#1316 Nate Fischer on The Shocking Future of Bitcoin, Economy, Government & Geopolitics

Nate Fischer is the Founder of New Founding and American Reformer. In this conversation, we talk about economics, geopolitics, where the world is headed, why he owns an ammunition company, breakdown of globalization and how that could occur, allocating capital, and much more. ======================= This episode is brought to you by Frec — Just as easy as investing in an ETF, Frec Direct Indexing can help you earn more by unlocking tax savings, no matter the market. Done for you, automatically. Check them out at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://frec.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Introducing Espresso - the world’s most interactive portable display. They have a portable screen that is incredibly light, comes with a nice stand, and the user interface is very easy. Anyone who listens to this podcast can go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠us.espres.so/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. They have a brand new offer waiting for you. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Nate Fischer. Nate is the founder of New Founding and also the founder of American Reformer. In this conversation, we talk about it all: economics, geopolitics, and where the world is headed. We talk about the arrow of direction being disintegration and anarchy,

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  how the attempted deplatforming of Russia from the global stage has impacted so much of our world, why he owns an ammunition company, a breakdown of globalization and how that could occur, what the future of warfare looks like, how turmoil and the end of the current regime is possible, why optimist's version of the future will win, and how somebody like President Trump's erratic unpredictable behavior could be a good fit for the future that we're headed into. And then where exactly you can allocate capital today and where Nate is allocating his capital, including betting on people, not numbers, and how things like trust minimized infrastructure or trust maximizing groups of people is where he thinks lots of value is going to accrue. And then we touch on value alignment

• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

  and how things like immigration are affecting both positively and negatively the value alignment that happens in different societies. This is a wide-ranging conversation. Nate is a fascinating person and he's thought deeply about many of the topics that we discussed today. So I'm excited for you all to hear this. Here is my conversation with Nate Fisher.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:12Anthony Pompliano?

  This episode is brought to you by Freck. Historically, the wealthy had a hidden secret in investing. They would spend a lot of money and use very big teams to conduct tax loss harvesting. Tax loss harvesting is the timely selling of securities at a loss to offset the amount of capital gains tax owed from selling the profitable assets later. But now, Freck is bringing this incredible advantage to any investor. They'll literally lower your tax bill regardless of how much money you have. They use state-of-the-art technology through a product called Direct Indexing to allow investors to invest in the S and P 500 while getting all the benefits of tax loss harvesting without the big bill. If you want to learn more, go check them out at freck.com. That's F R E C dot com. I'm a big fan of the product and I even became an investor in the business.

• 2:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Freck.com. Go check them out today. Today's episode is brought to you by Espresso, the maker of the world's thinnest portable display. Now, listen up. If you're like me, you feel like you are at a command center when you sit down at your desk. I got a gazillion tabs open and different windows for different activities. There's my web browser, my text messages, I have Slack open and I got a Notes app. I normally work on a desktop and it can be very, very productive. But everything falls apart the second I leave my desk. If I'm traveling, if I go to a coffee shop to do some work, or just want to work from the kitchen table, my laptop doesn't have enough screen space. I lose my command center and my productivity falls off a cliff. It's a major problem. But this is where Espresso comes in.

• 3:39Anthony Pompliano?

  They have a portable screen that is so beautiful that you think Steve Jobs came back from the dead to create it. The thing is incredibly light, it comes with a nice stand, and the user interface is so easy that I figured it out, how to do it in less than three minutes. If you listen to this podcast, you know that's not an easy feat. So the Espresso team and I, we became friends. I got to know them because I really liked the product. And those screens, they now want to offer them to any fan of the podcast. So we struck a little deal. Here's how it works. Anyone who listens to this podcast can go to us dot E S P R E S dot S O. Or, if that's too confusing, just go click the link in the description. If you go to Espresso's website, they've got a brand new offer there sitting for you.

• 4:22Anthony Pompliano?

  You get a little discount and you'll get a beautiful screen. Trust me, I use mine every day. You'll love the Espresso screen and I think it'll make you more productive. Go check them out today by clicking on the link in the description.

• 4:35Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Nate here. I thought a great place to start this conversation is let's talk about the vision for the future and we can work ourselves backwards to today and what we have to do to kind of set ourselves on that path. But right now, it seems like there are two different cohorts of people. There are the optimists and there are the doomers. The optimists believe that the future is brighter. The optimists believe that technology, capital, capitalism, democracy, et cetera, not only are defaults needed, but also can drastically accelerate us into that brighter future. The doomers basically believe almost the complete opposite. Hey, we should stop all progress. Everything ahead is really bad. It's a dire situation and any progress we try to make will only make it worse, not

• 5:17Anthony Pompliano?

  better. And so when you look at it, I know you fall into the optimist camp, but what exactly does that look specifically? Are there certain milestones or finish lines that you look at that kind of say, hey, we will know we have achieved this vision when A, B, and C occur?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  So high level, yes, I fall into the optimist camp, although I'd say I take a different approach than a lot of people in the optimist camp in that I, I see, in a sense, I'm, I see the, I see turmoil and potential end of the current regime in many ways. A lot of, a lot of change. I just believe that we're better positioned to come through this. And I speak as someone who's sort of known to be on the political right and all that. I believe we're better positioned to come through this than many people tend to assume. So what would be, what would be success? To me, success is a world where we're going

• 6:14Speaker 02

  to see, we're going to see a lot of values baked into the algorithms that govern everyday life. In many ways, that's the government of the digital age. And success for me means that the values that can govern my life and can govern life of people who are, who are close to me are those that reflect fundamentally our values and sort of our way of life. So the scale of that, I think is an open question. This is one reason I'm, I think the degree of my optimism is, is uncertain. But can we at some level, and whether that means there's a disintegration from sort of

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Large scale government to smaller scale, or if necessary, large scale. Can we, can we operate in an environment where we can live our way of life and we can thrive in our way of life?

• 7:07Anthony Pompliano?

  When you say government, normally, I think, people in the tech industry say there's a separation of church and state. There is the politics, the government, et cetera. And then there are the technologists, the venture capitalists, and kind of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. It feels like those two things used to be very polar opposites and they did not have a lot of integration. There was not kind of a graying of that line. In the last couple of months, if not last, you know, two to three years, it feels like those things are becoming much, much more kind of related, integrated, in some cases, working together, in other cases, becoming more abrasive with each other. And so how do you look at the relationship between government and politics with kind of entrepreneurial endeavors?

• 7:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Whether it's, you know, on the capital allocation side or from a kind of an entrepreneurial building side?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  So I would say going back many years, and I think back to the mid, late teens of the last decade. I, I, I look at sort of intuitively sense that these digital platforms are de facto governments. They're layers of government. They're not just, when you have a monopoly platform that has significant power over aspects of your life, whether it's on the financial side, whether it's a search algorithm that in many ways determines what people believe and what they consume. That in many ways is a de facto government. And certainly you could look at it, you could say that has as much power as a government does in many ways.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  And as we've seen the emergence of, really, as we see the digital age emerge, I think you can very easily say.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  There's just an additional layer of government, right? You're you sort of intuitively recognize there's a local government. Everyone calls it a government. There is a state government. People call it a government. Uh, there's a federal government. And I would say there's a digital layer of government and the nature of digital. I mean, you have sort of vying powers between those different layers. I typically they're fairly, you know, at the federal level, it's fairly integrated. At the local level, you can sort of switch between between municipalities. For instance, I think right now you have a world where there's a lot of vying at the digital layer. But there's no question that those who control these powerful monopoly digital platforms

• 9:26Speaker 02

  are in a sense sort of lords or magistrates of uh digital domains. And I think you look at Elon's acquisition of Twitter, and that was a point where it's sort of very clear to everyone. Like, this is not, this is not a typical sort of financial buyer buying uh an asset, a company. It wasn't some guy, it wasn't like the acquisition of Revlon back in the eighties when the corporate raiders were taking it over. And it was clearly just sort of a financial move. We're going to bust this up, we're going to sell assets. No, it was much more akin to like one feudal lord taking, capturing a castle. And now he controls something that everyone recognizes has significant political uh political power. You could even think of it as during the thirty years war era.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  It sort of shifts from Protestant to Catholic or Catholic to uh whatever. And so I think that there's, there's a very clear sense, I think, that people intuitively recognize the political nature of this rule. And I think it's, it's useful in a world where the very concept of of governance is a little bit in flux to just have a continuum between business and government rather than I, rather than see it as a bright line.

• 10:40Anthony Pompliano?

  What's interesting is the government, in the traditional sense, they have a monopoly on violence. They can remove property at times. They can put you in jail and remove your freedom. They can use economic means to sanction or fine you. And it all really is rooted in that monopoly on violence. In the digital realm, although it is not physical violence, there are a lot of corollaries to your point. You know, they can deplatform you. They can put you in Twitter jail with either less reach, or maybe you can't post. YouTube notoriously, if you get a strike on the platform, you then can't post for a number of days. And so it does feel like there is some mirroring of what the actual governments are doing with what these kind of digital governments have come up with.

• 11:24Anthony Pompliano?

  But what I wonder is, can they stay separate? Like, is the end conclusion just that the state tries to really nationalize many of these platforms in some form or fashion? If you listen to some people, they'd say, hey, they already have done this with soft power, right? They're already censoring. They're already kind of influencing what's happening on these platforms. I think the great fear is, could it actually become hard power to a degree? And the state says, look, these are information platforms, and it's a national security concern if people say certain things, or they do certain things on these platforms. And therefore, we want to have even more kind of governance over them than what would they have today?

• 11:59Speaker 02

  You saw that in China. So it's very clear that, and I think there's a, there's going to be a very strong parallel between what many people here in the US want and what happened in China. I mean, to the point that you hear Sam Altman talking about cooperating with the Chinese on AI regulations. So no question, they're going to try that. At the same time, I think that in many ways, and I sort of buy into the thesis, Bologies talked about this, and people have talked about this. I buy into the thesis that many of the trends are actually in the direction of disintegration and anarchy, rather than the direction of centralized state power. I think that the US's state capacity is limited in terms of its ability to execute what you described, even if it wanted to.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  Whereas I think you're seeing, I think Elon's acquisition of Twitter is a perfect example of this. You saw what was, to some extent, a sort of integrated regime controlling the major, major tech platforms. And they lost one of the most important strategic assets there. And that, that significantly impedes their ability to regulate. So I think what you're going to see, if anything, and you talk about the monopoly of violence. I'll push back on one point there, which is I like to emphasize this certainly as someone who is personally in the firearms industry, but also emphasizing that they have a monopoly on certain types of violence. The US has always recognized that there's different levels of violence, right? You as a private citizen have the have the right

• 13:26Speaker 02

  to defend your home and to use violence in certain circumstances that fall outside of the state's bounds. So there's even there, there's there's limits that recognize a distribution of that, a distribution of that power. But I think that in a world where you have potentially a disintegration, probably a drop in societal trust, a disintegration of many of these sort of large scale government monopolies, certainly, I think, let's say, just less federal ability to control certain things. What you'll likely see is you'll likely see a relative increase. I mean, in a world where there's not that universal control, and they tried it with Russia, right? They tried to sort of deplatform Russia following

• 14:09Speaker 02

  the Russia-Ukraine war in a way that I think resembled a sort of a global extension of that power. And to a large extent, I think they failed to achieve that. They certainly failed to achieve the significant checking of Russia that they had in mind. What you'll see is you'll have to see more and more punishments resemble the ostracism that is what happens on tech platforms. So yes, violence is conventionally associated with the state. But one of the oldest penalties in time is ostracism. The Greek states, one of the things they would do is they would ostracize you. They would force you to leave and you're not welcome in the society. And that's effectively what digital platforms can do. They have very limited ability to enforce anything with violence. They may have very limited

• 14:53Speaker 02

  ability to enforce things in the courts, right? In the global system, you have a lot of people, they're operating pseudonymously. They could be judgment proof. It could be very difficult to enforce that. What can they do? They can absolutely ostracize you from their from their society. And I think what you'll see is I think you'll probably see a growing a growing significance of that sort of ostracism.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Of a penalty, potentially extending even to local societies to the point that I, I mean, local businesses, right? Costco as a club is able to maintain a certain level of quality inside the store experience than in a lower trust society is harder to achieve in a CVS that has to put a lot of things behind plastic because of fear of theft. You'll see that sort of privatization of spaces to the point that many of the things that we might take for granted as part of a society are something that you need to be a member in good standing of the society to benefit from. And that could be, that, that network could actually be a digital first

• 15:57Speaker 02

  network in many cases. Now, you could imagine that de facto applies to entire towns, de facto implies to entire regions. But people can sort of escape the consequences by leaving, but to be a part of something, you need to, you need to remain a member in good standing. So there's a, there's a world where you see that, that digital model actually coming back into the physical world.

• 16:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And you mentioned earlier, this arrow of direction of disintegration and anarchy. Describe that a little bit more in terms of what, what does that look like?

• 16:29Speaker 02

  So I think, and this is not a strong thesis of mine, but I would say the way biology talked about it is sort of, in a sense, both the right and the left are actually pushing for de facto anarchy. The right is, the right is obviously pushing for gun rights. They're pushing for loss of trust in many of the federal institutions. They've been pushing for smaller government for a long time. Most of our emphasis is on challenging institutions rather than on sort of consolidating, I mean, as an out of power sort of dissident movement, very little ability to sort of consolidate and execute power. But the left also is pushing toward anarchic.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Anarchic ends, abolish the police, reducing enforcement of crime. And yes, they sort of have isolated cases where they'll try to really drop the hammer of government on certain things, but they'll act the capacity to scale that. So I think you can look at, I would say, look at the gun control debate as an interesting example. And actually, I've owned an ammo company for a number of years. And it was interesting. It used to be, and this is sort of a grim, grim way of putting it. Well, it used to be that there were sort of two things that would result in a pop of ammo prices. Election of Democrats, school shooting. And school shooting, obviously, the implication was that's going to result in sort of a public push for gun control.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  What's really been interesting is you have not, the last couple of years, you did not see that. There was no pop after the 2022 election. There was no pop after the Uvalde school shooting. And I think what we, what we realized sort of collectively is there's no chance that gun control gets passed. The trend has just been stronger and stronger to solidify this right to own weapons. And essentially, in a world where sort of the heat turns up, the temperature turns up, that is one of the things that people are just not going to compromise on over their dead body type of mindset. And I think that's indicative of a sense that government is growing weaker in terms

• 18:38Speaker 02

  of the ability to achieve any sort of consensus to take power away from distributed power and concentrate it with the government. Going back to that question of monopoly of violence, the government sort of losing its ability to have that monopoly on violence even where it wants it. So that would be one, that would be one manifestation. I think another manifestation is the loss of their ability to, to control the tech platforms. So it's their loss of ability to control Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin was, there's clearly people, many, many people who would be seen as sort of influential people in the regime who wanted to seriously check it. Elizabeth Warren, people like that, Gensler.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Not succeeding in doing so, and I think almost certainly lacking the political ability to achieve that. So that's sort of a, I would say that's sort of a secular trend. Ways I've framed some of that, too, is you're seeing this breakdown of globalization broadly, or a breakdown, it's a growing sense of global disruption. I mean, what do you see in the Red Sea? You see asymmetric warfare where a, I think a drone that might cost a few thousand dollars can take out a ship, or can, it would cost millions of dollars to stop that single drone. And so you're seeing this situation where across the board, you're seeing a breakdown

• 20:01Speaker 02

  of the ability to enforce some sort of rules-based global order, which is, it's not necessarily what we think of anarchy when we think of it at the local level, but without question, it's sort of a growing global anarchy. Again, the sanctions regime, the US is no longer the sort of global hegemon. It no longer has the ability to stop Russia, even using a lot of tools that it thought it had. So you're seeing, you're certainly seeing at the global level, a growing disintegration of that power, and a tendency toward distributed power.

• 20:33Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of that breakdown is political, you know, and lack frankly of the ability for us to use diplomacy versus it is a technical advancement for quote-unquote "the enemy"? And I'll give you two examples. One would be, hey, we are projecting a weak position, given the current administration. Our diplomats seem to be much more interested in preconceived notions about how we need to react or posture ourselves to certain nations. You can see that Russia, Ukraine proposed peace plans, and then the US kind of stepping in and rejecting them in some cases. And so the diplomacy seems to be in a weird position. At the same time, you're talking about, you know, a $10,000 missile.

• 21:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I think the Houthis recently just shot down a US drone that cost a couple million dollars. You're talking about, you know, a couple thousand dollar drone being able to create havoc and really shut down some of these situations. And so is it geopolitical and diplomacy? Is it technology? Or is it maybe like, they're both the same thing, just coming at it from different angles?

• 21:35Speaker 02

  I mean, I think they inevitably converge in the sense that... Diplomacy ultimately diplomacy is always done in the shadow of conflict. Right. It's either there's true shared interests and there's there's real sort of altruistic alignment. But I think for most of these cases, it's it's people have very different interests and as technology changes, as technology changes what a kinetic conflict would look like, changes the calculus of a kinetic conflict, that's obviously going to lead to a very different diplomatic stance to to people who are representing the different parties. And especially if one side recognizes that, and I think you you may well see this, I

• 22:20Speaker 02

  don't know what's going on in the minds of people in the the US, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's a lot of parties that they both have a different set of values. They don't ultimately, they don't ultimately assume some of the assumptions of of sort of end state liberalism, liberal ideals, economic utilitarianism that might be assumed by, I think, many in the sort of Beltway Beltway group. But they also recognize that they have the ability to, they recognize weakness on the US's part. They recognize that their drone can potentially impose an asymmetric cost. They recognize that the US has failed

• 22:59Speaker 02

  to, despite its support for Ukraine, it's failed to check Russia, which is much, much poorer country by every measure. And when you see that kind of thing happening, you certainly, it certainly will embolden people who are willing to diplomatically challenge the US. So I think those two inevitably go together. And I think ultimately, I would say I'm sympathetic probably to the technological, I wouldn't go as far as technological determinism, but the sort of sovereign individual thesis that the digital age is fundamentally changing many aspects of.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Many aspects of the fundamental drivers that sort of shaped the very sort of nature of sovereignty at the global level.

• 23:46Anthony Pompliano?

  As we get disintegration, anarchy, breakdown of globalization, it seems like maybe the trade off is higher degrees of uncertainty and chaos. And so if you fall back on an assumption of you can't be rational with irrational people, specifically, we've seen this in conflicts on the ground where we have insurgents fighting kind of a more mechanized military in Iraq or Afghanistan. It's been very difficult for the mechanized army to be able to win and win consistently over years. It feels like maybe the leadership historically in the United States, we've prided ourselves on being A presidential and B very predictable, rational, being somewhat of an intellect and

• 24:28Anthony Pompliano?

  kind of control of emotions that would lend itself to that diplomatic approach. When Trump got into office, I think one of the critiques of him was he's erratic, he is irrational, he is unpredictable, and people saw that as a negative. Is there an argument that maybe that approach is actually what is needed for a world where uncertainty, chaos, and kind of this breakdown of globalization is actually like a better potential outcome for people?

• 24:53Speaker 02

  I mean, I think there's a lot of, and I'm not an expert in this space at all, but my impression is there's a lot of game theory support for the idea that someone who's less predictable can be much more effective at any number of even very conventional. And I would say this potentially applies to even conventional diplomatic calculus with rational actors, not just the irrational ones. As I, I mean, he's unpredictable, he's also potentially unconstrained by a lot of norms. And if we're sort of voluntarily constrained by a whole bunch of norms, that makes us predictable in a way that makes it easier to gain interactions with us, even by a rational

• 25:36Speaker 02

  actor or someone who who may value something differently, they may be willing to take a risk that we're unwilling to take. So I definitely think that that unwillingness, that sort of lack of constraint can be an asset. Now I'll jump into and sort of take this in a slightly. Different direction. I mean, we're talking globally. I would say my, I spend most of my time thinking about the nature of sort of interactions domestically, but in some sense, apply that same lens. I mean, when you're talking about a trend toward anarchy, that same lens you use for global relations applies to thinking, to competition between factions within the US, competition between different layers of government. And I think there's

• 26:16Speaker 02

  no question we're seeing an escalation of volatility. And this is sort of, this is the frame I've looked at, again, going back to actually the question of how to remain optimistic, where a lot of people would look at the domestic political situation and they would say, I, you know, things are, the left is ratcheting up its power, for instance. They arrest Trump. There's the sort of, there was the Trump arrest. There's the rulings in New York. There's various things that are just sort of, all seem like pretty straightforward exercises of power. They're showing that they're, they're willing to venture outside of norms, in a way that many people would say just shows that it's another win for them, another win for them. It's another example of consolidation of power. But anytime

• 27:00Speaker 02

  you see a departure of norms, departure from norms, you can think of sort of a stock market or a markets analogy, where that's like a big jump. That's a big move in a particular day. And what does that mean? It means higher volatility. Yes, it means a move in a particular direction. But even more than that, I think many people look at that and they'll say, that's an escalation of volatility, which means an increase in the range of potential outcomes, a wide increase. And you look at the last couple of years, and I think you could say, there's a wide increase in the range of potential outcomes politically, even within the US, as well as geopolitically outside. The same dynamic is true. And it's impossible to predict. Volatility by nature means it can go both directions. And so I

• 27:45Speaker 02

  think we're in a situation where we've seen larger and larger departures, which is the sign of sort of a regime that's losing its grip on power in many ways. Like, if they really have solid power, yes, in theory, they can sort of Ratchet things up as a sort of final consolidation of power. But in most cases, they're not going to want to turn up the temperature. They're not going to want to increase that volatility. If they have a firm grip on power, they would rather sort of slowly suffocate, suffocate their opponents. So I think, I think we're seeing the manifestations of sometimes a move from soft power to hard power as the regime loses a level of that grip. An increase in volatility in terms of the range of potential outcomes.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  And you're going to see in a world with a wide range of potential outcomes, absolutely the people who are willing to do something outside the box and take a bold stand, going back to your point about Trump, absolutely. Those are the, those are the players who tend to move the needle. And it's unclear which side they, I mean, you could see a Bolshevik who does something like that. Right. And so there's potentially very bad outcomes. You think of the sort of years of the Russian revolution or months even of the Russian revolution, where the balance sort of, where sort of the fate of the country hung in the balance. And that's a very high volatility situation. So it's not clear which direction it can go. But I think people like that will have an outsized disproportionate impact on the future

• 29:11Speaker 02

  in a world where we see this growing volatility.

• 29:13Anthony Pompliano?

  You've previously written a piece called, or titled Finance Means Betting on People, Not Numbers. And you already mentioned that you own this ammunition company, which is something that most people either one would sit out because like, oh, it's ammunition. It's kind of, you know, in that vice category. And so something I don't want to do. Or two, they would have to be an original critical thinker that gets them to a thesis on why ammunition will become more valuable. And it's not exactly clear that many people, one, can do the independent critical thinking. And then to come to the conclusion of how to play certain, you know, societal or political movements and developments by allocating capital. So how do you think about your investment thesis? And maybe what is that process to come to some of these conclusions or find some of these ideas of where to allocate capital?

• 29:58Speaker 02

  So I'll start with the ammo company, which is a little bit actually outside of, outside of the core of what I do, but it ties directly into my last point. I bought the ammo company in May of 2020. I had no experience in the industry, very, very little experience in the industry. I worked with some people who had a lot more experience in it, but the opportunity came up. And to me, I looked at it as a left tail risk hedge. In extreme scenarios, obviously, May of 2020 was a situation where we sort of recognized there was a lot of uncertainty, a lot, wide range of potential outcomes. And there's certain scenarios where it just seemed like an ammo company was a, it would, it would be an outsized return in otherwise very bad situations, almost like an insurance policy. But to the point of a type of insurance that

• 30:42Speaker 02

  you can't necessarily financially, financially plan for as, as financial markets might, might get caught up in lots of uncertainty. That, that sort of thing didn't play out. But that doesn't necessarily, I mean, a lot of times you buy something that, that comes off as, as insurance. I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's played out. It hasn't been a extremely profitable investment. As I said, ammo was sort of cyclical based on, based on political events. But more broadly, how do I think about investing? I think about investing, I think about investing, A, as, to go to your point about the, the betting on people rather than numbers. Fundamentally, entrepreneurial investing, the sort of investing that's going to produce

• 31:26Speaker 02

  outsized returns. I think there's trading, there's speculating, right? That's, that's, that can be betting on market movement, sentiment, things like that. But ultimately, like, the entrepreneurial allocation of capital comes down to, more than anything, a willingness to take a bet on a person that goes beyond something that you could perfectly justify on a spreadsheet. So what you've seen is you've seen this trend toward the sort of managerial Bureaucratic administration of finance. You can think of this as the trend from the, let's call it the hedge fund manager, the multi-strategy hedge fund manager, or just individual investor, really can sort of make whatever trade or bet he sees opportunistically as attractive to BlackRock.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  BlackRock, in many cases, doesn't even have any skin in the game in their investment, right? They take a certain number of basis points. They essentially have a set of bureaucrats who administer a strategy that in many ways is in turn set by sort of other bureaucrats and analysts, right? It's an index fund. The index itself is sort of intentionally stripping human judgment out of the concept and replacing it with some sort of formula. So you've seen this move toward, toward, I would call it managerial finance. It's a, it's a finance where everything is proven with models. Everything is proven on a spreadsheet. And any sort of human judgment is removed, removed from that. I would say it actually reflects a fairly pessimistic view of the person in a sense.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  And the opposite of that, I think, is the sort of truly entrepreneurial venture capital bet where you, and it could be venture capital in classic venture sense, it could be in a very basic sense, right? You, you see a young guy in your community who's a hustler and he needs that, he needs that sort of initial capital to begin flipping houses or whatever. And you, you recognize that this guy has something, not a degree, not a, it's not that he has the MBA or whatever. It's not that he checks certain boxes. You just see that like this guy has the traits to know how to make money and you take that bet on him. In both cases, those are bets on a person where if you're right, you're potentially creating enormous value.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  You're, you're both getting someone started in a career that can be quite rewarding. And if, depending on the structure, you can be greatly financially rewarded for it, bar in excess of what you would get through the sort of formulaic managerial allocation of capital. I think we've seen that systematically stripped out of our system as more and more investment goes to passive. I think we saw probably a great bubble where the move to passive in some sense becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as more and more capital flows in and really as. As the premium for what's recognized as a sort of highly desirable financial asset elevates prices, my bet is that's going to reverse. My bet is that a lot of that is driven by

• 34:18Speaker 02

  sort of the trend toward passive as much as it's driven by underlying fundamentals. And we're going to see a return of more and more, more and more return for those who can continue to make outsized bets on people that are rewarding. Again, I use two examples, but that can, there's a whole continuum there. There's plenty of hedge funds that have been extremely successful buying post-IPO companies, even mid-stage companies where they'll really get to know the CEO and they'll really recognize that this is the kind of person who's going to just produce outsized returns. I mean, a lot of the best ones look at, they both underwrite a CEO and they, they look at someone who actually owns significant equity in the company and they look for that skin in the game and they, it's kind of like

• 35:02Speaker 02

  that combination, does this person have this alignment and does he have the ability to, and the traits to just earn, drive an outsized return here. And again, that's not my personal focus, but you see it done well. My, my personal focus, to some extent, at the abstract is, is how do we look for the bastions of sort of trust that remain? The, the dynamics that continue to be able to produce those kinds of outsized bets on people in a world where, in a sense, people have become marginalized in the allocation of capital.

• 35:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain that one more in terms of like, give me maybe an example or where you actually see that happening?

• 35:46Speaker 02

  So venture capital is just one of the straightforward ones, I think. And we're, we have a venture firm. So new founding last fall, launched a venture firm. Our firm is sort of specifically focused on companies in some way associated with the right. And I use the right broadly. It talks about a lot of the, a lot of the themes that I'm actually talking about here. But very practically,

• 36:08Speaker 02

  We see a lot of founders. We see a lot of founders who in many ways are also by nature of sort of their values, their politics or whatever. They're not playing the very conventional venture game. And I think you could actually say aspects of the conventional venture game have become managerial in nature, right? The way to the way to get venture capital in certain circles resembles the path to get an MBA. I mean, you sort of you do the right sort of prerequisite extracurriculars, you you adopt the right aesthetic, you adopt the right sort of trendy

• 36:42Speaker 02

  you know, jump into the category that's trending in the right way. And it's very formulaic and that will get people certain types of venture capital. I would say that's not necessarily very entrepreneurial as much as as much as the people may pretend it is, but we're dealing with people who are outside of that. We're dealing with people where in some sense they're sort of a a dissident aspect of their business, whether it's sort of a category that's intrinsically just not as, I mean, you mentioned ammo in this category. I mean, was not a really a venture backable business, but

• 37:14Speaker 02

  we did a, we did an investment in a company called Arminet, which is a ad network focused on the firearm space. And firearm space is a space that's been blacklisted by advertisers by and large. We looked at the team. We were very, very impressed with the people. We're very impressed with both their capability, their grit, what they've done so far.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  They're obviously operating in the sector where most venture capitalists are not going to be wanting to to deal with that. They're specifically providing services to a lot of censored publishers, publishers, gun blogs or whatever, who aren't going to be able to get conventional display ads from the, from Google and some of the better networks. But ultimately, what does that bet come down to? Ultimately, that bet comes down to, yes, we can sort of underwrite the economics of the space. We can underwrite the like how big, what's the total, what's the total available market, total addressable market, all that. Ultimately, it's a bet on the person. Like, do we, do we look at these people and believe these are people who can execute? And that is the essence of, in many ways, every successful venture bet.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  So that would be one illustration of that. And then I think the opposite of the spectrum to some extent is not something I'm doing in what would be seen as an investment format, but sort of a continual problem I look at. And one of the sort of central, central things that we're, we're looking at is how do we facilitate more? Connection within aligned communities. So as you look at things like, how do you choose a, let's say, think of how do you choose a lawyer? Like, that's not an investment decision, but it is a, it is a risky decision you're taking. You're taking a bet on a person. You can obviously go to the sort of the most conventional option where you just go to the white shoe firm. You pay up for it. You go for someone who's fully credentialized and you theoretically know what you're getting,

• 39:00Speaker 02

  but you're paying for it. If you go for someone who's lower cost than that, you're kind of taking a bet on the person. Am I going to get someone who's going to get me as good of an outcome?

• 39:11Speaker 02

  I analogize that to an investment decision. I think that there's many, many times as many decisions that resemble that that are made. Again, those have also become very bureaucratized segments, just as hiring has become very bureaucratized through HR. You've seen a consolidation of law firms. You've seen something where sort of school rank matters more and more. And again, I think that people are losing trust in that system. I think you're seeing a breakdown where increasingly, I mean, you saw the controversy with Harvard at the beginning of this year. And it's sort of, that kind of thing will reverberate. The value of a Harvard degree will drop as a credential. The value of being at a big law firm, someone goes to a big law firm, you don't know that you're getting the best quality lawyering anymore.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  I mean, I've, I've sort of seen this up close when I was spending a few summers there back in law school. But even then, it's, there's a risk associated with it. And I think you're going to see a sort of steady drop in societal trust and trust in these elite institutions in society. And you're going to see more and more of a search for alternatives, many of which are going to come through sort of alternative trust-based networks. Example I give is like a church community, ask for a recommendation from someone else who goes to your church. That's a different way of getting, it's an, it's a true alternative to these institutional credentials. It's the same way, going back to the investing, that you're likely to find a sort of person that you're going to bet on flipping houses.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Right? You're, you're usually depending on existing social networks and to go back to sort of. The real estate example, there were incredibly dynamic communities. You think of like the Jewish community in Brooklyn in the 50s, for instance, lots of immigrants, many cases had not yet cracked elite schools, enormous opportunities that were through those sort of informal networks where someone will take a, you impress someone in property management, someone takes a bet on you, and that's what gets someone started on a multimillion dollar real estate career. And there's just story after story after story of people who got that start, their start that way. And I think in a world where we, we see a reverse of the institutionalization that's taken place over last decades, you're going to see more and more of those risk-based bets

• 41:16Speaker 02

  returning to high-trust-aligned communities. So the question then is, how do we, how do we find the communities that, that maintain those dynamics, far fewer today than I think were, were true then? And how do we start to build the infrastructure to facilitate high-value interactions, whether they be that hiring of a lawyer or the allocation of capital?

• 41:38Anthony Pompliano?

  What's interesting about this description or kind of framework is that many of the best venture investments come through exactly what you're talking about, in terms of there's a social network, that social network is making recommendations, people continue to build social capital, that capital then eventually gets cashed in for an investment in a company, they take that capital, they're able to allocate it correctly, build a product for a problem, and then they go and they end up having success and kind of everyone wins, and the cycle restarts, right? That capital gets recycled throughout a community, et cetera. But also, there's this element of, there's a saying in the military, aim small, miss small. And so when I hear, you know, using spreadsheets to make investment decisions, the reason why you have to put it on a spreadsheet is because you're trying to figure out, like, are there basis points difference between like the cost versus the return? And so, aim

• 42:22Anthony Pompliano?

  small, miss small. Like, you can potentially lose money on a small scale because you are trying to eke out 100 or 200 basis points in your spreadsheet, you know, type of work. What you're really talking about is kind of aim big, miss big. And it reminds me of very early on, when I got to Silicon Valley, somebody told me, you will be rewarded here for either creating rocket ships or craters in the earth. And what people outside of this don't understand is you get just as much credit for the crater in the earth. As you do for the rocket ship in some cases, because people want to reward ambition and going big. And if you go big over and over and over again, and you're eventually right one time. It has such a ridiculous amount of value creation and capture that it pays for all the times that you were wrong.

• 43:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it does feel like you see the same framework being applied across investing, across finding things within your network, across how you allocate your time personally, and it's this thing that just repeats throughout your life.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  I mean, I think that's absolutely, and just the perfect example of that is Adam Newman, who rocket ship, giant crater of WeWork. Within a year, year and a half, I think he gets another $300 million for a new project. And ultimately, he recognized in a world where, and it goes to that point about, again, like going back to the political leader thing, too. In a world of high volatility, the only sort of person who can produce those outsized outcomes, who can reach that $100 billion plus outcome, is someone who can take those giant swings. And a lot of people laugh at that. They think that's a sort of a, they think that that's a just exemplifies the bad judgment of venture capitalists. I'm not so sure.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  I think, I think there's very smart reasons to believe you bet on someone who can build something, right? The economics may not have been great for WeWork, but it's, it's a concept that had value. It was not a, it was not something that was, that was a total sort of pure financial bubble or anything like that. It was, it was something that people continued to use. So I think that, yes, there's a, there's an outsized return for, for aiming for something like that and going big. I do think that, I do think that the right models of this have built in optionality as well in many ways. I mean, if there's built in optionality, and that is inherent in the venture model, right? I mean, you, you give someone $20 million, let's say, yes, that's a lot of money. Yes, they might lose it.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  But the upside in that scenario is you can keep, you know, keep re-upping in future rounds. And the way venture inherently stages means that even the, even the losses are a lot smaller than you might see in, if you tried to take similar swings with a private equity model, conventional private equity model, or certainly with a government model. I mean, look at the government takes a swing with solar or something, and there's hundreds of billions of dollars flushed down the drain. So, or Ukraine or whatever. So I think you see. You see situations where, yes, they're seen as that sort of smoking crater, but it's actually, given the built-in optionality and really any model that has a lot of skin in

• 45:25Speaker 02

  the game like that, it actually ends up producing, by and large, it produces expectation of positive returns. I think ultimately bets on resourceful people do produce good outcomes.

• 45:39Anthony Pompliano?

  What's interesting also is the same things that are true 20, 30, 40 years ago in terms of these best companies, like obviously the famous book, The Outsiders, you know, essentially, can you, one, be a good capital allocator, two, can you have a decentralized type of organization and push decision-making down to great people who are closest to the problem and allow them to go make those decisions? Like, if you do that throughout history, you have been able to build great technology and great companies. And if you look today, maybe we use Tesla and Amazon as an example. Tesla is really like 10 different startups inside of one big company. Amazon, very similar type of thing, where AWS and Amazon's actual servers or their warehouse operations, yes, they're all interconnected and they maybe are relying on each other, but they're very

• 46:21Anthony Pompliano?

  different types of businesses. And so what I wonder is, and Elon's talked about it from a manufacturing standpoint of like the complexity in assembling a car means that there is a high degree of difficulty for someone to compete with him. But actually, the complexity of Amazon, even though it is not necessarily in the manufacturing business, has a lot of similarities. And so when I see a rise in deep tech and kind of these hard problems, I also see it's a rise in difficult solutions to build. And so it feels like, you know, as we leave kind of a zero interest rate environment, we head to, you know, what really is kind of normal interest rate environment. It feels like everyone is kind of put back on their armor and then like, hey, this shit's supposed to be hard, right? I need to go find hard problems. I need to create

• 47:03Anthony Pompliano?

  solutions that are hard to create because that provides a moat. And then capital allocators now also seem to be looking for very different types of opportunities than maybe they were before. And so... I don't think there's like a secret council. It's not like you and, you know, 500 people all got together and said, you know what? We're going to all change our investment thesis. Oh, we're going to change the way that we view the world. It almost feels like now as the pendulum swings back in favor of doing the hard things, there's a group of people who kind of almost felt left behind in the zero interest rate environment. And they were like, I don't get why people are allocating capital, some of these other ideas. So maybe talk a little bit as to like, how you were allocating capital pre pandemic, during the pandemic, and then like now, and what are the similarities? And maybe what are the differences as you've won, you know, both become more thoughtful

• 47:46Anthony Pompliano?

  about certain things in the world, but also the economic environment has changed?

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Well, so, I mean, at the very basic level, my first business was buying distressed apartment buildings in 2000, starting in 2011. We bought a bunch of apartment buildings across Florida and Texas. And in many ways, it was, it was, it was a distressed play, buying at a fraction of, a fraction of replacement cost. And we were buying things, there were apartments we bought for $10,000 a unit. They had a lot more activity at night than during the day. And it was, it was sort of an interesting, it was, it was, it was a classic distressed opportunity. Our bet was as, as people move in, there's going to be a convergence to replacement cost. You could think of that as sort of a classic value play, kind of a bet on these red states, on Florida and Texas demographic trends.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  That played out by 20, by 2015, in many ways, they were sort of, that thesis had played out. We continued to hold them and the Fed continued to print money. And it was kind of ended up probably making twice as much as we could possibly have underwritten for very little more work associated with that. And that was the epitome of sort of pre, pre pandemic investing. And really, I think you saw, you saw zero interest rates obviously continue after that was low interest rate environment and just massive asset inflation. It's kind of like that's, it's a very easy way to make a lot of money. How do you make a lot of money? You own levered assets. You go long levered assets. Leverage obviously includes, includes debt, but the private equity model itself has inherent

• 49:16Speaker 02

  building leverage for the general partner. And that was a system that rewarded asset owners, period. That was, it's a lot easier in many ways than actually going and building things. But kind of intuitively stepped away from the day to the day because it wasn't satisfying. Like it wasn't, starting in 2015, I and the co-founder of that both stepped out of the day to day operations of the business because it wasn't satisfying, right? It's not, yes, it's a good way to make money, but it didn't feel like we're actually, that wasn't what we wanted to spend the next 20 years on building. We wanted the harder problems. The market did not reward the harder problems the same way. In many ways, the market, had we, had we just spent the next five years in real estate,

• 49:59Speaker 02

  definitely would have made more money if we just continued to do more real estate deals. Instead, we exited, we sold almost everything in 2019, recognizing the market seemed quite high. And I think sort of anticipated some of the pivot that you're seeing a lot more over the next couple of years into, into what seemed like serious problems. During the pandemic, I think it was just, it was a sort of extreme example of zero interest rate environment, right? You saw, you saw massive bubbles in certain spaces. And then the last year and a half, the last two years, you've seen this, this,

• 50:41Speaker 02

  is it a return to, is it sort of people have refocused on hard problems? Is it more that those are, they're no longer drowned out by the, by the sort of bubbly stuff? I'm not certain, it's unclear. I mean, I think crypto is an interesting example where crypto included people who are, who are focusing on some real problems, but also included enormous amounts of speculative money. In many ways, probably the sort of rise of AI just flushed, I mean, all the sort of speculative trend chasers just moved over to AI and you saw a lot of people continue to be working on very hard problems. So I, in many cases, I think those people have always been doing what they're doing.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  And they're just, the other thing is if you're chasing speculative returns, that disproportionately rewards hype. So the people who are the best at the hype, the people who get the most intention are often going to be the ones who are, who are good at the hype rather than good at solving the hard problems. I'm not saying they don't, they don't, I mean, someone like Elon, I think is a absolute master at both of those. But

• 51:44Speaker 02

  You've seen this environment where I think we're returning to something. You're returning to the recognition that there's not easy money based on financial engineering and based on sort of classic zero interest strategies. And in an environment like that, you may as well get down to something that actually matters. You may as well work on something that's gonna, that is gonna create real value.

• 52:09Anthony Pompliano?

  As we see the world kind of head towards, you know, this optimistic techno kind of future, what are some of the things that, on the technology side, that you are looking for or you think could be quite valuable that maybe other people do not yet put a lot of value on? Like, are there things that you think are under discussed or areas where you think more capital should be flowing that will help accelerate us even more?

• 52:34Speaker 02

  So absolutely, and this is really the essence of, this goes to the essence of what I'm working on. And that's, there's a lot of technology, and I'll use the crypto world as an example. There's a lot of, there's a lot of interest in trust minimized technologies. Bitcoin, blockchain being sort of classic examples. You, you don't need to trust your counterparties here because the nature of the technology is, is protocols designed to minimize the need for trust. I think that absolutely makes sense. We need, we need a trust minimized infrastructure in a world where you don't trust the Federal Reserve as much, you don't trust Google as much.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  What I think is underappreciated is that, that nonetheless, never provides the greatest opportunity. Going back to, going back to the example of the bet on the guy flipping houses. That is a trust-based bet, and that is a trust-based bet that is only going to take place typically in environments where you've, you've developed relationships, trusted relationships over time. Yeah, you maybe know circles of friends who can vouch for the person, you've seen him growing up, whatever. So I think that the real opportunities, the things ultimately trust minimized is more akin to insurance. No one gets rich on insurance. Yes, they are, some people start insurance companies. Most people don't get rich on insurance. A society doesn't get rich on insurance.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  It's a necessary thing, it's a valuable thing, it's something that's gonna be increasing demand for as you see more chaos, but ultimately.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  It's still, to some extent, a cost. Whereas trust creating tools, trust creating networks, those can actually create wealth. Those can actually enable the sorts of entrepreneurial bets, whether it be the venture bet on the person or the bet on the guy getting started flipping houses. They can actually unlock tremendous value as the person who you took the bet on is now able to create more value than the risk that was taken on him. I think that is the side that is largely missing. And what you need in many ways, as the institutionalized mediation of trust decays and collapses, as the trust in university credentials, they print credentials, but those credentials increasingly mean less.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  As institutional trust and societal trust decline, I think there's tremendous opportunities around these remaining bastions of trust in these high trust communities. Churches being sort of the church communities and similar communities being, I think, sort of easy examples where a lot of the reason trust is declining is alignment declines, right? When we don't share values with people, there becomes a breakdown in trust and it becomes harder to cooperate in certain ways. So communities that have a natural alignment in values, it can be a range of different such values, but within that community, it's an environment that's conducive to maintaining trust, even if societal trust drops.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  That, to me, is a tremendous asset that is going to become more and more scarce in society. An example I actually give is in the 17th century, the Quakers were sort of a famously high trust community. And as there was lots of chaos in England more broadly at that time, religious wars, all sorts of things, they were trusted intermediaries. And they became trusted intermediaries, not just for each other. It wasn't just a value they provided to their community, but outsiders would want to do business with them as intermediaries. And you saw sort of a growing value in their ability to provide that trust-based intermediation to society. And Barclays came out of that era. It's founded by Quakers in that era. And it's just one good example of how.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Businesses that are able to scale that trust are valuable. So I think that the untapped resource is you've seen a lot of focus on on trust based or trust minimized stuff like Bitcoin. You look at almost any society and sort of the credit side is bigger than the money side, right? Credit is many multiple credit creation is usually many multiples of money. And we haven't yet seen the crypto analog, that sort of non institutional or or sort of new disruptive alternative to legacy institutionalized credit creation and trust creation. I think we I think we will see that.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  That's the the central thing I I'm working on. And I think when we see that, I think that it could be multiple times the size of the crypto space. And I think that in many cases, it's going to be it's not something that can be created with technology alone. I think you have sort of even sociological reasons, cultural reasons that you haven't seen that is there's just enormous cultural gaps between, let's say, these things like tight church communities where there's a concentration of this and Silicon Valley. Those are very different. It's very easy to see how Silicon Valley and technologists who naturally tend to be libertarian, they naturally tend to be individualists. It's easy to see how they're analogous, I would say, to the trappers and traders, the sort of individualist early adopters who came to America.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  There's not the same connections between the people building that technology, building that digital frontier and the tight, high trust communities that might be analogous to the sort of Puritans and Quakers who were the next ones to come to this sort of digital, in our case, the sort of new frontier, in our case, would be the digital frontier. So who are going to be the people who are going to build the build the ships in a sense and build the infrastructure that those trust based communities are going to come come move out of the institutional world into this new ecosystem and in many ways gain a power of network effect that can exist in a trust based network that can't exist in a trust minimized network and it could could really scale. So that's that's a broad way of saying.

• 58:36Speaker 02

  I think we're talking about something that's a many trillion dollar opportunity analogous to sort of what crypto was to legacy, legacy money. This may be analogous to sort of legacy. You could say both sort of credit creation on the finance side as well as credential printing on the university side.

• 58:57Anthony Pompliano?

  If we go and we look at certain regions in Europe right now, there's a lot of debate where the locals say, hey, we have a very specific value alignment. Those values are clear. Those values are agreed upon by the majority of people and that has created a certain culture, environment, society and economy. And there's always things to work on, but for majority of people, they're happy with what that environment looks like. Now, with the rise of immigration, that is being on some hand changed, others would say threatened by people with different values, not better or worse necessarily, just different values being integrated into these societies. If you look here in the United States at the

• 59:40Anthony Pompliano?

  southern border and how porous it has become and the influx, and there was over 3 million people who came to the United States, the most, the single largest increase in the US population in a given year in history. When you look at that, I don't think the debate is as much around values today, but it does seem to be becoming a louder conversation of are the people who are coming here have the same values. Now, in a country in Europe, it is less of a country of immigration compared to a country like the United States, which is kind of the melting pot of the world. And literally, the country was built by tons of people from different countries coming here together. And so how do you look at value alignment and how it changes in certain regions, both in, you know, maybe pick a

• 1:00:23Anthony Pompliano?

  country in Europe and then here in the United States, given the rise of immigration globally and how it has become a controversial, highly debated topic?

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  So I think the, I would say, I'll start with the immigration, which vastly exacerbates the problem. And I think you see very, very sharp conflicts in values in many ways. You're right that I think the US has sort of more of a mechanism for integration than many European countries do.

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  It's arguable you're seeing a breakdown of consensus even outside of immigration, right? Even within the US, you're seeing, even within sort of legacy US populations, you're seeing more and more sharp divisions, even though there's sort of much, much more in common there. So the point is, if even that has trouble finding consensus, if you're seeing a fracturing on that basis, how much more does immigration of people with vastly different sets of values exacerbate that? But it could be that there's just, it could be that, again, in this world, in the world

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  we're in, there is a, we lack the means, we lack perhaps the technological means that you had when you had sort of the television era and three channels, to try to maintain, try to force a consensus at that level of scale. If that's the case, then we need to think about what alignment looks like what's viable. And again, I would probably gravitate toward a fractal model. I do think that we need to minimize, at the national level, we need to minimize disruption. I certainly think that we need to cut back the border crossings. I think Europe has sort of a, they have a burning need to reverse this very, very quickly.

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  But even at the local level, I mean, even where you have different values within a particular city, the natural, it may be futile to look for a sort of consensus across a state, a consensus across a city. It may be that the natural organization of people is sort of fractal where it is at the level of that particular community. The example, again, I gave of the church, right? And you can imagine there's like different churches with different values. And then there's other communities that aren't part of a church, right? Different religions, there's maybe a different set of schools. And move away from this model where you need...

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  Global consensus of things. So part of it is can you change that sort of substrate to trust minimize? That's where the real trust minimize technology value comes in. Can you, where possible, move to something that's trust minimize that doesn't force force alignment of values, doesn't force everyone to agree on something? Second of all, just move certain types of mediation to layers that that allow more localism. So if you, if everyone in the world, if everyone in the US needs to compete to get into Harvard or get into some school that sort of plays the same game as Harvard and has the same standards as Harvard because that is sort of a universal credential hierarchy.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  And there's a set of values that are sort of rigidly imposed through that. That that requires a consensus or it's a de facto imposition of values across all of society. Your economic opportunity effectively comes from joining the party and playing the party game, not much different than it does in China. In a world where you have a diversity of institutions, in a world where even more so, maybe more of your economic opportunity is mediated through, to use the opposite example, you're recommended by someone in your church to someone who owns a business who's going to bring someone on to a

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  to a job that can lead to that same sort of potential economic outcome. You don't depend on that same level of consensus. That happens sort of outward through the local community in a way that lets you lets you primarily work with and sort of invest in those relationships with invest in building, invest in gaining the approval of and building trust with people who generally share your values. And there may be very different communities that have very different values and it's not debilitating. Whereas at Harvard, if it's all one, one status hierarchy, it becomes a sort of all or nothing battle for what is the value system that's going to be rewarded or punished within that hierarchy. So.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  I think the fractal is one solution. The thing about migration that I think makes this particularly hard is you're bringing people often directly into a community and like as much as you can have parallel communities, who your neighbors are do matter. There needs to be a degree of consensus certainly on things like physical and violent crime and enforcement of those matters. That needs to happen at the local level. So there's no digital solution to, you can't have three parallel polities all mixed with each other in one city where one of them has an anarchic view of physical violent crime or you end up like South Africa or Brazil where you kind of need to operate within gated communities and bulletproof cars, which I don't think people find desirable.

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  So there needs to be, there needs to be a degree of agreement at the local level. But I think you'll still see a movement away from, from a model that demands national consensus on everything.

• 1:05:56Anthony Pompliano?

  The United States has historically been kind of the policeman of the world. A lot of people have drawn, you know, allyship with us because they see that we can protect them, we can help to maybe deter potential danger for those countries or certain populations. At the same time, the US has either implicitly or explicitly wanted to outsource their values, whether it's democracy and capitalism or other maybe kind of religious type values and kind of the things that we hold dear here in American society. I wonder in this world where uncertainty and chaos increases, globalization decreases, and we now have more problems at home.

• 1:06:40Anthony Pompliano?

  We see obviously with Ukraine and Russia, we see with Israel and Gaza, it almost feels like we're trying to continue to uphold our promises, but do it via a proxy war rather than a direct intervention. And then when you look at things like the southern border, you say, oh, wait a second here, we have the same problem as maybe some of our allies in Europe do. We are going to have to use money now becomes a weapon in some cases much more than bullets, bombs and soldiers. Doesn't mean that we're not going to use the bullets, bombs and soldiers if and when necessary, but money now seems to be the lever to pull much more quickly than, uh, let's say, you know, kind of, uh, any sort of conflict, uh, participation. And so now it feels

• 1:07:22Anthony Pompliano?

  like some of these issues put a strain on our economy and the Fed is being asked almost to fight the war more so than the military is. And so I have this like theory in my head or a framework where I say Ukraine and Russia, sure, we probably have intelligence capabilities that are being deployed. We probably have some special forces that are being deployed, but really that war is being fought in the Senate and Congress and at the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury more so than it is being fought by our armed services. And so that feels like it can accelerate the economic issues that we're facing as a country because now it's like death by a thousand cuts.

• 1:08:01Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you view the, you know, integration or intersection of the economic problems with what seems to be geopolitical problems that now feels like it's, you know, heads I lose, tails you lose, uh, type situation?

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  So that's a, that's a tough one and that touches many, many issues. I think, I mean, high level, for one, why do we fight it at the, at the money level? Because I don't think there's really that many people who want to go die for a, a battle over in Ukraine. I mean, in many ways, the triumph of the managerial regime means, uh, you have rule by technocrats and technocrats ultimately like to push little levers on a spreadsheet, which is what you can do with money. Uh, there's a very big difference, but theoretically you can push those same levers and send, send military over, but that relies on people who are willing to go risk their lives for that. And ultimately, I Ultimately managerial bureaucrats don't go risk their lives in a society that's been conditioned

• 1:09:00Speaker 02

  to this managerial ethos. You're not going to get, you might get drone operators potentially. You're not going to get people who ultimately display the sort of virtues needed to, I think, truly fight an effective kinetic war, nor when it's, nor when the, there's as much division at home and the sort of, what we're fighting for is as abstract as this. Are you going to find people, even those who would, I mean, the traditional kids of military families, very, very large numbers of them are not, are not sending their kids into the military. You're seeing this situation where ultimately, I think, it is an abstraction of, it is an

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  abstraction of government and it's a move to, what that results in is a result in truly a significant weakening of state capacity. Ultimately, a state that has, that has something that people are willing to fight for, has something perhaps intangible, but it can become very tangible, that's tremendously valuable, that a sort of administrative regime is just not going to have. And you've seen this in sort of late-stage other empires, right? They increasingly, Roman Empire increasingly relied on mercenaries. Many empires increasingly relied on mercenaries and you're just never going to get the same outcome from mercenaries. And I think in our, in our society, you could argue that, I guess, paying for Ukrainians

• 1:10:26Speaker 02

  to go fight is sort of the equivalent of mercenaries at this stage. It's a financialization. From our perspective, it's a financialization and outsourcing of the war needed to achieve the geopolitical goals of the current regime.

• 1:10:42Anthony Pompliano?

  When Eric Prince started Blackwater years ago, I think that he maybe more so than most realized the world was changing, warfare was changing, the ability for the United States, both from a actual ability and a appetite to finance war was changing. And he looks pretty prescient now, given kind of what he created and it wasn't necessarily new. I think maybe it was just the modern version of what has existed literally for, you know, centuries, but even in recent decades.

• 1:11:15Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you view public versus private in warfare? And how much is the US going to be reliant on the private industry? Both for weapons, we see Andoril obviously coming in competing with a lot of the primes. But a lot of these kind of defense contractors in a world where we're not hitting recruiting goals of the military, it almost feels like they're going to become much, much more important in the coming years.

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  It's a good question. It's one that I think I I'd have a hard time saying exactly how that plays out. I mean, I I look to some extent at sort of the disintegration of that public-private distinction. So going back to my point about sort of the tech companies being de facto governments. You you are seeing you certainly don't see a world where I think a lot of people are signing up for the US in a way that matches sort of the public altruism associated with with patriots fighting for their their country. And that that eliminates a large amount of the the sort of public capability. So yes, you need to replace it with private.

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  You need to replace it with outsourced sort of Ukrainians are going and doing it for you. And yes, that's is that public? Is it private? I mean, from the perspective of sort of the US regime, I'm not sure that it's meaningfully different, whether it be Blackwater or whether it be Ukrainians in certain ways. It's you're going to see a what I'll say is I don't know about a sort of shift, but I think you'll see a confusion of those categories, a mixing of those categories. Now, what what strikes me about Blackwater is there was the privatization. There was also the capability. Eric Prince ran an incredibly effective operation in a world where the military has become deeply bureaucratized. And this is sort of the opposite of what you would traditionally think of in public-private.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Traditionally mercenaries would be less effective. They would be sort of they're there for the money. They're less motivated. They're probably less effective, but they're a supplement in certain cases. What you saw with Eric Prince, I think, was you saw he recognized the stagnation in bureaucracy. Of the military and the ability to actually get things done and operate at a higher level on the private side. And to the extent you see that, I think you're going to see a tremendous move in that direction. Whether it be, and that could be, that could be something private like Black Rider. It could be, I think if Texas wanted to create a, if Texas wanted to create a force to defend the border. Equivalent to the Texas Rangers or something, you could see the best of the best join that.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  There would be a sense that they're fighting for something worth fighting for. There would be the ability to create standards. So that's public, obviously, that's at the state level. But it's something that is, it's something that's much closer to home and mission. And it's outside of the, it would be operating in that with a sort of a consciously different culture than the increasingly managerial bureaucratized. Mainstream US military. So either way, I think it's going to be. To some extent, it's a question of culture and it's a question of sort of camaraderie and do people have the ability? Do they have the ability to do what ultimately men are looking to do if they're going to join a fighting force of some sort?

• 1:14:36Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the thing you're most looking forward to over the next five or 10 years? Is it, could be political, it could be something that is technology, it could be personal, professional. When you look out, you know, everyone wants something to kind of aim for, try to achieve or look forward to. What is it for you?

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  To me, it's the paradigm shift that gets to that point I talked about in terms of the reorientation of the world around trust-based communities. So I think we're seeing, we're seeing the chaos and disintegration of a decline of the a decline in trust in the institutions of the 20th century. Legacy institutions largely of the 20th century and really legacy models, very centralized. Models in the beginning of the century. And that, that certainly leaves people feeling like they're missing something. But in many ways, those lost parts, like they already felt like they were, they were already very impersonal. I expect that we see this tremendous sort of sea change paradigm shift toward.

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  Tribal alignment, you could say, people organizing around others, whether it's at the sort of community level or broader tribal level. That certainly is going to create a lot of chaos in the world. It's going to create major, major changes from certain of the comforts people are useful, used to. But with it, it'll create, I would say, a tremendous rehumanization of society. Suddenly, I... You'll be, people will be, people will be spending their day to day working with people who share their values and share their vision. Instead of sort of so much of what, what we give to what feel like sort of

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  nameless, faceless corporations, nameless bureaucracies, where there's no, there's no feeling of meaning. There's no feeling that you're actually building the country you want to, build the America you want to live in, build the town you want to live in. I think we'll see a move toward a, toward a world where most of what you get up and do is, is build a life, build a life with other people who want a similar way of life. I build relationships. The same relationships that might lead to opportunity are also just going to be relationships that lead to fraternity, to camaraderie with other people. And as, as that becomes a layer that, that can offer an alternative

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  to what those institutions offer, those big corporate institutions, it's going to be something that more and more people gravitate toward. And to me, that's exciting. As I said, I think that's a multi-trillion dollar opportunity. I also think it's something that people deeply crave in their bones. They crave the opportunity for, for being part of something like that, whether at a very small level or whether at a, a larger level with national impact. And I think that I... People are gonna find, people are gonna find homes in both of those. That, that change is exciting. I mean, to sum it up, it is in a sense, the sort of paradigm shift in trust-based

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  interaction that, that is analogous to that move from sort of legacy, legacy monetary system and, and money creation to crypto. You'll see a, an analogous and I think a larger move in how trust is, trust is mediated away from these centralized managerial institutions and toward more communal ones.

• 1:18:11Anthony Pompliano?

  When people ask you, what is new founding? How do you describe it?

• 1:18:15Speaker 02

  So new founding, high level, I say a venture firm. It's a venture firm for the American right. I define right in ways that go beyond conventional politics toward really three sets of trends. I, I also say venture firm, it's not explicitly venture capital. We do have a venture capital fund where we'll make investments, but we also build ventures, bring people together for ventures. So high level, fly a flag, be very public about certain sets of values, certain sets of, certain aspects of our perspective. People come to that, people are drawn to that. The, the flag that we fly, the values we state are values that are, in a sense, it's a message that's scarce in society that not many people in our circles publicly broadcast,

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  which means that when people hear it, they get to talk to us about things they might not be talking to anyone else about. We then are able to mediate connections between people, of which capital, venture capital connections may be one, but it may be people, people connecting in other ways to build institutions that can help realize that vision. So what are those values? How do I define the right? That's sort of the, the key question. And, and that is local, like family, household, local, even national self-determination. That to me is the solution to growing global disruption.

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  Growing sort of bureaucratic stagnation and managerial dysfunction is one of the major problems. Solution to that is ownership and skin in the game. One of the key things we stand for, one of the things that anchors our vision is tools that can create greater ownership and skin in the game. Greater cultural and political alienation. We just see widespread cultural and political alienation. We're focused particularly on a resurgence, sort of a re-emphasis on American ideals and Christian values. Again, not necessarily limited to a particular set of values, but a recognition that those are going to be core anchoring points for many communities.

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  And I see those as deeply integrated so that the sort of ventures we build are going to be at the intersection. That's going to my last point that I think decentralized, trust-based technologies will naturally find a home, naturally find early adoption in things like high-trust church communities where traditionally you've had sort of technologists pursuing one of those at one angle and often people who are somewhat techno-skeptical pursuing things in the other in the other community. I believe those are coming together. So to sum it up, venture firm focused on the right, focused on kind of these general themes and at the intersection of often very different circles where I believe these macro

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  trends are going to mean that solutions that bridge these worlds are going to be the winners in this space.

• 1:21:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And where can we say people to find you online if they want to either read more of your writing, learn more about New Founding, or just follow along as you come up with more kind of content for them to consume?

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  So I'm very active on Twitter. Best place to follow me, go to Twitter Nate A. Fisher. You can follow New Founding on Twitter as well. It lets you see sort of the venture firm, it lets you see the new real estate-related project, a local community we're building that's gotten a lot of attention, and the other projects. You can go to our website, newfounding.com, learn about the venture fund there, learn about this Highland Rim project, this real estate project. And also, we have a talent network. We have the opportunity to join our talent network, which ultimately is about connecting with other people around opportunities that build this world. So again, Twitter, @Nadefisher, New Founding and newfounding.com.

• 1:22:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I appreciate you coming on. I learn a lot every time we talk. I think that what you were working on is incredibly inspiring. Hope more people will follow your lead and we'll definitely do this again in the future.

• 1:22:23Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you for having me. It was great.