The Pomp Podcast - #1472 Anthony & John Pompliano | Trump Inauguration Sends Bitcoin Flying

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

John Pompliano and Anthony Pompliano discuss bitcoin hitting another all-time high, meme coins, Trump’s inauguration, why so many tech CEO’s were there, how Stanley Druckenmiller looks at the economy moving forward, Joe Biden’s legacy, and the outlook for the Trump presidency.  ======================= 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. ======================= The future is being built today and the future of currency isn’t dollars, euros, pounds, or yen, it’s crypto. And Gemini thinks that’s a great thing. Because a future where money is decentralized, inclusive, and globally accessible, that’s a future that we are anxious to be a part of. Go where dollars won’t. With Gemini. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on guys? Today we've got an amazing episode with John Pompliano. John's not only my brother, but John is stepping in for Polina today because she couldn't make it. And

John did a fantastic job. We talked about Bitcoin. It hit a new all-time high. What's going on with the Trump inauguration? Why were so many tech CEOs there? How does Stanley Druckenmiller look at the economy moving forward? Why is he enthusiastic? What is going to be Joe Biden's legacy, both in the economy and elsewhere? And then how do we think about the next couple of years under President Trump? What do we think about some of the executive orders? What do we think about some of the pardons that were recently extended. And then how do we think that investors are going to change their portfolio in the coming years? This conversation was not only fun, but allowed John and I to talk about some of the topics that we usually talk about

privately. So if you listen to the whole thing, you're going to hear a lot of new information and it'll help you think more critically about the world and how it's evolving in front of us. Here's my latest conversation with John 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

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Search for Bitcoin IRA in the app store or visit bitcoinira.com slash pomp to join 200,000 Americans on their journey to upgrade their retirement. Bitcoinira.com slash pomp to upgrade today and you can earn up to $500 in rewards when you add funds to your account. Today's episode is brought to you by Gemini. The future is being built today, and the future of currency isn't dollars, euros, pounds, or yen.

It's crypto. And Gemini thinks that's a great thing, because a future where money is decentralized, inclusive, and globally accessible, that's a future that we are anxious to be a part of. Gemini teamed up with futurists, technologists, and designers, like award-winning artist Matt Griffin, known for his illustrations for Dune, to craft a vision of the future with crypto at its core. The creative theme, Go Where Dollars Won't,

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All right. So Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $109,000 yesterday. Now it's trading about $103,000. Obviously, a lot of news around the inauguration, President Trump being pro-crypto. What are your thoughts? Where do we go from here? Well, I think that it's very poetic that Bitcoin hit an all-time high on the day that Trump gets inaugurated, but also it happens to be on MLK Day, which means that the stock market was not open. And so even though Bitcoin was hitting an all-time high, Wall Street was sitting at home on their hands and they couldn't participate because their market was shut down. So it's a reminder that they should open up the market 24-7. They should allow people to access financial assets. The fact that

there are hours of operations is ridiculous in 2025. Now, on top of that, I do think that there was a lot of excitement going into inauguration day and the swearing in of the president. People look and feel and are hoping that this is this like golden age of innovation that financial assets are going to go up. If you put somebody in the White House who cares about the US economy and measures its success by looking at the stock market and the Bitcoin price, its odds are that those things are going to go higher. And so anytime that people get excited, there's enthusiasm, them. There's euphoria in the market. Asset prices are going to go up. They're deploying capital. And so I think that's what you saw there. Now, the most interesting part to me about this

is that there's a lot of promises. First 100 days, first day, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. There was a lot of executive orders signed yesterday. But noticeably, there was no crypto related executive orders. So they didn't repeal SAB 121. There was no establishment of a strategic Bitcoin reserve. All of these things that people were speculating on. And so part of the kind of drawdown in the price, I think, is a little bit of a letdown. People are saying, hey, we thought we were going to get these on day one. We didn't get them. And so the price comes down a little bit. That does not mean that we won't get them. There are some that I'm hearing will happen probably this week. And so is there a huge difference between day one and first week

in the grand scheme of things over a long period of time? No. But on day one, people are like, oh, no, we thought we were going to get it on day one. We didn't get it. And so that letdown leads to kind of price. But again, if you are heading into an environment where there is going to be a clear regulatory front, you have banks coming out this morning. I think the Bank of America CEO said that banks want to hold this stuff. They want to transact. They want to participate in crypto. That should be a tailwind. And so I just think that this is a classic example of kind of the voting machine. You know, the price is coming down when the thesis really hasn't changed. And so over a long run, the markets will be much more of a weighing machine. And I think

Bitcoin would be much higher in a couple of months. Given the volatility too, it's pretty incredible to see that the letdown is 103,000. I mean, look, the price increase or decrease now, it used to be tens of dollars, then hundreds of dollars. Now it's thousands of dollars. There was a $7,000 candle on the chart yesterday, Monday morning. And I think that there was, again, in a matter of minutes, you saw thousands of dollars wiped off the price. And so as the asset gets larger and the kind of per Bitcoin price becomes bigger and bigger to get a one to five percent move, which really isn't that much volatility for Bitcoin, you're obviously going to get these bigger dollar amounts. And so, you know, percentages is probably worth paying more attention to than anything. But when, you know, a couple percent ends up being $5,000, $7,000, obviously people are going to look at that number and say, you know, quote unquote, it feels volatile, even though on a percentage basis, it's still pretty small.

Makes sense. Let's stay on the topic of the inauguration. Obviously, it was like a who's who event was there. We saw Bezos was there. We saw Elon Musk obviously was there. We saw the Google CEO was there. So a bunch of Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, fire them all off. Why do you think Theo Vaughn was there? The Paul brothers were there. Conor McGregor was there.

But why do you think a lot of the tech crowd was there, given that they haven't gone to some of the previous inaugurations? Well, you know, what's really interesting to me is this to me marks kind of a definitive change in the economy. So if you go back through, you know, presidents being sworn in or various campaigns, and you look at, you know, who is donating a lot of money, usually it was corporate executives or their companies. And so what were those companies? They used to be industrial companies, manufacturing companies, kind of physical world, pre what we think of software technology companies. And so those businesses dominated America for a long time. You can go back and you can look at each decade or two, there were these businesses that they

made physical products in the physical world. And so naturally, those were the people who were driving a lot of profit. Their executives had a lot of money. They interact with the regulatory apparatus. Politics matter to the health of their business. And so those are the people who tend to pay attention to politics, et cetera. Over the last 15 years or so, technology has been around before that, but really in the last 15 years, kind of the tech industry has grown up and it went from kind of an adolescent to now it is a full grown adult. And so what you are watching is kind of the red pilling of the tech industry saying, hey, we used to operate where we didn't have to participate in Washington. We didn't have to worry about what the regulations were.

We actually kind of just operated on a silo by ourselves in Silicon Valley and Seattle, etc. But now, politics cares about us. They are coming after our businesses. They are trying to overregulate us. They are trying to stop free speech. They are trying to, you know, essentially threaten the health of our business, the sustainability, our products, and the wealth of the founders. And so naturally, these people then have to start paying attention, right? And so when you look at Washington now, well, who are the like, you know, kind of kings of the corporate world? Look at the mag seven. It's all technology companies, all software based companies for the most part. And so naturally, those are the people driving profits. Those are the people who are donating money. And those are the people who are participating in the political process. And so I think that it really is just a shift where maybe historically you would see like, you know, I don't know, the Chevron CEO or, you know, the Ford CEO would be at these events

and kind of younger people, millennials and younger, we probably don't care. Like how many people, you know, watching this right now could name who the Ford CEO is, right? Probably not that many. And so instead, kind of the heroes that we've grown up with in the corporate world are the Bezos's and the Elon's and the Zucks, et cetera. And so those people being there, I think, is more of a sign of where the U.S. economy is more than anything else. And then also, I do think that it's a little bit of an olive branch, right? And imagine Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump both getting along. Five years ago, that was impossible to think about because Trump was railing against them, how he was being censored. He got deplatformed from many of these products or services. And so I do think that there's been this kind of reconciliation that's happened between the tech industry in Washington. And you see that in that Trump not only is participating on these platforms, he's inviting the CEOs to come to getting his inauguration ceremony. But more importantly, is a lot of these tech workers are being employed in the government now.

And so one of the things that I found really interesting is that I think it was Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga, was recently talking about the fact that he didn't pass kind of the heuristic or like the test in terms of his alignment with the current administration. And so he didn't go work in the government. But there's a lot of people who historically have not been massive supporters of the Democratic Party, etc. And so they have some value alignment or some openness to doing this. And they're going and getting these jobs. And, you know, obviously, there's David Sachs, who's the crypto and AI czar. You have Elon Musk and up until yesterday, Vivek Ramaswamy doing Doge. You have Sri Ramakrishnan doing AI policy. You have somebody like a Scott Kapoor who's going and I think he's doing the Office of Personnel Management, right? You have all these different people who are kind of going into these roles. And those individuals, what's so fascinating about them is they're not political, like in the sense of they don't have tons of experience in the political apparatus. They really are true operators. And so I do think that having those people there is somewhat not only of a sign of the economy, but it's also this reconciliation kind of olive branch. And then it is a belief that look, business people are now going to run the country. And there are plenty of people who are concerned about that. They say, oh, you know, I keep laughing. Everyone keeps that is criticizing and calling them oligarchs, right? Like you are dumb. You don't know what an oligarch is, right? You would actually not have the ability to say this stuff if they were oligarchs most likely, right? And so what you have is very successful business people who have built these companies. That's a very important detail, right? I do not believe that, go through the list.

Bezos, I don't think made his wealth because he inherited it or somebody gave it to him or there was nepotism or anything like that. Elon, Zuck, right? You go down the list. I don't think any of these people, they literally all created something from scratch. They employ millions and millions of people. They've built products and services that are used on a daily basis by people all around the world.

And so they kind of earned the value that they created and captured. And so then you put those people into government. And what we are going to find out is if the government and these people now on a collision course, who's going to win, right? And I think you see this in the Doge announcement. Way that I understand Doge is Doge is going to take four people and put them into each agency. And so those four people are going to have to affect change inside of these organizations.

Sounds like a great idea. But if you send four people into an agency with tens of thousands of people or even thousands of people, right, how receptive are those people going to be to the people coming in saying we're going to change stuff, we're going to cut costs, we're going to do this, that, whatever, right? A whole different ballgame. And so I think that's really where we've got to figure out kind of how do we do this. And the way we're going to measure success is four years from now, quote, unquote, was it effective? Did we get costs down? Did we become more productive? Did we better serve the citizens?

And do people think that Donald Trump, his administration actually created change in a positive way for the mandate that the citizens sent him to Washington to go in effect? So let's let's stick on that for a second. Trump notoriously has been a big driver of like his success is determined by the health of the economy and also the stock market. Right. Do stocks actually go up over time? A lot of the tech CEOs probably have a similar incentive. Do you think the incentives are in line there going forward over the next four years or there will be almost like a butting of the heads and saying, hey, look, Trump wants one thing. We want another thing. How can we kind of come to common ground? It depends on the topic. Right. There are definitely things where I think there's complete alignment. Right.

You need America to be strong. You need America to be safe. You need the best talent in America. Right. Those types of topics. I think everyone's fairly aligned. There may be some debate or even disagreements. Like, how do you do that? You know, how do you secure the southern border? If Jeff Bezos was president, would he be as aggressive as maybe Trump is being unclear? Right. Obviously, there's been videos and photos and stuff that have circulated of people literally waiting in line or an appointment to get into the United States, even though they're undocumented. And those things were canceled as soon as Trump took office. And so they're left outside the United States. Right. The pictures are obviously used to evoke emotion, but also if you think about it, if you change the vernacular and say, hey, somebody who is not supposed to be in the United States is trying to come to the United States and we stop them, you're right. There's another side of the political aisle that would say, well, good, we're doing our job now.

And so I think that's the type of stuff where there would be a lot of disagreement or maybe things done differently. But I do think a lot of the tech CEOs in particular are pretty smart about, look, they're not here to try to solve immigration. They're not here to try to solve, you know, name whatever problems out there. They have a very specific skill set, the very specific kind of expertise, and they're going to go and they're going to try to do that. Elon is not being called in to even do things around crypto policy or AI policy, right?

Elon is being called into the government kind of apparatus in order to go and slash cost. There is probably no one better in the world than Elon at doing this. And so take your very specific skill set and come and do this, right? They're not asking him to build technology. They're not asking him to come up with an EV mandate. They're not asking him to come up with anything else. Come in and slash cost. And so I think if you look at a lot of these folks, the way that they are interacting with

the government and this administration is, what is the thing I'm uniquely able to provide that you unlikely cannot find elsewhere? And let me come in and do that job. And that's exactly what you want, right? You want these super talented people to continue to operate in the private market. But if they have a specific skill set, lend it to the government, use it, and then get out of the way. Absolutely.

All right. Let's talk about Stanley Druckenmiller. He went on CNBC yesterday. Seems to be extremely bullish. I want to talk about two things that he mentioned while he was on CNBC. The first is he stated, I've been doing this for 49 years and we're probably going from the most anti-business administration to the opposite. What do you think about the idea of going from kind of, especially in the crypto world, an anti-business, pro-regulation, unclear environment to something completely different? Obviously, we don't know what's going to happen right now, but we have a general idea that like America is open for business. What are your thoughts around what Stanley said? Crypto, I don't think actually even matters for this specific thing that he's saying. but I think crypto is kind of an example of the much broader point, which is, you know, look, in America over the first 200, 250 years, there was a lot of understanding that we needed to take risk. We needed to embrace capitalism. We needed a democracy. And the way to create value was to

solve problems, whether you create products or services. If you do that, you should solve that problem, that problem creates, you know, productivity. And we built the greatest country ever erected, right? There's no better system. There's a line out the door of people who want to be here. This country more so than anywhere else, there is social mobility, there's economic mobility. And that is why it's such a magnet for people to come. Now, in the last call it five years, maybe maybe eight years, right? Even Trump was kind of fighting this for since 2016, is somehow, specifically the mainstream media, certain outlets, but also individuals, they began to really vilify success. And the vilification of that success started to show up, not just in

online conversation or kind of other areas that you would say, hey, I'm aware of it, but it doesn't really have an impact. It started to show up in a pretty aggressive regulatory kind of treatment of people. You saw the lawfare that was obviously happening in the political arena. You saw things like the FTC start to block a lot of acquisitions and M&A activity. There was a lot of pressure on a lot of different companies. Obviously, in crypto, pretty much if you were in crypto, you were in the crosshairs and they were coming at you from every which angle. There's Operation Chokepoint 2.0. There's all these different things. And so what we really were doing is we were asking our entrepreneurs to go and build businesses.

but while you do, we're just gonna keep shooting you in the foot. Well, it's pretty hard to keep running if somebody's shooting you in the foot. Now what's happening is we're saying to them, hey, keep running, we're just not gonna shoot you in the foot anymore. And so allow people to get their business acquired

or to acquire companies so that they can grow. Allow people to go and try to build new products and services, allow people to take risks, right? Go do these things. And it doesn't mean that we should have unfettered, just, hey, everyone can do everything or anything. Instead, what it means is it's pretty clear where kind of the common sense line is, right? And so that common sense line, when I say that, well, it's not so common.

Well, no, to the majority of people, it is pretty common, right? That's why it's called common sense. What we saw was a number of people get into positions of power and influence who were essentially radicalized and they were doing advocacy rather than doing their jobs. And so because they were in those positions of power and influence, they were able to go and affect massive kind of change, but that change really was damaging to the environment. If you go and you look, and maybe the best way to describe this is look in other countries around the world. There's a lot of US investors who will not deploy capital in certain countries.

For example, how many US investors will go and they will deploy capital in Venezuela right now? Not that many. Why not? Well, it's because there's not really a strong rule of law. You can't actually say, oh, no one's going to come and just take over the business, right and if you go and you look at a bunch of these different uh stock markets many times they are some of the best performing stock markets every year why are they the best performing because the currency is being inflated away and as that inflation occurs the stock prices go up so on a percentage basis they perform a you know spectacular but i'm not gonna put my money there because i don't know if i can get it out right the beauty of the united states is that we have

a rule of law that we have a capitalistic system that there is kind of this belief that the government is actually cheering for people to be successful. Over the last couple of years, I don't know if that was necessarily true. And so what you're seeing is investors are getting very enthusiastic because they're realizing, wait a second, we're going to put smart people in these positions. And these people really understand how the world works, right? Take Scott Besant. You're putting them in there as the treasury secretary. He has made billions of dollars for him and his investors. And he really understands how the global financial system works. Do you think Scott

Bessette was saying in 2020 to his investors, don't worry, inflation is transitory? Hell no, right? And so now what you're doing is you're taking people who are academics out of the system and you're putting in people who are much more practitioners and you're saying, look, you go run this thing, right? And then if you go and you take a look at

maybe even Paul Atkins going in as a SEC chair, right? Like Paul Atkins really understands the SEC, but he also understands kind of the private sector and I think that'll be a really big bullish thing. The last thing I want to say is, um, A lot of success in a business is about momentum. If you have momentum, take an early stage startup.

If you have a lot of momentum, all of a sudden it becomes easier to fundraise. It becomes easier to recruit talent. It becomes easier to get sales, right? These things become easier and easier because there's momentum. So right now, chat GPT and open AI, do you think it's easier for them to raise money? Sure, they have the underlying numbers, but there's a lot of people who want to invest in that business. They don't even get to see the numbers, right?

They just say, hey, I got an opportunity to invest in open AI and some private market thing, whatever, like, here's my money. That's all momentum. That's all, that's all, you know, branding and et cetera. And so the U.S. kind of has that momentum now is we were headed in the wrong direction. All of a sudden, it feels like there's an inflection point. There's this like V-shaped recovery in the U.S. economic kind of enthusiasm. And that momentum is going to make things a lot easier.

So what you're going to see is there's going to be more capital coming into the market. As more capital comes in, companies are better equipped to invest in R&D and invest in their business. You're going to see entrepreneurs have better access to capital, which means they can go and try riskier and riskier things and drive innovation faster. You're going to see employees have access to resources that then are going to allow them to build certain things to make their companies more efficient and drive more profit. Like all of this stuff starts to happen when you have this belief that like the future is brighter than the past. But if you go back, it's hard. I mean, we're talking about literally over one weekend, go back last week. I don't think a lot

of people, if they thought that Trump wasn't coming into office with this kind of current approach necessarily thought that. And so that's why you're seeing this kind of shift, if you will, in the enthusiasm. And that enthusiasm now that the challenge is we got to convert the enthusiasm into results. But that is the work of all American people, regardless of who you voted for, right, is we got to get GDP cranking. And if we want to get out of this debt problem, then we can't stop the politicians, right? They're going to do what they're going to do. Obviously, Trump, Doge, are going to try to slow down the spending. But the only thing that we can control is, can we crank on GDP? Can we create businesses that drive GDP and productivity higher? If we

can do that, then we got a better shot of controlling that debt situation. But if we can't do that, then we're going to be in big, big trouble. And so I just think that that enthusiasm has to get converted. And a great way to measure it is going to be in kind of the economic productivity and GDP growth that we should experience over the next four years. We talked about expenses. Now let's talk about the revenue side. Similar. How do you grow GDP? Obviously, one way is productivity through corporations. Another way that back to Stanley Druckenmiller mentioned was tariffs that Trump said he's going to impose. Stanley is quoted saying, we have a fiscal problem. We need revenues. To me, tariffs are simply a consumption tax that foreigners pay for some of it. Now the risk is retaliation. But as long as we stay in the 10% range, I think the risks are overblown relative to the rewards. The rewards are high. Do you agree with that the rewards for imposing tariffs are high or is there more risk than there may be rewards? One of the things that is really important to understand the current tariff conversation is the historical context. So historically, you know, many years ago, the United States had very high tariff revenue and very low income tax.

And so what that was is foreign nations and foreign corporations were paying to fund the United States. So the people of the United States benefited because we were taking money basically from foreign nations and foreign corporations. Over time, those two things switched. Now we have very high income tax and very low tariff revenue. And so now what is happening is basically that we are taxing the American people and it is benefiting the foreign nations and the foreign corporations because they're not paying that tax. And so what Trump is essentially saying is he is using, whether it's a threat or he actually is going to go through with it, he's going to use tariffs to tax foreign nations and foreign corporations to help benefit the American people, right? So if you are, again, kind of this America first agenda, if you wanted the American people to be in a better position, then naturally tariffs would be pretty attractive. Now, the concern with doing it is that it will raise prices. So if you put a 10% tariff, then everyone just raises their prices 10%, right? So are the foreign nations and corporations actually the ones paying it or the people here in America paying it? And so what it does is it incentivizes for certain things to be done in the United States because then you avoid that tariff, right?

And if you do it in the United States, then naturally that leads to more revenue in the U.S. as well. And so I do think that Druck is correct in that there is some, you know, band of error, right? If you do nothing, obviously we're in the situation that we're in. If you raise tariffs 30%, you're going to break a system, right? There's going to be a lot of change, and that may not be as positive as maybe you want it to be. But if you're able to tweak it, so let's say, for example, if inflation is ravaging America at 9% a couple years ago, now at 3%, shouldn't we be raising our prices? Shouldn't we be making it a little bit more friction for people to bring stuff here? Of course.

And so let's say that we increased revenue by 5% via 5% tariffs on all countries. What would the impact be, right? like that, that is the evaluation that people are going through. I don't have a perfect answer. I haven't spent enough time to know, Hey, here's the exact percentage. Here's the countries, whatever. But I do think that the establishment of the external revenue service. So everyone knows the IRS, right? The internal revenue service, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is focused internally on driving revenue for the government. They tax you, right? But it's kind of a genius idea. Why don't we have an external revenue service? And let's focus outward on driving

revenue for the United States. What exactly they're going to do outside of tariffs remains to be seen. But just the idea that, hey, the United States has a balance sheet. We need to treat it much more similar to a business than maybe people historically have. And of course, the critics, people always tweet and they say, like, the US isn't a business. Well, like, tell that to the debt. Tell that to the people who are being hurt because we have to inflate away the currency because the fact that we have this debt, right? Tell that to the people who can't get the goods and services they need because we're operating at a $2 trillion deficit a year, right? So maybe if we actually operated like a business, we would be in a better position.

We'd operate with a surplus. We'd be able to provide services to people and the country would be in a better spot. And so I think that's really the question is, okay, we're going to run an experiment. We're going to put a bunch of business people into office. They're going to treat it like a business. They're now not only focused on driving revenue internally, but now externally as well, set up a whole unit in the government to do this. Let's see what happens. And maybe the part that I think people should all find kind of solace in is you can critique what they're doing, but at least we can all agree that's probably a good thing that they're doing something. Because doing nothing is a road that we don't want to go down. And so the fact that

they're trying something is probably better than nothing. And then the fact that they are saying, hey, I don't want to increase taxes here for Americans, instead, we're going to go outward, and we're going to try to find revenue, again, feels like a pretty good, you know, general direction. There's a ton of details that we got to work out. And I think what Druck really is talking about there is, again, within that, like, you know, error margin, there's probably some magic number that you can figure out and, you know, country by country basis, that will drive revenue for the US won't have a massive impact to the everyday American experience, especially their consumption of goods and services. And if you do that, I think a lot of people would be

saying, hey, you know what? I didn't think this was possible, but they pulled it off. It sounds like you're bullish over the next at least 12 months. And there's a lot of uncertainty about what executive orders are put into place. How do the tariffs work? Who are we tariffing? What are we tariffing? And how does that fall back on the consumer? But it sounds like you're generally bullish for both the economy and the stock market over the next 12 to 24 months. I believe that America is at its best when America gives the opportunity to its people to go and solve problems and create economic value. And so what we have seen over the past couple of years is not that.

But now that we have an administration who is saying, you guys have the answers, we simply are going to put the ingredients together to incentivize you all to go and solve these problems, create economic value and achieve success. I think that that is when America thrives. And so we are definitely headed back towards an economy where risk taking is encouraged, investment is encouraged, economic productivity is encouraged, and ultimately success. You know, one of the things that probably doesn't get enough, you know, talking is everyone wants to talk about DEI and this whole idea of gender and the skin color and religion and all these different components. And they come at it from a culture war standpoint. Right. And maybe that's a good way to do it or maybe it's not. I'm not an expert on that stuff. But what I really understand, I think, is kind of financial markets. And what I do know is that if you have a DEI agenda, you are not putting the best people in positions to go and create economic productivity. When you go from a DEI agenda to a merit-based agenda, now all of a sudden, you are incentivizing

success. Who is the best person? I don't care what your gender is. I don't care what the color of your skin is. Who's the best person? Who can solve this problem? It's probably why I enjoy startups so much, right, is that at the end of the day, there's no customer I've ever seen that looks at a piece of software and says, let me go Google

who the CEO is and let me see their skin color. Can the software do its job or can it not? Does it make my business more efficient or does it not? Does it save me money or does it not? Does it save me time or does it not? That's what people are evaluating. And so merit is kind of at the heart of building something from scratch.

Now what we need to do is take that general idea and have it infiltrate into the rest of the economy, both these large incumbent businesses, but also the government. And so when you do that, you should be able to really crank on economic productivity. And if you're able to crank on economic productivity, then that should provide that tailwind that pushes the stock market higher, right? Because

companies are making more revenue, they're driving more profits. But also you should see kind of all financial assets doing better, because you're creating economic productivity that's driving capital into investors and shareholders hands, those then are going to reinvest it in the market. And so this whole idea is, let the market incentives, let the market structure take over. You know, there's the, I don't know if you ever heard the song, I think it's a country song. And it's something like, you know, Jesus take the wheel. Yeah, right. And in that song, they talk about it's like a car crash, right? And the car spinning and the woman who's singing it just says, you know, Jesus take the wheel, right? While the market is not

Jesus, I do think that there is a parallel analogy, which is a lot of times humans want to wrap their hands around the economy. And they want to say we have control and do this and pull this lever and establish this price cap and, you know, do this crazy thing in California, whatever. Instead, a lot of times the best thing to do is say, hey, let the market take the wheel, right? Allow the market incentives to work itself out. And sure, will it be bumpy in the beginning? Of course.

But overall, I do think that the market kind of figures it out. And for those that maybe don't agree with me, you know, there's this great saying that Warren Buffett has that where he says, in the short term, the market is a voting machine. in the long run, the market is a weighing machine. And so let the market do its job, but you have to trust that the market dynamic will take over. And you kind of have to, hey, let the market take the wheel, which again, requires some confidence in market dynamics that maybe past administrations really didn't have. Okay. Let's talk about a topic that's hot in the news right now,

the meme coin craze over the weekend. Obviously, we saw Trump launch a meme coin, as well as Melania following up with her own meme coin, whether it be a few hours or a day later. Um, what are your thoughts around one, the, you know, president-elect at the time, but the launch in general. Um, and then obviously the price action that we've seen with that, given that Trump holds a lot of the supply on his, right. Uh, Melania seems to have gotten rid of some of hers. Uh, like, what do you think about the timing with the inauguration? And then also just like a president-elect is launching a meme clinic. What is going on?

So first you have to ask yourself, um, what's happening in the world, right? And what, in my opinion, is occurring is the meme is the message, right? And I said something over the weekend that I think a lot of people in the traditional world got very upset about, but I believe it's true. And this is me doubling and tripling down, and none of them convinced me that I should change my mind. Berkshire Hathaway is the boomer meme. If you talk to an older person, generally, within minutes, they will start to tell you all about how they own Berkshire Hathaway, how value investing, like all these different things. It's a great way to invest.

What I am about to say is a compliment to Warren Buffett. I think that Warren Buffett is the greatest marketer in our lifetime in finance. Because what Warren Buffett essentially did, here's a great detail for you. Warren Buffett's general kind of brand is the aw shucks grandpa that lives in Omaha, right? Many people may not know that Warren Buffett actually, early on when he was, I think, like late teenage, maybe, you know, 20 something, 21 years old, he actually was gambling on horses and he was handicapping horse races and he was publishing his picks, right? So again, people can mature, people can change all stuff. But you're talking about a guy who was literally publishing horse gambling picks. So he was young. Then he started to buy businesses, buy stocking companies. At one point, he bought stock and then went and was writing articles, essentially shilling his investment in national papers. Again, as far as I understand, it was legal, but that's not exactly the reputation and brand that he has now.

So what I believe occurred is that over time, Warren Buffett had a couple of experiences where he realized that his brand and that of Berkshire Hathaway was really important. Another example that people don't really know or remember is that at one point, Warren Buffett bought shares in Solomon. And Solomon actually went through a massive treasury bid rigging scandal. And is the way that the story is told in many books that you'll read about it is Buffett kind of went back to Omaha after this incident, and he was very embarrassed. And he felt like his brand took a hit because of this. So there's a number of things that occurred where it became very clear to him, hey, my brand really matters. Now, why does that matter? Because Warren Buffett

is the original finance influencer. His substack is his annual letters. He writes one substack a year and he publishes it, right? If you go and you look at his website, it's the perfect branding for the boomer meme. I don't care about anything. It's just these links. I haven't changed my website, whatever, right? The annual conference, people are doing paid groups, right? Think about this for a second. They're doing paid groups on Zoom today. These like TikTok investors or whatever, like all these people that the traditional guys want to do. Warren Buffett's annual conference is a paid group. You have to be a shareholder to go. You had to spend money to go to the conference, right? Again, I'm not knocking. This guy's a genius. He's the greatest marketer of

all time. And the reason why he's the greatest marketer is because he's so good at it and you don't think that he's marketing, right? But he's reinforcing this meme. And so are there investors that go and they look at, is Berkshire Hathaway undervalued or overvalued? Of course. But a lot of shareholders at Berkshire are buying it because they think Warren Buffett's smart. They buy into the brand, they buy into the meme, right? And then yes, there's underlying businesses with cashflow. So you can't confuse the business with the meme, right? The meme is separate and the meme feeds into the business. So this idea of like a meme helping to be financialized is not new. And you can see this, Buffett was able to attract capital because of the meme. He was able

to win deals. He goes there, read any book about Warren Buffett. Many times he would show up and he would basically use the meme. I live in Omaha. I never sell. I'm the aw shucks grandpa, like all these things right and he would use that to his advantage to win deals so again he's smart he's a genius he's the goat all compliments of what i'm saying i'm not i'm not attacking him i'm saying that it's complimented now bring that to a little bit uh closer tesla tesla has a business i owned one of the cars they're amazing how do you get in a tesla and not think that hey this is the future right self-driving all this stuff but tesla also has a meme and that's why you see the fanaticism of shareholders online is that they are not only just buying into the technology or the

humanoid robots or the AI or anything, they're also buying into the fact that they've got the ability to kind of be part of the Elon apparatus, right? That they're buying into that meme. That meme sucked in a lot of capital. And at times the company was probably overvalued because you had the company plus the meme, right? That capital was then used to build the business. So Elon, again, very smart, probably the best marketer outside of finance in our lifetime, was able to create a meme and a brand that was then able to attract capital. Now, let's take it another step. DJT stock is a whole hell of a lot of meme and not that much of a business.

I think it trades at about $7 billion market cap, and they do $4 million of revenue. So if you think of- It's a great multiple. Well, if you think of Buffett, Buffett is a lot of business and a pretty good meme. Tesla is like 50-50, right? It's like really good business, really good meme. DJT is like incredible meme, small business, right? So now you say to yourself, okay, so the traditional stock investors, these are not crypto investors.

These are not like, you know, you can't go attack them. These dumb ass kids. This is the traditional stock market has assigned a $7 billion market cap to a company with $4 million of annual revenue. So that is traditional finance. The natural extension of that is, well, screw it. Let's not even have a business. Just launch the meme. Right. And so that's where you get the Trump token. There's nothing. It's just the meme. And what is the meme worth? Well, you put it in a certain market. The meme was worth $70 billion. Right. Now, it's a little misleading because there's only 20% float. so naturally as more supply comes in you would expect that to kind of you know work itself out very similar like tilray stock in canada a couple years ago uh at one point i think they floated like two percent of the business and it was you know exploded the companies were like billions of dollars whatever we like dude it's only two percent so it's a highly illiquid uh um kind of

float so uh that is i think kind of a a good way to understand this is this whole idea of like financializing memes is not new this is just the like purest final form and there's probably no bigger brand than trump right um and the president of the united states so like maybe this actually marks the top for like net new meme creation uh or meme coin creation because you you worked yourself up first it was like memes no one had ever heard of then it was like a couple of small rate celebrities then it was bigger celebrities and then like finally get the president united States launch one. Maybe that's the top. I don't know. I don't invest in this stuff, right? But like, let's see. You didn't buy? I did not buy. And look, I know the team that created this.

I think very highly of them. They are very intelligent. The other thing that I would say is you can tell from the launch of the token, it was done by professionals. What I mean by that is they used a product called Moonshot that really kind of incentivizes a more fair distribution or participation. The second thing is that there's a three-year vesting schedule. I believe that there's a three-month cliff where no one on the inside can sell anything. So even though the thing went to $70 billion, nobody could sell from the inside, right? Or like insiders. And so like, there's a bunch of structural things from the products they use, the launch, the vesting, et cetera, that suggests to me, these are people who know what they're doing.

When I see the Melania launch, it seems like it was a different team, right? Like it was a 180 difference. They used a different platform, Pump.Fund. It looks like there was less of a kind of structural thoughtfulness in the vesting and those types of things. And so it's not to say that, hey, the one's better and worse or whatever. I'm just kind of observing what's happening in the market and I don't hold either of the tokens. But what I do think are the big questions are, what is the regulatory treatment going to be? Because technically the meme coins, uh the way that people have been creating these uh they are legal and so i probably don't think we want to live in a world where like every kid in their 20s and 30s are just like speculating on

uh you know essentially casino games of like hey what's the latest hottest meme that doesn't feel like a very productive going back to like cranking on gdp that intelligence should probably be used somewhere else um but it's obvious that these things are going to exist right um i also think that there's got to be some, you know, standardization of like, hey, what is the information that's available to the public? One of the things in the traditional market that brings a lot of kind of regulation and security, and I think kind of confidence is that there's disclosures. And so what does that look like here? Again, people smarter than me will figure that out. But then also, one of the big critics, critiques of Trump is obviously going to be

like hey you're the president people can buy this thing whatever um i think that there is uh different flavors kind of like when you go get ice cream at a store you know you look and there's all these different flavors politicians on both sides of the aisle do all this stuff you have nancy pelosi who people accuse of uh inside trading amazing performance right uh you have um you know politicians who've been buying meme coins i think that there is a politician who came out and said he owns Ski Mask Dog. Obviously, that's like a new thing, right? And people got to figure out what is this? How does this work? Whatever. Then you got Trump, who's obviously launching these. And so when you look at this, you say to yourself, Biden was accused of receiving

money from foreign governments, right? And the shell companies, whatever. There's just different flavors of what's happening when these people are in power. I don't condone any of it, right? But I do think that it's kind of like same game, different flavor, right? And then maybe the last thing I will say that I think is pretty important here is my biggest question when people ask me like, hey, is this going to work or is this not, is what can you do with the coin? And there's two paths. either you say nothing and we're going to vehemently say you can do nothing with this

coin it's all meme which is what trump said correct which is what it is right now or you have to go the route of add a ton of utility accept it as properties accept it in the store do all this stuff i think that route is much harder i actually think that if you said to me hey take off my kind of market observer hat put on my uh trump token you know kind of advisor hat uh they should keep it as much of a meme as possible and they should continue to uh talk about it and make it a joke very similar like a doge right um and you probably aren't going to have a 70 billion dollar market cap i think it's down to like 30 right now um but uh maybe it goes to 10 and let's see kind of what happens um i again i'm not buying it uh i know people who

have bought a lot of it um and uh it's just not my investing style right it's no different than why don't I buy oil? It's just not my thing, right? And so I understand why other people buy oil. I just don't buy it. Same thing here. What I will say, maybe two other quick comments are there's a big question of whether this token actually will distract from the Bitcoin agenda. I don't think so, which I think is pretty important. Majority of Trump's net worth is now wrapped up in crypto. And I think that it is clear to Trump and probably many others that Bitcoin is the king. And so it's kind of like, hey, do you want somebody 100% focused on Bitcoin? Of course, if you can't get that, the next best thing is to have them focused on crypto with Bitcoin being a

huge part of it. And then obviously, the least ideal thing would be them just saying, hey, I don't care about the industry at all. Right. And so I think that there's a lot more conversations going on around crypto right now than there were two weeks ago in the Trump administration, because of some of this stuff. And so I do think that that will still serve as a tailwind for Bitcoin, even though a lot of people will not like the fact that he's not just 100% on Bitcoin. right um it's kind of like a company like coinbase coinbase's success and how important it was for bitcoin probably is bigger because it actually added the other coins than if it had just did bitcoin only right and that's just you know that that just is what it is um and then maybe the last

thing that i will say is um balaji sreenivasan he tweeted out this uh idea that maybe what trump should do is rather than make it a kind of zero sum game uh instead what he should do is he should take a hundred dollars worth of the trump token and 77 million people voted for him and say if you are signed up for my email list i'm going to airdrop you a hundred dollars of the trump token we've never had a president give personal value to the people right and um one of the points he made is like a lot of democrats would go sign up for the email list to get 100 bucks right um but now all of a sudden you have a much more dispersed holder base i think last time i looked there's like 770,000 people or 800,000 people who hold the token. If you get to tens of millions,

you also start to take away some of the downside volatility, right? And then it becomes really interesting because now the conflicts of interest actually become more of an alignment between the president and the people. Again, I'm not saying he's going to do that, but Balaji has this really great, pretty long, detailed plan as to how you could do it. And that stuff I think becomes interesting. But again, this is a new era. This morning, somebody filed for a Trump token ETF with the SEC. Is it going to get approved? My guess is probably not, right? But who knows? Maybe it will, maybe it won't. And I think this is now where we're going to start finding where are the areas where this becomes interesting and where it doesn't. It'll take some time to figure that

out. But I think that that's the stuff that is kind of the, maybe quote unquote, the future of finance. There's a lot of stuff that are going to stay the same, but there's maybe 5% of finance that is changing very rapidly. And people are trying to figure out what does this look like? I don't know if meme coins are going to make its way into pension fund portfolios, but it's obviously infiltrating into the retail portfolios. Well, there's also, I saw a bunch of comments over the weekend about the ICO market in about 2017, 2018. Can you talk about the differences between what happened there and maybe recap what really went on in crypto and the ICO market, and then where we are today and are there

similarities and are there differences with these meme coins and then the ICO coins that were kind of popping up all over the place. One of the things that's interesting is early stage startups, one of the golden rules is you actually don't want to have money revenue until you fundraise. Because if you show up to an investor and you say, hey, I built this great piece of software, look how cool it is. Imagine the future. That's actually a way better pitch than, hey, I built this great piece of software. I have $2,000 of monthly revenue. Like you have $2,000, that's not that impressive, right?

I mean, you gotta be growing at such an incredible rate to really kind of surprise people. And so having no revenue allows you to tell a story versus having some revenue means that they're gonna evaluate the numbers, right? Which is counterintuitive. The ICOs were raising capital to then go and build things, to go and do stuff with it, to drive a return, right?

That's why I saw a lot of regulatory crackdown is like that probably was some security questions in there, et cetera. When you launch a meme coin, there's no promise of anything, right? Again, it go back to Buffett is a lot of business, a little bit of meme, right? Tesla is, you know, half meme, half business. DJT is a lot of meme, a little business. This is just all meme. And so if you think about that, maybe that's the better model, right?

Again, if you want to drive attention and capital, et cetera. The reason why I don't participate in this stuff is at this point in my career, when I am especially making large investments, I'm much more worried about what's the downside than what's the upside, unless I'm doing early stage venture capital, right? Early stage venture capital is the only area where I don't care about the downside. I know it's 1X. I just want as much as asymmetry as possible. But any other financial asset or kind of sector, I really want to understand, hey, how much

can I lose here? And to me, it is unclear what that risk reward looks like with the meme coins, because there is no quote unquote margin of safety. If there's no margin of safety, then basically what you're saying is I'm willing to lose it all for an unknown upside. And it's not clear whether that upside is asymmetric or not. When you invest in a $5 million valuation startup, you know, hey, if this becomes a billion dollar business, right? And here I can do some math and figure out just what they'd have to do. With the meme coin, all bets are off. And so actually the people who are going to be the best meme coin investors are the people who don't overthink it. They're just trading on vibes. And that sounds like a absolutely atrocious investment

strategy for 99% of investors in the world. But I know some of these guys. They're very good. They're making a lot of money. And the way they're doing it is they basically have a pulse on a market and so just like i don't do private credit because i don't have any understanding of that i don't have any you know alpha or advantage um if you don't have advantage in trading meme coins uh then you probably should sit it out as well okay let's talk about biden and his legacy so obviously we have now wrapped up four years of the biden administration the biden economy um inflation went pretty crazy there a lot of people try to contribute that to the spending that trump during his last year in office. But the S&P rose 60% over Biden's time in office.

Inflation was extremely high. What is the narrative around Biden now leaving office? Is he going to be kind of the forgotten president? Is he going to be looked down upon because of some of the things that his administration did, especially in the economy? Or is he going to be favorably remembered and people are going to be like, hey, look, he made good strides in these areas. Every president is a complicated figure. They don't get straight A's. They do some things that are good, some things that are okay, and some things that people wish they would have done better. The other thing about a president is that the longer time goes on, the more people are almost nostalgic for that president. George Bush, good example. George Bush, at the time,

there's a lot of people who weren't that, uh, fun, uh, or weren't really that excited about him. Um, he paints, he's friends with Michelle Obama. I saw a tweet yesterday that said, you know, born to be the MLB commissioner, but ended up, but was forced to, you know, go into war, right? Like these, these different things that, um, I think people's kind of opinions change, uh, as they get older and we get further away from their presidency. Biden, I think one of the tailwinds that he has outside of the stock performance and some of that stuff, he was really old. And towards obviously the end of the presidency, he started to appear old. And so I do think there's a lot of people who are going to look back, not right now,

but years from now, and they'll kind of be like, oh, the old, kind of the grandpa, the aw shucks, whatever. That doesn't change that there was a lot of damage done. And I think what you saw was the American people overwhelmingly said, hey, we don't want to go down the path we're going down now. We are giving a full mandate to secure the border, build housing, get inflation down, you know, the whole kind of agenda. But I think that right now, people feel the most vehemently they're going to feel against Biden, and his supporters feel the most support they're going of feel and over time those emotions will dissipate and um i think that uh there's going to be a lot of people who say to themselves you know he did something good something's good something's

bad and so it's kind of like a wash um which you know obviously you want to be known as a great leader as a great president is doing amazing things but maybe the second best thing is to be awash. What you don't want to be is you don't want to be the president that oversees, you know, kind of significant decline or making decisions that are obviously very detrimental. And so look at the wars, you know, both in Israel and then also in Ukraine. I don't think that a lot of people will credit Biden with going to war. And they may even give him credit for like withdrawing from afghanistan um but it's like a proxy war right and so like again his his uh legacy is going to be very complicated because it really is going to depend on what you think about him today

and then on the economy you know on one hand uh it's a very strong economy on the other hand there's some underlying you know kind of soft spots and depending on who you talk to uh recessions right around the corner or hey the economy is actually pretty strong we're heading right direction. I tend to think that for the next four years, barring some significant external shock that we don't foresee now, we will probably be in pretty good shape. And so Biden gets to say, hey, I handed off a great economy. And Trump says, I went on an epic run. You did see Trump talking down the market, going into him being sworn in. So kind of making sure he gets that purchase, that starting price a little bit lower. But yeah, it's just very complicated. And, you

know, unfortunately, one of the big questions is, I don't know, you know, exactly how this will play out. But one of the things that I would be cognizant of is Joe Biden may rapidly decline from here. And, you know, at some point, look, he's going to pass away. And it'd be sad, you don't want to see anyone lose their life, especially any president, whether you agree or you disagree with them. But the mental acuity and clarity, although many people argue he had very little, right? But just like the day-to-day, having to be involved, having to wake up, having staff around, communicating with people, going to events, doing all this stuff, probably kept him actually feeling younger than he would have otherwise. And so now that that's gone,

it would not surprise me that there would be a rapid you know decline both cognitively and then also kind of physically and so um it's just a fascinating thing whereas then you look at trump like you know if trump wasn't doing this he probably would just be at the same pace you know in business or something right and so the question of like what does biden go do now will probably drastically affect you know how much longer is he with us for um and uh so it's just something that you know it's worth paying attention to of like kind of the last hoorah you know was yesterday um hopefully he goes and he engages but if he just goes and sits on the beach all day you know that probably is going to have a different uh different outcome does it

matter i don't think it really matters right not necessarily matters um i just think that it's like an interesting you know thing to think about is uh in a weird way although the american people heavily criticized Biden and the lack of mental acuity and kind of, you know, who is running the country, right? I saw a very interesting thing. You know, he pardoned a lot of people yesterday. He pardoned his family members. He pardoned Anthony Fauci preemptively. I think that there are significant ethical questions about why are you pardoning somebody who hasn't been accused officially of a crime and you're pardoning them back 10 years, 11 years, what do you know? Did he advocate for it? These are all questions that need to be asked. Why are you pardoning your

family members? One of the interesting things is they thought Trump was going to do that, and now he did it. That feels a little off. It's an egregious use of the pardoning ability. And so when you look through that, you say to yourself, could somebody argue that Biden didn't even know what he was doing? And so you can't reverse a pardon because the presidential power is so great. but if biden was mentally uh not in a place to be able to actually know what he was doing there is potentially a legal argument that there was never an actual pardon right uh established because the president wasn't in a position to be able to do it um again i think that's a very long shot type argument but these are the things that people are trying to figure out you think they just put the paper in front of them and were like sign here there's a story that um i heard

somebody tell recently uh where somebody was talking to biden um i think it was the speaker i think it was uh mike johnson and he said that uh he kept asking for a meeting with biden and his staff kept telling him he's busy he's busy he's busy he's like i'm the second in line to be the president united states if anything happens what are you talking about he's busy like get me a meeting so he finally gets a meeting he walks into the oval office and he says it was like an ambush there's like 20 people in the room and the 20 people were um you know trying to convince him to all this stuff whatever and at some point biden says to everyone everyone please leave the room i'd like a minute with the speaker everyone's like uh like no but president says something so

everyone leaves the room and so they start talking a little bit and um speaker says you know hey why I got you here. My constituents are telling me that you have stopped the export. I think of LNG or something. Right. And Biden says, I didn't do that. He says, you know, sir, Mr. President, you signed a, an executive order to do that. Like last week, he goes, I didn't sign that. And he goes, no, sir, you did. I can pull it up. Like, do you want me to like print it out or whatever? He goes, no, no. I signed an executive order that did something like a study around LNG or something. He goes, no, Mr. President,

these are my constituents. I have the thing. Like we can get your secretary to print it out. Like that's what you signed. And then I'll say like, oh, I did sign. I did like,

and it was unclear. Did he just like have a lapse of memory or like was potentially he signing things that he was unaware of? Again, I don't want to speculate, right? But like that type of stuff obviously is behind us now.

Whereas Trump is sitting in the Oval Office, essentially holding a 90 minute freewheeling press. I mean, the guy loves it, right? He's got a stack of executive orders. He's signing his signature perfectly every time, answering random questions, including like what's going on with the New Jersey drones, right?

And he's like, Susie, go find out. Let's tell people what's going on. I have a guy who's just like wheeling and dealing and just loving life, right? And so I think that, again, it goes back to the enthusiasm. So I don't know. I don't got all the answers, but still pretty interesting to kind of think through. A lot to unpack. All right.

Thank you for doing this. Yeah, of course. Thanks for watching!