#1072 Mike Solana On How Woke People Are Destroying America

Mike Solana is a Vice President of Founders Fund, the ring leader of Hereticon, and Editor-In-Chief At Pirate Wires. In this conversation, we talk about everything: politics as theater, if the truth exists anymore, why science is no longer science, the changing definitions in society, AOC, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, conspiracy theories such as lab leak & Hunter Biden, and more! Nothing is off limits in this conversation. ======================= Crypto wallets and browser extensions are outdated, limited in features, and don’t meet the needs of today’s Web3 users. Core, the free, non-custodial browser extension built by Ava Labs, is more than just a wallet. Core is packed with features that give Avalanche users a more seamless, and secure, Web3 experience. With Core, any crypto user can easily swap assets, display NFTs in a beautiful interface, and store your assets in a Ledger-enabled wallet. Plus you can put real dollars in your Core wallet in just a few clicks. Go to www.core.app to access the full power of Web3 on Avalanche! ======================= The number one name in NFT domains and the world’s most powerful wallet are teaming up to bring something new to the crypto and Web3 world: The Blockchain.com community can get one, for free by signing up for the waitlist here. Free NFT domains provide all the benefits of premium Unstoppable Domains, including fee-free, lifelong ownership. Don’t have a Blockchain.com wallet? No worries, these new domains are available to everyone for as low as $5. Either sign up for a free blockchain.wallet or visit Unstoppabledomains.com to buy your domain today. ================== Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more. Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U. S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. ======================= Valour (formerly DeFi Technologies) represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. Currently listed on U. S. (OTC: DEFTF) and Canadian (NEO:DEFI) exchanges. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at valour.com ======================= BCB Group is the leading payment services partner for the digital assets industry. BCB Group provides payment services in 30+ currencies, FX, cryptocurrency liquidity, digital asset custody and BLINC, which is BCB’s free, instant settlements network for the BCB client ecosystem. Find out more by visiting bcbgroup.com/pomp =======================

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. Mike Solana is a Vice President at Founders Fund, the ringleader of Hereticon, and Editor-in-Chief at Pirate Wires. In this conversation, Mike and I talk about politics as theater. Does the truth exist anymore? Why science isn't science? The changing definitions of society? AOC, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, lab leak theory, Hunter Biden laptop, and much, much more. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mike. It'll make you think much deeper about culture, the way the world works, how information is

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  flowing in the digital ecosystem, and why you need to be an independent, critical thinker. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope that you guys enjoy it as well. Alright, let's get into this episode.

• 0:57Speaker 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.

• 1:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, I'm here with Mike. I think a great place to start is just, what is a Pirate Wire? You have a publication called Pirate Wires. What the hell's a Pirate Wire?

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Oh man. So yeah, Pirate Wires is my media company. Pirate Wires is like, it's just sort of how I feel, I guess, on the internet. It's like, I kind of conceive of the internet as this chaotic, turbulent ocean, and you have the kind of like flagship empire, like empire ships kind of patrolling the seas. And it's just like me kind of watching and sending dispatches from the insanity.

• 1:57Anthony Pompliano?

  So you're like the Somali pirate as the-

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Caribbean pirate.

• 2:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Caribbean, okay.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Caribbean pirate.

• 2:03Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the difference?

• 2:04Speaker 02

  I think that the Caribbean pirates, it's like rum-heavy, it's like hidden gold on secret islands, pirate coves in beautiful locations is like very much kind of the energy I'm trying to represent.

• 2:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Not so much the Somali-

• 2:17Speaker 02

  Not trying to like murder and pillage and rape and, yeah, no, it's a more-

• 2:24Speaker 02

  You know what it is too, it's like the Caribbean pirates are in the past and so we can look back on it with rose colored glasses and every now and then.

• 2:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, they were great people.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  They were amazing. They were heroes.

• 2:34Anthony Pompliano?

  We make movies about them.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  That's the American piracy, it's like, that's like a part of American history as well. It's like.

• 2:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do you say that?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Well, that's how we used to handle, that's how we used to take care of the British. I mean, this was like a much more dominant power and we used sort of pirate tactics to navigate a competitor with whom we really had no business competing. They were way bigger, way more powerful, way wealthier, and so you kind of have to be a little bit guerrilla about it.

• 3:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So, America was technically the insurgency?

• 3:04Speaker 02

  I mean, we were. I think that if you look in hindsight, it's obvious we were always going to win. It's like a resource game, it's the distance, it is the commitment, all of those things, but at the time, it seemed impossible.

• 3:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And do you think, as we've watched the American history play out, other countries have been like, oh, you know, that American Revolution thing, like, they had certain tactics, we should just employ them? Or do you think that's us just trying to be privileged people in America, looking at war after war after war and trying to overlay them on top of each other?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  I mean, I think we had a huge impact on the world. I lived, I was an English teacher in Spain for a little bit after college, and one thing I thought was really interesting was how everyone in Europe was like, they really believed the French Revolution happened before the American Revolution. They genuinely believed this.

• 3:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 3:52Speaker 02

  No idea what happened over there education wise, but they all, they would all talk about this. It's not true, obviously. It's like the American Revolution happened first.

• 4:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Google.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  And I had a college professor also, who used to go on and on about how the American Revolution wasn't a real revolution. And he talked about the French Revolution as being a real revolution, as like presenting fundamental change and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But of course, it's all bullshit. The American Revolution was, we had an intellectual revolution in which we sort of decided that the concept of the divine monarch was stupid. We got rid of it completely.

• 4:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Why did he?

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Inalienable rights of people, right there in the piece. I guess the idea is that like, we've, a lot of our curse of concept of rights is derived from British law, but... But I mean, the French had a concept of rights as well. It's we were the first country that had a real revolution of the people.

• 4:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Why did he think the French Revolution was a real revolution?

• 4:55Speaker 02

  I think because he sees, I mean, his framing was that it was a fundamentally different government and perhaps ours was not. Ours was closer to the parliament system or something. I don't know. It's a lot of coat, man. I think that I think that mostly what people want to do is eat away at the idea that there's something special about America. And it's silly because that's the path for them to calamity. I mean, there is something special about America. I don't actually think America can be replicated anywhere else. I don't think I used to think it was just a matter of philosophy. There are people like Peter Zeihan who think it's just a matter of geography. I think it's somewhere in the middle, but we are special. It's a we're a special place. We're protected by two oceans.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  We have two neighbors, both of them peaceful with us. Most of that does come down to geography. It's like a hard place to invade from and into. We have abundant natural resources. We have inherited a history of rights from Britain that we then kind of made more libertarian and extremely pro individual and pro freedom. And we have just an incredible amount of capital that we're we're sort of riding forward with. We're in an amazing position. It is hard to replicate this country.

• 6:08Anthony Pompliano?

  We obviously just saw Russia invade Ukraine. It's almost impossible to believe that Mexico would invade America or Canada would invade America, right? Like it I don't even think there's anyone who would say that with a straight face and be like, yes, I think this could happen.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Well, no. And I mean, it's also it's I don't are there any more? There's no more peaceful border than the Canadian US border in the world. I think Mexico, yeah, we have this immigration problem, but even with that, it's still not a super patrolled border. I mean, that's part of the problem. We have they're just we have really, we have really strong relationships with both countries and they're strong trade partners. They are ideologically very close to us, especially Canada, obviously, within the Anglosphere.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's just really nothing like America.

• 6:55Anthony Pompliano?

  The Mexico border is an interesting place to start to dive into the insanity of the world. Obviously, we had Donald Trump who was gonna build a wall. And in some ways, it was a proxy, a simple statement that just said, hey, we want better border security.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? But build a wall is a much better meme. It really gets people jazzed up.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Well, I think what I loved about it is when you say no to it, you have to, you have to answer the question of like, well, why? Why don't you want, why don't you want the, the wall? And you either say because it's not gonna work, in which case you're admitting that we need to stop this sort of like free flow of legal immigration from South America. Or you say, because I don't believe in the concept. And I mean, the entire left has really gotten to a place, the, the idea that we should have open borders was a pretty radical idea that was strongly libertarian. It was not leftist. It was, I mean, Bernie Sanders was anti-immigration because of labor. Libertarians were, were open borders. It was a Koch Brothers thing.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  That has completely changed. The Democratic Party has more or less, in rhetoric at least, adopted the language of libertarians on things like immigration. And then in practice, it's more complicated because I guess, I mean, the sort of both major parties have less of a, of a hard time lying. Libertarians, to their detriment, love to be sort of principled and honest, no matter what, to a fault.

• 8:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do you say that the Democrats have kind of almost taken over or infiltrated the like open border movement? What is their argument?

• 8:26Speaker 02

  I think it like happened to them. I think that wokeness is like a pretty chaotic, crazy, almost religious movement that, I mean, it reminds, I don't know if you've ever seen, have you watched Game of Thrones? Okay, well, there's a, this sort of evil queen who I love, her name is Cersei.

• 8:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not surprised you love Game of Thrones.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  She's the illegitimate ruler of King's Landing. And she has to fend off the new young guns. And to do this, she invokes a growing religion. She goes to a religious leader. He's like this very like austere, like Jesus looking kind of guy. No beard, but like barefoot, walks around everywhere, pro poverty.

• 9:06Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like Adam Newman, just a couple centuries ago.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Yes, a little shaved down, a little more like a little older, shorter hair, but very Adam Newman-esque.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  And she aligns with it because it's powerful and she uses it to destroy her enemies. But then it comes after her and it's like, no, you're impure. And it just burns, it sort of like burns that world of power down. And I think that's what the Democrats did. The average person is not woke. The average person, I think, looks at this stuff and is like, this is crazy and regressive. And, you know, why are we, why are we reducing people to things like their race and gender? It seems wrong. It seems like the opposite of everything that we worked against for all of these decades. But it was powerful and young people loved it and it was deranged. And it felt like you had the grassroots energy on your side. And so people tapped into it and now it's consuming everything.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  And if you notice now, really where wokeness is striking is on the left. It doesn't, people on the right, I mean, if you're working for Disney, maybe you're going to get canceled. But the average person on the, if you're purely in politics, you have nothing to worry about. If you're media, it's like, maybe you get canceled, but then you start a Substack or you work for someone who has, who has their own, who has their own sort of budding media company. The game is social media and unless you get canceled on social media, you still have your followers. And in fact, when people try to cancel you and you say, fuck off, you just become more popular. So, I mean, unless you're like sort of left of center.

• 10:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's go to this idea of like the woke is equivalent of a religion, right? So I think most people think of that as like, oh, religion is declining in America. And there's now these ideologies that have replaced it, or at least tangentially kind of risen as religion has declined. But what you're making an argument is less about like the, kind of the congregation. You're making the argument that like, no, the politicians are the priest. Right, like they're the ones who are saying, hey, human nature is that you want to party and have sex and like curse, but Jesus in the Bible says you shouldn't do that. And so like, hold back on your inhibitions, right? And like, be a man or woman of God.

• 11:15Anthony Pompliano?

  The politicians essentially, or the leaders of the woke movement are almost saying, hey, you all don't want to view the world this way, but like, this is the pure or ethical way to view things.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Right, I mean, first of all, I don't think the political leaders are actually the priests. I think that it's, it's all, it's like academia is where it started. It's mostly professor oriented. This is why these people are also obsessed with like forgiving college debt and getting everybody into college, even though increasingly, it's increasingly obvious that the meme of if you go to college, you're going to do better than someone who doesn't is incorrect in, in most cases of, of the liberal arts that are, so you go and get a gender studies degree and you're now a hundred thousand dollars in debt because you went to a pretty good school, but you kind of like squeaked your way in. Is that, is that better than not going to college and becoming a plumber? Of course not. It's just insane. That doesn't make any sense at all.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Why, why are people so, so determined to get every kid in college regardless of what they're studying, regardless of how well it's setting them up for their future? They don't care about that. They just want them in the machine because it's, it's a, it's a religious indoctrination campus. And that's what it is now. That's what all of college is. It's bled out. And so now you have, it's like, how do we appease the academics in the first place? But now increasingly, you have this sort of class of activists, these people who are, and social media allows this. I mean, you can, you can eke a living out of it. Some people are better than others. Shaun King is really good. I don't know if you've read about his $40,000 dog he just bought with the funds from his activists.

• 12:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Tell me about this guy, because I, I saw an article one time and I have no clue if this is true or not, but let's just dive right into the shit. That they basically were like, he literally changed his appearance and everything to like more align.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  I am not touching this, but I mean, we'll, we'll talk about what the controversy is. I mean, we're talking about a man who many people think. Is a white man pretending to be a black man? I don't know that that is something that I would say. I will say that black Twitter loves to tease him about it. I mean, he's, if you go online, anytime there's a Shaun King controversy, it's usually, it's usually like black Twitter that's merciless. And this is because he's gotten a lot of criticism from especially black women for like stealing funds and things like this. It's, you have, just Google it. This is not, I'm not an expert in the Shaun King discourse. I'm sort of a casual observer every now and then I dip in. But I mean, they call him things like Talcum X. And I mean, there's like a whole, there's like a whole litany of like insane things that they, that they say. But he's really powerful.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  He's really influential. He, I think, what was it? Maybe it was Rihanna did some kind of video with him not too long ago. And this is what always sets people off. Or it's, it's other activists who are angry at the opportunities that he's receiving.

• 13:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So is it a level of jealousy, envy, something like that?

• 14:02Speaker 02

  I think part of it's that. To be fair to Shaun King, which I hate doing. He is, he does seem actually committed to the cause of sort of,

• 14:12Speaker 02

  he really believes in the like police brutality stuff. And that's, I mean, a big part of what he talks about. But he's gotten famous because of it and he's made money off of it. And he gets incredible opportunities because of it. And I think people see that as in some way,

• 14:32Speaker 02

  lacking integrity. Because, I mean, to go back to our model for religion is Christianity and that is austere. And, you know, it's nothing about the physical world matters. Everything you're doing is for the sort of next world. You're, you're working towards that. And, and this is mapping to that in some way. And so if you're making a lot of money and you're really successful and you've got all these sort of like worldly riches because of your sort of, you're like goodness, then it's, how good is it really? Like, I mean, are you, are you really an activist? Or, or do you just play one on?

• 15:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that the playbook now? Is like drive a bunch of attention and then figure out a way to monetize the attention? And we're watching this, you know, there's obviously the woke component. There's a Shaun King. There's also, you can go through the, the right. You can go through kind of all the different causes. And like, there seems to be, if you throw out an issue, we could all think of like the one person on social media who's like hung their hat on that thing. And ends up building up a huge audience and then like figures out a way to monetize it.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  I think it's like.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  I don't even think people realize what they're doing online. I mean, it's a really chaotic place because of the incentives. And the incentives on social media are all, they're all towards either the novelty or the extreme, because that's what drives attention. You want to get attention. You want likes and clicks, you know, retweets, you want followers. And the way that you get that spotlight is by doing something that no one else is doing. I think the average person, I think most people, myself included. You live on these platforms and over time, you kind of internalize the rules. You have a sense of them. You can feel it, like when a tweet's not doing well, immediately you have a, well,

• 16:16Speaker 02

  if you have enough followers and you have a kind of expectation of a certain kind of engagement, you can feel pretty much within the first minute whether or not something is working or not. And at that point, I think that it's just behavioral therapy, basically how behavioral therapy works, positive reinforcement. When you don't get that hit, you discard that tactic. And when you do get that positive hit, you keep up with that tactic. You dig in deeper, stronger. It takes a lot to guard against that kind of stuff and to try and be honest with yourself and to say the things that you want to say with your platform. Most people aren't even thinking about this stuff. They're just naturally sort of guided. It's like, this is very, it's Marshall McLuhan talking about the medium is the message.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Like, the medium that we exist inside of shapes the kinds of stuff that we talk about, the way that we talk about, the things that we talk about, the way that we talk about them. This is very much, I think, what we're seeing on all across social media. And every platform is going to be a little bit different, whether it's short-form words or video or whatever else. They all have their own rules and so naturally you're going to see a certain kind of content in each. And with the activists, for sure, I think that's what's happening. I think that people are gravitating towards the extreme because that is what's rewarded. Or the extreme, the bizarre, the sort of, the controversial, all of those things.

• 17:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Is this why, like, Donald Trump and AOC are the same person?

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, they employ the same tactics, it's on two different ends of the political spectrum?

• 17:45Speaker 02

  They live on, I wouldn't say, I don't really see Donald Trump as...

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Classically ultra right. I mean, people like to call him the fascist.

• 17:54Anthony Pompliano?

  No, he was a Democrat and he said that if he would just run as a Republican.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  I see him as more like I see AOC on the far left for sure. I see, I see Trump as an outlier kind of, I, I once referred to right after the January 6th, I referred to him as the, the most sort of successful clown in human history. And I mean that like in a, almost a positive sense. Like I think that he is, is, is the court jester. And he, he did the clownish, most clownish thing possible, which is he won the presidency. And then we had like a clown on the throne, throwing eggs at the court for four years. And it was, it was crazy. He threw the curtain back.

• 18:34Anthony Pompliano?

  It was entertaining as fuck.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  And it threw the, it did what a clown is supposed to do. He threw the curtain back and we saw how things really worked. And he, he threw the curtain back at, at, of power. He threw the curtain of power backwards. We saw the, the machinery behind it all and, and then he laughed and, and we laughed and.

• 18:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And is this why like, the reason why I say it's so, it was so entertaining was regardless of you right, left, independent, anywhere in between, even the media companies, like they literally could not look away. It was just.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Obsessed. It was the greatest show on earth.

• 19:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. If you put Donald Trump's name in a headline, viral.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Well, he's an entertainer. And so of course, of course, America, I mean, given the mediums that are dominant, would ultimately elect a really sort of savant level entertainer. Donald Trump has an intuitive sense of crowds. He is funny. I think that this is one of the biggest mistakes Democrats made was they would, they would meet him. He would say something and they would be like, he's so angry. He's filled with so much hate. And it's just obviously not true. He's laughing all the time. He's, he's having fun. And, and if you can't, if you can't acknowledge that he's telling jokes and that they're, they're landing, then you can't fight with him because he's playing a different game than you are.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  You, you have to be at least as funny as, you have to at least have a sense of humor or you're just never going to survive in, in, in a fight with Trump.

• 20:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Scott Adams wrote a whole book and he basically talks about the two moments that everyone should have known like, hey, this it's over. Was one on the kind of logo or the mantra mission, whatever you want to call it. Supposedly Hillary Clinton ran like 100 plus tests on what it was her slogan gonna be. And so ended up coming together like stronger together, right? Which is like very politician.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And I'm sure that they ran the test and they got the data and like, okay, this is this is it. And then the way that the story is told is that supposedly Trump just walks in a room and like, hey, we need a slogan. He was like, uh, make America great again.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And, you know, obviously borrowed it from the past or whatever, but like intuition is, you know, kind of the takeaway from that story of like, he really understood kind of what would play. And then the second one was in the debate, I think it's Megyn Kelly, who was asking questions and said something about, you know, you've previously called women X, Y, Z, whatever. And he's like, nope, only Rosie O'Donnell. And like, again, to your point, Scott basically lays out the argument. He's like, it's a lose lose. If you lean into it, you're an asshole, you're a misogynist, you're like all this stuff. If you back away, you're weak, you're like, whatever. It's like a very, very smart question to ask him because it basically was lose lose. He sidestepped it, right? In a way that only an entertainer probably could do it.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  I think a lot of what people reacted to with Trump was just, it was how he said things and it was, they clocked him as fundamentally unserious. In competition for what they perceived as the most serious seat of power in on the planet. And, and that's actually what drove them crazy. It wasn't any of his positions. It wasn't, it wasn't his lack of respect for them or anything else. It was, it was that he was jarring. It was like, uh, he can't have this. Someone like him can't be here. It challenges their entire worldview. It challenged their, it challenged my worldview.

• 21:51Anthony Pompliano?

  In what ways?

• 21:52Speaker 02

  I was.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  I mean, I'd be lying if I said I thought he was gonna win. I thought it was impossible myself. I'm not, for me, I wasn't like, I found that whole election pretty disorienting. That was the beginning, I think, of

• 22:08Anthony Pompliano?

  2016.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Well, 2015 is when it all kind of began, and then 2016 for sure is like when the world felt, this was in this period of time where it's sort of like every year felt crazier and crazier until 2020, and then we got a pandemic and like a race war. It was like insane. It just built and built and built and built. But that was the beginning of the the sort of unraveling of the kind of like 20th century America, like 90s America, the early 2000s America, even after September 11th. There was this sense that history was gonna, that the future was going to look like this forever. It was gonna be this very static suburban type American world, and everything was gonna be basically the same. And then everything started changing. And I was, I, it, even while predicting that

• 22:51Speaker 02

  things were gonna change, I somehow wasn't prepared to see them start, start changing.

• 22:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I have this theory, I can't put a date, like, there's no like, hey, it was, you know, August 1st or whatever. But somewhere around that timeframe, my belief is that that's when America went online. It's the first, it's like, okay, the transition happened. We're like, yes, the internet was built before in the, you know, 15, 20 years beforehand, and we're laying the infrastructure, consumer behaviors were changing, companies were being built, like all the stuff. But somewhere in the mid 2010s, 14, 15, 16, somewhere in there, it was like, oh shit, the internet matters more.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  It was mobile penetration.

• 23:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  It was everyone had an iPhone. And so everyone now is walking around with the internet.

• 23:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  And that was, you know, you might have dipped in before and checked your email, but now you're living inside of it. And so the rules of the internet begin to shape the way that you think about the world. Donald Trump was the first Twitter president, he was, Twitter, he is, Twitter is the reason that he's the president.

• 23:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  And AOC is in the same, it's the same exact mold. These are social media candidates, and we are a social media country. You know, people spend hours a day on social media in America. I think it's like 200 million plus people on Face, probably be more at this point on Facebook. I just saw that TikTok was at 100 million. People are spending on TikTok like two to three, maybe four hours a day. Facebook, two hours a day, Instagram, two hours a day, like YouTube, two hours a day. That's, that is our, that is our reality to a certain extent. Zuckerberg talks about Meta a lot, and it's kind of weird, it seems, to change the name of your company to be

• 24:23Speaker 02

  A thing that doesn't yet exist, right? Like, you have this very successful company now, you're saying, "No, we're Meta now." Meta is the meta, it's a reference to the metaverse, a virtual reality, a world of virtual reality that we're going to kind of go into with our Oculus Rifts and walk around, and it's very reminiscent of, it's literally from Snow Crash.

• 24:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  And the idea of that, of kind of changing everything to be a thing that doesn't exist, changing your whole, your whole brand to, to, to be the metaverse, it seems weird until you sort of reflect and realize that we're already living in it.

• 25:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, we're already there.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  That's it. It's just, it's a less, it's not a, it's a less perfect version of it. It doesn't look the way that it looked like in sci-fi movies, but, but yeah, we're there. I mean, we were all, even with dating, right? Like, we're, we're all, the idea of like, are you dating online? Everyone's dating online, whether or not they're on the apps, because you meet someone and you Google them, and you go to their social media presence, and you, and you, you're sort of, you're, you're dating online. That, it's a very-

• 25:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, imagine-

• 25:29Speaker 02

  It's changed every, every aspect of human culture, this has changed.

• 25:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Imagine a 1990s movie where they were like, you know, Tom Cruise sitting there with his, with his gloves on, and he was swiping through women, right? And like, "Oh, no, this one, this is the one that I want to talk to." Like, people would be like, "Uh, I don't, is this okay to, like, publish?" Right? And now, every single person does that on their phone, every single day, who's looking for someone in a city.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's what, we, it's funny that that still somehow is not making it into our movies and television. We don't, we don't like the way that it looks. And that's weird. I don't know that we've ever seen something like that. I, I think about the way that, when you dream, no one dreams of their iPhone.

• 26:07Anthony Pompliano?

  [laughing]

• 26:09Speaker 02

  That doesn't seem, like, why? That's crazy. For something that you walk around with every day and think about, and if you're missing it for a minute, you're like, "Shit, where's my phone? I lost my phone." You panic a little bit, because you're addicted to it. Why isn't it in our dreams? It's just, it's like, very, that I don't have an answer for. That's just a question.

• 26:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do you think it's not there?

• 26:26Speaker 02

  I have no idea. I have absolutely no idea. It's, it's a bizarre, I don't understand that. I do think that people feel-

• 26:39Speaker 02

  A little bit trapped by this stuff. Younger people especially who spend more of their time on it.

• 26:45Anthony Pompliano?

  They seem screwed to me. Like, I grew up, I think we're about the same age. I grew up and like, people started getting cell phones in high school.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And my mom was like, very much, hey, you're gonna get one later than everyone else.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Back when cell phones were just cell phones. They were just phones.

• 26:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Like the Razr.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could text as well.

• 27:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Huge deal when somebody got the Razr, right? Like, oh shit, or whatever. And then the sidekick, you could slide it open and you had like the keyboard.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  That snake on it.

• 27:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So there's like three or four phones that if you grew up in this general timeframe, like, once everyone got one, it was like, cool thing. But like, you texted barely because it was T9s. You had to like click through everything. It was a pain in the ass. And you made phone calls. And like, that was it. But if we grew up and like, every time you did anything in high school and even in college, and everyone whipped out their phone like they were the paparazzi, like, there'd be a lot more people canceled.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  I remember, when I was in high school, a kid created a message board for, it was, we had, there were three high schools in my town. And this kid at one of our rival high schools created a message board for all of the local high schools where kids could go and just talk to each other. And it created such tremendous drama that they, I don't even know how this is legal, but they forced them to shut it down. And it was just, it was like, I mean, this, we're talking about like, months and months and months of buildup, of dramatic buildup before finally it ended. And, and now we live in a world where that's just, you can't shut it down. That's how we live.

• 28:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you think about like, how early kids get cell phones now. If you're 12, 14 years old and you get a cell phone, you're on TikTok and you're on Instagram, I was like, you're screwed. Right? Like, your entire view of the world is warped.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  I keep looking for, I mean, there have to be, there are trade offs always, it seems, in technology. I think that what I was not prepared for, something that I was wrong about.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  When social media first bubbled up, I was like, I was very much a tech, a blind tech op, not blind, but I thought everything was better. Everything was getting better. Everything was better than it was. Everything was getting better. I had no, I just didn't, I thought that, that all warnings of social media and whatnot, I thought it was all just propaganda, anti, anti-business, anti-tech propaganda. None of the predictions were right. They were, they were all like, it's gonna, it's terrible in ways that, and it's not, that was not right. But there were negative externalities, and there are negative externalities probably in every technological development.

• 29:13Anthony Pompliano?

  You think it changes people's brain chemistry?

• 29:15Speaker 02

  I think that when you change the reward structure in your life, it's changing your, it's changing you. Yeah, you're definitely changing. I don't know if it like physically changes your brain. I'm not a, not a brain guy, but you gotta bring in a neuroscientist, I think, for this conversation.

• 29:31Anthony Pompliano?

  You don't have to be a brain guy. I mean, Tom Cruise was calling it out way before everyone else.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  And he was right about everything.

• 29:38Anthony Pompliano?

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• 30:22Anthony Pompliano?

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• 30:49Speaker 02

  This is it. This is, I mean, this is, Tom Cruise is really, I wrote about this in Pirate, this is, so in a piece called Dark Plots and Secret Explanations in Pirate Wires, I wrote about Tom Cruise. This is how I, this is like part of my processes. You know, I'm sort of, we used to say surf the web. It was such a great phrase. And that is kind of, I'm out there, I'm like sailing.

• 31:12Anthony Pompliano?

  The equivalent of Caribbean pirate versus Somali pirate, right? Is like you can go on the internet or you could surf the web. Surf the web sounds way better.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm surfing. I'm cruising. I'm on my little, I'm on my pirate ship, just like chilling out, like, like laughing, looking at all the insanity. And then every now and then, something happens that feels like it represents a lot more. And Tom Cruise in 2005, appeared on the Today Show to talk about War of the Worlds, which I just assumed bombed. No, it was one of the most popular movies ever. It was his most popular movie until, for the last 15 years, huge box office success, until now, until the newest

• 31:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Top Gun.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Top Gun movie. 2005, he appears on the Today Show with Matt Lauer. And this is in this sort of moment in which he's been framed as pretty crazy by the media in America. I mean, I thought he would, everyone thought he was crazy.

• 32:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Scientology.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  I think I was in, yeah, I was in college. And I mean, talking about crazy Tom Cruise was a thing that people did. Yeah, Scientology was there, but also, he, he had just a month prior to this interview with Matt Lauer, he jumped up on a couch on the Oprah Show and talked about how much he loved Katie Holmes. And in hindsight, I look back, I'm like, I watched the interview. And he just looks like he's being like a crazy actor guy. I didn't, it doesn't seem unhinged to me. I mean, I think, I think part of that's because there's so much unhinged behavior around us now, that I look back at that and I'm like, that's just a guy. That's just, that's what people are worried about. That's just like how we all do it now. But he is in, he's on a sort of like tour of crazy. And so he goes on the Today Show, he talks about War of the Worlds for like five minutes.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  And Matt Lauer's like, cool. So you, you said, I forget the actress's name, you sort of criticized her for being on antidepressant medicine. And

• 33:05Speaker 02

  That's messed up. They like respond before the nation, the entire nation.

• 33:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Which is wild that that's what they used to do, right?

• 33:11Speaker 02

  Like crazy.

• 33:12Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think?

• 33:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, like you're here. I mean, that's even to this day. I mean, it's always your movie or your book is just an excuse to get you on the show. And then it's like, now tell me about your personal life. But Tom Cruise's personal life was a little more interesting at that point because of the Scientology stuff, because of his new bride. Was she like coerced into marrying him? I mean, there are all sorts of crazy rumors. And he had these really extreme views about psychology or psychiatry, which is that it is pseudo scientific bullshit. And he just said, you know, there is absolutely no scientific evidence supporting the notion that depression is caused. The root of depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain.

• 33:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Which at the time was accepted scientific.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Here's the thing, it wasn't.

• 34:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  Like everyone said that, and that was the accepted thing. It was you are crazy. How dare you say this? Unbelievable. But what just happened? So this, this interview resurfaced where he, in which he says, you know, there's no evidence for this. And then, I mean, there are endless articles about how crazy he is, how dangerous this was.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  The study comes out, an umbrella review of all of the studies on this subject over the last, you know, several decades. And what it concludes is not that depression isn't caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. We don't know what causes depression. What, what the conclusion that we have is that there's no evidence for that. And there hasn't ever been. And that's, it was a huge deal. Everyone was like, wait a minute, Tom Cruise clip resurfaces from 15 years ago, 17 years ago. And suddenly we have this weird conversation about experts. And what I thought, I mean, this is my, this is my jam. I love to write about this kind of stuff in the contemporary world. Like I love to talk about when the experts are wrong and some random asshole on Reddit was right.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  But this struck me as different because the conversation on looking back, I remembered it as being crazy. I remembered him seeming crazy and rude and it was like this wild thing. If you watch the interview now, it's so calm and normal. And Tom is definitely like, you need to educate yourself to Matt Lauer, which is accurate. But he wasn't crazy. He wasn't yelling. He wasn't, he wasn't saying anything that was completely untethered from reality. It was a very regular sort of conversation about studies that he had read. And it was shocking to me to realize the treatment of him back then as compared

• 35:49Speaker 02

  to the world we live in now, because we have this sense that the entire world is like uniquely hostile to dissent. You know, everyone's constantly talking about cancel culture. I myself am talking about this kind of stuff. You know, there's all this sort of pressure from the establishment to silence the voices of dissent. They're using social media platforms to do this. I believe that all of this is true. But culturally, actually, things are much more open to dissent now than they were 17 years ago. I just didn't, I didn't realize that. The culture has changed in a huge way. And the Tom Cruises of the world are now completely normalized. There are any number of them. This is sort of that. This is sort

• 36:34Speaker 02

  of the legacy of Tom Cruise.

• 36:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I've seen, I've seen Brett Weinstein and a couple of other folks kind of talk in certain situations with like, look, a lot of the scientific studies or the consensus view, and maybe even like the virtue signaling that comes out of some of those communities. A lot of times it's based on like, hey, we ran some studies and we don't know what the answer is. Like, it must be this other thing. It must be a chemical imbalance in the brain. Yes, we don't have evidence, but like, we've tried all these other things. Like, what else could it be?

• 37:03Speaker 02

  But also, just so the drugs do seem to work. I don't want to say that the drugs don't work, right? Like, it does seem for many people, the drugs do help.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  The drugs are a chemical and so you must be missing some chemical or something, right? It's like, yeah, you just.

• 37:18Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a process of elimination without the actual confirmation of a, of a scientific study that proves, yes, this is true.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  I think we also just have this really wrong belief that we know everything. We even know most things. The idea that you go into the doctor and the doctor's just gonna know what's wrong with you, you internalize that as a little kid is like, that's the way the world works. We know most things. We have medicine and you take a pill and then your bad thing goes away. And, I mean, as I've gotten older, I don't know about you, but like, I've been to the doctor a couple of times where they don't know what's wrong with me. It's not a huge thing, but it's like, this is disorienting. What do you mean, you don't know? And then I even had one case where, I mean, we tried a few different drugs and like, nothing really worked and multiple tests, multiple doctors and, you know, I'm finding out, this

• 38:02Speaker 02

  was years ago, but that was a, a really shocking moment for me. It, it was like, yeah, again, I, rationally, I understand that these people are not gods and there are lots of things that they don't know and they're not perfect and there are lots of things that we as a people don't know, but emotionally, I think I'm still carrying that sort of childhood sense of, of like, these are the people in charge and they know stuff and they're the good ones and we have to listen to them. Like, that's still in my gut and it's hard to shake. And you have to shake it because it's not true. Like, there are all sorts of things that we don't know. I would say we don't know most things. And, I mean, I was at the doctor a couple of years ago where he was trying to figure out what I had.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  I suggested something and he was like, hmm, I've never actually, I've never seen that before, so I'm gonna do some research and get back to you. And I'm like, do you mean like, like you're gonna Google it? And he said, yes. I was like, what? That's crazy. Why am I here? It was, it was just insane to me. But that's, you know, that's most experts.

• 39:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, my brother is a doctor and so I've seen him and kind of his classmates and everything over the years. I go through the process and uh, my brother's obviously incredibly intelligent. And I always ask him, it's like a gut check on like the healthcare system, like hey, evaluate like people you come in contact with. And like the hospitals or the doctors or whatever. And he's like, well, it's like everything, you know, like there's some incredibly intelligent. Like I'd trust them with my life. There's other people, you couldn't pay me to go see them, right? And so like you get the dispersion and I think this is where you end up, uh, even if you look like here in Miami, like, um, there's certain healthcare facilities that people are like, this is amazing, right? Like everyone should go here. And there's other ones where literally it's like, oh, everyone that goes there dies.

• 39:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, when you think about it, you're like, holy shit, but that's not unique to any geography. Like if you go to, especially in small towns.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:01Anthony Pompliano?

  If you go, like people are just, they don't have confidence, right? And it's because of these experiences where they're talking to a doctor and doctor doesn't know the answer. Or they believe that something, uh, there was medical treatment and, uh, there was wrong decisions made. And there was a bad outcome, whether it's, you know, unfortunately death or, you know, something less severe. But you start realizing you're like, nobody, it's not that nobody knows nothing. It's just that like the level of expertise that we assign in many different fields is nowhere near what in our minds we hope it is.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think the big difference between today and 20 years ago is now people are just logging on to the internet and disproving things that the experts are telling them. Uh, and I think what you're saying is right. There are people who are just very smart and very competent and probably should be in charge. Great. Love it. Would love for them to actually be in charge. The problem is that we're a huge country and we need a lot of doctors and we need a lot of, uh, government officials. And we need a lot of, uh, you know, people working in business or what, I mean, every, every sort of aspect of the society, you know, you need a lot of people. Um, most people are not that good. And so you're going to have a lot of experiences with people who, who suck. And every time you do, and then you go and you prove that they're wrong yourself.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  It chips away at this idea that there are people in charge and that they are good. And that makes you feel sort of ungrounded, like untethered to the world. Like you feel nervous, like you're living in a world of chaos. That is, I think it's a very internet kind of phenomena.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  There was this AP article that came out, dark plots, it was, what was it? It was like, it was just like more Americans are believing in conspiracy theories, dark plots, and secret explanations. And they go into this very sort of breathless warning about what's going on. And they say, you know, like, more than ever, Americans are turning away from scientific experts and government officials and the media. And, and basically, they're turning to the internet to talk to these like crackpot, crazy Alex Jones types of people. Well, in the first place, like Alex Jones has been wrong about stuff, but he's also been right about some stuff. And eventually, America's gonna have to deal with that. In the second, what I was more interested in was this concept they can't

• 42:14Speaker 02

  let go of, which is that they are in some way deserving of authority, after years of proving that they are not. That, that is over. The world in which we all just blindly follow along with the hegemony, the sort of like hegemonic media powers, that's just, it's gone, the ship has sailed. What's gonna happen increasingly is people are gonna be interested in looking for single individuals who they trust to help them make sense of the chaos. And this is the success of Joe Rogan. This is like, really what he does,

• 42:53Speaker 02

  is he's fun, he, people connect with him personally. And then he's sort of on air, fact checking things and, and, and sort of navigating complicated topics that are interesting with a guest. And he's sort of like, getting to the bottom of stuff, which is how we all feel. It's every scary thing that happens in the world that actually affects our lives. So COVID was a great example of this, where you have to get to the bottom of it. And you can't trust the people who are telling you shit, because you keep catching them in lies. So where do you go? And you go to the internet, and you start Googling around, and you find some crazy person who's telling you it's like a microchip of the vaccines a microchip by Bill Gates or whatever. And then you talk, you see someone who's maybe like, okay, it's probably not a microchip, but here's what the studies that I've read,

• 43:38Speaker 02

  and here's what I think. And, I mean, That's the future. We're gonna be finding for better or worse. I'm not saying this is better. This is just, this is the world that we're heading towards.

• 43:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm writing a piece right now. I'm gonna publish it before this comes out, I'm pretty sure, called "Digital Osmosis Theory." And the entire idea is that in the analog world, we trusted institutions and experts. And when we moved online, there was literally osmosis. Like, we went from high density of where we perceived knowledge and kind of value, and it has migrated and transitioned to now this decentralized internet of information, where if you have a topic, whether it's COVID or anything else, and you ask the average American, "Do you trust the institution, or do you trust what you can find on the internet?" More and more people are picking the internet over the institution.

• 44:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And some of it is because, over time, they've lost faith or trust because they've seen the mistakes. But also, the amount of value and quality on the internet has skyrocketed. Because now, all of a sudden, I don't know, during COVID, like, there are a lot of people on there. I was like, "Oh, you're the head of, you know, viral studies at whatever university?" Like, I like the fact that I can read what you think, right? Rather than have somebody else try to just publish it in the New York Times.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  All of the answers that we actually, that people, that we have, like, every true thing that exists, that is known and exists, is online. The problem is just navigating all of that information. There's too much of it. We have an overwhelming amount of information that you'll never be able to navigate, and most of it is just crazy. Like, made up stuff and just political. Everyone, there's propaganda everywhere. Everyone does it, I think, without even realizing it. People sort of spin things and frame things in certain ways that end up being misleading. So the problem is search, and... I don't, there's no technological tool right now to help us with this.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  And so people are just gonna fall back on what they've done for thousands of years, which is they ask the person who seems to like care the most about the news, what's going on? That's like always what it is. Even in elections, this has always been the case in our lives. There's like one person or two in a friend group that are actually paying attention. And come election time, everyone's like, yo, so uh, who are you voting for? What's going on? What like, what should I care about? I get this all the time. Like in San Francisco-

• 46:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you that friend?

• 46:09Speaker 02

  For local politics, I am that friend. People come to me and it's, I'm like, yeah, here's everything that I think. But here's what you should read also. Like, I mean, here's where the people are talking about it. Here's where these dramas are happening. But people don't, they don't pay attention. I don't blame them. It's a nightmare way to live, being so like super plugged in.

• 46:28Anthony Pompliano?

  When we were kids and growing up, there's a lot of like scary things online or whatever. You would like find a headline somewhere. You'd be like, wow, that's kind of crazy, whatever. Now I don't think that we're really that shocked by the headlines because it's kind of, we've seen so many shocking headlines like, you know, Trump tweeted at the North Korean government essentially and was like literally like little rocket man.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And like, again, going back to like this, like almost you can't believe it's real, but here we are. But now what I find the scariest or like the most shocking is not the headlines. It's like when you go read the source material. Because one of two things happens. Either you read the source material and you're like, whoa, this is a ridiculously big deal. Like, I can't believe they said, you know, A, B, C, whatever. Or it's, you read the source material and you look back at the headline and you're like-

• 47:16Speaker 02

  It's mostly that.

• 47:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, like, how did this headline come out of this piece of source material?

• 47:19Speaker 02

  It's mostly like a weird study of 10, if it's a medical thing, it's like, you know, 60 people were studied and it's not conclusive. And the headline's like, you know, diabetes is caused by rare fungus found on french fries from McDonald's or something insane. And it's like, it's not accurate. Is accurate, it's like just accurate enough to not be sued in America, which in a, which is a country where it is like famously difficult to be sued for saying stupid shit. Like that's, that's the kind- Media dynamic.

• 47:49Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a thing in the in the Bitcoin community. There's a study that happened in Nigeria. It's self reported and they surveyed, I think it's like a thousand to 4,000 Nigerians. And they asked them, how many of you have used or hold Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies? And the claim of the study is 32% of Nigerians use crypto. And so like, doesn't take that long to quickly figure out, okay, there's like 200 plus million people in Nigeria.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:17Anthony Pompliano?

  It's growing at a pace where by 2050, there'll be more Nigerians than Americans. And so that's like a big number. You don't even have to be a mathematician, right? You just know tens of millions of people. And then you look and you're like, but the estimate is that there's like 150 million people globally that use the technologies. And you're like, so a third of all the people are Nigerian? Are Nigerian? Like, something seems off and I'm going to go with the sampling of a thousand to 4,000 people. Has like the the error here. And so like, by the way, like directionally is probably correct, right? So you can say like, okay, there's high internet penetration, mobile phone penetration, like they have a failing currency. Like, yes, it probably does have a higher than normal penetration and use of the technology. I wouldn't hang my hat on the 32% being like the number.

• 48:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And it feels like if that's happening in a study that frankly, it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of like your health, my health, the way we live our lives, whatever, like what's happening in like the medical environment? What's happening in these other areas?

• 49:10Speaker 02

  I think so. This what process that you're going through right here? I mean, this is anytime that you want to understand something, this is the way that you do it. And it's usually like you talk to a friend about it, you read the headline, you dig in a little bit. My friend and colleague, Aaron Gleason at Founder Fund, she runs PR. Like, we always are talking about stories together. And it's like, back in the day, there were the diversity studies and it was it was stuff like that had to do with disparity in in gender pay and things like this. And and so the article would would come out with some like really wild headline about women making like like 30% less than men or something. And you'd be like, wait, like, what what actually is happening here?

• 49:49Speaker 02

  And that's when we both got in the habit of really, this was like back in 2017, when I think Me Too was happening.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  Just clicking into every single study, like reading exactly what people were talking about, but that that process is increasingly normalized across across the culture. It's like you have two options, either be a detective or just don't know what's going on. And I think a lot of people are fine. Most people are fine, just not know it's not knowing what's going on, but they do want to know someone who's a detective and they want to be able to dip in or do they want to be able to check in with that person and be like, hey, did you see this crazy headline? That can't be real. Is that real? And then that detective puts on their little detective hat and answers the questions for them.

• 50:37Anthony Pompliano?

  But I think like, so there are some topics for sure, right? San Francisco politics, perfect example, like it's a thing that people in San Francisco really care about. Maybe there's some other folks who are like, you see San Francisco as like the city on the hill for woke politics and like, does this experiment work or not or whatever. And so like, there's some group of people who care, but like in the grand scheme of the seven plus billion people in the world, like, nobody really cares. Right? So you, from a time investment standpoint, you do want to have that friend. Right? But then there's like, what I'll call the normalization of like the conspiracy theories, right? That's now entering the mainstream conversation. And so let's use, you know, the administration, the White House recently came out and was like, a

• 51:17Anthony Pompliano?

  recession is not two quarters of negative GDP growth. Yeah. And you're like, okay, I don't think that's right, but let me go to the internet, right? And kind of you start the detective process. And what you find is like, there was, the first question I had was like, okay, cool. What is the definition? Yeah. And then the answer was basically like, oh, there's like this organization, the National Bureau of Economic Research. You're like, sounds made up, but okay. And they're like, and they just tell us when there's a recession. And you're like, well, what's their criteria? Right? And then it's like, well, we look at a confluence of factors and like, lists like 20 different things. And they're like, it's vibes. Yeah. And then we just like, we'll tell you when there's a recession. And you're like, okay, so like, basically, the definition of a recession

• 51:58Anthony Pompliano?

  is no longer two consecutive negative GDP quarters. It's now like, when these people say it's a recession, it's a recession. Okay. Who works there? Right? Like, you start like going down and you like, end up in a real bad place very quickly. And like, the trust in institutions like falls off a cliff. But you're like, all right, fine, whatever. Whether it's labeled a recession or not, at the end of the day, like, small businesses, big businesses, investors, consumers, whatever, they're gonna, like, act how they psychologically feel the economy is, it's a kind of vibes, right? But then they go on national television and they're like, not only is it not a recession, but like, it's never been a recession, right? And like, they like, double and triple and quadruple down.

• 52:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, to some journalist's credit, like, some people are like, "Uh, I have a question." Right? And they ask. Other journalists are just like, "Oh, we're actually just PR, like, we're just gonna regurgitate the state talking points," whatever. But then, you get on Twitter. And Twitter is, uh, the Super Bowl of internet detectives.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it was war. It's information, the whole culture is information war, but Twitter is, Twitter's the arena.

• 53:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, the coliseum.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's where the combat takes place.

• 53:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, of course, you get in and like, you kind of log in and you're just like, "I'm not gonna type in recession in the search bar. Not gonna do it. Not gonna do it. Five minutes later, I'm definitely not gonna do it. Ten minutes later, fuck it." And you type it in and you go, and the very first thing I see, just like, going absolute mega-viral, is like, 38 Wikipedia entry updates to the recession page, and now it's locked.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And you're like, that could be a whole bunch of different things that are going on there, but like, that's in the last two days since these talking points came out.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, it's war. I mean, Wikipedia is a battleground, just like the dictionary is a battleground.

• 53:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain that.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  I mean, you literally, you have the dictionary literally changing the definitions for words in the middle of hotly debated, uh, sort of concepts in the, in the country. So, famously, Amy Comin Barrett, um, in her court hearing, her congressional hearing before she was nominated, or before she was, uh, put on the court, back when she was nominated, uh, she, she used the phrase "sexual preference." And immediately, a journalist, uh, for, I think, Huffington Post, I forget where he works, I always see his face floating around the internet, um, he's like, "This is, you know, outrageous. This is, uh, a huge insult. It's not a preference. It's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is outdated, offensive language."

• 54:31Speaker 02

  I'm gay and I did not know it was offensive. I was like, this is news to me. I've never heard that before. I've definitely heard people use the phrase sexual preference up to, you know, like the last week, probably like, I mean, less than maybe I used to, but it's not, it's not, we're not dropping, you know, a slur here. This is like a phrase that is said. Huge debate because one of the congressmen then brings this into the hearing and is like, you just said something extremely offensive. Apologize, basically. Barrett does.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  And then Merriam-Webster's dictionary changes the definition of sexual preference and includes, now it says, you know, this is an offensive piece of, this is now, it's now an offensive thing to say. So any conversation about, you know, did she or did she not say something offensive? It just, it's like, well, let's, let's look at the dictionary. What does the dictionary have to say? And the dictionary says, well, the dictionary says that it votes for Democrats, obviously. That's, I mean, I don't like, and this is, I wrote about this at the time. I was like, I don't like knowing what political party my dictionary votes for. And that is how Wikipedia is as well. It's like, these are battlegrounds now for concepts, but there are lots of words and definitions that have changed over the last two years.

• 55:59Speaker 02

  It's like sexual preference, preference, female, vaccine, anti-vaxxer. Anti-vaxxer was a crazy one because anti, the definition of anti-vaxxer changed from someone who doesn't take vaccines, who thinks all vaccines are bad, whatever, to someone who doesn't want a vaccine mandate was included in anti-vaxxer. Suddenly, the definition changed in such a way as a, as a thing that I thought was stupid my whole life, I suddenly was. I was suddenly the definition of an anti-vaxxer.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  And that's the landscape, that's the terrain is the place where we go for source material, if it's, if it's, I mean, it doesn't matter who controls it, if it's controlled by an organization, or if it's, or if it's crowdsourced, all of it is part of, of an information war. We don't have analog encyclopedias anymore. We don't have analog dictionaries. There's no, there's no like trusted, unchanging source that we can go to. People say Bitcoin fixes this. I'm waiting for the solution. I would love to see it. Haven't seen it yet. Right now, we're living in a world of malleable information that is manipulated for obvious political intent, like constantly, every day. It's just, it's literally an information war. And the ground is sort of shifting underneath our feet.

• 57:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I tweeted something to the effect of like, you should be fearful when they try to nationalize the dictionary. And like, I tweet a lot of things. That was like a off the dome, just, you know, type it, send it, whatever. I've probably haven't gotten more text messages about a tweet than that one in a long time. And I was just like, why do y'all care so, like, duh, right? Like, of course. And it was people being like, they're not nationalizing the dictionary. It wasn't people being like, okay, yes, I agree. Like, we should be fearful of that. It was immediately jumping to the like, are they doing it or not? And I was like, you guys already lost. Like, if we're already having the debate, or like, are they doing it or not, is basically proving the point.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  I mean, there's no, what, my question is, what's the difference? I mean, the dictionary already works for the state. It already works for the establishment. This is, you have a few people who agree with the political consensus, and they're in charge of the dictionaries. That's just what it is. And they're going to change online forever. I mean, I have at home, hardbound, like a hard copy dictionary and encyclopedia. They don't make them anymore. So it's old. It's like, it's like 2000. And I bought it on, I mean, I bought it a few years ago. I bought it during the Amy Coney Barrett thing. Like, I, that shook me. I was like, no, no, sir. I need an encyclopedia. And it's, I like that it's dated pre-social media penetration. It's like, it's like in The Matrix.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  Where they just choose 1999 is the year that like that was the last or the late 90s. They were like, that's, that's when everything went downhill after that. It got super technological and everything fell apart. And so they just simulate that world forever. I'm now living in that it's like a, an information simulation of just before the chaos began. I mean, the truth is I still get most of my information online. But I've got the encyclopedia there if I'm really confused and you can look back and just see how things are changing.

• 59:09Anthony Pompliano?

  It's basically a snapshot of how people used words and definitions. And then you can see how far we stray from it.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  Sure. And language changes, of course. It, it always changes. It has always changed, especially the English language is an especially malleable language. It incorporates a lot.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  What's different is the speed at which things are changing because it's now happening just in real time on a whim, based on a court hearing that a bunch of Democrats want to use as a weapon. And that's fucked up and it's going to get worse.

• 59:44Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:00:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry leading equity products and protocols, all through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. They currently are listed in the U.S. under the DEFTF stock ticker and on the Canadian Neo Exchange under DEFI. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial Information, visit their website at valour.com. That's V A L O U R dot com. Let's talk about this idea of like, I'm offended, right? So you could have an entire group of people that could be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people. And it seems like now we live in a society where if one person in that group says that they're offended by something,

• 1:01:12Anthony Pompliano?

  it becomes truth. Like, if one person says sexual preference is offensive, everyone else is just like, okay.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  One Guardian writer just said that the word spaz was offensive and Beyonce had to change her song. That's crazy to me. I looked at her profile. She's this, she's a disabled writer on disability and she writes about disabilities. And she had like a couple thousand followers and I was like, today, this woman is more powerful than Beyonce. Because she was offended. Yeah, it's wild. But also, all Beyonce had to say was, I'm not changing the song, bitch. And everyone would have been fine with it. So, I mean, at the end of the day, it's like, it's, it's, it's in your hands. Like, like, do the offended people really have this much power? Or are most people just cowards?

• 1:02:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think the playbook when somebody goes after, like the cancel culture, we'll, we'll use that as a generalized term. When cancel culture comes for somebody, the playbook now has been pioneered, whether it was by the Trumps of the world, people on social media. It's just, no. Just like literally like just stand your ground, say no, and they go away?

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it certainly is. Like I was saying earlier, I think, I think it's like anyone who's,

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  it becomes a, it becomes hard when people who are more inclined to being offended are in your sort of, they're part of your fanbase.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  And that's not a problem that I have. And so I don't, and so I don't worry about it. But if you are Ocasio-Cortez, you should worry about it. You know, if you're, if you're an entertainer

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  or a singer with a ton of young people on TikTok who are obsessed with the, the language of offense, then it's going to be a more challenging equation for you to, to figure out. I do think that.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  Well, listen, culture is changed. And this is something that I was writing about, you know, this last piece, I was writing about this a little bit, the sort of shocking realization that we, there's more room now than there's ever been for dissent. There are whole funding apparatuses for it, like you can make a living off of it. I think culture is on the side of people pushing back against this stuff. The problem is wokeness controls everything. I mean, it is infected, I wouldn't say controls, but it has infected every edifice of power in the country, you know, from the military to your local office of, you know, small business,

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  whatever the fuck, to the largest tech companies in the world. Well, at least in the largest American tech companies in the world, Chinese tech companies are not woke. I always wondered this, I always wonder, I always used to wonder, we used to have all these, we still have all these diversity reports that the tech press does, I'm like, where's, why aren't we doing these for the giant Chinese tech companies? Why is no one, why is no one interested in that? It's always, it's always just ours.

• 1:04:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Or why are people not talking about how, according to the studies I've seen, the media companies are less diverse than the tech companies?

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, it's like, no one cares about that one as much. I mean, people talk about it every now and then, but it doesn't land. It's like, it's tech that they're coming for.

• 1:04:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that because money and power have like, kind of flowed to these tech companies? And it's the idea of like, they used to go after Wall Street very aggressively because that's where money and power is flowing, now it's tech, it'll be something else in the future?

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  Well, I don't think they actually believe in any of these concepts or care about them. I think that they just don't like business. These are, these are mostly writers, they're not making much money, they are suspicious of power, which I think is a good thing, and suspicious of like capitalism, which I think is a bad thing. And their natural enemy is business, their natural enemies are the people they cover. They do clock us, I think correctly, they clock the tech industry correctly as very powerful and deserving of criticism, I agree with that. I think that what they're critiquing is not what I'm critiquing, they're critiquing, I'm critiquing abuses of power, in my opinion, specifically on social media and things like this, the censorship stuff.

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  I think when you control the entire Town square, you you have, I think you actually do have a responsibility to appear American values, things like some semblance of openness and free speech. They're not critiquing stuff like that, they don't care about that, they don't they don't care about all the control that a censor would naturally have. They're critiquing like the concept of these things. They don't believe in, that's their problem, it's like business conceptually. So that's where we part ways. But back to wokeness, I mean, in terms of like where, what's been been infected and where the culture is, all of these things have been been infected to some degree, but

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  but the actual culture is just, for me, the counterculture eventually becomes culture. So what is the, where's the counterculture and the counterculture on the left and right? You know, Bernie bros are just as anti-woke as as most, you know, people on the right at this point. It's all pushing back against the cultural authoritarianism. And that, to me, is a really good sign. It's like, those are where the strongest winds are, and so that's where content's going to be created, and that's going to drive, I think, a lot of this back. I don't know how much damage has been done at this point, like, what is irreversible, what's not, but it does just feel like the culture shifted completely.

• 1:06:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Is this why Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both have started to be much more vocal online about?

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:07:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Politics and they're kind of getting ahead of what is perceived to be some big red wave in the midterm elections and and culture is shifting and so they're going to be out in front of that to benefit?

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  Five years ago, there was no cancel culture discourse, right? It was a few people would do something, there'd be some little bit of pushback. The reason there was no discourse was because it actually had power, like the wokeness was at its, I think, zenith in 2017. You had a quick flashback that was more powerful than ever in the summer of 2020. But but for the most part, things had changed at that point. The reason you have so many people talking about this stuff now is because you actually can, because America is on that side. Most, the majority of people, regardless of politics, don't like

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  Hall monitors.

• 1:07:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  They don't like to be told what to say, how to think. They don't, they, they can feel language changing rapidly. They don't like being punished for not using the right words. They don't like people losing their jobs forever for a tweet like they, they. It's, people don't like this shit. And, uh, and yeah, it's, it's definitely, I think, a lot. It's still dangerous, honestly. I mean, you, people are losing their jobs still, um, especially again, if you're in, in, in entertainment or you work at a giant tech company is actually still dangerous to say, to speak your mind. But I, I think that, that has to change. I think it's, I think that that has to change.

• 1:08:23Anthony Pompliano?

  What about like the use of tactics? So one of the most fascinating things, uh, that I've seen play out over the last, I don't know, a couple of months is, uh, on one side, uh, there was a gentleman who was arrested. Now, I'll probably get the details wrong, but, but my understanding of it was a gentleman showed up, uh, or was on the way to a Supreme Court justice's house with, I believe, a gun.

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:08:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And from whatever, everything I read, it was like, he was going to go try to assassinate him.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think he, he might've turned himself in.

• 1:08:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And like called the cops and it was like.

• 1:08:55Speaker 02

  It was crazy.

• 1:08:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, I'm here. I don't know how I got here, you know? There, there was something that happened, but like man, gun, Supreme Court justice, not a good situation.

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And then on the other side, uh, there's this guy from Texas. I, I think he's a comedian or maybe he's just got like some internet show. He's gone viral a million times because he goes to like the local city council and he sings and he dances. He acts like, you know, an idiot.

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  I've seen one of those viral videos.

• 1:09:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And he's basically saying like, this is ridiculous. You're going to give me two minutes. Like, I'm going to make a, a big deal about it. But he went to Washington DC and he was on the steps of one of the buildings. AOC is walking in and, uh, he basically was yelling at her and commenting on, I think, her clothes or her, her butt or, or whatever it was, right?

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  He said, I think he said, I love that big Latina ass or something.

• 1:09:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Whatever he said, right? And so like in those two situations, like I think you, I, and like 99% of people would be like, hey, in a normal society for a private citizen, like harassing them in any form or fashion is just like fucked up, right? Like just leave people alone.

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Go about your life, do whatever. Now, when it comes to public figures, right? There's this whole idea of like, hey, we should hold people in power accountable. We should be suspicious of things. And there's probably like. What you're allowed to do, and then there's like a tasteful way of doing things. And sometimes those things overlap and sometimes like they don't.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  I think threats of violence, jail, go directly to jail. Do not collect $200. You're going to prison, you're staying there for as long as possible. Like I have no tolerance for that shit. Saying mean things to people in power, specifically elected power. I have no sympathy for people who are like, oh my God, I'm so sad. They said this mean thing. You're a congresswoman and you're like the most powerful one. There's no insults, too horrific. And I hate that shit. It was gross, but I don't care. That's just not something that's gonna, that's gonna move.

• 1:10:53Anthony Pompliano?

  So like if we kind of go through this like meandering river thought process, right? Is, so you have those two, which I think most people would generally agree that like, hey, words versus like threats of violence are different and whatever. Then you get like, I saw online, there was a tweet where somebody had taken AOC being like, the whole point of protesting is make people uncomfortable.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so like.

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's a hypocrite.

• 1:11:17Anthony Pompliano?

  One guy sitting there with his video camera like yelling things, which by the way, like, I wouldn't say that, right? Like, I don't think 99% of people would have gone there and done that or said that. But like, he did, okay. There's a little like hypocritical component. But then it was like the crown jewel, which I saw you tweeting about. Was there was a protest and a couple of congresswomen.

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  Or fake handcuffs?

• 1:11:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. Where I saw a headline that said they got arrested.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Then I saw the video and I was like, that doesn't look like an arrest.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  No, they escorted her to her press conference on a grassy little patch of land where they were given water and they talked to reporters. That's what happened. They were not marandized, there were no fingerprints. Their mugshot was her and the squad colleagues with their fists up, smiling. Like that was the mugshot. It was insane. And then she tried to say that she wasn't faking her handcuffs. No, ludicrous, a ludicrous, obvious lie. Her hands were behind her. They were like on top of each other. She did one little fist thing, which, you know, the left is saying, well, clearly she wasn't faking her handcuffs because she did, she put her fist up at one point. It's like, yeah, because she's fucking, she's an idiot. That's why, because she could, she got too swept up in the moment and put her fist up

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  and blew the whole thing. But the point was for her to be photographed with her hands behind her back and a cop next to her. So it looked like she was handcuffed. So that headline with that picture would go viral. And it did for a minute, but the internet sleuthing is a powerful thing. And the story really did become, I mean, I'm not going to sit here and say that the media won that one. The story definitely became this annoying woman faked her handcuffs. I don't think the New York Times even wrote about the arrest. Maybe they did after, but that day I checked and they didn't touch it. And I think that that's a pretty good indicator of when someone is sort of embarrassing the establishment. And she in that moment was certainly an embarrassment.

• 1:13:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Because of thought process would be if a politician was actually arrested, it would be out on the wires, headlines.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  It's a huge story if Ocasio was actually arrested and sent to fucking jail for being at a protest on abortion. It's a huge deal. It didn't happen. I mean, there's this, we can quibble endlessly about the definition of arrest, but it's not that. That's not what happened there.

• 1:13:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. When you see that, does it beg the question of like, does the truth matter? Or is actually the most important part in that, unfortunately, just the photo and the headline? And like, you score a point and everyone moves on?

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  You know, the idealist in me wants to say that the truth matters. But this is something I struggle with a lot myself. I believe that you should tell the truth. I think that. What carries the message forward is the story. So you want to make sure that the information you're conveying is is accurate, but you still have to tell a compelling story. And that's something that Ocasio-Cortez is very good at is telling a compelling story online. Trump was really good at this. And it's like, the question almost doesn't matter because we're in the middle of an information war. And the people who are going to win are the people who have the most compelling story. So I think maybe it does matter, but it doesn't matter more than the story you're telling. You have to have both.

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  I think that's, that's the important thing that you have to reach for. And if you don't have a compelling story, it doesn't matter that you're right, because you're just gonna lose.

• 1:14:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you look at politicians, mainstream media, let's call kind of those in positions of power, influence, whatever, there seems to be blackouts that happen on stories. There's like, what I'll consider less severe, but still important to call out, things like Andrew Yang, when he was running for president, we saw the mainstream media essentially just like, we don't even know who that guy is. At one point, they were putting pictures of other people, like, it's just all crazy stuff. Then we got the COVID and we saw like the lab leak stuff. And I remember the day that Zero Hedge got kicked off Twitter.

• 1:15:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And I turned to somebody and I was like, odds just went up, that's true.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  It's like, literally that second. The lab leak was, that's the craziest one. Okay, why? It's the reason that we always go, it's that and the Hunter Biden laptop. There, there's such insane things that we can't let them go. And then sort of you always see people in the press like, yeah, okay, you have your one example. Can you please let it go? I can't let it go because it's, it's an insane thing that happened. You have, you have a virus coursing the planet, a coronavirus. And we are like, hey, what's up with that fucking coronavirus factory in Wuhan? Do we think that perhaps it came from there? And you're banned. It's like, that's, I'm not saying it definitely happened.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  I'm saying that is a very reasonable question to ask. It's very reasonable to say like, what's up with that place down the block from where you're saying the infection happened, where all the rare coronaviruses are being studied? Can we maybe look into that? And the fact that we couldn't, the fact that there were actually consequences for looking into that for about a year. No one is going to forget that. Anybody who was concerned about that lab,

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  only to a year later be told that, yeah, you know, it's probably, you're probably right. After going through an entire year of censorship, it's like you can't ever, you can't ever look at the media the same way again. And that was a really important one because it was clearly, it was clearly being weaponized. You have, and it's against our, against our national interests. You have a powerful foreign adversary did something potentially, like, potentially, it was a potentially existential threat to the planet.

• 1:17:11Anthony Pompliano?

  If intentional could be considered.

• 1:17:13Speaker 02

  Even if it wasn't intentional.

• 1:17:15Anthony Pompliano?

  That's what I'm saying. But if it was, it would be very egregious and like, absolutely imperative that we knew exactly what happened and responded.

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  To this day, we need to know if a horrifying hell virus can be escaped from that lab, because if it can, we need to shut it down. It's like, yeah, there should be consequences for that. And it's insane that we can't have that conversation. And now we really can't. I mean, it's been years of who knows. There's no getting to the bottom. We'll never know the answer at this point.

• 1:17:42Anthony Pompliano?

  It was a bat.

• 1:17:43Speaker 02

  But, right. It was some guy eating a bat, which we were supposed to believe was somehow less racist than the idea that the, like, evil prison state country had some evil Chernobyl-like event that led to a catastrophe. Like, yeah, like, that's obviously, that's obviously what happened. Like, that's just obviously what happened.

• 1:18:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And I actually think, right, and this is like the craziest part to me, let's accept that if that is what happened, that would be a way better explanation for almost everyone involved. Right? Like, not intentional. It wasn't something that we don't understand.

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, but was it not intentional?

• 1:18:23Anthony Pompliano?

  That that is a very, look, it's a very important question because again, it goes back to, I mean, there's things that the second and third order effects of that entire situation, including at the time, the President of the United States shutting down flights from certain geographic regions.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  It led to the end of Donald Trump.

• 1:18:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Called racist.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  And I mean, that's really what that COVID is why Trump lost the last election. And Trump was the only person who's been hard on China for, I mean, since the seventies, right? Since before Nixon went to China, there hasn't been someone harder on China than than Trump, just in terms of economics. And that's the Chinese, that's a preferred Chinese vertical of war is it's like, it's like the economy and the market and then like propaganda. This is how, this is how we're in conflict with China. They wanted him out. I'm not saying I have no evidence. I have no evidence. It seems like it came from the lab and it seems a little suspicious that this worked out so well for the nation of China.

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  There have been zero consequences and and we weren't allowed to talk about it because the media also, our media that hated Trump also knew that COVID was disadvantageous to Trump. So if he could find, if he could be like freely say, hey, it seems like it came from this country, America, we would have been outraged. That would have been the story. It would have been a much more important story than just Trump's clownish incompetence handling a pandemic that then nobody else handled.

• 1:19:54Anthony Pompliano?

  If you look at past historical events, nothing unites a country more than war. And there have been arguments that some people have even gone to war to unite the country for political gain and all this type of stuff. If the media had treated that situation 180 degrees difference, there's a very strong argument that the country would have been heavily united on this front of we have to address the situation. There's leadership and actually would have won by an absolute landslide.

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. How do you have a serious conversation about the problematic use of the word spaz when an aggressive nuclear superpower is trying to destroy your entire population? It's impossible. Like all this divisive shit is just impossible in a, in a, in a world like that. I think war is bad and we want to stay out of it. And increasingly, we want to.

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  I mean, I think probably best case scenario after World War II is America would have just been in charge of everything, but we didn't do that. We tried to sort of police the seas and do this free trade thing. We allowed power to grow in places like China and Russia. Now increasingly, we're in a multipolar, nuclear world, and sort of geography's thawing again, history's beginning again, and we're gonna have to, I think, retreat a little bit and just fortify our borders and bring manufacturing home, things like this. That's gonna take time.

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  But also, I mean,

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  like this Taiwan thing, I got in a lot of trouble among right-wing people.

• 1:21:40Anthony Pompliano?

  What did you say?

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  So among the populist right right now, it's like they're America first. That's their whole thing. If something is not in America's interest, then we shouldn't be doing it. And I agree. That's, I 100% agree. That's my politics. I, it's, we should, this country should come first. It's, I don't want a single politician in Washington who doesn't think that America should come first. That's their job.

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  But when it comes to things like Taiwan, this is, this is then used as a reason to not be involved in the sort of China-Taiwan conflict at all. And that's ridiculous because what happens to Taiwan affects America. We need semiconductors. Like, we, without, we will have years of no electron, no new electronics, potentially. That is the world that we're, we're walking towards without a free Taiwan. And that is just a product of, that's, that's what happens after, you know, decades of globalism, where we've exported all of our manufacturing and left ourselves completely vulnerable. Things that I write about all the time. Our resource insecurity, our manufacturing insecurity. We do need these industries at home, not because it's like, just because it's, oh, bring the jobs home. It's not, it's

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  not, it's just, it's also, it's a huge national security issue to be so resource insecure. But also, there's, there's no short-term way to snap your fingers and start processing rare earth metals across the country. It doesn't work that way. It takes time to build this stuff up. And until it does, we are at the mercy of these global supply chains, which we kind of have to protect. And so I think it's a balance. I think it's like, you, yeah, you don't, you're not going abroad because it's like, oh, it just makes me sad that the Taiwanese are gonna be invaded by China. It's like, this is- We are affected by all of this. And so we kind of have to keep things as steady as we can until we can build our strength back up.

• 1:23:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And so why'd they get mad?

• 1:23:27Speaker 02

  Why did who get mad? Oh, the right-wing people? They don't, they're just like, oh, you love war. You want to go and, you want to go and send our boys abroad to die on the shores of Taiwan for semiconductors. And it's like, first of all, I don't think that we even need to fire, I don't think we need to even send anybody over there.

• 1:23:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Send Nancy Pelosi.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. And she bought it, fixed the problem. Look at that. Look at that. Maverick. Flying over there.

• 1:23:50Anthony Pompliano?

  You saw the meme?

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  Oh, I've seen the memes. I live in the memes.

• 1:23:53Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, yeah, it's pretty good, though, right?

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  The memes are my home.

• 1:23:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I also think it's wild that many of the Chinese state talking points I've gotten from Chinese state Twitter accounts.

• 1:24:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's like, wait a minute.

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're like, they're all there. Alex Jones isn't, but we've got literal Chinese assets telling us the news.

• 1:24:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I mean, just kind of crazy, right? Like, we don't have, you know, you take one end of the spectrum, Alex Jones, take another end of like a politician, a Donald Trump. You've got plenty of other people in various other corners of the internet, whatever, that aren't on Twitter anymore. Uh, but like, there are accounts that literally are labeled Chinese, like state affiliated media.

• 1:24:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:36Anthony Pompliano?

  You're like, okay.

• 1:24:38Speaker 02

  I wonder if the strategy there, it seems, I mean, obviously you think on the one end is like, this definitely shouldn't be on Twitter, but then is the strategy, like, if we let them post openly, then they won't create a bunch of fake accounts that are even more difficult to keep track of?

• 1:24:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I'm not advocating to take them down, right? Like, cool, I like that they label it. Like, I get it, leave them. But the argument I think I'm making is like, I mean, you would have to be so egregious, short of inciting violence.

• 1:25:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Why are they on and other people aren't?

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:25:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, it's more, it's less about like, hey, ban more people, kick more people off.

• 1:25:19Speaker 02

  Martin Shkreli was banned.

• 1:25:21Anthony Pompliano?

  More people on the platform.

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Martin Shkreli, remember?

• 1:25:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Farmer bro.

• 1:25:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Martin was banned because he went after, went after Lauren Dukie, who is no longer on the internet. We forget about. She was like, she was, she was the Taylor Lorenz before Taylor Lorenz. She was the last, like, sort of main character of the deranged left. And she worked for Teen Vogue and was on like Tucker Carlson and stuff like this.

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  Always just sort of making the craziest possible cases that were new to America. And we were like, whoa, this is like a crazy thing to say about the reduction of us to our gender or our race. And she was talking about things like systemic white supremacy back before that was a normal thing to say. Really, I mean, people forget, but white supremacy used to mean KKK like five years ago. And now it's just like, I mean, your mailman's a white supremacist. Everyone's a white supremacist. That's, that's a new thing that happened. She was a sort of pioneer in the space of deranged woke bullshit. And she got into it with Shkreli. I don't even know of her what, but he started asking her on dates. And he just was like, I think he might've even asked her to a dance or something, but it was like very innocent, but persistent.

• 1:26:34Speaker 02

  And she said this was harassment and, and he was banned from the platform for it. And I, I went back and looked at it because he got out of prison recently. And I was curious about why he had been banned because he was creating new accounts and they kept removing him. They're like, no, you're permanently banned. So I went back and I saw it and it was that. And that was just.

• 1:26:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Given hindsight bias, did it seem crazy?

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  No. Well, again, it's another sign of the fact that culture has shifted. This was, you know, in 2017 or something when he was kicked off. It was, it was, I think things are, I do think things are better right now, which is a crazy thing to say. But I think that culturally, I really believe that things are, are, are much better. He's still permanently banned, but I don't know that someone would get banned. Who knows? Watch me get banned for this. I don't even know. But I, I think in general, things are better.

• 1:27:30Anthony Pompliano?

  That haven't been said, yeah. Like, why are these Chinese assets tweeting while, you know, Alex Jones is still off the platform? When it comes to all these banning decisions, we had one incident where we had a video, we were interviewing somebody, a pseudonymous person, he's talking about Bitcoin stuff, whatever. And all of a sudden, I got like, an email, an email, and then not just like, "Hey, that video is taken down," like, the entire YouTube channel was deleted. I think I remember this, and I remember at first just being like, "Eh, give me five minutes, you know, like, turn your computer off, turn it back on, maybe it'll like, reappear." And then it like, took like, I don't know, fifteen, twenty minutes, I was like, "Holy shit, like, the channel's gone."

• 1:28:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Or just being like, at the end of the day, like, does it really matter, right? Like, in the sense of like, it's not like somebody came and like, shot me, but like- No, but it's crazy, you've built a whole world there, a whole audience, a whole thing, like, all the stuff. So luckily, I had other platforms, like Twitter, where I could go and tweet and be like, "Yo, what the fuck?" Right? And tag YouTube and like, do all the stuff and everything. And of course, if you have a big following, like, there's people who work at YouTube who follow you, who are like, DMing you, being like, "Can you give me some details? Somebody's looking into it," whatever. So like, "Thank you, that's super helpful." But then like, I don't know, six hours later, or whatever it was, like, it gets reinstated. And there was like, an email, and it was like, basically like, "It's back," right?

• 1:28:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, essentially, like, just like, "Here you go peasant, like, you can now have your toy back," right? Like, "All right, thanks, guys."

• 1:29:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And I remember I asked, I think it was an employee there, and I said, "What happened?" And the answer gave me the like vibe that it was like, one employee at the company, who had the power to do it- Was like, "Fuck this guy." Literally, right? And, uh, because normally, the way that it works is like, you get a strike, you get a second strike, right? There's like, a third strike, then you're done, like, all the stuff. So like, there's a process, which I agree with, like, they try to warn people, they try to have a dialogue, whatever, and you may disagree with some of the decisions they make, or whatever, but it's not like, you just wake up one day and bam, it's gone, short of again inciting violence, or whatever. But I was like, "Holy shit, how many people at that company have the power to like, press a button and just like, delete shit?"

• 1:29:46Anthony Pompliano?

  How many people have been erased? How many people have been erased who don't have your platform? And I think it happens all the time, or it has. I don't-

• 1:29:56Anthony Pompliano?

  It's all mistakes.

• 1:29:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:58Anthony Pompliano?

  It was accidental.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  It is when they become hugely pop, like when they become like big loud stories for sure.

• 1:30:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's messed up. At the end of the day, you don't own your audience. This is why I mean, I prefer things like Substack where or any email newsletter where you where you at least have the audience. You know, I don't, you can't even, you know, I have however many Twitter followers. I can't even, I can't even DM them all. You're right. Like, I don't, they're not, they're not actually my audience if you don't have any meaningful ability to communicate with them directly.

• 1:30:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you can't take them anywhere either.

• 1:30:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, yeah, they're just there.

• 1:30:30Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:31:12Anthony Pompliano?

  in a decentralized future. The blockchain.com community can join a short waitlist to get one for free at blockchain.com/watchlist/blogchaindomain. Free NFT domains provide all the benefits of premium unstoppable domains, including fee-free lifelong ownership. If you don't have a blockchain.com wallet, no worries, there's new free domains available to everyone. Either join the waitlist for a free blockchain.com domain or visit unstoppabledomains.com to buy your domain today, starting as low as $5. UnstoppableDomains.com Another story you mentioned earlier, the President of the United States, his son.

• 1:31:51Anthony Pompliano?

  As the memes would suggest, every time that he wants to hang out with prostitutes, do drugs, pretty much like just live his life, he puts like 17 cameras on his head. And films everything.

• 1:32:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, he loves it.

• 1:32:05Anthony Pompliano?

  He loves the camera. If this was a reality television show, it would be the number one show in America. We would be like, holy shit. Like, how did they get prostitutes on television? How did they get hard drug usage? Like, all this shit, it'd be like cops when we were all growing up. And like, you'd watch and be like, I wonder if the guy's gonna run away? Combined with like, the fucking awesomeness of the internet in one show. And like, it would be the, the, uh, the number one show in America.

• 1:32:34Anthony Pompliano?

  But it's not a show.

• 1:32:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it's real.

• 1:32:36Anthony Pompliano?

  But no one really talks about it in the mainstream media.

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  I think, yeah, I mean, I've noticed the New York Times doing, I mean, they did a piece on the Hunter Biden. They were the ones, so the Washington Post, back when the Hunter Biden laptop story, a month before the last presidential election, was, uh, put out by the New York Post. So New York Post gets this laptop, uh,

• 1:33:05Speaker 02

  from some repair guy who like handed it off to, I think, I forget, I forget like the chain of events.

• 1:33:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Somehow gets Rudy Giuliani.

• 1:33:13Speaker 02

  That it gets to Rudy Giuliani and then like the Post is writing about the contents of it. So this, this explosive thing is coming out. And these are the first, this is like, you know, in, in the sort of maybe trilogy of Hunter Biden sex tapes. This is like, this is the first one. This is the fellowship of the ring, um, fellowship of the cock ring. It's like, it's right there. That's where it begins. So, uh, the New York Post released the story and, uh, it's censored across the entire social, the social internet immediately.

• 1:33:44Anthony Pompliano?

  It did sound like a crazy enough story where you're like, that can't be real.

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  It was crazy. And what you had is you, you had a series of people in the intelligence community, not directly working for, uh, US intelligence anymore, but they have been. So they're in the intelligence community and they go to the social media people. They're like, yo, this is Russian misinformation, disinformation. This is, and it's like, what is like, is, is the laptop leaked? Like, did they, is it?

• 1:34:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Is the video not real?

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  Did they fake the video? Like, what is, what is fake exactly here? Doesn't matter, all banned.

• 1:34:18Speaker 02

  What really got crazy was actually how you couldn't even, on Messenger, you could not even DM the story to someone. You couldn't share the link to the story. Twitter as well. On Twitter was the worst one. Facebook, everything was just, the virality was slowed down. So they just slowed down the story until a third-party independent fact-checker could verify or not the claims, which of course, I mean, we've never heard back from that review ever. This is years ago and we've not heard back from the third-party review. They're still doing the work. Yeah, they're still checking it out. So this happens, it's of course, all real. The Washington Post is, at the moment, the official fact-check on the New York Post

• 1:35:01Speaker 02

  story. And the New York Times, if you look at it side-by-side, the New York Times was much more like, "We don't really know." Yeah, I mean, "We have no information that it's not real. Here's what's happening. Here's what the New York Post is saying. We have no idea." Whereas the Washington Post was like, "We don't like what this implies." Because the New York, I said, the Washington Post, the Washington Post fact-check was like, "We don't like what this implies." The headline of the New York Post, which broke the story, said it was a smoking gun of corruption. So what was actually being fact-checked was just the opinion. They didn't like, what the Washington Post didn't like was what the

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  New York Post was saying this probably meant. And so then the story was widely censored, but it was the New York Times that then kicked the ball forward a little bit later, like a year or so later, I think. They verified all of the claims. They were the ones who broke it. And everyone was like, "Oh, whoops, guess it was real." And like, "No harm, no foul, right, guys?" Kind of moving forward. And they're the ones who seemed to be inching forward with Hunter Biden corruption story still. Like, they're still very much a team, it looks like to me, that's on top of this story. And it has to do with Burisma, which is this Ukrainian energy company that Hunter was on the board of. And it's like, did he

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  use his father's influence at the time of the Barack Obama presidency to gain favor and all of this shit that they seem to be on? So people do seem to be following the story.

• 1:36:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Does anyone in the world believe that the children of the president or vice president of the United States of America does not get treated differently? Whether it is crossing the street, whether it's in business, whether it's literally standing in line to order fast food.

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  Well, also, it's like, I mean, the reason that the sex tapes and the sort of like crack saga is so important is because it's like, why would you want this guy on your board? Why are you paying this guy $500,000 a year to be on your board? He's a drug addict addicted to filming himself having sex with prostitutes. It's like, well, I don't even know what his qualificat- what are his qualifications? Well, I would love to sit down with the Burisma execs and be like, what do you like about Hunter? What are you, what are you getting from this relationship?

• 1:37:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Has anybody interviewed them yet?

• 1:37:26Speaker 02

  Uh, I have, you know what? I haven't seen that interview. I would love to, I mean, if maybe one of your, if one of your listeners can link me, I would be, I would love it.

• 1:37:33Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the, um, the, the other piece of it too, uh, is if that's all on his laptop, like, where are other things, right? Like, the internet is a place where like, you only gotta press a button to send shit to other people, other places. And so I think there is this element of like, hey, there's some crazy stuff here, right? And like, you know, do I really care that you do crack cocaine? Uh, and like, there's an argument, we should get you some help, right? Like, there's like a sad, like, humanity component?

• 1:38:06Speaker 02

  Well, the conspiracy is that, no, I don't, tell me the humanity thing. No, no, just like, if, if you're aware of somebody who's addicted to hard drugs, right? Like, there's two responses, like, that's fucked up, and then also like, hey, we should probably get that person some help. And so there is this element of like, okay, if the president of the United States' son is addicted to crack cocaine, like,

• 1:38:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Some portion of people, whether it's small or large, is like, did we get him help?

• 1:38:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:38:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, can we help the guy out?

• 1:38:35Speaker 02

  I felt bad for him during the election before I knew about the Burisma stuff.

• 1:38:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So then this is where, when you add in the context of everything else.

• 1:38:42Speaker 02

  Leave this guy alone. I don't care about, the son's not running for the president. Like, why are we talking about this? And then I learned a little more and I was like, this person's very close to power and money. And, uh, and this is, I mean, it, there's a lot of smoke in this story. It's like, I don't think there's yet any real fire, corruption fire, but there's smoke.

• 1:39:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think would be like the smoking gun?

• 1:39:04Speaker 02

  They need to know if Biden offered anything.

• 1:39:14Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like, if the president is directly involved, then all of a sudden that's like.

• 1:39:17Speaker 02

  The vice president, yeah. He was the vice president at the time, so.

• 1:39:21Anthony Pompliano?

  But if it's a step away, even if it's, I'll call it, um, a gray area, questionable.

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  I mean, it's bad already. It's already, it's already pretty bad. And I think that, uh, so the conspiracy about.

• 1:39:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Give me the most extreme conspiracy theory.

• 1:39:39Speaker 02

  Well, that the deep state has leaked the videos because they want to remove Biden from power because he's going to lose the next election. So you have to weaken him so you can primary him. You have to justify the primary. And I was like, oh yeah, we're constantly seeing him now with his, his gaffes. He's like looking dumber by the day. Is that because he is more senile than he was when he ran for the last election? Or is it because people are putting more of a, of a spotlight on it? And like, who is doing that? That's the, that's, you have the, the media and the people around the Biden administration. But then this footage is, is, is released in waves, increasingly drawing scrutiny uh, over the Hunter Biden corrupt, the Hunter Biden corruption story. And you are really in a place now where, I mean, it does seem like he's going to be, I, if I were,

• 1:40:24Speaker 02

  you know, a card carrying member of the Democratic Party, just obsessed with partisan politics. I would want him gone. I would want to, for sure, I would want him. There's no way he's going to win then. I don't see him winning the next election.

• 1:40:33Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't, I don't, as of the information we have at the moment, uh, it looks bleak. For both the midterm election and also, uh, if he was to run again. And it always goes back to me also, like. Why do any of these 70 and 80 year old people want to be the President of the United States?

• 1:40:51Speaker 02

  Why are they allowed to be the President of the United States? Like honestly, can we just have a cutoff? It should be just the age of retirement. That's the cutoff. But if we're not going to do that, then I think at least 80. I think 80 is like a fair cutoff point for all of them.

• 1:41:04Anthony Pompliano?

  It begs the question, should it be an age cutoff? Or should there be like a cognitive test? Should there be a, uh, some sort of disqualifying medical evaluation? Right? And I don't say it from like, uh, you know, I see the memes. I see it, I see the speeches. Like there are times where, uh, there are maybe gaffes is like the, the nicest way to put it.

• 1:41:28Anthony Pompliano?

  But like, if you or I wanted to go become a Navy SEAL, they would put us through immense physical and mental training and evaluation to then send us to faraway lands.

• 1:41:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:43Anthony Pompliano?

  To support the United States of America.

• 1:41:45Speaker 02

  The problem is how this test is going to be weaponized. You have pretty much one party that, in America, I think that you have one party. You have one sort of ethos, worldview, kind of class that controls, you know, every seat of government. It controls the tech, the media, academia, and, um, and certainly all of the bureaucratic seats. Like the whole, San Francisco government, for example, like you can change over the government. There are a handful of supervisors that you could vote in. You could change the way government looks. You could change your legislator, uh, your legislators. But what you can't change are all the people who work for the San Francisco government.

• 1:42:28Speaker 02

  And they are just, they're all the same kind of like,

• 1:42:34Speaker 02

  useless bureaucratic, like the hall monitor energy is what you get. And they're, they're everywhere. Um, and so like those people all vote the same way. And that test, there's, there's like almost no way it's not going to be weaponized, in my opinion. So I think an age cutoff would be, would be a little cleaner.

• 1:42:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Age is the easiest one, yeah. All right.

• 1:42:56Anthony Pompliano?

  As we watch kind of the world unfold, we've talked about a lot of pessimistic things. What's like the optimistic argument as to like how America at a minimum holds on at a maximum has this like renaissance and continues to accelerate as the greatest country in the world?

• 1:43:14Speaker 02

  Well, I think America's biggest problem is that it's so easy to succeed here. Like, we have a lot of room to fail and we're still thriving. And that has to do with our relative geographical isolation, our abundant natural resources, and all of the wealth that we're standing on top of from, you know, the last decades and decades. So because of that, it's, we allow things to get, to get pretty bad. And so I don't know, I don't see us, I don't see, long-term, I see us, it's almost impossible for us to enter a world of like Dark Ages status.

• 1:43:59Speaker 02

  I think we're gonna be limping along for a while. The question is whether or not we become great. And, and that is all, that depends on culture. So that's why I care so much about culture. That's why I write about culture. That's why I try and make other people care about this stuff because that's, that becomes who we are. The stories we consume, the things that we want to be is what determines the shape of our world. And we're in a really great position, actually. We could be, you know, the greatest, we already are, I think, the greatest country in the history of the world. But I mean, we could be great in ways that are inconceivable right now. And I-

• 1:44:41Anthony Pompliano?

  What do we have to do? Like, we're back-to-back world war champs, right?

• 1:44:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think we want to go fight another-

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  I think we have to care about local politics, honestly.

• 1:44:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain.

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  I think that we have really abandoned-

• 1:44:58Speaker 02

  Like, basic shit, just, we have internalized a sense that we're not in charge of our, of the world around us, that we're not responsible for the world around us, our own lives. Like, this, the way that this manifests is in every city I drove at the beginning of the pandemic, or the fall after the pandemic began, I drove cross-country and I was looking for another place to live, maybe, I didn't know where I was gonna be. Every city I went to had a homeless problem, every city I went to had a drug problem, every city I went to was covered in trash, like, every city I went to had a public education problem, had a public infrastructure problem. I was living in San Francisco, and in San Francisco, there are a lot of, like, sort of influencer-type people with big megaphones, and so we know a lot about what's going on

• 1:45:43Speaker 02

  in San Francisco, and it is crazy, and I do think San Francisco is kind of uniquely crazy, there are, it's like, almost a fun city to tell stories about, because the people are, the politicians are so deranged, I mean, you had an actual pro-crime DA who was just recalled, like, it's a fun story to tell, it's like, it's crazy. But, the problem, the problems are everywhere, that we have a problem of smart people not engaging where they are, people feeling in transient, I think, is that the right word, in transient, or when you're uprooted, and, just transient, it's like you have a transience of people kind of moving from city to city, smart people specifically, a lack of loyalty to where

• 1:46:23Speaker 02

  you're from, and that, when, that kind of, I think, that, that becomes the way that we engage with the entire world, is, is just, someone else will do it, someone else will work on this, why is it like this, I'm gonna just be mad about it and then let it go, or not be mad at it, that's even worse, if you just kind of internalize a sense that, you know, a homeless drug addict going to the bathroom on your front steps is normal, that's just the cost of living in San Francisco, like, once you internalize that, that's the end, I mean, you're never gonna fix anything if you just think that that's normal, and, and, and feel bad for criticizing it. So I think you start there, you have to start

• 1:47:03Speaker 02

  with your home, you have to, you have to make where you physically are right now, a better place, and, and I, I think that if we can, we can start doing that, I mean, we have people in the tech industry talking about Charter City stuff, and, we're gonna build a new country, that's how I got into tech, was the C-Setting Institute, this whole cool ideological...

• 1:47:26Speaker 02

  Idealistic thought experiment, really, about what would it look like if we could build a sort of host of politically autonomous cities in the middle of the ocean and rebuild everything from scratch. That's all exciting. And I-

• 1:47:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it possible?

• 1:47:40Speaker 02

  Yes, I think so. I think it's all possible. But, but actually, like, the path to change is just unfortunately caring about the five idiots on your board of supervisors who have legalized crime. Like, you could just, you could just focus on that problem and vote them out and fix things. And, you know, you don't have to reinvent the city. You have to just care about the city that you're in. And I, for some reason, like, people just don't do that.

• 1:48:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw the new, what, San Francisco DA, I think, came in?

• 1:48:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:14Anthony Pompliano?

  And real radical ideas, like, we're gonna put people in jail if they commit crimes?

• 1:48:18Speaker 02

  She's saying, I like what she's saying. I like what she, we'll see, we'll see what she does. But, yeah, I mean, it feels good just to have someone not gaslight you and say, like, yeah, like, if someone throws a brick through your window, that's a problem.

• 1:48:34Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for, thank you for saying that to me.

• 1:48:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Already a step ahead. Last thing I want to talk about is the state of the media. With Pirate Wires, I think you've got, like, pretty big ambitions in terms of, like, how do you create content and allow people to consume things of that are like the signal among the noise, or like, the pirate ship among, like, the chaos?

• 1:48:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do we need independent media?

• 1:49:00Speaker 02

  Well, I think everything is independent media at this point. Even people who work for the establishment increasingly have their own Substacks or whatever, their own channels, their own presences on social media. They're becoming, they're independent, in a sense. That's just identity. Your personal identity is really powerful now because of social media. And, and that's the future landscape of media. New York Times is this big outlier, where it's, it's definitely a brand first, and then writer second. And they've, I think, fired the one person who was like, sort of- Fighting against this trend internally, in a very public way, and she happens to be very obsessed with with brand and social media and things like this. The New York Times is the outlier.

• 1:49:45Speaker 02

  The general trend are it's people online talking who we like. And maybe it will be a collection of them. It'll be like a handful of people in a crew, in a group, in a, you know, maybe in a small army. But it's always going to be people. That's the future. And that's what I mean, I want, as I grow, I want to bring in more people and have just like a handful of people who you can trust. So also, when they get things wrong, just admit it and be like, oh, I was wrong about that. And tell people, I want to build, I think in all of this chaos, information chaos, like, I mean, I love a good fight online, but also, like, it's funny. A lot of it's funny.

• 1:50:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, performative.

• 1:50:28Speaker 02

  And I just, like, I can't help but laugh at the craziest shit. And I want to build a place, I basically just want, Pirate Wires is just, I'm building the place that I wish existed, online, a place in the media landscape where I can go and just, like, laugh at the bullshit and kind of try and piece together the facts of what's happening and get a more accurate sense of what's going on, someone to help sort of like parse the news. Yeah, and that's what it is. That's the future. And it starts there, it's just going to grow through, I'm going to hire more writers, and we're going to grow it and take it sort of day by day.

• 1:51:07Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you replicate the magic? So I've told you in private, like, every time you write, I'm just like, you just don't miss. Right? Like, just every time I read it, I'm like, either this is laugh out loud funny, this is like so spot on, or like, holy shit, I should text him and make sure that like, he's still okay, because they're going to definitely come for him. It's like one of those three things, sometimes all three together. But like, there is a unique combination of, one, you see what's happening, you're able to kind of pick out what are the important parts, you can connect them to like Tom Cruise and other things that are happening in today's society, and like how they all kind of fit together in a narrative. You got a very unique way of writing, which I think people really enjoy consuming. But like, each one of those things is hard by itself.

• 1:51:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, you're a unique person, how do you replicate that with other people that you would bring on?

• 1:51:57Speaker 02

  I think that you don't, I think that what you want to do is First of all, I don't really believe in diversity of thought, like in the way that it's used. People talk about the real diversity you need is diversity of opinion. And it's like, maybe. I mean, not on the big stuff, though. Like, in terms of values, I don't believe in diversity. I believe that we are, it's like, we're thickest thieves, we're on the same side, we want the same thing, we're completely mission oriented. That's actually the place where, where you, that's the, diversity in every other aspect, go for it. This, no. Like, I think that you, you want a shared perspective. I want to work with people who don't necessarily see, they don't think the way I do, but they kind

• 1:52:41Speaker 02

  of have the same impulses that I do. They're like, they're, they want the same things, and like, generally, for the country and for their communities, and they kind of agree on the bullshit. It's like, once you have that much in common, then it's about finding people who have their own strengths, and nurturing them. And I think that's the, that's, that's, it's gonna be like the X-Men, where it's not, not everyone wearing the same costume and having the same power. It's a collection of people who do a bunch of extraordinary things, and together, you're fighting the sort of, you're fighting the fight.

• 1:53:13Anthony Pompliano?

  What does success look like? Like, do you take down the patriarchy? Or like, what, like, what is the, what is the thing that you're like, yes?

• 1:53:21Speaker 02

  Well, we are the patriarchy. I'm the, I'm, I'm the treasurer of the patriarchy. Nice to meet you. I, I wanna be, I mean, we're gonna build the biggest media company in the world, and it just is, this is where it starts, that someone is going to. This is like, the media has completely changed. The old model is dead. It's, what you're seeing now is not even the old model, it's just the, the empty carcass of what once existed. It's like, we're roaming the museums of, our cities even feel like museums of a world that once was. Certainly, our media entities right now, these big media properties, they're not alive anymore. They're not, they're, they're not, they're, it's just people have, people are working there and kind of keeping the lights on, but that's gone. The next

• 1:54:05Speaker 02

  thing is gonna be, it's gonna be a person who's going to become very big, and then grow the company.

• 1:54:13Speaker 02

  Around them. And there are all sorts of people who are trying to do something like that. Everyone kind of knows that that's the future roughly.

• 1:54:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Are there other ones that you're impressed by or that you think are doing it right? That you point, you're like, oh, like they get it?

• 1:54:30Speaker 02

  There are lots of people I have a lot of respect for. I think so. I really like Stratechery. I really like.

• 1:54:42Speaker 02

  I really like Barry Wies.

• 1:54:45Speaker 02

  I think that you have people like Tybee and Greenwald who are huge, but not doing as much with that. It's like they're still, they're just right. They just have big audiences. That's different. It's like, what, what do you do to expand? And

• 1:55:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Like if you were Glenn Greenwald, what do you think he should do to double or triple?

• 1:55:05Speaker 02

  Well, I think he's probably in a confused place right now because he's, he started with a company and now he's his own person. And that seems better and more flexible. And maybe he just doesn't have the ambition to build like an empire.

• 1:55:18Speaker 02

  I think that if you are.

• 1:55:21Speaker 02

  I think the mistake you would make while building something off of your back would be to hire a bunch of people who are nothing like you. I think you want to hire people who amplify your voice first, because that's what's working. And then fi- find talented people who are doing their own thing, but care about the same thing. And, and kind of have the same vibe roughly speaking. And, and I think that's the way that you build it. I think that the, the mistake a lot of people are making right now is trying to like rebuild the old model that's not working. And what you can't do online is anything that sacrifices your voice. Because in a world with so much writing and so much media, we live inside of it.

• 1:56:04Speaker 02

  Everything sounds the same. Mediocrity has the same voice. And what, what stands out are people who have a unique voice. And that's the only thing that matters now. Everyone successful has that and, and some are better than a few or the best. And you want to just feed that, you want to feed that originality because people, they are looking for that in the way that.

• 1:56:34Speaker 02

  They know that the thing that exists right now is wrong and so they don't want, they didn't know that, and so they know that the truth is going to sound different. Like it'll look different, it will sound different, it's going to stand out and people are going to make fun of it. You know, people, people in the establishment are going to make fun of it, they can throw eggs at it. Look at this clown talking in a funny way or whatever else, but necessarily like the new thing has to be fundamentally different. And so people will look for that. And when you find it, you have to nurture it.

• 1:57:03Anthony Pompliano?

  When you take that idea of the media, it overlaps really well with a lot of these folks who are now becoming politicians or who have been politicians. Obviously, Trump was the quintessential example. But I think as people look forward to 2024, it's like Trump, Biden, DeSantis, Newsom. Those seem to be like, again, I don't pay a ton of attention to politics, but if you said to me, pick the four people who are like most likely to run and have a shot, it seems like those four are the names that you keep hearing. But now, post-Trump, feels like there's always gonna be like the wild card. And like, I've always said, like, I think The Rock will be president one day.

• 1:57:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Super charismatic, well-known, you know, all this type of stuff. Physically, just massive compared to everyone else. And so kind of human biology is like, I guess that guy's the leader, right? All that type of stuff. But like, how do you think that all plays out? And, you know, it's almost kind of like when you're a kid, you're like, would you rather, you know, do this or do that? And you come up with the most ridiculous things you come up with. Like now, it's like, do you think that Trump, without a Twitter account versus Biden, you know, at 80, like, who wins? It's like, how do you see this playing out?

• 1:58:09Speaker 02

  I always just bet on the best story. And that's Newsom versus DeSantis. It's a battle of Florida versus California. And we have a real national conversation on the differences between those two states. I, in, in my gut, I think Trump's not going anywhere.

• 1:58:32Speaker 02

  But I think, I think, I think I'm, this is not the way that I'm not good at these kinds of predictions, because I go off of just.

• 1:58:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Intuition.

• 1:58:42Speaker 02

  And I just, I think that that's, I think it's DeSantis Newsom, which is crazy, because it means Trump is gone and Biden's gone. It's the weirdest one, I think, in a sense.

• 1:58:51Anthony Pompliano?

  But I think it's the most rational.

• 1:58:53Speaker 02

  I think it's the most, it's just the one that people, I think it's the conversation that people want to have.

• 1:58:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it goes back to, again, like, I'm joking, but I'm not, right? Like, Trump without a Twitter account is not Trump, right? Because like, part of the entertainment value, and also part of the effectiveness, and also part of the like, stoking the critics and the haters and, you know, whatever other, I think he said the haters, the losers and the critics, or like, whatever he said, right? Like, all of that was, his central hub has not been taken away. So it's kind of like, you know, if you said to an MMA fighter, like, get in the boxing ring, right? Like, you're not allowed to kick, wrestle, like, you're like, all right, well, like, maybe they got a shot, but like, probably not as effective. And then Biden, I actually think, age is like a huge, huge component of this.

• 1:59:35Speaker 02

  I think the Democrats never intended on running him again, and then, no one stepped up. And so for a minute, it was like, well, he's gonna run again. And it's just clearly, I think there's, it's, if he does, it will be the end.

• 1:59:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So you, you get DeSantis and Newsom, and I think that they also believe that, because Newsom's starting to run ads in Florida.

• 1:59:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:56Anthony Pompliano?

  DeSantis is, you know, got the Disney thing, like, you can see them almost jockeying to kind of set the stage for this, like, I don't know, okay, Corral 12 noon, like, let's draw pistols, see, you know, who's quicker.

• 2:00:08Speaker 02

  It's also, I mean, it's so far out, anything could happen between now and then.

• 2:00:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:00:13Speaker 02

  But right now, that's where the, I think that's where all of the energy is. DeSantis, for sure. Listen, Trump is powerful, and, I mean, he is just, he's like, king making right now, in seats across the country, so it's hard to say that he's, he's lost his mojo.

• 2:00:32Anthony Pompliano?

  But how does he communicate to the people? Like, like to me, your, your whole thing of like the story. The story is really important, but distribution of the story is also important.

• 2:00:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's gonna be hard for him without a, without a channel. I think that, uh.

• 2:00:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause it's not like, hey, they'll give it back to him from what we understand right now.

• 2:00:48Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:00:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, that would be a curve ball of an event if all of a sudden Twitter was like, cool. If you're running for president, you can have it back. Like, you thought there was uproar when he got kicked off. Imagine the uproar if they, if they brought him back to run for president.

• 2:01:02Speaker 02

  We'll see what'll happen. I mean, at the end of the day, they might just want the growth because Trump, wherever he goes, is a huge draw for crowds. And to a certain extent, he kind of, I mean, he kind of invented Twitter in its most recent incarnation. This current incarnation is, it's his platform. It's, it's, he's the one who, who drew all the attention and, and made Twitter what it is today, in, in a sense. They might just want it that badly.

• 2:01:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Or Elon's forced to buy it.

• 2:01:31Speaker 02

  He might be forced. I mean, I kind of, I know he doesn't want to buy it and I feel like he's going, he has a lot on his plate. I understand that, but I selfishly want him to be forced to buy it.

• 2:01:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. One, I mean, can you imagine?

• 2:01:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. I live in these fantasies.

• 2:01:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Within a week of him owning it, even if nothing in the product changes? Like nothing, no, nothing changes.

• 2:01:52Speaker 02

  He's gonna appoint me to CEO.

• 2:01:53Anthony Pompliano?

  You think so?

• 2:01:54Speaker 02

  I'm gonna slide into his DMs. I'm gonna tell him I'm ready to step up and serve my country. And he's gonna be like, go for it.

• 2:02:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I think, um, uh, uh, there would be a shift in energy on the platform to the point where people would be like, the internet is fun again. Like Elon, Elon is here.

• 2:02:12Speaker 02

  I think that is the most important thing. And people are just done being miserable. And that is the most compelling part of, I think, what Elon is and what Trump was that people refused to see. And in general, what things, the things that, that really land online, it's like, I think people are looking to move past these, this last handful of years of, of kind of just like intensity and, and find the levity. It's like a pressure release. It's gonna allow us to just breathe and move forward. And I agree with you a hundred percent.

• 2:02:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:56Anthony Pompliano?

  It also begs a question, I guess. Did you get, is it a subpoena? Were you, were you dragged into?

• 2:03:05Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:03:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw, I heard that it's the new Midas list.

• 2:03:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:07Anthony Pompliano?

  So explain, first of all, what's going on so people know about the.

• 2:03:09Speaker 02

  It seems like, I mean, what I've read online is Twitter leadership is, has subpoenaed a bunch of people in Elon's orbit. Just, I have no idea why, just because of the lawsuit, they're trying to bring them in, maybe piece the whole wild story together. I'm waiting, because aren't, is this the kind of thing that's like, you've been served? Is they like, they find you outside or something and, and call your name?

• 2:03:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I think if you're like a billionaire, or you're, you know, I mean.

• 2:03:35Speaker 02

  Or a fake billionaire.

• 2:03:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Fake billionaire. The, the circle of people that they have brought into this are literally the best investors in the world.

• 2:03:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:42Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, the whole idea of the new Midas list, okay. I don't think that they like, track you down on the street. I think it's more of like, they call a lawyer and they're like, hey, we can come do the on the street thing, but like, I want it.

• 2:03:56Speaker 02

  We are gonna make it very, very difficult.

• 2:03:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I want the whole thing. I want, I want the, the real treatment. I want to be served.

• 2:04:02Speaker 02

  Mike Solana.

• 2:04:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And it would be, I would love to, I would love, I would love to tweet about this, is the thing. I would love to, I would love it.

• 2:04:09Speaker 02

  It is, take a picture with it on the ground.

• 2:04:11Anthony Pompliano?

  It is the new Midas list. I mean, everybody wants to be on this list. It is the, the hottest new status symbol in Silicon Valley is a subpoena in the Twitter Elon lawsuit. And I'm waiting for mine.

• 2:04:22Speaker 02

  All right. Where can we send people to?

• 2:04:25Anthony Pompliano?

  PirateWire.

• 2:04:26Speaker 02

  PirateWire.com. I tweet at Mick Solana, M I C Solana, S O L A N A. And this is where you can find me.

• 2:04:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:04:36Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:05:05Anthony Pompliano?

  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.