The Pomp Podcast - #1544 Anthony & Polina Pompliano | Why Isn’t Bitcoin $150K If Everyone’s Buying?

Episode Date: May 6, 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 bitcoin, what you need to know about the economy, jobs, Warren Buffet, Berkshire Hathaway, and future market outlook. ========================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/========================Polkadot is a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain technology aimed at creating Web3. Created by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot empowers users to build decentralized applications with ease. Backed by industry leaders, making it a preferred choice for big names, Polkadot stands out as a leading choice for investors seeking a reliable, future-proof solution in the growing world of Web3 technology. Learn more at https://polkadot.com/.=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

go check it out at readtheprofile.com. Now that the plug for her is over, let's get into this episode. We talk about Bitcoin, what's going on with price, what you need to know about the economy and how Scott Besant, Warren Buffett, and Anthony Pompliano, me, all agree on a lot of stuff that people didn't think that we would agree on. And on top of that, we get deep in the weeds of what's going on with Berkshire, Bitcoin, economy, jobs, growth in your portfolio. Today's episode was a lot of fun. Polina and I, she also tells you guys a little something secret, something happened recently in our house, which I'm not exactly thrilled about, but you guys will find out. So 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. your mining profitability. With over 500 clients worldwide, we manage over 15,000 machines across our sites. Our facilities are staffed seven days a week and we fix most on-site issues in under 48 hours. In fact, we can repair more than 2,000 hash boards each month in our dedicated repair center, ensuring your miners run smooth. Want to see it firsthand? Tour our mining sites either in person

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Go check them out today at Polkadot.com. All right, Polina, what's the first topic? All right. Bitcoin's price is at $94,000 currently. But my question is, if there's so many public companies buying Bitcoin, why is the price not going up faster, more? Well, the price is going up. I think people just kind of lose sight of context. So if you go back to November 1st, I think it was last year, kind of right before the election. If I remember correctly, Bitcoin was trading at $69,000.

Today, it trades at $94,000. Pretty good performance for less than a year. If you look over the last year, Bitcoin is up 50%, 5-0%. It's outperforming gold, which is only up 45%. And Bitcoin is up positive on the year while stocks are down. And so I do think people are so used to Bitcoin ripping up hundreds of percent that when it is only up 50%, they're kind of disappointed. And so context really matters, kind of the comparable return.

So I think that's kind of one broader story is like, hey, it's probably not as bad as people think it is. The second thing is if the price is staying stable at about $94,000, $95,000, which it pretty much has been since the start of this year, although there's been fluctuations up to 109 and down to 75. What you have to remember is that markets are just math, right? If there's more buyers than sellers, the price goes up. If there's more sellers than buyers, the price goes down. And if you think about already in just 2025, in the first kind of four to five months, we have seen exuberance. People, oh my God, Trump got into office. Asset prices are going to go to

the moon. Everyone, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. Institutions coming in. Sovereign wealth funds are coming in uh you know executive order for the strategic bitcoin reserve all good positive green buy you know type things price went up then all of a sudden tariffs sell everything the portfolios are going to be crashing you know just get dollars get treasuries oh no you know fear fear fear fear fear everyone starts selling assets and price goes down stock market went down uh 20 bitcoin went down to 75k right like that emotion shows up in the price but where we are today is basically where we started the year. And so what we have seen is we saw institutions and also public companies buying at highs. We saw them buying at lows. We saw them buying

everywhere in between. And so what you actually have is you have price insensitive buyers now in the market, which really the retail audience has historically been, but you're seeing that same activity come from public companies as an example. And so if you have price insensitive of buyers, and they're gobbling up all this Bitcoin, the odds that Bitcoin's price can stay depressed for a long period of time is pretty low. And so my expectation is that we are probably 60 days away or so. Let's say we're kind of at the beginning of May, you're probably going to see towards the end of June, sometime in July, we'll start hitting that 100 day period where it's 100 days after gold hit a new all time high. And I would expect Bitcoin to really kind of start

moving then. Doesn't mean it's going to like double or triple in price, but I would expect kind of the second half of this year to be very positive for Bitcoin. And so what, you know, my take to people is just, you see a bunch of people buying, obviously you can do the math on how much they're buying versus how much is coming into the market every day. It's pretty good odds that Bitcoin's price is going to be higher in the next six to 12 months. Calm down and do what they're doing. If they're dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin and you're taking your foot off the gas, that's not good. You should be dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin as well. And I think that you'll end up in the same trade that they end up in. And that's where returns end up are going to

be captured over the next year or so. Yeah. Seeing the emotions in the market has been wild. Related to that, Warren Buffett recently spoke on the dangers of fiat currencies at the Berkshire meeting stating, fiscal policy is what scares me in the US. He said, the natural course of government is to make the currency worth less over time they devalue it at rates that are breathtaking in the end if you've got hold on a second in the end if you've got people that control the currency you can issue paper money i warm buff it's a bitcoiner yeah i didn't even realize i mean no well it's the reason why he's always light cash flowing businesses right is he understands how inflation works he like he's a smart guy and yeah of course bitcoiners love to

and scream at him because he said some inflammatory things about rat poison all's nonsense whatever right uh but you also gotta remember warren buffett's a showman in the same way that the bitcoiners are out there being showmen the same way elon musk is a showman warren buffett is too he's a performer when he gets on stage and he sits there for hours and he's answering questions and everyone's like oh look at like the old grandpa with the comedic relief like he's putting on a performance right and it's a certain audience likes it warren buffett can sell out stadiums because his performance is well accepted same thing with the rat poison whatever he's playing to his audience right more power to him don't hate the player hate the game now what he's saying is

true as well he's very smart he understands how the economy works he understands that money printing is a massive issue and so if that is the case then warren buffett's choice to how to insulate himself from the problem has been to buy cash flowing businesses for less than they are worth, and then hold them for a long period of time. That has produced since 1965, a 5.5 million percent return. Since 1965. So again, I'm not a mathematician, but 1965. And so what did I say? 55, 65. So 1965. And so if you go and you look at that, that's about 60 years, 5.5 million percent return. Bitcoin in the last 14 years has delivered a 2.5 million percent return. So Bitcoin has been compounding at a much higher rate. Now the question is, if Buffett's compound annual

growth rate over the last 60 years is 20%, what is Bitcoin's going to end up being? And also you don't have to sit and analyze companies or do private deals or doing the stuff that Buffett had to do. People can just go and buy Bitcoin. So right now the compound annual growth rate of Bitcoin is something like 80%. And so if you're compounding at 80% and Buffett's compounding at 20%, who's going to end up actually gaining ground? Obviously the Bitcoiners are. And so I'm not claiming that any of the Bitcoiners or Warren Buffett, I don't want to take away from his track record and the success that he's had. But I am saying that the next Warren Buffett is probably not going to look like the old Warren Buffett, right? The next one is probably going

to do something that was different. And if you think about Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, these guys all pioneered something that most people hadn't done previously. And so now what you're starting to see is people are saying to themselves, wait a second, there's an asset that is compounding at a very aggressive rate. It benefits from the exact same things that Buffett is calling out here. It is a new generation's chosen way to express this quote-unquote trade, whereas the boomer generation, overgeneralization, but the boomer generation chose to express that trade via the Berkshires of the world. Neither one is right or wrong. It's just on a comparable basis moving forward for the next 10 to 20 years, who's going to outperform? I'll take Bitcoin over

Berkshire all day long, especially with Buffett not at the helm. And that's why you saw Berkshire their stocks sell off. So the other thing no one wants to talk about, Berkshire Hathaway is the boomer meme coin. I've been saying this forever. People get all upset about it. Well, we got proof. Ha ha. I was right. You want to know how I know? Because when Buffett announced that he was stepping down, the stock traded down, the stock traded down 6%. So I used to say that 5% to 10% of Berkshire's market cap was the Buffett bump, the Buffett premium. But you know that. Okay. So, again, you go back and go look at the tape. Berkshire Hathaway, 95% good company, 5% Buffett meme, right? You can call the premium a meme. Tesla, maybe it's 50% good company, 50% Elon meme. Then you go to something like DJT. It's like 5% good company, 95% Trump meme. And then the Trump coin was like 100% Trump meme, right?

And so it's a variation of all this stuff and people get upset about it, but it is obviously true. Buffett is, you know, the original finance influencer was able to create this entire kind of aura around him and the company and all this stuff, which he should have done. He should be celebrated for it. It's excellent. That is what somebody should do. But still, we finally got the proof that there was a Buffett meme that was baked into the

stock price. And with him stepping down, the stock price traded lower and that Buffett meme is now going away. So that was the next topic to talk about Buffett stepping down. Oh, okay. Why do you think he stepped down? Do you have an opinion? Because he's 94 years old. I don't think that that's why he stepped down.

Of course, that's why he stepped down. No, I don't think so. Why? What do you think? I think that Buffett most likely stepped down because he understands he can't find a deal to do given how much cash he has. And so by stepping down- He has $347.7 billion in cash.

Yeah, all-time high. If he keeps sitting on this cash and it goes longer and longer and longer, it becomes apparent that he's not sitting on the cash because he's waiting for a crash. There was just a 20% crash in the stock market. They didn't do anything. They can't find deals to do

that are good enough and big enough. Why? Because you can't buy a company for a billion dollars or $5 billion or $10 billion. Or you've got $347 billion on your balance sheet. you got to go and do massive deals. And so if he can't find that deal, he has to step down.

Now people say, oh, he's the goatee. He steps down on top, which by the way, makes him even more of the goat to know now's the time to step down. Right. I also think that Munger not being there anymore,

probably it's like not as fun. You know, it's like you did something with somebody for 50, 60 years. I think that's a big part. And again, it's not, I'm not saying that age doesn't play a part at all.

Obviously it plays some part, but I've always thought that Buffett was the type of person and the way that people have covered him, the way he's talked, et cetera, is like, you know, he tap dances to work was always the thing that people would say, like, he's going to die. Now, the reason why I don't think it's age, ready for this one? Buffett came out yesterday and said that he still is planning to go to the office every day. So why are you willing to go to the office every day and continue to do what you were doing, but you're stepping down from the role? Because it's a better, smoother transition, I think, for the shareholders than if he dropped dead and then suddenly,

that's the transition it's a key man risk it's like minimizing the key man risk i think that there's a good argument for that but why now why not last year or why not next year or why not whatever maybe there's some health thing that we don't know about or something right there's a lot we don't know about but i think that uh the fact they can't find deals to do actually may be a bigger part i'm not saying it's the only reason but it's probably a bigger part of why they're doing. I know a very, very well-known investor who he claims the reason why the giving pledge was started is because these guys couldn't figure out what to do with the money. So they tried to claim the moral high ground by giving it away. I don't know. Right? Again, I'm not saying

I agree or disagree. I'm just saying that there are ways to view some of this stuff. Here's an interesting thing warren buffett took hundreds of billions of dollars from bill gates and nobody ever talks about it bill gates would be the richest man in the world he'd ever he'd be the world's first trillionaire if he never sold his microsoft stock or gave it away yeah but again there's an argument about like giving it away is that beneficial for society of course but do you think that it would have been better or worse if bill gates had a trillion dollars now to give away I have no idea. Well.

It depends if you like what he's doing or not, right? But it's just like, there's a time value to the money, right? And there's positive things that you can do with it in the short term. But also there's a long-term value to the money as well and allowing it to continue to compound. Of course, but he didn't have, you know, 20, what is it? 20, 20 vision. Is that, no, when you look back.

Hindsight. Hindsight. Well, he could have had 20, 20 vision and hindsight. He didn't have the benefit of hindsight when he was making these decisions. Agreed. Okay. Wait, and there was something else I wanted to ask you about. By the way, I think that Warren Buffett is a fantastic investor, but the paradox of him is I don't think he's a good person.

Earlier, okay, we'll discuss that at another time. You want me to explain why? No, no, no. So earlier you said, yeah, but they agree, whatever, it's a whole thing. Okay. It was a consensual two wives. Consensual two wives. Just think about how we're defending this now.

Come on, go ahead. You would have thought I would have, yeah. um no you said earlier since 1965 every man who's listening to this podcast just perked in what that's go ahead you're crazy his wife didn't want to be there she wanted to be in california painting and then she sent over her friend and then she's like you go take care of him and then like whatever um but are you listening so since since not you said since 1965 it's actually 1964 berkshire hathaway has returned over 5.5 million percent outperforming S&P 500 by 140 times what? Go ahead. I was off by 12 months.

Oh, okay. Well, first you said 1955, let's be clear. Then it says a $10,000 investment in 1964 would be worth $550 million today. That's 5.5 million percent return. Yeah, that's crazy. Of course, it's insane. Yeah. When you think about it like that, but I guess $10,000 in 1964 is a lot of money too. Yeah. But still half a billion dollars. Yeah. So anyway, that's all I got here. All right. So what's next? Okay. Let's see. Okay. Investors are still concerned and some are talking about the

great depression coming, but the data continues to be mixed after the market panicked post Liberation Day. Is that what we're calling? What is that? Okay. The economic declaration of independence. The market went on a nine-day run in the green, the longest streak in 20 years, leaving the S&P 500 essentially flat the past month. Consumer confidence outlook hit its lowest number since 2011. However, Americans continue to spend and make more money. A report by Phil Rosen of opening bell. The jobs report came in higher than expected with 177,000 jobs added in April. And what does Trump think here? He said, I think the good parts are the Trump economy and the bad parts are the Biden economy. This sounds like something I would say if I was running for

school president. Obviously, I think that comment is ridiculous. So for all the people who think i'm like some trump mouthpiece right i disagree with that uh you either gotta take uh you gotta take credit for everything or you gotta take credit for nothing right and i think that um it is true to his base of course by the way it's smart from a communication strategy right no it's very smart from a communication strategy standpoint because they got you talking about it right now so i think that it is true that if you become the president right on whatever january 20th. The data on February 1st, nothing you did affected that data, right? Well, what about on March 1st or April 1st or May 1st? At some point, you got to take responsibility for what the data

is saying, right? And if you have very polarized economic policies compared to your predecessor, then you're more responsible than not, right? So I don't think anyone's like, oh, the stock market is down because of anything other than kind of terrorist economic policy, etc. So the question then becomes, is it worth it? Right. And I think that the current administration is saying, yes, it is worth the short-term pain because there's all these benefits they're going to get. I tend to think that they're right, but I think that's kind of the way to evaluate it. So I would argue that we now are getting closer to this being a Trump economy, right? And a Trump stock market and all that kind of stuff. When does it switch over? I don't know. I don't think there's like

a single date, like, okay, it switches, but it feels like, all right, we're a couple of months in. Obviously there's been these economic policies that have been implemented. They're having an impact on the market. We're getting closer to it. So if you then go and you say to yourself, okay, let's take a look at what's actually happening in the economy. Jobs are getting created. Now, I'll be the first one to say, I don't believe the jobs number ever. Jobs numbers, nonsense. But directionally, jobs are getting created. How many? Who knows? But jobs are getting created. The second thing is that inflation has fallen off a cliff. It was at over 3% according to Truflation in December. It's now under 1.5%.

But isn't that bad? Like, don't we need a little bit of inflation? 1.5%. Well. Right? The defense target's 2%. The last guy put it to over 9% in the official numbers while he was not paying attention. And so 1.5% is better than 9%.

And so why is it going down? Well, certain food prices are going down. Gas, huge part of people's day-to-day expenses. That's been cratering. Again, administration came out and said the gas is like $1.98. That is some places in America. There's people that are on Twitter who are like, I went to my local gas station. Here's $1.98, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

But with that said, I think most people are paying more than $1.98, but it is less than they've been paying for the last couple of years. And so if you look at this stuff, you say, okay, this is all like the economic data points. If you look at the sentiment surveys, people are saying how worried they are and all this stuff, but people are buying in the market. And so it goes back to this idea of you can listen to what people are saying, but you have to watch what they're doing, right? And what they're doing is different than what they're saying.

On top of that, the stock market right now is down less than 4% year to date, less than 4%. And as you said, there's people talking about the Great Depression. These people are idiots. What are you talking about? The stock market going down 4% is literally a blip on the radar. Nobody cares about 3%, 3.5%. On top of that, over the last month, the S&P is up 11%, a double-digit return. if you just bought the dip, you ended up in a great spot. And so I think that's a huge part

of the story. On top of that, if you go and you take a look at things like Bitcoin and gold, those are positive on the year. They're up 45, 50% over the last 12 months. So this idea that we're talking about some massive recession or some huge Great Depression and stock prices are actually up over the last year, then you're just detached from reality. And so I recently went and we have this new show uh that is on x it's called from the desk of anthony pompliano and in there i did a segment that maybe we can link to in the comments or something where i showed a bunch of data points now that are coming out about politics and there's a theme that everyone's been talking about for the last decade to 15 years in tech they're like oh we're financializing the world

bitcoin and crypto is financialing the world the fintechs are financializing the world all these things about financializing the world. But the opposite is also happening. We are politicizing the world. And so what this data shows is that conservatives and liberals both pretty much had the exact same view on free trade. About 20% of people who were polled were supportive of free trade. Then the election happens and Trump starts talking about it. And on the chart, you can just see liberals and even moderates it just rips in the other direction and the liberal cohort went from 20 believing in free trade to over 40 and so basically the administration took a position and their political adversaries immediately reversed their position to be anti whatever

the administration was saying yeah i'm sure a lot of then if you go and you look at there's some data that just came out uh from rasmussen and again some people like this data some people don't just share what the data points are saying you can decide whether you like it you don't like it, whatever. The data shows that single men, married men, and married women are all neutral to positive on their approval rating of Trump. So single men and married men, double digit positive, married women, neutral, plus zero, single women, negative 26%. So what it shows is that if you take the economy and you break them down into cohorts between gender and marital status, one out of four groups. Single women are negative. Everyone else is neutral to positive. And so the reason why that

becomes interesting is if you look at what is dominating headlines, right, is you're getting a left-leaning media and you're getting articles that are written for a certain cohort of people who tend to be online a lot, who share a lot, all this kind of stuff. And it is appeasing their view of the world, which is all of this is bad. And so I went and I looked this morning at a bunch of the topics that were being covered on Bloomberg's homepage. It was like a hall of fame, a fear porn. It was all about trade war cost. And there's literally an article. One of the top articles on Bloomberg this morning was the Trump tariffs are wrecking holiday shopping. I think they said wrecking havoc on holiday shopping. I read that article. OK, we're in May. Well,

we're in may i understand but nobody's holiday shopping yet no no i think it's more about the small businesses who focus on the holidays for nobody is holiday shopping it's may it's like may 5th but if you're a small business you ain't shopping for holidays either yes you are you're restocking you're trying to get inventory again you you may be starting to think about that stuff etc but you are not holiday shopping not holiday stocking not holiday supply chains holiday shopping and so it goes back to this point of this is insane this is crazy he he does he's the the media realizes that there's an opportunity fear fear fear fear shove it down the consumer's throats because what does it do it grabs their attention it makes them click but if you take

a step back and you say oh sigh just calm down look at the market the stock market is down three and a half percent to start the year. You see data points. There's jobs being created. People are spending money. Look at M&A transactions. That's another thing that I talked about in this segment. M&A transactions are still healthy. Pershing Squares investing $900 million into Howard Hughes Holdings. You see something like Google buying Wiz for tens of billions of dollars. OpenAI just bought Windsor for $3 billion. There is M&A happening. And so when you have real bad economic times,

you don't get that stuff to occur. Think back to COVID during March when it was actually bad stuff happening. All of a sudden, all of that froze. That's not what you're seeing here. And so I continue to say, I think that we will see stock all-time highs before the end of the year.

Again, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Whatever, that's fine. But I just think that you already saw When I was saying this in early April, stock prices have significantly recovered. They haven't hit an all-time high yet, but now people feel very differently about the economy and about the stock market than they did just three or four weeks ago because they see stock prices recovering. And so where do we end up?

I don't know. I don't have some crystal ball, but what I do know is that the mainstream conversation is completely diverged from reality. The stock market has recovered. It's up 11% in the last month. If you look at sentiment surveys, the sentiment surveys are showing just as negative, if not more negative sentiment in the market. How is it possible that the stock market is up 11%, but sentiment is actually the same or worse? It's because they're getting hammered in the media

every single day with fear and negative stories. But the data actually tells something completely different. And I think that's where you got to pay attention to is stop paying attention to all the fear mongering and just look at the numbers. And I continue to say it, study reflexivity. The faster we fall, the faster we're going to recover. And so there was a lot of fear, a lot of selling. Well, we're already back up 11% in 30 days. Do you think that we're going to end up going sideways? Maybe. Are we going to go down? Maybe. We're going to go up? Maybe. I don't know. But what I do know is that the US economy is going to be even stronger in the future. US stocks are going to be higher. And Scott Besson, he had the quote of the week. He said, the history

of the U.S. economy can be described by five words, up and to the right. That's what Scott Besson said? That's where the stock market goes, up and to the right. Everyone calm down. It's going to be okay. Okay. Speaking of Scott Besson, he said on Monday, reprivatizing the economy. On one side, we're going to be bringing down government spending, which has been crowding out the private sector. We're also going to be shedding excess labor on the government side. And on the other side, we have a substantial financial deregulatory agenda coming. What does this word, Zalan, mean? It means success. That's what it means.

If you're in the business world, this means boom times are coming. What they're basically saying is that in the last four years or so, there was an explosion of government jobs, right? Public sector jobs. And if you go and you look at the data, historically, I can't remember the exact number it is historically. It's something like 5% of net new jobs are like from the government or whatever. In the last four years, that exploded to over 20%. More than one out of every five jobs in America was coming from the public sector. so we became an economy that was becoming more and more dependent on the public sector both for job

growth but for economic growth we were pumping money into the economy we were doing all this all manipulated so inflation rose etc now what they're saying is we are going to de-lever we're going to fire people we're going to shut down organizations we're going to stop doing all this spending stuff we're going to de-lever the public sector and what we're going to do is we're going to push talent, capital, energy, et cetera, into the private market. It's your turn to pick up the ball and bring us to the promised land, right? It's kind of like I think of in football, you know what a lateral is? No. A lateral is when somebody's running down the field with the ball, you can't throw the ball unless you're the quarterback forward, right? It's illegal.

Oh. But what you can do is you can take the ball and somebody's running next to you and you can toss it to them and then they can keep running. Oh, you can toss but not throw? Yeah, you toss it to the side, right? And there's a bunch of rules that I'm not going to get into, but it's a lateral. That's what we're doing in the economy right now. We're saying the public sector, you ran a good race, lateral it, let's go private sector. We got this. And so if you're in the private sector as an investor or a business person, this is your time to shine, get to work. They're telling you they're going to de-lever the public sector. They're going to put capital, time, attention, people, et cetera, into the private sector and run. And as part of that, they realize as they

move all those resources over to the private sector. They, on top of that, are going to deregulate. What does deregulate mean? It means they're going to remove a bunch of the rules that they feel are onerous so that now not only do you have time, capital, and people coming, but now you've got looser rules, which means then you can run even faster, right? And so if you think about this, if you want an economy to grow, it cannot sustainably grow forever using the public sector. has to use the private sector. That's what America was built on. Risk-taking, innovation, right? GDP growth, industrialization, all this stuff. That's where we're headed. And so when he's talking about this, they use big words. Scott Besson is the man to talk to the market.

That guy gets on and the market goes up. You know why? Because Scott Besson just sits there and he says, who's that? Everyone calm down. Yesterday, we were talking to someone and they were like, Scott Besson is great on CNBC because he will just bore you to death but you trust what he's saying he ain't boring me I gotta guess up there I say woo oh yeah going to the private sector

this man going to deleverage the public market I watched Anthony turn on CNBC at like 8am go up to the TV like this close and just stare at Scott Besson up close and personal to hear every word coming out of that man's mouth I didn't want to say this to my wife before

But now that we're in a public area where she can't murder me live on screen, I did that because you and our children are loud and I got bad hearing, so I couldn't hear. It wasn't because of my eyes. My eyes are fine. I got 20-20 vision, both in hindsight and forward. But my ears, I need a little help. And, you know, until they invent some way for me to have headphones for the TV, which, by the way, somebody said I'll buy all of them, I got to get close to the screen. Guys, okay. So what you thought, see, don't always judge a book by its cover.

You're like, oh, look at this old guy trying to get his eyes working. No, no, I didn't think it was your eyes. But instead you didn't realize it was my ears. I just knew that you wanted to be close to Scott. Well, if I can't hear, I got to get closer. So Scott Vessant in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal also said, in the first 100 days of his presidency, we have laid the groundwork to rebalance global trade,

restore America's industrial base, and build an economy that allows Wall Street and Main Street to rise together. and that's kind of like what you were saying in the beginning not now but before so Besson and I we simpatico but by the way go back to Warren Buffett me and Warren Buffett dapped up on uh on the recent uh market you know why he also said last 45 days 100 days he said pick time frame he goes this is a nothing burger and don't worry about this stock market volatility yes he said that on stage all these people who are like oh pops me lost his mind literally I got people that I've known for a long time who are DMing me all this crazy stuff, telling me about

how I'm just, I'm blind. I don't understand stuff, whatever. And I continue to tell them. He's not blind. It's his hearing. I don't care about right or left or which president's in office. I'm just looking at the economy. And now Warren Buffett's saying what I've been saying the whole time. This doesn't matter. It's a nothing. Scott Besson is saying the same thing I've been saying, right? And so you keep coming back to this idea that everyone who was being fearful, they got roped in to the consensus and the consensus is wrong. Go back, find the tape a couple of weeks ago, a month ago, two months ago, whatever. What did I tell you? The number one way to know

that the consensus is wrong is when all the economists agree on something. The second they all agree on something, I take the other side and we go back, bam, perfect. I thought that we were supposed to be in the Great Depression. I thought that we were supposed be down 40% by now. The tariffs, they're so bad. We're up 11%. We're down 3% on the year. Gold and Bitcoin, we're up. We're rocking. We're going to hit all-time highs this year. Guys, do you know how challenging it is to be married to someone who loves to take the other side? Loves. Well, if you've got a history of being right, sometimes maybe you should join me on the other side. That's all we got. Amazing.

but okay by the way uh i just want to uh real quick because you're so kind to sit here and uh listen to my nonsense um will you tell us about this ryan serhant uh piece that you have coming out okay it's gonna come out tomorrow morning tomorrow morning on readtheprofile.com what was the url readtheprofile.com here's one more time no anthony uh don't embarrass me in front of the people. Okay. So R-E-A-D-T-H-E-P-R-O-F-I-L-E, readtheprofile.com. Go ahead. Thank God you spelled that right. Okay. So on readtheprofile.com tomorrow, I have a long form profile that I've been working on for the last three months on Ryan Serhant. For those of you who don't know, he is a real estate entrepreneur. He started on a million dollar listing on Bravo.

Um, and then he made his way to, he was a, you know, just a regular real estate agent. And then in 2020, he left, uh, the brokerage he was working for to start his own. And I think, um, this story, yes, it's about Ryan Serhant, but it's more about kind of like where we are with modern entrepreneurship because he is someone who realized that there's so much power and leverage in distribution and having an audience that he does not run his brokerage like a real estate firm. He runs his brokerage like a media company with a real estate arm. So the real estate is just one part of it. Maybe it's the part that like most people that brings in the most revenue, but he sees himself as a media brand. And he sees himself as basically

like David going up against the Goliaths of real estate, real estate, these deep pocketed real estate firms, but he has what they don't, which is maybe he doesn't have that much capital and that much, that many agents, but he does have a really powerful distribution engine. And so the stories about that, how he built his business, but it's also kind of like a very human story in that Ryan comes across on social media as very likable, very authentic, very charismatic. But underneath all of that polished exterior, I discovered through my reporting and shadowing him and talking to 20 people around him is that there's he's driven by something much more powerful and much more complicated and darker than just I want to be successful, which is he's driven by revenge. And I think that that, you know, for a lot of people got me hype when I heard that very powerful. I said, dude, he said, I'm going to be successful to prove everyone wrong.

I said, I like that guy. thank you guys see you guys next time