The Truth About “Overvalued” Stocks And The Massive Gains Ahead

24:21In some of these conflicts sometimes, and you go throughout history, the thing that ended up getting kind of the final solution or the final piece, nobody at the table walked away saying, hey, we got a great deal. And so how do you kind of think through this idea of, you say that the conditions in Gaza are bad, they're still hostages, Israel has this kind of military success that they've been building from a momentum basis, but Hamas and many others are still, you know, kind of continuing their plight, if you will. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, you sort of acknowledged it there, right? I get asked a lot of questions about the Middle East.

24:56And oftentimes the questioner is like, what's the good answer? What's the right, you know, and all too often in the Middle East, the choice is between a truly god-awful and a partly god-awful answer, right? So it's a hard question to answer. But look, here's the reality, right? You know, Hamas has been 90%, I'm just making that number up, but I'd stand by it, you know, obliterated as a military force. You know, their ability to build rockets, their ability to attack into Israel, as they so brutally did two years ago, is largely gone. They've also managed to replace a lot of their people, you know, and put AK-47s into the hands of pissed off 19-year-olds.

25:35You're never going to get that to zero, right? Without, well, you're just never going to get that to zero. We couldn't do it in Fallujah. We couldn't do it in Afghanistan. The Israelis can't do it in Gaza. And so to me, militarily speaking, they've achieved their ends. And so what you hope they do is they say, wait a second, we've been doing this for two years and we still have a couple dozen hostages. Months and months and months of restricting aid into the region, into Gaza, and military activity hasn't released them. Let's try something different. Let's try something different. Let's take the next step and say we are going to bring in.

26:10It'll be an Arab multinational force. God only knows how you're going to work that out. You can imagine how enthusiastic the Jordanians will be and the Egyptians will be to take on that role. And then enter into serious negotiations around the future of those guys with 19-year-olds with AK-47s and the future, most importantly, of those hostages. So again, I think now is the moment to try something that would be a risk, but that might actually work and might actually turn a horrible, you know, vicious circle into something slightly better. Now, one of the aspects, you know, I spent time in Iraq in the U.S.

26:43Army. And one big takeaway I had was you can't kill an idea. And I think that people who have never seen this stuff aren't involved in the intelligence communities. They don't really kind of look into this. Many of these organizations that people will read about in the news at the essence is an idea, right? And it is many times a idea that is incompatible with maybe the American viewpoint, whether it's ethics, morals, you know, kind of approach. And so the way that it shows up in the world is via terrorism or violence or whatever it ends up being. I think one aspect that I find that ties into the U.S.

27:18economy is that we have a very precarious situation. We need to get labor into the United States. There is kind of this illegal immigration, you know, that really took off under Biden. I think Trump has come in. He ran on this campaign promise that he was going to shut the border. Seems like he's been able to do that. Then they are taking it a step further with a lot of the ICE actions and the deportations. And so you're kind of taking labor out of the labor force that are doing a lot of these jobs that are in the U.S. economy. And so when I'm on X, I use X as kind of like a lab of ideas, and some of them are really bad ideas, some of them are good ideas and everything in between.

27:57It seems like there is this thought process of how do we get people who are skilled, who also will assimilate to the American values, the American ethos, the American kind of way of life. And I don't know what the right answer is, right? But it does feel like maybe some of what is happening in the Middle East or some of these other areas where you are getting these competing ideas that eventually resort to violence to try to settle them. In the US, we don't necessarily have that degree of violence, but it does feel like there is a growing portion of the population who is very worried about, okay, American ethos, American values, if we keep bringing certain people here who have a different viewpoint, is that a problem, right?

28:38How do we address the economic needs of the U.S., but also make sure that from a society standpoint, we're kind of bringing the people here who are going to be contributing members of the society, not people who show up in our cities or our streets and are chanting for the death of America, right? It's kind of this like very interesting balance there. So how do you kind of think through some of those things and make sure we're not just exporting the problems from some of these other regions into the United States? Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting question you asked, a lot in it, right? And let me say two things to it.

29:08Number one, you're absolutely right, right? Actually, I would change. You said you can't beat an idea. Yes, you can. You beat an idea with a different and better idea, right? This is why we exist as a country, right? Our forefathers lived under a monarchy for, you know, whatever it was, 100 plus years until we said, hey, there's a better idea, which is that the people will provide their consent to the rulers, right? So, the way you beat an idea is with a better idea. And that's what's frankly missing in the Middle East right now. It's been very frustrating to me. You know, two million people in Gaza, and by the way, millions of Palestinians in the West Bank, they've been fed for a very long time a disgusting, evil idea, which is that the way you deal with the Israelis is through violent resistance.

29:48And that's why Hamas, you know, amongst other reasons why they were appealing. The only way you beat that horrible idea is by saying there is a future for Palestinians. There's a future that involves development and modernization and getting wealthy. you know, the way lots of people who have put down arms can do. And that's what's been missing there right now, right? Especially as the Israeli, the current Israeli government obliterates the notion of a two-state solution. Look, you know, you and I are young guys, right? Well, no, I can't claim to be a young guy, but, you know, you know how we would feel if we lived in Ramallah and the government was saying, you will never have your own country and this status quo will be all you ever know.

30:26You and me would take up arms, right? So you need another idea in the region. And that idea has to be about a legitimate and secure future for all the people living in the region. Okay. Number one, number two, to your immigration point, look, when you say people in the streets of America chanting death to America, I'm sure Fox News has that imagery, but that's not the story of American immigration, right? The story of American immigration is the story of people all over the world seeing a better chance in the United States coming here. And by the way, initially being mischaracterized, look, my forebears were Irish, right?

31:01You know, look at what was said about the Irish in the late 1800s, right? They were subhuman. Irish need not apply. This was true of the Japanese. It was true of the Jewish. It was true of the Italians. And basically, if you didn't arrive on the Mayflower, when your people arrived, you were, you know, you were, you know, second class citizen in this country, but you prevail, right? And you integrate and you assimilate and you do it to the extent that you want to, right? Because it's a free country, right? So, you know, we've got Irish American societies all over this country. You never really lose touch with your initial heritage, but you ultimately assimilate into this country.

31:33You let drop the, you know, crazy old world fights that you were involved in. I get a kick out of the fact that I was in Chicago at one point, this was probably a decade ago, you know, or two decades ago when the Balkan Wars were on. You know, in Chicago, a Bosnian sitting next to a Serb in a bar is having a good time talking about the bears or the bulls, right? But you move them six time zones to the east and they're armed and fighting each other, right? It's the genius of America. So bottom line, we need more immigration in this country. We just do. And we shouldn't, you know, say, oh, well, this kind of immigration is okay.

32:07And this kind of immigration is not okay. If you come to our country, immigrant or domestic or whatever, you come to our country and you start committing violence or breaking the law, we're going to arrest you. By the way, if you come to our country illegally, and this is a point that my party has not sufficiently gotten, if you come to this country illegally, we're a country of laws. We defer to the laws of the land, and that's a huge problem. So anyway, I've gone on at great length on your question, but we need more immigration, and what we really need to do is reform the immigration system so that we get the young people, the entrepreneurs that we need, and don't have this massive incentive for people to come across the border illegally in order to work in chicken farms or to work in restaurants or with contractors, etc.

32:52Well, it's interesting because I think what you're basically saying is, look, we need less illegal immigration. We need more legal immigration. And one of the beauties of America is that people who come here and assimilate contribute to the society. And I actually think that that's a pretty non-controversial viewpoint, again, across age groups and across political parties. It's just that's not really the public conversation, right? It seems like there's this extreme view of one side of the conversation is saying, hey, we need no immigration. And then the other side is saying everyone should be able to come here regardless of whether they follow the law or not.

33:26And I think that you're kind of taking a rational viewpoint of saying, look, it does matter that we have laws, but also we do need people. And so how do we solve that problem? Maybe, well, let's make legal immigration of people who are going to assimilate much easier so that we can get those people here into the country and have them contribute to our society. Well, look, I agree with everything you said, except one thing which I very much disagree with. Look, this country, first of all, we need immigration, right? We just need it. The population's aging. Look at who's running our tech companies.

33:52It's immigrants. You know, there's a thousand reasons why we need more immigration, right? The one word you use that I would quibble with is assimilate, right? Now, look, the experience of immigrants here has always been to assimilate to a greater or lesser extent. But we're a free country, right? So if you're a Hasidic Jew in Brooklyn or living up in the Catskills, that's one of the most unassimilated populations on the planet. I don't know if you've ever sort of wandered around the Hasidic neighborhoods of Brooklyn, but, you know, the people there are dressed the way they dressed in Minsk, you know, 200 years ago.

34:24And they're very explicitly not interacting with modern American society. But it's a free country. It's a totally free country. So if that's your version of being an American, in this free country, you get to do that, right? And so I get a little nervous about the word assimilate because usually there's some words after that that make me nervous, right? Like if you assimilate into our religious tradition or if you assimilate into this political view. So again, I agree with everything you said except for the fact that in a free country, you get to come here, you get welcomed. And so long as you abide by the law, that's non-negotiable, you get to live how you want.

34:57Yeah, I think it's interesting the word assimilate, right? Because I do agree that there's kind of different applications of it. But maybe the thing that I find that's probably non-controversial, I would think, is assimilate to being an American. And America is, again, an idea, right, of encouraging other people to have freedom, encouraging other people to do these things. I agree with you that I don't think assimilation in terms of the clothes they wear or, you know, what food they eat or those types of things makes a ton of sense. But I do think, you know, sometimes the best way to show an example is to kind of show a counter example is I forget the name of the politician, but there's a politician who went and it was somewhere in Latin America.

35:37And they basically said, you know, I am X citizen or X type of person more than I am an American or before I am an American. And I think that's the things that make people a little bit uncomfortable is they start to say, wait a second, politicians on one hand, but just people in general, do they have an allegiance to another country more so than they do the United States? And in the immigration process, they are asked to essentially pledge allegiance to our country more so than any other country, right? And so, again, some of this is like nomenclature stuff, but also some of it I think is more kind of spirit of saying, hey, look, we want people here who are going to try to assimilate in terms of the idea of America and help grow America, which, again, to your point, like we do need people, right?

36:20And, you know, look, technologists are going to try to do humanoid robots and AI software. And, you know, they're going to try to do all these things to kind of help support. But at the end of the day, like we're still going to need the people. And so let's go figure out how to be able to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Look, I'll tell you, my best day is when I go up to an immigration swearing in. Right. I just love this. Right. There's people from all over the world. And not only are they raising their right hand and swearing allegiance to the United States and explicitly abandoning their allegiance to their previous political entities, whether that's India or Colombia or China.

36:49we make them learn the names of the founding fathers, the names of their senators. I mean, it's crazy to be in a room where it's the only room where people can actually, you know, competently discuss the Federalists, right? So we make, when people raise their right hand, they make that initial commitment of loyalty to the Constitution and to the country, including, by the way, the oath includes you will take up arms on behalf of this country if we ask you to. So I think that's the moment. And then when you're a United States citizen, again, I just chafe a little bit at this idea that there's a set of ideas that make you somehow less American.

37:26Look, I'm as patriotic as they come. But if you want to come in front of me and say, you know, the government is corrupt because of this, that and the other thing. God bless you in a country that celebrates freedom of expression. And by the way, in a country that was founded by a bunch of guys who said this government that we lived under, you know, where the king is endowed by the power of God ain't going to cut it, right? This country is founded on skepticism of the government. So we don't need to spend any more time on it. But that initial oath that you take when you become a citizen is really important.

37:58And it goes without saying that if you take up arms against this country, you're going to jail. But we want to be really careful that once you're an American citizen, you enjoy the right to believe and say whatever you want under the protection of the First Amendment of our Constitution. Let's talk about two more economic things before I let you go. You were previously a commissioner at the Greenwich Housing Authority, I believe. Home affordability, massive issue in America. I think that people, regardless of wealth status, of geography, of education level, they are feeling the pain when it comes to being able to afford a home.

38:33Some of that is because the actual price of a median home has exploded. Some of that is currency debasement and inflation. Some of that is high interest rates that are leading into the mortgage rates. There's a whole bunch of stuff to unpack here, but you get a magic wand or you get to kind of solve the problem for a day. What can we do to solve home affordability in America? Yeah, this is one of those problems where the answer is really obvious and really short to say and really hard to do. And the answer is we need to build three to five million new housing units in this country. Right. We have this massive deficit of supply.

39:04And if you remember back to freshman year economics in college, when you don't have adequate supply, price goes up. And in this case, it is so hard for people. I mean, listen to the 20 somethings. Right. Who, unlike our generation or our parents generation, cannot afford to buy a home. And in fact, are probably spending half their income on rent in economically vibrant places like San Francisco, New York and Boston and Austin and everything else. So the answer is we have to build a lot more housing. And that's a hard conversation. I'm talking to you from Fairfield County, Connecticut, where the housing is so constrained that an acre of land can be$5 million.

39:38dollars. We need to build a lot more housing, not just to house people, but so that this generation can participate in the single greatest wealth creation thing for the American middle class since World War II, which was the appreciation of the homes that you own. So, okay, like I said, easy to say, what do you do? You actually incentivize our cities and our counties and our states to have smart, and I do mean smart, you know, the opponents of housing in Fairfield County are like, oh my God, they're going to build skyscrapers in Greenwich. I kid you not. Skyscrapers in Greenwich. No, no, no, no, no, no.

40:11You build in a smart way. Around train stations, you build maybe eight, nine, 10-story houses, apartments, the way we are in Stanford and other places. But there's a lot of little things you can do to push states and municipalities to be more open to housing construction. But that's really 95 % of the answer. Until we figure out a way to build a lot more housing, we're going to have a huge problem here. And you bring up a really good point, which is, you know, the federal government obviously talks about this a lot. I think it's a very big point in terms of presidential races and Congress and Senate and stuff like that.

40:42But it really is a local issue, right? The zoning laws, the city councils, I always say that city councils are like one of the most dangerous groups in someone's life because what they decide actually can have a much bigger impact than like what the president decides sometimes on any given person's day to day life and housing being, you know, maybe one of the biggest examples. And so how do you incentivize them? Is it like an economic incentive? Is there some sort of guidance? What do you think you can do to really get these city councils, these cities, these states to start to open up some of this and really get people building?

41:16Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, we kind of know how it works, right? There are, you know, I mentioned the city of Austin. You know, there are examples out there of cities that have allowed for the creation of real supply. And yes, you can call it deregulation. I prefer not to call it that because then it gets wrapped up in the whole left-right fight. But look, there's some really technical things that we know works. One of the ways you stop growth is by saying for every unit you build in a 40-unit apartment building, you need three parking spaces, right? And that's a pretty good way to stop buildings from getting built.

41:52But think about it. If you're building that apartment near a train station and it's going to be populated by 20-somethings in their first job, they probably need one car, not three, the way a family of six might need. So there's a lot of little technical things like you can do. How do you do it? Because you put your finger on it. These are local and state issues. I would point to two things. Number one, in the 1970s, when the federal government decided it was a good idea for people to drive 55 miles an hour, I guess for fuel conservation, the federal government sort of flexed its muscles and said, look, Highway 8 is going to depend on states making that decision.

42:25Now, we've come away from that for a bunch of reasons. But my point is that there are both coercive ways of doing that. But I'm more interested in the incentives, right? I represent the city of Bridgeport, right? The city of Bridgeport is desperate for revenue. And if I said this, by the way, this could be a terrible idea, but I'm gonna share it with you anyway. You know, if I said to the city of Bridgeport, if you can hit 500 new units of housing every single year for the next five years, or 1000 units of housing, because, you know, theoretically, they could do that, you're going to get grants from the federal government at a rate 5x what you would have gotten otherwise through things like the community development block grant or whatever.

42:59Anyway, I'm not sure that's a good idea, but I do know that poor cities like Bridgeport will respond to economic carrots if they're put out there. So again, I'm not ready to despair and say that just because it's the city councilors who control it, we've got no tools. We've basically told an entire generation that you don't get to live the American dream anymore because for the next 15 years, you're going to spend 60 % of your income on housing. And that has terrible economic and, oh, by the way, political implications. So we got to address this. Last thing is we've got a pretty big wealth inequality gap.

43:33I know you've done a lot of work and various organizations kind of looking at this. Artificial intelligence, I think on one hand, I've got very smart friends that are kind of tech forward and they're very excited about this. Their businesses are going to be more productive with less employees. They're going to kind of fulfill the capitalistic mandate of efficiency and productivity. On the other hand, there's a very big problem brewing, especially in kind of young workers that are entering the workforce. They are not getting hired at the same rate that they used to be. You see these kind of anecdotal stories of people saying, hey, I was working six months after I started my job.

44:07They fired me and they kept saying that I can't do anything the new tools can't do. I saw one of those stories recently, right? And you say, okay, hold on a second here. If there is people who don't have proven skills in the workplace and they are not, you know, kind of well-versed in using these tools, is that wealth inequality gap just going to explode even further, right? And so how do you think about addressing some of, you know, what we already know is a problem and obviously we want to solve, but it does feel like there is maybe a even worse situation coming down the pipe in terms of some of these technologies that really are going to kind of drive that inequality even further.

44:44Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm glad you made that transition because I chaired a committee a couple of years ago on wealth inequality in this country. And I would tell you that there's a lot of things you can do. The number two, the two things I would, if I could wave my magic wand, which you gave me earlier, I would say, let's fix the housing problem. And by the way, let's do something about childcare, right? There's so many moms out there who would love to work and keep their skills current, but because childcare is so unaffordable, like housing, they just can't do it. But anyway, that's not what you asked.

45:08You asked us a question. I've always been a tech optimist. I'm talking to you right now because I, because I retain my optimism about the blockchain and crypto, the internet, you name it. I've always been an innovation guy. For the first time in my nearly six decades on the planet, I'm really worried about what AI could do, right? Because it's not just replacing folks making$14 an hour in the call center in Kansas, right? It's replacing radiologists and lawyers and bankers and maybe everybody. I mean, it turns out this is the technological innovation that can do everything. Now, interestingly enough, it can't probably install HVAC in my house right now or fix a broken toilet.

45:51There's a lesson in that, by the way, for those smarty pants who are like me, who are like, you really should go to college. But anyway, setting that aside, I'm really worried. And the optimists say, well, AI is going to be a tool that the radiologist works with or that the nurse works with or that the lawyer, well, maybe, maybe. But daggone it. I mean, As I go on perplexity and chat GPT, maybe that's true for the next two years, but 10 years from now, 10 years from now, are we going to have pilots? Are we going to put a human being in the cockpit of a plane when AI can outperform that human being by a factor of 10?

46:24I wish I had the answer for you, but for the first time in my life, this tech optimist is really worried about the fact that AI may not just take away the wages of an awful lot of Americans. And again, those Americans who aren't used to having it taken away like radiologists, but it may take away the sense of belonging and dignity. I mean, as Joe Biden used to say, a job is more than a paycheck. It's a sense of meaning and belonging and of dignity. And so I don't have the answer for you, but I'm really, really worried about – look, I'm staggered and amazed by what AI can do, but I'm also really worried about it.

47:01Yeah, I think that there's a lot of people right now. They say, hey, look, there's a lot of benefits here. there's going to be some trade-offs and how do we deal with it? Congressman, thank you so much for your time. This has been very, I think, informative for me, but also I think kind of the nuance of your views is important for people to hear. Do you have a website or anywhere that you'd like people to kind of go? They can find out more about you and some of the ideas that you're trying to put forward? Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, on the official side, you can just Google heims.house.gov. We've got some stuff there.

47:26And, you know, I took one of the smartest things I've done, you were talking about extra earlier in my life was to take a three-week August break from actually, but I'll be back on. I do it myself, by the way. But yeah, and on the campaign side, Heimspakon, this is my campaign side. So between all of that stuff, you'll get a little feeling for some of the stuff that I focus on. But no, really, really grateful you had me on. Great conversation. Thank you. Absolutely. We'll do it again in the future. All right. Take care. I told you it was going to be a great conversation with Jim. He did a fantastic job talking through a lot of the nuance of some of these very complex topics.

47:57That's it for today's show. Now remember, we have 17 ,924 subscribers on YouTube. I need your help to get us to 1 million. That's the big goal. So please make sure that you subscribe. Please make sure that you're following us on X and I'll see you guys live tomorrow from the desk of Anthony Pompliano.