#1359 Anthony Pompliano on Julian Dorey Podcast About Bitcoin & Deployment To Iraq

Anthony Pompliano went on Julian Dorey's Podcast to talk playing football in college, being deployed in the middle of the season to Iraq, America today, making Facebook millions of dollars, discovering bitcoin, bitcoin adoption, and a theory between the Mafia and the fall of America. Subscribe to Julian's Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDorey ======================= Join me at Consensus 2024 May 29-31 in Austin, Texas. This year marks the tenth annual Consensus, making it the largest and longest-running event dedicated to all sides of crypto, blockchain and Web3. Use code POMP to get 20% off your pass at ⁠⁠https://go.coindesk.com/3Q60F2Q⁠⁠ ======================= Buy and sell cryptocurrency in a tax-advantaged crypto IRA with iTrustCapital. Enjoy 24/7 access, lowest fees in the industry, and tax benefits for your retirement. Open an account today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.itrustcapital.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= 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.

• 0:30Speaker 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.

• 0:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Consensus 2024 by CoinDesk. On May 29th through 31st, I'll be heading to Austin, Texas to speak at Consensus, the world's most established global event for all things crypto, blockchain, and Web 3. I'll be sharing my thoughts on what the next bull run will look like, how it will differ from previous run-ups, and the broad macro investment thesis for Bitcoin and crypto more broadly. That's not all. Consensus has tailored programming for Bitcoin maxis and multi-chain mavericks alike, covering everything from post-having strategies to mining and more. Plus, get ready for the epic showdown, Bitcoin vs. Ethereum at karate combat. That's just a taste of what's to come at crypto's only Big Tent event. Join me in Austin alongside 15,000 other investors,

• 1:37Anthony Pompliano?

  founders, brands, and more to take in all that blockchain has to offer. Get your pass today by clicking the link in the description and using code POMP to save 20%. Again, click on the link in the description and use code POMP if you want to save 20%. And I'll see all of you at Consensus 2024. Today's episode is brought to you by I Trust Capital. Are you buying crypto on an exchange because you're excited about the bull run? Well, I hope you're reporting your crypto gains to the IRS because they want you to pay your taxes. That's right, when you buy and sell crypto on an exchange, you need to pay the government taxes when you make profits. That sounds pretty taxing. There's another way you can buy and sell crypto without worrying about taxes. At I Trust Capital, you can buy and sell crypto inside of a tax advantaged crypto IRA.

• 2:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Crypto IRAs are retirement accounts that work similarly to an exchange, but with tax benefits. Let me give you an example. If you can buy and sell crypto on an exchange and you make a $20,000 profit, you have to pay the government taxes. However, if you do the same thing in your Roth IRA and you make a $20,000 profit, you don't need to pay any taxes. That's right, you get to keep all the profits and not have to pay taxes because it's in a tax advantaged account. So, opening a tax advantaged IRA at I Trust Capital only takes a few minutes. You have 24/7 access to the markets with some of the lowest fees in the industry. The bull run has begun and people are starting to see their accounts go up. So, start taking advantage of tax benefits with an IRA at I Trust Capital.

• 3:04Anthony Pompliano?

  You can start maximizing your crypto investment today. Go to Itrustcapital.com. That's Itrustcapital.com.

• 3:13Anthony Pompliano?

  A bunch of guys get out of the vehicles. They walk down and they're trying to find it. Because remember, the vehicles have a hard time getting down there. They get online and as they get online, they start to walk through a field. And it's a wide open field with trees at the end. And they walk into an ambush.

• 3:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, basically, as they're online, walking through the ambush, all of a sudden, somebody starts shooting them. And they all hit the ground, jump back up, return fire. At some point, one of the guys doesn't get back up. This guy named Sergeant Baum, he's part of the QRF force and...

• 4:03Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up, guys? Thank you so much for checking out the channel. If you haven't already, please make sure you smash that subscribe button and hit that like button on the video. It is a huge, huge help on the algorithm and it allows us to continue to get great guests like this. So, thank you and enjoy the show.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  New York POM's looking like a million bucks these days. I'm used to the hoodie, like, what happened here?

• 4:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I can't disrespect you. If I'm gonna wear the suit and tie on CNBC, then I gotta come. If I'm coming on the most popular podcast in the world, I gotta have the suit and tie here too, right?

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Well, you know what? You look good. You're one of the best top five all-time dressed on the podcast already. So, it's a good start.

• 4:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Does somebody wear a tuxedo?

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Uh, have we had a tuxedo? No. We haven't had a tuxedo, right? Johnny Russo. Johnny, oh Johnny Russo came in here decked out.

• 4:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What'd he wear?

• 4:46Speaker 02

  I'll put that on the screen. I mean, he was, he was iced out, you know, his, his necklace.

• 4:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I can't compete with that.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  That was, the chest was open, guy's like eighty-three years old. He came in here, he came in here with a, with a, with a gold skull cane. And he doesn't need a cane, but he just likes having something.

• 5:05Anthony Pompliano?

  But he had it.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, he has a gold skull.

• 5:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Sometimes they won't let you walk around town with a baseball bat, so you have a cane just in case.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  That's right. You know, you turn around, you hit someone on the head.

• 5:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Better than brass knuckles or something.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. But actually, before we begin, I want to make sure I say this on the record. You and I have known each other for around five and a half years.

• 5:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  And we connected because my friends who were older than me in college were your friends who were younger than you in college. So we never overlapped, but I had heard about you through them. And, you know, one of the things I like is when people come up and do great things like you've done and also get a lot of attention and, you know, to a degree certainly have fame in what you do. As, uh, who they are off camera and who they are as a person is very, very important to me. And when I was, you know, a young kid right out of college and got connected to you and went in to meet with you, I had nothing to offer. I remember coming in that day, December twenty eighteen, and you gave me an hour out of the middle of a Monday

• 6:08Speaker 02

  to sit with me and answer all my questions for no value to you. And I always appreciated that a lot. And then you checked on me when I, when I started doing this podcast. Again, no kind of gain to you, but I just think that's really cool when people do that, especially like when you don't necessarily have anything yet. So I, I appreciate that from, from all those times and, and I hope people know that's, that's what you're like off Twitter too.

• 6:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I learned, right? I mean, I take a lot of meetings that I would consider by most people's standards to say, why is he spending time doing that? But I learned something from every single person I talked to. And if there's one thing in finance, investing, even in, you know, kind of the founder world of building companies, most people get very kind of tunnel vision. And so it's just about what is everyone in my echo chamber talking about? What are the things that they're worried about? And that's just not how the world works. You have to have a very broad understanding of people, industries, different experiences, et cetera. And so being able to talk to as many people as possible and kind of expose yourself to all those different perspectives is really important.

• 7:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And then, you know, I always say to people that when I was younger, I used to ask people all the time for help or get meetings and like do all this stuff. And I could name exactly who helped me along the way. I remember every single one of those people. And a lot of times they didn't realize they were helping me, right? They thought that they were actually meeting because there was something in it for them or something, right? And so there is this element of like, you want to pay it forward. Now, uh, there's also kind of a filter. You don't want to spend time with people who are going to waste your time, right? Or people who aren't serious or don't have something they're trying to accomplish. And so it's usually either there's somebody you know that in common that's kind of vouched for this person. There's some experience they have that you want to gain some sort of insight from.

• 7:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Or it could be, you know, this person comes from a world I don't know anyone in. I don't understand it at all. And I don't even know if they're successful in that world or not, but I want to use them as my first kind of toe dip to understand, is that something I should go learn more about? So sometimes I'll meet with people who I have no connection to, don't know anything about them, but they happen to be in a sector that I've heard other people talk about or something. And it's like, all right, well, let me see kind of what this is about. And time is, you know, very expensive to spend, but at the same time, uh, if you can learn, one insight can completely change your life. And so it's worth it.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Well, it makes sense because you're such a well-rounded guy. You have a lot of knowledge around a lot of things. I know you read like crazy, which is awesome. But you know, that also goes to show like I constantly see you connecting in all different circles and learning from people. But at the beginning of all of it, you as basically a kid, I don't even think you were eighteen yet, you went to serve the country and you were in the army for how long was that you were in?

• 8:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Six and a half years.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Six and a half years and you were over in Iraq for a year, year and a half, something like that?

• 8:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  What made you want to do that?

• 8:53Anthony Pompliano?

  I did like the watered down version of the army. Um, so when I was in high school, uh, I think there was a combination between, I knew I was gonna go play football somewhere uh, in college. Uh, I was a pretty horrible student, but probably not because I couldn't have done the work when there was a class that was I was interested in. Uh, I did pretty well in it, but for the most part, like I just was like, this is all stupid. Uh, literally ninety-five percent of this I'm not gonna need in life. Uh, they're basically just teaching us things to try to get us to pass some test. I don't care about the test. I don't care about the credential. I don't care about like the end result. And so when you're a teenage boy and you've already kind of figured out that what is supposed to take up, you know, seventy percent of your day is meaningless essentially. You got a lot of free time.

• 9:40Anthony Pompliano?

  You got a lot of time to think about a lot of stuff, right? And so where it comes out is like, you're always scheming to like get out of class, get out of school, figure out things to do after school, figure out what parties you're gonna go to on the weekend, do all that kind of stuff. But also figure out like, how do you make money, right? And every kid, I think, kind of always has some element of like, they want to be able to do the things that they want to be able to do. And when you're in high school, like go to the movie theater, right? It's nothing crazy, but like that twenty dollars to go to the movie theater is a huge deal. And so I just remember spending a lot of time doing things that almost were like real world applicable. When I was supposed to be paying attention in school. And so teachers took that as like, this kid doesn't care. He's, you know, really poorly behaved, et cetera.

• 10:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And I bet you if you went back to high school and you asked some of those teachers, it's like the classic story. They're like, this dude ends up in jail or super successful. But like, there's no in-between, right? It's not like, he's not gonna follow the traditional path. He's a smart ass. He like, doesn't care about this stuff. And so when you have-

• 10:37Speaker 02

  What did your dad do? Like, what, did you have an example that you were looking up to with that?

• 10:41Anthony Pompliano?

  But both my parents worked their ass off. Like if there's one thing my parents taught me, it was that. Right. It's just like, you always have to work hard. Um, and so, uh, when you see kind of that as the example, the other thing that my parents would do is if I wanted $20 to go to the movie theater, I remember times where my dad would be like, uh, and he would just look around and be like, go rake the leaves and I'll give you 20 bucks. Right. And so it was like teaching you, again, no matter how stupid the thing was, it was very much like, if you do something, you can earn money, like you're getting paid for it.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 11:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And so as kids, I mean, we did everything. I remember it would snow when we were in high school and I've got four brothers. There's five of us, which, uh, essentially is like a company. Like some people are like, oh, we have a basketball team. We're like, no, we don't need five people to beat people in basketball, but like, yeah, we got like a mini company. And so, uh,

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Five pomp brothers. That's crowded, man.

• 11:31Anthony Pompliano?

  It, it would snow and we would like race around the neighborhood. And I remember that most kids would go to one house and be like, hey, can we, you know, shovel your driveway. And where we lived, uh, the driveways were, um, uh, they, they weren't like super wide, not like a mile long, right? But like, they definitely weren't kind of these short little driveways. Um, and it was like a very wooded area. And so, most people would be like, oh, I'll just shovel a hundred percent of the driveway. So our first thing was like, well, why don't we just shovel tracks? Like the whole point of this is for you just to get out of your driveway. Who cares about the sides of the driveway?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Efficiency.

• 12:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Like, let's just do that. It's way faster. And then we realized, well, while we're doing this, like other people are getting these other houses. So then what we would do is we would like run around the neighborhood and be like, hey, agree. Like let's enter into a verbal contract that we're the ones who get to do your driveway. We'll be back in a couple of hours to do it. Cause we gotta go do like the first three first, right? But we would like essentially try to like build a monopoly. And so like you're doing all these things. And again, you're talking about small dollars, um, but it's very helpful, right? And so, uh, because I knew I was going to go play football in college, um, I got to my senior year and frankly, I, I didn't know what I was going to do, but I knew that I didn't want to continue going to high school. And I knew that I was not in a situation where I was going to like drop out of high school.

• 12:46Anthony Pompliano?

  It was, I'm going to try to make a move that is uncon- Conventional because I see a bright future for myself and I have aspirations and ambition. And so what can I do? And so going into my senior year, I'd, um, my dad had really helped, uh, go and talk to the leadership of the school and say, look, basically like you guys probably will enjoy not having my kid here for a full year. He's just like bull around, right? He doesn't want to be here. He's gonna go play football in college, all this stuff. Why don't we let him graduate a semester early? And I had read about kids who would do this. They would graduate in their, uh, December of their senior year and then they would enroll for spring football in college. So they would, so actually they're going to college early, right? One way is like, oh, you're trying to get out of school.

• 13:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Another way to describe it is like, wow, they graduated in three and a half years from high school and they're gonna go to college.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Smart as hell.

• 13:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, yeah, so smart, right? And the reason why they would do this, they wanted to go through spring football practice and then you could take some of the college classes. So when, uh, fall came around, you didn't have as big of an academic workload. You'd kind of eased your way into college. You had already spent time with the football team, all these components. And so that was one option. A second option was, uh, I was thinking about doing what they call a PG year, postgraduate year, where I could go to one of these kind of like boarding schools essentially. And you go in between your senior year and your, uh, high school and your freshman year of college. And you go to those schools and basically it's a football factory, right? You go there for a year, you get stronger, you get faster. Academics eh, you know?

• 14:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Do the bare minimum, right?

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Show up.

• 14:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and then basically then you, you try to go play. And so, um, I had decided, hey, I'm, I'm gonna graduate early. And so going into that senior year over the summer before, I had to go to school. I had to do extra classwork. So imagine the like, uh, kind of oxymoron of like the class clown who doesn't care about school. The summer between his junior and senior year is going to the school when everyone else is home on summer break, doing extra schoolwork so that he could leave early, right? So it's very unconventional, but it allowed me to leave in December. And so most people would say, that sounds insane. Why would you leave high school right when it gets good, right? Your second semester, senior year.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Such a good time, man.

• 14:59Anthony Pompliano?

  I didn't go to graduation. I didn't go to prom. I didn't do any of that stuff. I was out, right? And what ended up happening is I, I want to go to Duke University. And coaches were incredibly kind. They said, hey, man, you're like, you're like on the bubble.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  So you're still, even though you're around a little bit, you're still getting pretty good grades to be looking at places like this.

• 15:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, I, I basically knew that as long as you got like Bs and you could sprinkle in a C or two, you're good. Right? Like there's a sliding scale in college football. The faster you run, the worse your grades can be.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, and so like, I wasn't fast enough to have Ds and Fs. But I also wasn't slow enough where I had to have straight As, right? This is kind of the way to think about it. And so, um, I really wanted to go there, but I wasn't good enough to get a scholarship. And so it was like, they're like, ah, we got like one hanging around. Maybe we'll get it for you. And so signing day is in February. So like December comes, it's like, yo, you gotta decide, are you coming back in January or not? So I gambled, I said, I'm not coming back. I'm, I'm committed to this. And so, uh, February comes, hey, we don't have any extra scholarships left. If you want, you can walk on. Okay. What else could I do? And so, uh, there's a couple of other schools, Davidson, Brown, uh, et cetera, that I was looking at. They're all kind of like academically, you know, kind of high end.

• 16:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And I was definitely trying to use sports to get into these schools. And I knew that, uh, I was not going to go play in the NFL. Like that was never, I was never confused by that.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  But it weren't the next Julian Edelman?

• 16:28Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 16:30Anthony Pompliano?

  It was just like, this was my ticket to the next step in the game. Right? And so, uh, through a long conflated thing, uh, basically somebody's like, well, what about Bucknell University? And I, I don't even know anything about Bucknell. Where is that? And, uh, they're like, it's in Pennsylvania. Awesome. Uh, and we basically took a tape, we sent it to them, uh, did a couple of phone calls. I think they kind of like, who the hell is this kid? He wasn't on our radar. I'm like, well, you weren't on my radar either.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Who was the coach then?

• 16:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Tim Landis.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Tim Landis.

• 17:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Tim Landis. Yeah. And so, uh, long story short is I decided I'm going to go to Bucknell University. So while I was graduated until I decided where I'm gonna go to school to play football, uh, I got a lot of free time again. And now I don't have free time sitting in the classroom. I got like real free time. So I'm like, well, this is not gonna be good.

• 17:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Not only do I have free time, but I'm like free to roam. I got a car. Right? I'm like, I could roll around.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  What number brother are you by the way?

• 17:29Anthony Pompliano?

  The oldest.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  You're the oldest.

• 17:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So also I got four brothers who are like, yo, you got a car, you're not in school. What are you doing this afternoon type thing, right? So I ended up getting a job first. Uh, I went and I got a job at Quiznos.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Love that.

• 17:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, it was a job. I think I paid.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Character building, baby.

• 17:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I got $7.25 an hour. And, uh, I loved it because I got free lunch. Oh, like this is cake. They're gonna pay me to go here. They're gonna give me free lunch. I'm a genius, right? Um, I'm making more money than all my friends in high school. Look at these fools sitting in the classroom. Uh, and so I started working there and within a couple of weeks of working there, I knew this was not going to be a place that I should get boxed into because a guy showed up, uh, who was working there. He, he wasn't the manager, he was like the assistant manager. And he had a big, uh, like, um, a wrap on his hand, like he had an injury.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 18:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And I remember just being like, sup? Like, what happened to you? And he said, uh, my girlfriend stabbed me last night. And I was like, ooh, I watched a lot of cops, like, you know, on TV. This is like, got it. You're supposed to be one of the leaders here. Like, okay. Uh, Quiznos is a great place. I actually learned quite a bit because you got to interface with customers, do all this stuff, right? But definitely not the place that I like. I'm not gonna build a career here.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it wasn't an end plan.

• 18:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So, uh, I was working five days a week, uh, again, a lot of free time. Um, and you know, at this time, like we'd all just gotten cell phones and like, I think I got a cell phone as a sophomore in high school. Maybe some of my other friends got them when they were freshmen. So like, we could like communicate and they're like sitting in class board and I'm like making sandwiches in board. Um, and so I was like, all right, I gotta figure something out. And this was a little bit further away from my house. Um, and so, uh, I applied for a second job. So I got a job at, uh, Chick-fil-A. So now I got two jobs.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  I see the theme here.

• 19:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so I'm like, I got experience. I know how to serve customers, make food, do whatever you need, right? And so I get a job at Chick-fil-A and Chick-fil-A paid $7.75 an hour, I think it was.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  They were high rollers.

• 19:32Anthony Pompliano?

  So I'm getting paid more to work at Chick-fil-A. But the difference was Chick-fil-A was like a corporation. Chick-fil-A, they were on it. There was nobody showing up with bandages on their hands. There was uniforms, there was on time. I mean, it was a system, right? And so very much I think back to that experience and I found myself scheduling more time at Quiznos, even though it was further away, even though it paid less because I enjoyed the freedom of being able to do certain things versus at Chick-fil-A, I was just a cog in the wheel. And so it was my first time where I realized like, wait a minute, actually chasing like the higher income, but playing the wrong game may not be the thing that you want to do. And so while I was doing this, I was working two jobs at fast food. You know, all my friends are in school. They're like, what are you doing? You're insane.

• 20:18Anthony Pompliano?

  One day a guy walked in in a military uniform in Quiznos and he, and I started talking and I basically was like, what do you guys do? And he was like, we're in the military. And I think it was like a maybe air force guy or something. No disrespect to the air force guys, but I was like, nah, that's not for me.

• 20:41Anthony Pompliano?

  He was talking about, cause he basically was talking about all like the non-combat roles, right? And like, it sounded cool. Yeah, it sounded cool, but I was like, eh, that sounds kind of not for me. And so for whatever reason though, it piqued my interest of like, well, what about the military? I never thought about that. And I only really had two data points that kind of drove that interest. The first was I was in eighth grade when September 11th happened. And I remember I went to a school where there was a lot of families from New York who'd moved to North Carolina. And so many of these kids had extended family members, people who lived in downtown Manhattan, worked in the towers, like all these different things. And so they literally shut school and the parents came and got the kids, right? And I remember being like, what happened?

• 21:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And when I went home, I remember talking to my parents and I think it was my dad who told me something to the effect of like, somebody tried to kill a lot of Americans today. And for whatever reason, I remember just being pissed.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And then I like, and then I remember just like, I'm in eighth grade, like, who am I to care about this? Right? But, but it stayed.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  It hits something in you. Yeah.

• 21:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And then the second was, uh, Pat Tillman. So, uh, Pat Tillman, uh, was a NFL player, uh, who he basically turned down a, I think it was a three and a half million dollar NFL contract.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 21:53Anthony Pompliano?

  To enlist after September 11th, he went overseas. Uh, the story at the time was that he'd gotten killed, uh, fighting the Taliban. Turns out that it was actually, uh, kind of, uh, friendly fire that had killed him. But I remember thinking like, if this guy who is an NFL player who turned down millions of dollars could go do this. Well, why shouldn't I do that? Right? Why shouldn't I consider this as an option?

• 22:16Speaker 02

  What a guy. Seriously.

• 22:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, savage.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  What a guy.

• 22:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 22:20Speaker 02

  I remember that, like, as a very little boy, like.

• 22:23Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  My dad, like, yeah, this guy is leaving, you know, the Cardinals, cause I was a big sports fan. I'm like seven years old, whatever it was. So he's literally leaving to go fight for America. It's cool.

• 22:33Anthony Pompliano?

  It, it, like, imagine being in an NFL locker room and somebody comes in and is like, yeah, I know, like, we got the life. Like, I'm gonna go do this.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And it is incredible. And so it was very inspiring to me to, to see somebody who had done that. Um, and I think that part of it was like, why not me? And so, um, I remember calling around and eventually I get to, uh, an army. Uh, kind of like, I don't know if it was a recruiting video or what, I found something online and it was like, oh, like the army sound like their videos look like this I'm trying to do. Right? They're jumping out of planes. They're shooting guns. There's no pencils and paper anywhere in this video. Like this sounds awesome. Right? Um, and so I walked into a recruiting center and I literally was like, do y'all need help? And they were like, they were like, like physically, you know, like the music stops, right? And I was like, who the is this guy?

• 23:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, and so guy sat me down and he basically was just like, yeah, like they needed a lot of people. And again, going back to kind of the economic incentive, uh, they were offering signing bonuses.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Now, how does that work?

• 23:35Anthony Pompliano?

  They stroke you a check if you sign the paper.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Right there.

• 23:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, the way that it works is, uh, to a seventeen year old kid, I was like, well, damn.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  This is help from Quiznos.

• 23:48Anthony Pompliano?

  If I sign an NFL contract, I get a signing bonus. I'm basically like a free agent right now.

• 23:55Anthony Pompliano?

  How much you talking? And so, uh, it was twenty thousand dollars.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Oh, alright, that's, listen, you're making seven twenty-five an hour.

• 24:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Seven twenty-five, seven seventy-five, and I'm paying gas and all this stuff, right? Guy's got a, a thing on his hand, getting stabbed by his girlfriend, also, I'm like, huh, twenty thousand dollars? That, that's a big check, right?

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Hey, guys, if you have a second, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends, whether it's Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, doesn't matter. It's all a huge help, it gets new eyeballs on the show, and it allows us to grow and survive. So, thank you to all of you who have already been doing that, and thank you to all of you who are gonna do so now.

• 24:33Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, uh, he goes, now, there's a sliding scale for the signing bonus. Twenty thousand dollars, those are the dangerous jobs.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  I said, now you're talking my language.

• 24:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Not only are you gonna let me do the dangerous stuff, but you're also gonna pay me more to do it? You guys are dumb. Like, sign me up. And so, at seventeen, you can't sign the papers. Your parents have to approve it, cause you're under eighteen. So, uh, pretty much up until this point, my parents don't know any of this.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Oh, they didn't, you didn't tell them you were going to the office, nothing?

• 25:04Anthony Pompliano?

  No, nothing. So then, I'm like, alright, I wanna do this. So now, I got all the materials, it's in like a nice folder, you know? It's definitely directed at the young man who's gonna be signing up, not the parents.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, and so, I go and I talk to my mom, or, alright, I'm sorry, I go talk to my dad first, and my dad's like, I'm, I don't want any part of this. I'm not being involved. Your mom is the only person who's gonna give the thumbs up, thumbs down on this. Um, and I had like, maybe four or five months until my eighteenth birthday, uh, at this point, cause I think I, I left in March. So, this is probably like, February timeframe or so. And, uh, I remember kinda like in the back pocket, being like, I could just threaten to wait till my eighteenth birthday, like, they can't stop me. And so, I go talk to my mom, and she's like, like, two seconds into the conversation, no.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 25:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Well, what about in for like three days, every five minutes, what about, what about? And to the point where she finally was like, you know what? You have a lot of free time on your hands.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:56Anthony Pompliano?

  You've been fucking around in school, basically, like, uh, maybe this will actually be good for you. Right?

• 26:02Speaker 02

  And she did a total 180.

• 26:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Some structure, some leadership training, like all these things. And, and I think part of it was she was nervous, but also she probably had some degree of like, you know, I'd be proud of my son to go and, and do this. Um, and so she finally relents. She agrees, uh, she signs the paper and you gotta pick a job. And so you take this test, um, and the test that you take allows you certain opportunities to go through. It's called ASVAP test and I scored pretty well on the ASVAP. And so, uh, I also knew I was going to college though. So now I got like in August, I gotta be there for football at Bucknell University. And we're talking this February, March. So I'm like, all right, what job requires three things is dangerous?

• 26:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Gets me $20,000 check and I can be done with training and back by August. And they're like.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  In the inside of a six month time period?

• 26:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Everything. And they're like, uh, son, we have just a job for you.

• 27:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, what is it? You can be a truck driver. Why is that dangerous? They're like, oh, they try to blow you up. Like, great, sign me up for that.

• 27:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So literally my original contract that I signed was, uh, a truck driver. I was gonna go and, and, uh, I think it was 88 Mike is what they called it, uh, which is the job description. And I was gonna go be a truck driver. I didn't know what I was signing, to be honest. I'm getting $20,000. They told me it was dangerous. I can get back by August. I'm in. Um, and I also had to sign a contract where, uh, I wasn't going to go to a full-time active duty, uh, military unit because I'm in college.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Oh, so they were gonna give you the flexibility on that. They're not saying just like enroll.

• 27:41Anthony Pompliano?

  At the time with the Army National Guard where you could basically go serve in a National Guard unit. You would go once a month for four years and then after you got out of school, you're supposed to do ROTC, come out as an officer and then you would go serve your active duty time. So kind of reverse it. Most people do like three or four years active and then they have some reserve time and then they get out. This is kind of the reverse and it was a program. Again, you're trying to get people who have some degree of intelligence, etc. Come into the military. You want to train officers. You want to go and they knew we're gonna be fighting this war for a while.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  This is still Iraq at the time, obviously, right? It's like 08, something like that?

• 28:22Anthony Pompliano?

  This is 2006. I'm going through all this.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 28:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I go to basic training. Basic training was cake. Cake. Like this is like normal Army basic training. They're like, do pushups. I'm like, this is fun as shit. I remember going through basic training and literally the drill sergeants would like, call me over. And there's another kid, I forget his name, but like the two of us would get called over and they'd be like, look at how good our guys are. And they'd just be having to bang out pushups and shit and they were like joking with us. And that's when I realized, I was like, wait a second, this is supposed to be some super complex, hard thing that like breaks people. And it's like fucking dudes crying and shit. You know, like bitch.

• 29:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Who are fucking doing pushups, right? What is going on here? It's like, you're probably not gonna make it, right?

• 29:09Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but it's a very testosterone filled environment and all that stuff. But what you realized was like, first of all, I'm 17 years old. There's guys there that are in their early twenties, mid twenties, etc. So like you have an advantage. You're just young and like probably stupid. Two, you're physically fit because I'm gonna play college football. And three is, it was the first time in my life I realized, wait a second. The better that you are at basically like they can't break me type stuff and I actually enjoy the pain, they respect you.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And so then it just became a game, right? They called us smoking you. So if you did something stupid, they basically take you outside. And I remember there's one kid, this kid is fucking animal. They would literally bring him outside and they had to do something called iron mikes, which basically you put your hands behind your head and then you just do lunges and they would just be like, walk to that like telephone pole out there and walk back, like iron mic it. Like half a mile.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 29:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. And like the dude be like falling over.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:59Anthony Pompliano?

  But he never complained, never complained. And I, I remember this kid's face like he's just seared in my brain. Cause I remember just being like, dude, that guy's tougher than me. I don't know if I could do that, right? But like that dude, they smoke him every day. Cause he's always doing dumb shit. But he don't complain. And so guess what? Eventually they're not gonna like mess with them anymore. By the time we were ready to leave, they loved this kid. And so it was very much just like high pain tolerance, right? And, and understanding this. But while I was there, I realized that there was basic training and then you go to your job training. And I started doing some math and I'm like, oh shit, I'm not gonna be back by August. Hmm. The job training I'm going to is gonna get me back in September. Okay, that's not gonna work. But I signed a contract.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Excuse me, Mr. Army?

• 30:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no like, uh, just kidding.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  I'm going to Lewisburg.

• 30:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So, um, uh, so I met somebody, uh, in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where we were doing the basic training. And he was like, oh, I'm going home by August. And I was like, what's your job? He said, I'm a combat engineer. I said, damn, that sounds way cooler. And you're out by August? Alright, I gotta talk to somebody. And so I literally got transferred. I changed my job while in basic training. And again, it was this game of like, the rules apply until you change the rules. Right? And so if you're stuck in basic training in the army, this thing that like, you shouldn't be able to change any of the rules. I just made the argument. I said, listen, actually you guys need more combat engineers than you need truck drivers. I looked at the numbers.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  I see where a young pomp was. I can see it now. It makes sense.

• 31:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and so, uh, they allowed me to change. I went to job training and I was out. I actually got out like the last week in July and I showed up to play football in August. And so all of that training, everything, by the time I roll up to college, they're all like, yo, what did you just do? Hmm. Cause I hadn't told the football coaches.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  Oh, you didn't tell them you en- you enlisted?

• 31:49Anthony Pompliano?

  It's none of their business. Something I'm doing for myself. And so I show up and when I was in high school, I think I weighed like 195 pounds. You know, I was training every day, lifting, all this stuff.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Slot wide receiver?

• 32:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I was a safety mainly and I was going to college to play receiver.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 32:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And um, when I got there, I weighed 170 pounds and I couldn't bench press two, 25, one, three times. And they were like, where did you go? Like you just withered away because I had been in basic training in the middle of the woods in the heat of the summer in Missouri.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And so that started the journey of like, I gotta put on a lot of weight. I gotta get strong again and I gotta build it all back up. But it was worth it because it got me into the military and allowed me to play football at the same time.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Okay, so you play football, I guess like freshman year, maybe sophomore year. At some point mid-career, you were called into war.

• 32:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, people, people today, I think are always surprised by my daily schedule. Like, how do you do so much stuff? I mean, I've been doing this shit literally for two decades, right? So when I was in college, um, I would go to classes. My freshman year, um, my parents hate when I explain this to people. I got a 1.8 GPA.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Oh, that's good.

• 33:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Or, uh, yeah, 1.8 GPA.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  That's like Drake Rogers' numbers right there.

• 33:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I was, uh, trying to recreate my success in high school, just, you know, take some numbers off of the GPA.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So 1.8 and literally the first semester freshman year, I just didn't go to class. Like, I was just like, this is awesome. We just play football. Like, this is incredible. And when the grades came out, I remember the coaches called me in the office, they were like,

• 33:31Anthony Pompliano?

  like, dude, you, you basically get a 1.8, uh, and that allows you to play next year? After this year, you have to be above a 2-0.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And me being like, oh, there's grades, like you guys are gonna get the grades, like, okay, all right, got it. And so, uh, I, I forget what class it was, but I remember one of the teachers, like, after this meeting with the football coach, came back and was like, oh, I made a mistake and he changed everyone in the class's grades. And my GPA went from 1.8 to 2.1.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Love that guy. Let's go.

• 34:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I rolled back into the football office like I was walking down the red carpet. I was like, hey, motherfuckers, I got a 2-1.

• 34:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And they were like, well, your, your trophy for getting a 2.1 is you now have to go to a remedial class five days a week for like three months. And it was me and there was like four or five other freshmen. I remember sitting in that class and they checked every day to make sure we were there. And it was this guy who wore a three-piece suit. He had these eyebrows that looked like he had flames coming out of the side of his head. And

• 34:34Speaker 02

  What was his name?

• 34:34Anthony Pompliano?

  His, I forget the guy's name, but his whole thing for these like three months or, or six weeks, whatever it was, was the teachers had a speed read. That, that was the point of this. And so I remember sitting there thinking like, yo, I really think the athletic department thinks that if we get speed read, we're going to be like, get better grades. Like that, that's obviously why they sent us here. And so this whole thing was a complete waste of time. But after getting those first grades, I said, I'm never ever going to be in this position again. And I never got below, I think I got 3.5 or 3.6 the rest of my college career. And so to this day, I'm pretty sure the football team is convinced that that remedial class taught us all how to get better grades.

• 35:13Anthony Pompliano?

  It was just an effort thing, right? Like if you don't study, you don't get good grades. If you put the effort in, then you get good grades. And so while I'm doing school, I'm also playing football. So you can imagine early morning workouts, practice, games, all that stuff.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  You know, I was around all the, all your younger brethren there. I saw that schedule.

• 35:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And then, once a month, I'm going to army training. I'm going to our local National Guard Unit for an entire weekend and doing stuff.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 35:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And so there were times on game days where it overlapped with these weekends. I would go to class on Friday morning. I would go to practice on Friday afternoon. I would then go to the National Guard Unit, check in. I would go back and sleep because we had to check in for football and be in our rooms by a certain time. Then I would wake up on Saturday morning. I would go Saturday morning for prep for the game, play at like one o'clock, leave after the game, go back to the National Guard Unit, do that until they let us go for the day, then go out and party with my friends. Obviously you got to get that in, right? Be up till two, three o'clock in the morning. Turn around and go back to the National Guard unit.

• 36:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Do whatever they needed me to do. And then depending on how the schedule works, some days we had Sunday off. Sometimes we would do Sunday and have Monday off. I might have to go back to play football or go to like football practice and film and stuff. And so you go through all this and you're just like, you just got to get it done. There's no complaining. There's no telling people, ah, I don't want to do it this weekend. You just got to get it done. And so from a very young age, it was just like, how do you have a high capacity for work and be able to do this? So when junior year rolls around, uh, I get a phone call. We're two weeks into the football season. And it is, uh, the lieutenant who is at the National Guard unit. And he says, uh, calling to inform you that you've been, uh, uh, selected. Is one of the members from our unit who's going to get deployed, uh, to Iraq. And I said to him, I said, yeah, yeah, uh, there must be a mistake. Like I'm in college, like,

• 37:09Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm, I'm Gucci. Like, I got four years. Read my contract. If you need, I could bring a copy over. And he goes, no, that's only if you're an ROTC are you protected? Because ROTC is the officer training. I was in ROTC because football practice and ROTC stuff would overlap a lot. And so it wasn't possible to do football, school, ROTC plus National Guard. So I wasn't doing ROTC stuff. And so I said, oh, so what happens if I don't come? And they're like, you go to jail. And I was like, I'll be there. So this is, uh, for about a week, I'd gone back and forth with them. And then finally it becomes obvious like, I'm, I'm gonna go. So on a Thursday morning, I walk into the football offices and I tell our football coach, uh, I said, hey, uh, I'm not going to be able to, uh, to play in the game this Saturday.

• 37:54Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, he's like, don't worry, you weren't going to play anyways.

• 37:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? But, but I'm like, uh, yeah, I'm going to get deployed. And he looks at me and he goes, shut the fuck up. That's what he says to me. Right? Now, the one problem with telling him on that Thursday morning was literally the night before, we had played a prank on this same coach. And told him that our star running back had gone to the train station and was going home and he was quitting college. Like we're like fucking with him. So he was not in the mood to joke around, right? Cause he'd been pissed the night before that we were playing with him. Uh, and I was like, no, I'm serious. Like when I walk out of this office, I'm going up to the dean's office and I'm withdrawing from school. And he was like, what?

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Wait, withdraw? How does that work? Like withdrawing from school or just saying like, hey, I have to.

• 38:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So, so basically what you do is so there's a federal protection. If you're a veteran, you get deployed, the school can't not let you come back.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  Understand.

• 38:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So, but you have to withdraw. You have to let them know, hey, I'm not going to be in classes and stuff like, I'm not going to be attending.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 38:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, so I walked up, dean's, the management at Bucknell was incredibly gracious. They understood. They said, okay, great. So then I got to walk over to the football practice and people have been practicing and you know, it's like a small college of, I don't know, five, 6,000 people. Uh, the football team, everyone's like, yeah, where, where is he? Right? Like, like anyone's missing at any point, everyone's like, hey, where is he? Um, so I walk out there and I don't have any of my equipment on. So everyone was like, did he quit? Like that motherfucker quit, right? Like a loser, right? Um, and so I, I walk out there and, and the head coach says, uh, he goes, uh, he, he's got something to tell you guys. And I tell them, uh, you know, I, I've withdrawn from school. I'm going to be deployed, uh, all the stuff. And I remember one kid, he just stands up and goes, yo, like you going to war?

• 39:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, yeah. I mean, yeah, that's blunt, to put it bluntly, yes. Like that, that's what we're doing. And so, uh, uh, the next morning, I remember I went to the locker room. They were leaving for an away game. And, uh, it's raining outside. Uh, I'm like saying goodbye to them. I literally don't know if I'm going to see these people again, right? And, uh, it was like emotional. It was weird, right? You're like a, I think I'm at this point, I'm probably 20 years old. And you're like saying goodbye to other 20 year old dudes and like college football is very much, you know, family oriented, like all this stuff. And you're like, I will like, see you later, big dog. Like, you know, hope I come back. Um, and so they leave for the game. I drive to North Carolina. I spent a week with my family.

• 40:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And then the following, like Wednesday or Thursday, I'm there and, uh, no, no, no, I, I show up to like go on this deployment. And the way that they do it is that you basically go to training first. Uh, the, the thing about the national guard is, uh, you're basically asking citizens to be ready at any time to do anything that this unit may be called to do.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Very unique.

• 40:41Anthony Pompliano?

  It's unique, but it's also, it's very difficult for those individuals, right? If you think about it, imagine having one foot in as a soldier, one foot in as a citizen. And so it's very much the onus is on these individuals to be ready, right? To be physically fit, to stay kind of mentally sharp, all this stuff. And they may get called because there's a flood. They may get called because there is some sort of, you know, other natural disaster or situation. In Texas, they may get called up to protect the border, like all these different components. Or they may get called to go to quote, quote, "real war" in the Middle East. And so thankfully, before they send you, they send you some training, right? They're like, hey, maybe we should like treat you full time for three months before we send you over there. And so we went through a bunch of training. When you're going through the training, frankly, it kind of feels like you're playing, you know,

• 41:26Anthony Pompliano?

  cops and robbers in the woods a little bit, right? They're like, they're like, "They're shooting at you." You're like, "Well, I know they're not shooting." Like, "That's a fake gun."

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Shut up, Jim.

• 41:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, obviously, that's not a real gun. And they're like, you know, set off a thing, it's like a sound machine, right? And like, "A bomb went off." And you're like, like, "Not really."

• 41:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, "Okay." Right? So like, you're trying to take it seriously, but also you can imagine like it's impossible to recreate actual war, right? And in those scenarios. But, and we can talk about it later, when we get to Iraq, that training saved our lives multiple times. And so even though we were fucking around and you kind of looked at it as, you know, "Hey, this is stupid," right? Like, kind of like the cops and robbers in the woods, you know, type mentality. It worked, which was pretty incredible for, you know, again, a kid who was playing football, going to college, going to parties on the weekend, to three, four months later, I'm sitting in the middle of Iraq, right? With a gun in my hand, being like, "I hope the army, you know, prepared me."

• 42:28Speaker 02

  And so what, when, when you first got there, where, what was your, what was your role on the ground? Like, and what kind of, were you with a unit of all National Guardsmen? Or were you put in with guys who had already been there?

• 42:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the way that they did it is this unit in particular was, I think, the only National Guard unit at the time who had this vehicle called the Striker. And so a Striker is like, just think of it as like, the coolest badass vehicle that the army had at the time, right? And so as combat engineers, again, what does that mean? They pitched it originally as like, we got explosives, we're gonna like, go blow shit up. Like, awesome. When you get to Iraq, you sit in Kuwait for two weeks, and basically they get you acclimated, they kind of teach you all this stuff, they show you, you know, videos of soldiers getting beat up, and they're basically like, keep your mouth shut if this happens to you. You know, all these different components of like, trying to prepare you. You fly into Baghdad into the green zone, and they did not, they do not, it's probably the

• 43:24Anthony Pompliano?

  number one thing that scared the shit out of me first in Iraq. They do not tell you that when you're flying in, the helicopter is going to take like, evasive maneuvers. So it starts like, kind of flying in like, like a unstructured way. And then all of a sudden, it also, upon landing, we came in at night, it shoots off flares in case anyone's gonna like, shoot like an RPG, I guess, or some sort of like, you know, like anti, like a missile or something. And so I'm sitting kind of near the back of the helicopter, all of a sudden we start doing this, and the flare starts going off, and I'm like, are they shooting at us? We ain't even been here yet. I have not even been on the ground, and these dudes are already shooting at us? Wait till I get off this helicopter. Right? And then like, the guy who was like, part of the crew of the helicopters, like, pipe down,

• 44:09Anthony Pompliano?

  kids, like, it's just the flares. You're like, okay, well, that'd be nice to know before we land. Yeah. And so there's a lot of that going on, like, when you're, especially when you're in some of these combat roles, it's kind of like, shut up and get over here. And like, if somebody shoots at you, shoot back, right? It's kind of like the mentality. But there's not a lot of prep work sometimes. And so you gotta kind of, you know, keep your head together and not just like, react wildly to any situation, especially at this time, because the rules of engagement were changing quite often. So, 2004, 2005, if you're going to a house, and you think there's a bad guy in it, and you kick in the door, and somebody runs out the back, you can shoot them. Target house, somebody's escaping.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Guys, if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button, please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank you.

• 44:59Anthony Pompliano?

  The first time that anyone got blown up in Iraq, we saw guys running through a field at 3:30, 4 o'clock in the morning with guns. And we had a call for permission to shoot. Like, I don't think they're getting coffee.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? A bomb just went out. They just tried to kill somebody. They're running through the field that obviously they, the, uh, you know, the detonation device came from with guns. What do you think they're doing? I had to call for permission and I remember the gunner of our vehicle called and got asked three or four times, are you sure they got a gun? Like, motherfucker, I see they got a gun. I got night vision and thermal imaging on my gun. They definitely got guns. Do I have permission to fire? And so you can imagine the difference between, you know, one extreme, which is pretty much anything goes. It's like, quote unquote, real war. And we are invading a country. And so you can imagine all the brutality and, and, you know, just kind of nastiness that goes with that.

• 46:00Anthony Pompliano?

  To kind of the bureaucratization of war, where now like you got to get permission to do shit. And so you can imagine, like, why do we end up in the situation we're in to some of these wars? Well, like, if you train people with a skill, but don't let them use the skill, not really going to get the result you want.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Now you said in there, you mentioned when you're coming in the green zone. There was a movie literally called that with Matt Damon. But can you explain that to people? Cause this, this, this is kind of like a forgotten part of what Iraq was like once we got in there. That's very fascinating to me.

• 46:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Greens was basically like the safe area. Think of it as like our most fortified position in Iraq. Uh, it was in Baghdad and, uh, it would be nearly impossible for someone to get inside the green zone who wasn't supposed to be there. Lots of checks and security and all this kind of stuff. And so the green zone also, when you have a very fortified position and we talk about position, we're not talking about like a square block. We're talking about like, We took over the heart of Baghdad essentially, right? Um, and we have the full might of the US military, both the army and other armed forces protecting this area. That is where you are going to take off from, you are going to land, that is where you're going to resupply. That is like the heartbeat of US operations in all of Iraq.

• 47:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And so from there, you then have outpost, which are areas that people may be, some of them are very large, very large bases. We were based out of one called Camp Tajji.

• 47:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Literally, there was a swimming pool on the base, right?

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Nice to meet you.

• 47:32Anthony Pompliano?

  The people doing the paper and pen, I then learned I might have not taken the $20,000 and just hung out with them because they were fucking chilling, right? But then you have the combat arms who are going out and kind of doing the things that they're doing. And then you have like very, very remote out bases, which could literally be one building or like an old police station or something like that.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Got it. So you, what was the name of your job again? Combat engineer?

• 47:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  Is that right? Okay.

• 47:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Bait.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  And you were bait. Why do you call it bait?

• 48:02Anthony Pompliano?

  That's what we were. We were bait. We basically, uh, majority of what I did in Iraq was something called night route clearance. Basically, what would happen is there would be a road, they knew five o'clock, six o'clock in the morning, someone's going to drive down that road. They've got resupply, um, could be troop movement, could be, you know, all kinds of different things. And what we were trained to do was to go out in the middle of the night. Uh, we would go out in what they call skeleton crews.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  How many?

• 48:24Anthony Pompliano?

  In a, in a normal vehicle, let's say, uh, like a striker vehicle, I think it can hold like 11 or 12 people. And so you got a driver, uh, you got, you know, kind of a commander of the vehicle, you've got a gunner and then you can carry, you know, called eight to 12 people in the back. Uh, we would go out with five people in that vehicle. We'd have the driver, we'd have, uh, one gunner on the actual, uh, kind of 50 cal machine gun. We'd have somebody as the commander of the truck and we'd have two guys out the back. Uh, in other vehicles, uh, we had specialized vehicles specifically for this task. Uh, there's something called a husky. Basically what they would do is we would drive them on the sides of the road out in front of us. Two of them and their job was to try to visually locate IEDs before we got to them. And it's exactly what it sounds like. We're clearing the road at night for people who are going to come behind us.

• 49:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And so that bait is not just try to find the IEDs, it's also try to get them to attack you. Because if you can clear the road, then the people behind you will be able to go swiffer.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  How many days a week were you doing this?

• 49:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Every night.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  Just every single night?

• 49:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it was fun as shit. I'd go back and do it in a heartbeat.

• 49:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, you gotta remember, right? Like, you're doing this. Um, there is something incredibly intoxicating about driving down the road uh, in a vehicle at 12 miles an hour, slow as possible. Everyone else is going fast as shit. Speed deters a lot of attacks. We're going slow and we have floodlights on the outsides of our vehicles to light up everything around us so we can see better, but also so they know we're here. You want to attack somebody, attack us today.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  You got a rush from that?

• 49:58Anthony Pompliano?

  You are doing this with guys that you know very intimately at this point and you feel like there's no one who could fuck with you in the world. And as you're rolling down the street, when people try to, whether it is they're shooting at you, they're trying to blow you up, or literally they're just fucking with you, trying to make your life hard, you there, you get a feedback loop, right? And you realize like, yeah, we're good at this. And so as you're doing the night route clearance,

• 50:26Anthony Pompliano?

  when you first get there, it's like any job, right? Like, okay, well, in the manual, it said, uh, this is what we do, you know, we, we see a potential IED. There's some trash on the road. Okay, everyone stop, call it in. Uh, we think that we see an IED. And in training, they're like, you, we had robots. Like, there's a guy who could control a robot. He'd like put it out. It's called a Talon. And uh, he could like move it up there. And we remember being so impressed in training, like the uh, the pincher on the robot could like pick up an M and M and not crush it.

• 50:53Anthony Pompliano?

  We're not getting fucking blown up in Iraq. We got a, we got a robot, right? Oh, if you identify the IED, like call in uh, EOD, which is the Explosive Ordnance uh, Division. I think there was a, a movie about this guy, you know, puts on the whole suit, walks down, he's supposed to like actually.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Hurt Locker.

• 51:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Hurt Locker, right?

• 51:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, call those guys. They're gonna come disarm the bomb. It's gonna be this great thing. When you get there, there's trash everywhere on the road. You'll, you, you won't make it down the road if you stop for every piece of trash. So, guess what our SOP, our standard operating procedure became? Run it over. If it blows up, it was a bomb.

• 51:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And so these vehicles, that's what they're designed to do is get blown up. They have something called a V-shaped hole. So when the explosion goes off underneath it, it basically dissipates the energy and pushes it out to the side.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  This is where the military industrial complex comes up with some good shit. I gotta give them a ton of credit. Shout out North of Crumman, whoever the fuck Lockheed.

• 51:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Have to put that in there.

• 51:49Anthony Pompliano?

  The way that this, the way that our unit operated is you basically would rotate these positions, right? And so each squad would take certain roles on different missions. And some of it is you're doing it frankly, so guys just don't get bored, right? Do the same thing every single night. Some of it is, again, there's like this psychotic element of like, well, if somebody's gonna get blown up, like, I hope it's me today, right? Why do they get to have the cool story? Like, I mean, literally, there's some of that stuff going on. And so when you get into these Husky vehicles, these vehicles are designed specifically to get blown up, but also you're the only person in the vehicle. So think of like a, it basically looks like a tractor. And you're getting in it and you've got a little box around you. There is no gun up top.

• 52:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Your gun is the only gun on that vehicle and you have your rifle in the vehicle with you. And when you get in this vehicle, you know that the probability of any vehicle in this convoy getting blown up is higher in this vehicle. But there is no one to help you if you get blown up. Because

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Wait, why is that?

• 52:47Anthony Pompliano?

  There's no one else in the vehicle. You are solo in this vehicle. And so if you look up,

• 52:52Speaker 02

  Is this it right here?

• 52:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Husky Army vehicle. It, you'll, you'll find it.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  But Okay, that's a striker right there. You were talking about that one too.

• 53:00Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the striker. So the Husky vehicle is you're basically going to, yeah, just pull up one of those. You can see that top there, those two flaps. You basically drop in to what is that kind of boxed in windowed area? And then you pull these flaps down on top of you.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Like a fly trap.

• 53:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And you're in that vehicle and, and you can see that there's these panels on the side there that those panels actually come down and they can scan for mines underneath the ground.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Now, this is in like 08?

• 53:31Anthony Pompliano?

  This is, yeah, this is 2008.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  God, what do we have now?

• 53:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you have all that stuff. Guess what? We never put the panels down. Never. Takes too long.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Oh my God.

• 53:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Drive over the fucking trash. If it blows up, it's a bomb. And so what ends up happening is when you get in this vehicle though, here's where it really fucks with your head. When you get in that vehicle, we started to put tourniquets on our arms and legs before we got in the vehicle. Cause God forbid you get blown up in that vehicle and actually get hurt. No one's coming until they can fight through whatever the ambush is and get to you to help you.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  So you'd have it already tied, ready to roll.

• 54:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So what you have is you have it loosely applied to the tops of your legs. Like kind of near your groin area and you have them on your arms. I have pictures of myself and other guys getting into these vehicles with it. And we would literally practice. If I get blown up and my right arm is gone, how do I put tourniquet on with my left arm? And you gotta practice. And so you can imagine psychologically, you're getting in a vehicle, you're excited. Like I'm out in front, I'm leading the way, right? But I can't fight back. And if I get hurt, I'm on my own. And so there's all these components to it that you go through it. But what you end up realizing is it's a lot like life. There's like the way you should do things. But there's a trade off. Efficiency, right? Cost, et cetera.

• 54:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if we're gonna go do multiple miles of a route and clear it and we gotta be back here in three hours. We better be moving, right? We gotta be going or we're gonna just sit here all day. And now that route can't, people can't go down that route until we're done. And so going through that experience, what you start to realize is like, oh, I see. The real world is actually about people getting shit done, not what is in the manual, what was the training, et cetera. It's really just, okay, given all of the inputs, given all of what I understand about our desired outcome. How do I make decisions? And at the end of the day, the people on the ground are making the decisions. It's not somebody back in, you know, some command center. They got no clue. They got no clue we don't have those panels down.

• 55:34Anthony Pompliano?

  All they know is when I ask these guys to go do shit, they get it done on time. And when that route goes, is hot next, uh, and somebody goes down that route, they don't get blown up. These guys always clear the route. So you just learn over time what to do and kind of what the on the ground truth is versus, you know, what you're trained to do.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  You got blown up, though, while you were there, right? You were in some of those convoys when that happened?

• 55:56Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the first, um, the army does a very good job, uh, doing, uh, transitions. So the most, two most dangerous times in, uh, kind of deployments are basically like the first two to four weeks and the last two to four weeks. The first two to four weeks, you can think about the fact that you're new. You don't know the routes. You don't know the people. You don't know that, hey, that cinder block's never been there before. That's different tonight, right? What, what, what's going on over there? Um, and then also the enemy pays attention. Every day a vehicle goes by and it's got the same marking on it. All of a sudden, there's a new one. Had never seen that guy before. Wait, next day, I haven't seen that guy before. Oh shit, they're transitioning and they know.

• 56:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And so attacks ratchet up during those first two to four weeks and last four to, uh, two to four weeks. So it's very dangerous. And so what they do is they basically do like a left seat, right seat. At first it starts out like a hundred percent old unit, zero percent new guys. Then it's like 90% old, old unit, 10% new guys. And then it eventually gets to 50 50 and then you kind of fully transition over and it's a hundred percent new guys. And so I think it was the first or one of the first missions that we went out, uh, as a hundred percent our unit without the guys we were taking over from. Uh, we're driving through in the middle of the night, going super slow. Um, I'm standing out the back of, uh, the striker, um, and you know, you're up there, you're watching shit. You got your gun, uh, hoping that either it's really quiet or like, let's just get this shit popping.

• 57:21Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, second we get outside the gate, like, but anything in between is like death by boredom, essentially. Um, and all of a sudden, uh, we're going through kind of a very small town. Uh, I just hear a just real close, like right past our heads. And, uh, growing up, I didn't play with guns a lot. I didn't do any of this stuff. And the guy who's standing up beside me, uh, from Western Pennsylvania hunts all the time. And I just look at him, I go, what was that? He goes, I don't know, but I've been, uh, I've, I've been hunting a lot. That was a fucking bullet, get down. And we just dive into the vehicle. And so immediately everyone starts calling out that there's a potential sniper. Um, we can't see, it's pitch black. And not only is it pitch black, but they can see us easily.

• 58:06Anthony Pompliano?

  We're illuminated. And so now we're sitting inside the vehicle, but basically you, you gotta choose. You're gonna sit inside the vehicle all night or you're gonna get back up there and try to find this guy. And so, you know, we're searching, everyone in the convoy is searching, we can't find him. So, okay, keep moving. That should have been the red flag. But we just thought, hey, you know what? Maybe we're wrong. Right? We have headsets on and stuff so we can communicate with each other. Uh, it's the middle of the night, two, three o'clock in the morning. Maybe we're tired. Do we imagine it? Right? All, all these things are going through your head. It was one, why didn't he shoot a second time? All this stuff. And so we keep driving. We get out onto, uh, um, a main supply route. And, uh, the unit we took over from, they had nicknamed a stretch of this road as IED alley.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, IED alley has become a, uh, um, a phrase that people use for a lot of parts of Iraq.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Each unit kind of has their own sector that they're responsible for. And there's usually a road in there that that's where the IEDs go because it's a great place to place IEDs.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  Right? I've had some guys mention this on the show.

• 59:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And so for us, there was this one stretch of the road. Um, and it was perfect for the enemy because basically what it was was a very long stretch. There was nothing. There was just fields on both sides. There were telephone poles on the street. So they could actually time how fast we were moving by they could just time. Okay, between telephone pole one and two, it takes them X amount of time to get there. Well, if they keep that speed, I know when I can detonate this thing and hit them. And then on both sides of the road, there were these big, like, uh, what we would call like waddies, like basically, um, uh, drainage ditches. So it made it nearly impossible for our vehicles. If we wanted to pull off of the road and go into the field, we would have to go to a crossover, like a road or a bridge area to get over these things to be able to go get these guys. If we want to send a vehicle.

• 59:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, um, we're driving down same night and all of a sudden, uh, I just hear a massive kaboom and the shock and the energy wave that just goes through. Go back to the training. All of the stupid cops and robbers in the woods, every single person in that convoy immediately starts screaming out, IED, IED, IED. You didn't even think it just the training kicked in and you're just like, holy shit. Somebody just blew up one of the vehicles. And so very quickly, um, we basically were the first vehicle in the convoy that had a weapon system on it that could actually defend us. And so, um, without kind of explaining too much of the detail, basically we maneuvered ourselves near the front of the convoy. And there was a vehicle in the back that maneuvers.

• 1:00:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And so now we've got basically 180 degrees in the front. They've got 180 degrees in the back. The vehicle's in the middle. They're looking out each side and we've created essentially a little bit of a circle.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Anthony Pompliano?

  That we're going to try to figure out what's going on here. Now, when IEDs go off, there's one of two options you have. You can basically stay in place and you can try to figure out what's going on, right? And try to locate the people, et cetera. Or if an IED goes off and immediately it's a complex ambush where people start to shoot as well, one of the best defenses is just what they call get off the X. Just get out of the kill zone. Right? They've set everything up to try to kill you in this one area. If you get out of the area, they can't kill you. Right?

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:01:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, and so, uh, no one was shooting. So bomb goes off. It's the Husky. There's a, there's a, a gentleman that's in there. Uh, the vehicle literally gets lifted up almost perpendicular to the ground and slams back down. He, only thing he suffered concussion.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 1:01:29Anthony Pompliano?

  The engineering of these vehicles are incredible. Right? I mean, think of a roadside bomb that is buried in the road. He ran it over. They correctly set it off right underneath his vehicle. He got a concussion.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Now, so you, you got someone in there and was he knocked out?

• 1:01:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I guess, or? Because you're trying to assess the situation. Hmm. Right? Again, he's on his own. And so there's this element of, a lot of times what you're trained in the military and it's very, um, it's not applicable a lot of times in business because you're not talking about physical, uh, kind of, uh, security or safety. But let's say that you're in a firefight and if somebody is laying out in the middle of, uh, an area and they're wounded. If I run out there and I go and try to save them before I've neutralized the threat and I get injured, now we got two guys that are injured. So a lot of times it's actually better for you to fight, neutralize the threat and then go get them.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:02:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And there's a, a rule in the military that for every one wounded soldier, it takes two to carry them.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So if you take one out of the fight, you actually took three of them out of the fight. And so again, what you're doing is the training takes over. I know this guy unless he is dead, he's gonna be okay. He's got tourniquets. He's got the ability to communicate, and he's in a vehicle that's built to go through this. Our job is not to look inwards. Our job is to look outwards right now and find these guys. So we find these idiots running through the field and call it in, immediately command is like, uh, what happened?

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't know. We got fucking blown up.

• 1:03:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. And to the credit of the people who are in the convoy, they're all amped up. Somebody just tried to kill somebody, right? Like, they're ready to fucking go. But the command back at the base is like, are you sure? And they don't have eyes on them. They can't see anything, right? They're like, are you sure it was an IED? Like, fucking yes, we're sure, right? And so it was the first mission we were on also where tempers flared, and you could tell that like, almost think of it as like, the middle management and the executives, they're gonna butt heads now, right? Because the middle management's like, I understand the problem. I have visual confirmation of what happened, what is happening, and I'm trained to go do something.

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  And they're like, did the doctor touch you in the wrong area?

• 1:03:43Anthony Pompliano?

  No, they're like, they're like, yo, if you do something stupid, like, you could go to jail, because now everyone's freaking out about Americans, you know, shooting people. And so eventually, we get permission to fire. And now the striker has a 50 caliber gun on it, and that gun has almost like a video game type joystick, and he's able to switch between night vision and thermals and all this stuff. And so he fires, doesn't hit anything. Oh, shit. Imagine trying to hit a couple hundred yards away, two dudes running through in the middle of the night, and they're moving, and you basically got a joystick and you're trying to hit them. So you can't shoot where they are now. You gotta shoot where they're gonna be.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:04:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So now you're playing it literally like a video game, right? And so he eventually gets closer and closer and closer, and then shoots. One guy goes down. Second guy keeps running. And so as this is all happening, we've called in what's called a quick reaction force. And so in that quick reaction force, their job is to show up and basically bail you out of shit. They know they're coming because they're something happened, right? Their job is to show up and bring immediate violence of action to help us go from what could potentially be a fair fight to now it's an unfair fight in our advantage, right? So those guys are showing up right as all this is happening. And so a bunch of

• 1:05:07Anthony Pompliano?

  guys get out of the vehicles. They walk down and they're trying to find it. Remember, the vehicles have a hard time getting down there. They get online and as they get online, they start to walk through a field. And it's a wide open field with trees at the end. And they walked into an ambush. And so basically, as they're online, walking through the ambush, as they're walking, all of a sudden, somebody starts shooting at them. And they all hit the ground, jump back up, return fire, shoot, jump back up, return fire again. At some point, one of the guys doesn't get back up. This guy named Sergeant Baum, he's part of the QRF force, and he was shot right in the head. And probably, there's two things that

• 1:05:52Anthony Pompliano?

  happened that day that I don't think people quite understand. And it's kind of on the, maybe like, the opposite ends of the barbell, in terms of what American soldiers have to do in war. On one hand, you have an American soldier who runs over to Sergeant Baum. He basically starts administering first aid while still firing back, because he's in the middle of an ambush, right? And so, insular, trying to take care of his soldiers. He doesn't know this guy. He literally has never met this guy before, right? But that guy showed up to save him. And so administering first aid while shooting back, incredibly heroic. At the same time, eventually, American soldiers push through the ambush, they get down into the trees, and they find the guy. It's one guy, who is the second person who had not

• 1:06:36Anthony Pompliano?

  yet been hit. And he was the one who was firing at them.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  So one guy was ambushing from the trees?

• 1:06:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Because basically, you couldn't tell, right? It's still kind of, it's still nighttime, he's just spraying.

• 1:06:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And I always say that if I had been the soldiers who walked up to him, I pray I was as good as men as they were. I don't know if I would have been. They didn't kill him.

• 1:06:59Anthony Pompliano?

  They would have every right to do it, right? What'd they do? They captured him. They called in a helicopter to airlift Sergeant Baum out and they put that guy on the same helicopter and they saved his life. And so when you look at that, you say to yourself, man, that is the challenge American soldiers have on the battlefield, where we watch videos every single day of brutality, of torture, of violations of the Geneva Convention. That's commonplace. This is war, right? When the American people think of war, they think of it from the perspective of, oh, it's like playing Risk, right? Like, oh, we just moved some troops over here. Like, no, this is fucking savages trying to kill each other

• 1:07:42Anthony Pompliano?

  and they will stop at nothing. And so in that situation, those soldiers saved this dude's life who just tried to kill them. And that guy ended up having an amputated leg. Later on, our leader of our squad, basically like my boss, he had to go to court and testify in Iraqi court that this was the guy who did it. And when he came back, I remember asking him, I said, what'd you think? And he said, I sat there the entire time and I thought about pulling my knife out and slicing this dude's throat. Fuck this guy, right? But again, human emotion, everyone has. But the ability to control it, to be

• 1:08:25Anthony Pompliano?

  a professional, to understand where the line is, that is what Americans are held to the standard.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:08:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And so that whole situation, you look at it and you're like, man, that is not something that other countries normally have to be held to that standard. And so it changes the battlefield because now what you have is you have the ability and violence of action to do certain things, but it's like doing it with CNN.

• 1:08:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Having a camera on you at all times and being like, let me, I'm gonna play Monday morning quarterback and make sure, ah, you shouldn't have done that.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:08:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Whereas if the roles were reversed, they wouldn't have just killed an American soldier in that situation. They had a fucking torch at them. And then killed them and then paraded them through town, right? And as they deal with the Blackwater, uh, uh, contractors would have burnt their bodies and hung them from a bridge.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:09:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So that's what you're up against is you, you're allowed to have brutality and do your job to align. But you gotta be able to literally pull a trigger and then know, let me put it back on safe and capture somebody, even though every single ounce of my body is telling me this is evil in a human body. Can't pull the trigger. So that's just the, the challenges of battlefield today.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  Now, you're there in oh, eight, oh, nine. It's been five years since we went into that war and I'm always careful. I said this, especially with veterans who were there. You know, I, I think sometimes we misappropriate politics with the, the military members who are following orders to go do what they do. And I think that the, the guys who went to these wars and fought, obviously were doing their jobs and I don't have any issue with that whatsoever. But there's a lot of speaking Monday morning quarterbacking. There's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking about that war in particular. Much more than Afghanistan or something. Iraq, it's like, okay, well, why did we go there?

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  And you, in this case, aren't going there when it's fresh. Operation Iraqi Freedom or something like that. You're there when we've been there. Al-Zawahiri has now been run a while. He's dead at this point, but like the remnants of him, which would later form ISIS are all there. And it's, it's kind of a hellhole at this point. Was there ever a thought in your brain? Obviously you're doing your job. You're told, I gotta go out and do this and you're trying to execute and save lives. But was there ever thought in your brain of like, well, what the fuck are we still doing here?

• 1:10:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, of course. And I think that's every soldier who's ever been in any war, right? There are Russian soldiers right now in Ukraine who are saying that. There's Ukrainian soldiers in Ukraine who are saying that. There's, you know, Israeli soldiers, there are Palestinian citizens, right? I mean, there's all these different people who, um, the politics overlay is very tough. One of my favorite ways to kind of think through this is Marcus Luttrell has a great speech that he did. Marcus Luttrell, for those that don't know, uh, he's a Navy SEAL. Uh, if you ever watched the movie The Lone Survivor or read the book, uh, he is the survivor. And he basically says, listen, your job as a politician is to do everything in your diplomatic power to keep us out of war.

• 1:11:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Do everything you possibly can to get along with other people, get deals done, solve problems, do all these things. War should be the last resort because God knows that when you call me, I am going to fucking kill everybody in my path. That is what I am trained to do and I will bring hell with me because that's my job. So if you do your job, you don't need me. But if you can't do your job, I'm gonna do mine and mine is a very different tactic. Right? And so when you think of it from that perspective, there is diplomatic things that were done that were great in the Middle East. There's other things where we probably failed. And so naturally, um, the whole invasion of Iraq, we are undefeated in invading countries.

• 1:12:12Anthony Pompliano?

  The United States of America is

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  We're pretty good at that part.

• 1:12:15Anthony Pompliano?

  A plus at invasions. You, there are a ton of books you can go read about the invasion. We are stellar.

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:12:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? There is not a fighting force in the world that would ever want to see the American flag coming down, looking at invading their country. Those fuckers put down their guns and they run, right? But we are not so great at nation building.

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  We are really bad at it.

• 1:12:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  How many times have we said this on this podcast, I want to see?

• 1:12:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if you put those two things together, it's called war.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:12:46Anthony Pompliano?

  But we're real good at starting them. But the nation building is hard. What is, what does success look like, right? Think about it from a business perspective, or think about it from anything you've ever done in your life. Okay, I'm gonna go do something. Let's start with what is the desired outcome? What is this, the finish line? What does success look like? And the problem with most wars that we fight directly or indirectly is that it is unclear. Because usually either leadership has not directly established and said, this is what we're trying to do. Or we have multiple people in positions of leadership who have different ideas of what they want.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:13:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And so to the average soldier, they don't care about that stuff, right? One of the things that people in the military will tell you, if you talk to them, is they don't give two shit about that. Once they're there, they're not really fighting for the thing on their shoulder. They're fighting for the names of the guys on the chest next to them.

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:13:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And so there's this element of they're proud to be an American. They're proud of a country and the ideals and the ethos and all these things that we stand for. But when bullets are flying, they're not patriotic, right? In terms of the bullet, the bullet doesn't give a shit what country you're from, what language you speak, what your education level is, what your story is. It just knows science. And so those guys end up fighting for each other because they want to come home. And so it becomes this very, very disconnected thing where the planners, the decision makers, they're looking at it from a strategic standpoint. The guys on the ground are looking at it from a survival standpoint. It's, I'm here, I can't just call someone to get me out of here.

• 1:14:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm fighting to make sure that as many of these guys come home with me. And so that disconnect is probably one of the biggest reasons why there are a lot of veterans in combat arms who over the years have become very frustrated. Is it goes back to like, what is happiness? Happiness is having as little difference between expectations and reality as possible.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:14:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? When you think about it from a soldier's standpoint, well, the soldiers are less frustrated when their expectations of what they're doing meet reality. But if you tell them, hey, we're gonna go conquer this, you know, area, they're really evil people, all this stuff. And they spend 90% of their time and they don't see any of those evil people. Like, well, what are we doing here? I've been driving around this fucking town, right? I see women and children. I see, you know, people trying to go to school. I see a guy trying to build a business, right? What's going on? And so what you have to do as a leader of these ground units is you have to remember and remind your teams, it's not about the everyday. 100% of these people are not evil.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:15:25Anthony Pompliano?

  We're looking for the 1%.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:15:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause those motherfuckers are not going to be out in the street. They're hiding in the shadows, right? And those are the guys we gotta find. And so, again, remember, you're asking 18, 19, 20, 22, 25 year old men, in many cases, in these combat arms, to make those decisions. Their brains aren't even developed.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:15:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And guess what? You gotta have them be able to turn it on when they need to turn it on, and then you ask them to turn it off at certain times.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  That's tough.

• 1:15:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I know 50 year old men who can't do that.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so it's just, um, it's very complex. And I think the people who haven't lived through it, they just look at it and they're like, oh, I just don't kill good guys.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, because it's easy to turn on the TV and watch three talking heads debate a topic for seven minutes and then think that you understand what the fuck is going on. You don't. You know, I don't pretend to sit here and I've been privileged to sit across from a lot of people like you, who have been there, done that, right? I don't sit here and pretend to understand what that is. I don't. I grew up in New Jersey. It's pretty good here, right? But there's an element, when you look at it from the political ends of the people who are sending you there, where first you can think of like the money and, you know, the military industrial complex and constantly having war as a, as a source of power and gain. Okay, put that aside for a second. The second layer of it is something that you kind of brought up in there that's a great point,

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  which is that so many of these people sitting in Washington DC seem to have it in their mind that in country X around the world, as someone is dying at the hospital, hopefully they're not dying out there. But anyway, someone in, in these, these countries around the world, they're gonna be what we want them to be.

• 1:17:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  They're gonna love democracy. We're gonna show them how great, we're gonna spread democracy, show them how great it is, and they're gonna love it. That's not what it is. There's a line I talk about a lot in different podcasts that is from a show, Homeland. It was, I think it was season four or season five. There was this terrorist in this show named Hakani, played by Newman Akar, who played a fucking great terrorist, by the way. But, you know, bad guy, awful dude, like your stereotypical, you know, blow people up kind of terrorist. But he was talking with the CIA director Saul Berensen, who he had hostage in the show. And they're going back and forth. Saul's trying to have him see it his way, like,

• 1:17:57Speaker 02

  why are you doing this, whatever. And he says to Saul, he goes, "America hates what it can't understand." And for a minute, you know, again, it's just a TV show, but I'm like, there's a little dose of truth in that. And what ends up happening is you get all the people who are a part of the war machine that are trained to do it caught in the middle of that while some dudes, you know, playing fucking gin rummy in the Capitol Club on whatever, K Street, you know, are like, yeah, seems like a good idea. That never escapes me.

• 1:18:31Anthony Pompliano?

  I tell friends all the time, you want to know what the average Iraqis like? They're like you.

• 1:18:37Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? They're trying to live their life. They're trying to make a better life for their family. They're trying to pursue, whether it is economic, security, happiness, freedom, etc. But guess what? If somebody came here and tried to kill somebody we knew, whether it was intentional or not, where's the fucking guns? Let's go. Right? Imagine the American response if America was invaded.

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:19:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, I always use that there was a point in time, right around 2007 to 2009, there was something called SOI, Sons of Iraq. And basically what the United States figured out was like, hey, we don't have enough soldiers to put checkpoints all over this country.

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:19:25Anthony Pompliano?

  We need to teach the Iraqi people how to do this. And so they created this coalition, essentially, and they went and they recruited people. And what they said was, this is your country. You young men, you sons of Iraq, you have to be able to defend yourself. Because one day, we're gonna leave. Probably not anytime soon, but like one day we're gonna leave. And so during this time period, they basically tried to train these people. They helped them set up checkpoints at the beginning and ends of their towns. They really kind of put a lot of time, energy and money into this. And it probably changed the war for quite a while. Because now all of a sudden, you didn't need American soldiers there to deter things. Because now what you had was you had the sons of Iraq who were willing to defend their own country.

• 1:20:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I've always said, America is full of the equivalent. There's a lot of people. And you can look right now, how many people are willing to step up into roles in their local community? But also, even if you look at like the border crisis, there's a lot of people who are doing a lot of things.

• 1:20:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:20:30Anthony Pompliano?

  That may not be quote unquote sanctioned, right? By the federal government, but they're saying enough is enough. I'm gonna defend my family, my community, my land, etc. And so I always think back to that push by the Americans is probably one of the most American things we did in Iraq.

• 1:20:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What I wish we would have done on top of it is we should have been able to teach them or to give them economic freedom. And the problem is that when you're the hammer, you're always looking for the nail.

• 1:21:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:21:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And so most of our soldiers, if you give them a gun, that's the mentality they're in. But if we would have been able to lift some of these individuals in these communities out of their situation, without having to leave their community, it would have changed the face of that country.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  How do you do that though?

• 1:21:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, with the internet, it's much easier, right? Historically, you would have had to make physical things, right? You would have had to figure out how to operate a physical business, etc. But with the internet, right? What would have the impact been in, let's say, Iraq? If you could have taken every 13 to 18 year old male and taught them how to code?

• 1:21:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, again, it's not like, you know, you see today in American kind of conversation, people are like, oh, learn to code. It's not that, right? But it is with the internet, you are able to democratize economic activity, right? And if you're able to take someone off of the potential battlefield by giving them another path, it's no different than in American cities where we talk about, hey, this kid's got one or two options. Either they find a way out or they're gonna join a gang. Right? It's very similar is if your entire family joins the gang, you're probably gonna join the gang.

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're gonna join it.

• 1:22:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Right? And guess what they're saying?

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  It's a cycle.

• 1:22:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And guess what they're saying? We're gonna defend our country. We're gonna defend our town. Yeah, no shit, right? If I was a 14-year-old boy in Iraq, you know what I'd do? Give me a gun. Tell me where to stand, right? Show me where they're coming from. And let's see what happens. I don't care what vehicles they have.

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  Did you make a distinction on that too? Cause like, obviously you're dealing with that 1% where you do have some people who, before you got there, were hardened terrorists, right? But then you have a lot of people who maybe, after the invasion happened, again, it's their homeland are like, what the fuck? You know, all the door-to-door stuff is going on.

• 1:22:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, they came in my house. They kicked in my door and they killed my dad.

• 1:22:55Speaker 02

  And do you, so when you see that, was there some sort of distinction made between like those types versus like the hardened types?

• 1:23:05Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the, it's unclear because frankly, you don't get to talk to a lot of them, right? You, you don't know, like, one of the things that is missing in society generally is just like, we don't talk to each other. Right? Yeah. Twitter is a perfect example. I hate you, right? It's a real tweet. There was a guy, uh, maybe, I don't know, a year ago, saying all kinds of crazy stuff in the internet. I just DM'd him. I say, hey, man, you wanna get on a call for five minutes? I'd love to just hear, hear your complaints, right? Just tell me, like, I love feedback. We got on a call. By the end of it, he was like, dude, I love your stuff.

• 1:23:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I literally wanted to like, take all the tweets and be like, like mail them to him for Christmas. Be like, dude, what the fuck are you talking about? Right?

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  Oh, that's so good.

• 1:23:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, um, that is like the definition of society, is that we now, it's all about like scoring like intellectual points, right? Or like the internet points. And so you, you unfortunately, uh, there's language barriers, right? There's all kinds of things that are at play in the complexity.

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  Hey guys, if you haven't already, please make sure you go subscribe to our other channels here on YouTube to support the show. We're posting different daily content on Julian Dory clips, best of JDP and Julian Dory daily, every day, including mid-form and short-form clips. So if you haven't already subscribed to those, please go subscribe by hitting the links in my description below. Thank you.

• 1:24:20Anthony Pompliano?

  But I I've told a story before where I remember driving down the road and we used to at times if we had extra stuff that people had sent us that we didn't need, we would like throw it out to Iraqi children etc. And they would like fall. They knew that we had like candy or whatever, right? We would throw it to them. And I don't, I want to be careful to not position like every soldier is great, right? Yeah. There are definitely soldiers, like remember, you're at war, you don't have a lot of oversight. There are people who do dumb shit and frankly do stuff that are counter to Sure. Things that we should be doing as a country, right? So it's not everyone, but majority of the soldiers, I would say 95 plus percent of them are there to do the right thing, try

• 1:25:04Anthony Pompliano?

  to follow the rules, you know, do their job, go home. And I remember driving, and I don't know how old this kid was, 12, 13, 14 years old. It's the first time I ever saw a kid with actual hate and evil in his eyes. And he was looking at us, he didn't have to say anything. You just knew, if this kid could, he'd kill us. Thousand yard stare? Just, just the way he looked, it just, for whatever reason, it just was a international, if I was walking down the street and I saw this kid and I wasn't here in an armored vehicle with a gun in my hand, I'd probably cross the street. I don't want, I don't want trouble, right? Yeah. But this guy, he wants, he wants the trouble. And so, again, he's 12, 13, 14, maybe 15 years old, right? And you see that, you're just like, man, that's a hard life, right?

• 1:25:46Anthony Pompliano?

  That is a hard life for a kid who has that in their eyes and their heart to then grow up. What do you think? That doesn't go away, right? And so, it's no different than certain generations of Americans who, you know, if you go and you talk to them, you know, oh, I hate a certain nationality or something because back in the war, right? Yes. Same thing here. And so when I saw that, I just remember being like, man, this shit is, this shit is just nasty. And so it goes back to the Latrell quote. It's just like, look, we need politicians who are strong leaders who are able to go ahead and actually do what they can to prevent us from going to war because we have the best fighting force in the world. And when you send them somewhere, they are going to fuck shit up.

• 1:26:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And it is not always the direct damage that you're able to assess. There's a lot of collateral damage that is hard to measure. And so if you look today, you know, one of the big questions, and we don't know the answer, right? There's a lot of speculation, a lot of conspiracy theories, none of that, just a very direct question of how many men? Did we piss off during the global war on terror? Who now see an opportunity to come into our country and cause trouble?

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  A lot.

• 1:26:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe, I don't know what the answer is. Maybe it's zero. I don't think so, but like it could be zero, right? Or it could be a lot. And part of it goes back to, you can't walk around a battlefield with roses. Right? Like it's war. There's bad people who are trying to do bad things. So you gotta do shit to neutralize them.

• 1:27:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:27:20Anthony Pompliano?

  But there is this collateral damage. And so this is a story as old as time. People used to infiltrate uh, or invade lands and they would rape and pillage and kill and do all this stuff. And guess what? There'd be a lot of bad stuff there too. Right? And so I think that's just happening, you know, now.

• 1:27:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I, and that's kind of the endless cycle of it where no one. How do I say this right? It's like, it's just human nature. It's not really that someone's at fault there. Like if you are put into a situation where war actually is necessary and you can argue some wars, maybe they're not, but let's say World War II, for example, pretty goddamn necessary. The people who are sent there both have their job to do. And then as a result of the, that is the highest emotion situation you can be in. Literal life and death, bullets flying by, your buddy's getting killed, like rah rah rah. You're gonna have feelings about that afterwards. You're just got like, there's no way around that. So

• 1:28:20Speaker 02

  sometimes cynically, I'm like, there's, there's kinda, because that's gonna then affect the next generations. Because those people go home, they have kids, they tell their kids about the war, there's certain emotions and attitudes that are formed socially towards perhaps other people or areas of the world. Cynically, you kind of have a spout of an endless cycle of there will always be some form of war in the world. And I hope we get to a point where yay, world peace. We don't have that. But like, I do try to live in reality, and I don't think I'm going to be alive on this earth at a point where there is not some form of serious conflict that involves people on the ground against other people on the ground in some way hurting each other.

• 1:29:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, not only is that true, I would take it even two steps further, which is the reason why military recruiting numbers are down so much is because there's a bunch of guys who understand reality. And they realize that leadership is trying to optimize for something else. So when you get into all the DEI stuff, when you get into all the transgender stuff, when you get into this thought process that certain people or genders, etc., are going to be able to go and fight at the same degree that, you know, American males, 18 to 25 years old are, right?

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  So stupid.

• 1:29:40Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see it, and look, it's always in my experience in dealing with this stuff, it starts with somebody who has good intentions. But damn, there's a lot of good intentions that lead us to bad places, right? So it's never somebody who's like, ah, I'm gonna figure out a way to like, you know, eat the American military from inside. That's not what's happening, right? They're trying to do the right things. It's just you make one bad decision, that's compounded by another bad decision, it's compounded by another bad, and the next thing you know, you're 10 years later, you're like, holy shit, how did we get here?

• 1:30:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're kind of at a point in society where, again, you talk about intention, great point. We want to be in a place where we don't hate on other people. Totally agree. But we've taken that to such a point that like, we'll celebrate things that you don't need to celebrate, so to speak. Meaning, they will, they'll, they'll get injected into things like our military, where suddenly we're worried about quotas with, like you said, you know, how many transgender soldiers do we have? Listen, if someone's transgender, I love them, that's great. I'm not concerned about whether or not they have representation in the military. And actually, like, it's somewhere where you may go and get shot and killed, so I don't feel bad telling you that you might not have the best representation there.

• 1:30:50Anthony Pompliano?

  These are first world problems.

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:30:55Anthony Pompliano?

  It always cracks me up because whenever I hear people talking about, you know, some of these topics, it's always like you haven't spent time around blue collar industries, blue collar people or the military. You want to know who some of the most quote unquote racist from an external view people in the world are? Soldiers. You put a black soldier, a Hispanic soldier, an Italian soldier, all these people in the American military together, they don't have anything to talk about other than racist jokes.

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  I saw where you were going with that. Yeah.

• 1:31:28Anthony Pompliano?

  That's, that is the like through line of their conversation, right? Is they will say something like, oh, uh, make him do it, you know, because uh, that's all his people do is they just carry shit around, right? And he'll be laughing like, oh, shut the fuck up, you know, uh, you're, you're what? And like, and they'll just go back and forth about it. And it's endearing because they're actually friends. Right? And if you go onto a construction site, if you go to these areas, right? People who have respect for each other are actually building deep bonds. And again, I'm not talking about racism where like one person is saying something and the other person uh, feels offended, et cetera. There's no offense being taken here, right? And so when you look at that, you say to yourself, wait

• 1:32:10Anthony Pompliano?

  a second, that is just a reality, whether we like it or not, like that is how these groups of people operate together. Um, so when you have the like quote unquote coastal elites who sit and say, well, you guys can't, uh, can't talk like that. You know what these guys do? Their, their human nature? Fuck you.

• 1:32:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had Dale Comstock sitting right there saying that.

• 1:32:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Literally, that, that is their reaction. You, how are you going to tell me how I can talk to these guys, right? Because guess what? When the bullets fly, guess what I need to know? I don't give a shit what the color of the guy next to me is. I need to know that he's not going to put his gun down and run away. Right? And that, those are like the realities on the ground versus kind of this top down uh, perspective. And so I don't know what the right answer is, right? Uh, yeah, we would love to all wave a magic wand and be able to achieve all of the objectives that these, you know, kind of coastal elites have and also keep the reality on the ground. It's just you can't do both. It's a trade off. Life is full of trade offs. And so I do go back to this idea of like, what is the point of the US military? The point of the US military is defend this country and at

• 1:33:11Anthony Pompliano?

  a moment's notice, go anywhere at any time and execute immense amount of violence on our behalf.

• 1:33:19Anthony Pompliano?

  That is what the point of the military is. The point of the military is not to fucking checkboxes on, you know, different things, et cetera. So if you go and you talk to soldiers on the ground, they don't give a shit. I don't care where you're from. I don't care what language you spoke. I don't care your education, your wealth, any of that shit. Can you fucking shoot straight? When we go in this house, if I go right, are you gonna go left? Right? When you pull that gun up as you go left and you're presented with two targets and one's got a gun and one doesn't, are you smart enough to not shoot the innocent person? Right? When I get shot, are you gonna be able to carry my ass out of here so I don't die? That's the shit that they care about.

• 1:33:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:33:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And there's stories that I wish more people would tell and, you know, I know we're talking about some business stuff, but like one of the ideas that I would love to see come to fruition and if there's somebody out there that wants to do this, I would love to talk with them and figure out how to make it a reality is I would love to see a movie production studio get built that only tells these stories of patriotism to help inspire an entire new generation of Americans to understand what America stands for, why it is important and what many men in combat arms have done in order to preserve it. There's a story of a gentleman named Mike Day. And a lot of people don't know this story, but Mike Day is Navy SEAL.

• 1:34:39Anthony Pompliano?

  He went into a building and was shot 27 times while in that building. He walked into a room, there was an ambush, shot 27 times, he was hit with a grenade, got knocked out. He neutralized, I believe it was four people.

• 1:34:54Speaker 02

  There's no way he lived.

• 1:34:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And he walked to the helicopter to get airlifted out.

• 1:35:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Mike Day is one of the biggest fucking American savages that ever walked this earth.

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:35:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And most people don't know his story. And so when you look at that, he got shot 27 times. Mike Day took his life a couple of months ago.

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  Oh my God.

• 1:35:18Anthony Pompliano?

  But when you see this, this guy not only was a great American in the sense of being able to go serve our country, develop other young men as soldiers, be a great leader, but he also, one of the most heroic events in the war. Most people don't know. And so when you see that, why did he walk to the helicopter? That's like the most heroic part, right? Is he got shot 27 times? Holy shit. The story is that they went into the building, he went right into a room. There were four guys in there. As soon as he walks in the building, they, they killed, I believe, the guy in front of him. He walked in second, gets shot up a bunch of times, falls to the ground. They think he's dead. He pulls out his pistol.

• 1:36:01Anthony Pompliano?

  His hands are like shot up and stuff. Pulls out his pistol, kills two of the guys while laying on the ground. Somebody throws a grenade. He gets hit with it, gets knocked unconscious. They now think he's for sure dead. He then comes to, the other two combatants in the room are still firing at his friends and he kills both of them. He gets up, there was so much fire going on in terms of firefighting that the SEALs had backed out of the house. He calls his friends and says, hey, I'm alive. Come get me. And then he proceeds to get up and clear the rest of the house, goes room to room, making sure that there's no other bad guys and there's no innocent people. If I remember the details correctly, he finds

• 1:36:43Anthony Pompliano?

  a family in the house, rescues them, brings them outside. And the way he told the story is the reason why he walked to the helicopter, because it would hurt more if his guys carried him. And so you sit there and you say, and you go back, you know, why did I go in the military? Fucking Pat Tillman can do it. Right? How many people who didn't want to go into the military, who didn't get told the stories of heroic, heroic actions by our soldiers, hear these stories and then say to themselves, you know what? Maybe it's pretty damn important that we have people go into the military ranks. And in the most extreme case, you're going to war, right? That is a potential option. But in the like lowest watered down version, you're actually going to get leadership training. You're going to become disciplined.

• 1:37:28Anthony Pompliano?

  You're going to be able to get all these life skills, right? And everything in between. We just don't tell a lot of stories.

• 1:37:35Speaker 02

  It's a high price to pay to get those, but you get it at the highest level as a result. That's, that's wild though. So this guy just committed suicide.

• 1:37:44Anthony Pompliano?

  He just committed suicide, um, which, you know, again, you, you kind of, you hear that whole story, right? The guy lived for almost a decade, I think, since.

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was 07.

• 1:37:54Anthony Pompliano?

  07. So, you know, the guy lived for what 15 plus years after that incident. Imagine what you went through and that was one incident. He Navy SEAL, right? Like how many other things he went through in his life? And eventually couldn't take it. And so you get to that point and you just say to yourself, man, these guys are willing to dedicate their lives to this stuff. And it feeds into like, okay, look at the American economic situation. We're spraying money around like we're Santa Claus around the world. We got plenty of problems in our backyard.

• 1:38:32Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:38:33Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not saying you gotta pick one or the other, but I am saying that if given the choice, we gotta make sure we take care of our people.

• 1:38:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And then, trust me, we got plenty of money. We'll be able to help other people too. But we can't do, help other people at the expense of our people.

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  It's the same thing as like a relationship, right? If you are really fucked up and you have things going on and you do not help yourself with that first, how are you gonna help your girl? Right? I, I don't, I, I view it. When it comes to the US and we're, we're gonna talk about this in a little bit in more detail because you're a financial genius as well. But, you know, that, that is a great point. Like we, we really.

• 1:39:17Speaker 02

  That train at some point will crash because we are on, on a one-way road to do that. And I think that, you know, it, it just, it really affects me when, when I hear stuff like that because you, you just look at the numbers of it. Shot 27 times. Clears a whole, I forget how many rooms you said, but clears all these rooms in a house, walks out to the helicopter. Or whatever. The guy is is a is literally supposed to be like this bulletproof. American warrior savage, but then for whatever reason, because again, he's unknown to people like me. You know, and years later, after surviving all that shit, that's just one story. I'm sure there were a lot of others too. He can't, you know, he he's been put in a position where he feels.

• 1:40:03Speaker 02

  Like he can't take it and that that's so heartbreaking to me.

• 1:40:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And and look, part of it is, um, Mike Day is not the guy who's plastered all over the news, right? But if you go and you talk to SEALs, people in special operations, that's who they look up to.

• 1:40:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? It's like, yo, that guy is a fucking savage, right? And so it's all relative to some degree in terms of, um, everyone has someone they look up to. And at the highest degrees or levels of the military, sometimes they look up to each other.

• 1:40:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:40:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And when you think of how does a great organization operate? Usually it is you get a bunch of A players together, you set the standard really high and then they hold each other to that standard. And that is the epitome of what, uh, you know, special forces, Navy SEALs, et cetera, do. Is you have A players who have gone through immense amount of training and selection to be in the room. And then they are all filled with imposter syndrome that I may not be good enough. And if I'm not good enough, if I'm not on my best today, the guy next to me dies.

• 1:41:05Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:41:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? That's a pretty good incentive to make sure that you're on top of your shit.

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I think a lot about now bring that into the business world. How many organizations can actually say they have A players? Everyone likes to think they're an A player, right? But an actual A.

• 1:41:19Speaker 02

  These days, not as many as as as I'd like to see, I'll tell you that.

• 1:41:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, eh eh, part of it is there's probably a societal thing going on, but but even more so is the, let's just. Hold constant and I probably think it's it's more true than not is like, there's just as many A players today as there were 20 years ago. In the in the aggregate number, the problem is that usually companies don't get a lot of them together. Right? So what ends up occurring is you have maybe one or two A players in the company. Then you got, you know, a good number of B players and you got a ton of C players. Well, you're only as good as your worst people.

• 1:41:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:41:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So you get a C plus organization, even though you got those two A players and those two A players will leave at some point. Right? And so I think that the best companies in the world, what they figured out is like, why don't we just collect all the A players? And just make it really tough, right? So when you read, you know, Elon Musk's biography by Walter Isaacson. People are like,

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  How is that? I haven't read it yet.

• 1:42:15Anthony Pompliano?

  People are like, oh my God, that sounds insane. How could you work in that environment? Well, it's like, well, if you got to ask that question, you're probably not an A player.

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:42:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Cause guess what? A lot of people would say, why would you ever want to be a Navy SEAL? Why would you want to work in special operations? Why would you want to, you know, go into the military, right? All these different things. Well, like that environment's not for you.

• 1:42:32Speaker 02

  The best.

• 1:42:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. But there are some people who are drawn to that. And the same person who might be drawn to go into the infantry or into some special operations role, may not be the same person that's drawn to go work at Tesla for Elon. Right? But there's also a lot of people who are an A player in sports and they couldn't care about business. Right? And so it's really just like, if you are A plus, there is something that you are called to, or something that you really desire being involved in. And it's usually some degree of excellence. You just want to be around excellent people doing excellent things. And that in our society has gotten pressure when people come out and say, we want to be excellent. We want to have excellent people.

• 1:43:14Speaker 02

  Well, this is, this is tying into a bigger point you made a few minutes ago that I think is really important. When you were talking about Mike, you, you mentioned you had the idea that you wish one Hollywood movie house or something was, was dedicated to telling these stories. And I think that's a great idea. But we are living in a time where we've turned in on ourselves and it feels like when you, we are disincentivized from celebrating America. Now, I didn't even serve in the army or anything. So you have a even a bigger appreciation for it than I ever could. But like, I think I'm the luckiest dude in the world to live in this fucking country. I think, yeah, we have our flaws. I'll call them out when we do, we want to fix them.

• 1:43:55Speaker 02

  But like this place is, even when we're fucked up, this place is so great compared to other things I've even had the chance to see around the world. And yet it feels like sometimes people will make.

• 1:44:09Speaker 02

  They will make it their habit to be able to just say everything that's wrong with this and why we suck and why, you know, we hurt everything we touch and whatever. What do you think that is? And how did we even get here?

• 1:44:23Anthony Pompliano?

  There is a whole new perspective on America. And America is not perfect, but America is still the greatest country ever assembled. Democracy and capitalism are the two best systems ever created. There's a lot of people who've experimented with a lot of things, but we ain't seen one that's better.

• 1:44:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:44:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And the only thing that you need to measure as to whether America is still great or not, is is there a line out the door of people trying to get in?

• 1:44:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:44:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Because there's a lot of countries where the line is headed out. They don't want to be there. They're leaving. They're voting with their feet in their wallet.

• 1:45:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:45:07Anthony Pompliano?

  America is still the greatest beneficiary of that movement in terms of people wanting to come to our country. And our country really was built by immigrants.

• 1:45:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:45:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you look at how the country was built, we used these systems around democracy and capitalism to drive performance. And if you think about in companies, right? There's a huge study done, there's a book called The Outsiders, I think it is. And what they talk about is I think they follow eight or nine different CEOs. And they basically say, why are these companies so great? There's a couple of commonalities. The first is they have very decentralized governance. So the CEO doesn't make all the decisions. CEO says, you're a smart person. You're an A player. You manage this division. Make the decisions. We're going to live or die with the decisions you make. The second thing is they push that decision making as close to the problem as possible. Why should the person working on the problem have to come to you and then you come to me?

• 1:46:03Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:46:04Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the person who understands the problem better than me. Let them make the decision. The third thing is they're great at capital allocation. Capital allocation ultimately is just a game of incentives. If I put money here, what happens? If I put money here, what happens? And thinking through that. And so there's a couple of these different components that go into what make you great. Was a country. We basically are the epitome of the same strategy. We have decentralization, we have 50 states. We have pushed decision making as close to the actual problems as possible in structure. Maybe not in practice, but in structure. We have local governments, we have state governments, and then we go up to the federal government. And then on top of that, what we usually try to do is we try to actually make it better. Capitalistic incentives, right?

• 1:46:48Anthony Pompliano?

  The whole point is if you come to our country, you have the opportunity to build a life of value, happiness, economic prosperity, and probably one of the most important things, freedom to the degree of if you don't like it here, you can leave. And so when you see all of these components going into it, we're like, wait a minute, we're just a great corporate structure where we have incentivized our quote unquote employees. Those employees produce actual economic productivity for our country. They pay our taxes, they're part of our income. And what we are incentivizing them to do is if you win, we win. And then from a governance standpoint, we don't just say you're the king. We have a democratic system.

• 1:47:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, in practice, what I think a lot of people have actually gotten very uncomfortable with when it comes to government is that the local politicians seem to be distracted with stupid things. In many of these cities, they're worried about, let's build a million dollar toilet. Rather than, hey, let me actually figure out what are the problems my citizens are facing? And how do I solve those problems? The state level, similar. And then the federal government comes in over the top and acts like, get out of my way, I'm the federal government, I'm going to tell you guys what to do. And you see this with public health crisis, southern border, et cetera. And so as a country, what we actually would benefit from is to simply say, listen, all

• 1:48:14Anthony Pompliano?

  we're going to do is we're going to make your vote actually matter. When you go into the ballot box, when you vote for that local representative, they're going to make the local decisions. Make sure you choose wisely. We're not going to tell you who it should be. You as the local people-

• 1:48:27Speaker 02

  Do you think that realistically it'll happen?

• 1:48:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that what, the only way that it can happen is you actually need a president and an administration that has the intellectual humility to say, I'm not going to overstep.

• 1:48:40Speaker 02

  But do they, but does the president and administration really have-

• 1:48:46Speaker 02

  This is not like a conspiratorial stuff, but did they really have that level of control over, over things? You think so?

• 1:48:53Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I think that leadership matters and I think that there are certain people who frankly, I, I don't know if I'd be like, oh, this would be the best president, right? I, I don't think that we know enough about different people who want to be president, et cetera. But I think that if you put the right people in place, they will get things done. And part of getting things done is knowing what not to work on and also when to delegate and really having local politicians at the local and state level do work and actually focus on important things is a form of delegation. It's to say to them, hey, it's not up to the federal government to make this decision.

• 1:49:28Speaker 02

  Balls in your court.

• 1:49:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What do you think your people should do? And then what you end up doing is now you allow the states to compete. And we saw this a little bit during COVID.

• 1:49:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:49:36Anthony Pompliano?

  We saw California and New York lose a lot of people to Texas and Florida. That was straight competition.

• 1:49:42Speaker 02

  They got you back though. They got you back.

• 1:49:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Here, here's, here's part of what I think is really interesting, right? Is individuals then start to ask themselves, what do I really care about? Do I care about paying 10% lower taxes? Do I care about some degree of freedom that may not be afforded to me somewhere else? When I left New York, they were doing all kinds of crazy stuff around public health. Things that I didn't necessarily agree with.

• 1:50:10Speaker 02

  That was what, like December, January, 2020, 24?

• 1:50:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, December of 2020. So before Miami and all that got really hot, and I thought I was going for the winter. I literally was like, hey, this is going to blow over in three or four months. I'm just going to go down there, right? My wife and I, we're going to hang. We're going to come back. And then more people started showing up. New York kept getting crazier, right? And it was just like, there's night and day difference here.

• 1:50:36Anthony Pompliano?

  But then at some point, I said to myself, wait a second. Actually, they're kind of back to even ground. New York isn't doing all kinds of crazy nonsense. Florida's doing what Florida's been doing. So on that standpoint, they're actually equal. There's crime all throughout this country. And when you look at the crime statistics, it is actually very telling. Guess where a lot of the crime happens? Where there's a lot of people.

• 1:50:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? California's got crime, Texas got crime, New York's got crime, Florida's got crime. Right? And so like, the narrative is actually very different than when you look at the statistics. So you kind of like, can't get away from it if you want to live in a big city.

• 1:51:12Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:51:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And then from a business perspective, I said to myself, am I optimizing for 10%? Or am I optimizing for 10x? And so I could save 10% of my taxes on living in these low tax states. But is it actually what's best for my business? Or could I just make 10x more for my business by being in a California or a New York? And sure, you gotta pay more taxes. But your tax revenue that you pay, you're buying something. Right? So yes, you have to pay 10% more to live in New York City.

• 1:51:40Speaker 02

  That's an interesting way to look at it. Wow.

• 1:51:42Anthony Pompliano?

  But I'm buying the ability to live in New York City. I'm buying the density, I'm buying the energy, I'm buying the ability to walk to the corner store. I'm buying the ability to go to Central Park. It's like the most expensive park in the world to attend. Right? But damn, is it awesome.

• 1:51:57Speaker 02

  It is awesome.

• 1:51:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you look at that and you say, okay, what are you optimizing for? And the reason why people argue about it on the internet is because everyone's optimizing for something different. Somebody who lives in Texas can't imagine why you would pay taxes in California. Because they care about the taxes. But the person in California may say, I can't imagine why you would live where the weather isn't perfect.

• 1:52:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:52:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:52:19Speaker 02

  Different strokes, different folks.

• 1:52:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And so the debate is almost stupid. But what I do think is important is for the American people is to have as much optionality as possible. Let the states compete. Right? Allow them to use their incentive systems and taxes to try to get people to show up or to push them out. Right? Also, allow them to compete on all of the other regulatory fronts. Because my guess is that if states took more kind of ownership over the regulatory environment, and they said, you know what? We're actually, we're okay having more biotech experimentation here. A lot of people would move there, who want to work on biotech stuff. Right?

• 1:52:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:57Anthony Pompliano?

  The incentive system works. I always joke, I got a bunch of friends who moved to Puerto Rico. Right? And I ask them, and they're like, well, I pay 0% taxes. I'm like,

• 1:53:06Speaker 02

  Okay, you live in Puerto Rico.

• 1:53:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, beautiful place. A lot of friends I know actually are from Puerto Rico, but they've left. And the reason why they're giving you 0% taxes is similar to why the military paid me $20,000 to sign up. If you're dumb enough to sign the contract, we'll give you 20 grand.

• 1:53:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, that was kind of the, you know, jokes on me, right? In hindsight, is like, damn, they got me for 20 grand. They got six and a half years of my life.

• 1:53:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:32Anthony Pompliano?

  So same thing here. It's just, it's all incentive systems. And so I do think that a huge, you know, kind of issue of our time is none of our smartest friends are going into politics.

• 1:53:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. It's all, it's all the dumbasses.

• 1:53:45Anthony Pompliano?

  How do we get them to do it? Now, here's the other thing.

• 1:53:47Speaker 02

  Who wants that job, though, Pop? Who wants to do that now?

• 1:53:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Is people ask me all the time, would I ever do it? And I say to them, absolutely not. Right? One, the structure, the bureaucracy of it, I don't actually think you can get that much done right now. Because you, at the top, don't have the leadership that pushes it down. The second thing is, it's very stressful. Right? Like, it's incredibly stressful. And so there's an element of like, serving your country, and you can do that in a lot of different ways. I actually think finance and tech get a bad name, because people are like, oh, you're just trying to get rich. But another way to view it is that they're serving their country by being able to drive as much tax revenue for their country as possible.

• 1:54:27Speaker 02

  I see what you did there.

• 1:54:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, think about it, right? Is right now, the United States government runs a $2 trillion deficit, meaning that they spend $2 trillion more than they make every single year.

• 1:54:38Speaker 02

  Sounds good.

• 1:54:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, that's unsustainable. Right? We have 34 trillion, on its way to $35 trillion of national debt, that we owe to, like, the earth. Right? Like, everyone else has our debt. And so when you look at this, you're like, okay, wait a second. We really have two different options. We can either stop spending more than we make, and we can balance the budget, pay down our debt, or we can make more money. And the way that the quote-unquote "government" makes more money, is they have to drive more tax revenue. The best way for the American people, for the government to drive more tax revenue, is for all of us to make more money.

• 1:55:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? What is going to happen instead, is they are going to keep ratcheting up the percentage that they take from you. So if you live in New York City, and you have the highest tax bracket, you don't work for yourself until July.

• 1:55:29Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:30Anthony Pompliano?

  January through June, that's for Uncle Sam. Right? July through December, that's for you. If you live in California.

• 1:55:38Speaker 02

  I never thought of it that way. That's interesting.

• 1:55:41Anthony Pompliano?

  If you live in California, I don't think you start working for yourself until like July 15.

• 1:55:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So you got two extra weeks going to work for Uncle Sam. Right? And so you look at this stuff and you're like, okay, like there's different ways to view taxes, et cetera. But I tweeted it recently and people got all worked up. I said, but you should stroke it. You should smile every time you stroke your signature on that tax check.

• 1:56:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Live in the greatest country in the world that has given you freedom and economic opportunity. And if you weren't writing that check, there's a lot of other countries that would say you don't have to pay us anything. But you don't want to live.

• 1:56:16Speaker 02

  That's an interesting way to say it.

• 1:56:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it's not about, oh my God, I want the government to take all my money. No shit. I don't want to pay extra money either, but it's the framing of I gotta pay the money I gotta pay.

• 1:56:29Speaker 02

  You're, you're doing the classic glass, glass half full thing. Right? Is the glass half empty or is it half full? It's half full because I get to live here. I'm with that. Like, I like that.

• 1:56:41Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, pick your favorite country that people like to dunk on that is not safe, has no economic opportunity. You know, kind of would can be considered like a third world country, just whatever country.

• 1:56:50Speaker 02

  Chicago.

• 1:56:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Set you up for that one. And I said to you, you don't have to pay any taxes, but you get to live here in this country. Or you have to pay between 30 to 50% of your income every year and you live in the United States.

• 1:57:06Speaker 02

  Now, if I could reinvest my tax losses into a really good investment that like 100 X's and higher private security enough for a compound for my family and all of my friends. With a private jet and possibly like a landing strip there that I could get in and out to any country at any time to visit.

• 1:57:25Anthony Pompliano?

  You still wouldn't do it.

• 1:57:27Speaker 02

  It's possible.

• 1:57:28Anthony Pompliano?

  You wouldn't do it. You know why?

• 1:57:29Speaker 02

  It's possible.

• 1:57:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause none of your friends will come. Your family won't move.

• 1:57:33Speaker 02

  They might.

• 1:57:34Anthony Pompliano?

  They're not gonna do it.

• 1:57:35Speaker 02

  They might.

• 1:57:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Because what ends up happening is all of this sounds good in theory. I have a lot of friends who have been immensely successful. None of them left the US.

• 1:57:46Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:57:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? None of them. Even some. I know one guy who is very famous now, not a friend of mine, but somebody who renounced his citizenship. They literally changed the law after he did it. And, um, cause he had a lot of money in billions of dollars. And he was able, after renouncing his citizenship, he didn't have to pay American taxes because he wasn't an American citizen anymore.

• 1:58:09Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:58:10Anthony Pompliano?

  You can't do that anymore after this guy did it. Um.

• 1:58:16Anthony Pompliano?

  He spends a lot of time in the US.

• 1:58:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So when you think about that, you're like, wait a second. Um.

• 1:58:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Taxes are like this really stupid thing because guess what? The government knows how much you owe. They don't tell you. You gotta guess. Right? And then they can print as much money as they want. So people get very frustrated by it. But at the end of the day, you can try to change a system, but the system isn't going to change. So just put a smile on your face. Put your name on the dotted line. Move on with your day and enjoy America.

• 1:58:48Speaker 02

  That is a whole new way of looking at it.

• 1:58:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:58:50Speaker 02

  I've never heard that one before, but I, I, I like that. And, and yeah, I, I think it does still go back to there's elements of push and pull where we can try to improve things, but what's the, what's the bigger picture at the end of the day? Great to live here. It's, it's just, it's an awesome place.

• 1:59:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, listen. I'll be the first one to say, we ain't seen nothing yet on taxes. Right?

• 1:59:12Speaker 02

  What do you mean?

• 1:59:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, we are entering the era of creative tax, uh, for the US government.

• 1:59:17Speaker 02

  What does that mean?

• 1:59:18Anthony Pompliano?

  A perfect example is the congestion tax in New York City. It's the first time in the United States that any city has implemented a congestion tax. There's some in Europe that have it, but for some of the United States.

• 1:59:27Speaker 02

  Can you explain this to people?

• 1:59:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So in New York City, there is Manhattan, the actual island. Uh, and there's five boroughs, but in Manhattan is where most of the businesses are. And so between, I'll call it 8 a.m. and maybe 6 p.m. Uh, there are quite a number of people who come to those businesses. And some of those people live in one of the other boroughs. Uh, some of them live kind of above 59th Street. Uh, some of them live in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, etc. And they come into that area. Well, the city of New York City, um, needs more tax revenue. And so rather than hike up the income tax, they're looking for opportunities to get creative.

• 2:00:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And they found one. And so now, um, I think it starts this summer. If you drive below 59th Street, basically during work hours, they will hit you with like a 15 or a $20 tax. One time a day.

• 2:00:21Speaker 02

  Really?

• 2:00:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So guess what happens?

• 2:00:23Speaker 02

  They just read your plate?

• 2:00:25Anthony Pompliano?

  They, they have a, uh, they already have installed the like camera things and they're gonna hit you. No different than paying a toll to go on the road. The problem is.

• 2:00:33Speaker 02

  This is smart.

• 2:00:35Anthony Pompliano?

  If you're trying to get creative and get more tax revenue, it's genius. It's like evil genius, right?

• 2:00:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:41Anthony Pompliano?

  They think that they can raise, I think the latest estimates are something between 12 to 15 billion dollars in tax revenue.

• 2:00:46Speaker 02

  I believe them.

• 2:00:47Anthony Pompliano?

  15, 20 bucks at a time. Now guess what the ramifications of that are? You think Uber fares are gonna go up?

• 2:00:54Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, Uber's not gonna pay that. Well, if you're the third rider of the day, you don't know. Are you the first one where they're gonna get hit with the tax? Or are you the third time and they don't have to pay the tax? Everyone's fares are gonna go up.

• 2:01:07Speaker 02

  Get in that subway, baby. Let's roll.

• 2:01:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So you start thinking about all these ramifications. And that's why I say we're entering a creative era of taxation for the U.S. government is because that is the first idea they had. They're gonna come up with a lot more. And the reason is because they need the money. And if you need the money, you have bureaucrats who are sitting around all day with time on their hands.

• 2:01:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:01:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And saying to themselves, how could we take more money from the people?

• 2:01:33Speaker 02

  That's right. They're not working at Quiznos.

• 2:01:35Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 2:01:36Speaker 02

  They're thinking about your pockets.

• 2:01:37Anthony Pompliano?

  No, they're thinking about the franchisee who ran that Quiznos location. How the hell can we get another 3% of the revenue that goes through that business? You know what we're gonna do? We're going to create a sandwich tax. The fuck is a sandwich tax? Right? You're like, every time you sell a sandwich, you have to pay us 2 cents. Like, literally, I mean, this is the stuff that they're thinking of, right?

• 2:01:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:01:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And you're like, well, why is it a sandwich tax and not a soup tax? Oh, because the soup industry paid us off. Right? I mean, like, that's the crazy shit that goes on. And so I just think that people are not yet ready for that creativity. Because we overestimate how conspiratorial the government is. And we underestimate how creative they can get in the evil genius stuff. Right?

• 2:02:21Speaker 02

  Wait, can you, can you clarify that?

• 2:02:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So, we give most government conspiracy theories way too much credit. Like, you know.

• 2:02:30Speaker 02

  Oh, I, I, I agree.

• 2:02:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Go talk to some of the people who run these organizations. Uh, they can't figure out how to get people to show up on time to their office.

• 2:02:36Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:02:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Uh, a friend of mine always says, uh, governments like doing any conspiracy theories, like, they can't even get TSA to get you to the line in 15 minutes, right?

• 2:02:44Speaker 02

  There's some that are true, but then there's a lot that it's like people, you know, have too much time on Twitter.

• 2:02:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. So like, we probably give too much credit there, right? And we, we see one that actually ends up being true, and then we extrapolate out all of them must be true.

• 2:02:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:02:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? You know, um, recently, the ship hit the bridge in Baltimore.

• 2:03:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And incredibly sad, right?

• 2:03:03Speaker 02

  You know, Brandon was almost on that. He's driving back from New York City. I had Brandon Buckingham in here doing a podcast, gonna come on after yours. He was like, driving back from New York City, going over that, because he lives in Carroll County. And I guess it was like a few hours before.

• 2:03:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Incredible.

• 2:03:18Speaker 02

  Scary, man.

• 2:03:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the, the, uh, my understanding is that the police officer stopped traffic. So there's actually only a, a pothole repair crew that was on the bridge, no one else.

• 2:03:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Saved a lot of lives. But you look at that, and the first thing every single person on my timeline said, sabotage.

• 2:03:33Speaker 02

  That, dude, right away. My group text, all of it.

• 2:03:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, here, here's the thing. Maybe. Right? I don't know. I don't know what hap- like, we don't even have all the details, right? We don't understand.

• 2:03:44Speaker 02

  But they jumped to that right away.

• 2:03:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, it's intellectually stimulating. What if, right? Humans have been doing that forever. But also, I think there's this element of,

• 2:03:55Anthony Pompliano?

  you know, you started getting some of the details of like, are people really that smart? Are we really, are we really intelligent enough to understand what bridge, what port? How many, you know, cars go in and out? I saw one guy was like, they did it to get Tesla stock down.

• 2:04:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And I was like, all right, I gotta read more. Like, that'd be crazy. And it took me 10 seconds to think, this is ridiculous. But basically, there's a lot of cars that go into the Baltimore port, right? And so if you stop cars from being able to come in, Tesla can't sell them, right?

• 2:04:28Speaker 02

  It all comes back to Elon!

• 2:04:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you're looking at it, you're like, okay, like, that's the insanity. But at the same time, we underestimate the ingenuity of this, right? Like, remember, these people literally ordered a national lockdown. I saw people that are very, very well respected when there was lockdowns in other areas around the world, who tweeted and later deleted and said, that will never happen in America. People covet their freedom too much.

• 2:04:58Speaker 02

  Happened quick.

• 2:04:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, right? And so when you look at that, you're like, is that like? If anyone had ever told you before 2020, like, the government's gonna mandate you to lock in your room? Like, okay, prouder. Like, what are you selling? Right?

• 2:05:11Speaker 02

  What was the movie called, like Quarantine or something? Like, yeah, okay, that'll happen here.

• 2:05:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you look at it, and you're just like, yeah, there is a lot of this ingenuity. And so I just think that trying to sift through all the noise is very difficult, obviously. But that is the challenge for business owners and investors in today's world, is we live in a dynamic world. You gotta be able to critically think. You gotta be able to independently think and take in all this information, sift through it, synthesize it, and then make good decisions. That is the challenge. And it's really hard to do if you're unprepared, either in the information you consume, in your ability to synthesize information, or your self-confidence in the decisions that you do make. Because usually what ends up happening is people are just sort of like, oh my God, all this information. The world's ending. I'm just gonna go crawl in a hole.

• 2:05:59Anthony Pompliano?

  But the people who get shit done in the world, you can't do that.

• 2:06:01Speaker 02

  And there's always going to be people who do get shit done in a way, but where are they doing it? Right? You're looking out at the future and, and if we're going to have an environment where good corporations can thrive and, and good innovations can thrive. It's, it's worth the question just because of some of the things we've been hinting at today throughout the conversation, which is the endless path to devaluation we seem to be putting ourselves on economically. So if you don't mind for one sec, I just have to go to the bathroom.

• 2:06:31Anthony Pompliano?

  That's really it.

• 2:06:32Speaker 02

  But that's the thing. We now live in a society where people, they'll pull up next to the Ferrari and they'll say, I want that. I should have it too. Right? Whereas it used to be, I don't know how many years ago, but 20, 30 years ago, it used to be, wow, I want that. I wonder what that guy had to do to get that. I want to do that too. There's, there's something that shifted there and it, and it's created a, it's a widespread social problem to the point that I think it, it has infected the mentality of people who maybe would be those self-starters. You know, and it's not to say we don't still have a ton of them. I mean, look around. There's a, you see it all the time. There's innovation happening everywhere. There's people doing amazing shit. But I wonder sometimes if like people feel disillusioned with the system because of what

• 2:07:18Speaker 02

  is presented to them on their social media or what their friends fucking talk about even when they're kids in school.

• 2:07:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Life is about trade-offs and the internet brought access to information, to exposure of other societies, economies, lifestyles, et cetera. The trade-off is the internet through accessibility also made it seem easy.

• 2:07:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Because guess what? People only celebrate their wins.

• 2:07:43Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:07:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so then people get frustrated. It goes back to what is happiness? Difference between expectations and reality. You think it's going to be easy, but it is hard. So therefore you get frustrated, you're unhappy and you give up. I was having dinner recently with the two friends. Uh, they run a business through over a hundred million dollars in revenue. Literally both of them immigrants came to the United States, built an incredible business that people would have heard of. And, um, we were talking about what are some of the things that they've seen that have been successful? In the sense of, um, founders.

• 2:08:16Speaker 02

  Is this GoPuff?

• 2:08:17Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, they, they even bigger.

• 2:08:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And one of the things that they pinpointed was persistence.

• 2:08:26Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 2:08:27Anthony Pompliano?

  So many people give up.

• 2:08:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Nvidia is like the talk of financial markets right now. And for those that don't know Nvidia basically makes computer chips. Those computer chips are used for artificial intelligence, right? In the most basic way. And it's gone up a lot. The stock is really high, right? And people are like, oh, my God, this is amazing. This guy Jensen, who's the CEO, he's a genius.

• 2:08:50Speaker 02

  Diamond hands, baby.

• 2:08:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Jensen's been working on this for 30 years.

• 2:08:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 2:08:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:08:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, he deserves, because he worked at it.

• 2:09:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:09:01Anthony Pompliano?

  You can plot all of the hours and days and weeks and months and years that he toiled away and nobody cared.

• 2:09:07Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:09:08Anthony Pompliano?

  But he also did something that is essential usually for people to create value in the world. He did something that other people didn't do, and he was right. Being different and right is where most economic value is. It's true in investing and is also true in business. But what you need at some point is the different thing to eventually become the consensus thing. So just because you're doing something different, if no one else ever believes that you're right, it doesn't matter. You could buy a stock. You're like, yeah, I bought it. It was a great price. But if no one else ever buys it, stock ain't going anywhere. But if you buy it before the people find it, right? Or you buy it at a great price when everyone else doesn't want it. And then in Nvidia's case, all of a sudden, you're like, oh, my God, artificial tunnel is going to be a big deal. I want that stock.

• 2:09:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Jensen's like, yeah, I knew this 30 years ago. Like, we're doing pretty good. And so I just think a lot about when it comes to like economic security and financial freedom. Most people, they get sucked into the world of like, oh, don't buy my $5 coffee. And sure, there are some people who have spending problems, without a doubt.

• 2:10:13Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:10:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? But for the majority of people, you're probably better off trying to figure out how to make more money rather than spend less money.

• 2:10:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. People are penny pinching rather than dollar gaining.

• 2:10:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so it's just like, create value in the world and you will receive value is like a law of the universe. The hard part is, how do you create value? And that's ultimately entrepreneurs who are successful, they figured it out. And then the ones who are trying but haven't yet hit success. Each combination of what they're doing is not yet the one that unlocks the value in the world that will give them that economic gain.

• 2:10:47Speaker 02

  Where did you develop? This worldview and this thinking like I would imagine when you were fucking around in high school thinking about more important things you were you know you're a smart guy naturally so you're thinking about a lot of stuff and then obviously you go over literally fighting a war that's crazy but you came back and I believe you started off in Facebook working your way up through their what was it the growth team?

• 2:11:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I started two businesses before that and I think

• 2:11:15Speaker 02

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 2:11:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so when I was in when I came back from the military I had four semesters left. I missed three so I basically my junior year fall get deployed I don't come back until the spring of what should be my senior year so the last semester of my senior so all my friends are leaving

• 2:11:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:11:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're partying they're having a friggin blast and I'm like man I got four semesters I got two years I gotta finish school and so a lot of the younger guys on the football team or in school I was like well I don't know any of them these are gonna be my new friends right like what's up have you ever seen the meme where like the guy the old guy shows up with the skateboard and is like

• 2:11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, how do you do fellow kids?

• 2:11:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that was me right literally some of them called me grandpa right and I'm like motherfucker I will whoop your ass right and and on top of that though I didn't know this at first but I came back right football team dynamics are really important.

• 2:12:16Speaker 02

  And you're playing football again that's so wild. You go from war to football.

• 2:12:20Anthony Pompliano?

  It was one of the best things that ever happened in terms of like the mental component. So if you think football is a team oriented sport all male you put on armor and it's combative without like true violence in the sense of like guns etc to war if I would have come back from the war experience right back into regular society I don't know how I would have done but instead I gotta step down go back into it all male environment uniforms team armor

• 2:12:50Speaker 02

  You have an outlet.

• 2:12:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Combative right and you kind of step back down into it so I actually credit going back and playing football with a huge part of a successful transition back because it just allowed me to kind of process stuff right. Um, but I remember there, there was a couple of guys and if they hear this, they'll, they'll die laughing. But, uh, when I came back, maybe I don't know, a couple of months after I'd been back in, in school. I went over and I to talk to him, ask him a question or something about, you know, play or something. And, uh, and they were really nervous. And I was like, you good? And they were like, ye- ye- ye- yeah, man, I just, I would have never talked to you unless you talked to me first.

• 2:13:27Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 2:13:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And I was like, why? And he was like, I don't know, dude, you're like a white dude with a shaved head and they said you went to war. I ain't fucking with you.

• 2:13:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so like, if you think about it from that perspective, like there's also these dynamics of like now, especially on a small campus. Everyone knows.

• 2:13:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And, you know, the school at the time was like trying to parade me around because like now it's like a recruiting opportunity for them. So they've got me like, you know, trying to do all this press stuff and all this bullshit, whatever. Um, and I'm just like, hey man, look, look, like I now, I saw the real world, right? Like I know that this ends and so like, I'm really serious about school now. I'm really serious about like trying to figure my life out and, and figure out what I need to do.

• 2:14:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I decided I'm not going to take four years to graduate from college either. I'm going to do it in three and a half. So I'm going to do seven semesters. And that last semester, uh, I remember, um, having a conversation with somebody, uh, and, um, I think it was my dad said to me, he goes, you have two options. You can get a job or you can create a job, but like, but the finish line is here. Like we were like four or five months away. Like you're getting kicked out of school, but you know, once you graduate, right? They don't let you stay, figure it out. And it's just my nature. I was like, well, what do you mean create a job? He's like, well, you could like start a business. Oh, that bingo, like that sounds fucking awesome.

• 2:14:44Speaker 02

  I'm doing that.

• 2:14:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. I am definitely not getting a real job. Um, like fuck those two idiots.

• 2:14:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So I started a company and, um, it was an online advertising business. I started with three of my best friends from high school. And the whole idea was tons of web traffic on the page where parents and students sign in in public school. Kind of portals to check their homework. Those websites, uh, with the login page has immense traffic and no one monetizes it. And so we decided that we were going to basically build like a business directory or put a link there. Uh, and then we would, uh, sell people to get listed. We would split the revenue with the school district. And, uh, that was like the idea. Now I knew nothing about business. To give you a sense, I literally started my professional career out going door to door in local shopping centers,

• 2:15:34Anthony Pompliano?

  walking into businesses unannounced and saying, hey, is the owner here? And I did it for months.

• 2:15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:41Anthony Pompliano?

  10, 20, 30, however many I could do in a day.

• 2:15:43Speaker 02

  Character building, man.

• 2:15:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And what you start to learn in hindsight, like damn, that's a great way to start your career. Because you do, you learn all this stuff, right? You learn sales, you understand people's problem. Like all these components that go into it. At the time, my friends are bawling who aren't certain companies. They got, you know, 100K jobs, we're gonna have banks. They're doing the equivalent of posting on Instagram every single day, you know, on the weekends, partying, all this shit. And I'm like, dude, this sucks. But like this is the life I chose, right? And so either I make it work or I don't.

• 2:16:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And so we basically forced that business to have some degree of success. But in the grand scheme of things, like in the way I look at it is a failure, right? We didn't know how to build a business. We didn't know how to actually scale anything, et cetera. And so I started a second business. Second business, I was like, all right.

• 2:16:32Speaker 02

  How soon after the first one?

• 2:16:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, the next day.

• 2:16:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I'm sorry, how long did you spend on the first one?

• 2:16:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, more than a year, less than two years.

• 2:16:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:16:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? But, but like it was clear at some point, like there, there was multiple dynamics. There was like the dynamic of, um, this business probably can't scale that, that big. And like one A was like, we don't know how to scale it that big, right? Uh, and then two was, um, I picked my best friends because they were my best friends. And they picked me because I was their best friend. And I think at some point we all kind of realized like, ah, if we were like drafting the like first round draft team for business team, I don't think the four of us would pick each other.

• 2:17:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, let's be friends, not like business partners, right? Like that's actually what we enjoy doing. Uh, let's not like force this. Um, so I started a second one. Uh, and this time I was like, all right, I want to be software related. Like that seems way more scalable than like walking around fucking local town, you know, shopping centers. Um, and that one, we had a bigger degree of success. That's how I actually met some of the folks at Facebook was, uh, we were hitting, uh, the social media APIs and we had built a piece of technology that essentially allowed you to draw like a box around a area on a map and you could look at all of the social media data that had been created inside that box in like a two hour period. So think

• 2:17:50Anthony Pompliano?

  of like a sports stadium. This is back in like 2012, 2013. They would love to know.

• 2:17:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:17:56Anthony Pompliano?

  What are the 60,000 fans in our stadium saying? And then we could even do things like, okay, when you go home, we see that you keep tweeting from this area, you know, this specific neighborhood every night between 8:00 PM and 5:00 AM. It's probably where you live.

• 2:18:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:18:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So, okay, what's the average salary of people who live in that neighborhood? What's the, you know, uh, occupations? Like, like you start to get all this information that you can then give to businesses.

• 2:18:19Speaker 02

  Was this term geo-tagging?

• 2:18:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Geo-tagging is, uh, when you're tagging the tweets, like you're creating the tweets. At the time, only 5% of tweets had-

• 2:18:29Speaker 02

  Geo-location, sorry.

• 2:18:31Anthony Pompliano?

  That's what you have on your phone. So, so geo-locations on your phone, when you actually tag a place, that's geo-tagging. Uh, but the whole idea is like the geography that you're in, the location, right?

• 2:18:40Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 2:18:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, only 5% of tweets had what they, what you consider coordinates, right? Like they had a tag on it. So what we started to develop was a, uh, something called identity stitching, uh, phrase we came up with, which really just said, okay, what are all your social profiles? You have a Twitter, you have a Facebook, you have a LinkedIn, you have a foursquare, you have whatever. Let's suck all that information in. And then if you tweet and say, I love ice cream, and five minutes ago, you checked in at an ice cream store, you probably liked that ice cream. Wouldn't that business love to know that you're the person who came in and you tweeted saying that you loved the ice cream, right? But you didn't tag the business. So they would never find you. So you start to stitch together. Now- We then expanded it more. So law enforcement became very interested in this.

• 2:19:26Anthony Pompliano?

  The military, the intelligence community, because if you can basically take, if you can basically take this social media data in, you can use it for offensive or defensive purposes. So like in the law enforcement use case, let's say that a shooting happens. If all of a sudden they show up, but everyone's ran, they don't know who was there. They go to the shop owners, hey, did you see anything, whatever? But if they know that you tweeted three minutes before the shooting, well, you were there, they can digitally canvas. They now can reach out to you and say, hey, there was a shooting. Did you see anything? Do you have any idea who the suspect is? Like all this kind of stuff. So they love this idea. It's all publicly, so you know, it's all public information. At the time, I wasn't as aware of what Palantir was doing, but think of Palantir's doing it with private data sets.

• 2:20:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:20:08Anthony Pompliano?

  We basically were trying to use the public data sets and the social media APIs were really.

• 2:20:12Speaker 02

  Less spooky. Yeah.

• 2:20:14Anthony Pompliano?

  I was too dumb to know that there was private data sets, right? I just knew what was publicly available.

• 2:20:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And so then you imagine the intelligence use cases. And so again, it like, we had a degree of success, but it became clear, like, I don't know what I'm doing. Right? It's a good idea. Obviously, people want this. We can kind of force this thing, but like, how do you actually scale these? It's unclear. So that's when I decided, all right, I have two options. I can either go to business school, like, you know, be a good little boy, put on my suit and tie, go to fucking business school, pay a bunch of money, like, figure out how to do that.

• 2:20:48Speaker 02

  Or the real world school.

• 2:20:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I can go somewhere and they can pay me to teach me.

• 2:20:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:20:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So I like that option, obviously. And so people always laugh, like, how'd you get the job at Facebook? I literally, a recruiter asked me, what are you going to do now after we were done the second business? And I said, I don't know. He goes, why don't you come out here, do an interview? I said, cool. What's the position? He said, product manager. I didn't know what a product manager was. So I said, I'll be there. Tell me when, like, hook up the flights. Never, never as an adult been to California. Like, sounds awesome. I flew out there and on the flight, I had purchased in Kindle form, The Art of Product Management. It's a book. And I read it. From beginning to end on the flight and I went in the interviews and I repeated back

• 2:21:34Anthony Pompliano?

  every single thing in that book to the people interviewing me. I was on my A game. But like if you go back, it's like same thing from high school, you're like constantly you're trying to figure out how do you hack the system? How do you figure out like what is the thing to to find success? And they probably were kinder to me than they should have been. I think that there was an element of like I was saying all the right things. I think they knew that I really wanted to work there and like I was excited about doing it. And then also, I think the recruiter really went to bat for me. And he was like, hey, I think this guy's like legit. You should like really take him seriously. And so somehow I got the job. And I remember when I got the job, a friend called me and he had played

• 2:22:15Anthony Pompliano?

  basketball at UNC and he was managing money for one of his teammates who's very famous basketball player. And he said, you hit the lottery. What do you mean? He goes, dude, he goes, so and so plays in the NBA, average career is three years. Let's say he pays six years. He's getting paid, I think at the time, like eight or $900,000. Here's how much money he's gonna make. He also has a lifestyle where he's spending tons of money. You think you're only gonna get paid, I think I was getting paid like 150 grand or something. And you're get some stock options. He goes, your trajectory is only up, his is only down from here.

• 2:22:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:22:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And it changed my mind, right? It completely changed the way I looked at it. I was like, oh, my God, actually being a professional in the business and investing world is better long term than in the sports world. Now, there are, Tom Brady made a lot of money, right?

• 2:23:04Speaker 02

  If you're at the height, yeah, at the highest, that's different.

• 2:23:06Anthony Pompliano?

  But the average player versus the average successful person in business is very different because longevity you have in the business career. And so when I went to Facebook, I got a world-class education and they paid me for it.

• 2:23:18Speaker 02

  But you also rose up through the ranks like crazy, no?

• 2:23:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I did, but.

• 2:23:25Anthony Pompliano?

  When I joined, they have a very interesting interview process. They basically say, go pick your team and the team, it's like a double opt-in. The team has to want you and you have to want to work on the team. And so I picked a team, it was internet.org and I picked it. I was so excited. Two days later, they're like, we're shutting down the team. I was like, shit, I'm gonna lose my job. And they're like, nah, it's like, just like, go pick another team. Alright, this place is awesome. You guys just like, go pick another, okay. And so I end up getting onto this team, Facebook Pages Growth. So the Pages product is not profile, it's business pages, it's the top of the funnel for their advertising revenue. I didn't know at the time, again, young and dumb is a very big advantage when you're at that point in your career. No one had ever worked on this before and they probably didn't think it was an important

• 2:24:08Anthony Pompliano?

  job. Okay. Step in, like two or three people on the team, I'm now the leader, right? Like, yeah, okay, let's see what this kid can do. In less than six months, we doubled the number of people who had Facebook Pages on Facebook. And that combined with another team that was driving, converting those people to advertisers, we drove something like $700 million of unforecasted revenue onto the financials of Facebook.

• 2:24:35Speaker 02

  How'd you do that?

• 2:24:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Stupid stuff. For example, Facebook color scheme is blue and gray. We would do a lot of testing, very A/B testing type culture. So we would take the button that said, create a page, and we would put it in a bunch of places on the website, and then we would test things. Should the corners be square, rounded? Should there be a shadow, not a shadow? Should the font change? What is the shade?

• 2:25:04Speaker 02

  Unless he's getting PTSD over here.

• 2:25:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Whatever, right? Like all these things, right? Now, Facebook also has a system where you can put a bunch of variables in and it does the multi-variant testing for you because one of their great advantages is they have tons of traffic. So if you have a startup and you only get, you know, 10 people a day, it may take you a year to get a statistically significant result. Facebook can get that in an hour, right? And so they can learn faster. And so we just kept tweaking, kept tweaking, kept tweaking. The other thing is Facebook has a very big international audience. So one of the things that we did is, remember like T9 texting? So you would like press button, you know what T9 texting is? Okay. Wow, I'm old as shit.

• 2:25:39Speaker 02

  What is T9 texting?

• 2:25:40Anthony Pompliano?

  T9 texting is basically like on your phone, you know how it's like one, it's A, B, C? When you, when texting first came out.

• 2:25:46Speaker 02

  Oh, like call them 1-800-ATT-AT&T?

• 2:25:48Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, no. So like when you first texted, what you would have to do is there was no letters.

• 2:25:54Speaker 02

  Oh, you gotta hit the number?

• 2:25:55Anthony Pompliano?

  So you hit the, like, to get to C.

• 2:25:56Speaker 02

  Oh, like in The Departed, when he's fucking, right?

• 2:25:59Anthony Pompliano?

  No, like in real life when I was in high school.

• 2:26:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So what you do is you would hit like the number two here at three times to like type the letter C.

• 2:26:08Speaker 02

  Oh, that sucks.

• 2:26:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And then if you wanted to type the next letter as A, you would wait a second, let the cursor move, and then you would press it once, and then you'd get an A.

• 2:26:15Speaker 02

  Oh, that's so slow.

• 2:26:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And then if you wanted a D, you would go, you know, and you would just go and you would do T9 texting. So in emerging countries, all of the phones are still like this for the most part. And so, um, what would occur is the more clicks you have to do to get to a button, the less likelier to get there. So me, being an enterprising young man who is gold on getting more people to download pages, I went to the team who built that for emerging markets. I said, yo, I think we should move create a page to the front of the line. And they were like, why? I was like, well, we're trying to, you know, drive more money to the business and, you know, all these reasons, whatever. And they're like, okay. No one ever went to them before. They were ecstatic that someone cared what they were doing. Moved that shit right to the front of the line, exploded the number of people who clicked on it. And so.

• 2:27:01Speaker 02

  It's like a cheat code.

• 2:27:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's just, it's just figuring out, like, what are all the, like, what are our tools in our toolbox? We have a global audience. Okay, well, we're all focused on the US. What about the 83% of users that are outside the US at the time? How do we get them to create more pages? What phones are they using? What is the internet connectivity? Like, like, just really trying to understand this stuff. And to the business's credit, like, they sent me to Indonesia at one point, um, to go, like, learn more about this and stuff, right? So, like, really trying to understand. And, um, I remember at one point, uh, I got an email from a well-known executive, uh, and they basically were like, stop growing so fast.

• 2:27:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And I remember being like, that's weird. Like, I'm on the growth team. We grow. We grow everything. And so one of the leaders, a guy who was a mentor of mine, you know, he goes, hey, don't worry about it. Like, you know, it's good. They don't like us growing too fast because it's public companies. They like to say, hey, this is how fast we're going to grow. And then they want to slightly beat expectations.

• 2:28:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:28:01Anthony Pompliano?

  When they say a number and then we like triple it. Not really easy to kind of build true trust with public market. So I was like, well, like, I don't give a shit about that. Like, do I get paid more money? Because we just made $700 million. And they were like, no. And I was like, oh, I'm like, I'm like a real live employee. Like, the business made the money.

• 2:28:24Speaker 02

  No incentive.

• 2:28:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I remember being like, all right, I'm not going to be here forever. Like, that's bullshit. But like, that is how business works, right? Is that I just get paid my salary, I get some stock options, whatever. And so from there, after the first year, I was asked to go work on a team, three people, with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.

• 2:28:42Speaker 02

  Oh, shit.

• 2:28:44Anthony Pompliano?

  They specifically, in end of 2014, beginning of 2015, wanted to learn how to, what we now would call go direct. They realized, I remember Zuck saying, 1.5 billion people on Facebook, he only had like 9 million followers. He can't talk to the user base. Everything he does to communicate, he's got to go through the press. And they weren't attacking him, they actually loved him, right? But like, I want to talk to my users. How do I do that? And so he wanted to learn, as a user of Facebook, how to grow his audience. And that's what we, that's what our job was. And it's like stupid stuff, right? Like, people think it's like, oh, my God, you guys must have like some magic, magic wand. It's like, no, we posted a photo, one had Zuck's dog in it and one didn't.

• 2:29:29Anthony Pompliano?

  The one with the dog did better. Let's do that again, right? Zuck's face in it versus not. Zuck's face works, right? Like, stupid, stupid things. You just learn.

• 2:29:37Speaker 02

  You mean, there's not an, there's not an internal button that just says, follow Zuck?

• 2:29:41Anthony Pompliano?

  I will say this.

• 2:29:44Anthony Pompliano?

  He had the opportunity to change the rules of the platform for himself. MySpace Tom friended everybody, right? He could have done.

• 2:29:53Speaker 02

  Shout out MySpace Tom, legend.

• 2:29:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. He could have put an interstitial and like made a follow, he could have done all this stuff. Both of them were very, very concrete on they did not want to change the rules of the platform for themselves. They thought it was important that they'd learned how to do it and didn't give themselves an advantage.

• 2:30:09Speaker 02

  That's cool.

• 2:30:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So like

• 2:30:11Speaker 02

  You're talking about Zuck and Cheryl.

• 2:30:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and again, like everyone's like, oh, are people good people, bad people, whatever. Like, I can only tell you my experience, right? Like that was a pretty good guy, you know, decision.

• 2:30:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:22Anthony Pompliano?

  To not MySpace Tom everyone. And like everyone now is Zuck's friend. So he can push his stuff, you know, into their feeds. And so then before I left, uh, that, that was like a 90 day project, basically, right? Cause once you kind of learn, hey, put, put my face in the photo, put my dog, whatever. Like you kind of know those things.

• 2:30:39Speaker 02

  Take up jujitsu.

• 2:30:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I mean, incredible glow up, right?

• 2:30:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:44Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but I will say, uh, there was one meeting he came to, um, he's got flushed in the face and he had a, uh, a protein shake. He was like doing his like 10 o'clock in the morning and I remember being like, we're just working out. Like, you know, I'm not gonna brag, but like I work out, like, are you working out? And he was like, yeah. And I was like, how often? He was like, you know, three times a week.

• 2:31:04Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you Mark Zuckerberg, multi billionaire doing the gym? And he's like bench press. And I was like,

• 2:31:08Speaker 02

  Respect.

• 2:31:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Like, I don't know how much you bench, but like, that sounds cool.

• 2:31:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So now I see this like, it's not a, oh, recently, like he was working out the whole time. Uh, that's pretty cool.

• 2:31:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And so before I left, then, uh, there was a team called social good and goodwill. And again, to Facebook's credit to some degree, uh, they basically said, look, let's use the system of Facebook to do good in the world and don't worry about making money. So people are like, ah, that sounds kind of bullshit. Like, what, like, what do you want to do? So products that we launched are things like, uh, voter registration. So don't care how you vote. We just want you to register to vote. When we launched that product in the UK, I think that it was responsible for like 30 or 40% of all voters who registered.

• 2:31:46Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:31:47Anthony Pompliano?

  In like a week. Just thinking everyone on the, in the UK is on Facebook. Click a couple of buttons way easier than like go to your local polling center or whatever. Right? So like, social media platforms have plenty of problems and things that they got to improve, but there are things when you have massive distribution and there's people inside the company that want to use it for positive impact that can happen that just isn't possible elsewhere. And then another one was Amber Alerts. And so everyone's familiar with Amber Alerts stuck on your phone.

• 2:32:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:32:13Anthony Pompliano?

  You see them, you know, missing kid. Highway or whatever. There's this woman, Emily Votcher, uh, who was FBI agent. And she was working at Facebook and her, this was like her passion project was I want to figure out how do we use Facebook to help on these things. And so I just happened to be somebody on the product team who was sympathetic to what she was trying to do. She was more like in a policy type position, if I remember correctly. And so we decided, hey, let's get this, let's figure this out. And we launched it. As you can imagine, people were very excited in the press because it's like a feel good story. I don't think we really thought we were going to find any kids. Like, I mean, we hope that-

• 2:32:50Speaker 02

  You're gonna find some.

• 2:32:51Anthony Pompliano?

  We hope so.

• 2:32:52Speaker 02

  Data says you're gonna.

• 2:32:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, we hope so, but like you just don't know if it really works. Like you kind of want low expectations going into it, but at least we're trying.

• 2:32:58Speaker 02

  But if you find one out of a thousand, that's one more than was going to get found.

• 2:33:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So six weeks after we launched the product, uh, I get into the office and she's on the east coast, on the west coast. And she's like, did you hear? I'm like, what? She's like, we found a kid yesterday. I'm like, whoa, what happened? So what happened was, I think it was in the state of Washington. There was a guy who his girlfriend and her mom came over. They had a baby with them. They said to him, it's so and so, a friend's baby. We're babysitting it, but we got to run to the store, watch it for 30 minutes or something and we'll be right back. They left him with the baby. He is sitting there on Facebook and he sees the Amber Alert and does one of the like,

• 2:33:43Anthony Pompliano?

  I got the baby.

• 2:33:43Speaker 02

  Holy shit.

• 2:33:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And he calls the police and he says, I was just on Facebook. I saw a missing kid. I have the kid. And he's like, does an interview.

• 2:33:53Speaker 02

  I didn't take it though.

• 2:33:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, like, of course. By the way, I didn't steal the kid, right? Like, I don't know where it came from.

• 2:33:59Anthony Pompliano?

  So he does an interview and the interview is like internet gold. Like, he's like-

• 2:34:03Speaker 02

  Do we have this?

• 2:34:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know. You can try to find it.

• 2:34:06Speaker 02

  Facebook, Washington, Amber Alert.

• 2:34:11Speaker 02

  Man.

• 2:34:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Like recovery or something.

• 2:34:14Speaker 02

  But keep going.

• 2:34:15Anthony Pompliano?

  But I remember him just being like, and then I was on Facebook and then I saw the picture and I saw the kid and like he's just like stunned that he had the kid. And then we're there, we're stunned. We're like, oh my God, we found the kid. Like, who cares how long it took to build? Who cares? And like, if we never find another kid, it was worth it. One kid, right? And so it's just like, it left me, um, I think now I look at like a lot of the critiques of the social media platforms and like, again, they deserve some of the critiques for sure. But there's a lot of those stories that people don't share because they're like people internally and they tend not to try to brag about that stuff. So I think that's really like where I learned how to build products and companies and stuff was at Facebook, watching people who were exponentially better than me at it.

• 2:34:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And just saying, all right, well, I'm just going to emulate what they're doing.

• 2:35:02Speaker 02

  And you did this at a really high level across multiple projects. And then you ended up at Snapchat for like five minutes, right?

• 2:35:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Seventeen days, I think.

• 2:35:10Speaker 02

  Seventeen days. Is there still litigation going on with that?

• 2:35:14Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 2:35:14Speaker 02

  There's not?

• 2:35:15Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 2:35:17Speaker 02

  Do you want to talk about it?

• 2:35:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Everything's out there.

• 2:35:21Anthony Pompliano?

  People can go read it for themselves.

• 2:35:22Speaker 02

  Okay. I'll leave that there, but you disagree with their assessment. I take it.

• 2:35:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I said what I said.

• 2:35:30Speaker 02

  Okay. All right. Fair enough. So you ended up, we really got through a lot of your story. This is great, but you ended up going out on your own again after this, you come back east. You start full tilt investments, right? And I think it was, how many companies did you invest in in the first 90 days?

• 2:35:46Anthony Pompliano?

  So, um, I didn't know what I wanted to do after that. Um, I can say that, uh, there's only been one time in my career that I ever made a decision for money. Um, and not like this, what I want to do. Um, I, I'm pretty sure that it is publicly known. Uh, I got offered a million dollars to go work, uh, at another company.

• 2:36:08Anthony Pompliano?

  I was 26. Stroke me a million bucks. What y'all doing? Right? I was willing to like, put my life on the line for 20K at, you know, 17.

• 2:36:20Anthony Pompliano?

  A decade later, ran a million, like shit, what about 37, I'm gonna be getting 10, right? Like, move it up in the world. And, um, yeah, it's just like, i- it's just, one of my big lessons in life has been, uh, there's no such thing as a good or bad culture. I think a lot about, uh, you can have a company, let's say a company that I start. I can have both of you work at that company. You may love the culture. You may say, this is the most amazing company I've ever worked at, I never want to leave this place. And he could look at it and be like, I fucking hate this place. I hate this culture. It's the same culture. Culture is more about fit. It goes back to this idea of like, A players want excellence.

• 2:36:55Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:36:56Anthony Pompliano?

  But B or C players don't want excellence. They actually hate that environment. They're like, yo, why is people up my asshole all the time? Right? And so, a lot of things that I, I am thoughtful about now, or intentional about, come from experience. I've, I've learned them, right? Both positive and negative experiences. And so, when I decided, when I was deciding what I was gonna do next, I didn't have an idea for a company. I wanted to start a company, but I didn't have an idea. So I started investing, um, and frankly, you know, a lot of the credit goes to a guy named Jason Williams. Jason had built a, uh, very successful, uh, kind of urgent care facility called FastMed. Had a massive exit. And I think that he wanted to start investing as well. And we were a good team because I had a pretty decent deal flow from having worked in Silicon Valley, known some of these people, et cetera.

• 2:37:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And he was like, the guy in the local area that everyone was like, yo, that guy always wins. But he was like the Elon of the local area. His head now will explode because I said that. But, but he was, he was, he was. And so, he was able to raise money and I was able to help deploy the money. And so, we were a good team.

• 2:37:59Anthony Pompliano?

  We, that fund, we didn't know what we were doing, but we nailed it. And the only two pieces of advice that I ever got in investing before I started a fund was, follow the talent. And then, bet on the people.

• 2:38:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:15Anthony Pompliano?

  That's it.

• 2:38:16Speaker 02

  Good advice.

• 2:38:18Anthony Pompliano?

  The two best pieces of advice anyone could have been given, right? In hindsight. And so that's what we did. We went, we found people who were starting companies as early as possible. And we bet fifty to a hundred thousand dollar checks on, I think it'd be like sixty three companies in the fund or something. Sixty something companies. And we have nailed multiple multi-billion dollar companies in that fund. Where we are one of the first investors in those companies.

• 2:38:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And for example, I don't want to name the company, but people probably could figure it out. One of our companies recently sent us an email and said they just won a billion dollar lawsuit.

• 2:38:55Speaker 02

  Unless he's Googling.

• 2:38:57Anthony Pompliano?

  So again, the company's already worth a couple billion dollars. If this holds, which yeah, I'm sure people are going to argue about in the courts, whatever. But if this judgment holds, like they will get a billion dollars. And so we invested in that company at fifteen million dollar valuation.

• 2:39:10Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 2:39:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. And so you look at this like you can create a lot of value.

• 2:39:13Speaker 02

  And this is like twenty sixteen, twenty fifteen?

• 2:39:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen. Yeah. So like you can create a lot of value in doing early stage investing. Now, the downsides are, it's been almost nine years. We have had very few of them actually get to liquidity events. So it's very illiquid on paper. It looks amazing. Let's see where the cash comes. Two is I had a lot of access. I knew people I worked my ass off to meet a lot of people and get access. And it's very much access driven game. Cause you gotta know about the deals. It's not the stock market where anyone can go buy the stock. You just gotta figure out if it's a good company or not. You gotta go find things that are kind of hidden. Third is very underrated trait in all of business and finance is you gotta be likable. So there's a lot of people who are just assholes. Or they're very abrasive, or they don't go out of their way to help people.

• 2:40:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Likability gets you into deals. Likability gets you phone calls. And so if you're in the business of deal flow, if you're in the business of knowing people, if you're in the business of people telling you information so that you can help them, you gotta be likable.

• 2:40:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:40:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And then I think also there was an element of probability. You invested in sixty companies. A lot of them went out of business. A lot of them didn't. You're playing a probability game, right? And so there is a degree of speculation that goes into venture capital that a lot of people don't like to admit because it makes them seem like, oh, maybe you're not as good as you say you are. It's just a probability, but it's true. Like if you invest in 60 companies, you don't think all 60 of them are going to end up being grand slams.

• 2:40:42Speaker 02

  It's a reality.

• 2:40:42Anthony Pompliano?

  You're playing a probability game of I need, you know, two to four of these to be huge out of 60. So if I'm right, less than 10% of the time and they become multi-billion dollar companies, which they have, it works.

• 2:40:56Speaker 02

  It works. And it was during this time, I believe, when you were doing these investments that you really got exposed to blockchain.

• 2:41:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 2:41:03Speaker 02

  And if I remember correctly, I think you tell you told me this back in 2018, that you thought you had missed it. You thought like, you thought like, oh my God, I should have gotten to this like six years ago or something.

• 2:41:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The first time I think I heard about Bitcoin was working at Facebook. And I actually found, uh, there's a guy that I was DMing with about it, maybe even as early as 2012. But I don't even think I actually knew like what we, I think it was an offhand comment. But like, the first time I really was like, oh, somebody's talking about Bitcoin, 2014, uh, maybe early 2015. And, um, we had hired David Marcus, Facebook had hired David Marcus from PayPal. And, uh, he'd come over, he was running the messenger team, like the messaging app. And, um, he was talking about Bitcoin. And I remember turning to an engineer on our team and being like, yeah, like, what the fuck? What's the payments guy like, you know? Bitcoin shit real, right? And he was like, he just said, he's like, it's stupid.

• 2:41:54Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:41:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Didn't Google it, didn't do it like so dumb of me, right? But hey, you gotta learn. Didn't think about it. And then in probably 2016, a 21 year old kid, um, maybe it wasn't even 20, it might've been like 19 year. Yeah, I think it was a freshman or sophomore at NC State, kid named JP Barrett came to me and he said, uh, he goes, um, I know that you know about data centers because, uh, my dad had been in the data center business for a long time. And so, um, he goes, uh, do you know about this thing called mining? I was like, no. He said, what you do is you buy these computers, you plug them in, uh, it runs a computer program and then it makes money. I've been trying my whole life to make money. What do you mean just buy a fucking computer and make some money? Like, yeah, right.

• 2:42:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And he showed it to me, um, and I started Googling around and I was like, there's a 50 50 chance this is real. And a 50% chance this kid steals my money. Like, that's literally what was in my head. I say, man, I'm game.

• 2:42:49Anthony Pompliano?

  They killed me in Iraq. So like, let's fucking roll the dice, right? Like, I got good odds on my side so far. And so I sold all of my Facebook stock. I put 50% of it in the bank because I needed money to live. And I took the other 50% and I bought machines.

• 2:43:07Speaker 02

  This is 2017 ish?

• 2:43:09Anthony Pompliano?

  2016.

• 2:43:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:43:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think it was 2016. Yeah, like second half of 2016. Second half of 2016.

• 2:43:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Get hosted in Washington State. Get a dashboard.

• 2:43:24Anthony Pompliano?

  You'd be shocked. We really got money coming in every day. And we're mining Ethereum using these GPUs. I don't even know what Ethereum is. Fucking could have been, you know, dummy coin, whatever. All I see is what it's worth. Ethereum at times like $5 goes up to like $8. And I'm getting it. And I'm, I think I'm mining at the time like five ETH.

• 2:43:47Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 2:43:49Anthony Pompliano?

  No, not, oh, my God. I'm like, bro, we're never going to get our money back. I just spent, I don't know, how tens of thousands of dollars.

• 2:43:55Speaker 02

  In today's terms, my guy.

• 2:43:56Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I know. But I'm thinking, but I'm thinking at the time, I'm like, we just spent, you know, each machine was a couple thousand dollars, whatever we ended up spending. How am I ever going to get my money back?

• 2:44:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Five ETH a day, it's like 40 bucks, let's call it. And so it started of 2017. Starts out at like eight bucks, 10 bucks. By May, it's 100. And I haven't sold any ETH. I've been sitting, I don't know what to do with it. So now all of a sudden, I'm like, oh, each one of those $40 days are now $400 days. Okay. Goes to 150. I sell it all. I'm a fucking genius. I just 15xed the money that I mined. Get back all my money plus some profit. I'm a gangster.

• 2:44:40Speaker 02

  Had you thought about it all, like what it was? Or was it just like, oh, we can mine this shit?

• 2:44:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I have a money printing machine. Why? I am going to be rich, is what I'm thinking.

• 2:44:53Speaker 02

  That's how it starts.

• 2:44:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Ethereum keeps going up. It goes to $300. I'm like, oh, shit. It goes to $1,400.

• 2:45:02Speaker 02

  I remember this.

• 2:45:03Anthony Pompliano?

  I sold it at one tenth of the price it actually went to.

• 2:45:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, each one of those $40 days would have been $4,000 days.

• 2:45:16Anthony Pompliano?

  So, um, I'm like shit, but now I have too much pride to buy back.

• 2:45:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Actually, a bad investing decision, but thankfully I get saved because these cycles, which I didn't understand at the time. So start really now, now I gotta figure it out. So now I'm talking about a lot online. I'm trying to understand who the players in this, what do you guys know? Who the hell created this shit? Who's Vitalik? Satoshi? Is that a real person? Like I'm in the weeds, right? My wife always jokes that one time she came home, we were dating, I had basically just moved into our apartment. She didn't know yet. And so I was there at a duffel bag clothes. I'm like, I'm grinding, right? And I have books, but not like regular, I have like textbooks. And she's like, what are you doing? I'm studying. And she's like, oh, what do you, what could you possibly be studying on the internet?

• 2:46:06Anthony Pompliano?

  As soon as I say the word internet coin, she's like, I'm fucking out on this. Like I literally am dating an idiot, right? So I start learning, learning, learning. And by the end of 2017, I'm like, this shit is the future. Sounds like somebody you probably heard, like plenty of people are, this is the future, right? But along the way, it also simultaneously for years been looking at investors. And what I knew was most people are able to identify trends at some point along the way, but they don't do anything about it. And so it became very clear to me. I said, hold on a second, I'm doing all this investing. I'm seeing these prices go up on assets I'm not buying because I'm just doing regular venture investing. I think this is going to be the future. I gotta figure out how to get in this game and do it with some degree of size of money.

• 2:46:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I'd met a guy named Mark Usco. Mark ran a company called Morgan Creek Capital Management, a big hedge fund. And going back to many points in my career, I said, okay, I want to work with this guy, but I ain't gonna be an employee. I did the employee, I'm out on the employee thing.

• 2:47:04Anthony Pompliano?

  He wanted me to go work for him. And I said, why don't we be partners? That's it. He said, okay, what do you think? And so me and Jason, Mark and Morgan Creek became partners. And we basically set up a joint venture.

• 2:47:16Speaker 02

  It's separate.

• 2:47:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so we used the name Morgan Creek Digital Assets, but separate but related.

• 2:47:22Speaker 02

  You got your nice office in New York that you put fucking nothing in.

• 2:47:25Anthony Pompliano?

  We can talk about that.

• 2:47:26Speaker 02

  Except a bag.

• 2:47:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, you know, they owned half, we owned half. And the whole idea, again, how Jason and I became partners was they could help us raise money and we knew how to deploy the money. And for whatever reason, we just figured it out. We tried, figured all this stuff out. We were able to raise money from the first two public pension funds in America to put money into a fund to want to buy Bitcoin. So we were investing mostly in other things and companies and things like that, but a little bit in Bitcoin. And I think a lot about that experience because it took people with courage to say, hey, you know what? This is new, but I think it's valuable. And I'm going to do something that may not be popular today, but if it becomes popular in the future, be pretty good.

• 2:48:13Speaker 02

  But Mark believed in

• 2:48:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Mark was in.

• 2:48:15Speaker 02

  The concept when he first partnered with you, right? Like when he was talking about it?

• 2:48:19Anthony Pompliano?

  I think all of us probably were like, this is going to be big. But we don't, we lied to ourselves and thought we understood it better than we did, as with everything. Right? You always think you understand something better and then five years later, like, oh, wow, I understood it way better than I used to. And so that fund, there are a couple of investment decisions in my life that I've made where I'm like, that was a big decision, I got it right and paid off. Bitcoin had hit $20,000 in 2017 and it started to draw down, meaning the price was going down. So there's a bubble-ish type of activity and now it's crashing. And Bitcoin, by June, is when we started raising the money, was now at like 10K.

• 2:48:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:48:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Or something. And it dropped to about $6,000 and kind of went sideways. So it's down 75% from the high. It's down 75%.

• 2:49:07Speaker 02

  We're in what, like now we're in September, October 2018?

• 2:49:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, this is August, I think. Yeah. And most people, they'd be like, hey, that's a pretty good discount, I'm gonna buy it. But my entire career, I take the perspective of a small brain, but a lot of smart friends. I was calling every single person I knew and I said, hey, what do you think is going to happen? What do you think is going to happen? What do you think is going to happen? Are you buying? Are you selling? Are you holding? What are you doing?

• 2:49:30Anthony Pompliano?

  So much information into my algorithm as I can. And then I'll figure out what I think based on what all of these other smart people have told me. And I came to the conclusion that Bitcoin was going to drop from 6,000 to 3,000 before it went back to 10.

• 2:49:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And I not only thought it, but then I like a moron decided to publicly write it. And I wrote it and I published it.

• 2:49:57Speaker 02

  But you did it though, too.

• 2:49:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And when I published it, people went nuts. They were like, you're an idiot. Posted on Twitter. I was like, whatever. Why do you guys care if I'm wrong? Alright, you're dumb. Okay, that happened. And when it happened, uh, that's when I made the first big purchase of Bitcoin at $3,200.

• 2:50:19Speaker 02

  I was there that day. That was Monday, December, I want to say 17th, 2018. That was the day you met me in New York that I mentioned at the outset. And I'll never forget that because when we were sitting in there for an hour, just going back and forth on shit. One time in the whole meeting, you pulled your phone out and it was at, it was like smack dab in the middle where I'm like, you know, what do you think of this? Like, what about the motion on Bitcoin? And you literally flipped out your phone like this. Flipped it out, he goes, okay, what's the trade now? I was at, uh, it looks like it's about 3200, 3250. Yeah, I take every dollar I own right now and I put it all right into that. It's the lowest it's ever going to go. Now, if you look at the bottom chart of Bitcoin at that point, you literally nailed it almost down to the exact day,

• 2:51:04Speaker 02

  that like the exact hour. And when I went to leave that day, I went to take a piss before I left. And when I got to the elevator, you were getting in the elevator to go down to go home to make the biggest Bitcoin trade of your life. So when people's like, this is the thing. You do say things that, you know, you got to make a call on stuff and you're going to be wrong about stuff. But I appreciate when people, you know, actually use their platform, type something out that is a conviction, but then literally go do it.

• 2:51:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:31Speaker 02

  And that's what you did.

• 2:51:33Anthony Pompliano?

  I didn't know any better, right? Like, it was just, hey, this is what I believe. So like, I'm gonna say what I believe. I also went on television. That's the first time I went on television. I think it was in 2018. And they were like, the price is down a lot, like idiots. And I was like, we're buying. And by the end of, maybe the end of 2018 or beginning of 2019, we also got the genius idea. We're like, let's, you know, rally people up on Wall Street. You guys think we're dumb? Fine. We issued a million dollar bet. We said, anyone on Wall Street, you pick any asset you want. For 10 years, we'll take crypto. You take anything else.

• 2:52:10Speaker 02

  Crypto in general.

• 2:52:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it was crypto because we had to pick like, what was the asset? And we had like an index fund, like basically S and P of crypto, right? And we said, we'll take this. You can take anything else and we'll put up a million dollars. You put up a million dollars. Whoever's right in 10 years, you can take the money or it can go to charity. Not one person took it. So like, you know, we'll see, but like, we put it out there. I think there was CNBC article, the whole thing, like, whatever. Bitcoin starts to rally. We start buying in the funds as well as personally.

• 2:52:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And sure as shit, that's what happened. It went from 6,000 to 3,000 back to 10. Now, that's a good story. On the other side, when it hit 10, I said, I think that by December of 2021, it's going to go to 100,000. So 10x, right?

• 2:53:00Anthony Pompliano?

  It went to 70, right? And so you will always get criticized because they didn't go to 100. I was wrong, right? 100% was wrong. It did not go to 100. But I called for 10x and went up 7x.

• 2:53:16Speaker 02

  Ballpark.

• 2:53:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Well, just if you had bought then, like, you're not complaining type thing, right? And so, over time, what you learn is you get some intellectual humility. You gotta be wrong, right? When you start your career off hot and you're right all the time, people take notice, but also you need to be humbled a little bit. So you gotta be wrong a couple of times. And then you're like, all right, you know what? I'm right more often than I'm wrong, but also I know what it's like to be wrong. Maybe I should actually not have the bombastic 100% confidence, certainty, this is gonna happen. Instead, it's likely this is gonna happen, but here's the reasons why it wouldn't happen. It makes you a better thinker, right? And so one of the benefits of the internet and having a big audience is you have to write tweets with the trolls in mind. Right?

• 2:54:01Anthony Pompliano?

  When you write a tweet, you can't just say what you think anymore. You gotta write a tweet and be like, okay, what are these dumb asses on the internet gonna say? How are they gonna critique this? What? And so it becomes the like, let me put the caveats into the tweet. Or let me write it in a way that is addressing what are gonna be the concerns. Well, that's just called critical thinking.

• 2:54:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:54:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So the trolls are actually some of my favorite people. Because they have taught me how to critically think.

• 2:54:25Speaker 02

  They keep you honest.

• 2:54:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, they keep you honest.

• 2:54:27Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 2:54:28Anthony Pompliano?

  It's, you know, short sellers are idiots and assholes a lot of the time. But they do provide a great, healthy activity in financial markets.

• 2:54:35Speaker 02

  The yin and the yang, man.

• 2:54:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so like, being a short seller, you basically got blown out for the last decade. But there are times where they're right. And especially the ones who are activist short sellers who go and identify frauds. And then call them out. They have, they, they specifically do a great job.

• 2:54:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:54:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And so same thing with trolls. Like they're intellectually short sellers. Right? They are like intellectual short sellers in that they look at ideas and they short them. Okay. You make me better. Thank you.

• 2:55:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:55:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if you think about, um, kind of Bitcoin as an asset, it's super volatile. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don't. But what we've seen so far is people just buy, hold it, they do okay.

• 2:55:15Speaker 02

  But you said that by the end of 2017 is when you were really sold like this is the next thing. Which doesn't mean it's gonna be tomorrow.

• 2:55:22Anthony Pompliano?

  But I stopped every single thing I was pretty much doing.

• 2:55:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:55:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, to go and dedicate all my time to it.

• 2:55:26Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:55:29Speaker 02

  I own, full disclosure, I own Bitcoin. I've never sold a dime of it. Right? I own Ethereum. I've never sold a dime of it. Those are the only two I've ever bought. I think Chris Ibrahim bought me $50 worth of a few other things. I don't even know what they are. But I do question, like, the idea is great. The idea that Satoshi Nakamoto invented on October 1st, 2008 of taking power away from these governments that have fucked everyone over. Printed away their money for years and now we're crashing the world at that time with the great financial crisis. And putting it in the hands of the individuals is a beautiful idea. The complexity of it still hasn't been solved for me, right? Meaning, I can go try to explain how to do Bitcoin to my 85 year old grandma. She ain't gonna get it.

• 2:56:12Speaker 02

  And there's aspects of it that even I'm like, I gotta have Chris come explain it to me. And so, from an adoption standpoint, two questions here. Number one, how does, how can crypto, or if we want to go more specific, something like Bitcoin that is truly decentralized? How can that come into mass adoption? Number one, and number two, at what point are we gonna stop talking about it then in concepts of US dollars? Which is what we're trying to, in a way, hedge against with it.

• 2:56:41Anthony Pompliano?

  How does the dollar work? Could you explain it to me?

• 2:56:44Speaker 02

  It's backed by the power of the US military.

• 2:56:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe, right? But like, when you think about trying to explain the dollar, it's super complex. People don't, you don't describe it. You're just like, oh, the dollar can buy goods and services.

• 2:56:54Speaker 02

  Money green.

• 2:56:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Same thing with Bitcoin eventually, right? It's just like, an entire generation of people grow up, it's just a thing. So if you think about gold, it's been around for 5,000 years. The dollar's been around for about 50, right? 1971 in its current form. Bitcoin's been around for 15. Compared to 5,000 years, 50 and 15 is basically the same thing, right? And so, there's not a person under the age of 16 in America, or in the world, who's grown up without Bitcoin being a thing. They're not gonna want an explanation. They're just gonna, it's money.

• 2:57:24Speaker 02

  But are there kids right now who are, who are really using Bitcoin in their day to day?

• 2:57:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, every person who holds Bitcoin is using it. Like, there's some people who think Bitcoin-

• 2:57:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, but are they going to Starbucks and buying it?

• 2:57:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think that's the purpose of Bitcoin, right? And I've changed my mind on this. I used to think Bitcoin could become, you know, this great payments thing also, maybe.

• 2:57:41Speaker 02

  That's what Jack Mallers is trying to do, right?

• 2:57:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, he, he's using the network really to send other currencies. Bitcoin can be sent, but a lot of times it's other, so you're using the dollar across the Bitcoin rails, right? But yeah, it's like, if there's an asset that's gonna keep appreciating in value, remember the dollar loses value, so you're incentivized to spend it.

• 2:57:58Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:57:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? If an asset is going to appreciate, you're disincentivized from spending it. You shouldn't spend it. Like, we don't accept Bitcoin for almost anything, any of our businesses. People are always like, what do you mean? You're supposed to like, be like, you know, enjoy Bitcoin also. Like, no, I'm not, I don't want your Bitcoin, right? There's nothing that we're gonna ever build, uh, create anything that is worth you spending your Bitcoin.

• 2:58:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't spend on Bitcoin.

• 2:58:21Speaker 02

  So you're viewing it as gold?

• 2:58:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's a store of value. Now, if you think about that, Bitcoin and the dollar are probably going to win together. Right? Bitcoin as a store of value. It's your savings.

• 2:58:35Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, it's the joke, I got a savings account, I got a checking account, right?

• 2:58:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:58:38Anthony Pompliano?

  You guys know that stand-up bit? I'm probably too young. Alright.

• 2:58:42Speaker 02

  I followed what you were saying, but I don't know the stand-up bit.

• 2:58:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll tell you the story later. So, a checking account and a savings account. Savings account, you're not supposed to spend. Checking account, you spend, right?

• 2:58:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:58:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Same thing here is just think of the dollar and Bitcoin as a checking and a savings account. Bitcoin is your savings account, the dollar is your checking account, right? So you're going to spend your dollars because you're going to lose value over time. You're incentivized to spend them. But your savings, you don't want to spend that. So Bitcoin is your savings. And now, yeah, sure, at some point, the dollar gets so bad and Bitcoin becomes stable. Right? There isn't volatility to it. That sure, maybe people eventually use it. If that happens in my lifetime, amazing. Probably not going to happen.

• 2:59:18Speaker 02

  Do you think there's another infrastructure crypto-related that would come in and take over the dollar? That's not a centralized currency that the government creates?

• 2:59:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, there's dollar-stable coins, and those are used more often than Bitcoin for transactions. So, again, it's the same dollar, it's just in a new technology form factor. Like, you have physical dollars, you have electronic dollars like in an ATM, right? Now, there's just digital ones that are on a blockchain, but they're all dollars. So those are very popular. But again, it's dollars and Bitcoin, they're just in digital form. I don't think the other blockchains are competing with Bitcoin in terms of technology or trying to be money. Ethereum, Solana, all the way down to the meme coins, like, they're all trying to be something else. They're more like technology companies. So it's the similarity of like, Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. You would never be like, well, which one are you going to buy? You can buy dollars or, you know, Facebook. Do you buy Amazon or oil?

• 3:00:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? It's like, no, all the companies might compete with each other for revenue or attention or whatever. But currencies are in a different bucket and commodities are in a different bucket. And so, these other things are very competitive with each other and they're trying to optimize different, you know, kind of technical features. But Bitcoin is trying to be, you know, a great store of value, trying to be digital gold. And there's no one even close. There's no one who could unseat it. It's either Bitcoin works or it doesn't. I actually have a theory that if Bitcoin did not work, which I think it will, but if it didn't work, an entire generation of people would never trust a digital currency as a store of value again. Because it's similar to somebody in Venezuela where their government gives them a currency. It fails. Government's like, oh, we have another one. You're like, I've seen this play, but I'm good, right?

• 3:00:51Speaker 02

  And you don't think that effects happen though with all the other forms of crypto that people, you know, got rugged on and stuff like that?

• 3:00:58Anthony Pompliano?

  No, because I think people understand you buy Bitcoin, you hold it, it's store value. The other things are speculative, right? Same thing as early-stage venture capital, same thing as tech stocks, right? You know, we live in a society of gamblers. And that's something that's new to American society. We have destroyed the currency. And so when you destroy the currency, people fall behind. The wealth inequality gap gets worse. People feel like they can't catch up. And the most important thing is they lose hope. When you don't have hope, you then take risk, right? You have to hit a home run rather than a single or a double. So the second that you have lost hope in the traditional financial system based on the current dollar system that is deleting your wealth slowly,

• 3:01:40Anthony Pompliano?

  you then say, well, where can I speculate? Where can I gamble? Where can I risk take? And so you see this across markets. You see this in zero-day options. Literally, people wake up every day and they're buying an option based on what they think the price is going to be by the end of the day.

• 3:01:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:01:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Sounds like gambling.

• 3:01:55Speaker 02

  That's gambling.

• 3:01:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Then there's meme coins. You're buying a coin because you think it's funny. No, it's not tethered at all to reality. By the way, some of them are hilarious, right? Some of them are not so funny. Some of them are going to go up, some of them aren't. All of them have no actual value in the sense of being tied to reality. It's all about a meme and a consensus view. People make a lot of money finding those opportunities, but it's still gambling, right? And then if you look at things like sports betting, you can't watch a major sporting event now without having gambling ads and inside of their apps, they have literally the lines and all this kind of like, like we've become a society of gamblers. And a lot of it is not the gambling companies or platforms or oddsmakers, et cetera.

• 3:02:38Anthony Pompliano?

  They're just seizing an opportunity that was presented by the devaluation of the currency. And so if you really-

• 3:02:44Speaker 02

  I've never heard someone put it that way.

• 3:02:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, if you really think about this, like we have a society of gamblers now because we literally had a central bank that devalued our currency, which drove people away from opportunity because they lost hope. And if you don't have hope, then you gotta take risk. You gotta hit a home run. And so literally today, people's retirement plan is can I nail the zero day option? Can I buy the meme coin that 100 X is? Can I find that sports bet and hit the triple parlay? That is going to pay out, you know, 500 X.

• 3:03:13Speaker 02

  Well, what do you make of the fact that the, the government? Well, let me correct that. The corporate elite of society is now entering the casino with this. Right? I mean, everyone obviously has their theories about some of these companies and stuff, but you see a company like BlackRock create the ETF. We saw what the inflows of that did to the Bitcoin price. They're buying up a lot of it. I think you might've said this earlier, but if you didn't, for people who don't know, there's only 21 million Bitcoins that are ever going to be created. Some of them are already lost forever. So there's a, it is, it is literally like not inflationary by definition. And so you see companies like this buying up so much. Are they just saying like, okay?

• 3:03:57Speaker 02

  If this Satoshi was really, we don't know who he was, but if it was a guy or a group of people and they truly were individuals, unassociated with anything and had created this thing that is now getting this adoption. Are they, are, are, you know, the corporate elites coming in and saying, well, at least let, we'll take as much as we can out of that population so that we have control over it?

• 3:04:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll give you a, another version of this that probably no one's ever told you. I think that a huge driver of the fall of America is the shutting down of the mafia. So if you think about how societies and civilizations work is whoever has the monopoly on violence sets the rules.

• 3:04:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:04:41Anthony Pompliano?

  If you, let's go to the extreme example of Afghanistan. The Taliban set the rule. There was a rule of law. We as Americans in a democratic nation, in a capitalistic society with human rights, et cetera, we don't like it. We disagree with it vehemently. We think it is pure evil and we want to stomp it out. Now, it is hard to argue, understanding all of that and me as an American who agrees with everything I just said, also that there was stability in a society because there was a agreed upon set of rules. Instability entered the country when there was warring factions of two different sets of rules, the Taliban and the Americans.

• 3:05:20Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 3:05:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, does not mean I agree with the Taliban, does not mean I agree with what they're doing, but it is very clear from a sober viewpoint that instability is introduced when you now have two different sets of rules, it's unclear who they should follow. And at times, they may be following two different sets of rules based on who's in the room.

• 3:05:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? The US withdraws. All of a sudden Afghanistan actually gets stability back into some of society. Now again, brutality comes with that stability.

• 3:05:51Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:05:52Anthony Pompliano?

  But, when the Taliban took back their effort, you don't have two warring factions now. You have one clear set of rules. Again, Americans, we don't agree with it.

• 3:06:00Speaker 02

  But it's a shitty set of rules.

• 3:06:01Anthony Pompliano?

  By our standards, yes.

• 3:06:03Speaker 02

  And by the standards of a lot of people there who have to live under it now.

• 3:06:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Some. But there's also, there's also a lot of people, right? There's also people who, they, they say, hey, look, I have a certain religious view, I have a certain societal view, I subscribe to this, right? Now again, it's like anything, in the United States, there's some people who agree with the rule of law we have, there's some that don't. The war on drugs, I don't know, 80% of Americans now say, eh, that kind of sounds like it's stupid, 20% love it, right? Well, it's the rules, whether we like it or not, and it's the rules. So I do think that there's this element of like instability and stability that comes with one set of rules. And whoever has the monopoly on violence and has a clear set of rules, creates stability in a country, whether we like it or not.

• 3:06:48Anthony Pompliano?

  If you come to the United States, when the mafia ran, especially the Northeast, but a lot of the country, there's a very clear set of rules. You don't mess with women and children. You don't do certain things, right? You don't participate in certain industries, right? All of these different components that they had laid out.

• 3:07:07Speaker 02

  Well, allegedly on some of those, to be fair.

• 3:07:10Anthony Pompliano?

  But there's a clear set of rules.

• 3:07:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:07:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. Now, do they subscribe to themselves? Same thing as, does the government follow all their rules?

• 3:07:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:07:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you can see there's a lot of parallels, right?

• 3:07:17Speaker 02

  I see where you're going with this.

• 3:07:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, what ends up happening is they ruled by violence. People were scared, right? And so that is not just the Italian mob. The same was true of many other ethnicities.

• 3:07:29Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 3:07:29Anthony Pompliano?

  When they came here and also in their home countries.

• 3:07:32Speaker 02

  Jewish, Irish, eventually Russian.

• 3:07:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So this is not a US thing. This is not an Afghanistan thing. This is not a single ethnicity. It's just like, this is how civilizations really govern themselves. And so with the fall of the US mafia, what ended up happening is those clear set of rules and also the aspirational elements of like, what it takes to be a good citizen inside of that society fell. And people defaulted back to the government. The government does not have a clear set of aspirational rules or guidelines. What does it mean to be a good American today?

• 3:08:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Nobody tells us. What activities should we participate in or not participate in? Nobody tells us. In fact, they may be doing the opposite. They may be working even further against us and trying to make us not patriotic and have us not want to have very specific viewpoint in the world. And so in a world where it used to be, you don't touch women and children. Now, there's people in New York City who are scared to get on the subway.

• 3:08:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:08:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Because that actually may be the target is the women and children. Right? It's very, very different. And so when you look at this, I use the mafia as a way to kind of encapsulate this idea.

• 3:08:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 3:08:45Anthony Pompliano?

  There is this element of regardless of who is in power and has that monopoly on violence as to why they have the power, having a clear set of guidelines and rules, having a rule of law, whether actually government mandated or mafia enforced, the rule of law actually drives behavior in the society.

• 3:09:07Speaker 02

  All right. So bring this back to BlackRock buying up Bitcoin.

• 3:09:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin is the ultimate set of rules. It is written in software and can't be changed. It is the governance system in a digital world. In a world where everything changes, everything is dynamic. There is one certainty, which is Bitcoin's rules will not change.

• 3:09:28Speaker 02

  But if, but if.

• 3:09:30Anthony Pompliano?

  That's why Bitcoin ends up winning.

• 3:09:32Speaker 02

  But if organizations were able to get control of it just on the basis of them controlling the supply of it, could they not, they can't change the rules, but could they use the rules to their advantage?

• 3:09:43Anthony Pompliano?

  No. Whether you, whether you own Bitcoin or I own Bitcoin, Bitcoin doesn't care, doesn't change. You can't use Bitcoin to hurt me. It's the idea of your enemy should have free speech, whether you agree with them or not. That is the true test of free speech.

• 3:10:01Speaker 02

  Yes, that's true.

• 3:10:01Anthony Pompliano?

  The same concept in Bitcoin is it's your enemy's money. They have the same right to lack of censorship as you do. If you truly believe in no censorship. And so the reason why as Americans that makes us uneasy sometimes is because one of our biggest weapons is being able to censor and seize and do all these things, right? Sanctions, all this stuff. And so it's a new paradigm, but really what it is, is it's a global governance rule set that now is in a digital world where people are able to say, in a digital world, it's not about offensive violence. Like this is a big change. When I talked about whether it's the US government, the mafia, the Taliban, or any of these other organizations, it's all about offensive violence.

• 3:10:46Anthony Pompliano?

  If you have the monopoly on violence, you win. In a digital world, it's about defense. Right? If I keep you out of my system, I'm more powerful than you. If you keep me out of your system, you're more powerful than me. So in a digital world, the most defended or the most secure system or set of rules is actually the most powerful. And Bitcoin is the strongest computer network in the world. So when you think about it from that perspective, the rise of Bitcoin to kind of this global store of value is the first time in history that that could happen without somebody having to drop bombs, shoot bullets, invade countries, do all this. Because it's not about offense in a digital world, it's about defense. And Bitcoin already won that battle. It's the strongest computer network in the world.

• 3:11:28Anthony Pompliano?

  It, if you took all of Amazon, Google and Facebook's computing power and put it together, it's not even close to how strong Bitcoin is as a computer network. And so, again, all of these ideas of like how civilizations are governed or societies are governed have been written rules in software that cannot be changed and then is secured by the strongest computer network in the world. And so you see that, okay. People subscribe to it. They, they want to be governed by those rules.

• 3:11:56Speaker 02

  How do you think it could fail if it did? Play devil's advocate for a minute. How do you think 10 years from now Bitcoin, if it failed, would have failed?

• 3:12:03Anthony Pompliano?

  I think there's three things that people could do to, um, they couldn't guarantee the failure, but they could increase the odds. Uh, one is they could deter adoption by basically taxing the hell out of it, uh, either through transactions or like some sort of like egregious wealth tax. I don't think it would ever pass, but if they said, hey, we're going to take 50% of everyone's Bitcoin every single year. There's a lot of people who just, I don't even want to play this game, even if I could hold it and you don't know about it, like the odds of that or go to jail, uh, I'm good. Um, the second thing is, uh, there could be a bug that's introduced during the software process, very unlikely. Uh, there's a lot of checks and balances and, and very slow, methodical, intentional development, et cetera, but that could be catastrophic if, if, uh, if it was ever to happen. And then the third is, uh, there could be some yet unknown computer advancement.

• 3:12:48Anthony Pompliano?

  A lot of people like to point to like quantum computing. Uh, there, there is no quantum computer yet, but, um, there could be some advancement that somebody could basically hack the Bitcoin, uh, network. Now, what I always explain is it's kind of like grabbing water, right? If you try to grab water, you close your hand, but the water squirts out. Bitcoin, if you were able to hack the Bitcoin network and take all the Bitcoin, they would have no value. The whole point of Bitcoin is it's never been hacked before. That's where the value is derived from. So if you steal all the Bitcoin, you don't make any money.

• 3:13:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, but if you're not trying to make money, you're just trying to destroy it because you're a government, like you're China and you have a quantum fucking 14 computer.

• 3:13:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, if you're a non-economic actor, sure, that there are things that you could probably try to do. Um, but also if you develop the quantum computer and no one else has it, no one is prepared to defend themselves. Are you going to try to destroy Bitcoin first or maybe you're going to go take, you know? The United States of Secrets, right?

• 3:13:33Speaker 02

  Oh, I'd do that first. Yeah.

• 3:13:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, like, you know, there's all these kind of different components. So it's hard to talk about like the unknown or the future. But I do think that it's important to know what some of the risks are and then just kind of think through, hey, how could you mitigate those risks as we move forward?

• 3:13:48Speaker 02

  All right, well, there is a lot of geopolitical finance stuff that we didn't get to talk about today, but I know you have a meeting coming up. I'm looking at the clock and we're right up against your time. So we got to cut it there, but this, this was really good, man, because I really haven't heard you. I know you talk about it like in pieces over time. You've been doing content for years and everything, like some of your story, but putting it all together like that. I haven't heard that yet. I really appreciate you sharing that. It's, it's, it's a pretty wild ride you've been on. And I think the common theme is that you are constantly finding a way to scratch your own itch and solve your own problems. And that's what's made you such a great entrepreneur and a good example for people. But for those out there listening, we will have the link to your YouTube down below.

• 3:14:30Speaker 02

  You are appearing on CNBC and other networks all the time as well. You write a Substack every day, which will put that link down below. What, what else, where else can people find you?

• 3:14:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Twitter is probably the best thing.

• 3:14:40Speaker 02

  Of course, the Twitter. What do you got, like 2 million on there or something?

• 3:14:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Less than that, but yeah.

• 3:14:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're up there, you're up there in the Twitter universe, but pop. Thanks so much for doing it, brother. I appreciate you. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Thank you, guys, for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also, if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory Podcast or also on my personal page at Julian Dorey. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory Podcast Playlist link in the description below. Thank you.