What's up, everyone? This is Anthony promptly on. Oh, many of, you know, me as Pop. You're listening to the pump 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 got
An awesome episode with Polina Pompey. Ah, no, we talked about Bitcoin, the new all-time high, where prices are going and why Bitcoin may be telling us something that no one is talking about yet, but everyone should be. Then we get into Elon Musk. How he made seventy billion dollars since Donald Trump's been elected. Why that may not be enough money, and how is Elon Musk possibly underpaid while unique do? So you're going to want to pay attention to on that one? Then we get into Donald Trump's tax cuts and Kenny actually balance the budget. What's going to happen in the United States? And should you pay less taxes or not? We then talked about Vice.
Harris and all the spending of her campaign, how she went into debt, who she paid the money to, and why, there are so many issues on that front. And lastly, we finish up with Gary Gensler, the SEC, and Regulatory bodies. There's lots of questions about who is going to run these organizations in a trump Administration and we get into all the details. Today's episode is packed with tons of insights, I promise that you will learn a lot if you watch the full thing and then when you get done going to the comments and let me know what you agree with what you don't agree with. I'm always trying to learn. Here's my latest conversation with pulling up Pump Liana.
Anthony pump, Logano runs, pump Investments, all views of him. And the guests on his podcast are surely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of pomp investment. 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 Gemini. The future is being built today and the future of
Isn't dollars Euros pounds or yet? 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 futurist technologists and designers like award-winning artist. Matt Griffin known for his illustrations for Dune, to craft a vision of the future with crypto and score the creative theme, go where dollars won't emphasizes exploration growth and the crypto markets Limitless potential whether it's going on that Martians.
Safari to capture an unforgettable photo of our heard of woolly mammoths grazing. The red planet, we're using Bitcoin to pay for your lift pass to go strata skiing down the mountain peak of a breathtaking comment whatever Adventures will be living. One thing is for sure. In a future this fantastic the limits of traditional currency. Simply cannot keep up Financial. Innovation will usher in this new frontier and so go. Where dollars won't with Gemini? Go check them out at Gemini.com. /, go where dollars won't
Don't again, go check it out at Gemini.com /. Go where dollars won't?
This episode is brought to you by bet online. Do you like making a profit from sports? Betting will set yourself up to take home the most profit possible using crypto to fund your sports, betting, casino and poker count at bet online. Dot AG, you can avoid costly transaction fees. Get your pals lightning fast and do it all securely and anonymously with the highest deposit and withdrawal limits in the industry. If you want to get in on the action do it the smart way. With crypto at bet online, .a G head to the website sign up with promo code.
Chomp 100 to get 100% bonus and your crypto deposit today. If you go and you deposit, they'll give you 100% bonus if you use promo. Code pomp 100 bet online. The game starts here, that online .a g. Go check them out today.
All right, plan was for stopping. You got all right, we got Bitcoin at an all-time high. It was treating, just shy of 90 thousand yesterday after breaching 80,000, just a day earlier. It feels like everywhere. You turn Bitcoin, just goes up. What's going on? I told you so. Oh, come on. I Told You. So when I told you guys a couple weeks ago, sideways Summer's over we're going to come out of hibernation, Bitcoin was start going up in the next couple of weeks because it is time. I talked
Out
how the having occurred earlier this year, for about six months, we go sideways. And then this thing wakes up and up, we go and guess what, that's exactly what happened. Not because I got a big brain, we all know I got a small brain, but because if you look at all of the market Cycles, before it takes about six months for that Supply shock to kind of work its way out. And then you start towards the end of the year, getting this demand increase, which we're seeing right now. And then it happens to Overlay with a easing monetary
A policy. Of course, the asset is going to go up and so predictable. Now what is most fascinating to me, is I am shocked at how fast it is going up. So, I went back and I looked in 2020 and I said to myself I remember that Bitcoin went up in November through March of 2021 and I said but I don't remember the numbers. Let me go do some detective work Bitcoin in the first week of November was about fifteen thousand dollars by March of 2021 Bitcoin was at sixty four thousand dollars.
Massive appreciation in five months. And so I said to myself, well what happened between the first week of November and the end of the year. Hmm, Bitcoin went from 15,000 to 30,000. So Bitcoins price doubled in the last two months of the year in 2020. I think that at the current Pace, I extrapolate out with my little math on my Excel sheet. Bitcoin is actually on track if it continues on this path to double by the end of the year. I'm not saying it's gonna happen.
Happen. I'm just saying, based on the first 10, 12 days of the month of November, given the price appreciation. We've seen so far that is the trajectory it's on. And so what ends up becoming really interesting is that these candles these days of appreciation, Bitcoin was up yesterday. 13%, we're not talking about a hundred million dollar asset. We're talking about an asset that is worth more than 1.5 trillion. Dollars is a 13% in the day and the craziest part is there was no news.
And it's not like somebody that no one had ever heard of before was announcing they bought Bitcoin, or the Bitcoin Corporation was coming out in announcing earnings or anything like that. Instead, this is simply Wall Street realizing that they are under allocated to bitcoin. And so they start buying as they buy, it brings more attention become was the number one story on. CNBC Bloomberg, Fox Business Etcetera. Yesterday, and so I set down last night. I said to myself,
This can't all just be Wall Street saying I'm under allocated. They've known about Bitcoin. The ETS gotta prove to almost a year ago. What the heck is going on and then that little brain of mine, all of a sudden had a stroke of an idea oh thank God a little a little lightning flash went off and I said to myself, Bitcoin is speaking to us. Why are we not listening Bitcoin is not telling us anything about Wall Street. Bitcoin is yelling and
Screaming. It's setting the alarm off. It's calling the bluff of the politicians. The politicians have accelerated, their spending. The national debt has exploded by eight hundred and fifty billion dollars in the last 90 days. These people are spending faster now than they were 90 days ago. Bitcoin is telling us pay attention, the politicians are destroying the future, and that's why it's going up. And some during that same three-month period, where the politicians
Added 850 billion dollars to the national debt Bitcoin is up 44 percent. Bitcoin is telling on the politicians we're just all being too dumb enough to listen. Now do we not think that this price increase has anything to do with the fact that Trump was elected, president? Of course, it does. Donald Trump has a reputation for making people Rich. There are plenty of things that people don't like about Donald Trump. There's plenty of things people like about him.
I'm an independent, I don't give a hell about your tribalism, whatever side of the aisle. You're on knock yourselves out. I don't care about that. I just call it how I see it. When Donald Trump walks in the room, a lot of people think he's going to make money and so am I? And so, when Donald Trump got elected asset prices took off your stock market went up. Crypto in up, many, many other assets all go up. Why is that important? Because if Donald Trump walks in the room and says, I'm going to the White House and everyone thinks this guy's upset,
What the stock market will view president in the White House? Who's obsessed with the stock market? The stock market is probably gonna go up. That's, that's his metric, that's his kpi. What you measure is what you move and his measurement is the stock market. So he's going to move it higher. And so, if the stock market goes up under Donald Trump, it reinforces the reputation that Donald Trump makes a stock market go up. And so investors are saying to themselves. I previously was operating in an uncertain environment. I did not know whether the executive branch.
He was behind me or in front of me, they were a threat to my Capital. They continued to talk about raising the tax rates. They continue to talk about implementing unrealized capital gains tax. They continue to pursue policies that hurt my portfolio despite that the stock market is still at or near all-time Highs. But now somebody is walking into the White House who is pro-business, who is pro investor and has a reputation for making the stock market. Go up and investors now feel safety.
And they are allocating capital and going risk on because they believe that Donald Trump is going to make the stock market go up. It's already happening, he hasn't even assumed office yet. Imagine what is going to happen for the next four years? Yeah. The speaking of like the lack of clarity around the regulatory environment, the CIO of bitwise, Matt Hogan, I think is how you pronounce his last name. He said that's just shifted 180 degrees were now in a positive regulatory environment. We now have Tailwinds from that, and
that comes in the case of a market that was already in a bull market. So that's going to push us higher. There's a difference between bureaucrats running the place and Market participants run the place and there's a lot of people who critique having a market participant in the White House and making the decisions of who's going to run these regulatory organizations. But what we know is that the market participants are going to be much more pro-market than the bureaucrats when the bureaucrats get in there. Look at across all of these regulatory bodies look across the administration. There's a bunch of people have never operated in the actual
It and so when you go and you listen to what they're saying, they're basically operating on academic Theory but when you go and you talk to a market participant, they tell you how it actually works. And so, what always cracks me up is take, let's say, Bon trades in America. I forget the exact statistic, but it's something like over 80 percent of bond trading in America. Still happens over Bloomberg terminals in the chat function or over the phone, an academical sit there and say, well obviously, technology has been created and we're going to be able to trade these much more efficiently over that one more.
Whatever. It's like no you go talk to the person actually trades Bonds on daily basis and they're like, we use Bloomberg chat or used Tulsa. There's no reason in the internet age that those are the two things that they would use. But that's what they use. And so, understanding the nuances of the market is really important because if you don't understand the technology, if you don't understand the assets, if you don't understand how the markets work, how do you regulate them? And so, there's always this balance, right? You don't want to just put a bunch of Industry, insiders into regulatory bodies and then they basically help out their friends. But you also need people who have an understanding of the market that
Use the Nuance knowledge to be able to create rules that make sense. And so I think that right now, we have never seen in my lifetime. The American people as excited about government waste as we do right now, the fact that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk is teaming up with Donald Trump and a whole bunch of other people. And he is saying we are going to slash government spending. There are people who don't even know how to spell government spending. And they are on Twitter right now saying /. The spending we've never seen this before and so my guess.
Is that you're going to put people in a room with the mandate to slash government spending and they're going to do it. Then you're also going to see people who are saying hey we voted you into office because we want inflation to come down. We want housing to be more affordable. We want stocks to go up. We want you to protect our right to own Bitcoin and to self custody at etcetera. And I think that the administration based on a number of different moves that they're making number of the people that they're putting into certain places, they are taking that mandate very seriously. And I hope that they deliver on these promises and no matter what
So I feel like it's good for Bitcoin because going up regardless who became the president but Donald Trump definitely is going in there saying I'm going to be the pro Bitcoin president. The big question right now is will he actually deliver on the promise to establish the Bitcoin? Strategic reserve, the Bitcoin, strategic reserves is what is that bunch of different policies for it. But the idea is a central bank or a sovereign wealth fund, they hold different assets. And so, central banks have been buying a lot of gold Gold's up, 30, 35 percent this year. So, why is that happening? Well, big pools of capital like Central.
Are buying gold. They're using it as part of their reserves, how are they actually going to store that wealth? None of them for the most part are using Bitcoin and so this idea of a strategic reserve of Bitcoin is if Bitcoin is going to be really valuable and is only 21 million of them. The United States should own some today, we have about 200,000 big corner, so that we've gotten through ceasing from different criminal cases, Etc. And so, Donald Trump made a promise that we were not going to sell any more of that so that could be the establishment or the start of a strategic Reserve that strategic Reserve is just
Wine is held on the United States, government's balance sheet and we don't sell it if it goes up a lot. Great, if it doesn't. That's fine too. We already have the Bitcoin, just don't sell it now, somebody like RFK jr. He made a promise that he actually wanted to implement it plan to buy more Bitcoin. If you look at Cynthia lummis, Senator she has come out and she said well, hold on a second. Why don't we buy 1 million Bitcoin and we can do that over the next five years or so? Here's how much it's gonna cost. Let's go not just keep the Bitcoin we have let's actually go buy Bitcoin put it on the go.
I meant balance sheet, if the United States goes and establishes a Bitcoin strategic reserve, it will kick off a global fomo that we've never seen before. Because every single nation state will say, if you're going to buy it, if you're the biggest economy, if you're the one, who is the global police and you got Bitcoin, I better have some too and so, it's fun and games when you've got individuals fighting over Bitcoin in circulation, it's even funnier and more interesting when you've got corporations and financial institutions. But the
Boss is the central bank's is The Sovereign wealth funds. And when you have people showing up with trillions of dollars in assets and they say, we're going to buy this asset, this thing will Skyrocket. Now, the question is, are the cycles over? Are we going to get these massive, you know, increases in price and then these big drops. If you would ask people over the summer, they would have said, no. I think that we just kind of grind up slowly. And there's not kind of these big blow off tops based on the price movement of the last two to three weeks.
There may be bigger, blow offs in the future than there were previously and so if you get these blow-off tops, you still are going to get Market draw downs. But I was asked on Fox a couple of weeks ago. They said, you know, what is the headline in 2026? And I jokingly said Bitcoin Crashers to 100K because that was like a dream of people when Bitcoin was at 20K. I mean I remember how excited everybody was when it hit 30 K. And so if it runs up and then it crashes to 100,000 dollars,
You will be like, oh my God, you know, so much fear whatever slavin there yet. But that's the type of thing that has happened in this market. And so I don't know how the future will play out. But what I do know is that the United States has an opportunity to be the leader on a global stage. When it comes to bitcoin, there's plenty of people who don't like Bitcoin but I believe that Bitcoin will continue to be the best store of wealth available to anyone in the world. And so if that is true and the United States needs to store its own wealth, the same way that is people need to store their wealth companies and financial institutions, then the United States should have
Establish the Strategic Reserve, they should buy it, put it to the side, forget about it, don't touch it, don't trade it. Don't try to get cute with it and instead let's go operate. Let's go deregulate the energy industry. Let's go build all the things we need to do to make the United States. This amazing place to live and to be prosperous and the Bitcoin will take care of the Bitcoin and we'll be fine in the future. So, the government needs to be Diamond hands, not Scissorhands. The United States is amazing, but it's a bureaucratic. And so when
You're a
Critic. You have this deadlock or this gridlock, that makes it very hard to make decisions and so the same way that the United States is slow to make certain actions or kind of make certain decisions. Once they buy the Bitcoin, they put in the teacher preserve, I would not bet on the United States being effective enough to actually make the decision to sell it. And so, my general thought process is the setting up is way more important than anything else because once it's set it'll be very hard to kind of stop the government from
From the direction of travel that it is which is just simply hold the Bitcoin. How come? Nobody says Diamond hands anymore. They do. Do they do. Yeah. Just on the internet. Okay, it's not cool. Yeah when you hear the media talking about it then you'll know you know hey things are getting frothy but it's not Scissorhands. What is the 10? I don't know where that came from. No, the one that / hands paper hands. Yeah. Diamond hands and paper hands. That's what it is. Yeah, they say Dave, Portnoy has beforehand, sorry, somebody else and something else and was like, I don't think that's it, okay. Elon Musk spent at least 130 million dollars to help.
Get Donald Trump elected that obviously paid off because now Tesla skyrocketing and he has about 70 billion dollars richer on paper because of Tesla stock. But what do we think? I mean mosque. I feel like everything he touches just explodes. I think that Elon Musk realized there was an existential threat to the United States in terms of the woke agenda in terms of the lack of free speech, in terms of the unsecured border Etc. And he decided that it was important for
him to participate because he did not participate in this way. In the 2016 election, Elon Musk is the type of person from what you see, what he works on etcetera. He don't give a shit about politics. Yeah, right. Well Baltic, scared about Elon Musk. That's the difference, right? Ilan didn't care about it, but he ran into a roadblock. And so a lot of people don't realize this, but let's say as an example Ilan, there's the famous story. Ilan was sitting around and they were talking about building tunnels. And he said, I maybe we should like, get good at building tunnels, there's a speck.
As to why they want to build the tunnels with it, whether they're practicing for Mars where they want to do the kind of hyperloop stuff underneath the ground, whatever, but we should build tunnels, it was on a Friday and there were sitting in the conference room and he asked the team. He said, how long will it take you guys to get the equipment start, you know, trying to dig a tunnel? And they basically were like we think we can get started by like in a two weeks from now. And he said, why don't you go rent the equipment right now and go to the parking lot? And see how far you can get by Sunday. Let's start right now and they're like, okay.
Okay. And so they went they moved all the employee cars and they started digging that day, right? Like that is elon's whole attitude. It's just like do it now and so he ran into a roadblock. Imagine they started to talk about it publicly. Imagine being told, you're trying to create a reusable Rockets, the help to settle Mars and they want you to kidnap a seal, and do testing on the seals ears again. I'm not saying that you shouldn't pay attention to the environment. What I am saying though is that's pretty insane and so when he ran into that political kind of
Station, he said to himself, I gotta solve the problem. And so, Elon Musk actually is not eligible to be pressing the United States, right? He was born in South Africa but I saw somebody online. Say Elon did the second best thing is he got the president elected and so he went, he's been 130 million dollars. He got Trump into office and now he is heavily involved in creating efficiency in the government via this department of government efficiency. What I think is probably the most interesting part of this entire situation is that people drastically underestimate. How much?
Elon Musk has become a role model for young men in this country, everyone wants to point at Elon Musk and all the adults want to yell and scream about, you know, political stuff for free speech, or they don't like them, or they like them, or whatever. Then, people don't care, young people. See, a guy who's the richest man in the world? Who is shitposting on Twitter? Who runs five different multi-billion dollar companies and he's doing cool stuff. He's launching Rockets. He's putting computers in people's brains right he's got Tesla and self-driving cars. All the stuff like
He's cool and so do the younger generation. They all look at this guy and they're like, man, Elon Musk is who I want to be. And so when Ilan came out and he said, this is a battle worth fighting. I'm gonna go spend my time and money on doing this. There's a lot of people who I think said, hey, that's important and they went they follow them and so when we go and we look at Elon getting seventy billion dollars richer, I think that's not enough and people don't understand in a capitalist Society, the person who creates the most value should get the most money.
That is how capitalism Works name. Somebody who has created more value than Elon Musk you can't. And so Elon deserves to be the richest person because he created the most value the question is is he actually getting paid enough for the value that he's being that he's creating my argument would be that if he'll on right now was worth 500 billion instead of 300 billion, the world would be just as good off and it probably would be much more you know kind of indicative of the
you that he's created. And so when people look at that 70 billion dollars, they hold on a second here, actually we should be having a conversation about is Elon Musk underpaid because of the value that he's created, right? And you can kind of go to this. The best entrepreneur In Our Lifetime. How much is he worth?
Yeah, I also love that he's an immigrant from South Africa, and he came and built, all this value in America. It's like the ultimate story, okay? And he's proud to be in America, which I think is an important part is, you know, there's a lot of other places around the world that he could build certain products and services but he does it here in the United States. And again he I think took immense personal risk. It Donald Trump does not get elected because he threw so much weight behind him if Yuri Lon.
Do you think that the next government would mess with your companies? Do you think that they'd come investigate? You do? They think that they would personally come after you probably they were already doing it before the election. Yeah, and so it just goes back to this idea that we need as much free competition in America as possible, right? We cannot have bureaucrats playing Caesar and basically, thumbs up, thumbs down in the success of a company. That is not how the free market works. And so do we need certain regulations, of course.
We need as many regulations as we have now. Absolutely not, we have to get back to that free market capitalism and somebody like, Elon I think is like a sledgehammer, he walks in and he just breaks down. Whatever is there and that Altima is what unleashes what America really was built on. Yeah, I think you and I always talk about like, what if the government was run by entrepreneurs and now we actually get to see that. So I think that will be an interesting experiment in the America story because he's surrounded himself with people who run companies. So running the
Government as a business will be an interesting experiment. The ideas have always come from the private market, right? What a lot of people realize is these politicians? They spend immense amount of time talking to the private market, right? And the private Market, they don't want to go be a politician, but they make suggestions. You should do this. You should do that. You should do this. Now, what Trump is attempting to do, we don't know if he's gonna be successful or not, is he is trying to bring those people more into the government? And say, listen, I'll create new things that you can operate where
Don't have
to have a dot gov email email. You don't have to work here just give us the answers. Will go implement it and so I think that's people like Howard lutnick Elon Musk, Etc. They're all saying I don't actually work in the government but I am going to help you get the right ideas. Get the right people in the places, get the actual funding. And then, let's go and execute on the stuff you remember in 2016, he had, he tried something like a Founder Roundtable of advisers table, CEO round table, but then Trump became toxic and they all quit.
It. So there's there's a lot of CEOs, who I remember the very first one. Rex Tillerson he came out of there. I think of Steve schwarzman, Ilan. Was at it, Etc. And they all they were doing like postgame interviews with a walked out, right? The media was asking a bunch of questions, and they all were like, you know, very very positively speaking about Trump and then within two or three years, basically, all of them I think, you know, kind of felt like, hey, maybe this isn't the thing that I should be associated with. And so, they started to back away. Interestingly, almost every single one of those
People and not all but almost every single one that was in that original group endorsed Trump for president this time. And so they kind of, you know, they saw the kind of direction that we were headed. They said, No. Actually, that's the one that we should go with. I was gonna say, instead of a round table this time, he's actually like moving them further. More intimately into the administration. I've seen multiple pictures of Elon Musk at Mar-A-Lago like in meetings. Yeah, right. And so when you see that stuff, you say, okay, if I am an American citizen, what team
Um, do I want to hire? I want to hire the best. Elon Musk is probably better than most people regardless of the problem. Yeah, I think of a problem the government has and think whoever is currently working on it or Ilan? Who's more likely to solve the problem? Yeah. And not just that one of our friends said this a long time ago and it remains true, he said think about your smartest friends. How many of them are going into politics, your smartest, friends are probably going into starting companies.
Or
Finance or something like that. Very few of them are, like, I'm going to be a politician. I think that this is slowly starting to change. You think she's like JD Vance, you see, people like vivec ramaswamy like a couple of these folks, but I think they got inspired because of hundred percent but you see those people? And now you're like, oh wait a second regardless of whether you agree with him or not, pretty objectively, like these people are intelligent, right? They are, they are good. When they talk right there, they communicate. Well, they do all that stuff. I think part of the challenge for
The Democrat Party moving forward is going to be. Where are your young stars? And so a lot of the young stars that they previously, kind of I think we're betting the party on were very far left in America, just gave a mandate that said we don't want that. And so there's an opportunity for the Democrat Party to go find those young stars and go and put them up on a pedestal and say, here's our answer to JD Vans. Here's our answer to the vake. Here's our answer to whoever we've got our own stars but
Now, it's a question mark. We don't know who those people are and I think some of them will emerge, right? And part of it is the party saying, hey, we want you to be the young star. Some of it will be young, people will be inspired, right? Who kind of lean left and say, hey hold on a second. Here I saw what happened? We got to go fix them. A lot of their young Stars, turned Republican. Wow, that's a whole different situation. Okay, let's talk Trump tax cuts so I found this personally, very interesting. So Trump has promised
Just much more to both individuals and businesses on tax policy. Tax cuts on tip to income overtime, pay some social security taxes, tax cuts for First Responders and the military and Americans living abroad and deductions for auto loan, interest among others. But then the you know, I was like reading more and the head of you know, this expert on tax legislation said, conservatives don't have the stomach to do all the 2017 cuts and keep campaign.
Is on the deficit. So what do you think? I can? He deliver on all of these tax cuts without increasing? The deficit. It's very hard to do. Think of, if you cut taxes, you have to cut spending more, right? If you want the deficit to come down, you also have the option to increase Revenue elsewhere, and so things, like tariffs things like monetizing, the balance, sheet etcetera, all potential options, but I do think that although it would be unpopular, I
Think that there is probably somewhere between 60 to 80 percent of the government budget that you could slash and the government will continue to run, does it mean to be easy to be Rocky to do it? But I do think that the government can run with a 60 to 80 percent reduction in spending and be perfectly fine. Anthony had a debate with someone on this recently. What was your example of you said, think about like the not DMV, maybe the post office was it? Or just think of any any government thing that you engage with, right?
Right? The 10%, it is not, but here's a good example, right? I'll give you two when Bill Walsh was hired by the San Francisco 49ers. He came in, they were the worst team in the league and he wrote this great book that's called the score will take care of itself. And when he walked in the building, he's a football coach, he's coming into a horrible organization. The first thing that he did is he went and he spent time with the receptionist
And he sat with the receptionist and he said, I'm going to teach all of you. How to answer the phone, you're the head football coach, you're supposed to be doing x's and o's in finding the right players and doing stuff on the field. He said, no the culture of this place is going to be set by the receptionist because they are the first line of defense when somebody interacts with our organization. The first interaction that you have with the San Francisco 49ers is. If I'm the head coach is you call and the receptionist was the phone true.
How do we do that in an excellent manner? There is no Excellence. Going on in the US government. There is no standard that they're being held to write. Go and look at the TSA, just go to the airport and watch what people are doing. If it was a for-profit organization that was actually trying to achieve Excellence, they would be monitoring. What are our employees doing? How are they treating the staff? How are they actually pushing people through quicker? How the heck is it possible that
You have sometimes 20 different, TSA agents and you've got a backed-up line.
It's not excellent. And so the reason is, they keep throwing more and more people at these problems. And then what happens is, they get this bloated and there anymore? Not excellent people at the problem. Depict people are not excellent or not. Excellent. You can take any group of people and make them. Excellent. If you have good leadership. But instead what happens is the TSA goes and they hire a bunch of people. So say, okay now we have 10 people here, they're all going to work at this one station. So we got two people up the tops and it
Your socks and shoes off. Take your belt off, take your, you know, that. Okay, so you got one person that's their job, I can make sure everything gets put correctly on the Belt. You got somebody who's monitoring, they got somebody who's patting down right. Then you got somebody's gonna do the extra bag checks. Like all there's like ten people for a single Lane within the TSA says, oh, there's 10 people. We need a manager for those 10 people and then the manager for each lane, we also need somebody to do this whole gate and so it all of a sudden, you're like, wait a minute, there's like 50 people.
Looking at this one, TSA gate empty words, they're missing their flights and then they say, okay, but now there's four gates at the airport. So we also need to have somebody who manages all that next. You know there's like seven layers of bureaucracy at one airport times every airport in the country and that's just the TSA. And so you say to yourself, hold on a second. If you were to go in and you are to design this from scratch,
Zero based budgeting and you were to say to an entrepreneur you get X dollars per year to do this. You think they can do it more efficiently. Of course they could. And so it goes back to this idea of what we have done is we've just put bureaucracy on bureaucracy, on bureaucracy and then we have basically fulfilled, all these roles with people they can't get fired.
The reason why people want government jobs is because it's incredibly difficult to get fired from them. If you have a job where you can't get fired, a lot of people don't try hard, a lot of people don't pursue the standard of Excellence and so you have to change that stuff. You have to say we are going to go back to an area where we need to be efficient. We need to deliver on the service that the American people are paying us and we need to do it.
A manner that is not wasteful but right now, there's no incentive to do any of that stuff. And so this is a deeply deeply seated problem. It is incredibly difficult because basically, you gotta go to the government. You gotta say, we need to be able to fire people. Well, guess what happened. There's unions there's government workers. There's all these. They fought so hard so that you can't fire them.
So what do you do? Somebody has to go in and smash, the incumbent kind of structure and it may take an executive order it may take whatever. Yeah. But yeah, but but that is the only way that you break this stuff. Here's the problem. Trump has four years and four years only like, that's it. Can he really realistically? If you're honest with yourself, do all of this dismantle, all of this and like it's just you don't need to do it in every single Department, what you gotta do, right?
Right. If I was Donald Trump walking into office, 30 days. We're doing it to one Department in 30 days. We're going to transform one department and we are going to tell the American people. Here's where we start. And here's where we ended. We had X number of employees. Now, we're down to this. We've increased the time that you stand in line at the TSA from this, and we've dropped it down to this. We've increased the number of positive interactions or NPS score went from that. Like, like that's what you do and you would in 30 days and you do it. So swiftly, that people don't even believe.
That it was possible.
Elon Musk fired, 80% of the Twitter staff in like three months. He did a massive cut. Like, okay, we saw up to maybe we did another one, anything you need a third one. So if he'll on can do that and it's not like there was your 500 employees and there was thousands of employees there that he was able to go and do this to. You can absolutely do it in organization and maybe something like the TSA is too difficult to start with. It's very big, it's very fragmented, you've got the interaction with the
The American people on a daily basis so it's very kind of painful, right? If you do, if it's understaffed or whatever, but there's plenty of other things that you can do. I also think that they current Administration should create a website and they should basically keep a scoreboard of how much money they create of new revenue for the American people. Selling off buildings, leasing things driving money through, tariffs, etcetera, and run that scoreboard up as much as you can. And every time someone says, what are you doing for?
I'm paying you taxes. Where's that money going? You point to the scoreboard, you show them were cutting. The this were making money here. Those are the things that all of a sudden people start to say, you know what, maybe I don't like all your policies or whatever, but you're telling me, you give me a report. The problem is that politicians have always hid behind. The fact, they don't want to talk about the details, because when they talk about the details, they can get attacked. But Donald Trump knows. You only got four years. He can't be president again. He's 78 years old. Go for it. Do we think
Look JD Vance runs for president, JD Vance is somebody left a comment on Joe Rogan's interview with JD Vance. They said, man that's wild your the 47th and forty eighth president on your podcast in the last week, talking about JD Vance videos, president, I don't know. Right now, be interesting, probably wants to be the president, but let's see how this goes. Yeah, there's a world where maybe the current administrator the incoming Administration, completely fumbles the ball. Yeah, right. And it's just horrible. Well American, people probably are going to
Will we don't want that. And so you don't, you don't get the kind of free pass of. If you're the vice president, gonna be the president. It does Harris just found out instead. It's all about or your policy is actually the thing that the American people want. All right, Kamala Harris, her campaign team raised a billion dollars and somehow ended up in more than 20 million dollars in debt. Guess how that happened? Oprah her endorsement cost a million dollars. The
Shirts were 20 million, the influencers were four million and then the call her daddy set was a hundred thousand dollars. I mean there's got to be more spending hear that but address is just that alone as a lot of money. Let me give you a couple of details. I know someone who got approached for to make videos for Kamala Harris. This person has got nothing to do with politics and in sponsor. Yeah these got bigger audience there outside of politics whole thing and
They were shocked. They didn't even ask how much money it. So, I'm not doing that. I'm not voting for the person, I'm not doing that. But do you know how many people probably said well, how much money? Yeah, yeah. Of course, they give me some more, right? The difference is that if you want to see why Donald Trump won, is because Donald Trump, Ali had more videos created for him. Then Harris did, if you actually went looked at the numbers and even pay for a single one of them, it's the difference between a true authentic fan base and then people who are being paid to do it. And so if you look at those,
Rally's. Imagine spending all the money to set up the facilities do all the stuff and then you're paying five, ten twenty million dollars to people to come. Perform. Yeah. Obviously these things exploding cost, right? If you pay them, a five million dollars to show up your entry price for this event, before you set anything up as five million dollars. Yeah. And then you've got all of the other things that go into it. And so, I think that
We are now entering an age where the bureaucrats will continue to leverage using money. It's kind of like a startup that doesn't have product Market fit. They keep spending money to try to say hey look we're having people are coming to our website. Instead the company that has product Market fit, they do no marketing, right? Tesla doesn't do marketing. The product speaks for itself but a lot of other car companies, they're spending immense amounts of money. And so that is the difference here is that Trump had product Market fit. He didn't need to spend
Any
money. But on top of that, I saw a statistic, the stat that I saw was that Harris spent 500 million dollars on her team whether it's 50 or 500, Trump only spent 10 million dollars. And so if Trump spent 10 and harrasment 5 or 50 x more, that alone shows you that it's just a different way to actually look at how are you going to use money? And it goes back to this idea that when you run a business before, when you
stand how revenue and expenses work, you have a very, very different approach and ultimately it goes back to this idea of. Do you respect money or not, right? If you talk to an entrepreneur, a small business owner, anyone who operates, they will tell you, I respect money cuz I know how hard it is to get it and I know how quickly you can lose it and they respect the dollar and so they don't spend it as if it's never going to end. But if you're a politician,
A career politician and is not your money. Yeah. You just spend everybody else's money like it's never gonna end. Wait, just a really quick aside, but you know what, I just thought about people normally when they have a product and then they find out that the founder has a certain point of view that they don't agree with their. Like, I'm never shopping from X again, or from this again, but I have not seen anybody say, oh, Elon Musk has a line with
Trump. I'm gonna boycott his products. What? Maybe. But a lot of people are still buying Tesla's. There are a lot of people still buying Tesla's. There are some people who said, hey, I'm not gonna by Tesla's anymore. I saw a couple people said I'm selling my test out, what I'm really but but not not anywhere near like a big number. My favorite is the people who have bumper stickers. The say I like the card out, the guy who built it. I have a nice little have a Tesla right? But see like it's like a product that's so high quality that is just like of course and
Just think about if you could take that same thing where they're such great product Market fit that even though people don't like you as the Creator, they still buy it. Imagine if we did that to education in this country, we're parents were like, I don't even like the current Administration, but the school is so good. In the public school system that I, that I gotta send my kid there. Yeah, right. That's not what we do. Instead, we take this approach of do the bare minimum, and when you do the bare minimum, the problem is that you then have people who don't actually hit the bare. Minimum your goal was the bare minimum but they under-deliver, it's
it ends up being worse. I saw a statistic you should Google is I saw a statistic on the national literacy rate.
That is it was shocking to me. And in the US the US, the stat that I saw, if I remember it correctly with something like, 25% of Americans don't meet the like standard literacy rate. Is there a number out? 21 percent of adults are illiterate? There you go, ski four percent of adults. Have a literacy below sixth. Great grade level. Think about this for a second. We are a country that provides public education with US taxpayer dollars.
To our population. So more than half of adults 21 percent of u.s. adults are illiterate, how is that possible? We're not talking about. Hey there's a big SAT Word that I don't know how to read or pronounce. They're illiterate one out of five, American adult is illiterate but again over half, 1 out of 2 cannot have a literacy rate higher than sixth grade. What are we doing here? Take a sledgehammer.
Hammer and destroy the incumbent system and rebuild it so that you can build something that can actually benefit the people, if you had a product, that promise, something and one out of two of every customers that came through and use your product, did not get the desired outcome, you'd be out of business. Yeah, it is insane that the most prosperous nation in the world has 10.
Every two Americans that cannot read above a sixth, grade level, what are we doing? And that rage that just complete discomfort that disapproval of the system is why Donald Trump won the popular vote? Is this people when that Ballot Box and they said enough is enough, I don't even know if this guy actually is the guy who can solve it, but what I know is that the people within the system are not going to do anything different, and I think that is why
Why this was such a landslide? Yeah. Okay. Gary Gensler is likely to resign and there's some possible candidates who could take his place. Do you have any that you think would do it? Let's fast forward. 10 years from now I think that Gary Gensler is reputations. The SEC. Commissioner as SEC chairman is going to be much more positive than people believe it to be today. If I
So
when I pull, all of my friends in the crypto industry, a lot of them will Express, you know, unhappiness with Kinsler and his administration. I think that's well covered in the media, but I always go back and I look at George w--, Bush. George w--. Bush was not very popular because of the wars George w--. Bush paints. He's friends with Michelle Obama today and people actually have a much better view of him, you know?
Teen years, almost 20 years, after his presidency, the more time that passes, the more nostalgic kind of sets in people are able to kind of evolve their reputation at cetera. I think that Gary Gensler is going to be able to hang his hat. On the fact that he approved coin basis. IPO, he approved the first ever Bitcoin ETF in the United States and he approved The Ether ETF in the United State claim basis IPO. Yes. Coinbase went public with Kinsler as the SEC.
I
believe if I remember the dates correctly and so when you look at that, you say to yourself, okay? Regardless of the abrasiveness, the infighting the the debates, all this stuff, the results are going to end up being the resume. Hmm. And so it's very hard to see today with people in the crypto industry. But I do think that Ginsburg can have a very different reputation that maybe he has today, we'll see, but it's not on normal for these regulatory.
A body heads to either resign or for the new president come in and switch them out, that that's kind of a normal thing. And so I think that people are kind of grasping at straws to kind of tell a story of, you know, Pro crypto anti crypto, whatever. If you take the crypto topic out of it. I think that most of these regulatory body kind of leaders would change over anyways. And so it's probably less of a story than maybe people want to make it. Yeah, I do think it's interesting. Like, this is again, one of those like, political things we're trying,
Ump has promised the American people that day one of his administration, he's firing Gary guns, or technically. He can't do that. It says that he can't remove Gensler without cause until his term ends in 2026. But people think that Gary will resign himself, you just gave the answer what without cause. Yeah, was the cause listen. Listen, do you have to remember, it's
If you put enough smart people in a room and finding that challenge, they'll create a chart cause, right? They, they'll figure out a way to do it, right? And so, it comes back to this idea of yes, are there, technicalities is like, Jerome Powell, right? They said, if Donald Trump ask you to step down, will you? He said, no. And he basically insinuated that he would go to court to fight Trump. Who do you thinks gonna end up winning their? You really think that the Federal Reserve chairman is going to go to
Court be able to resist the full power of the executive branch to stay in power, right? Come on with, with an unfriendly president to you. Well, and then there's always the question of like from a reputation standpoint. Do you really want to be the one who did that or do you just say, hey look, you can't fire me but I'm gonna resign. Yeah, right. It all comes back to kind of like, what are you optimizing for? And some people may dig their heels in and you know, kind of fight stuff but for the most part I think people generally, you know,
And of this practice of new. President comes in. A lot of people were designed new president, you know, is able to then put in their people, the two candidates that I have seen floating around our Dan Gallagher who previously worked as an SEC commissioner and is currently the chief legal compliance and corporate Affairs, officer of Robin Hood markets Gallagher has criticized genzler SEC and ask for changes to the way the agency approaches crypto regulation. The other is Paul Atkins who was part of Trumps
16 transition team and also previously served as an SEC commissioner he is currently the CEO of consultancy Potomac Global Partners since 2017. He has served as a co-chair of the token Alliance which is an initiative of the Chamber of digital Commerce. So I think it's interesting that kind of like the sticking point or the issue is the crypto issue with us. You see things get one. I do think that a lot of people are interested in another name that I would love to put out there.
Know
if you'd want to do it but a Christian Carlo, he previously ran the cftc. I think that he could be a pretty interesting one. He's known as kind of crypto. Dad is very good lawyer. Do mom is mr. Uh, purse? Well, um, all right, right? And so you're either one of them would be great suggestions as well but usually when you hear kind of like, hey, here's the rumor. It's pretty much like the Administration has already narrowed it down to two or three people. Very rarely do at this point in the game. When you're ready, have the transition team in place
A short into the president's going to be at cetera. Is there kind of a surprise appointment? It happens from time to time, but if the names are being floated, it's probably because they've already said, hey, it's going to be one of these two or three people have a question. If the SEC chair, somebody who's very crypto friendly, right? Isn't there a risk that the fraud in the the riffraff of the crypto industry? What kind of not be right?
Deleted as much. No, because most of that stuff has happened to Offshore. So what you do is if you stamp down so hard in the United States, you push a lot of it offshore, which sounds great. But because we live in a digital age, people can still use all those products and services, right? So you like some of my FTX, it didn't matter instead, if you bring them into the regulatory fold and you say, hey, here's the rules, we're going to have oversight, right? You can actually probably catch things before they actually.
Become a problem. And so remember there's fraud that happens in the US Stock Market, right? It's not like there's some magic solution but I do think that the general goal here is you want to have two turns and then you want to be able to catch some portion of things before that, she end up hurting investors or whoever it's just really hard to do that if they're outside of your purview or the SEC doesn't have jurisdiction everywhere. And so, I think that part of the argument people have had
We want to work with regulatory bodies. We want to do this in America, but there's got to be some sort of, you know, kind of understanding of how we're going to do that. And that's ultimately what people are trying to figure out in an Ideal World. What is your view of the SEC? How should it operate in a perfect world? People smarter than me? We'll figure that out. I generally think that you want smart people who understand, the various Financial Industries. There's a whole range of complexity and some things are pretty straightforward. Some things are very
Very complex, you get into like, you know, kind of all kinds of derivative and financial products and instruments and stuff. Things that I might not even understand, right? Is it's hard to create these rules and then I think that you want people who have a good understanding of the law. Do you want people who have a good kind of network of Market? Participants they can draw on. And then you want people who genuinely care and I think that's actually very underrated is. If you have people who care about the market being successful about creating an environment, where people can come in and participate in a
From Fairway without having kind of too much of a regulatory burden etcetera. I think you get a better outcome. And so to me it's not about any one decision as much as it is like, do you have the right people in the room? And do they have the right kind of evaluation and decision making process? And if you can get those two things right, in terms of people and process then you're likely to get good outcomes regardless of what the topic is. And really I think as a market participant, that's all you can ask for, right? Is hey, do you have the right people in the room? Do you have a good process? Most of the
Things. You know, hopefully our Common Sense kind of outcomes every once in a while, something might not go our way, that's okay. But at least there's some predictability, there's some confidence in this process and it's not to say the SEC doesn't do that now, but it does mean that, you know, you got to kind of constantly keep improving and trying to deliver that message to the market. Great. Do you have any final thoughts for Bitcoin? For anything higher?
We're going higher. Let's see what happens. All right, everyone talk to you next time. What's up guys? I hope you're enjoying this episode but I got a quick message for you. I just released my very first book. It's called how to live an extraordinary life in this book. There are 65 life lessons that I've picked up over the years. These lessons will teach you about money investing, relationships, work, health, happiness, and much more. In this book, I wrote letters to each one of my children and I tried to share those life lessons with them. If you pick up this book,
Three things that I can promise you. The first is that it is very concise. The audiobook is only three hours. You can listen to it on a long drive, on a rainy afternoon. The second thing is that you're going to learn something. It's worth the price of admission just for the lessons themselves. And then the third thing is, it will make you think more deeply about your life and how you try to live it. So go pick up how to live an extraordinary life today. It's a quick read. It's very impactful, it's very concise and it would mean the world to me for the support. Go check it out today.
A on Amazon Barnes & Noble or wherever you buy your books hardcover. Audiobook it all works. Thank you so much for the support and I'd love to hear what you think about the new book.
