#1403 Polina & Anthony Pompliano | Trump vs Kamala, Elon Musk vs Brazil & The Economy

Polina Pompliano, Author of ‘Hidden Genius’ and Founder of The Profile, and Anthony Pompliano, CEO of Professional Capital Management, discuss historical September performance for asset prices, $100 billion OpenAI funding round, battle over X between Elon Musk vs Brazil, similarities and differences between Kamala Harris & Donald Trump, and economic data points. ======================= Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit ⁠⁠https://www.xapobank.com/pomp⁠⁠ to join. ======================= Gemini is the safe and secure way to trade crypto. Gemini is offering eligible new users the opportunity to earn $100 in BTC when they trade $1000 in crypto within their first 30 days of signing up. Head over to ⁠https://www.gemini.com/partners/pomp⁠ and start trading crypto to earn $100 in BTC. ======================= 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/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  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 up guys? I've got a very special episode for you today. We've got Polina Pompliano, not only my wife, but the author of Hidden Genius and the business journal at The Profile. In this conversation, Polina and I talk about a bunch of current events. We go over things like,

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  why is September always seeing asset prices go down? Does that mean that asset prices are going to go down this September? What is the perfect paradox? How should you think about OpenAI's brand new funding round at $100 billion? Are people paying too much? Or actually, could it be undervalued? We then get into things like Elon Musk and Brazil, the battle over X, free speech. Why was a hedge fund manager in New York City seizing a warship of a South American country back in the day? What does that mean today? And what is going on with all sorts of different economic data points? I really enjoyed this conversation with Polina. We got into a ton of different topics, and maybe there's even a little surprise as to why. Everyone wants to think that Harris and Trump are different,

• 1:30Anthony Pompliano?

  but I point out that they might be more similar than you may think. So make sure you pay attention to that part as well. Here is my latest conversation with Polina Pompliano.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:04Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:49Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:33Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:16Anthony Pompliano?

  or you can make instant payments with the Lightning Network. Head over to zappobank.com/pomp to join. That's X-A-P-O-B-A-N-K.com/pomp. Go check out Zappos Bank today. All right, guys. Plena, what's the first topic we're going to talk about today?

• 4:34Speaker 02

  We're talking about treacherous September and how it's leaving traders everywhere on edge. So I didn't know before this that September is just a notoriously horrible month for the market. Like, I had no idea. But apparently, bonds, stocks, and gold have typically suffered losses in September, historically, as traders, you know, they come back from vacation, from holiday, from summer, and they reassess their portfolios, they start selling off some things. So, so why is this interesting?

• 5:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the month of September historically is bad. And for what you said, where people basically come back, they had a little time off. I noticed that I didn't get a lot of responses in August. And then, literally, last night and this morning, I started getting a ton of responses from people being like, "Oh, I'm back from holiday." So traders do that, too. They have had time off, so they're thinking about their portfolio. They come back with new ideas. They come back, "Why do I own this thing?" They start thinking from here to the end of the year is kind of a timeframe. And so they want to know, "What should I own going into that?" Now, here is what is interesting about this September. Historically, this month is down, but we have a little paradox going on.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  You called it, you called it "the perfect paradox."

• 5:45Anthony Pompliano?

  It is the perfect paradox, which is, everyone looks at the historical data and says, "September is supposed to be down," which historically means that people then start to position themselves defensively because they expect it to be down. So it's a weird thing where, from a psychological standpoint, if every September is down, then you start to anticipate that it is down, which means you take certain behaviors that force or contribute to the market going down. And so if everyone thinks it's going to go down, and everyone positions themselves for it to go down, the market goes down. But the perfect paradox is that the central bank doesn't care about history. The central bank is positioning itself to go ahead and cut

• 6:25Anthony Pompliano?

  interest rates on September 18th. And so, since the Jackson Hole speech that Jerome Powell gave, people have been saying to themselves, "The odds that the central bank is going to cut interest rates in September is going up. It's increasing." Cutting interest rates historically leads to higher prices. So the perfect paradox is history says September is down, but also history says that interest rate cuts leads to higher prices. And so you have this like good versus evil kind of battle, right? This energy of down prices versus up prices. Now here is what makes it even more complex of an analysis is it's not just which is more powerful, interest rate cuts or historical performance in September, but also because the central bank likes to tip their hand

• 7:09Anthony Pompliano?

  or forecast to the market and say, this is what we're going to do in the future. They don't want to surprise the market. Traders and investors have a couple of weeks to position their portfolio for the interest rate cut. So one of the questions is how priced in is the interest rate cut already? If people know it's coming in September and they've had four, five, six, seven weeks, then maybe what they start to do is they actually start to position themselves as if the interest rate cut already happened because markets are forward looking. And therefore the interest rate cut may not have as much impact as people perceive it to have. And so the perfect paradox is literally history in terms of monthly performance versus history in terms of interest rate cuts.

• 7:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And the beauty of this, and the reason why it's so intellectually stimulating for all the people watching this and for me and you, nobody knows the future. We have no clue what is actually going to happen. And so people are wagering trillions of dollars on this outcome, but the perfect paradox is unknown until we get the result.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Interesting. And to throw even more volatility in there, we're now having this, there's a debate between Trump and Harris next week. Then there's this like things and weird energy brewing around the election. People are saying, could it be like the 2020 election? Like, there's a lot of uncertainty around it and it's not, I feel like a normal election, if that's even a thing. So do you think that that could throw markets into a tailspin?

• 8:40Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to hear an analysis of the political situation that may be unpopular with both Republicans and Democrats?

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Do I?

• 8:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 8:51Anthony Pompliano?

  There is no debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 8:57Anthony Pompliano?

  They both are populist candidates. They both are appealing to the working class. J D Vance versus Tim Walz. They both are going after that working class in the Rust Belt. They're trying to appeal to a certain type of person. Both Harris and Trump have very populist perspectives. They both started out as extreme right and left in the view of many people, and they're being pulled to a centrist view.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  They are being pulled a little.

• 9:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Trump is caving on a lot of things around abortion, and he's becoming much more centrist in that view. Women really care about reproductive rights, and so he is catering to, or he is listening to the will of the people. Harris, who is the most left-leaning senator, is now being pulled into a centrist view.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  And how so with taxes?

• 9:51Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a number of different things that she previously said that she is now kind of either backtracking is the negative. Softening, changing her mind, however you want to view it, right? But she's being pulled to the center as well. And then you go and you take a look at, there's actually agreement between the two candidates on way more topics than people want to agree or acknowledge. No tax on tips. That was not in the lexicon of political proposals or campaign promises until the last three or four months. Now both candidates are saying it. The southern wall, which was a cornerstone of Donald Trump's policies when he was running,

• 10:31Anthony Pompliano?

  and then when he was President of the United States, and would still be considered a cornerstone of his campaign. All of a sudden, Vice President Harris is saying, we need a wall.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  No way.

• 10:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you start to put these together, you realize that, yes, obviously there are still differences in their campaign. Obviously, their styles are different, and there's many things that people can look at for differences. But these two candidates, through a memetic competition, are ending up much more alike than anyone would have ever kind of predicted. And so the last thing I'll say is... The question for the American people is going to be, who do you believe? Because they both are now saying things that are different than what they did when they were in office. So for example, Donald Trump is talking about providing

• 11:28Anthony Pompliano?

  certain things for prisoners, right? People that are arrested right now or in jail. He's saying, hey, I'm going to get them out. There are things around abortion that previously he said that now he has softened on. Kamala Harris, same exact thing. And so she is the sitting Vice President of the United States. There's a lot of things you could do right now.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, she's got three months, but.

• 11:51Anthony Pompliano?

  So, but, but again, there's a lot of things that she can, there's a lot of things Trump could have done.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:55Anthony Pompliano?

  But the campaign promises, the American people are going to have to ask themselves, who do I believe more is likely telling me what they're really going to go do. And so to me, that is this fascinating thing of everyone focuses on the difference between the candidates. I am way more interested in trying to unpack and understand why are they becoming so aligned and agreeing on so much stuff, whereas historically that isn't what these candidates normally did.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  That's what I was going to say is like, maybe finally the will of the people is actually winning out in that they're becoming more moderate, more centrist, which is I think what most of America is. I don't think we're all just a bunch of loony extremist running around, but do you think that, how, how does, why would this affect markets?

• 12:43Anthony Pompliano?

  The more centrist that they are, the more steady Eddie markets can.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Steady Eddie, you heard it here first.

• 12:49Anthony Pompliano?

  They can just view the kind of future. There's not a lot of chaos. There's not a lot of uncertainty. There's not a lot of surprises.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Loose cannons.

• 12:58Anthony Pompliano?

  In either direction. And so if you have a politician who comes in, let's say like in Argentina, Malay, who is now the president, he ran on a campaign that he was going to slash government spending. He was going to do all these different things. He literally was running around the streets during his campaign with a chainsaw, saying, I'm going to take the chainsaw to the government. When he got in office, he actually did it, right? He, he has cut significantly costs. He has embraced free market economics. He's done all the things, or I shouldn't say all the things. He's done a lot of the things he said he was going to do. And that country has started to, it's still an untold story right in the future, but it has started to turn the corner. Inflation has come down.

• 13:39Anthony Pompliano?

  People are very bullish on these policies being implemented and what the potential impact could be. Now, if you come to the United States, Donald Trump is saying that he's gonna cut spending. I just saw a report that whether it is actually true or not, I think the spirit of it, Donald Trump is considering Elon Musk to be put on a special audit committee for the government to slash bureaucracy and slash kind of overspending.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think a lot of people in America say, yeah, we probably are wasting money somewhere, right? We are spending trillions of dollars. Of course, we're wasting money somewhere. But where the disagreement comes down is like, on what? Some people on one side of the aisle, they want to cut the Department of Education. Other people say, well, why would we ever cut the Department of Education? So there is nuance, there is difference. But I also think that when you look at the United States, the centrist view, as you said, is the dominant view. What America has been fooled into is the mainstream media in their pursuit of clicks and coverage and attention, because that is their business model. I actually don't think it's malicious.

• 14:45Anthony Pompliano?

  They're just following the incentive, has led to more and more divisive language, which has led to more and more extremism.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Because people are basically being trained. Just think of the social media algorithm and the mainstream media algorithm. It's training you to be outraged more often.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Of course, and it's just by even word selection.

• 15:06Anthony Pompliano?

  It is training you to think of, I'm on the right side, they're on the wrong side, right? And so, you know, there is this recent study that came out, and I tweeted the chart, and I'm sure we can pull it up, that showed that overall, generalized, Republicans think major cities are unsafe. Democrats think that major cities are safe. So right there, on the generalization of America, Republicans and Democrats disagree on the safety of Americans, of America's major cities.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:41Anthony Pompliano?

  When you go and you look at the murder rate, again, murder rate does not fully equivalent of safety, but it is a pretty good predictor.

• 15:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Actually, the truth is in the middle. So Republicans are on the extreme of thinking every major city is unsafe. Democrats are on the side of thinking every major city is safe. The truth is that, well, some cities are safer than others, but both sides over rotate on their angle.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  I was surprised that like Dallas ranked higher than New York City in terms of murders.

• 16:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you also have to remember that part of safety is not just do crimes get committed or do they not? New York City has a incredible network in terms of breadth and robustness of surveillance cameras, of police force, of all of these different things that are there to create lawfulness within a city. And so if you think about that, it's like, imagine if the city of Dallas and their kind of police presence was in New York City. You have nine million people, this place would be a zoo, it'd be chaos.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And so instead, you have to match density of population with density of police, density of kind of law enforcement tools, all that kind of stuff. That does not mean that New York City is necessarily the safest city in America or anything like that. It just means that if you were to take a city like Dallas, where there's a lot more kind of opportunity and there's less police presence and all that kind of stuff, and bring it to New York City, it'd be a disaster.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  This is an aside, I'm not going to tell the story because it's too long, but I just want to say that Anthony is a very upstanding citizen when it comes to this stuff. He has helped a number of civilian in the, in New York City, but in trouble.

• 17:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, just to be clear, I have saved, I have saved multiple people's lives in New York City.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  Kind of true, but what, what you did that was smart, like the way you thought that was smart was, we're in New York City, there's gotta be police like down the street. He literally held, what is it, you, you stopped Third Avenue traffic. It was, it was, it was, I'll never hear the end of it.

• 17:52Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a very long story.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  But you knew that there would be a cop right there, so you were like, hey, we need help.

• 17:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, we don't need to get into the full story, but yes, there was a situation where there was somebody who was having a medical emergency, needed help. I was able to. Assess the situation, get them help. Uh, who knows what would have happened if that didn't occur?

• 18:13Speaker 02

  By the way, Anthony was the only one out of a semi circle of like 16 people who are doing absolutely nothing, me included, because I panicked.

• 18:22Anthony Pompliano?

  But it goes back to incentives. It goes back to actually to politics and it goes back to law enforcement. Right? You know, we live in a society in America where um, you're actually disincentivized from helping because it, you know, God forbid, in this specific situation, um, I had helped and done something that actually contributed to the problem or further exasperated the situation the guy was in. Um, he could sue me.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Which is probably the way most people think, but it's the wrong way to think.

• 18:47Anthony Pompliano?

  It is, but, but also it's just a fact of life, right? Um, also, uh, there's a situation where, you know, at the end, at the end of that scenario, uh, the police were there and I said, hey, you know, I gotta go. I got some things I gotta do. Uh, do you need me anymore? And they said, no, like you're good, go. But there's a lot of people who just, they don't even want to deal with the, you know, interacting with the police and all stuff. So, you know, it's a very long story, but I think that just going back for a second to kind of the, the political uh, implications on finance. Um, right now, markets are oscillating with the odds that Trump is going to win or not win. Trump is seen, whether it's true or not, he is seen

• 19:27Anthony Pompliano?

  as a pro-business, pro kind of asset price candidate. Um, and so if you go and you look at, you know, Trump versus Biden, Phil Rosen at opening bell had this great analysis, the S and P performed the exact same under both of them. Right? So Trump and Biden, both S and P, exact same performance. Now where there was difference is things like the Russell 2000, small businesses, right? And so, uh, it isn't a perfect thing to say, oh, all asset prices, um, you know, uh, kind of perform the same. But I do think that the world is so focused on differences. It's so focused on um, kind of the abrasiveness, the divisiveness, all this stuff.

• 20:06Anthony Pompliano?

  In a weird way, one of the narratives that is not being told right now is that both candidates are being pulled to the center. There is more overlap than people realize. Doesn't mean there's a lot of overlap, but just more overlap than people realize between their policies. And maybe more importantly is structurally, both candidates are taking a populist approach to try to appeal to the little guy. And the little guy may agree or disagree with their policies, et cetera. But I cannot think of in modern history, in terms of like my lifetime, from when I've been paying attention to politics, where both candidates showed up in this way with such an aligned approach to we have to have the populist kind of agenda. And so,

• 20:51Anthony Pompliano?

  if either one of them wins, it suggests that the financial market should continue to kind of grow as they're growing. There's not a lot of shock. Now, I will call out one thing. There's a wild card here. The wild card is Harris's recent economic plan is full of a lot of things that would be very bad for the economy. Things like taxing unrealized gains, et cetera. One of the parts that is unknown, which is very hard to kind of think through. What are the odds that the economic plan actually gets implemented? So for example, taxing unrealized gains is one of the dumbest economic ideas anyone could propose.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  As we have discussed in episode two.

• 21:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But the odds of approval of that is like less than 5% in my mind. So it kind of doesn't matter how stupid the plan is, because it's not actually going to be put into practice.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  100%.

• 21:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. But I think people look at, well, if you suggest this dumb idea, what other dumb ideas do you have that you're not saying out loud? Right? So there's, it's like a multifaceted analysis of, I'm trying to pick a leader, but I'm not just picking a leader in terms of safety, or geopolitics, or whatever. I'm trying to pick a leader that is also going to essentially be overseeing or stewarding my portfolio.

• 22:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And so Trump definitely has an edge there where people think he's more pro-business. But if you go and you look, and again, you know, it's a really interesting analysis. The stock market performed under Obama incredibly well. Now, again, peel back the onion one more time. We were coming out of the global financial crisis. So he had a very kind of low, you know, base starting point. But I do think that there's this, um, you know, kind of, uh, easy attraction to headlines and kind of the, the black and white, the extreme. And instead investors should just look at, okay, if either candidate gets into office, don't think of the market as just one broad, you know, brush.

• 23:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause actually my bet would be that under either candidate, the market is going to go up in general.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Because the one thing that the political parties, both Republicans and Democrats, agree on, even though they probably shouldn't, they're going to print money, they're going to increase the debt and we're going to run deficits. And so if you look at that, that means we're going to have a devalued dollar. We have a devalued dollar under Republicans or Democrats, asset prices go up. The better question to ask is not, will the market go up or down? The better question is if Trump is elected, where should I put my money? If Harris is elected, where should I put my money? Because there are sectors in the economy that will benefit from either one of them getting into office. It's just like, that doesn't make a good headline.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  It's just a different strategy. Yeah.

• 23:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And it frankly requires critical thinking, which most people just like, tell me the answer, let me go buy it and you know, I'll go back to my day to day life. What else you got?

• 23:57Speaker 02

  The Supreme Court refuses to revive Biden's latest student loan debt relief plan. The Supreme Court rebuffed a Biden administration plea seeking to revive the latest plan to tackle federal student loan debt. So the court basically denied an emergency request filed by the Biden administration seeking to lift a nationwide injunction imposed by an appeals court. Oh, my God, word salad. But basically, under Biden's loan forgiveness plan, borrowers would have their monthly payments lowered, and those who originally took out federal loans of $12,000 or less would have their outstanding debts forgiven after 10 years. So, and I just want to say

• 24:39Speaker 02

  this quote, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said, "This court order is a stark reminder to the Biden-Harris administration that Congress did not grant them the authority to saddle working Americans with $500 billion in someone else's Ivy League debt. This is a huge win for every American who so believes in paying their own way." What do you think?

• 25:03Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm a pretty chill person. I like to think that I, of myself, as an independent, I like to kind of stay in the center of a lot of issues.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  I'm a registered independent.

• 25:14Anthony Pompliano?

  But one, one of the topics that I think-

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Makes your blood boil.

• 25:19Anthony Pompliano?

  No, not blood boil. I'm chill. But one of the topics that I think just leaves me scratching my head-

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Scratching his head.

• 25:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Is student loan debt forgiveness. Because what is presented, again, as a populist-

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:34Anthony Pompliano?

  -policy, that, hey, you person who took out tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, you are so dumb that you didn't read the paperwork. This is essentially what we're saying. We're saying you didn't know what you were doing, but you took on this debt, which, in my mind-

• 25:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do we assume that these people are dumb and didn't read the paperwork?

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Wait, hold on, hold on. Is that what we're assuming? Or are we assuming people would say, "Oh, you know, I took this money out because my family didn't have money for me to go to college. Now I went to college, I'm saddled with all this debt, and I'm back in this, like, awful cycle, and I can't get out because of this debt."

• 26:12Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but-

• 26:14Speaker 02

  But I went to college.

• 26:14Anthony Pompliano?

  You knew you were taking on the debt, right?

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 26:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Part of this is, what, if we really boil down maybe from kind of a first principle standpoint, the problem with student loans is that, in most cases, not all, sometimes there are other people involved or whatever, but most of the time, you're asking a 17- or an 18-year-old to make a long-term decision, their brain is not even fully formed yet.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Well, hopefully their parents are there to guide them and tell them-

• 26:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Again. The average American is not that well versed when it comes to taking on debt, interest rates, long-term thinking, all this stuff, right? And so you're asking a 17 or 18-year-old, who really, at the end of the day, should be the decision maker, not in every family, but that should be who the decision maker is, to take on debt, which can be an astronomical amount in some cases. And it requires you to understand how the debt works, what the interest rates are, be a long-term thinker. Ask yourself, from a financial decision, I'm taking on $200,000 of debt. What am I going to get in return?

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:20Anthony Pompliano?

  That will help me pay off this debt in the future? So you go through all that, and of course, it's like you're giving out money, right? So if you're giving out money, people are going to take the money. So that's kind of step one, is the structure of student loans is basically putting people in a position, who are not yet prepared to make a decision, asking them to make the decision. And then we're like, five or six years later, like, oh, my God, you were, why did you do that? Like, they weren't prepared to make the decision. So obviously, they did the thing that was the short-term incentive, take the money. But the second thing, and probably the more important thing, is this entire policy is presented as, we're helping the X number of people with $1.6 trillion of student loans.

• 28:05Anthony Pompliano?

  The part that is left off of that sentence is, we're helping the people with student loans by taking the debt and making everybody else pay for it.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:16Anthony Pompliano?

  But because it's not seen as like, money coming out of my pocket to pay for somebody else's student loans, everyone's like, wow, that's amazing. Like, I don't want them to be in debt. I genuinely hope that everybody who is in debt, whether it's from student loans or anything else, is able to get on a path to get out of debt, right? Nobody wants to be in that situation. But the part that everyone leaves off of the analysis is if you absolve the student debt, who pays for it?

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Somebody somewhere is paying for it.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Of course, and I agree with that. And but I think this debate has kind of become like a little bit inflammatory where the Missouri Attorney General says, we're like working class Americans shouldn't be paying for your Ivy League education. Totally agree. Except for if we read this, the plan isn't to wipe 200K off your student debt. It's people who took out federal loans of $12,000 or less would have that outstanding debt be forgiven in 10 years. It's $12,000. It's not, you know, these crazy, it's not the kid going to Harvard.

• 29:25Anthony Pompliano?

  They shouldn't forgive a dollar.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  But again, I'm just saying, I think the debate is inflammatory and the rational.

• 29:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, but but as a country, we need to encourage personal responsibility.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Accountability.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  We need to fix the problem at the root, not.

• 29:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. And so it goes back to whether you're absolving $200,000 or $12,000. You are asking the citizens of the United States to take on that burden. So what you're really doing is you're socializing the losses. You're taking it from one person who's in debt and you now are saying, quite literally, the rest of the nation is now going to take on this debt.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Which, again, everyone talks about this person shouldn't be in that debt. But actually, if you think about it from a social contract standpoint, why should somebody who didn't go to college?

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 30:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Have to pay for the person who did go to college?

• 30:22Speaker 02

  No, I agree.

• 30:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And that is, I think, and again, the inflammatory language of like the working class American for the Ivy, Ivy League, you know, debt, right? But that's ultimately what it's trying to get at. Now, what I think would be more interesting is if you want to solve the student debt problem.

• 30:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Go to the private market and say to people, "This is a problem in America. We need to solve it as a nation. This is quote-unquote wartime for student loans. Here are the numbers and the facts. Here are the human stories of people who are saddled in this debt. We need to help these people get on a path to be able to get out of the student debt. We are going to work with the private market to incentivize and prioritize. Anyone who has student debt is going to get some sort of opportunity that businesses can provide for them to start to get out of the student debt. Now, doesn't mean that they should get the job when somebody who doesn't have debt, doesn't get the job or anything like that.

• 31:25Anthony Pompliano?

  But what it means is, could you convince the private market to create programs where, "Hey, you know what? If you've got $200,000 student debt, we probably shouldn't be putting money in your 401K. Instead, can we create a program where we help you pay off your debt? Can we match, right? And is that one employee perk for people who have the student debt? And it's part of your comp package?

• 31:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 31:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Can you inspire the private market to come up with free market solutions or private market solutions to help these people? The problem in America is that everyone looks at this as a government problem. They don't look at this as a private market problem. And so, the government gave out the money.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, the government's left holding the bag. And so, now, one of the best critiques against this whole student loan forgiveness thing is, "The government's just trying to cook their books." Right? The government's saying, "Hey, we have $1.6 trillion of outstanding debt. We have no path to ever getting it paid back." Just knock it down to like 800 billion. Oh, we, there goes 800 billion. Not a big deal. Crisis over, we're back under a trillion.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:28Anthony Pompliano?

  But you didn't actually solve the problem. Actually, you probably exasperated, you made it worse. And so, I do think that there is, what most people look at as a math problem, I actually think is a leadership problem. Because we need somebody, it doesn't have to be the president. It could be at the state level, right? It could be even at the local level. But we need to incentivize some sort of economic programs that come from the private market to help people pay this stuff off. And, and last thing I'll say is, if you run a business where these people work for your business, imagine the line out the door of top talent from the best universities that are the most expensive ones.

• 33:09Anthony Pompliano?

  If you were to say, come work here, and one of the employee perks is we are going to help you pay off your debt, the line would be around the corner. And so it's not hard to see how the private market also, it's not a charities, right? They're actually getting some sort of benefit. It just takes people who have the courage to act, the people who are creative enough to come up with these solutions, and rather than just fall back on the easy thing, which is the government solution, which actually isn't a solution. Instead, if the government was able to step in and say, we want to create some sort of program, even if it was a public-private partnership, to help address this problem, I think we would have a way bigger dent put in this issue. You would have way less inflammatory

• 33:52Anthony Pompliano?

  responses on both sides. And maybe the craziest part is, you probably would actually start to solve the problem versus appealing to the Supreme Court and saying, you know, hey, please let us just wipe all this debt and offload it on to all the other Americans. I just, I have a very hard time seeing how that is constitutional, which obviously is part of this injunction, but also too, is you are creating more divisiveness in the American population, because then people start to say, wait a second, I don't like that political party because look what they did to me. And I think that for the long-term health of America, we need to get rid of that stuff.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. And I think something like the 401k matching, if it was something like that in companies, and they're like, we'll help you pay off your debt by matching programs or some, whatever it is. I think, yeah, the talent will be very excited for that. Okay, next topic. OpenAI is in talks for funding round that would value it above $100 billion. My God. Okay, so OpenAI is in talks to raise several billion dollars in a new funding round that would value the startup behind, the startup behind ChatGPT above 100 billion. So Thrive Capital is investing, that's Josh Kushner's firm, they're leading

• 35:15Speaker 02

  the round actually, and they're expected to invest around $1 billion. And then Microsoft is also expected to.

• 35:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Does it have the revenue number? What's the latest public revenue number?

• 35:26Speaker 02

  For OpenAI?

• 35:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  Uh, no, but I have their last valuation, which was eighty six billion.

• 35:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think, um, I think I saw that OpenAI's revenue annualized is now over a billion dollars. Um, maybe it's even, uh, more than that.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  It's okay. According to an article on June 12th, it had annualized revenue. Um, it had doubled it to three point four billion.

• 35:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So let's just say, you know, with growth, it's four to five billion dollars of annualized revenue. It's not crazy to raise at 20 times revenue if you're growing this quickly. Remember this product, you know, chat GPT got launched, I think in 2022.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:04Anthony Pompliano?

  We're talking about in less than three years, they went from zero to three plus billion dollars, four billion dollars in revenue. It's probably one of the fastest growing companies in the world. And so to get a 20 times annualized revenue multiple is not crazy at all. Is it high? Sure, by some standards, but it's not like, oh my God, they're raising at 200 times revenue. Right? And so the valuation is actually maybe the least interesting part of it to me. It is that, uh, very smart, experienced investors who have very smart, seasoned LPs believe that from here, there is still a venture type return.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And so these are not hedge funds.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  That's what's hard about it. It's such, such a massive valuation.

• 36:49Anthony Pompliano?

  It's, it's a binary outcome. If you invest that a hundred billion, either it becomes worth a trillion or it's worth zero.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:57Anthony Pompliano?

  But like, you're not playing the game for to go from a hundred billion to one twenty or for it to go, you know, oh my God, I hope it doesn't go from a hundred to eighty billion. You're playing the game because I'm investing at a hundred and I think it's going to be worth 500 billion to a trillion dollars.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  But it's worth noting that there's a lot of competition here. So there's Google, there's, um, who else? Amazon, Meta is having a moment with its AI. So like, do we really?

• 37:20Anthony Pompliano?

  There's competition, but most of those other products are free. Not all of them, but but many of them are free. And maybe that changes over time. But again, if you look at a company that's gone from zero to, you know, call it four plus billion dollars in revenue in three years, that has been done very few times in history. And so things in motion tend to stay in motion. And so, you know, one of the things I've learned in my investing career over time is everyone loves to be the the guy or girl who goes intellectually short a hot trend. But actually, you should just expect the trend to continue. It's kind of like in the stock market, the best day to buy a stock like the the index

• 38:05Anthony Pompliano?

  is at an all time high. Because if you buy it at an all time high over time, over one, two, three years, it's likely just to keep going higher.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we've all seen the AI bubble, right? Like AI keeps popping up every so often.

• 38:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it a bubble?

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Or like the the hype, the trend of AI companies popping up every few years and then fading away. When is the right time?

• 38:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that AI historically, like AI, kind of put that in air quotes, wasn't really what we're talking about now. The AI of the past was kind of like software that auto executed. And maybe it had like some interesting decision, you know, making, you know, out of a limited set of options, whatever. The idea of large language models is radically better and and kind of different than, you know, call it the like 2010 to 2017 version of AI. And it is very obvious that the machines are going to be better than humans at a lot of things.

• 39:12Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, one of the the parts that I am fascinated by is there was a study done where they took x rays and they showed them to doctors and they showed them to the machines and the machines were more accurate. Obviously, it's pattern recognition, right? Like, the machine should be better than the humans at something like that. Uh, object detection, like all these components. Now, that doesn't mean that AI is gonna come and take your job, right? It depends on what your job is, but like, maybe, maybe not. I was talking to somebody recently-

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Next episode, you see a machine right here.

• 39:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I, you know, I was talking to someone recently who runs a pretty successful company in Silicon Valley. Most people in tech would know this company and know this founder. And he said to me that 60% of all support tickets that come into their business is now handled by AI. And so what's interesting about that is he had a bunch of support engineers. That now what they were doing is being answered by the machines. He doesn't want to get rid of the engineers, right? And this guy has, you know, mid hundreds of million, or hundreds of employees. So he's like, I gotta find other things for these people to do now because the AI is answering 60% and we think we can get a higher percentage.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:27Anthony Pompliano?

  So what else can you start to automate? And so what we were talking about is like, you know, the future of work. In a weird way, we have a lot of businesses. There are times where I want to hire people, but I say, look, I need this person for the next 90 days. I don't know if I need them for the next year or two years. And so actually, do you move to a model where people kind of, maybe you have two or three different things going on, but it's kind of like gigs. Right? You're like, okay, cool. I got this gig going on for 90 days. They need me, you know, four days a week. I got this other gig going on. It's kind of one day a week. And he was saying that inside of his company, even the engineers, but across the company, employees are much more entrepreneurial than they historically have been.

• 41:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what they've had to get comfortable with is, okay, I got an engineer. We don't think the engineers are gonna stay here for 20 years. We think that they're gonna stay here somewhere between, you know, call it two to five years. While they are here, they got a side gig, not necessarily a job, but maybe they're working on a passion project or something kind of on the side. And then also, I got engineers that are like creating content on YouTube and they're, you know, kind of like influencer type stuff. And so he's like, normally companies would try to stamp out all that other stuff and say, just focus on your job. He goes, but in order to be able to attract the best talent, I gotta let them do this stuff. I gotta let them be entrepreneurial because that's the type of people that we want in our organizations, the top talent. And the top talent wants to work

• 41:55Anthony Pompliano?

  on something that they care about, but they also want to build an audience. They want to do the side project, all that kind of stuff. And so if you pull it back into the AI conversation, it's like AI is going to replace a lot of tasks. Jobs remains to be seen, but tasks already are happening, which will free up people's time. And so if you free up people's time, what else are they going to do?

• 42:16Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 42:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And well, nobody knows.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think that that is what people are trying to figure out is like, you know, the, you know, maybe utopian version for some people is like AI takes over all the work and the rest of us are just like fat happy cats who sit around and, you know, drink wine, eat grapes and, and hang out. I don't think that's the world we're headed to. What's more likely to happen is if you go back to like the 1800s in America, I think it was something like 96% of all Americans were farmers.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:45Anthony Pompliano?

  To some degree, maybe you had another, you know, kind of job as well, but like to eat food, you had to farm the food.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if you fast forward that today, I believe the number is now 2%. So we went from 96% of everyone being farmers to 2%. The rest of us got other jobs.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 43:00Speaker 02

  As a result, other work popped up, right?

• 43:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. And so if that's the world we're headed towards, there are jobs that will be around in 20 years that do not exist today. And, you know, maybe a great example of that is if, imagine going in 1990s and saying to someone, uh, I'm a YouTuber.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:20Anthony Pompliano?

  YouTube didn't even exist.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  Even more recently, I went to school for journalism. And while I was there, there was not an idea or even a possibility that you could send out a paid newsletter to your subscribers. That wasn't a thing I went to school for. A newsletter at the time, yeah, would be just like printing it out and handing it to people. Whereas and then like companies like Substack came along and now I'm able to like make money off of a thing that didn't exist, what 10 years ago?

• 43:52Anthony Pompliano?

  If you even take it a kind of more, you know, maybe to the everyday American and then also closer to tech. In the tech world, something like prompt engineering was not around. I mean, I don't think I heard that term until three years ago.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Can you define that?

• 44:08Anthony Pompliano?

  A prompt engineer, I mean, everyone's got kind of a different definition of it, but essentially just imagine someone that sits and is able to prompt the large language model, get certain responses. Sometimes people say, well, a prompt engineer also needs to be able to automate it into code. Some people just describe it as literally, you know, kind of typing and prompting or asking questions. But a prompt engineer in general was not something that people thought about seven, eight years ago. If you think back, maybe 15 years ago, an Uber driver, that was a completely foreign concept. And so look at the gig economy today, delivery drivers. I actually delivered for, I think it was Domino's.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  I thought it was Pizza Hut.

• 44:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Or Pizza Hut, I can't remember, one of the pizza places when I was in high school. And so delivery drivers existed, but you worked for one company. So even the definition of what is a delivery driver has drastically changed versus, I don't know, 20 years ago. And so you can just see that continuing. This is a story as old as time. It's always happened. But now I think part of the question is corporate America, businesses, right? If you're an investor in the public market, you want to understand what's going to happen to these businesses. If you work at these companies, if you run these companies, you're trying to figure out how is this going to change? Customer service is one of the areas where we've seen a lot of businesses go and have impact. The question is just like, how far, how much? Into the company can you get?

• 45:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And that will determine a lot of how big does the company need to be? Where are the capital requirements? What does profitability look like? How can challengers who are more kind of AI embracing? Go after these incumbents? How easy is it going to be? There's a whole world of things that are still yet to be determined. But OpenAI at $100 billion is very much a bet in my guess on is it going to be a trillion dollar company or not? And that is the business of venture capital.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:02Anthony Pompliano?

  It's not, hey, do I think it's going to go up 20%? It is, is it a 10x or not from here? And, you know, if you look at the trend, it would suggest there's a higher probability that it's worth a trillion than it's going to be worth zero in the future.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  So for those people looking at Thrive and Microsoft investing at $100 billion valuation, that's not a dumb move.

• 46:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, what your framework or definition of dumb? There are people in the public markets who would look at investing at 20x revenue and say, that's insane. Like the, the multiples off the charts. This makes no sense. And then there's other people who probably have more of kind of a tech bent and look at growth and things like that. And they would say, I actually think that's a very fair valuation. And I'm surprised they didn't get higher. I actually think I would be in the camp of, if you have a company going from zero to four billion in revenue in three years. And it is a category creating product where you are the clear leader. You have a brand kind of moat and you have now cash flow that you're able to kind of compound your advantage. And you've proven your ability to attract some of the best talent.

• 47:07Anthony Pompliano?

  A 20x multiple doesn't seem that crazy to me.

• 47:13Anthony Pompliano?

  But again, you know, who, who knows? We could look back at this investment and they lit a couple of billion dollars on fire and say, wow, how dumb that was.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, just never know.

• 47:22Anthony Pompliano?

  What else you got?

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Brazil blocks X, formerly known as Twitter, after Elon Musk ignores their court order. So what happened was a panel of Brazil's federal Supreme Court justices voted unanimously to uphold orders to suspend the use of Elon Musk's social network X nationwide. One justice voted to uphold but expressed reservations about a measure of the order that allows the court to find individuals or businesses. Who, you know, wanted to use X on a VPN or something like that? So. X had earlier defied court orders to take down accounts or posts that the court

• 48:06Speaker 02

  said violated Brazil's laws on political misinformation and hate speech online. And Elon Musk called the judge a criminal and wrote in another post on X, unless the Brazilian government returns the illegally seized property of, of and SpaceX. Also, they also did SpaceX, right? They, uh huh. We will seek reciprocal seizure of government assets too.

• 48:32Anthony Pompliano?

  He, he, he.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  I freaking love Elon Musk. He's a loose cannon, but like my kind of loose cannon. Go on.

• 48:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, there is precedent for private citizens taking, uh, assets of the nation states.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  I have never heard of this.

• 48:49Anthony Pompliano?

  So for those that don't know, this is one of the craziest stories of all time. Paul Singer.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Who owns Elliott Management. He is in the business of extending loans and credit to nations that, you know, nobody else really wants to give them the money. And so, uh, because of credit risk or other reasons, he's in the mud. Uh.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  Wait, so you can lend a government money?

• 49:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, if there's two consenting parties, you can do anything you want, right? I mean, JP Morgan lent money to the US government in the early 1900s or whatever, late 1800s, whatever it was.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 49:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it's not common. The United States government is not going to anybody. In a weird way, the US government was approached by Warren Buffett during the 2009 crisis. And he called up the Treasury Secretary and said, ah, it looks like your banks are in trouble. Would you like me to step in there and help out? Maybe you could help me negotiate a nice little sweet deal. Again, I, I couldn't have called them. A lot of people couldn't have called them.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Maybe this is how we cut the.

• 49:55Anthony Pompliano?

  But Warren Buffett could.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  The deficit.

• 49:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And so did he get a backroom sweet deal? Hell yeah. Did the banks need it? Questionable. Some banks needed it, some didn't. There's a lot of stuff, right, that gets involved in this. So again, he wasn't giving money to the government, but he definitely was helping the government. Now, what Singer did is I forget if it was Argentina or another country, maybe you can Google it real quick. But Paul Singer lent money to a government. That government defaulted on the loan. And I think he actually bought some of the bonds as well. It was part of it. I forget all the exact details. But when he

• 50:32Speaker 02

  Argentina.

• 50:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Argentina. Yeah, look at that big brain memory I got. And so when Paul Singer

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Wow, sorry. He made $2 billion off of it.

• 50:41Anthony Pompliano?

  He made $2 billion, but wait till you hear what he had to do to make the $2 billion. They basically were like, we're not going to pay you. And I think that he, maybe he hadn't lent the money. If I remember correctly, maybe he bought the bonds like pennies on the dollar was part of it. And they basically defaulted on paying out. And so he said, if you don't pay me, basically, your life's going to be miserable. And they rightfully so said, you know, here's the middle finger, you hedge fund manager in New York City, we're a nation state, we're Argentina, what are you gonna do?

• 51:10Speaker 02

  He launched a 15 year battle to wrestle.

• 51:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Eventually, Paul Singer

• 51:18Anthony Pompliano?

  took possession.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 51:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Stole? I wouldn't say stole, because technically, he needed the collateral. But Paul Singer's Elliott management ended up in control of one of Argentina's battleships.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Yes, I remember this.

• 51:34Anthony Pompliano?

  He essentially, and again, details are generalized here, he essentially hired like a private military kind of contractor to go. And they literally went on to a battleship from Argentina. And they said, this is our ship now. And the Argentinian Navy was like, what do you mean? And they were like, you owe us money. We are here to repossess this ship. The same way that if you default on a car loan, somebody comes and repossesses your car. Elliott management did that to the nation state of Argentina and took one of their warships. Now, the reason why that is crazy is because it actually stood up

• 52:17Anthony Pompliano?

  in a court of law, where people said, well, you owe them the money. So your assets or the collateral, and this is this whole thing, he ends up making $2 billion. Now, fast forward to the Brazil situation. Elon Musk, as far as I know, doesn't own Brazilian bonds or any of this type of stuff. It's more complicated than that, which is Elon Musk has a service which really is used in the country at the invitation, at the invitation of the country.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So the United States could easily ban, we ban all kinds of technologies, right? And Brazil could do the same thing.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  22 million Brazilians use X.

• 52:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So Brazil likes the fact that X is there because 22 million people are using it? My guess is the government uses it, the politicians use it, the judge may even use the service.

• 53:07Anthony Pompliano?

  But they asked him to censor accounts. We have now seen a pendulum swing back where a bunch of these social media or technology executives say, I'm not going to do that. Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter saying that they got pressured during kind of the pandemic. He says, if I could go back, I wouldn't do that and we're not going to do it in the future. Elon Musk says, I'm not going to censor these accounts.

• 53:32Anthony Pompliano?

  The judge, who I'm assuming is some sort of big judge in Brazil, said, oh yeah? We'll just ban your service if you don't listen to us.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, what is interesting about this case to me is you should

• 53:48Anthony Pompliano?

  listen to the laws of the countries that you're operating in.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 53:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? What is interesting about this case, though, is that, of course, Elon, he's got a decent amount of cash, he's got lawyers, they went and they looked at, I think it's the Brazilian constitution or whatever document, and in it, it explicitly states that the judges and the kind of government should not be allowed to censor people, all this kind of stuff.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  And not just censor, it's important to note that the 22 million accounts on X from Brazil, if somebody is caught using Twitter or X via VPN, they can be fined $8,900 a day.

• 54:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, that is now, so Elon said, I'm not going to censor. The judge ratcheted it up, said, we're going to block your service. Elon then tweeted and said, no problem, if you're in Brazil and you want to use our service, use a VPN. The judge said, okay, fine, you want to tell people to use a VPN, I'm going to, I'm going to find them. So it keeps ratcheting up. And then the judge says, oh, by the way, you see that nice shiny SpaceX thing you have over there in Starlink? I'm going to go after that, like, I'm going to apply max pressure.

• 55:01Anthony Pompliano?

  The judge is miscalculating this scenario in two ways, I believe. One, know your enemy.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Next thing you know, there's a Brazilian battleship.

• 55:12Anthony Pompliano?

  The more you ratchet up.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  With Elon on it.

• 55:14Anthony Pompliano?

  The heat on somebody like Elon Musk.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 55:19Anthony Pompliano?

  The more he is going to ratchet it up back.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  I know.

• 55:23Anthony Pompliano?

  The de-escalation that the judge should be taking is actually probably the path to getting what he wants. But instead, it is now becoming like a pissing match between these two. Elon is probably more powerful than the judge in Brazil, which sounds insane.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Elon's more powerful in Brazil than the judge?

• 55:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Definitely globally, right? Because the judge has zero power outside of Brazil. But even in Brazil, Elon is probably more powerful. Now, what ends up becoming this like back and forth between these two people?

• 55:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Is really going to end up being.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  Sorry, I can't stop picturing Elon on the battleship.

• 56:05Anthony Pompliano?

  It is a debate about can a judge override what is

• 56:13Speaker 02

  The will of the people.

• 56:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Kind of case law and all this stuff in the country. But here's the part that I think Americans need to be very careful of. I've been fortunate enough to travel around the world, see a lot of great countries, meet incredible people, all this stuff. American values, American ethos, and I would even argue, American rights are not the same that in other countries. But also, some people in other countries don't want those things.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Freedom of speech is actually one of the things I think everyone would like.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Ah, I think that's a very American value, actually.

• 56:52Anthony Pompliano?

  In terms of protection, but if you go talk to people on the ground in every country I've ever been to, they would like the ability to say what they want to say.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  They would like, yes.

• 57:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, the people want freedom of speech. It doesn't mean that the government protects it, doesn't mean the government guarantees it, doesn't even mean that the government believes in freedom of speech. Right now in Europe, it's chaos. Half the things I've probably tweeted in my entire life will put me in jail in the UK right now, right? And so you say that, you say yourself like, what kind of society is that? But Americans are looking at it through an American lens. Doesn't mean that people in the UK are like, oh, this is cool. No problem. You know, throw me in jail for tweeting something. But it goes back to the people across every language, every religion, every single country that I've ever visited, the people on the ground would like to have freedom

• 57:40Anthony Pompliano?

  of speech. The governments do not. America is actually somewhat unique and you could even argue that the people have to hold the US government in check to continue to preserve our freedom of speech, because we can look at 2020 and see, well, a lot of people in the government that were encouraging freedom of speech then. And so you kind of keep looking at this situation, and you're like, yeah, the trend here is the government will continue to clamp down on speech on these platforms. And what we need is we need people with iron wills running these platforms to say, this is the line. I am not going to let you step across this line.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  It's like what we talked about with Mark Zuckerberg, wishing that he had done things differently in 2020 now, you know?

• 58:26Anthony Pompliano?

  We just saw one of them get arrested.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Pavel, CEO of Telegram. If Elon goes to Brazil, are they going to arrest him? Imagine the international incident that would occur.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  That would be wild.

• 58:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Arresting a US citizen. It's one thing, again, Pavel's situation is not good, right? There's a lot of information we still need. My guess is that it's going to get worked out and everyone's going to kind of go back to their, you know, go back to their couches and everyone chill out. But if Mark Zuckerberg, if a Jeff Bezos, if a Sundar, you know, if Elon, I mean, just go through them all. If one of them got arrested in a foreign country over a freedom of speech issue?

• 59:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I think the President of the United States, regardless of who it is, they're making a phone call. And so it is a very kind of like slippery slope that you have to ask yourself, okay, accelerate it to the end. What happens? I do believe that in a lot of these countries, freedom of speech is going to be under attack and taken away from people. America is unique in that we have most of the platforms. We have this belief in freedom of speech. And in a weird way, again, generalization, but somewhat true. Elon Musk is backed by the full faith, credit,

• 59:50Anthony Pompliano?

  power, and military might of the US government. So was Mark Zuckerberg. So was Jeff Bezos. So was all these people that if they went to another country and that country arrested them for freedom of speech on their platforms, it would be an international incident and the US government's full focus would be on it. Brittany Griner was gotten out of Russian jail faster than Paul Whelan.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And again, that's not to say that she shouldn't have got out. That's not to say that Paul Whelan should have stayed in, right? But it's just when you have a celebrity, it's unfortunate it works this way because every human should be, you know, kind of treated the same. But obviously, the celebrity case gets more eyeballs. And so people focus on where the noise is, right? It's kind of the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If any of these guys got arrested, it would be a massive issue. And so what's more likely? Starlink, SpaceX, and X end up working in Brazil? Or the judge prevails and the Brazilian people hold a ticker tape parade for them and say, ah, you got them. You got Elon?

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, I don't know. But I'll, I'll put the link in the comments. But if you want to go read this amazing profile on the Paul Singer situation from 2018.

• 1:01:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it the New Yorker profile?

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  The New Yorker. It's called Paul Singer Doomsday Investor. I'll put the link in the comments.

• 1:01:18Anthony Pompliano?

  He's the definition of a Wall Street gangster.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, he, Anthony read this profile and would not stop talking about it for days. Do you remember this?

• 1:01:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Since the day he seized the warship, I was like, yo, what?

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  I think that's how it starts.

• 1:01:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, when it first, I remember, uh, what year was it?

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  2014.

• 1:01:36Anthony Pompliano?

  2014. So I remember when the story kind of first broke, uh, everyone, cause like Twitter was around, but it wasn't really like used like it is now and everything. Uh, everyone was kind of like, wait, is this true? Is this like some like nonsense rumors? This is gonna like end up, you know, in the tabloids, but not like, you know, the, the traditional financial press. And then when it was confirmed, every single person was basically just like, like basically, oh my God, he did it.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  Paul Singer on the, on the Navy ship?

• 1:02:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, he, he basically had, I, I, cause I think it was like 10 years in or 12 years into this battle.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  It's a 15 year, yeah.

• 1:02:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So it was a 15 year thing, but like, by the time he took the warship, he was already years into this millions of dollars. Like, like it was a whole saga that was, uh, going out. And, uh, people talk a lot about, um, you know, Carl Icahn buys your stock. People shaking their boots like, oh shit, I don't want to deal, you know, like this guy's a legend. He, he's, he's ruthless, whatever. Like, let's talk to him. Nation states shaking their boots when Paul Singer starts buying their bonds.

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 1:02:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Because they know this is what he'll do. Now, last thing I'll say before we go, uh, speaking of seizing property.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  That's, yeah.

• 1:02:48Anthony Pompliano?

  The US government.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:02:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Just seized Nicholas Maduro's plane. It was outside of Venezuela. I forget where, uh, what, what, uh, country, somewhere, you know, in the general Central America area. And, uh, the US government seized it and flew it back to Fort Lauderdale.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  Oh God.

• 1:03:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And they basically said, uh, nah, you ain't gonna use this plane to do bad things. Whatever the specific, like conspiracy to commit, you know, whatever, whatever the thing was.

• 1:03:19Anthony Pompliano?

  We're playing a game of tit for tat.

• 1:03:24Anthony Pompliano?

  There is a controversy, maybe is the most gracious way to describe it. A contested election in Venezuela where the incumbent Maduro and his party says, we won fair square. Look at us. The challenger says, no, you didn't. You're cheating. We obviously won. The US government has started to insert itself. Venezuela is a pretty important country because of oil and other things. Venezuela is distrustful of the United States. They had gold that was sitting, I think in the UK vaults seized at one point.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  A lot of season going on here.

• 1:04:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Imagine, again, yeah, no one's going to do this because it's the US. But imagine if Air Force One was like chilling in Mexico and the Mexican government was just like, that's ours now. Just imagine the US reaction.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  I am the captain now.

• 1:04:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, we would just be like, what? Meet our hellfire missile or whatever. You know, like whatever our response would be, it would be such a ridiculous, massive response.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  Of course, but like you said, the US is so dominant and has such a dominant military can do whatever it wants.

• 1:04:38Anthony Pompliano?

  The United States likely, I would think, has some sort of plan. They've war gamed out a little bit. If we're going to take the president of Venezuela's plane, there's going to be, you know, repercussions.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  Well, they're saying it was, they're claiming it was bought illegally for 13 million.

• 1:04:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, that may be true, right? But my point just being that like, there's a lot of world leaders around the world who do illegal things.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02Anthony Pompliano?

  The United States doesn't go and whatever. And so part of why I bring this up is when you're the most powerful nation in the world, especially from like a mechanized military, you know, might.

• 1:05:18Anthony Pompliano?

  There is power in not using your might.

• 1:05:23Anthony Pompliano?

  If you constantly exert that power, it loses a lot of its efficacy in the sense that people eventually are like, dude, you guys keep messing with us. Like enough's enough. And many countries on their own can't fight back. Like, again, unless the Venezuelan government has some sort of military, you know, capability we're unclear of or don't know about, it is unlikely that they're gonna like invade America. But you can see that the US could easily go from confidence to arrogance. And if we continue to exert that

• 1:06:06Anthony Pompliano?

  power internationally, something like the BRICS, where there's countries that say, well, why don't we work together? Maybe we should lessen our dependency on the US dollar. And so what you want to do in the United States, I think, is just think as long term as possible, really focus on decisions we make today. What is the impact in the medium to long term? Not just what is the short term impact. But what makes that hard is the US government is made up of a lot of branches. There's a lot of people that are acting with individual incentives, not in the incentive of the whole. And so you read a headline like, we took the Venezuelan president's plane, and it's easy to jump to conclusions. But actually, what I've learned over time, you should just end up with a lot of questions, and you should

• 1:06:50Anthony Pompliano?

  reserve judgment, because there's probably a lot of information that we don't have. And that doesn't make people feel good, doesn't make them feel like they arrived at like, here's my perspective. Instead, if you have a perspective on something in the news where it is likely you don't have all the information. I would question whether that is a sign of intelligence because you have an answer. Or are you actually raising your hand and saying, you know what? I haven't really thought this through that much. And so therefore I'm just jumping to conclusions, which means that my decision making is faulty. And therefore it signals that's somebody who maybe you want to take kind of all of their opinions with a grain of salt.

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  Perfect note to end on.

• 1:07:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you learn something today?

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  So much.

• 1:07:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I learned something.

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  What'd you learn?

• 1:07:39Anthony Pompliano?

  You told me all about the Paul Singer details that I'd forgotten. That's great.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  We should reread that profile.

• 1:07:44Anthony Pompliano?

  It is very good. So make sure you guys read that. Hopefully this was valuable to all of you. We would love to hear feedback. What do you like? What do you not like? I've seen some people say these should be shorter episodes. Some people saying they should be longer episodes. Some people said that they like when we go back and forth. Some people said that they like when Polina offers her opinion. Some people said that, you know, maybe I don't have good opinions. There's all kinds of feedback.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  Somebody said I was funny and Anthony.

• 1:08:08Anthony Pompliano?

  That is true. I read that as well. I blocked you on the comments.

• 1:08:13Anthony Pompliano?

  But no, if, if you have any feedback at all, we're trying to make these as valuable as we can. We're only going to do them one time a week. We will continue them because the feedback has been so positive. But the more you guys give us feedback, we will kind of cater these to make sure that they're valuable for all of you. So leave a comment, good, bad, indifferent, whatever you got, give it to us. I'll try to respond to every single person if I can. And we appreciate you watching or listening on the podcast and we'll talk to you guys next week.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  See ya.

• 1:08:39Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed that episode. That was one of my favorites. Now we got a lot of things to talk about because I spent a lot of time making this podcast or these videos. And now I need your help. There's a couple of things you can do to help the show get bigger, get in front of more people. The first, if you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit the like button. The more likes there are per video, the more people that see it. It's pretty simple. Now, if you're an audio listener, you don't like video, you don't like seeing my beautiful face, then you can go to Apple, Spotify, or any other audio platform and leave a review. Hit five stars, leave a nice comment, help us promote the show. On top of that, I got a brand new book coming out September 24th. It's called How to Live. An Extraordinary Life. I wrote 65 letters to my children. Go on Amazon,

• 1:09:24Anthony Pompliano?

  wherever you like to buy books, search "How to Live an Extraordinary Life", Anthony Pompliano. It'll pop up. It's a nice black cover. Go ahead and hit that "Buy" button, so you can preorder the book as well. Now, if you like the show, tell your friends, share with your family, annoy your brother, your sister, your mother, or your father, and make sure that they become a listener and a watcher as well. Thanks so much for tuning in. I'll see you guys the next episode.