as great of a return as if it does it in three years. Yeah. And so I do think that there's this element of trying to figure out, OK, what is the compound annual growth rate going to be moving forward? Now, there are people who will argue that the 50%, 60% that it's averaged over the last couple of years, if we just extrapolate that out, Bitcoin goes to a really high price.

I personally believe that the compound annual growth rate of Bitcoin is going to continue to go down as the asset gets larger. That's usually what happens. If that occurs, it doesn't mean that it's going to go to 5%, right? It's probably going to still continue to outperform the stock market. And so maybe it's at 20%, 25%, 30%. Maybe it's 35%. Still very attractive rate of return.

you're still outperforming most hedge funds. But all of a sudden, it's going to extend that amount of time it takes to get to a million dollars, etc. And so I think that's really the thing to think about is like, what is going to be the compound annual growth rate of Bitcoin moving forward? If you could know that number, then you would know whether you should be buying Bitcoin or doing something else, right? But if it's 5%, you probably can generate 5% somewhere else. If it's 40%, well, there's not very many people in the world who can generate more than 40% a year every single year uh and so bitcoin obviously would be that if you can't beat it then you gotta buy it let me ask you like a personal somewhat personal question um i want to kind

of go through this journey of like under finding out about bitcoin understanding what it is sitting there learning about it in 2017 but like nobody was talking about it to now where everybody's talking about it everybody's buying it how do you feel now let's see what happens but like do you feel a little like vindicated vindicated or like you know like it paid off you know no look i i think that there's an element of um when i first discovered bitcoin i thought that i'd missed it right uh in 2016 uh i started mining eth and and you know started getting into this whole space et cetera. I was like, oh my God, I'd heard about this years ago. Why didn't I buy any? I mean, very common, I think, experience for people. I don't think that I really fully understood

how much the legacy financial system did not like Bitcoin or how dumb they thought it was until 2018. So really 2016, 2017 was all like, my experience was on the internet and people there loved it, right? They were understanding it. They were adopting it. It was very kind of a bottoms up thing. In 2018, there are three experiences that I had that I think really hammered home to me. Oh, my God, these people don't get it. The first was I went on CNBC and Kevin O'Leary was screaming at me saying that he forbid me from putting 50 percent of my net worth or more in Bitcoin. He was telling me how dumb it was, et cetera. Now, I love Kevin. We've become friends. He's incredibly smart. And the reason why, you know, he's smart is because he changed

his mind he's got new information he changed his mind right but i remember being like oh my god like this guy's like on tv i'd never met him before uh he had a very visceral reaction uh to this and um man they they are bringing me on tv because they think i'm like the idiot in the room and they're and they're like you know using me as like the whipping boy like okay that that's kind of crazy the second experience was um i went and uh mark yusko uh took me to go meet julian Robertson. Julian Robertson is obviously a very famous guy who unfortunately recently passed away. And Mark Yusko is Morgan Creek. And Mark took me to go meet Julian to talk about Bitcoin. And Julian is famous because

he had Tiger Management. He seeded a bunch of other hedge funds, Tiger Global, etc. And in that conversation, I saw what it was like to be somebody later in their life, but still remaining intensely curious. He was asking questions. He was bringing in analysts. Like he just wanted to understand it, right? And I think he was like 80 something years old at the time. And so it was a surreal experience.

But when we left, I remember saying to myself, I don't know if he's going to buy any, right? Like he's obviously super curious. Like it's easy to see why this guy's been successful because still at this age, his mind wasn't really rigid, et cetera. Like he wanted to be successful. Then we went, and I don't want to say who the investor is,

But we went to go see another kind of legend of Wall Street, somebody that everyone would know. Everyone is very fond of. He actually has a fantastic reputation. The very short meeting was only about 12 to 15 minutes. It was not supposed to be 12 to 15 minutes, supposed to be a regular meeting. But when we start talking about Bitcoin, he kind of had this attitude towards me of like, oh, that's like a cute thing. Leave your papers here. We'll look at it. Like, thanks for coming. And I remember walking outside and Mark was very disappointed because this was a guy he had known for a long time. you know he thought that the guy would be a little bit more receptive to it and i remember saying to

mark that um i was excited that the guy had that reaction and mark was like what are you talking about like you know we could have raised money we could have done whatever and i said no mark that that's the opportunity the opportunity is that that guy could go buy a lot of bitcoin right now but he's not going to because he doesn't get it he doesn't care he's not intellectually curious etc our opportunity is that we can go buy the bitcoin before he buys the bitcoin right did he do you know if he ever bought bitcoin or changed his mind funny enough uh a couple years later uh this guy's son reached out to me and he said hey i've been trying to convince my dad uh of this um would you mind doing a zoom call with me and my dad and so i did it and you know i said to him i

said look you know you probably don't remember but i came to your office this whole thing uh he was incredibly polite etc and one of the things he said to me was he goes you know i'm not in the the business of identifying disruptive technologies so i'm not surprised that when you told me about something new i kind of you know pulled away he goes because actually i'm in the business of finding things that don't change right so it's kind of a warren buffett versus maybe like a jeff bezos or an elon musk and so what's interesting to me is uh this guy now is starting to one as a family they've bought some but now he's in a certain uh investment field where bitcoin is starting to kind of infiltrate. And so some of the products that they are going to be buying or

creating probably will have Bitcoin in it, not because there's some crazy Bitcoin bull, but because they understand, hey, if we have our traditional kind of investment strategy and we put a little bit of Bitcoin, there's a lot of value that can get created there. And so I just think that, you know, if you kind of look back over the last almost decade or so, it's not so much about being vindicated or being right, wrong, et cetera. What I think is the most interesting part is that Bitcoin taught me about everything else, right? It was through the lens of Bitcoin that I learned so much about monetary policy, that I learned about geopolitics, that I learned about energy, that I learned about infrastructure, that I learned about all these different things,

even history. And now what is cool to see is that there are people who are coming into the market who bring a different level of validation and bring a different level of knowledge. And so Bitcoin is this thing that if you're interested in it, I think you can remain intellectually curious, you continue to learn more and more. And it's like, you know, the perpetual preferred equity offering. I had no clue what that was. I hear it. I got to go research it. I got to go do it. Right. And all of a sudden you're like, OK, cool, I get it. Like, I understand why it is you can look in history and see all the people who have done this. You can go and you can check out, you know, who currently has these out there or whatever. And I think that's the beauty of

Bitcoin. And so, you know, I think one of the things Bitcoin will do is teach you to be intellectually humble and say, hey, look, it's not about being right or wrong. It's about trying to constantly understand something that is ever changing. And if you can do that and kind of sit in the student seat more than the teacher seat, then it's this incredible experience that I'm glad that I had. Very cool. Bitcoin is your second best investment. I'm the first in case somebody didn't get that. If you have to explain the joke, it's probably not a good joke. All right, let's move on. So Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta, formerly known as Facebook, he posted a video on Instagram and the caption is, it's time to get back to our

roots around free expression. We're replacing fact checkers with community notes, simplifying our policies and focusing on reducing mistakes. Looking forward to this next chapter. Is he just taken a page out of Elon Musk's playbook? Well, look, there is there's been two factions in American culture over the last, I don't know, maybe 10 years or so. And part of the faction that I'm going to put as the like left the woke faction, whatever descriptor you want to use. I think it's very clear, like there are people who were not for free speech. There are people who were for free speech the people who were not for free speech i don't think they woke up one day and they're like i'm not for free speech what happened is it was death by a thousand cuts

and zuck mentions it in uh the video but i actually think that uh these were well-intentioned people who were pursuing inclusiveness yeah and so inclusiveness means that you can't offend anyone well and so by being inclusive what that really morphed that terminology morphed to was we are held hostage by the most extreme people because they will stand on the outside of our inclusive circle and yell and scream say you're not including me and so if you just constantly keep doing that over and over again then eventually you're like oh we include everyone and you're like oh my god there's like a wolf in the hen house no it's like there's nothing we can say And so simple things like we probably should not be encouraging people who are doing really nasty, illegal things with children.

It's simple, right? We also should be looking at things like what is the power of the Internet? The power of the Internet is that allows anyone to speak to anyone else. It allows anyone to transact with anyone else. It allows anyone to actually conduct commerce, to send data, et cetera, with anybody else. That's the beauty of the Internet. What these platforms started to do was they got put in a position mostly through political pressure, some of it through like societal pressure. To become the gatekeepers.

To become the referee. And so when you become the referee, you can't be right. And so I think that if you go and you look at a lot of CEO speeches or interviews, this is a great example. CEOs have a point of view. If you go talk to a CEO in private, whether it's Zuck or anybody else, they have a personal opinion on things. And usually they tend to be pro-business. They tend to be pro-economy. They're capitalists.

They believe in democracy, all these things. It is very rare to find a communist CEO, right? It is very rare to find somebody who is just off their rocker in terms of the social issues that is a CEO. And so why is it that that's their belief behind closed doors, but they don't actually go and talk about it publicly? Well, a huge reason of it is it's all about risk mitigation. And so what they do is they say, okay, this is my belief. And somebody on their team says, well, we can't say this, that I don't offend this group. Oh, can't say that because that'll offend this group. Oh, you can't say that because somebody on the internet will twist the words

into this. And by the time you go through this whole process, it's like you took your personal beliefs and now it's just like glob, right? It's just this, we would like to be inclusive of everyone in the world, right? Like, well, guess what? We shouldn't include everyone in the world. And we got to be okay saying that. If you're a bad person, you shouldn't be included. If you're an extremist, you shouldn't be included. Like that is okay. If you stand for nothing, you will fall for anything and that's basically what happened with that faction of people is they said we are accepting of all views inherently that means that you are accepting of people that are doing illegal things that have radical views that are extremist etc so obviously if you are saying we are accepting

of all views at the same time you are then going and deplatforming critiquing uh uh de-emphasizing content that is critiquing some of those views where you can't be for all views. And so, again, it just becomes that faction became held hostage by the extremist. And so what happened here, I think, is a couple of things. The first is the country rejected that view. The country said we've had enough of this. And I think that what's really interesting is this idea of the A.B. test in politics, where you had Trump, then you had Biden. And it's very clear that the country said hey we want this perspective rather than this other perspective right and you saw it like you know i've never met kamala harris but when i heard that she didn't go on joe rogan

on the podcast the largest media outlet in the world because people on her team said if you go on his pot if you go talk to him you're going to offend some people i thought it was that she wanted him to come to her and he was like no it came out later that the team uh advised her that if she went on, she was going to offend some group, whatever. Who knows if that's even true, but that's the story that came out. And so you look at that and you say, wait a second, how in the world is it that one side doesn't even want to talk? They're scared because they may offend somebody in their own party. It's crazy, right? So then you say to yourself, okay, the country has a certain perspective. They put a guy back in office, right? Trump is coming into

office who has a very specific view of embracing free speech. On top of that, you have the world's richest man who said, I'm going to buy one of these platforms. I'm going to instill free speech. And so now you have an example. It can be done. And one of the things that I'm very sympathetic to Zuck for, which I think that people frankly don't give them enough credit for, is I worked at Facebook. I interacted with Zuck on numerous occasions. I've seen how that team operates, These people are not malicious. They are not negligent. They are not trying to put some weird view out in the world, etc. What happens is they are constantly under barrage from law enforcement and politics. These people are constantly coming at them. And so what do you do? Right. It takes immense risk to stand up against that. And because if you look at it, Zuckerberg, this is he's newly kind of in the spotlight. He was never really out there. He would, you know, make statements via Facebook post or letter. He was never like actively sharing his view. Well, I think that a huge piece of it, and this is my personal opinion, I never heard him or anybody else at that company say it, but I do think that he became very media shy once the situation with Kara Swisher happened on stage.

I was thinking the same thing. If you guys haven't seen this, I mean, it's very hard to find the video. I don't know why, but he was on stage at Recode and with Kara Swisher getting interviewed about all sorts of... let me see if you sweat it through it and he was like i'm not gonna take off my hoodie she made him in front of everybody take off his hoodie and then paraded that it was it it's a bully yeah i think that was unnecessary and not professional or journalistic but some would argue so if you think if you think about that yeah like the media also is a huge part of this because the media felt like they had weapons if you're not inclusive we're gonna come for you but there is safety in numbers It took one courageous person to come out and say, I don't care if you come for me. Another one, a third one of it.

Now I can list 50 CEOs who say, I do not care. You are not the media anymore. We are the media. Zuck did not do this. He didn't go on a show, do an interview. He didn't go to the papers. He literally sat down. It's a cell phone video and he posted it directly on his platform.

And guess what? It's the talk of the world today. He went direct to the audience. And so that is ultimately what has happened now is that the media overplayed their hand. They kept going and canceling people and going after them, et cetera. So the final people said, yeah, we've all been canceled. Every single one of us has been canceled. Right.

I, me personally, have had people come after me. I mean, you remember there was a time on Twitter where there is an individual who literally I tweeted something to the effect of hard work never goes out of style. I don't remember the exact words, but I said something about hard work. And this was like 2018, maybe 17. And somebody came after me and said that I was racist for it. And sexist. Racist, sexist, whatever. This is the whole cancel culture playbook.

They came after me and it became this huge thing, whatever. And I just sat there and I was just like, I just don't care. Maybe it's my personality or whatever. Like I know who I am. My friends know who I am, et cetera. And it bothered the hell out of me because after that, this person then DM me and asked me for money for their company. It was like a shakedown. She said, I'll stop if you invest in my company.

I was like, I cannot believe. And I was a reporter at the time and I knew who this was. And I was like, it blows my mind that people do this. So that's the whole game. And the world has had enough. And so now all of a sudden we have these CEOs who are saying, I'm not going to participate in this anymore. And he references it. He says, look, it's incredibly hard to operate when the government is operating against you.

And so with Trump coming in, obviously, that's not going to happen. Now, two other things that I want to mention real quick on this. One is Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook or Meta just put Dana White on their board of directors. You want to say that there's a big vibe shift? Dana White isn't exactly your, you know, buttoned up corporate CEO. And so putting him on there, one, Dana White's an incredible operator. He's a great CEO and he's built an amazing business in terms of entertainment, et cetera. I bet there's a lot of technology and AI, et cetera, that's coming to that business.

And so he'll be a great resource. But he also is very close to Donald Trump, and he really understands and has his finger on the pulse of what society is doing. And so Zuck is not just talking, he's taking actions here. And then the second thing that he's doing is he's moving some of the teams out of California to Texas. Now, he said, I think, I can't remember if he said perception of bias or to remove bias, but it is very clear that politicians overplayed their hand as well.

and so it goes back to america was built on taking risk it was built on giving people freedom and it was built on government being small and out of the way yeah but but that's not what happened over the last couple of years and now the internet and these digital natives are going to take that back and but do you know what i kind of think about all this like culture shift and vibe shift as you call it is that it's almost like the cool girl effect it used to be very cool like you gained social capital by canceling people and by being um someone to point fingers and say oh they did this and did you see their twitter history and like all this stuff like that used to be only with nerds and losers well right but that used to be considered the cool thing to do now that's out

of style and now the cool thing is like common sense so i think that where you place the cool factor that's what's gonna grow well and also the media and others they uh pioneered the cancel culture playbook and they taught it to the people on the internet and now the people on the internet can weaponize it back and so they now what they do you can see this right um if you say dumb things we have a voice too and really the the entire power dynamic was based on previously we as the media have a voice. We as the platform have power. You as an individual are susceptible to our rules. Again, this is something that I very, very intimately understand. We've had our, we've had videos taken down. We've been censored. We have had tons of issues banking wise, et cetera.

Right. And generally we're not that controversial. We're not that, you know, doing anything too crazy. There are people who are way more controversial that deal with this on a day to day basis. I'm talking about over a decade, you know, maybe four or five, maybe six incidents, but there are people who've dealt with this every single week. There are people who still are kicked off the platform. And I go back and I constantly remind people that if you want to see ultimately how the future will play out, the number one thing that I will keep reminding people of in the digital age is that eventually the people's voice will be heard. you can trick them you can uh slow them down you can provide friction you know all stuff but

eventually the people's voice will be heard and the people's voice has been heard they put the president they wanted into the white house they pushed back and they've got people to cave on the platforms right free speech is making a comeback the people's voice is now being implemented it took a long time there's a lot of people's careers that got derailed there's a lot of people who had to kind of fight the fight. But ultimately, the people's voice is prevailing. And I think that that is going to be a huge theme of the next 10 to 15 years. All right. Let's talk about the people's voices not prevailing. Congestion pricing was introduced in New York City on Sunday after a late attempt by officials in New Jersey to stop it in court failed. The measure, which charges

many drivers $9 to enter Manhattan during peak hours, is intended to bring relief to the country's most populated city. According to traffic data analysis, New York had the worst traffic in the world in 2023. Drivers lost 101 hours to traffic during peak commuting times. Is this really about traffic or is this about collecting some money? Well, there's a couple of things that are worth paying attention to. The reason why every single person in the United States should pay attention to this is because the New York City is the first city in the country to implement a congestion tax. This is coming to the rest of the country. You think so?

It's in Europe. I mean, Atlanta's got it's in Europe. It is coming to other cities in America. Once it is implemented, it is in Europe. Yeah, this is the New York City did not invent this. They borrowed this from from other places. They've now implemented it. Other cities are going to start asking themselves, should we do it?

The second thing I'm going to say is that whoever created the terminology congestion tax is a moron. Just call it a toll. Yeah. right people are used to paying tolls the second you put tax in the name of course people are going to freak out stop taxing me stop taxing me right no tax without representation it's literally built in the dna of this country but tolls is really what this is because it's not just during peak hours you get have to pay whether it's at midnight you have to pay on weekends you have to pay during the week they just implemented a toll okay and it's also not just to enter the city it's if you

want to go uptown. Basically, they just implemented this thing where anywhere below 60th Street, right? You got to pay. Now, here's what people are not talking about is, yes, that is the actual thing that the government implemented. How are companies like taxis, Uber, Lyft, et cetera, doing this? Taxi drivers. I talked to one and he said every single time you get in the taxi used to be four dollars. That's the flat fee. Now it is going to be four dollars and seventy cents. He showed me it's $4.75. That 75 cents difference is what the taxi companies are putting on every single ride to make up for the $9 a day tax. On top of that, Uber and Lyft, they now are adding some to every single ride as well. And so you don't end up just paying the $9. What happens

is every single time you take a ride, you are going to pay some of this on these ride sharing services or in taxis. So if you go back and you look at this, my number one problem with the entire situation is that they estimate they're going to raise $500 million to do this, right? If they, everything plays out how they say they're going to get $500 million. Every year, the MTA loses out on $700 million by allowing people to jump over the turnstile. I don't know if they allow it. Well, what else would you call it where this has been happening for years? Why is it that when I go to certain news organizations, they have the equivalent of a turnstile, but guess what they have?

It's not just a rotator where I can easily jump over. Instead, it's these doors. They pop. They're fully closed. Costs money. Nearly impossible to jump over, right? Then they open. You walk through.

You see this at airports, etc. Again, maybe it costs money, but again, it goes back to if you actually want to stop the bad behavior, There are solutions. The solution is not, oh, screw it. Let the people keep jumping over the turnstiles and let's take the money from the good actors. You're punishing good people because the bad people are getting away with doing bad things. So why don't we, again, common sense, go after the bad people and stop punishing the good people? And then how stupid do you have to be if you have an area where there is commerce happening to try to deter people from going to the area of commerce? Yeah, very dumb. I mean, what are all the businesses above 60th Street saying? You mean below 60th Street? Oh, sorry. Below 60th Street. Yeah, they fought it for a while. So there's something called the Partnership for New York City. Kathy Wild runs that organization. She's a fantastic woman, very well connected. I think

probably one of the most important people in New York City. And she pushed back a lot on the congestion tax on behalf of her members because at first it was going to be $15. So here's a very interesting idea, which is if somebody could actually fix the MTA's budget, they spend over $19 billion. They have more than 74,000 employees. If you can't find $500 million of savings in a $19 billion budget, we need new people running the MTA, right? And so ultimately, this congestion tax is not a thing about New York City. New Yorkers will figure it out, right? People in the tri-state area will figure it out. But this is something that now is going to come to the rest the country. And it's because ultimately these cities, this infrastructure, they're broke.

They are bankrupt. They cannot operate. And so either we put people in positions that can actually operate these things and make them sustainable, or we are going to have the state and federal governments have to keep funding this stuff. And so what does that do? It puts immense pressure on the national debt. It devalues the currency and ultimately again, hurts the people because the ones who are holding cash end up being the ones who have their currency devalued away. And so it goes from if you want to solve this problem in the United States, you got to have the politicians in Washington stop spending like idiots. And then you got to have people at the individual local state level who can actually run these organizations and say,

we're not going to run at a loss. We're not going to keep dipping into the state or federal piggy bank because we can't figure out how to take $19 billion a year and run this organization. And then my favorite part is that the firefighters, they came out and they said, our members used to drive their personal vehicles into New York City to take on extra shifts, to provide more coverage, to do all this stuff. It has ripple effects, right? Our members are no longer going to drive their personal vehicles. They've told us they're not going to do it. So we're going to have to buy vans with taxpayer money to go pick up our members because this tax is onerous on them. So again, this is a blanket tax.

There's no, oh, policemen, firemen, paramedics, they don't have to pay the tax. I saw a story that said, if you have a funeral hearst taking a dead body, you got to pay the tax, right? So everyone gets treated the same, which on one hand, okay, got it. Everyone gets treated the same. But on the second hand is, well, if all of a sudden the firefighters aren't driving in, we might not like that, right? What are the repercussions to that? And so there's all of this complexity around this thing. But ultimately, this is an example of you have politicians who are implementing a really, really dumb idea because they are simply trying to play math where rather than say, how do we get more money?

They should be saying, how do we spend less with abuse, fraud and inefficiency? And if they were better at the spending part, they wouldn't need to drive more revenue. But ultimately, they don't know how to do that. And so the only thing they know how to do is add more tax. Mm hmm. I'm looking at these tools to enter the congestion zone and it's a lot of money because it's like five hundred dollars a month approximately, depending on how many days you come in, et cetera. So the average worker now has to pay if you drive your car, you have to pay five hundred dollars extra a month, which is six grand a year. I don't do public math, but I think

that's right. And so from there, then you get what if somebody gets paid one hundred and twenty grand pre-tax yeah yeah and let's just say that they pay 30k in uh taxes they're paying the tolls with post-tax dollars all of a sudden you start saying wait a second here these people are paying high single digit percentage of their take-home pay for a tax and if you think about it the people coming into the city many of them you know work normal jobs it's not like you're taxing the billionaires of course it's crazy and um why do you think other cities will start to implement this just to make more money for the because idiots love to copy idiots clip that it's true i'm gonna start up okay no idiots love to copy idiots and so if you're an idiot and you belong

to the idiot club and you see somebody else in the club doing something stupid you can't help yourself like oh my god the great idea and then you go and you try to implement what did people not vote on this i don't that there is uh an entire uh faction of people who um i mean just cracks me up they believe that uh there will be less pollution uh because of this tax oh boy and here's the crazy part is the only country in the world that matters for uh the environment is china it doesn't matter what the u.s does china is the biggest polluter in the world so unless you are able to do something in china no matter what the united states does it will not matter interesting and so the people who are celebrating this again it's all virtue signaling it's all part of the

cancel culture crowd etc they're in the streets literally claiming victory but what is hilarious to me is they don't realize that they're actually plotting their own demise in doing this oh i did not realize that sorry this is back to our former topic but i didn't realize that meta is moving the trust and safety from california to texas that's what i said yeah oh i did not hear that yeah interesting don't clip that okay all right let's talk about justin trudeau he has announced his resignation as leader of canada's governing party after nearly a decade god he's been there forever as prime minister trudeau said that he will stay on as prime minister until a new liberal party leader is chosen he said this country deserves a real choice in the next election congratulations

to my canadian brothers and sisters congratulations the people's voice will eventually be heard they hate this guy his approval rating is below 30 percent he can't help it and i actually feel bad for justin trudeau why because he's probably got an incredibly low amount of testosterone and when he's got a low amount of testosterone he's susceptible to being convinced to do all kinds of dumb things like the trucker protest that guy should have been out of there on that alone is you basically have people expressing their free speech and then you threaten to take their children away. People forget how nasty they got

towards that trucker protest, right? The government threatened to take people's children away because they were saying what you are implementing is not correct. The people ended up being right. The truckers ended up being right. But the government tried to use all of their power and might to crush those individuals.

Yeah. Well, guess what? The people's voice was eventually heard. I cannot tell you how many videos I saw of people walking up to Justin Trudeau at various events saying, you know, sir, sir, sir, go up. And he thinks that they're there to take a picture or to shake his hand or whatever. And let's take a picture and they'd be on a video. And then they would be like, F you, Justin Trudeau, you slum bag and just like go at him on video over and over. It just became cool to do because they literally did not like the guy. And so, again, I said I feel bad for him because I don't think that he's ever had an ounce of strength in his bones. But to be a leader of a country, you have to approach it from a position of power and strength. You have to lead. If you, again, get co-opted by this, we're going to include everyone, you get held hostage by the extremists. And Canada is a perfect example.

A lot of the dumb ideas in Canada were from the extremist saying, oh, my God, they're saying this. They're saying that they won't let me do this. They won't let me do that. Good. That's the point. You're an extremist. The rest of society doesn't agree with you. And so it comes back to this idea that if we want to live in this digital world, if we all want to have peace, prosperity, high GDP production,

production if we want people to actually live a better life than their parents lived etc you have to stand for something and when you put weak leaders into these positions they don't stand for anything and the worst kind or the one who say all the right things but then when the time comes they don't stand for it and that's the category i put him in because if you listen to him over the years he actually says a lot of the right things but when it came time what did he do right and so if you go back and you look at times in history where people were better off it's always with strong leadership and strong leaders know i don't need to dictate things i can simply empower people to do what they want to do i will give them free speech let them talk

about what they want i will give them the ability to have freedom of commerce and transactions Let them come commerce how they would like. That is ultimately what the leadership ends up being. And so Justin Trudeau is the like antithetical leader to that. And that's why he's no longer there. Isn't it kind of cool to circle back to our like Bitcoin conversation about how things being distributed is a good thing, even in things like leadership and government, things like meta. I mean, they're instituting community notes. No longer is Zuck going to be the, you know, this is good speech. This is bad speech. Now there's going to be community notes. Let the people, you know, flag it. the fact checkers are one of the stains on american society over the last 10 years what

fact checkers the the people who sit in these fact checker seats because they're all full shit right they would literally sit there and you saw it right here's a great example do you remember the presidential debate on numerous occasions they tried to fact check uh trump and then it came out like there was one uh i think about violent crime right and they said oh that's not whatever like fact check them and then literally three days later the fbi uh went and they updated their numbers and he was right right and and i'm sure it happens on the other side it's not just a right thing or a left thing that happens on all sides of the political spectrum go back to uh the lab league theory remember when we weren't allowed to talk about that remember when they were

deplatforming people from that the u.s government now says that's the most likely uh cause of it but again like i mean things evolve and like we get more information to a story so it's not fair How did they know then there was there was research done. There was it was obvious, but it's probably more accurate to say this is a developing story than call it a fake fact, a fake news. You can say whatever you want, but at the end of the day, I can go through example after example after example. The Hunter Biden laptop story. The fact checker said that's not real. They lied.

The government knew that it was real. and so when you look at this over and over and over again nobody has a monopoly on facts inherently the fact checker believes that they are the arbiter of right and wrong of truth and false and so get rid of them because that's not the world we live in instead let people figure it out for themselves if you're so concerned about truth then go into the grocery store and get the tabloids and don't let them post the things that they post because there's all kinds of crazy stuff going on there but if you're not willing to go and actually oversee that then you shouldn't be overseeing the conversation online and so the fact checkers are just absolute stain on american

society just oh go ahead you know who else falls in that category the misinformation reporters like that they report on misinformation they're the ones who they're like they're basically fact checkers right is they come out they say uh that's misinformation how many times have they been wrong the misinformation people the the uh irony is the misinformation reporters are full of misinformation do you remember that new york times story that came out when what was that app that everybody was using to talk uh during the pandemic like to chat audio clubhouse clubhouse and the new york times had that story about like they are allowing unfettered conversations like people are just talking of course that was crazy that was crazy of course because you've heard that you've

heard John Kerry say it, that free speech is an impediment to their plan. You've heard the media talk about it. They don't want people to transact. They do not want people to talk unless it is approved speech or it is approved transactions. The Internet is taking a sledgehammer to that idea. I really hope that all of this kind of manifests itself into what is considered journalism and media today i don't think is true journalism and media because of um i think it's just advocacy right so i hope this like freedom of speech and whatever has a resurgence into you were there to be a journalist not to be an advocate for a cause uh you and i probably disagree on this i don't think the idea of journalism that uh has previously been presented is a real thing i think that there

is um no such thing as unbiased or objective reporting no but there's some there's a fourth estate to check power right like powerful institutions like the government somebody needs to be watching to report on what are they doing as accurately as possible so we the people know what's going on i think what ends up happening and again i'm not some media expert that knows the future right but i do think that what ends up happening is uh you're going to start to see less of an emphasis on uh this idea of uh we're objective we're unbiased uh i have no opinion which is obviously not true it's a human if you go talk to these people i know them right if i talk to them they have opinions you know that the journalists of today so no no but

these are even people who have been around for a long time etc right they've always had opinions right just say your opinion you can still report the facts you can still do all that but tell people show the transparency that's what the internet did the internet ushered in i want to know what you believe you're the journalist you did all the work you went and found all the facts you did all the the quote journalistic work but then just so you want analysis but that's the whole thing you don't just want here is what happened you want that's not that doesn't exist in the world because when the people write the quote-unquote objective you know here are the facts what we have learned is they constantly are twisting the facts they constantly are injecting

uh indirectly their opinions and the most extreme version is the advocacy that you're talking about et cetera. But I would argue that the world would be better and there'd be better checks on power. Like think of all the reporters who were sitting there and were being told that Biden was sharp as a tack. Right. It took three minutes for the American people to see the man on stage in a debate and people felt bad for him. Yes. But you see, again, I think that this is this like new wave of because we're democrats and we don't want this quote-unquote dangerous trump to go into power we're going to go against journalistic ethics and not report things and not show the reality of the situation i just think that there's a new crop of quote-unquote journalists

who were raised on blogs and who are raised on advocacy and they don't know that there's journalistic ethics and like that you should try to be as unbiased as possible you should go look at documents with facts and report that instead of my argument is that you should be as biased as possible and just tell us the bias and then we have competing bias yeah i want to know what is then you have a divided country in which people believe different things over the same set of facts yeah well it's different opinions of course and then you get biden half the country's like oh he's great and the other half the country is like oh he's not mentally well

of course but then you show them the video and you have them talk and then people are like oh obviously this and over time what happens is people build up trust with certain individuals based on their analysis that analysis is a sub stack theory because

I read the free press I know what the free presses bias is and I choose to read it I also read other things where I know like the author's personal bias bigger than New York Times one day probably but but my my thing is that i think we've just like swung so far on the advocacy swing that there's room in the middle like there is room to objectively report facts like what the associated press or reuters used to be maybe but anyway okay some of those

organizations disagree i think some of those organizations are going to be uh um even crazier if you can hide behind oh i don't have an opinion it gives you license to indirectly pull the strings that's the problem i mean i see what you're saying it's just that all right you guys just saw the yeah i see that see you guys ever want to see a private conversation between you and i can i uh ask you two questions before i let you go why you love my blazer i'll tell you i mean i've just well you're in your equestrian era um can you uh tell us you read the free press what are the other uh media outlets that you consume well i do read a lot of bloomberg i read the new york times um but you know i know what i'm

getting into um i read the wall street journal wall street journal magazine um yeah i read oh yeah well twitter you consume a lot of x you have two feeds on x you have the one they give you and then you have me just constantly dming you all of the red pills but see again another thing with like x becoming uh oh you know freedom of speech whatever which i agree that speech should be free but how what percentage of your feed on x is fake i mean a lot of it is like manipulated video things that didn't actually happen people are doing it for retweets and likes and you're like i don't even know it's true anymore well but if i read the mainstream media same thing nah Yeah, there's a lot of manipulated videos. There's a lot of that type of stuff. I'm more informed. This is my test. Am I more informed or not reading X? I'm more informed. Am I more informed or not reading certain mainstream publications? I'm more informed. So, like, give me all the information and let me decide what I believe and what I don't believe rather than you act as the filter.

Yeah, I get it. And you try to determine what's true and what's not. I mean, citizen journalism has always been a thing. It's not like it's new. It's just that all of us live on these platforms. So that's how you get your news now. If Elon keeps saying, you are the media now, people are going to start applying to places for media passes.

Go to events and say, I'm the media. Elon said it. Anyway. All right. That's all I got. I appreciate you doing this. Thanks so much, everyone, for listening. We'll see you guys next week.