#1095 David McIntosh On How To Save America

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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. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. David McIntosh is the president for the Club for Growth. In this conversation, we talk about prosperity, opportunity, economic freedom, taxes, cutting government spending, expanding school choice, Fed policy, inflation, Bitcoin, and much, much more. I really enjoyed this conversation with David and I hope that you guys enjoy it as well. At the end of the conversation, let me know on Twitter what you liked about this one, what you didn't like about this, and any other guests that you think that we should bring on the podcast. All right, let's get in this episode with David. I hope that you guys enjoy this one.

• 0:42Speaker 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.

• 1:05Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got David here with me. I thought a great place to start a conversation is debt to GDP in the United States at 140%. That is not a good situation to be in. And most people, as part of this conversation, talk about, "Stop spending, stop spending, stop spending," which I know that you and your organization are very worried about. But also, it is called the Club for Growth for a reason. Can we grow our way out of this GDP ratio? Is it possible for the United States to buck the trend and get back to a high-growth environment?

• 1:39Speaker 02

  It absolutely is possible, Pomp. You look at the productivity of the United States and the ability to bring new technology, new innovation into our economy. We're by and far the world leader on that. Now, does that mean that we should keep this profligate spending and adding more and more debt? No, we've got to stop that because we're seeing, now we've reached the point last year where this much debt to GDP is leading to inflation.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  About eight percent. Uh, one of our candidates figured out that basically for the average American, that means they've given up a month of salary. The buying power of about a month of their, their earnings. That's a huge impact on families in this country. So we can't just keep spending. We have to have discipline on that. Washington totally lost that discipline during COVID and they think they can keep spending. But we can grow out of it when we unleash that innovation. So that there are two sides of the equation. Hold down the spending and then hold down the regulations, the taxes, all of the parts of government that are break, put a break on the growth of the economy. Unleash that growth. We've seen it before. Reagan did it in the eighties. We, we grew phenomenally.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Clinton did it in the late nineties when we unleashed the power of the tech industry. We can do that again now.

• 3:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So when we think about uh, these past environments where we've seen impressive growth in the United States, um, there's a couple of different points in American history that I think we can look at. And uh, if you look from the eighteen seventy to nineteen seventy timeframe, uh, incredible growth, incredible innovation, all of that. Obviously the late nineties is another one, as you mentioned. Is it just a remove regulation and kind of let the free market ride? And that usually leads to growth? Or are there other ingredients that are needed in order to really kind of stoke that growth?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  One of the key ingredients is this sort of, you can call it animal spirits or this desire to innovate, to, to search out new technologies, to, to dream big. You know, the, the person who symbolizes that most right now is probably Elon Musk, right? Uh, who would have thought that, that you could create a company based on an electric vehicle 10 years ago? He dreamed it up and is doing it. And all of those innovations have ripple effects throughout the economy with the new approach, new technique. Um, and you look back in history, Henry Ford did that in making cars where they used to be handcrafted individual vehicles. He said, no, let's mass produce it. Up the assembly line.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  You saw it moving forward in after World War Two, the unleashing the power of all of the new technology that was developed then. The moon landing gave us a whole nother set of technology, computers that started in the sixties and became popularly available in the late seventies and eighties. I lived through that era where we didn't have any computers in college, the way everybody does now. And then the tech revolution, also in life sciences, biotechnology was a whole new way of looking at disease and creating therapeutics that would be able to cure diseases that were previously untreatable.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  America has this ability to imagine the unimaginable. I'm a big science fiction fan. I think that's where a lot of these ideas come from. People dream about a future that is fantasy right now. And then they think, well, how do we get there? And the rest of the world copies us. We lead with that imagination and that innovation. And part of what Club for Growth says is, let's let that flourish. Let's make sure we've got a country where people are free to follow their dreams.

• 5:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I've seen a couple of folks on Twitter and in private conversations over the last two years or so, say something to the effect of, man, it hit me. Everything we use on a daily basis was because somebody either had the courage, the conviction, or put the energy, time, and money behind building it. And there was one individual in particular who's in the tech industry, founder, and he was tweeting and he basically was like, that building wasn't there at some point. Like, somebody went and built that building, right? And if you think of like, this road was not here until somebody said, we should put a road here, they set the plan, they went and they got the approvals and they laid the asphalt and kind of did the work. And so in some way, it's an elementary view of the world of like, walking around with

• 6:19Anthony Pompliano?

  kind of childlike wonder. It's like, wow, you know, somebody built all of this. But at the same time, it's a reminder that like, we will not grow, we will not change, we will not improve unless somebody But he says, I will be the one to go do that.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Elon obviously is doing it in very kind of a public manner with things I think people think are cool and interesting. But it also can happen on your local community or in a other type of technology that maybe isn't, you know, let's go to Mars. But it does take individual citizens to actually do the work to move us forward.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Well, little things make a huge difference. Going back in history again, somebody looked at a four story building, which five story, maybe that was as far as people were willing to climb up their stairs and said, well, what if we make like a train that would go up and down instead of horizontally? And they invented the elevator, right? And that let us build these skyscrapers.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  It's those little ideas that people have, really from, interestingly enough, from the founding of our country, built into our constitution is the notion that we'll reward people for that. That's why we give people patents and protect proper intellectual property rights. And it's right there at the founding of America where our founding fathers said, we need to incentivize that because that's going to build the future.

• 7:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I have this book. It's kind of an oversized hardback book. And in it, it's a very visual thing. Every page has some sort of imagery, design, diagram, patent, or something from history. It's all about science and technology. And one day I was flipping through it and one of the pages I just happened to come upon was a man's forearm and it had the arteries and veins. And it was a lifelike image, but it was showing that somebody one day just put their finger onto it and said, oh, wait, something happens when I touch that. And they were trying to figure out like, what is this thing in my arm? And you remember that, like, there was a point where we didn't understand our own bodies, nearly to the degree we do today.

• 8:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Same thing when it comes to elevators, building urban density and kind of all these different ideas. But it also reminds us to like, there's things that will be invented in the future or will be discovered in the future that we have no clue about today.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And there's things about our own bodies. There's things about technology, but there's also things that will get created. And I think that's really where you seem to be the most kind of excited about and say, hey, look, we need to allow for that to happen in the United States, or we risk it happening somewhere else and us not reaping the benefits of it.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  That's right. And we're in a competitive world, right? Now, I think we have a natural advantage that we take that imagination and incentivize people to go do something with it, tinker with that in their garage and create something new. The rest of the world tends to copy us, right? And they're very good at that. China and Korea are very good at, okay, America has this technology. How do we refine that, copy it, make it mass producible?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  And we're an organization that believes in the world free trade. We've come to realize that there are adversaries out there, like in China, who will weaponize that and try to hurt the United States. So we can't allow that to happen. But when countries sign up to freedom and being partners with each other, there is a great flourishing of wealth that comes back and benefits us here in the US, but benefits everybody in the world.

• 9:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. One of the key ideas, I think, of the work that you do today is this idea of prosperity and opportunity comes from economic freedom. And given the world that we live in, especially in the Western world, over the last two or three years, economic freedom continues to be brought up, but we come from some level of financial privilege, right? If I go to the ATM, I get my money out and all of that. Economic freedom means something different to us than it does to somebody who is literally financially oppressed or worried about the confiscation of their wealth or the devaluation of their currency, literally to zero, in other parts of the world. But when you think of that term economic freedom here, what does that mean? Like, how do we wrap our heads around what exactly encompasses economic freedom?

• 10:42Speaker 02

  I think that's a great question, Pamp. I think of it fundamentally as each person can seek to pursue their dreams, that they can look for a job that fulfills them. They can decide, "I don't want to work for a big corporation. I want to try creating my own small business," whether it's a dream to set up a taco stand somewhere, or a dream to say, "I want to be the new innovator in financial services. Let me see if I can pull together a group of people to... I'll find some really smart people who know tech and computers, and find some marketing people, pull that together, and see if it'll work."

• 11:25Speaker 02

  And our economic system rewards that. It incentivizes people who have money to invest the capital in that. But for that to happen, we have to make sure they get the return on their investment, right? So you look at venture capital folks. They're picking, you know, maybe a dozen opportunities they see might work, and 10 of them might work a little bit, and two of them take off. And that's how they get rewarded for that. If we have a tax system, for example, that says, "No, when they take off and you make a lot of money, we're going to take 90% of that for the government," well, that destroys the

• 12:05Speaker 02

  whole incentive for people to use their money to help somebody else pursue their dream. So we, at the Club for Growth, look for ways in which we can lift those barriers that government has put on, either unintended barriers, that happens a lot. They're trying to do something good, protect people, but they inadvertently take away that freedom and that initiative and the reward/risk calculation. Or sometimes, we see people...

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Push the government, they use the political process, they come in and lobby and they say, "Hey, why don't you adopt this new rule? We can follow the rule." But what they know is their competitors will have to spend a lot of money to do that, so that it gives them a competitive advantage. And one of the reasons we try to keep the economic activity outside of government is that when you bring it into government, automatically it becomes politicized. And there are winners and losers based on who can do the best in politics, rather than who does the best in serving their customers, or building a new plant, or discovering a new idea.

• 13:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. When we think of taxes, I think that's the one that the average person interacts with the most, right? If you don't run a business, if you don't have a business that operates in a highly regulatory environment, the regulation that you deal with the most is taxes. And sales tax and things like that, I don't think people, whether they should or not, are very concerned about, is it 6% or 7%? Okay. The one that they see, the one that they feel, and the one that I hear people talk about the most is income tax.

• 13:53Anthony Pompliano?

  There seems to be a psychological barrier, and I've talked about this quite a bit recently, but 50%. If it's under 50% is my total tax rate, I am the majority stakeholder in my life.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Once it goes over 50%, the individual is now the minority stakeholder in their economic production. Right? Which seems kind of weird. And so how do you all think about income tax and this 50% on either side? And where we're headed when it comes to these types of almost personal regulations?

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And by the way, I'd want us to drive that down to about 20% to 25% for the government, and the rest, let people keep what they make. There's a real effect. People figure, "I'm doing all this work, or I'm taking this risk with everything I own, and the government's taking half of it or more of it?" Eh. Let me, I can just invest it in something that's tax-free, like a municipal bond. I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to take the risk and I'll be okay. So you get that. It's a real psychological phenomenon where people, it becomes a barrier for them working.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  It becomes a barrier for them taking risk and putting their heart and soul into it. There's several things that are problems in the tax code. That's one. That's the biggest one. As we increase that income tax rate, we see less and less economic activity, less and less people willing to work, willing to invest, willing to take risk.

• 15:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And that makes sense, right? I think this is like a really, really important point is if people have less resources and they also have a lower and lower incentive from a reward standpoint.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:41Anthony Pompliano?

  They do less work, they're less productive, they make less investment. Like, like there's this cascading effect of every additional point of personal income tax that is levied against an individual, it drops the incentive and it also means that they have less money in their pocket to do whatever activities they want to do, whether it's economic consumption or it is economic investment.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, you think about it this way, if somebody's looking, if I'm gonna bust my tail and put in 24/7 to do this and then somebody else gets all the benefit of it. I mean, at some point, you just get discouraged and say, eh, why don't I do something easy and relax and enjoy? There are also some other things that happen. One, the compliance costs. We get an increasingly complex tax code, right? You have to, once you get really invigilated in something, you gotta hire an accountant to tell you what you can and can't do. And half the time, they, if they're honest, they tell you, I'm not sure about this, but let's try to do the best we can. That's a ridiculous way to set up a tax code.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  We're all for just a flat tax. Make it very easy and simple. This is what you owe. Fill out the form, send it in, and don't worry about all these different deductions and steps you gotta do. The other thing that happens when you make it complicated like that is it distorts what people put their money into. I mean, we see a lot of people investing in windmills 10 years ago because the government created this super tax incentive where people made huge profits selling the materials for windmills. Now, would they have done that without the tax incentive? Maybe. Maybe they would have done something else that would, you know,

• 17:26Speaker 02

  build photovoltaic cells and put that on their roof instead. So it distorts the choices people make.

• 17:33Anthony Pompliano?

  The complexity is hilarious, I think, right? And it's like sad that it's hilarious. But there's the classic Donald Rumsfeld. Every time he filed his tax returns, he sent a letter in and he was like, "I'm college educated. My wife's college educated. We've done the best to our ability to actually figure out what we owe, but there's no ability for us to say with confidence that this tax return is correct and hopefully in my lifetime we'll simplify the tax code." Right? And you read it and you're just like, "That's a pretty baller letter to send." I don't suggest everyone send that letter. Maybe somebody like Donald Rumsfeld.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  From a former member of Congress, right, who wrote some of those tax bills.

• 18:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. So I think that's one. And then the second thing is, it cracks me up that it is so complex that there are memes that go viral on the internet all the time that are like, "You're telling me the government knows what I owe, but they just want me to like guess and try to send them how much I owe." And then they tell me later whether I got it right or not, right?

• 18:28Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 18:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, it's kind of crazy.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  That's right. Well, this has happened to me. You get a little bill saying, "You got this one wrong," you know, and it's always, "Send us more." They never say, "Well, we'll reduce it."

• 18:39Anthony Pompliano?

  They, one time, I, I think I got like an $80 check or, you know, something.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 18:45Anthony Pompliano?

  I almost framed it.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  I know.

• 18:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I was like, "Oh, my God. That's amazing." Came on like a check with the green paper and I think the Statue of Liberty was on the back of it.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  It's gotta be one in a million. And your accountant always says, "Well, it's easier to just pay it. Don't, don't kind of argue about it, David." It's crazy.

• 19:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you think about taxes, obviously, income tax is the big one. It does serve as an incentive and as a stick, right? There's kind of the carrot and the stick that happens. And for people who listen to this show, one of the things a number of people did is they all moved to Puerto Rico. And I remember thinking to myself, at first when I heard people say, oh, yeah, that's why are you going there? And then, oh, there's a tax incentive, right? And then you learn more and more about the tax incentive and you're like, you gotta be there for five years, right? Like, like, like, it's not like, oh, I'm there, kind of, sort of there. It's like, you gotta be there because it's such a big incentive. And so what it showed me was like, people are literally willing to uproot their life.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Take their families and move completely, you know, across the Gulf of Mexico.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? To an island.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  An island.

• 19:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Because of the incentive. That's a pretty damn good incentive, but it also then tells us like, wait a minute, are they running from the stick? Or are they running to the carrot? Right? Like, how much of it is the incentive versus no, the punishment, the penalty has gotten so egregious that they're looking for anything that is a better situation?

• 20:14Speaker 02

  No, that's right. Well, you see that in folks moving from California. And I know a lot of folks who've moved to Tennessee, a lot of come here to Florida, and they love California. It's a beautiful state. They loved living there. They'd raised their family there. And it just became too much. And so it was the stick became too burdensome. And they finally said, we gotta move, put down roots in a new place.

• 20:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. I think the top tax rate in California, if I remember correctly, is 53%. And there was, I'll call it a rumor, because I don't know where it was in the legislative process, but there was a proposal that was making its way through, that they potentially would increase it by another 5%. So the top tax rate would end up being 58%. And it goes back to the psychology, right? 49, chilling. 51, a lot of people who are like, hey, I don't feel good about this. If we saw 58%, yeah, I think there's a lot of people who would be like, I'm out of here. Right? Like, like, like, how do you sort of do it? Because at 58, well, what stops you from 60? Right? What starts you from 62? Like, at some point, do we just get, you know, is it 75%?

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then, then you're working for the, working for the man, as they say.

• 21:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, what about like, death tax? And other types of taxes that I think as people build more wealth, it becomes more of an issue that they worry about. But but still, it is a large tax that usually is around 50% on very large pools of wealth. How do you all think about stuff like that?

• 21:48Speaker 02

  One, we think it should be eliminated. It's an extra tax, a double or triple tax on what people have earned and the money that they've made. And we see incentive effects there. I mean, Florida was one of the first states to to get rid of the estate tax. And way before the differential on state income taxes, that attracted a lot of wealthy people when they retired. Nice place to retire. The infrastructure is there for us. Doctors are there and we avoid this estate tax. People, one, they don't want to be taxed twice. But second, that's a very much a human emotion, human nature to want to leave something for their kids, right?

• 22:32Speaker 02

  And so they they spend a lot of time, effort, figuring out, how do I maximize that when when I leave? You can't take it with you, but there's a big desire to leave it for to the people they love.

• 22:44Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the logic behind the death tax? Like, if we were to talk to someone who says, no, we should absolutely have that. It should be 50% or whatever. Is it just a revenue source for the government? Or is there some other logic?

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, there's also this this sense of fairness that when somebody's made wealth, they ought to give a big chunk of it back, that society is entitled to it. I guess it's hard for me to make this argument because I don't really believe it. But but I could hear somebody saying, well, it wasn't just you. I guess the famous Obama, you know, you didn't build this. The government did. Society let you build your wealth. Now you owe it back when your when your life's over.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  My answer to that is, why do you owe it to society? Or why don't you pick who in society you want to give it to? Some people give it to charities, some people give it to their children. The other thing, Pomp, that we think about wealth being unfair because it creates for this individual or this family a huge advantage. One of the great things about America is the way in which people rise and fall. We don't have static, elite, rich classes, the way European aristocrats used to be. And that's, to me, one of the most important indicators of whether our society's working well or not.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  People at the top bracket, in a couple generations, they'll be at the lower bracket. And vice versa, people at the bottom of the ladder can climb to the top in America. And it's still the case that you can do that. One of the great things, we'll talk more about Bitcoin and crypto, is we're seeing that happen. People who were at the bottom of the ledger said, "This is interesting, I'm going to invest in it." And suddenly, they find themselves with real wealth, and they're investing it and creating a life for themselves. It's the American dream, and one of the unique things about our society, we were talking earlier, why are we good at growth? It's one of the reasons we are.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Is that you've got that dynamic where people are not ossified into stratus, based on where you're born, it's based on your skills.

• 25:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, one of the jokes in a lot of the kind of family office world and the asset management world is like, "You don't need the death tax, because you just need to wait three generations, and they'll for sure give the money back."

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 25:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Do something dumb that somehow will disperse it back into society, either through consumption or stupidity.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 25:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think it goes back to this idea of like free markets, right? To some degree...

• 25:31Anthony Pompliano?

  We as a society place an emphasis, maybe lesser emphasis than historically, but we still place an emphasis on free markets. The question is just, do we have free markets? Right? I remember during 2020 with the volatility in the stock market, the stock market would open and it was limit up, limit down almost every day. And they were, they were hitting these kind of circuit breakers and we were literally shutting off the stock market and then putting them back online. And you look at this and there's reason, right? There's obvious reasons as to why we do it. But we live in a country where the stock market is closed more hours than it's open in a week.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And you start to think about this stuff and you're like, okay, maybe we don't have 100% completely, you know, ungoverned free markets. And hours of operations are great because people need to sleep. Okay, fine. But then you kind of get more into the Fed policy and you get more into interest rates and you start to look and you're like, do we have free markets in the United States?

• 26:25Speaker 02

  So I think we still do. They're not as free as they used to be and they're not as free as they should be. The, and Federal Reserve, as you mentioned, it, it no longer follows the green span notion that we're going to peg the dollar to, I think he essentially used gold, but, but to a commodity with real value to it. And that was a great hedge against inflation, a great hedge against expanding further than the economy could, could really take it. Milton Friedman said, it's better to have a formula because humans will tinker with each edge and most of the time they get it wrong. Well, you look back at the history of the Federal Reserve, most of the time when you

• 27:10Speaker 02

  look backwards, they get it wrong. They're smart and the, and the market follows them and listens to them, but they, they look and they see, as we're seeing now, inflation, oh, it isn't transitory, it's real, we got to do something. And so they start hiking interest rates. Well, chances are they're going to hike them too far or too long. Because the economy is going to turn and correct itself before the Federal Reserve does. So that's an example where we don't have a perfectly free market and there's a cost to it.

• 27:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, even if you just look over the last two years, I mean, it's again hilarious to a degree, but sad on the other side is we created a loose monetary policy environment, which we'd been living in for about a decade or so, but we really kind of ratcheted it up with 0% interest rates, started printing trillions and trillions of dollars. And they were still conducting quantitative easing and had interest rates at zero and we had 7% inflation in the United States of America. Like, talk about being behind the curve.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Totally, totally.

• 28:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And then, as we now have two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, which is debatable, I guess, somehow that is that a recession or not. But I don't think the Fed, from my knowledge, has ever hiked interest rates while in a recession. And so you start to think about these things, you say, are we already behind the curve? And whether you think we are or we're not, it just begs the question of like, can humans actually understand where we are currently, given all the data we have, accurately analyze that, and then predict the future as well, and keep the price of money in an economy at the correct level? Like, that is a near impossible task.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  That's right. And so you've got to build in structures that correct along the way and trust those structures rather than human decision making. There was also just bad economics that came up after the 08 crisis, where they believed it's okay to do unlimited quantitative easing, basically pumping up the money supply. It's not going to cause inflation. Well, we now look at it and realize the inflationary effect was being spread across the world because the dollar is the world's reserve currency. At some point, that limit's reached. I mean, these rules in economics are immutable. You can't suddenly

• 29:35Speaker 02

  decide they've changed. No longer, we won't have inflation anymore when we pump up the money supply. No, it's going to maybe be absorbed for a while, but now we're starting to see the real effects of it. Some concern that we've over-

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Built the money supply so much that there's going to be a crisis. I don't know the answer to that. My hope is, no, we'll be able to correct it and get back on course and then have innovation and the whole productivity of our society catch up with that money supply.

• 30:10Anthony Pompliano?

  You think that's possible?

• 30:11Speaker 02

  I think it is possible.

• 30:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Really? You're gonna have to convince me of this because I don't think that they even know that there's a problem, let alone that they're willing to do the work.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  No, I don't think we've fully convinced the Federal Reserve of this. People who are objective are realizing this new, new economic theory was a bunch of bunk and, and they should reject it.

• 30:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Handing out free money is not a good idea.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  It doesn't work. I mean, and it, it satisfied a political agenda, right? To, to keep everything going as long as you can, but eventually you gotta pay the bill.

• 30:45Anthony Pompliano?

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• 32:02Speaker 02

  Go check them out today.

• 32:04Anthony Pompliano?

  It begs the question, so if we just look at this from a kind of the most basic analysis, the Federal Reserve is supposed to serve two core functions, right? Stable prices and as close to full employment as they can get. Employment and prices.

• 32:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Employment right now is still fairly low unemployment and appears to be good. Now, we can debate the finer points of labor force participation and all that, but just put that aside for a second and say, okay, the official number is correct and we have low unemployment. Prices are obviously not stable.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I am hard pressed to find anyone who believes that inflation is only eight to nine percent and they don't think that it hit double digits and is still over double digits. But let's take the official number and say it's eight point two, eight point three percent. What I think it begs the question of is like, the Federal Reserve is supposed to be independent. And now what we saw when Trump was president, he was literally tweeting at the Federal Reserve.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 33:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Devalue the currency and you would have thought that he was an economist, maybe a armchair economist, but saying, hey, we need to change the value of our money because of all of these growth initiatives. When we got through some of the pandemic stuff, we also saw a lot of politicians, not the president, across aisles, and then now with the new administration advocating in various different ways for certain monetary policy. And so is the Federal Reserve an independent organization today? Or should we never expect it to actually be independent? And we should understand that it operates within a larger machine of the political system?

• 33:40Speaker 02

  I think the latter. It's too much to expect it to be truly independent. And when they created it, tried to build in the mechanisms by having the banks be the ultimate owners rather than the government. But as soon as you get anybody that's weak, and I think Powell is weak in terms of resisting political pressure, that the constituency becomes both Washington and then the market. And ultimately.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  There is a governor on them and that the bank ownership will dictate that what interest rate they are because banks aren't going to lend below the inflation rate forever. Right? So, so there are governing principles that come in and force them to do the right thing. But it's, it's in some ways better than the White House controlling the money supply.

• 34:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Agreed.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  And whether it's Republican or Democrat, right? So it's, it's better than the alternative, but it's not perfect and it's not going to be totally independent. The, the key thing I, I think is to move in the direction that Friedman urged us for decades, put in more formulas that are tested over time so that you don't have that human indiscretion, or you limit the human discretion, because humans inherently are political. They're gonna, they've got some audience they're playing to, whether it's, it's their friends on Wall Street, whether it's the politicians, whether it's the public at large, you know, if, if

• 35:19Speaker 02

  the last thing in the world the Federal Reserve decision makers want is to have the media turn them into evil agents that are destroying our economy, right? Because then everybody will hate them.

• 35:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  And it's just human nature. You don't want to be in that position.

• 35:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  But if we set up these formulas where they, they can say, these are proven over time, it can be painful at times when we've got to do the correction, but we're going to rely on the formula, then, then it takes some of that human frailty out of it.

• 35:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It did feel a little bit, at one point, Joe Biden called Jerome Powell to his office and they had a meeting. And I said at the time, I said, this feels like getting called to the principal's office.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And, you know, of course, they're never going to explicitly say, you must do X or you must do Y, but it did feel a little bit like, I'm checking in here. Inflation's high, it's not coming down. What the hell's going on over there? And, you know, publicly they'll say all the right things of, the Federal Reserve is going to do what they believe best. But, but it's hard to kind of balance that thought process with, we have Fed Reserve presidents day trading assets that the Fed is buying themselves. We have politicians who seem to be very involved. And then you get into like,

• 36:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Talking about this stuff. And I think that's actually the most interesting part of the Federal Reserve right now is they used to never talk.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:44Anthony Pompliano?

  They never did press conferences. Many young people don't know that. That like, this is the new phenomenon in the grand scheme of things of the whole idea of having the press conferences and having trillions of dollars basically waiting on every breath of, you know, what is Powell going to say or whatever?

• 37:00Anthony Pompliano?

  But then they just say crazy things like inflation is transitory, or the president was recently interviewed and he's like, ah, inflation was only up just an inch.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Month to month, just an inch. And it's like, uh, okay.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, but when it's at 8%, that inch matters.

• 37:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, how do you guys just think about like, okay, there's something that's happening, but then there's a way to talk about it. And I think that actually, it feels like most people are,

• 37:26Anthony Pompliano?

  they're willing to deal with what's happening because they can't change it. But they do feel like the way these things are talked about, that's where people are getting upset because they feel like they're either being misled. People who are talking are capitalizing on the lack of financial education, or the understanding of the nuance of markets. Like, how do you guys think about that?

• 37:42Speaker 02

  And, and the huge risk in the economy that when they talk, one, they always hedge everything, right? They're like lawyers or politicians, which I'm both. People accuse me of doing the same thing. But they hedged, and just in case they're wrong. Well, recently Powell sent out a message that, okay, we're, we don't have a definite plan going forward. Well, the market for two or three weeks took that as, oh, they're not going to do any more interest rate hikes. By the way, I'll give credit to my guys at Morgan Stanley. I called them and said, what are you guys doing? And they said, we're ignoring that because they are going to have another interest rate hike. And so we're steady as it goes, David.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  And they were right, because about three weeks later, the whole market realized, oh, that isn't what Powell meant. He just meant they weren't definitely having a plan, you know, three quarters out. But yes, they're steady as we go and raising interest rates until we get it to the right level. And so you had three weeks where everybody was using bad information. And if, whereas if you say nothing, then people will look at what are the market indicators? What's the, we're not going to try to second guess what government's going to do to change our lives. Also, back to the Federal Reserve, I think it's a mistake to have that dual mission.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  And now the progressives are arguing for a three-part mission, the third part being kind of woke capital. But it would be, they would be much better suited if they focused on, on the monetary supply and the inflation. And they left the employment number to the policy side, to Congress and the president to do policies that will allow the economy to thrive. Because when you have the Federal Reserve driving that, it creates too much of an incentive like we've had over the last 10 years to have lower interest rates than what should be there in the market.

• 39:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. How do you balance the idea that the Federal Reserve now, you know, pretty much since November of 2021 has been talking about tighter financial conditions. We're going to raise interest rates. We're eventually going to do quantitative tightening and, and we're going to kind of turn this big cruise ship and, and we're going to get on the right track. Remains to be seen whether they will be successful or not. I tend to think that it may be hard for them to get inflation down if they can't raise the interest rate above inflation without bankrupting the United States. And so you get some complexity there. But at the same time that they're attempting tighter financial conditions, politicians are still spending like they're drunk.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Seems like every week we're sending, you know, weapons and money and all this other stuff to other countries.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  Forgiving debt.

• 40:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, like, how do you balance it? Because it literally feels like these two strategies are completely at odds with each other. Like, we have inflationary pressures by continuing to conduct all sorts of fiscal policy and, and geopolitical, essentially, I don't want to use the word bribery, but like, it, it feels very kind of weird. While at the same time Fed's like, hey, we got to stop this and we got to create tighter financial conditions.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  So this is where elections come in. The Federal Reserve isn't elected. They're going to continue past these November elections. But, but we're going to have a referendum and the public's going to say, do we want more of this profligate spending by both Republicans and Democrats? Or do we want to tighten the belt and get a grip on this inflation? And the poll numbers, we, we poll three times a week in different races around the country. Every time, the number one issue people are concerned about is that inflation and the cost of living and how it's hurting their ability, their, their real income. And so that's that's going to be on the ballot and the politicians.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Both sides are continuing with their current strategies. Republicans saying, no, we're not going to go all the way that that the Democrats want to do, but we like some spending, so we'll go with the ones we we like. And Repub- and Democrats saying, no, we need to just spend more and that'll solve the problems that we have. And the voters are going to decide which path do we want to go on? And then afterwards, the politicians wake up and say, oh, okay, the public mandate's this, I got to be careful and don't get crosswise with that public mandate.

• 42:03Anthony Pompliano?

  You've mentioned a couple of times that Republicans and Democrats both do it, which I think will surprise people to hear you say that, given the organization that you run generally supports Republican candidates.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do you say that both of them do it?

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, let me let me set the table for that. What we try to do is support candidates who are for free markets and limited government. The Republican Party is generally more in favor of that. So the candidates we pick are Republicans. We spend a lot in the primaries to pick which Republicans will go forward and that. But it's true. You look at the spending, you know, President Trump advocated all sorts of deficit spending. The Senate, Mitch McConnell and the appropriators, they love to spend money. And and they would argue that's good politics. You never lose if you spend money.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  And the problem is, we now see this, as you pointed out, 140% debt to GDP ratio, that it's putting the country on the brink of of a real financial disaster. And I also think it's an integrity question. Every single one of those Republicans goes home and tells their constituents, I'm gonna stop this government wasteful spending. We're gonna get a control on this. We're gonna get to a balanced budget. And then they go back to Washington and they vote on all of these huge bills. And if they feel bad about it, then McConnell comes out and says, oh, well, we can't shut

• 43:44Speaker 02

  down the government, so we gotta spend for, vote for this huge spending bill that I know you haven't read because we just wrote it and showed it to you 24 hours ago.

• 43:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's 7,000 pages long.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  7,000 pages long. All these ridiculous spending, as we were talking about earlier, you know, studies on the effect of marijuana, the bridge to nowhere, the mating habits of bees, you know, all this ridiculous stuff that they load into there.

• 44:07Anthony Pompliano?

  So I've heard an argument, I one time said to somebody, like, all the pork, right, all the, essentially buying votes, right, and done in a politically acceptable way. And a very well-known investor who's at lunch with me said, no, we need that. And I said, what do you mean? He goes, it would be a deadlock. We would get nothing done unless there was the ability to put some of this stuff in. And so he was making the argument that, like, look, nobody likes it, but it's a necessary side effect in order to get things done. Do you agree with that or disagree with that?

• 44:39Speaker 02

  Well, the question I would ask is, what are they getting done? And is that a good thing or a bad thing? So I don't want to just get things done because oftentimes in Washington, it's actually a bad thing. I get the theory that it greases the skids and gets the votes, but what it's getting the votes for are these huge deficit spending with absolutely no restraint and very little oversight of where's all this money going, how's it being spent, what's happening to it? So to me, the ultimate response to that is, I don't want to just get anything done. I want to get the right thing done.

• 45:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The two data points that just stick out to me as kind of wild over the economic markets of the last couple of years is, first, Federal Reserve's balance sheet 10x. It was a 10-bagger, right? And we jokingly, for a while, had like a countdown. Like, hey, when are we going to hit the 10x? Because we were kind of like around 900 billion or so when the 08 crisis happened. And it took 14 years, you know, started at the bottom, but now we're here. And we got the 10x increase, which is insane.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 45:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Obviously. Do you think, I guess on the first point, do you think that that can come back down? Do you think we'll ever see, instead of having eight and a half, nine, nine and a half trillion dollars, could we get it under five? Could we get it under a trillion again? How do you think about that?

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Yes, it's possible, but it'll take leadership that's willing to break some eggs and change the way things are done in Washington. What I see Americans wanting is that type of leadership. Now, I think it's important to discern who that is, what they're going to do. What do they have good judgment? But it is possible if you disrupt the system the way it is going now.

• 46:31Anthony Pompliano?

  What would that look like?

• 46:31Speaker 02

  And you have discipline. Well, honestly, I think it will take somebody who's willing to basically tell the political leaders on their side of the ledger, I am willing to disrupt close things until we get it right. I'm not going to just accept this 78,000-page bill that you're writing and use the majority that he'd have in his party to change the system. In the Federal Reserve side, I think it'll take a new personnel in some ways. Somebody who understands the real way that monetary policy should work and the discipline, not immediately to totally disrupt things,

• 47:15Speaker 02

  but put us on a path to say, we're going to reduce this systematically over time.

• 47:19Anthony Pompliano?

  When we think of the second data point that sticks out in my head is in 2020, we bailed out the airline industry. And when we bailed out the airline industry, there was two key components to it. The first was the airlines for basically a decade had spent a lot of their free cash flow doing stock buybacks and we can, you know, tons of incentives that that maybe misalign with shareholders and all this stuff. Basically, they got to a point which was a catastrophic external shock to their business, but they didn't have the money. They could not survive. And it's easy to armchair quarterback and say, hey, what were you doing for the last decade, right? Why don't you have that cash? But that's the situation they're in. But at the time, I remember explicitly calling

• 48:00Anthony Pompliano?

  out, saying, wait a minute, they're not going to the equity markets. They're not going to the debt markets. They ran to the government on day one and said, you have to bail us out. We are too big to fail, essentially, right? You have to bail us out. And what struck me was they've identified the sucker in the room. They know that they're going to get a deal from the US government that nobody on the equity or debt market will give to them. And sure enough, there was, I think, $25 billion was kind of the initial bailout. I think there was a second leg to it at some point. And the money was given and about two thirds of it, no equity. So there's no nationalization of any of these. And there was no intention to pay back the money. It was just literally, we're just going to

• 48:45Anthony Pompliano?

  hand you tens of billions of dollars and like, you know, just keep running the planes. How do we run a government? Or how do we deal with the next crisis if that now has become the playbook? Right? The banks did it. Now the airlines do it. Like, who's next?

• 49:01Speaker 02

  So, exactly. And you, you get all of the bad side of the risk reward equation, right? You don't, you're not punished for taking a risk when it fails. And I'm a big believer, this is going to sound harsh, but I'm a big believer in let bankruptcy work and keep the airlines going, but wipe out the equity and for people who invested in management that made bad decisions. They didn't reserve the capital for that type of a contingency. And don't reward that because for two reasons. One, it's not fair, right? Why should every worker in America pay money to reward these people for making bad decisions?

• 49:45Speaker 02

  But second, it creates an incentive for the next time to make the same bad decision. You know, they've, they've realized we can go back to the ATM that is the government in Washington, and that'll cover any downside to the risk. So let's take stupid risks. It's, the key to free markets working is the discipline of that risk reward. You fail, you lose. You succeed, you get rewarded. And when we have the government come in and say, we're only going to let you get rewarded, and we'll cover your backside. Well, that sounds nice, but it creates all sorts of wrong incentives.

• 50:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that the removing of risk from markets incentivizes some pretty ridiculous behavior.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Because what you do, you go and take as much risk as possible. There's no punishment.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  We've seen it over and over again. This is maybe a little bit old history, but there was the whole savings and loan crisis, where the government basically guaranteed they'd cover the downside of loan defaults and incentivize these savings and loans to make very risky, out of the normal banking decisions on loans they make. Well, soon, pretty soon, they were all bankrupt, and the government was having to come in and take them over.

• 50:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Shocking.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? If you say to somebody, we will remove the risk, they will take as much risk as they possibly can, because there's no punishment.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  And, and you get a much higher fee for that risk, right? So it looks like your, your bottom line is you're making tons of money. But what happens is when it all, the risk doesn't work, then that, they pocket the money, and the government pays for it.

• 51:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The Club for Growth, one of the, the key ideas is this idea of reducing the size and scope of the federal government. You have a unique perspective. You actually were in the government. You, you served as an elected official. What was it like decades ago, right? Compared to today? When you actually were serving in the government? What was the size of the government? How has it changed over time?

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I started shortly after law school in the Reagan administration. First, there was actual genuine bipartisanship still at that point. And I think part of it was the Democrat Party was pretty secure in controlling Congress, and the Republican Party, most of the time, was able to win the White House. So you had a balance of power and they worked together. But there was also an integrity that Reagan himself brought to it, which is, when I say something to the voters, to the American people, my government's gonna do that.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Too many times today politicians separate campaigning, what they tell people, and then what they do. And they cynically think, "Well, nobody will figure out that I didn't keep my promises." What's happened over time, but we still believed in the American government back when I was growing up at that point in time. Today, people see that, and I was gonna say they're cynical, they're actually perceptive, that we've got a bunch of people who tell us one thing and then do the opposite when we give them power, and they don't know who to trust. And that perception leads them to distrust government, which is bad for our society.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  Government should have as its number one priority, building that trust and confidence of the American people. I'm a big believer that power in our system is with the people. The government of the people, by the people, for the people, as Lincoln famously said. And that power is lent to Congress, lent to the President, lent to the government in Washington, to do good things for society. But if the government becomes self-interested, or lacks integrity and lies to people about what they're really doing, then the people have eventually become dissatisfied, they

• 53:48Speaker 02

  become disgruntled, and eventually, I think, they'll replace them. And... Hopefully that replacement is through a peaceful democratic election process. If they continue to get frustrated about that, then then there'll be people who come up and say, well, we got to have revolution, essentially. I don't want that. I think we're prosperous when we have this stable democratic process, but that requires integrity. And that's one of the bigger differences that I see. Also, the the scope of what government believes they can get in involved in. Back then, the key mission was fighting communism

• 54:28Speaker 02

  in the Soviet Union, right? And keeping the prosperity in our country so that everybody had a chance at the American dream. You know, you worked hard and you succeeded. Your kids could go to college and have an even better job than you. That was what everybody felt, knew, experienced in their life post-World War II and believed was the future. Today, you see that governments thinking, oh, well, we want to tell people, you know, how they behave. We want to tell people what products they can buy and shouldn't buy. I noticed that the bank regulators are starting to tell banks, well, some products that are

• 55:12Speaker 02

  legal, we don't really like, so don't lend them money. That's a huge intrusion into everybody's personal choice about how they spend their money and what they do in life. If it's a legal activity, the government should be neutral about that. And that decision that's gradually crept in, that it's okay for us to have the government tell people how they should live their lives, rather than create a system of opportunity where they make the choices. And that's a big change. I read an interesting book, it's actually been out now probably over 10 years, by Charles

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Murray, Coming Apart. And he described how there are increasingly separation between the elite, college-educated citizens and the rest of the country. When I grew up, it was a little town in Indiana, and there were no fences. There were a couple wealthy families that lived in the same neighborhoods as everybody else. There were foundries that people worked and spent their lives doing that and sending their kids to school. There was this sense that we were all one community. Today, you look and you see, and he pointed out that the wealthy, college-educated folks

• 56:32Speaker 02

  live in certain neighborhoods but are not distributed around the country anymore. And typically, those neighborhoods are fenced off and with a gate, and they're isolated. And they have power and are using that power to benefit themselves. And the rest of the country's feeling like, you know, what's happening to us? We're being left out. Yeah. That sort of social divide, I think, is very problematic for us. You see it, people are surprised by it in elections when Donald Trump harnessed a lot of that discontent upon the broad public. And the elites were shocked on the day after the election that someone like that could get elected.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  And, but they didn't wake up and say, oh, maybe we need to rethink how we do things and have a better, more united society, and that not everybody is like us. Yeah. That hasn't happened. And I think one of the things we look for are political leaders who are aware of that and want to lead for everybody.

• 57:36Anthony Pompliano?

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• 59:06Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things I'm fascinated by is although I consider myself an independent and generally have been very disinterested in politics and a lot of what I would consider the day-to-day kind of posturing and campaigning and all this stuff, as you get older, as you learn more, you realize it is part of every aspect of society. But in today's society, everything seems to get politicized even faster. The feedback loop happens quicker and quicker. And I recently heard Peter Thiel, he gave a speech at a conference, and he was like, you know, the old adage of the Republican Party is for the middle class and the Democratic Party is for everybody else. Which was interesting, because I think if you went and you talked

• 59:50Anthony Pompliano?

  to many people in the finance world or who pay attention to economics, they would say, hey, America is losing the middle class. There's basically this bifurcation. You see it in the wealth inequality, you see it in kind of all these things where we're getting, some people are getting very, very wealthy, and then some people are getting into more and more dire financial situation. So how do you guys think of like the different economic classes and then how that intersects with political parties and kind of like where we are as a society right now?

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  So the old thinking was the Republicans were for business and the rich, the Democrats were for the working man, and that was the post-World War II. Now, I think it-

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  It's like a barbell. The Democratic Party is actually the party of the rich and elite. And at the other end, the folks who are on welfare, the dependent classes. And the Republican Party is that middle class, you know, from industrial workers all the way up to small businessmen and folks who are in that, you know, upper middle class, not quite rich group. They tend to identify more with Republican on economic issues. The problem with the way the Democrats approach it is there's this huge incentive to keep

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  that poor dependent class on welfare, right? You see it in education policy where they, you have elite schools, you have either neighborhoods with really good public schools or private schools that they send their kids to. And they throw money at these poor inner-city schools, but they don't do anything to change it where it's safer for the kids and they actually get a good education. So, poor, typically minorities, blacks, Latinos, their families are stuck in these public schools that are supposed to be the pathway to opportunity, but in fact, keep them down on the farm, if you will.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  And that, nobody will admit that's what they're doing, but our whole welfare system is created around the notion of, we want you to be dependent on us, we're going to keep you in the system because otherwise you'll be penniless and out on the streets, rather than a system that says, we'll be there as a safety net if something happens and you're not working well, but we're going to channel you into that broad, middle-class mainstream where you can take care of yourself, have your own apartment, have your own house, have your job, and your kids can go to a good school. That used to be the dream that America had for the poor, that they could escape poverty and become in that. Now, because the politics are for the

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  Democrats, rich or poor, dependent people on welfare, they can't afford to let too many of them escape because then they don't have enough votes to win the elections.

• 1:02:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  That's the truth of the matter that nobody will admit in Washington.

• 1:02:57Anthony Pompliano?

  So let me ask, there's a lot to unpack here, right? I think there's a lot of people who will listen to this and some people will not read, yup, he nailed it like that. That's exactly what happens. And then there's other people who say this guy's nuts, like, what is he talking about? And I already envision the nice conversation that happens with a framework like that. I guess the first thing is how much of that is intentional? What you just laid out is intentional versus it is a byproduct of people who are well intentioned, trying to do good, and they just don't realize that there are side effects that that end up happening. Like, is it a evil plan? Maybe it's like the extreme way to describe it, like there's some intentionality there?

• 1:03:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Or is it, no, they're trying to do the right thing as a system and we just haven't figured out the right way to do it? And so we have these side effects.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  So I think initially it starts with the unintended consequences.

• 1:03:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  But when they reject any reform that would change the system, then I think it becomes intentional. We want to keep it the way it is. And again, you see this in education. The teachers' union absolutely rejects any notion that we're going to have parental choice about what schools their kids go to.

• 1:04:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Describe a little bit about school choice, because I know you've spent a lot of time on this.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  The core value there is that the parent should be involved in the spending of the money of where their kids go to school. So they can look at the school and say, yeah, this is the right fit for my child. Or no, this is a dangerous school. I want to send them to another safer school. Now, a lot of times we used to think of it, okay, it's taking kids out of the public schools. I think of it as also putting parents in control of the public school money.

• 1:04:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so this is a idea that I think a lot of people, they've never even heard of, school choice, right? But right now, the way that the system works. Is where you live pretty much determines where you go to school. Like when I, when I was in elementary, middle and high school, people would, they would move, they would. I remember I went to school with a kid in third or fourth grade and like they were using somebody like a relative's address. There's all these things that happen, sports specifically.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  Right, be a big incentive, yeah.

• 1:05:14Anthony Pompliano?

  All that. What you're talking about is maybe those lines shouldn't just be drawn based on where you live, but there should be more control given to the parents. So how would that work? And let's say I had a middle school or a high school student. What does that look like in terms of what I'm able to choose?

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. And we label it school freedom, by the way, because it gives the parents the freedom to have the best education for their kids. The classic way it would be is if the parents are in a neighborhood and the school is failing. They're not teaching the kids. It might be dangerous because there's no discipline. They have the ability to take some of that money and send their kids maybe to a parochial school that's they're in the same neighborhood.

• 1:06:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Stupid question.

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  So you get competing schools.

• 1:06:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So stupid question is when you say some of that money, there's like a budget that each parent is given or how does that work?

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, they call it a scholarship typically. And let's say in a lot of urban areas, it's fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a kid that's being spent. Yeah, it's huge and we're getting very little for it. It's one of the big.

• 1:06:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So each kid that goes to school, there's about, let's just round up and say twenty thousand dollars or so being spent for that kid to go to school that for a year.

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And now it would say, well, wait, maybe if the parent doesn't want the kid to go there and the kid might not even want to go there. Is there a way to redirect those funds to allow them to go somewhere else?

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  That's right. And typically what, what the proposals are is say, okay, let's take maybe ten thousand of that. They can use it for tuition somewhere else and another five thousand. The new plan is another five thousand that will put in a savings account so they can pay for college. So all of a sudden, these, these poor families have a chance to get a better education and funding for college. And that leaves the other five thousand that stays there in the public school. And they don't have a kid that they're worried about, so it's extra money for them essentially. That's the typical proposal of how it would work. I would add on to that, that if the parent decides to stay in that public school,

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  the school has to get the parent to sign off on the money going there.

• 1:07:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  Think about it. If a bureaucrat in the school doesn't want parents in his office complaining about, you know, their kid getting beaten up and nobody's doing anything about the gang, he'd prefer to keep them out of the school. Well, if those parents get to sign off whether he gets his money or not, he's going to pay attention to them. I mean, it changes the whole dynamic.

• 1:07:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, in some way, the parent and the child is the customer.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  They become the customer when they control the money.

• 1:07:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  And we saw this up in Virginia. It was a suburban county. They were frankly terrible about disciplining some of the things going on with the teachers abusing the kids. And the parents got really upset. And they locked them out and actually had some of them arrested when they tried to go to the school board and complained. This was the big incident that Glenn Youngkin said, no, parents need to be involved in education. He won the Virginia governorship on that principle. If the dynamic had been there where that school board knew this whole block of parents can take their money and go somewhere else, I'd tell you they would never would have done that. They would have never tried to hide from those customers. And it changed the dynamic.

• 1:08:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Now-

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  That school freedom, I think, is probably the biggest way we can change life for middle America and folks who are underprivileged and poor.

• 1:08:55Anthony Pompliano?

  If we flipped the other side of the table, what would the counterargument to this be? Like, the people who say, you know, "Sounds awesome," no.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:09:05Anthony Pompliano?

  What is their logic as to why they don't want this to happen?

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Typically, and it's the teachers' unions that come out with this, they say, "Oh, you're stealing money from the public schools." That's the counterargument. And-

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  In the past, people heard that and said, "Well, no, I liked my public school. It was a great experience. That's where I went. I had a good..." Now, interestingly, COVID changed a lot of that. Parents looked in and saw what was going on in the public school, and they weren't that happy with it. Especially when they said, "Your kids can't come back", or "They gotta wear a mask", and the parents didn't want that. So COVID kind of blew open the system in education, where parents now have a much better idea of what's going on. And that old argument that, "Hey, you're taking money away from us", doesn't carry water anymore. We see it in polls, where we ask people, "Would you want to have this

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  type of school freedom in your school system?". It used to be less than 50, now it's close to 60% of Americans say, "Yes, that'd be a good reform."

• 1:10:12Anthony Pompliano?

  So the trend is more and more people are opening, are open to this idea, and your hypothesis is it's because they saw what was going on in the schools during COVID?

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  And on top of that, I think it's the civil rights movement of the next generation.

• 1:10:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  Because if you look at where poor schools are, they're almost always disproportionately black Hispanic minority school systems. And if we can change the way they deliver education for those families, it's a huge step up. It's a huge equalizer in our society. And I think, honestly, I think it's not right if we don't do it.

• 1:10:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It feels like education, generally across political aisles, across countries, across ethnic lines, all these different ways you can cut societies, education is seen as an equalizer, right? And the more educated you are, the better kind of trajectory you have in life, the more likely you are to change your family lineage, or kind of generations of your past family, and improve that of your future generations. What always has shocked me, I think, is how many parents don't have the opportunity to even worry about what's going on inside of the school because they have got to work or they've got, you know, there's just life going on.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  Especially if both parents are working and.

• 1:11:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. And so I guess a piece of this is COVID obviously had parents and students both at home, right? And so there is this like almost collision of, hey, I'm on my computer, trying to do whatever I can from home, but like, what are you doing?

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? What are they teaching you?

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. What's going on? That doesn't sound right to me.

• 1:11:56Anthony Pompliano?

  But it also brings this question of like, education, not just for children, there's also education of young adults, of adults themselves. The internet obviously has broken down many of these large institutions. It is kind of exposed, you know, all these things in society that I think people previously held as true and maybe now question. But that also feels like there's this whole political movement around being willing to go and find the answers.

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Anthony Pompliano?

  I think when I grew up, it was always just like, what we were told, I don't think people, like a lot of people kind of questioned it. And that feels like over the last 20 or 30 years, that's changed significantly to now, maybe the default isn't, I don't believe that. But there's definitely like, maybe, right?

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:12:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Is the response when they're told something like, sure, maybe that's true. Maybe it's not like, let me go look. And so do you guys see that in the work you do?

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, totally. That people are, one, they're willing to go Google something, right? And say, is that right? So you, and I think that'll be a great antiseptic for politics because we, politicians became kind of cynical, you know, voters aren't paying attention. I can do whatever I want after I'm elected. But also in the campaigns and sadly, right now, I'd say we're in a really bad place where, and it's part of our ethic of First Amendment, let everything be out there. There, there used to be, yeah, your earlier experiences in politics, when I ran for Congress back in the nineties, there

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  was an ethic that you should tell the truth. You can have a strong message. You can attack your opponent. You can, but it needs to be truthful. They wouldn't stop you from saying something untrue, but you'd get called on it. And the public didn't like it. Today, I look at ads that are just made up. And people say, well, we'll throw shit on the wall and see what sticks.

• 1:14:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that both sides of the aisle or just one side?

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it is both sides, though I noticed the ones on the other side.

• 1:14:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 1:14:09Speaker 02

  But I think unfortunately, it is on both sides.

• 1:14:11Anthony Pompliano?

  It's more of a state of politics than it is any one like intentionally.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  I'm a big believer in the First Amendment, free speech. So I don't think government should come in and police it. But but I would like our society to go back and say, hey, we Googled that. And that's just not true. And have that become then a response. Because the politicians will then be stuck and they won't do it.

• 1:14:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. When I think of, I say both sides and I always catch myself, I say, well, actually, yes, those are the two dominant sides. There is the Libertarian Party. Andrew Yang has the Forward Party, which, you know, small and I think he hopes and aspires for too much bigger.

• 1:14:53Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you look at the kind of landscape today? Is it really just Republicans, Democrats, and that's all that kind of matters? Could a Libertarian candidate become president or win as a governor of a state? What about some of these new, you know, ideas around political parties? Like, how do you guys evaluate maybe outside of just Republican and Democrat?

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  What we see over and over again is that dual Democrat, Republican partisanship is really very strong. You get some of the outlier parties. And the way our system works is like the Republican Party has an incentive to be more Libertarian, to bring them back into the party. The Democrat Party has an incentive to be more, right now, more socialist, to bring the progressives in. I'm hoping they move in the, let's be more moderate, more pro-business, to bring in the Andrew Yangs that are more moderate in the way they approach things.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  And the two parties form these coalitions that bring in the third parties.

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  There's a risk, and some people have projected that one of the two parties will blow up, that the stress with those different elements is will be too great. The true progressives are totally adverse to the old traditional Democrat that was pro-economy, pro-America, but for a more liberal, bigger government. The progressives think they're the enemy. We saw it in the Republicans with the Tea Party viewing the old establishment Republicans as the enemy. And there's stresses in each of them that could blow up, and then you could have a third party if that happened. Typically in our history, I mean, the big time that happened was pre-Civil War over

• 1:16:43Speaker 02

  the question of slavery, right? The traditional parties blew up. You had a new Republican anti-slavery party come from nowhere and then elect President Lincoln eventually. It's harder to see that happening today.

• 1:16:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. When I think of the political parties, there's kind of two different battles, I'll call them. There is the rise of the oldest generation. So you have Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, right? And that's kind of, I don't know, over 70 and a very unique kind of facing off of two candidates. If you go down a generation or two, you then have Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom. And I think that, whether correctly or not, there seems to be, in the Twitterverse and among the tech community and folks like that, a belief that Joe Biden and Donald Trump will not run for president in 2024.

• 1:17:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Even if they try, they won't actually be the nominees. And I don't know if that's true or not, I can't predict the future. But let's hold constant for a second that neither one of the over 70 candidates end up participating. The, I think, default or the consensus right now would be, hey, it's probably like a Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis. If it's not them, it's people like them. How do you evaluate where on the national level?

• 1:18:11Anthony Pompliano?

  People kind of see these two types of candidates because it does feel like California's going one direction, Florida's going a different, there's differences in economic policies, there's differences in social policies and rather than like what's right, what's not right, like it just feels like they're pulling away from each other.

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And that usually plays out how?

• 1:18:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. So both of them are playing to their base, the strong beliefs in that and I'll, full disclosure, I'm a huge Ron DeSantis fan.

• 1:18:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  So I'll try to be objective in this analysis.

• 1:18:44Anthony Pompliano?

  You would have shocked me if you said that you were a Gavin Newsom fan, but okay.

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  No, exactly. But I think what DeSantis is showing leadership in consolidating the conservative base on economics and he has a lot to brag about with Florida, that yeah, our economic theory works, it's good for people, we survived COVID, we came out faster, but also on social issues that he's gonna, he's saying, we're not gonna kind of subsidize the woke capitalism anymore. You can do what you want, but we're not gonna subsidize it and pay for it. Newsom is basis, is the progressive wing of the Democrat Party. I've seen polling in different races that in their primaries progressives win.

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  In the general election, I think they're gonna lose because people will look at what's happened in California and say, okay, which future is better for us? One, where they've embraced fully both the woke culture, government control, progressive taxation, and are people rising there or are people leaving? And they're gonna say Florida embraced the opposite, it's successful, people are moving there and everyone in the middle is gonna say, I wanna be in an environment like Florida, whether they like Florida or not, rather than California. Both are beautiful places, places you'd wanna live, but the whole policy and economics is in such contrast, California's failing, Florida's succeeding.

• 1:20:16Anthony Pompliano?

  So really, it's interesting because they're both employing the same. Political strategy, play to the base, go say the things that hopefully they believe, but but they're saying the things that they know those bases want to hear and and are aligned with. And really, what I think you're outlining is less about individual candidates. And this is more of like an ideological election, right? It's kind of, hey, there are two futures, choose which one. And the expectation would be, maybe the people in those parties will vote along their parties and ideologies that they've previously kind of indicated. But it's this middle group now that is saying, oh, there's like a black and white, like there's, you know, the left, the

• 1:21:00Anthony Pompliano?

  right, and there isn't really maybe room or interest in some sort of centrist type candidate?

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  It'll the the candidate that shows they'll work with this interest is most likely to win.

• 1:21:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 1:21:16Speaker 02

  Ron DeSantis is really strong on protecting the Everglades, for example, and standing up to Big Sugar here in Florida. That won him a lot of kudos with more independent voters who care about the environment, and and that was important to them. If he finds some things like that nationally to carry forward, I think he locks down that independent voter. Newsom is is stuck with his record in California, where they they basically rejected the more centrist approach, went for the most radical answers in a whole bunch of areas, whether it's the environment, taxes, the economy. I mean, people are making fun of them now, where they're saying, we're

• 1:21:58Speaker 02

  going to eliminate gasoline driven cars, go to electric cars, but by the way, don't recharge them, because we also don't like power plants, so we don't have any electricity. I mean, it part of it is what works, right? Now, the other thing that is a factor in American politics is style.

• 1:22:19Speaker 02

  And you've got competing styles there. You know, Newsom is smooth, glamorous, kind of Hollywood central casting. DeSantis is more rough around the edges, coming out of a military background and a football player. Now, he went to an Ivy League school, and he's super smart, but his style is more kind of everyday man style.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  If it were following Trump, I would worry that there would be this appeal for the Hollywood glamour. But following Biden, I think people are gonna look and wanna more into Santa's type. I want somebody that's more relatable to me.

• 1:22:57Anthony Pompliano?

  It's fascinating to think about, even the style is, I don't wanna say polar opposites, right? They both wear suits, right, or whatever. But for within the arena of politics, it is pretty different. I never thought of it that way, but that is fascinating.

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:13Anthony Pompliano?

  When we think of Trump and Biden, they're over 70. I believe Joe Biden is the oldest president, oldest ever sitting president. But I saw a statistic recently, which was in the 90s, if I remember the data correctly, 5% of congressmen and women were over the age of 70. This is now, I think it's 24%.

• 1:23:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And so in a 2025 year period, we have essentially, you know, 4 to 5 x'd the number of over 70 within Congress. Is that good for America?

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  No, it's time for us to turn over to the next generation. We do a lot of elections and support candidates. Some of the ones that I'm super excited about, your listeners probably will never heard of, but they will, because they're the next generation. There's a guy in North Carolina, Bo Hines, who actually day traded cryptocurrency in college, studied crypto law in law school, and is 27, a super smart young leader. There's new people, Anna Luna, here in Florida, who understands and is engaged in social media, the next generation's way of communicating.

• 1:24:32Speaker 02

  Carolyn Levitt, up in New Hampshire, is a young 25-year-old, who you're gonna see in this new Congress, these freshmen, who will go on and rise in leadership.

• 1:24:44Anthony Pompliano?

  When somebody hears 25, right, let's use as an example.

• 1:24:47Speaker 02

  It seems super young.

• 1:24:48Anthony Pompliano?

  25 seems super young, 75 seems super old, right? It's kind of like the thing. So do we get a full rotation back to like 20 year olds?

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  There's plenty of folks in between that are going to be good, solid. They've been 10 years in some other profession or local government.

• 1:25:04Anthony Pompliano?

  The 30s and 40s as well.

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  But these, these young guys that I'm telling you about, like Caroline, she's worked at the White House. So even though she's that young, she's seen the center of power in Washington, knows the problems that come along with it and how to work with it. I'm very optimistic about the future and the type of leaderships we have. Honestly, as I observe on the Democrat side, Nancy Pelosi is, I think, going to finish up this term as her last time in leadership. My prediction is Republicans are going to get the House. It certainly looks that way in all the polling. And that is going to give the Democrat Party an opportunity to decide for themselves, what's our leadership look like?

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  Do we go next in line who's also 70 or next couple of people? Or do we move to the next, our, our younger folks? And they've got some really talented people. The, the guy who's the head of the Black Caucus in the Democrat Party, Hakeem Jeffries is both a progressive and he can work with them, but also pro economy, pro growth, smart, articulate. You know, I'm sure he and I would vote opposite on lots of things, but, but I like to see leaders in the other party who are committed to the country and, and good people.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  And, and I think the Democrats will have a chance also to pass the baton down to the next generation.

• 1:26:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And when you think of some of the topics that people care about, obviously the economy and inflation and stuff like that. But a lot of people listening to this care about Bitcoin, right? And they care about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and kind of all these new technologies and stuff like that. Maybe a place to start would just be like, what is the level of education you think? Or even maybe interest in the various political candidates or people sitting in political office? Is this something where the public perception is incorrect and actually all of these individuals? You know, hold Bitcoin, they're excited about it and they know everything. Or is there still a long road there? Like, how do you kind of analyze maybe that education level?

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, let me, let me start by saying Club for Growth is, and over the last two years, totally embraced Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as the future. And we see tremendous opportunities. I think it's the next wave. And if you want to call it technology and innovation, it's also a disruptor of the status quo in various areas and therefore a huge development for individual freedom. And we embrace it. It fits completely with our efforts. We're the largest political group that is pro-freedom, pro-free market, and we've embraced it and are moving in. But to your question, what's the status, where are we at? What's the status quo in the lay of the land?

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  Most members of Congress, two years ago, wouldn't scratch their head, "What are you talking about?" Today, would say, "Oh yeah, I've heard about Bitcoin. Yeah, it sounds good." The older ones would say, "No, I don't know. It might be tulip bulbs." You know, the old arguments against it that were out there in that older generation of investors. What that tells me is, we need to do education in those political leaders. This year, I went, came down to the Bitcoin Conference here in Miami. Fascinating. And what I saw was a community of people who were diverse all over the country, various backgrounds. Their whole lives were committed to the beliefs that I care about.

• 1:28:41Speaker 02

  Individual freedom, autonomy, making their way. And they were totally not political, right? If you talk to them a little bit about politics, it was, "Well, I hope we can be bipartisan about this." What's happened is with the infrastructure bill passing, sadly, Republicans wrote it, this empowerment of IRS to require more disclosure. Government is coming into that community. And my message to Bitcoiners and folks who are invested in it is, it's great that you've thrived outside of politics, but your enemies are going to engage in politics.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  I saw the other day that the guys who made money on Ripple have invested heavily in a couple of environmental radical organizations to attack Bitcoin mining. That's the way, I call it crony capitalism. We've seen it over and over again in industries. They use the political process to tear apart their adversaries and to try to get a business advantage. So it's coming. What we need to do is not only educate members in both parties, but identify champions. People who really understand it, see the value of it, and will defend it against the regulators, against the other politicians.

• 1:30:08Speaker 02

  We've found a few of those that we're supporting on the Republican side. Ted Budd, who's running in North Carolina, has a long history as a House member of, in the financial services industry, pushing back against the banks and the financial services that don't like Bitcoin because it disrupts their business. Blake Masters, who has embraced it totally, coming out of Silicon Valley in his work background, running in Arizona. The fellow I mentioned, Bo Hines, in North Carolina, who's studied cryptocurrency law and law school. He understands it, he knows what gas fees are. I mean, you ask any other member of Congress, what's that, and they'd scratch their head.

• 1:30:49Anthony Pompliano?

  They'd say, well, it's over $5 when I fill up my car.

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. So we got a lot of work to do. And when we decided to embrace this at the club, we're all in. But we've put together a strategy that has, you know, five different components. One of it's political, electing those champions. But a lot of it's education, bringing the leaders in Washington, influential people, up to speed on what Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is. Some of it's advocacy, presenting the arguments why it's good for society and why it should be left alone essentially, and so it can thrive and develop and innovate. And some of it would be working with outside groups to litigate.

• 1:31:35Speaker 02

  You know, if the SEC continues to play favorites in that area and leave murky with a threat of overregulation, well, sometimes you gotta go to court and force them to do the right thing. That's kind of the last, not most extreme, but you keep that in your back pocket if last resort. We also recognize the more we can keep this bipartisan, the better off we are. Now, Club for Growth, as you pointed out, is partisan. We tend to support Republicans. But I have some good friends on the Democrat side who are also big fans of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. And we've agreed to work with each other.

• 1:32:17Speaker 02

  You know, we'll agree to disagree on an election, but when we come back together to advocate to get both sides of the aisle to work towards that.

• 1:32:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that common on some issues where there's some issues where people say, hey, this is just too important for the partisanship?

• 1:32:33Speaker 02

  It used to be. You were asking what it was like. It used to be national security was bipartisan. The politics stopped at the boundary and America and the world, we were bipartisan and keeping us strong. But today, it's very hard. I mean, the...

• 1:32:52Speaker 02

  Let's just put it this way, it would shock everybody, your listeners, if some of them are up in Washington listening, David actually has friends who are Democrats? That's unusual. But it's true. And my view is do the right thing and work with people on both sides who want to do the right thing.

• 1:33:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:33:52Anthony Pompliano?

  own Bitcoin is go to compassmining.io today. Again, if you want to get into Bitcoin mining, go check out compassmining.io today. And something like Bitcoin, it's a fascinating topic in general. It's a financial asset that people can go buy and it goes up and down in US dollar value. There is an infrastructure component to it with Bitcoin mining, and we've seen the oil and gas industry really embrace that and see, hey, there may be a way for us to monetize our energy production in a more profitable way. There is a, what I'll consider an individual liberty or individual right, self-sovereignty, whatever aspect to being able to actually hold your own assets and

• 1:34:35Anthony Pompliano?

  kind of leave with some portion of your wealth, a fractional reserve system and all that. And then there ends up being this like privacy and surveillance aspect, not so much as to using a public ledger provides you privacy, but it is a very polar opposite to the promise of central bank digital currencies and some of the surveillance work and things that would be possible there. When you look at that, is there one of those areas where it seems like politicians have gravitated more towards, is it the financial asset, is it, oh, there's job creation in terms of infrastructure, is it, you know, I really care about privacy and so the opposite

• 1:35:16Anthony Pompliano?

  of CBDCs is kind of what I want to back, or how do you see them kind of interacting with this?

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  That's a great question. I think it would depend on their orientation. So the more libertarian political leaders are completely with us at the club on saying the CBDC is a terrible idea, in part because of you don't need it and it expands government power, but in part because of that privacy and the ability of the government to come in and tax your transactions through the currency, or come in and spy on you essentially and see everything that you've spent your money on. By the way, we polled that in a national poll of battleground states in the country,

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  and well over 50%, I think it's 53, reject the idea that the government should have its own coin.

• 1:36:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 1:36:16Speaker 02

  When you point out these risks, that opposition increases to almost 60%. So the American public intuitively knows this is a bad idea. But that'd be the focus of libertarians. The focus of people in the energy, carbon energy industry, and then on the other side, the environmentalist, is on the mining. And these environmental groups that have been, you know, paid money out of the guys from Ripple are at the state level, like in New York, they passed somewhat of a ban on it, they've been advocating at the White House Science Office on why it's bad for climate change.

• 1:37:00Speaker 02

  A ridiculous paper, I'll share with you our response that we're going to be releasing today or tomorrow, pointing out how bad the science is behind that. But the political motive there is to attack the Bitcoin mining. And then the energy sector realizes, as you pointed out, this is a way we can optimize the what we're producing. The what used to be flared off as as waste material can now be used to generate the power to do this mining. By the way, there are some good environmental groups that look at at Bitcoin mining and say, no, this is actually a good development

• 1:37:40Speaker 02

  because it's increasing the use of alternative energy. So, you know, people who aren't steeped in the politics of us versus them on the environmental side realize this is actually a good development. One of our missions is to bring that forward and tell people about it.

• 1:37:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, there's a ESG analyst, I think his name is Daniel Batten, and I had a conversation with him. I believe he's, if I remember correctly, is based in Australia. And he said, listen, I care about the environment, right? And I'm an investor. And he said, when I came across Bitcoin mining and gas flare capture and all this stuff, he's gone so far as to now, at least the content I see, majority of it is Bitcoin related. And I think he's even raising his next fund specifically around the infrastructure of Bitcoin. And it's fascinating because, you know, he's not the person that they would normally expect to be the proponent.

• 1:38:32Speaker 02

  I'd love to reach out to him and tell him what we're trying to do to educate people.

• 1:38:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Because another thing that you guys care a lot about, I think, is rolling back a lot of the environmental regulations. Talk a little bit there. And I think this intersects, you mentioned a couple of times woke capital or woke capitalism. It feels like Europe, specifically, is feeling the negative side effects of pursuing some of these, maybe theoretical exercises, right? Kind of the Greta Thunberg, let's just go all renewable, let's get rid of all of our power plants and avoid nuclear power plants, like all this stuff. And like, now there's an energy crisis and they're paying, you know, 2X for energy from China that's really just marked up and renamed Russian energy. So can I talk through that a little bit?

• 1:39:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I have a lot of history in the environmental area. Back when I was working for H W Bush and Dan Quayle, we reviewed all the different environmental regulations. In some ways, it's almost like a religion. And therefore,

• 1:39:40Speaker 02

  If you say this is good for the environment, then it becomes we're going to adopt that even if it's bad for people. I mean, the simple truth is, energy is necessary for everything we do in life. For getting around, for moving, for heating our houses, for cooling our houses, for life as we know it. And so you've got to have a source for that energy. We all want to reduce the pollution elements of it, but the environmental movement has grabbed that, as they did in Europe, as a source of, a way of controlling what choices people make, rather than optimizing what's actually good for them.

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  So my belief is we've got to push back on these regulatory structures. And we used, when I was doing the review in government, a cost benefit analysis. What are the benefits from the regulation in cleaner environment, healthier, safer? And what are the costs of people losing their jobs, less economy? And oftentimes, the costs way outweighed the benefits. And then I think we should ask ourselves, can we accomplish the goal in an easier way? I'm a big believer in incentives. So if you want to have less pollution, pay people to pollute less, right? Rather than come in, it's kind of the old Soviet model.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  We'll be command and control, tell you exactly how to run that plant or run that factory, and then slow down your productivity. Versus if we just tell somebody, hey, if you pollute less, you're going to make more money. They'll figure out a way. They'll do it faster and better, using the incentive structure. So there's lots of problems in that area. And the cost of those government regulations are almost equal to or more than the cost per employee of taxes. And so we are worried that jobs are being sent to China and Mexico and other countries. If we can lower the cost per employee of doing business in the US, then we'll have more jobs and more opportunity.

• 1:41:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. You're a fascinating guy because you obviously have the Club for Growth and the work that you guys are doing there. And it requires you to understand the economy and requires you to understand politics, a lot of technology, these different things. But you almost had like a life before this, which was in politics itself. But my understanding is that when you were in college, you created the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy, which I heard you describe it as just a couple of people sitting around having pizza at first. And now there was some influence that you all had and some participation in literally picking Supreme Court justices and helping to kind of do the vetting process. Maybe walk me through like, what is that organization?

• 1:42:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And how did it go from some pizzas to Supreme Court participation, if you will?

• 1:42:37Speaker 02

  And so it did. We looked around and said, hey, conservative principles, in this case, that the Constitution is what's made America great. And there's a role for judges to interpret the law, but they're not elected, so they shouldn't make new law. And that basic principle, we, you know, there were seven or eight of us that got together, talked about it, had pizza. And we thought, well, let's form a group and we'll meet regularly. And then we held a conference at Yale and invited people like Robert Bork and Nino Scalia to come. Scalia was one of my professors, so he helped inspire this.

• 1:43:21Speaker 02

  And they did, they didn't know each other and said, this is fun. But we also grounded in the principle of debate. So we invited liberals to come and debate with us and libertarians and traditional conservatives and different viewpoints. After law school, we were having so much fun, we said, well, let's keep going and formed a group in Washington, hired a couple of people. People to set up chapters and run it. And so, over the forty years, it's grown. It gained in reputation because it was grounded in debate. We didn't take positions, but we, so we allowed all different views to come and discuss and debate that. So, the liberal professors that were kind of bored at law school where it was all uniform,

• 1:44:05Speaker 02

  everybody believed the same thing, they liked coming and debating and having their ideas challenged. And the conservatives had a voice and a platform. Well, eventually, when Trump was president, he turned to the Federalist Society and said, "Give me a list of people that you think could be good on the Supreme Court." And one of the leaders gave that list to him. He said, "Okay, this is my list. I'm gonna do it." And what I noticed when he was president, he, we would talk periodically. He'd call me up and we'd mostly talk politics, like, "What do you think about this race?" But sometimes he'd just ask questions, "What about this?" He kept asking, "What about my next Supreme Court appointee?"

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  I guess he knew I was one of the founders of the Federalist Society. And I kept saying, "Amy Coney Barrett." "Oh, yeah, everybody likes Amy, but what about other people?" We talked about it. So, the opening came up and Justice Ginsburg passed. And he called and said, "So, David, what do you think?" And I knew he was getting advice to be political about it, appoint of somebody who's a good judge, but because she was Latina and versus just straight merits. And I said to him, "Mr. President, I'm still for Amy Coney Barrett." And he said, "Yeah, I know, I know." But I could tell I hadn't persuaded him.

• 1:45:31Speaker 02

  So, I said, "Well, remember the last appointment you did? You were kind of disappointed with some of the rulings." And I knew he wasn't happy about a couple of things.

• 1:45:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Who was the person?

• 1:45:42Speaker 02

  It was, gosh, a name just went out of my mind. His second appointment.

• 1:45:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it, okay.

• 1:45:50Speaker 02

  And I said, you know what, we didn't know much about him. So sometimes you'll get rulings you like, sometimes you won't. With Amy, you know exactly what you're going to get because she's been vetted. People have watched her. She's been experienced before. If you pick somebody else that's kind of new, you're not sure what you're going to get. By the way, that's the whole thesis the Federalist Society has. Look at, get experienced people, see how they performed in lower position, and then put them on the Supreme Court. So a couple of days later, he announced it was Amy Coney Barrett, and I was glad to see that. I don't know whether it was me or other people that talked him into it, but I think that's one of his best appointments because she is grounded in that Constitution and

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  the limited role of judges. If you'd have told me back when I was in law school, someday, David, you'd be advising a president about who should be on the Supreme Court, I would have laughed. Me? You've got to be kidding. But it's been a great experience, and the success is because it's built around ideas and the principle of debate.

• 1:46:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And in those situations, like, what is the process like? So when you talk about vetting and kind of watching, is it just, hey, here's the details of a case, and this is how they ruled, and then you just see that over and over and over again, and you kind of know what you're going to get? Or what does the vetting process look like? Is it an interview, you know, where they come and sit down for two hours, and you ask a bunch of crazy questions? Or like, what is it like?

• 1:47:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. So one of my first jobs in government was with Attorney General Mies, and he really set up that vetting process for Republicans. Before that, it was kind of politics. Who did the president know? Who did the senators recommend? And we would interview those judges. One, if they'd been on a lower court, or look at everything they'd ever written. And the idea was, things that they put down in writing and done before, that reveals their core beliefs and approach. But then we'd interview them, and instead of asking about politics, like, what's your view on abortion, or what are you... Think about gay rights, or what do you think about civil rights and civil liberties?

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  We would give them actually hypotheticals that would be real cases. And say, not just, what's your bottom line result? How do you get to that result? And we'd look and say, okay, if they, if their reasoning was grounded in the Constitution and the right, correct role for govern, for judges, then that's the type of judge we want to recommend the president appoint. So it was a very thorough vetting process. And Republican administrations have done that since then. My sense is Democrats have also done more of that. You look at Obama's appointees. And maybe because he was a law professor himself, he, he cared a lot about

• 1:48:49Speaker 02

  the way they thought about rulings and making decisions. And I think that's good for the country. They're not playing politics, putting their best friend on the court. They're trying to find people who will do a good job as, as a judge.

• 1:49:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What, the presidents, do they call regularly? Like, it sounds like you, Trump, you probably spoke to a little bit more.

• 1:49:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Biden or Obama, do they call?

• 1:49:11Speaker 02

  They don't call me.

• 1:49:14Speaker 02

  No, although Club for Growth was called by the Obama folks because we were for free trade and they wanted to get some bipartisan help on some of that.

• 1:49:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 1:49:24Speaker 02

  So we worked with them that way.

• 1:49:26Anthony Pompliano?

  So the, and I know very little about politics, which I will be quick to understand here. But the presidents obviously have some partisanship, is how they usually get elected. But it is very rare for them to reach across the aisle for the nonprofits or other types of organizations and kind of get the other side.

• 1:49:47Speaker 02

  That's right. Most of the time they'll look for their allies and ask them what they think.

• 1:49:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it because they? Believe, hey, if I call David, he's gonna tell me no and like slam the phone and you know, and not be interested, or is it, again, going back to kind of the governors of just like playing to the base or playing to the people they know and have worked with?

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  You know, it would be a smart thing for them to test what the other side thinks about things and have some friends there that would be honest with them. I think they assume they're the opposition. So if I call them, and if, say, President Biden called me, which I don't think is gonna happen, his folks wouldn't have him do it.

• 1:50:27Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll have my people talk to his people and talk to your people.

• 1:50:31Speaker 02

  They would worry that I would then go to a reporter and tell them about the conversation, right?

• 1:50:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 1:50:38Speaker 02

  So to use it for my own benefit, rather than to help them as an advisor. So hopefully, presidents either personally or through a trusted advisor have some connections on the other side that they listen to. It used to happen in Congress, that senators on both sides of the aisle would talk with each other privately and respect those conversations. Doesn't happen, it's so divided now.

• 1:51:05Anthony Pompliano?

  So now it's like TMZ, who can leak the information as fast as possible to the media. Is that because the media has gotten better at like infiltrating and building trust, and so they just get more information? Or is it because the politicians and those in that apparatus have learned how to weaponize the media against their opponents?

• 1:51:26Speaker 02

  A huge coin of the realm in Washington is information you give to a reporter. So people will leak things, they'll talk to them all the time. The reporters cultivate group of people that they call and get information, get leads on stories. So...

• 1:51:46Speaker 02

  More now that he's out of office, but the folks around President Trump have a group of reporters that they talk to. And so I've experienced when, when he would call me about a race, I'd notice a few days later that part of that conversation would be written up somewhere in the press.

• 1:52:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:52:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that means I'm gonna meter what I'm saying, recognizing some of it'll be public.

• 1:52:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:52:10Speaker 02

  Now, if I really wanted to communicate something to him, I'd call his cell when he was out on the golf course and tell him. And he might share that with other people or he might not. But that, that was his choice. Whereas if there was a big group listening in on the call, a lot of times they'd leak for their own benefit, not necessarily for the principal's benefit.

• 1:52:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:34Speaker 02

  It's frustrating. And in, when you're an executive and you want to have confidential conversations, you really have to get people that you trust completely.

• 1:52:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. This is a ridiculous question, but I have to ask you. Uh, well, first, have you ever gone golfing with Trump?

• 1:52:51Speaker 02

  No, I'm a terrible golfer.

• 1:52:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so am I. But I've been on the golf course and someone has called me before.

• 1:52:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, you know, I'm a younger person who has AirPods. And so I put my AirPods in and kept playing. But I always wondered, uh, if Trump got a phone call on the golf course, does he stop playing? Or does he like, do the, you know, hold it with the shoulder and try to swing or something?

• 1:53:11Speaker 02

  I've never been there to watch.

• 1:53:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:13Speaker 02

  Most of the time it goes to voicemail. Let's just put it that way.

• 1:53:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, because I'm golfing. Yeah, I've always wondered that because I, I, I've seen the photos and he's like, you know, standing on the, on the green and he's got the phone or whatever. And you're like, okay, I guess he just stops.

• 1:53:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, when you think of young people and their participation, last thing I want to talk about is the fellowship that you all run. Um, you have this really interesting program where, uh, you are taking young people and there's an education component to it. What does that program look like? Who are the types of people who go through it? And I guess like, how do you measure whether it's successful or not on the other side?

• 1:53:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, one, I kind of realized as we were vetting candidates for, um, Congress that the Club for Growth PAC would support and endorse, there weren't enough. There weren't enough people to meet and to, to kind of think about supporting. So I thought, let's Not set up something for candidates, but let's create a network of leaders who are maybe in their late twenties, thirties and early forties that established doing things in life, but younger, ready, maybe, hopefully someday, want to do public service. And let's train them in the principles of free market economics, liberty principles,

• 1:54:34Speaker 02

  teach them how government works so that if they're engaging with it, they realize, you know, these politicians have incentives that guide them to maximize their political contributions, whether it's good or not. Teach them a lot of that, but also give them some media training so they can be articulate spokesmen in their community for the principles that we care about. And so we started three years ago, this fellowship program, invited 50 people to apply each year. And like the Federalist Society, we decided, let's create a network where they know each other, they get to meet each other, getting together.

• 1:55:14Speaker 02

  It happened right during COVID, so it took us a long time to have that in-person meeting. And they could compare notes. Somebody who's on city council in Connecticut could talk to somebody in Colorado who's working on the same issue and share what worked, what their experience was. It's amazing to me, it's been already very successful. One of our first year's fellow is now the head of the Heritage Foundation. He's a very smart, younger guy, as they move to next generation leadership. Three of them ran for Congress this year and won their primaries, so they will be congressmen next year.

• 1:55:58Speaker 02

  One of them, a lady in South Carolina, was passionate about that school choice we talked about, and she ran for superintendent of education and won that race. Wow. So we're starting to see them move into these leadership positions. And next weekend, we're going to be together in Washington, bringing them all back and having them continue. Continue to build that fellowship, that colleague. If any of your listeners are interested, it's Club for Growth. Our foundation sponsors it and we open up applications in November.

• 1:56:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Careful what you wish for.

• 1:56:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. I hope we get a lot of them because I'm a big believer in the next generation in this country. Um, you know, I'm a spiritual guy. I pray about what I do. I ask for God's guidance and blessing. And about a year into the job, I had this strong sense that, yeah, David, you're going to go back and do politics now and you know, you'll help get people elected. We're going to be passionate about freedom. But what I really want you to do is identify, help elect maybe, but mentor this next generation of leaders for our country. And so for me, it's, it's not only my job, but it's kind of a spiritual calling that I can

• 1:57:16Speaker 02

  give back to them. Now, I have to be honest with you, to get there, and I think God did this to me, had to wring out the desire for me to be the guy, you know, the candidate who go get, get selected, the guy who might be president someday. I'm done with that in my life, but I want to give back to this next generation and turn over the country to them. Cause I was blessed growing up in America, guy who grew up in a little town, had big dreams, got to follow them and pursue them. And I want to see that be the country that we have for kids that are growing up now.

• 1:57:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. To go from a guy from a little town in Indiana to talking to the president on the cellphone, pretty big deal.

• 1:57:59Speaker 02

  It is. I count it as a great blessing.

• 1:58:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Where, where can we send people to find you on the internet or more about Club for Growth?

• 1:58:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, clubforgrowth.org is the handle there. Club for Growth Foundation has that fellowship. But look, look us up, clubforgrowth.org, you can see that. My number in Washington's 202-955-5500. If someone's coming to DC, wants to connect with us, I'd love to talk to them.

• 1:58:31Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think we've ever had someone give out their number on the show. I'm shook right now. Cause I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know if you get a lot of calls or done.

• 1:58:40Speaker 02

  We're going to find them. I'll let you know.

• 1:58:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Well, listen, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I learned a ton. I think a lot of folks in the audience will have as well.

• 1:58:49Speaker 02

  It's great to be with you.

• 1:58:50Anthony Pompliano?

  We'll definitely have to do this again in the future.

• 1:58:52Speaker 02

  One thing, we're so passionate about Bitcoin and the future there. We set up a whole new political group called Bitcoin Freedom PAC. So we're actually going to engage in the political process to elect those champions.

• 1:59:06Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a lot of people, I think, who would be behind that who are listening to this.

• 1:59:11Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:59:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends, and I'll see you all for the next episode.