The Pomp Podcast - #1469 Anthony & Polina Pompliano | Will The US Embrace Bitcoin?!

Episode Date: January 15, 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 Jamie Dimon’s recent comments about bitcoin, why global liquidity matters so much, what is going on with the LA fires, who is responsible, President Biden’s comments on the economy, and Mark Zuckerberg’s recent changes at META.  ======================= BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $500 in rewards. ======================= Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got an amazing conversation with Polina Pompliano. Polina is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Profile. And in this conversation,

we talk about Jamie Dimon's recent comments around Bitcoin, why global liquidity matters so much, what's going on with the LA fires, who's responsible, and does it matter whether there's actually going to be rebuilding of these structures or not? On top of that, we then get into President Biden. Does he have the strongest economy in history, as he claims? Or are there other ways to evaluate the situation? And then lastly, we talk about Mark Zuckerberg and his recent push to go ahead and remove a lot of the policies that they put in place over the last couple of years. This conversation is littered with lots of opinions, but also we try to get into the nuances, all the little crevices of these details,

and we try to understand what are the different sides to these stories and how you should think about this at home. After you get done listening, we'd love to hear your opinion. What do you agree with? What do you disagree with? If you disagree, I'd love to hear from you even more. And so leave us a comment on YouTube or go ahead and reply 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. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin IRA. Are you a crypto investor with a retirement account, but don't have any crypto in your retirement account? Then listen up. This is for you. Bitcoin IRA is revolutionizing the way Americans save for retirement by helping smart investors diversify their savings with access to over 75 cryptocurrencies. With world-class customer service, military-grade encryption, and a vertically integrated licensed trust company, it's no wonder more than 200,000 Americans trust Bitcoin IRA to secure their financial future. Getting started is quick and easy. It takes just three minutes to open an account. Once you're set up, their team of IRA

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From military-grade Swiss bunkers to cutting-edge digital protocols, they've got you covered. And now they're bringing you the kind of competitive Bitcoin trading fees typically reserved for institutional giants right in the palm of your hand with Zappo banks, ultra competitive spreads, more of your Bitcoin stays where it belongs in your pocket. Whether you're trading big or small, every move you make is designed to boost your gains and fuel your financial future. Head to Zappobank.com forward slash pump to join. That's X-A-P-O-B-A-N-K.com slash pump. All right, Polina, what's the first topic? Okay. JP Morgan CEO, Jamie Dimon is back at bashing Bitcoin. He said, quote, Bitcoin itself has no intrinsic value. It's used heavily by sex traffickers, by money launderers, ransomware. So I just don't feel great about Bitcoin. First of all, Jamie Dimon is an incredibly intelligent man. He is the best banker of our generation. And he has to say these things. If you're a banker, it's different than being an

asset manager. Larry Fink can go on television. He can say how great Bitcoin is because he's telling people, hey, come and buy Bitcoin through my ETF. There is a very direct relationship between Bitcoin success, the funds that BlackRock manages, and BlackRock success. So incentives. So Larry Fink, first of all, believes in Bitcoin. He also is incentivized for his company to be successful. Jamie Dimon, on the other hand, is not allowed to touch Bitcoin because he is a bank. He cannot custody it. He's not supposed to be doing other things with it. He can't lend against it, et cetera, including if you go and you apply for a mortgage and you show them your balance

sheet, they will tell you that the Bitcoin doesn't count. And so the banks are in a very different position. So I always say that they have to say this stuff. Now, does he believe it or not? I don't know. But what I will say is that Bitcoin is not used more than dollars by all those criminals for their criminal activity. So that is kind of out of there. The second thing is he says it has no intrinsic value. Intrinsic value is not true. It's a fake thing. What is the intrinsic value of this couch? Nobody knows. How do I know? Because if I ask 10 different people, they'll all give me a different price. So it can't have an intrinsic value. If I ask you, what is the intrinsic value of a stock or what is the intrinsic value of gold? It is different values assigned to

it by different people. Therefore, there is no such thing as intrinsic value. This is one of the things that comes from the traditional financial system that people hang their hat on and have forever bragged about, efficient markets and intrinsic value, et cetera. They're all made up things. They're academic theories that don't actually meet reality and survive. And so I think that Jamie Dimon is saying what he's supposed to say. But ultimately, this argument is going to fall flat. And I do believe that Jamie Dimon will end up being pro Bitcoin. It's just when he can actually participate, then you will see him flip. To be fair to him. He also said we are going to have some kind of digital currency at some point. I'm not against crypto. Bitcoin itself has no

intrinsic value. I just don't feel great about Bitcoin. But I applaud your ability to want to buy or sell it. So he's kind of talking out of both sides of his mouth. But this is why I think Jamie Dimon is a very smart person. He understands where he sits in the market. He's saying, hey, I don't hate you guys for buying Bitcoin. I don't hate you guys for trading Bitcoin. I don't hate you guys for holding it. I just don't think speaking as the CEO of JP Morgan, that this is something that we should be doing. And so, again, if it's rumored that President Trump is going to step in on day one, and he's supposedly going to do a bunch of executive orders around Bitcoin and crypto. Well, there's a lot of rules that got passed over the last four or five years that

have been very abrasive to crypto. And I think people are underestimating how much the Bitcoin and crypto audience has influence and a voice inside of the Trump administration. David Sachs is the AI and crypto czar. I think that he has tremendous impact inside of that organization. And so one of those executive orders is that he would repeal something called S.A.B. 121, which I'm not going to get into all the details, but basically it S.A.B. 121 doesn't allow or would allow the banks to custody these assets. Now, the politicians all approved S.A.B. 121, but President Biden vetoed it. so if you see this you're saying hold a second the representatives of the people voted for and said we should allow the banks to do this but joe biden unilaterally killed it trump's gonna step in and say hey sab 121 let's put that back in place let's allow the banks to custody these

assets and you got to ask yourself if you're gonna let the asset managers hold the bitcoin if you're gonna let coinbase and publicly traded companies hold the bitcoin the banks which are supposed to be the most secure you know kind of custodians of assets why can't they hold it okay to play devil's advocate don't don't come at me for this guys i see you in the comments but come on day one executive orders around crypto and bitcoin don't we have bigger fish to fry can't bitcoin wait until week two week three why does it have to happen on day one he's gonna do more than just a crypto executive order this man may publish like a hundred executive orders on day one they're already rebuilding the wall they already started started

the engine back up let's go let's get going did you know that the tiktok ban that's supposed to happen the day before the inauguration how is that possible well because they put that in place supposed to get banned you think he's going to strike a deal before he's even actually the president of course he's already got people in greenland that are coming out saying come by greenland we we don't like the danish we want to be americans no but i i did see i i i was following the the hamas israel war with the hostage situation and i saw that the hamas was kind of freaking out because they were like january 20th is the inauguration he said there would be like hell to pay if these hostages are now so there are hostages some that i believe are american

yeah that are still being held hostage where yeah let's go get them i know that's what i'm saying And do you think that this man is going to walk into the White House and play nice with terrorists? He is going to do everything in his power to eliminate them. That's what America does. Give us back the hostages. It's not hard. Yeah. And so if I was a terrorist, I probably would be pretty nervous to say, damn, this guy is coming in here.

we're already not doing so well in terms of israel and uh but uh the united states support etc it's not like hamas thinks they're winning now all of a sudden there's a guy coming in who's even going to be more aggressive probably give back the hostages yeah um okay great do you have anything else to say about jamie dime all right so on a more serious note um the wildfires in California, 38,000, more than 38,000 acres of land has been destroyed, costing over $150 billion, making this the most expensive wildfire in history. How will the California government recover from this? The government is going to recover because it's the government and they have the power to do all kinds of asinine things. How are the people going to recover?

But I think that the government got themselves in this position because they've been doing asinine things right and so if you think about um gavin newsom if you think about karen bass they all subscribe to the same uh kind of philosophy right which is this kind of woke mind virus that allows them to make certain decisions and those decisions end up leading to bad outcomes if you think about the two cities that these people have been responsible for san francisco and la newsom was the mayor of san francisco before they both have gone to shit and so the la one is really sad because we don't know why the original palisades fire started but what you have is you have firemen you have paramedics you have police officers they are

working their asses off yeah right i've talked to some of these people and what i see is they're like dude we're working 18 20 hour days they are trying as hard as they possibly can so i don't blame the government for the fire starting yeah it's a natural disaster even if it was arson i don't blame the government for that what i blame the government for is the complete ineptitude that they had in response and in preparation you have a reservoir that is not full when you know that this is the season for it not being full there's a bunch of people that are all pointing fingers at each other i don't want to get into the he said she said etc but the reservoir is not full and guess what it's not like the citizens run the reservoir yeah yeah so the government's

responsible there a second thing is that people are going in terms of the firefighters are showing up to the fire hydrants and the water is not there which is because the reservoir is not full On top of that, you then have a lack of planning in advance. And the best example that I can explain, Rick Caruso, who was the person running for mayor, he checks none of the boxes of the woke agenda. He's a white man who's rich, who's a real estate developer, who came in and said, enough with the nonsense. We're going to go and we're going to, you know, we're going to go and make Los Angeles a better place for families to live. all of that stuff is not what the woke agenda wanted to hear and so instead there's a lot of people i'm not going to name names but a lot of people came out in support of karen bass and it was very much this like oh no she's one of us like she believes what we believe put her into office in the palisades rick caruso has a shopping center it's called palisades village

in that village they had no structures damaged zero in the surrounding blocks everything is gone it is as if every single thing in the palisades got demolished and palisades village is sitting there now again why do why is that so important first of all the visual of their policies led to destruction his policy led to the protection of his unit argue it's because he's rich the government has more money than anybody they're rich how is it that and people say well how did he do it it's very simple he said wait a second are the firemen gonna save my building they would like to but they don't have water so what did he do he went and he hired private firefighters and he got water tankers to bring water in.

And then he was able to, with the water plus the fire retardant, be able to save his structures. This whole thing is just a matter of leadership and money. And inefficiency and misappropriation of things. Of course. So you get back to there's preparation and then there's response.

And Flynn and I had dinner with somebody last night who was explaining to us that actually caruso uh uh supposedly had put fire retarded material like uh mixtures that you just mix with water in all the parking uh deck underneath the the building in preparation if this ever happened so again like were they not prepared because they didn't think something of this magnitude could happen because it does seem like this happens there a lot i mean well fires have definitely become more prevalent yeah but um there's a whole bunch of things that lead up to this and again you have to separate out uh there are the fire is still going right now that's like

they're like put the fires out right that's really important but on top of that is it's not just the response the preparation component fire retardant water in the um uh in the fire hydrants uh why was there so much brush on the ground why was that not cleared out previously right all these issues that ended up happening. And so you start to say to yourself, okay, hold on a second here. We cannot go back and run the experiment where the fire doesn't happen. The fire happened. It's still going. There is now 40,000 acres or so that's been burnt. And so you say to yourself, okay, what is going to happen moving forward? And I actually think that if anyone who watches this show often remembers when the Baltimore Bridge got struck down, I said that the Baltimore

bridge is not going to get rebuilt so far the bridge ain't been built right now it may take a really long time but i still don't think that bridge is going to get built in la i do believe that structures will go back up in these areas but what i think is going to be a huge battle is that you have wealthy people who own the land allegedly oh they own the land well that's where their house was uh-huh don't you own the land if you buy the house in the land i guess so and they're going to say i want to rebuild my house and i think that there is going to be a battle it's going to go to court where the local government and the state government are going to try to change a bunch of rules and the coastal commission is going to come in and they're going

to try to rebuild multi-family housing and affordable housing and all this stuff in this area and they're going to basically pit it and say how dare the rich people want to rebuild their homes and build five and ten million dollar homes isn't it better for us we have a homeless problem we have this problem we have that problem shouldn't we build housing where we can actually put more people interesting now here's why do you think this because this is a classic thing that would come from an ideology that believes capitalism is bad, business is bad. They don't believe that people should have unequal outcomes. They hate success. They believe that success is immoral. Okay, well, let me just tell you, Gavin Newsom tweeted, just issued an executive order

that will allow victims of the SoCal fires to not get caught up in bureaucratic red tape, aka his red tape and quickly rebuild their homes we're also extending key price gouging protections to help make rebuilding more affordable so here we go here we go seeing the victims of the fires who are these people who had five ten million dollar homes right this is classic politician speak if you introduce price caps or price gouging anti-price gouging measures you are saying that the people aren't going to be able to build back their homes wait why no i think price gouging on the behalf of like the people price gouging should be encouraged not discouraged in this situation let me explain if you put a price cap on the situation

you create a massive backlog and you jam everything up because builders say i can't build and still make money. I can't actually solve this problem because I can't make money. You're interfering in the free market. Why is it that Uber has surge pricing? Because they say there's no cars in one area. If I want cars to go over there, I have to pay them more money. And so surge pricing is the equivalent. Imagine if the government came in and said, you can't do surge pricing. You would open the Uber app and there would be no cars at certain times. And you say, well, how do we get cars to come over here? You would be willing to pay more money. Uber proves that people are willing to pay more or less money depending on the circumstances.

And so surge pricing works. What they are saying is quote unquote price gouging is that they will not allow people to charge more or less depending on certain areas or certain circumstances. They are interfering in the free market same thing goes and i believe that um i think it was dave calm somebody recently said this to me i thought it was a great example in natural disasters let's say a hurricane usually what happens is people are desperate they need food water you know gas whatever they're willing to pay more than if they were just going through their normal day And because they're willing to pay more, people drive from other areas to come in and try to help by bringing those supplies or providing those services. Yeah.

If you cap the prices, then people are not willing to drive 100 miles to come and do this. Interesting. So if you want people to rush to L.A. to help rebuild all these homes, you have to rebuild all of Pacific Palisades. 12,000 structures in L.A. are damaged. There's not enough people in LA to build all those structures in a timely manner. You need to bring people from other areas to LA. So if you're a 22, 23, 25, 30, 35-year-old man

who has construction skills, what is going to incentivize you to leave your hometown, your family, whatever, to go there to help rebuild this city? You have to raise the prices. It has to be more expensive. That's how you get a flood of this. What about supplies?

Who is going to divert their supplies to LA versus some other city if they're not paid more money? So the way that economics works, the way free markets work is when you introduce a price cap, you do it and try to claim this moral high ground and say, we're gonna make it more affordable. But the dummies that put these processes in place

don't realize that you're actually hurting the people. You're going to draw out the timelines to get these homes rebuilt. You're actually going to ensure that a lot of them either don't get rebuilt or these people give up and leave. And guess what's already happening in LA? People are showing up and saying,

oh, that's so sad your house burnt down. I know you had a $10 million house there. I'll give you $750,000 for your land. And they're betting that some portion of people are just going to give up and say, I'm not going to spend three years. I'm not going to spend this money. I don't know if the insurance company

is going to give me this, whatever. I'll just take the loss. And so that sets a precedent for the rest. So you get into this whole thing. And so again, the word affordable being used already tells you everything you need to know. Has Trump said anything about how he's going to approach this whole thing?

No, but he's definitely criticized, which again, you get into this thing. Right now, the goal should be, let's put out these fires, right? You got to get the fires out. You also have to stop the looters. Which there's, that's a whole nother conversation, but there's a lot of organized crime. As there is always after a night.

Gang members, et cetera. And so what you have is LA has all the ingredients for these fires to spread. And so I've seen multiple videos online of people starting fires. And sometimes it's something stupid. There's a woman I saw this morning. She was walking. She lit some trash that was on the street on fire. Is she, does she think she's going to like burn down a neighborhood?

Probably not. But we got to stop that stuff too. You got to, it's like, it's an infected, you know, mental situation where people think that it's okay to do this. I just, yeah. And so if you go back and you say to yourself, okay, put all the problems, forget how we got here for a second. Let's be solutions oriented.

The single most important thing is put the fire out. The second most important thing is let the free market work. These people have money. Let them spend their money however they want to get labor and supplies into LA so they can start to rebuild. Third, let's figure out who needs to be the leader of the city, whether it's Karen Bass, Rick Caruso, or somebody else, so that the city can start to rebuild. But here's the crazy part is what's happening in LA is a magnifying glass for a lot of the rest of the country. now this is a natural disaster that has really caused a lot of problems but i think that there

are people around the country that are saying wait a second what happens if a disaster happened in my area yep are we prepared is our leadership capable what would we do you at dinner yesterday you said something really interesting and you said that this response will kind of inform other elections in the country like a New York mayor, New York City mayor race? I think that the New York City mayor race is the canary in the coal mine. Trump, he's an anomaly, right? In the sense that he is born with a skill set that most people don't have. You can attack him.

You can berate him. You can come at him in all these different ways. He has a very specific skill set. He understands how to communicate. he understands the political strategy. He's one of one. So put him aside. He wins as president. And I think that the country, we won the popular vote, right? The country definitely is saying, hey, we like this policies more than the other policies. But the country is not representative of these deep blue areas, New York and California. If you look at a map, you can see that New York

and California have lost the most number of citizens. A lot of people think that those covid policies and various other things that are happening in those states and inside these cities if the new york city mayor race flips red and a republican wins i mean that will be the canary in the coal mine that then you turn your eyes to california and california may flip red interesting and if that occurred it would blow people's mind to go from 2020 to 2024 where these policies dominated to then say, well, what happens if within two years, Republican president, Republican New York city mayor and California flips red. But I think there's a lot of people in LA and I know because I've talked to these people, these people are hardcore Democrats.

They're left-leaning folks their entire life. They've donated a lot of money to the democratic party. They're saying enough is enough. I'm done with this. And so again, does that mean that people are flipping to become Republicans? No. What I think has happened is the left pulled so far that people are saying i'm still standing where i was standing it's just now the policies the the party that most speaks to what i believe is on the other side of the aisle and so i do think that the new york city mayor race and then the california race those two uh are really going to be things to watch as to the sentiment of the country wow new york has not elected a republican governor since 2002 uh and uh for mayors i think yeah the last was rudy giuliani from night who

served from 1994 to 2001 since then it's been blue for 20 25 years yeah right just think about that in 2002 for a governor so it tracks do you know how many people but that was right after devastation that was right after 9-11 i i understand that but but that is not a failure of local policy right right i think that there's a lot of people in new york city that are looking around and they're saying i don't know if it's safe to go on the subway i don't know what's going to happen with the migrant crisis i don't know and they just have a long list of these things you think california same thing now hmm yeah do you think that that's a result of the ideological policies of these people or just like a failure of leadership in general what do you

stand for yeah if you stand for nothing you fall for everything and what these sanctuary cities did is they stood for nothing they said everyone can come here yeah everyone is welcome everything is okay everything is legal well what do you think is going to happen if you start to take a society and you start to interject things that are against that society, right? If you go to a small town in North Carolina, where I grew up, across the Midwest, even the South, right?

Maybe even in kind of Colorado and New Mexico and Arizona, et cetera, there is a shared commonality of things people believe. The social fabric is very obvious. Yeah. And they are across aisles, right? It's both red and blue live in the same town, but they understand that, hey, we're all in this together.

Yeah. But when you bring people into a society who have nothing to lose and who actually are incentivized to not work because they're getting money handed to them, they're getting cell phones, they have a free hotel room and they have all day long to go and create problems. Yeah. Of course you get on the other end. So is it an ideology? Is it a policy? It's all nomenclature. What we know is that the leadership that has been put in place has failed the people. And so the question is, how many people are fed up? I don't know the answer. Maybe actually that Democrats continue to run both New York and California. and a potential solution would be there's a number of young democrats that i know that actually i think got their head on straight they're pretty smart and they're fed up and they say look i'm

not a republican i'm a democrat yeah but i'm fed up with this nonsense this is extremism of our party i'm done with this i want to go and run in office and i want to solve these problems and do it the right way i think we saw what extremism does and how it actually does push people towards the middle you know some people got pushed so far they entered the other party well if you flip it the same thing i think is happening inside of the democrat party where you know um one of the people that i'm fascinated with is richie torres i don't know if people follow him on twitter richie torres a democrat he a young guy and if you didn't know he was a democrat and you read his tweets you would think this guy is like a MAGA Republican, you know, Trump guy. John Fetterman, he's a

Democrat. Oh yeah. He's going, I'm going to meet the president. He goes, I'm not the senator for just Democrats in Pennsylvania. I'm a senator for all Pennsylvania. And I think that's what bothers me the most is like so many of these people are willing to just be like, I represent these people, but it's like all sorts of people live in your state. Yeah. And so again, it goes back to, I don't actually think it's a right and left thing because what I think you're seeing is that there's a, definitely on the right, there's more people who are more vocal about it, that they kind of feel more safe about this, whatever.

But there are a lot of young Democrats who are saying, wait a second, it's not the party that I disagree with. It is this extreme ideology that I'm fed up with and I don't want to further it. And so again, I ask people, go and check out Richie Torres' tweets. He's tweeting about the subway safety.

That was taboo three years ago. How is that taboo? a democrat a democrat would not be allowed to do that how is that like think about that a democrat is not allowed to be taboo a democrat's not allowed to talk about it because you can't draw attention to the negatives of the policies but he's out there now he's just like he's had enough fetterman is another like you can just go down the thing rogue khana he's asking we got to get answers why did this happen where is the failure of policy again it's these people who frankly are more online than their counterparts who are a little bit older and they see they feel the kind of mood

of the country they feel the tempo changing and so if you have democrats who are saying this but it's also like i i really appreciate people like that because it's they love america and they want to improve it they're not just saying i'm just going to go along because that's what my party says it's like i want people to feel safe in this city of course it's why i am an independent is because I have friends that are Republicans. I have friends that are Democrats. I have people on the right that I agree with. I have people on the right that I disagree with.

I have people on the left that I agree with. I have people on the left that I disagree with. But what I end up trying to do is I try to say to myself, who are the people who have some degree of common sense? I'm not going to agree with anybody on 100% of things. That's fine. But when I see a Richie Torres or a Ro Khanna, a John Fetterman or whatever, come out and say things,

then I'm like, you know what? that's common sense that you actually are doing what's right by the people forget the party allegiances all stuff like you're doing what's right by the people yeah on the right side there's certain people who they go against what the republicans say right again it's trying to evaluate every single situation and say to yourself what is the policy what is the outcome is it right it doesn't do right by the people who voted me to be their representative yep and so i think that is something that uh historically we have not really seen that much of but now the outcomes are becoming so extreme so volatile like a physical manifestation of some of these policies

of course okay speaking of woof um president biden tweeted the economy i am leaving america is the best in the world and stronger than ever for all americans and then let me just read you the top comments to this delusional period uh this is why trump won and then um tell that to the young couple trying to buy a house somebody said not exactly thriving in western north carolina or southern california and then just clown emojis next here's the part that people don't like biden is right and biden is wrong yeah both are true okay before we get to that Biden didn't tweet that. Somebody on his social media team tweeted that.

I don't think that Joe Biden knows how to log into Twitter. Well, come on. So you have to ask yourself, this is a party. This is an administration talking point, not a Joe Biden talking point. I bet you Joe Biden didn't even know that tweet went out. So you ask yourself, okay, well, what is the administration saying? What is the blob saying? They're saying that they left the strongest economy in history.

Well, how do we measure that? if we measure it by stock market looking pretty good sure has it come down a little bit in the last couple of weeks yeah but stock market run during biden's uh you know administration was pretty strong if you look at asset prices across other asset classes looking pretty good if though you want to measure it by housing affordability not looking so good if you want to look at it with wage growth not looking so good if you want to measure it in certain areas like western north carolina or la not looking so good and so it goes back to uh this is all fluff what does it mean to have the greatest economy in history but it's just like read the room i think

of course but it goes to this point that i can twist any data point and tell you how amazing something is or how horrible it is yeah so when you hear that you say to yourself okay what he's really doing is he's trying to claim victory on his way out he has six or seven days until he's no longer the president he's trying to lock in his legacy he puts the tweet out right or his team puts the tweet out and that's what it is it's all noise who cares nothing that that man is going to do right now is going to change your life it's not going to change your portfolio and frankly it doesn't matter whether he thinks he had the best economy or not. There's some good, there's some bad. And it's the nuance that's really important. And frankly, if you go and

you poll Americans, there's a lot of people who made a lot of money over the last four years, and they'll tell you how great things are going. And then there's literally people who were wealthy who just had their house burnt down. They're going to tell you how horrible it is. And so it's all a very personal experience. It depends on what is your income? What are your expenses? Where do you live? Do you own? Do you rent? Are you subjected to some sort of natural disaster? What is the people around you doing, right? There's relative wealth as well. If everyone else around you got way wealthier than you did,

then all of a sudden, even if you're doing okay, you still think you're doing bad because you're comparing it to people who got more wealthy. And it's that nuance that people really don't want because they want the black and white. They want to be outraged or they want to come to the defense of the politician. But actually that nuance is where the truth lies.

And so you can literally have people in the same city. Some will tell you it's great and some will tell you it's not. And the part that is the hard pill to swallow, some of it, not all of it, but some of it is dependent on what decisions the individuals made. If you and I live in the same city

and I held cash for the last four years and you invested in the stock market, you're probably thinking things are better than I think. Right? And so is that the politician's fault or is that the individual's fault? And it always comes back to, do the policies matter? Absolutely. Does leadership matter? Absolutely. But there's

always a little hint, a little sprinkle of self-reliance and self-responsibility that also goes into these analysis. And so is it the best economy? Is it the strongest economy? Depends on how you measure it. But I think people want to just get outraged because they always feel like, hey, the cost of living is going up, housing is unaffordable. And so my personal experience is I'm not rich and therefore it can't be the best economy. And frankly, I understand why they're saying that. And I don't think that it's a horrible argument for those specific individuals. Great. Let's talk about Mark Zuckerberg going on Joe Rogan to take shots of the Biden administration and saying that the Biden administration called and yelled and curse

at his employees, telling them to take down a meme of Leo DiCaprio watching TV. And the meme miss something like you know 10 years from now you'll be watching tv and hear did you or a loved one take the covid vaccine you mean you may be entitled to whatever um now okay so i saw this right and i know that people's reaction is like oh it's a conspiracy theory they don't like the administration doesn't want this to exist because they're trying to hide something i actually think they probably did that because they were like uh you're pushing quote-unquote misinformation or disinformation whatever it is to the people and we want people to be safe to take the vaccine and you're actively hurting that initiative what do you think i don't want to live in a country

where the government censors jokes i don't want to live in a country where the government doesn't believe in free speech i don't want to live in a government i don't live in a country where the government tries to have state-run corporations. I don't want to live in a country where politicians lie to the people. And I don't want to live in a country where the government essentially infringes on the rights of the people indirectly as a way to try to get around the constitution. That seems like what happened. And so we were at a fork in the road. And I truly believe that the 2024 election chose a path where for all of the problems that we're going to face for all of the things that people may not like the incoming administration for at least one thing seems to

be true that people will have more power more rights and more free speech under the next administration than they had over the last one um and so what are all the details you know people are critiquing Mark Zuckerberg because he came out only when it was safe to come out. Fair critique. But he gets credit. At least he's coming out and saying he's changing stuff. But isn't it a little too little too late? Well, you can say it's too little too late. You can also say it's better late than never. Right. Both are true. And so, sure. Was it better if people had done this three, four or five years ago? Of course. But you also go back to how many people

knew what was happening? How many people were kind of red-pilled, right? How many people were awakened to all these challenges? I think that there's a lot of people who said, hey, I was kind of like, you know, sleeping through my life and all of a sudden the COVID thing or the money printing thing or the, you know, name the thing, that's what woke me up.

That's the thing that said, hold on a second here. I feel misled. I feel like something's not right. Well, that's for an individual that takes time. a corporation takes even more time and a corporation that's based in California takes even more time. And so I just think that it's easy to critique this stuff, but I do believe that people probably are underestimating how much

blowback Zuck is getting. Like a good example, removing the tampons from the men's bathroom. He probably got blowback from his own employees, right? I don't know if it was a large majority or, you know, kind of a loud minority, but I'm sure he got blowback. And so, again, you get into like, should you critique him because it took too long? I think there's a strong argument there, right?

I think also if you look at other people, right? Jack Dorsey, I mean, Jack Dorsey deplatformed the sitting president of the United States. Insane, right? For now, what appears, again, based on the government's own work, it appears that there were government officials, you know, confidential informants, et cetera, in the crowd, egging this stuff on, participating in a way. Yeah. So you start to say, just hold on a second here. we can either look backwards and we can critique all this stuff etc or what i think is really important is we can all collectively say we can't change the past

draw a line in the sand that was a dark part of american society we're going forward it's morning let's make it better let's make sure we don't repeat these mistakes yeah let's make sure that we use transparency in order to do this. Things like community notes, et cetera, that now we're getting added to Facebook as well. Let's use the tools that we have available to us so that we collectively can build a better future rather than sit and we could spend hours, days, weeks, months, years pointing fingers at who did what, who said what. Can't change it. So I think that there is kind of a line being drawn in the sand on January 20th. And a lot of people are saying, which team are you on and usually i don't think that there's kind of like a good or bad team

but i think on some of these issues america well i think on some of these issues there are definitely people who um are actively trying to do the right thing and i actually do think that there are people on some of these issues that are trying to do the wrong thing and something like censorship is a really easy one let the people speak let them speak the true test of Free speech is, are you willing to protect the speech of people that you disagree with? Right. It's easy to protect the speech of the people you agree with. But will you protect the speech of the people you disagree with?

Because if anything, over the last five years, we learned sometimes you think someone's wrong and it turns out they're right. And you won't know until you have hindsight bias. It's not even that. It's just like, if you want to live in a free society, you need free speech. Of course. um okay can we end on this note uh what do you think about what do you think about zuck you know wearing gold chains looking all cool growing his hair out what's going on he's a dad

i think that um why is he cool mark zuckerberg somebody who i've met i worked at facebook i had opportunity for a couple of weeks to work very closely with him on some of the stuff that I've talked about previously. But I think that he has gone through an evolution that a lot of people do. Imagine being a young person and having a ton of success very early in your life. You probably have imposter syndrome. You probably feel like you don't belong. You probably feel like this is what i'm supposed to be doing this is what i uh uh my consultant told me this is what the communications people told me this is what right all these things and so you do the thing that you don't necessarily maybe not believe but you you do the thing that you think you're

supposed to you've been advised on i think mark zuckerberg is being himself now and some of that is he has evolved over time. He's probably matured. He's probably gotten more comfortable and confident in who he is. His interests have probably evolved. I don't think Mark Zuckerberg sitting in the Harvard dorm

probably cares that much about, you know, ultimate fighting or MMA. But as he got introduced to the sport and stuff, he said, I like this. This is fun, right? So he got pulled in. I also bet that his testosterone level has increased. And so that kind of pulls as well.

Well, think if, I know for a fact that he's worked out for a long time, right? But if you do kind of one type of exercise, and then all of a sudden you introduce MMA stuff, right? It probably has a physiological impact on you. Maybe, yeah. And so, it's just, it's easy for people to critique somebody. He's evolved. He's evolved. It's easy for people to critique someone. But guess what? How many of the young CEOs have built these companies and been able to

navigate all of the pitfalls? I actually, I was going to say, I'm really impressed with Zuckerberg because he could have gone in a very different direction, but instead he's from what we see, he's a dad, he's a husband. He started at an age that most people didn't. Jeff Bezos built an amazing business. Jeff Bezos built his company when he was like 30 something years old. Zuck started, I think he was like 20. Yeah. Right. He, you want to see kind of the maturation of an individual. He used to carry around a business card that said, I'm CEO, bitch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And now obviously he's a different person. And so I just think that, um, critiquing people is easy. The harder thing is to say, you know what, when he was 20,

to now, he's evolved, he's changed. So have I, so have you. So, you know, like that's what people do. Are the decisions he's making today the right thing? Right? Are the things that he's doing today with the platform the right thing? And, you know, some people will agree with him,

some people won't, but I think that's a much, you know, kind of more important conversation than what jewelry he's wearing or what his haircut is. Very philosophical today. Let's end on that note. Thanks, guys.

We'll see you next time.