#1404 Phil Rosen & Anthony Pompliano on Why Bitcoin & Stocks Are Crashing (And What To Do)

Phil Rosen, the Co-Founder of Opening Bell Daily, and Anthony Pompliano, CEO of Professional Capital Management, discuss why stocks and bitcoin are down, economic policies for Trump & Kamala, proposed capital gains tax increase, and outlook on asset prices during interest rate cuts. ======================= Wondering where to go for financial advice? Domain Money makes financial planning simple. No hidden fees and no sales pitches - you get a personalized roadmap to your goals, from dream vacations to retirement. Flat-fee advisors create a plan tailored to you, with zero pressure to invest. Don’t be like most people who’ve never had a real conversation about their financial plan. Book a free strategy session today at https://www.domainmoney.com/pompWhile I'm not a Domain Money client and they are paying me, I've seen first hand the value of their service through the free plan they did for one of my brothers. Yes, I might have an interest in promoting Domain Money, so just like any major financial decision, it's important you understand what the service is and if it's right for you so make sure to see important disclaimer at https://www.domainmoney.com/t/legal ======================= Buy and sell cryptocurrency in a tax-advantaged crypto IRA with iTrustCapital. Enjoy 24/7 access, lowest fees in the industry, and tax benefits for your retirement. Open and fund an account today at ⁠⁠⁠https://www.itrustcapital.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠ to receive a $100 USD funding bonus. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's up guys? Bang bang. Today's episode is with Phil Rosen. Phil is the co-founder and editor-in-chief at Opening Bell Daily. In this conversation, we talk about why are stocks and Bitcoin down? What's going on? Is the interest rate cut actually going to

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  be bullish for these assets? Then we talk about both President Trump and Vice President Harris, their economic policies, this proposed capital gains tax increase, and we also get into why you sitting at home should just be dollar-cost averaging into financial assets over the long run and stop worrying about whether the market's going to go up, down, sideways, or backwards on a day-to-day basis. I always enjoy talking to Phil. This conversation's no different. Here is my latest episode with Phil Rosen.

• 1:11Speaker 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.

• 1:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Domain Money. I love talking about money, but I'm not a financial professional, so I don't offer one-on-one coaching or advising. But in order to get ahead, you need someone with expertise to work with you one-on-one and provide personalized advice. The decisions you're making now will significantly impact the rest of your life. The more time you waste not taking the steps to get a plan for your money, the harder you make it to achieve your goals. That's why I've partnered with Domain Money to pair our community with flat-fee certified financial planners. That's right, they are CFPs. They can actually give you advice and they can help you level up your Money game. Don't get left behind and head over to domain money.com slash pump to book

• 2:15Anthony Pompliano?

  your free strategy session to help you get started. That's domain money.com slash pump to get started with a CFP now. Go check them out. And just like any other major financial decision, it's important you understand what the service is and if it's right for you. So make sure to go see the important disclaimers at domain money.com slash legal. That's what the lawyers told me to say. Now go check them out domain money.com slash pump. Today's episode is brought to you by I trust capital. Are you buying crypto on an exchange? Because you're excited about the bull run? Well, I hope you're reporting your crypto gains to the IRS because they want you to pay your taxes. That's right. When you buy and sell crypto on an exchange, you need to pay the government taxes when you make profits. That sounds pretty taxing.

• 2:59Anthony Pompliano?

  There's another way you can buy and sell crypto without worrying about taxes at I trust capital, you can buy and sell crypto inside of a tax advantage crypto IRA. Crypto IRAs are retirement accounts that work similarly to an exchange, but with tax benefits. Let me give you an example. If you can buy and sell crypto on an exchange and you make a $20,000 profit, you have to pay the government taxes. However, if you do the same thing in your Roth IRA and you make a $20,000 profit, you don't need to pay any taxes. That's right. You get to keep all the profits and not have to pay taxes because it's in a tax advantaged account. So opening a tax advantaged IRA at I trust capital only takes a few minutes. You have 24/7 access to the markets with some of

• 3:40Anthony Pompliano?

  the lowest fees in the industry. The bull run has begun and people are starting to see their accounts go up. So start taking advantage of tax benefits with an IRA at I trust capital. You can start maximizing your crypto investment today. Go to I trust capital.com. That's I trust capital.com.

• 4:01Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Phil, what's the first topic you got?

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Okay, so Bitcoin is hovering at about 56K right now and it's down 12% in the last six months. In March, when Bitcoin was at 73K, the number of daily active addresses was 1.2 million. That has since dropped about 30%. What do you make of this data and are you more or less optimistic when you hear it?

• 4:24Anthony Pompliano?

  If you understand Bitcoin, you get excited when the price goes down because you can accumulate more at a lower price. The other thing is that people who hold Bitcoin are active users of Bitcoin. It just doesn't show up in the data. Part of Bitcoin's story is that it's a store of value. So if you're storing your value, you're using the product. You're an active user. You're a daily active user. And so, yes, people do look at things like transaction volumes and activity as a sign. And then when price goes up, of course, people are trading, they're transacting, they're moving stuff around. So you would expect price goes up, transaction volume goes up, price goes down, transaction volume goes down. But the unique thing is for store of value, a holder is an active user. And so there are hundreds of millions of active users around the world.

• 5:07Anthony Pompliano?

  We just don't think of it that way because it doesn't show up in the data in a way that if you're looking at a mobile app or something like that.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  So what I saw when I read that, I was like, wow, we're not getting close to the 100K price targets by year end, which many, many analysts said all year, pretty much. If you had to make the bare case for Bitcoin, for it to go further down, let's say in the coming six to 12 months, where would you start?

• 5:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think the short answer is just there's no obvious catalyst in the next, you know, through the end of the year, outside of the macro environment. So the macro environment, if they cut interest rates, there's, you know, things around the election that could potentially happen. Maybe a potential catalyst, although it isn't guaranteed to happen for the end of the year. If the sovereign wealth fund comes out and says they bought Bitcoin or something. But there's not a very clear, hey, this is going to happen. If you go back to this time last year, when the ETF was being rumored to be approved, it was very clear. If this gets approved, this is going to be a catalyst in price. It is worth noting that we are still up about 50%. From before the ETF got approved. So we kind of got this repricing. We've gone sideways for, you know, the summer.

• 6:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I do expect that there will still be kind of a bull market. I do issue a word of caution, though, that people who are expecting the bull market to be hundreds of percent from here, I think could be quite disappointed. My guess is that we should expect the volatility in each cycle to go down over time. And so it'll still be attractive compared to, you know, the S and P, but it shouldn't be here and go from 50,000 to 500,000 or something like that in the bull market.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  I think that makes sense. Speaking of the S and P 500, we are right now in the worst month of the year for stocks historically. I think dating back 75 years, the S and P 500 loses 0.7% every September. And there was an article in the Wall Street Journal this week that pointed out how investors are still super, super bullish on stocks, even though we're in this very red month historically. So we have retirement accounts that are booming. Households keep piling into stocks at record amounts. The S and P 500 has had hit almost 40 record highs this year. And there's a bunch of other metrics that are indicating that there's plenty of optimism for stocks right now.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  My sense when I read this was, okay, are we getting near the top of the market? All this exuberance and frothiness. What do you make of all this?

• 7:38Anthony Pompliano?

  So if I remember the stats correctly, a new all time high at fidelity for the 401k accounts, there's 497,000 of them now. On top of that, 42% of financial asset allocation is going to stocks, which is also a new all time high. There are two things that I think you can take away from this. The bull case for this is, well, people have been invested in the market. The market's gone up a lot. It's minted a bunch of millionaires. The US stock market is the single greatest millionaire minting machine ever created. It mints millionaires. If you allocate to it, you keep investing in it, you think long term and you do it for decades. Right? So kind of the timeless investing principles end up actually working over a very long time period. If you can ignore the short term volatility.

• 8:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Is not only for kind of minting a millionaire, but if you've been invested, stocks go up, you keep putting more money in, right? You keep buying. And so there is a lot of data that suggests that buying all time highs leads to more all time highs. I think this year alone, there has been almost 35 all time highs in the US stock market. So obviously it keeps going up. The bear case is what you're talking about, which is, oh my God, everyone's overexposed to equities. There's the big crash that's coming next. I actually think this is the wrong framing of like, is this good? Is this bad? Instead, what gets lost in that analysis is what is the timeframe in which you're looking? I have no clue and wouldn't try to predict what's going to happen through the end of the year, or what's going to happen in the next 12 months. Right? I think that's a fool's

• 9:04Anthony Pompliano?

  game. There are some people like a Renaissance, we're very good at figuring out what's the price of, you know, a certain stock going to be at the end of today. That's not my game. Instead, I think the average American is much better off saying to themselves, what is the timeline in which I am investing? Can I invest for five years, 10 years, 15, 20 years? If that's the case, the price tomorrow does not matter. And so instead, what they need to focus on is how do I continue to dollar cost average into a great asset that I can hold for five, 10, 15, 20 years? In that case, now what you're really talking about is you actually may want prices to go down. Cause if you're going to keep allocating and dollar cost averaging, you're buying up the asset as it is cheaper. And so let's say that you're going to buy an asset and hold it for 20 years. Actually, you want the asset to go down for 19 and a half years. And then right before you're

• 9:48Anthony Pompliano?

  going to sell, you want it to explode upwards, right? And more value. That's not how it works. The stock market is going to continue to go up. And so I do think that kind of that long-term thinking, the beauty is that you can have that viewpoint because the US dollar is going to be devalued because they've got to be able to monetize the debt. And so as long as that dollar gets devalued, stocks will go up over the long run. You just have to have the stomach to, to be able to withstand the volatility in the short term and keep that long-term perspective. If you do that, you'll be fine.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Can you explain that a bit more about the dollar getting devalued, which will make the stock market go up?

• 10:24Anthony Pompliano?

  There is one thing that every politician in America agrees on. They're going to devalue the dollar. That one data point is the single intelligence test for investors over the next 10 years. If you realize they're going to devalue the currency, you should get long financial assets. Because all of the financial assets are denominated in dollars. So why do real estate investors always make money? If I buy a piece of real estate and I hold it for some period, especially long-term period, somebody is going to have to show up with more dollars in the future to buy that same piece of property. In a lot of cases, it's not like the land got more valuable or the house, you know, all of a sudden, a bunch of things got built around it, et cetera. It's that the dollar, the thing it's denominated in, is worth less.

• 11:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if you look at home prices in America and their average appreciation over the last couple of decades, it mimics about the loss of purchasing power in the dollar. It's kind of a 45-degree angle up and to the right. The stock market, very similarly, it's a 45-degree angle up and to the right at about 8% a year. And so that is the dollar losing purchasing power, which means somebody in the future will buy that same asset from you, just need more dollars because they're cheaper in terms of value. And so that is the argument as to, rather than trying to time markets and do all this stuff, the US stock market is a millionaire minting machine. If you simply keep allocating, and people always say, oh, I don't make enough money. Take an average teacher in America. Let's say, and I don't know exactly what the salary is, but let's say it's $50,000.

• 11:54Anthony Pompliano?

  If you work for 30 years, so you start working when you're 22, you stop when you're 52. You don't even work till you're 62, you just work till you're 52. That means that you would end up making about $1.5 million in your lifetime. And so if you start doing taxes, if you start doing all this expenses, et cetera. Let's say that you can invest $300,000 to $500,000 of that, right? So you're able to invest about a third or less of your actual salary. If you're able to do that, and you watch it compound for 30 years at 8% to 10%. You end up in a really good financial position. You're not going to be Jeff Bezos, but you're also not going to be in a dire financial position where you can't retire, et cetera. And so the reason why that's interesting is if you go and you look, Dave Ramsey did a study years ago.

• 12:38Anthony Pompliano?

  He said, what are the top five occupations that become millionaires? Teachers is one of them. And when you look at that, you say, well, why is it? Have you ever seen a teacher drive a Ferrari? No, they're in an environment where it's not keeping up with the Joneses. Most teachers, right? They drive a Toyota Corolla. They wear kind of, you know, regular clothes. They are not trying to live in a mansion. Like it's something about whether it's a personality, whether it's an environment, whatever, they live within their means. They're able to save a lot of their income. If they invest it, they can end up being in a good position. And so the real, you know, kind of attack maybe on that story is that we have Instagram and people are like, I want to be ballin'. I need the watch. I need the car. I need the house.

• 13:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And that is really what is preventing people from being able to leverage something like the stock market. Instead, they become consumers, not investors. And so if they could switch that and say, I'm not going to consume all the craziness. I'm instead going to be fanatic about investing, getting exposed to the US stock market. Simply buying something like the S and P 500 and letting it compound for years will end up being a really good thing for them.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that makes sense, especially someone who's very steeped in financial markets. Every day I'm writing, reporting on this. That's what everyone tells me. So I did want to ask you about Vice President Harris's new plan on capital gains tax. Biden had a plan for a 39% tax and Harris came out on Wednesday saying that should be down to 28%. What was your read on, on that sort of tweak there?

• 14:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think understanding why capital gains tax, especially long-term capital gains tax exists is really important. So the idea is we have ordinary income tax and then we have long-term capital gains tax. The reason why it is long-term capital gains is it's trying to incentivize you to make investment, to be long-term thinking. And so they say, if you make investment in our long-term thinking, if you're investing in America, we will give you a lower tax rate in order to incentivize that, right? Taxes are an incentive system. And so if you go and you look at that, people will always yell and scream and say, oh, wealthy people disproportionately benefit from long-term capital gains. It's only 20% compared to whatever the ordinary income tax level is. The part that is left out of that analysis is it is usually the wealthy people who are making

• 14:56Anthony Pompliano?

  the long-term investments. So it is available to any American. It's just that one group has the capital to do it, the other group doesn't. And so it's not about the tax thing being somehow skewed in one favor or the other. It's that one group of people has capital and they understand the incentive and they're leveraging the incentive. But anyone, any American who buys an asset, holds it for over a year, they get long-term capital gains tax. So it's not really kind of skewing anything. It's all about kind of education and then action. Now, when we look at that 20% level, that is a number that they came up with where they're trying to kind of do a high-wire act. They want, on one hand, to incentivize long-term investment in America. On the other hand, they need tax revenue, right? They need

• 15:39Anthony Pompliano?

  the tax receipts. And so in order to do that, they pick 20% as the number. Now, that number's actually fluctuated quite a bit. We have seen a number of different things. If you go and you just Google "history of capital gains tax in America" and read the Wikipedia page, you'll be blown away by how much it has changed. And change in our relative lifetime, in the last 50, 60, 70 years, we have seen a ton of change there. We've seen change in the percentage, but we've also seen things change, like right now it's set at one year. So if you hold the asset for 12 months and one day, then you get long-term capital gains. There have been proposals and also plans in the past where maybe they have a one rate for if you hold one year, another rate if you hold three years, another rate if you hold five years, etc. And so they play with the timeline and the percentage. It becomes

• 16:20Anthony Pompliano?

  pretty interesting, but it's more complex. Now, if we go back to Harris's plan specifically, 20% is where we're kind of sitting at today. Biden came out at 39.6%, and people had an absolute field day in terms of their backlash around doing this. How can you go from 20 to 40? You're basically doubling it. You're going to disincentivize investment in America. I would push back on that and say, I don't actually know if you would disincentivize investment, because people aren't just going to go move and sit in cash, right? So they're still going to invest. What you're probably doing is you're deterring future investment. You're deterring kind of net new dollars on top of what people are already doing. So if you want to increase the amount of investment, you would actually have to drop

• 17:04Anthony Pompliano?

  the rate, not just keep it similar, right? So staying at 20%, you should expect to keep getting the amount of investment that you're getting, keep that rate, just extrapolate it out. If you were to drop from 20 to 15, a lot more people probably would go invest because like, oh, the rate's dropping, the incentive is higher, therefore capital changes kind of the allocation strategy. Now, at 20%, we're never going to go to 40. 39.6%, that's insane. No way you're ever going to get that passed. What Harris did is, she basically said, well, wait a second, everyone's anchored on this 39.6%. I've been backing a lot of the same Biden economic policies. They expect me to come in at 39%. If I come in at 28%, I'm actually, in a weird way, moving more to the center, even though she's increasing the rate by 40%.

• 17:47Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a 40% increase she's proposing in the capital gains tax rate. Now, Harris and Trump both are populist candidates. They're going after the working class. And so it's really easy to say, oh, but we're only going to do it for people who got over a million bucks. Immediately, a huge portion of the population says, well, I don't got a million dollars. I don't care what you do, those people, take all their money. And so by approaching it from this populist perspective, what you end up doing is, the most important vote in this election for both Trump and Harris is unaffected by this policy. And so she kind of doesn't care if she pisses off a bunch of rich people. Now, what I found hilarious and important was when she made the proposal, it came out, she then went to a rally, and she said, we are going to create a tax rate that incentivizes

• 18:31Anthony Pompliano?

  investment in American innovators, founders, and small businesses.

• 18:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I love hearing that the presidential candidate, the current sitting vice president, is talking about innovators, founders of small businesses. We should be cheering her on. Yes, these people, small businesses make up 50% of jobs in America. But what she is saying is not necessarily what 28% long-term capital gains tax would do. Instead, she's saying the right things, but the proposal is she would actually be 40% increase in that tax rate. It would be a deterrent to a bunch of people. And so I think that there is a near 0% chance that whether Harris or Trump gets into office, the long-term capital gains tax rate moves because it is very, very hard to convince a wide majority of people to increase taxes when it comes to the investment class.

• 19:22Anthony Pompliano?

  It's easier to do it in sales tax or things where it isn't exactly like you're taking my money, right? It's more so like you're inserting yourself into a transaction. That's very different. But to go from 20 to 28%, I think that you would have every single person on Wall Street, on both the left and the right, they would be up in arms saying, this is insane. And so my base case is it stays at 20%, regardless of who the presidential candidate is, and kind of nothing changes. The world just keeps spinning. Everything's fine. This is all a bunch of hoopla. Trump, on the other hand, wants to cut taxes. And so obviously, that sounds great to some people. But the question is, whether we increase or decrease taxes, does it matter? And my answer is no. It matters for the individual wallet, but as a country,

• 20:05Anthony Pompliano?

  we do not have a tax receipt problem. It's not a revenue problem. We have a spending problem. It doesn't matter how much money we give to the government. They're not going to stop spending. And so if we give them more tax revenue, they're just going to spend more and still operate the deficit. So if we want to address the problem, we have to stop spending as much. If we stop spending as much, I think it'd be interesting if a candidate came out and said, you know what? I'm going to slash government spending. If I get spending under control, now all of a sudden I can get to a balanced budget, or maybe I can get to a surplus. If I get to a surplus, I'm going to drop the long-term capital gains rate. I'm going to go from 20% to 10%. And I'm going to say, if you hold an asset for five years or longer, I'm going to only have you pay 10%. How can I do that? Well, because if all of a sudden I'm not spending as much as the government, I don't

• 20:50Anthony Pompliano?

  need as much tax receipts. And now I'm going to shift the thinking from a 12-month cycle, can I get to a 60-month cycle? And so if all of a sudden they came out and they said it's a 10% tax rate and long-term capital gains, if you hold an asset for five years, how many people on Wall Street or in the investment world would all of a sudden say, I ain't doing anything for five years. That's a 50% drop in long-term capital gains rate. Could that actually lead to more innovation, more productivity, more jobs, all that stuff? It's yet to be seen. We don't know. There will be people who say yes, there will be people who say no, but that is how taxes and incentives can work to change behavior in society. And so rather than have a political class that wants to constantly increase taxes, I actually think it'd be

• 21:34Anthony Pompliano?

  much more interesting if they could simply just get spending under control and then we don't have to take more money from the citizens. Instead, we just say, hey, we're not spending as much. So therefore, we can have a balanced budget. Everyone chill out, keep your money. You're working hard for it. Let's go build a great country.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  So when you talk about government reining in spending, I don't know if that will resonate with that many voters because most voters don't know what that means. How so how could Trump or Harris campaign on, we're gonna pull back on spending because that's way less sexy than saying, okay, we're gonna tax you more or less.

• 22:08Anthony Pompliano?

  I think there's two things that are pretty interesting. I do think that people really care about their children. And so explaining to them, hey, by the way, your bills got a, your kids have a bill right now, they can't cash. Right? As an American population, I have two young kids. There is 0% chance America can pay its bills by the time that they are, you know, 30s and 40s. And so if you look out that far, you say, oh, I don't want that my kids to be in that situation. What's gonna happen to the country? Whether something bad is gonna happen or not, people are worried about that. And so speaking to them, not from their perspective as voters, but for their kids, I think really resonates. The second thing is, we have a lot of waste. I just saw a report, Blake Hall from IDME tweeted out and said, the government office of accountability, this is the government

• 22:52Anthony Pompliano?

  says this, between, I think it was $233 billion and $532 billion per year goes to fraud. The government accountability office came out and said, hey, we have a bunch of fraud. We know we're getting defrauded to the tune of a couple hundred billion dollars per year. I think this study was from 2018 to 2022. That means that at least $1 trillion was paid by the US government where they were defrauded over a four-year period. One trillion dollars. And again, I'm not saying that all of a sudden if we could like stop all the fraud, that we would have a balanced budget and be off to the races,

• 23:34Anthony Pompliano?

  whatever. That is one thing. We have organizations in the government who can't pass an audit. Then you look at, what are we spending the money on? I remember when the infrastructure bill came out, we read it. They had money going to organizations that were going to literally buy marijuana to test the effect of driving high. And I remember saying at the time, I know a lot of people that are watching this podcast right now will do that shit for free. They don't need to spend any money. Just call for volunteers. There'll be a line out the door, right? There was a whole thing on studying certain endangered

• 24:17Anthony Pompliano?

  species of plants and the impact of building highways near them. And they were spending like a couple hundred million dollars. Listen, I like plants. Plants are cool. But we don't even spend a couple hundred million dollars to do the study, right? And so it's just this idea of like, everything in the government is all about spend money. If I remember correctly, I think that they also had in the bill $25 million for cleaning supplies for the Capitol Building. It's a big building. You gotta clean a lot. But I think that if you went out and you bid it out and you used economic incentives, you probably could get the Capitol Building cleaned for a year for less than $25 million. That seems kind of crazy. That was just the money for the supplies. I do not believe that was money that includes

• 25:01Anthony Pompliano?

  labor or anything else. And so you look at that, that was one bill. I think I just came up with a billion dollars of savings, right? And by the way, I spent 30 minutes skimming through it. I saw some guy tweeting about it on Twitter. I looked into what he was saying, whatever. Imagine if we had somebody who went in there who's financially literate and said, "We're only going to spend money on things that matter." And so, one of the things I think the US government could do that would absolutely blow people's minds is a zero-based budget. And that would completely destroy government spending. Zero-based budget, for those that don't know, is where you basically set, usually what people do is, "Okay, we're going to do the 2025 budget. Let's look at what we spent in 2024 and make tweaks off of that."

• 25:42Anthony Pompliano?

  A zero-based budget is you start from zero going into 2025. We have no money allocated to anything. What do we need to spend? And so, rather than tweak 2024, we'll naturally just get more and more spending, right? Because people just say, "Oh, I need a little bit more this year for marketing. I need a little bit more for operations." If you go zero-based budget, how much money do you need in the marketing department? I don't care what you spent last year. How much do you need for 2025? What you end up finding is it cuts down on a lot of bloat and kind of just bureaucracy and all this stuff. The issue is that a candidate who shows up and says, "I'm going to cut government spending that aggressively," kind of like Javier Malley in Argentina, would have to lay off tens of thousands of government employees. That's not a popular talk track.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  You're not going to have any bureaucrats or politicians running the country like a business. So, that's just the reality.

• 26:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Some of them have tried, and it just hasn't worked because they're fighting up against this bureaucracy, right? It's kind of like, you know, imagine if a private business ran the DMV. It just, obviously, if there was competition for the DMV, obviously, we'd have to improve. But it's a monopoly from a government service standpoint, right? And so, there's no competition, so you get what you get, which is like, people are like, "Oh, I gotta go to the DMV. I gotta, let me, let me literally schedule eight hours on my calendar so I can go to the DMV." It's crazy.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  It's horrible. Paul, on that note, thank you so much for your time.

• 27:05Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 27:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I wrote 65 letters to my children. Go on Amazon, wherever you like to buy books, search How to Live an Extraordinary Life, Anthony Pompliano, it'll pop up, it's a nice black cover. Go ahead and hit that buy button so you can preorder the book as well. Now, if you like the show, tell your friends, share with your family, annoy your brother, your sister, your mother, or your father, and make sure that they become a listener and a watcher as well. Thanks so much for tuning in, I'll see you guys the next episode.