#1076 Lucas Bagno On Why We Must Make America Rational Again

Lucas Bagno is an investor at Village Global and the host of the "Solarpunk" podcast In this conversation, we discuss the threat of the CCP, Taiwan, the importance of rare earth metals & semiconductors, the reinvigoration of the American spirit, the role of government in innovation, and the decline of free speech & critical thinking in America. ======================= BCB Group is the leading payment services partner for the digital assets industry. BCB Group provides payment services in 30+ currencies, FX, cryptocurrency liquidity, digital asset custody and BLINC, which is BCB’s free, instant settlements network for the BCB client ecosystem. Find out more by visiting bcbgroup.com/pomp ======================= Valour (formerly DeFi Technologies) represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. Currently listed on U. S. (OTC: DEFTF) and Canadian (NEO:DEFI) exchanges. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at valour.com ======================= Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more. Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U. S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. ======================= Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It’s supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your wallet. Interactive charts let you view an asset’s price history and your portfolio’s performance over time. And maybe the best part, Exodus is integrated with the Trezor hardware wallet - making advanced security easy for everyone. Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Playstore. ======================= ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit https://compassmining.io/ to start mining bitcoin today! =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Lucas Bagna is an investor at Village Global and the host of the Solar Punk Podcast. In this conversation, we talk about the threat from the Chinese Communist Party, the importance of rare earth metals and semiconductors, the reinvigoration of the American spirit, the rebuilding of the Department of Defense, the role of government in innovation, and many other important topics around culture, technology, and investing. I really enjoyed this episode with Lucas, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Let me know at the end what you think, and make sure that you share it with your friends.

• 0:43Speaker 01

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

• 1:06Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Lucas here with me. I'm very excited to have this conversation. I thought a great place to start would be with TikTok, which is now the most visited website in the world. It has taken American teenagers by storm, but there's a dark side to this. And there's a lot of folks who are issuing warnings about maybe America shouldn't be embracing a technology like this. Help us understand, like, what are the risks to something like a TikTok?

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. I mean, you know, I think back in 2020, we really had the idea about banning TikTok. And that was a very good idea that ended up getting nowhere. And realistically, TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is a Chinese company. ByteDance, for all we know, is controlled by the CCP. You know, China has a law that basically allows people, that allows the government to request any information of any company. So effectively, any Chinese company works for the CCP. So we have an app that is owned by a Chinese company that is controlled by the CCP, that is the most used app of every American, every young American in the country. We don't really understand how they run the algorithms. We don't really

• 2:17Speaker 02

  understand what they're putting up for our teenagers to watch.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  And that's effectively what's been happening.

• 2:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So, algorithms, I think, are an interesting component of this argument, right? Which is, if I go on Facebook, if I go on Twitter, I can look in the news feed, or I can look on my Twitter timeline, and I can either choose to get a feed that is algorithmically determined, they're trying to predict what I want to watch, or what I will engage with, or I can choose to have reverse chronological order, which is just, hey, I follow a certain number of people, whoever posted last, that is kind of the first thing, and I can scroll through, but there's not this algorithmic or kind of editorial layer on top of it. TikTok, my understanding is, they don't have a reverse chronological order option. It is 100% algorithmic, and that's one of the questions I think people are asking is,

• 3:09Anthony Pompliano?

  are they manipulating that in some way, in an adversarial way, for American audiences versus other countries?

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Right, and so, that's what I think is really important to hone in on, because I think a lot of the conversations that we had in 2020, 2021 around TikTok, were about the data, and perhaps there's an interesting argument to be made there, but I think it's mostly a distraction. You know, ultimately, we have the CCP, which sees itself in a long struggle against America, that has the control to potentially put in whatever they want, you know, American teenagers to see. Let's magnify all the issues that the country is having, let's magnify all the worries, all the concerns that, you know, this younger generation is having, by, you know, controlling what they see. Now, I don't really understand why people haven't really taken action against this.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Realistically, imagine if we were back in the 70s, in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, and we had a major TV channel that was controlled by the Soviet Union, where all the young Americans at the time wanted to watch. Would that, like, would that be controversial?

• 4:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, right? And for some reason, now we can't really have that conversation.

• 4:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, if you think even the United States, when we are at war, or sometimes not even actually direct combat, but we are trying To change the way that people think around the world. Like, we drop pamphlets all over certain areas with very specific messaging. We did it in the Middle East. We've done it in many other areas throughout the years. And in some way, it's psychological warfare. And we look at it as we want to inform people of a different viewpoint, or we want to educate them so that they'll see that it doesn't have to be the way that their country or their city or town or whatever is run. The, you know, that strategy on steroids would be, imagine if they all had an app on their phone and they had smartphones

• 5:07Anthony Pompliano?

  and that that is the number one thing that they consumed and we had the ability to manipulate the content that was shown to them. I think that we could probably change some minds pretty quickly.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, that's a very good point. You know, ultimately, every government in the world understands the role of propaganda, right? Like, what China could be doing, it probably is doing with TikTok, is not new. Every country in America, every other country has done that to countries that they saw as competitors, right? So it's really weird that here in this situation, we can't recognize a threat that that might be happening and the impact that that could be having in generations, in future generations.

• 5:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do you think Americans are so slow to recognize this? Is it because their kids use TikTok and so they think of it just as an app, no different than Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram or anything else? Do you think that it's because there's a lot of former politicians that are lobbying for TikTok and so we just can't get anything done? Like, why is it that this seems to be something, there's a fringe conversation, but not actually resonating with the mainstream?

• 6:12Speaker 02

  You know, I think it's a dangerous conversation to have because at that point, we start getting a lot into culture. I think the simple version of that argument is, the simple answer to it is that, at the end of the day, there's a lot of politicians that may just benefit from the fact that, you know, the people that are watching TikTok now are probably going to vote for them.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Realistically, I think the bigger issue that we see with TikTok today is that over the last 20 to 30 years, we've actually killed the idea of a national interest. And we've completely decoupled the idea of business and the economy with national security. And realistically, I think that, you know, people like me, like I think you and I probably share a common background as libertarian guys like Bitcoin, like Rumpel, like, you know, like 20, 12 years ago, that kind of stuff. And all of that made a lot of sense, you know, let's get government out of the way.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  We, you know, let's globalize the world and America is going to benefit from that. The reality is that did not happen. And as that did not happen, America did not change its strategy. But in the process, we actually killed the idea that the economy and national interest should have something in common. And unfortunately, that is kind of core to the argument as to why people don't really care about that anymore. I mean, we're going to talk about the CHIPS Act at some point, but like, talk about something insane that's been happening, right? Like you have Intel that stands to, by the way, massively benefit from all the money

• 8:01Speaker 02

  that's coming from the CHIPS Act, was heavily lobbying the government to try to stop the government from trying to curb US investments into Chinese, into the Chinese chip sector, right?

• 8:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So Intel was saying to the US government, stop allowing US investors to make investments in Chinese companies that are creating chips?

• 8:24Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no.

• 8:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Or the reverse?

• 8:26Speaker 02

  The reverse, the reverse, right? Like, I mean, how insane is that? So Intel was actually, so the US government was trying to curb US investments into the Chinese chip sector. And Intel spent record amount of lobbying money to try to stop the US from doing that.

• 8:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's because they wanted more and more US investment to go into these Chinese manufacturers of chips, but The argument from the critics of that strategy would be, hey, if the United States continues to increase dependency on supply chains in China, we basically are just exposing ourselves from a national security standpoint. And so it's probably pretty important that we build our own supply chains manufacturing capabilities for our chips where we're not reliant on China, who if one day they just turn that off, basically we're fucked.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Exactly. I mean, that's exactly right. And I think what's important to highlight there is that the notion of free markets, which I stand for, which I believed in and I've always believed in, is in some ways, at its best, an amoral ideology. At its worst, you end up you end up having companies and having leaders and having people that choose to do what's best for them at the expense of what's best for the country. And we need to fight back against that. We need to fight back against that hard. I mean, realistically, right, like, if we were having that conversation in which a US company was trying to, you know, do business with the

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Soviet Union, or trying to invest in critical industry and infrastructure for Hitler, we would call that person a traitor, right? Now, it's just business as usual.

• 10:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, what's fascinating is Google, Facebook, many other companies are not allowed in China. So this is not something where you could argue that China doesn't think in this way. They have long blocked US-based technology companies from servicing their citizens. And some people would just argue, oh, they want to create a regulatory moat so that there's Chinese companies that can be built and get economic progress and can capture that value. But now it looks like there's a, you know, second or an alternative reason for that, which is even if the United States was to say, okay, we understand that there is a benefit from an entertainment standpoint or whatever for our citizens to use this application, we don't

• 10:47Anthony Pompliano?

  want to ban it, but we're going to fight back, we're going to go on offense ourselves with some of these platforms. There's nobody who has access to the China market.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  That's right. And this is one of the most frustrating. Parts of this argument, which is a lot of times you talk to people here and you're saying, hey, this TikTok thing is a big deal, like it's a big issue. And they're like, no, no, no, we can't ban TikTok. That would be too provocative towards China. And I was like, really? Like, we're just asking to level the playing field. That's all it is. Like, they've treated us like that for decades. Right? Like, I mean, the amount of money that companies have spent trying to dominate the China market only to sell, you know, whatever was left for nothing is insane. So we're just saying, like, actually, like, China has, you know, decided to treat us like that for a long time.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  And we're just gonna do the same to them until we can actually find a middle ground that works. Is reasonable.

• 11:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Are we at war with China? Or are we simply in competition with China? Like, how adversarial is it versus just pure competition? And there's a ruthlessness that our competitor is exhibiting that maybe the United States isn't willing to exhibit?

• 11:57Speaker 02

  You know, I think that there are different sides to this argument. You know, Jacob Horberg, who I think you've had on the show, would say that we're at war. And I think where I agree with that argument is we are at a pretty dire situation that most of the country has not really woken up to yet. And perhaps calling it a war would actually be very helpful to get people to really have that sort of sputnik moment and wake up to the challenge. The more complicated version of this is that realistically, China sees war in a way that is different than the American mind sees it.

• 12:39Anthony Pompliano?

  How does the American mind see it versus China?

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I would point, your listeners, there's a Chinese CCP book called Unrestricted Warfare that was written by a few Chinese generals that now are very high up in the CCP about 25, 30 years ago. And that paper, Unrestricted Warfare, basically says that the American mind and the Western mind tends to see war as a very, in a very black and white way. You either go to war and you send your soldiers and then you win or you lose. And in reality, China sees war in a completely different way.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  You know, there is cyber warfare, there is propaganda, there is, you know, supply chains, like, and everything can be a subject of warfare to a given degree. So it's much less black and white and much more in a spectrum on everything that can be from a cold war to a hot war.

• 13:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's basically, there's like, direct combat all the way to indirect competition or influence to some degree.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 13:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And the American culture, American movies, American approach has very much been black and white, we're at war, we're not. I would question that kind of black and whiteness now. There are countries around the world where we're dropping bombs, but we're technically not at war with them, at least officially. And so that seems to still follow the line of, we are bombs, bullets, soldiers, you know, that's war. Everything else is not. But the Chinese seem to think that maybe the battlefield, and kind of more of the battlefield, is the indirect competition and influence. So things like the propaganda, the psychology, the supply chains, all of that seems to be

• 14:29Anthony Pompliano?

  where they have located and said, hey, this is the more important part. Why is it that they're focused there?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Well, that's where they have always excelled, right? So if you look back into the history of the CCP, there is one of the best books, the best book I've read all year, by the way, it's called The Long Game by this guy called Rush Doshi. And Doshi goes in and looks at the history of the CCP and everything that happened since Mao left power. And China has a, you know, an aspect of grand strategy, that they have seen nation building, you know, taking a hundred-year mindset to it. You know, there is this idea of a national rejuvenation that is pretty big. And by the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  You know, they expect China to be the biggest country in the world. To answer your question specifically, why do they see that war in such a different way? It's because that's where they can win. You know, if you go back to Deng Xiaoping, that was one of the leaders of the CCP back in the 70s. The mandate of China was hide your capabilities and bide your time. Don't show your fangs, don't go out to anybody, don't get into conflicts. Just build industries that can take China so that China by 2050 can become the greatest nation in the world. And then back in the 90s, in the early 90s, China had what they called the traumatic trifecta.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  You had the Gofor, you had the fall of the Soviet Union, and then you had Tiananmen Square. And all of those things really traumatized China and led China to become much more military focused than before. You know, talk about how China thinks about fighting a hot war. Even in that sense, China thinks about very much asymmetric warfare, right? So, you know, if the US has, you know, these billion dollar ships, these billion dollar aircraft carriers. What if you can build like a million dollar missiles to get rid of them, right? I mean, that's how China would think about fighting. And if you look at, you know, their defense infrastructure, that's pretty much what they've built over the last 20 years, right?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Like, the US is still very much stuck in this idea of, you know, spending billions of dollars to build this giant things. China is, you know, spending less money to build like things that can, you know, destroy the US infrastructure with much less money.

• 17:01Anthony Pompliano?

  It's fascinating because the United States, our single greatest military victory in, I don't know, the last 20, 30 years, was we put like 16 dudes on a helicopter, we dropped them off in the Kandahar Mountains in Afghanistan, and we said, "Go fuck up the Taliban." And we were pretty successful in doing it. And then we went into and transitioned our strategy from kind of direct action, take out a group of people that globally, I think most People were like, hey, these people need to be handled to a nation building exercise. And that's where billions and billions of dollars came in and it changed the way I think that America was engaged across the Middle East, but specifically in Afghanistan to start.

• 17:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And if you go back to kind of what worked in the beginning, right? If you think of kind of the military fighting force, it was like the tip of the spear is the single greatest fighting force in the world. And we were hyper effective in those early days in Afghanistan. But I don't know why we decided to do the nation building exercise. There's the arguments of it brought profits to the defense industry. There is a kind of a continuation. We didn't know what else to do. There's some people who just say, hey, like it was a mistake, right? There's all kinds of explanations or theories. But to me, there's no difference between let's build a million dollar missile to take out a billion dollar piece of infrastructure than hey, let's put, you know, 15, 16 people on a helicopter and send them somewhere and let them do their thing.

• 18:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And sure, there's a lot of money that goes into training those people and equipping them and getting them there and all that stuff. But it sure isn't, you know, billions, if not trillions of dollars that ends up getting spent to wage kind of these mechanized wars that also then lead to these nation building exercises. And it feels like maybe China understands that and doesn't have an appetite for for those kind of bigger ideas. They simply want the more targeted, almost sniper like approach rather than the bigger efforts.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say, I think if you look at the CCP today, I think they definitely have a much bigger appetite for, you know, spending big money on big missiles, big ships and all that kind of thing. They have certainly avoided that historically up until, you know, the last 10, 20 years. I think now as Taiwan comes into play, Chinese defense spending has definitely gone up quite significantly. They definitely have a lot of aircraft carriers, things that they never did before. I mean, the, the building of the first Chinese aircraft carrier was actually a very good point in time that you can see, okay, like, if you look historically, that's when things started to shift.

• 19:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Now, on, on your point about. America, you know, I think there is this, you know, joke that the US really sucks fighting wars for the last ever since Vietnam. That's not really true. You know, realistically, I think you cited the example of the Taliban. That's 100% true. If you look back at the Gulf War, I mean, the Gulf War was like extremely effective. Holy shit. Like you look at the data and I don't remember exactly the number of soldiers, but it was like, like over 10,000 and the US has like four casualties or something like that. It was incredible. So the US is good at fighting that.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  The reality is it is unfeasible to fight those types of wars in the world today, more unnecessarily should we be fighting those kinds of war in the world today. So if that's the world that we're living in, how can the US adapt to the new reality of unrestricted warfare? And this is where I think we have not necessarily done a good job or evaluated enough this new world that we're living in because what this means is everything becomes a battlefield. It's not that we're going to send, you know, some soldiers in the desert to fight this war against the enemies and they're going to send their soldiers. Realistically, all of our infrastructure becomes weaponized.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  All of our apps become, you know, a propaganda place. So if this is the world that we're living in, what are we doing to recognize the new challenges that we have now that we didn't have 20 years ago?

• 21:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So when we think of, let's just take a kind of mobile technologies, right? So anything going your smartphone, apps, et cetera. When you look at that, should we just ban every single Chinese company from putting their technology into the American market? Is there some sort of framework or evaluation process that we should implement? And should a government official, should a private organization, you know, be the one to kind of execute that evaluation? Like, what do you think is the solution to at least address the technology side of what goes on an American citizen's phone?

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a couple of different answers to that. I think from a, from a supply chain perspective, I think at the very least, we should recognize that we have a few couple of very, very important rare earths and minerals and metals that make the supply chain and that make basically every single piece of equipment and technology that we use today. Getting access to those and then getting access to semiconductors is extremely important. China has a very good degree of control over that. You know, I just did a podcast episode on my podcast with Nate Pekarsik that he goes very deep on that. I mean, listen to that and you see like China has actually spent like 20, 30 years really

• 22:30Speaker 02

  planning, how can we actually get control of those minerals because they're becoming ever more important. So, you know, having a strategy for how can we actually get the core items in our supply chain that we use every day for basically everything that we need for every equipment that we use is really important. Now, I don't personally think that we need to ban every single item from China. You know, in some ways China has become the factory of the world and that actually benefits Americans to some degree. You know, there's a lot of low piece equipments that we need. There's a lot of things that come from China that the US customer can get and that overall increases the quality of life of the average American.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  I could buy that argument to some degree, but you know, the vulnerability that America has with, you know, some of these core items of this on the supply chain is absurd and we absolutely need to change that.

• 23:28Anthony Pompliano?

  What are some of those areas on the supply chain that you're like, these are our biggest risks or these are the areas that we should really be paying attention to?

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Well, rare earths and semiconductors are by far the biggest issues. I mean, we're seeing everything that's happening with Taiwan and TSMC. We need to change that absolutely.

• 23:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain that situation a little bit more. Most people I don't think actually understand kind of the relationship between China and Taiwan, but also TSMC and the kind of their global importance for the semiconductor industry.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so on China and Taiwan, so when the Chinese Communist Party took over China almost 70 years ago, the party in power fled to Taiwan and Taiwan was declared an independent country.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Realistically, China has always considered Taiwan to be part of China, and they have the so-called "One China" policy. And it's very controversial in the sense that this was never a big deal, and realistically, the US or the UN have never really cared that much about recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. You could, you know, look historically, and you would always find records saying that Taiwan was a sovereign nation, but, you know, it's not like people really cared about standing up for that that much. And what happened was, you know, as the semiconductor industry evolved, without getting too into the details here,

• 24:56Speaker 02

  the company that became the most prominent builder of semiconductors is a company called TSMC that's based in Taiwan. And that's the company that basically produces the semiconductors that are in the best piece of technology equipment that we have today. And realistically, if we actually need, realistically, we need to change that, otherwise, China really could take over Taiwan, and that would send us 10, 15 years in the past. Do you want us? Yeah. Oh.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  That distracted me so much. I was like, "Oh, what was it talking about again?"

• 25:42Speaker 03

  I was like, "What just happened?"

• 25:46Speaker 04

  There's a new paper right there in that chair.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  That scared the shit out of me. He jumped up and you froze. I was like, "What is this?"

• 26:00Speaker 04

  Of all the things that could have happened, that's the least of our worries. Let's fix it real quick. I don't think it was even on camera, so they might have never known. Until they come back and somebody got something out of it.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Look what you did to the flag.

• 26:14Speaker 04

  The flag moved.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  Did you see this edit point fake?

• 26:18Speaker 04

  First edit, now this.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Unsubscribe.

• 26:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Sorry, I see you get on.

• 26:31Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, what part did it happen? Or just go from Taiwan, like the TSMC became the leading semiconductor.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and what you see is that ever, you know, over the last 20, 30 years, the main developer of semiconductors became TSMC, not Nvidia, not Intel. It became the Taiwanese company, which make really high quality semiconductors that we use in basically every single core piece of technology today. And in this scenario, as the, you know, fight between US and China continues to escalate, China taking over Taiwan becomes an existential issue for the US. Realistically, you know, talk about all the wars and nation building things that the US has done over the last 20 years.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Part of why a lot of people today agree that like we wasted our time there is because there was not really a vital US interest at play in a lot of these wars. We were fighting, but we're not really, we didn't really know what we're fighting for, right? And in the case of Taiwan, we actually do need that. If China takes over Taiwan, it will send the US five to 10 years in the past technologically.

• 27:47Anthony Pompliano?

  How easy, from a military standpoint, will it be for China to do? I mean, China's a massive country. As you said, they've made significant investment in aircraft carriers and various other military kind of functionality. Taiwan's not a huge place, population wise, not very big. Is this something where if China decides to do it, barring some sort of external support from the United States, Taiwan stands no chance of being able to fight off China?

• 28:16Speaker 02

  It's a complicated answer. Realistically, so President Biden actually said, I think, six months ago, or less than that, that the US would actually fight to defend Taiwan. That was the first time that a US president has actually made a statement like that. And after making a statement like that, if China were to do this, the US would either... Have to go do something or lose all of its credibility. In addition to that, over the last two presidencies, the US has tried to rebuild what they call the Quad and build more relationships with Australia and Southeast Asia. And you know, countries like Japan and South Korea that also don't stand to benefit from having China become a bully in Asia. So it would be complicated.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  China certainly has a lot of leverage by the fact that Taiwan is, you know, right next door. But things could get ugly very fast.

• 29:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I I saw, and I forget who who said this, but they basically were saying, look, the Taiwanese citizens, I think there's like 20 million or so citizens there. They basically need to hold on for two weeks. It would take the United States approximately two weeks to understand what was happening, kind of rally, get resources, equipment, everything to Taiwan to be able to help kind of support them. But those first two weeks would be incredibly important. And if the ultimate formula in this person's mind was just what percent of the citizens are going to fight. Right? And and we see this a little bit in Russia, Ukraine of, you know, whether you want to think it was a good idea or not, it appears that the Ukrainian government basically turned to their citizens and said, you know, we need some of you to stay.

• 29:57Anthony Pompliano?

  We will give you guns, we will give you equipment, but we need you to fight. And I I think that it's a very different approach, right? If you think in the United States, I think people have a hard time believing because the idea of an invasion is hard to imagine when you have, you know, two oceans on either side and you generally have friendly neighbors. But if we were ever in a position where we said, hey, in the United States, you need to fight, I wonder what what's the percentage of people who would fight? Right? And then you go to some of these other countries. And in Ukraine, I think people were surprised by the percentage of people who stayed to fight. Right? It was a positive surprise. Taiwan remains to be seen what that answer would be. This episode is brought to you by FTX US.

• 30:39Anthony Pompliano?

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• 31:47Speaker 02

  I don't claim to know Taiwanese people and Taiwanese culture well enough to know what would happen in that case. But what I do think that you've touched on that is a slightly different topic, but a very interesting one is, are people really willing to die for anything today? What happened over the last 20 years that the idea of people fighting, Ukrainian citizens fighting for Ukraine is inspiring, but also to some degree mind-boggling in today's culture? Whereas in reality, fighting for your country, fighting for what you believe in was always the standard, right? Like, that was life.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  And to some degree, by the way, I think it's a positive thing that as wars stopped happening and we've had, to some degree, America being the leading force in the world.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  You know, people don't really believe in that many things anymore, right? I mean, we have companies today. Companies are the core piece of institutions that we have. It's what is left. But the idea of national pride, the idea of national culture, the idea of religion, it feels like we've killed all of those things over the last 30 to 50 years. And now we have a generation of people that don't really believe in anything. And you see depressions rate going up, you see nihilism on the rise. And I think we should sit back and stay like, is this really the world that we want to live in?

• 33:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you look at China, how much nationalism is in the country of China? Like culturally, are they following the global trend and they've lost belief and loyalty and adherence to some of those ideals? Or are they actually counter trend and they are deepening allegiance and loyalty from a nationalistic view? And so they're kind of the outlier?

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. I wouldn't claim to speak for the whole Chinese culture. What I can say is, you know, when you look at a country that was growing 10% a year, every year for the last 20 years, or you know, something, some really crazy high amounts, the population is going to be happy. And realistically, like the population is going to be on board with whatever the leading party is in place. And that's true for basically every country that is experiencing crazy growth. That always happens. The answer for the CCP is very clear. The CCP has a long-term plan to make China the, you know, middle kingdom once again.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  And this is where it's actually really hard, I think, for Americans and people from all over the world to understand how China thinks about these things. Like, the US is a little bit over 200 years old. China has a history of 5,000 years. For a long time, China was actually the number one country in the world. And, you know, China experienced, not too long ago, from that historical perspective, what they called the century of humiliation with the Opium War. And then, you know, the Cultural Revolution and all of those things, you know, where China became an extremely poor country. China had a famine that killed thirty plus million people.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  Some really hard times. And now the opportunity to once again become the leading economy of the world and then the leading superpower of the world.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  So there is a lot of nationalism going on. There is a lot of pride for Chinese culture. And, you know, there is a sense of cohesion around the mission of making China this, you know, once again, great nation. And recognizing that that's what we are, you know, being challenged against is really important.

• 35:37Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of American culture and American companies are contributing to this kind of China long-term strategy? I'll give you kind of two examples, right? So we've got John Cena, who made some commentary, wasn't well received in China. It's important that movies, if you're optimizing purely for profit, get into China. He issued an apology, basically saying, hey, you know, Taiwan essentially is not an independent country, which I think shocked a lot of people. And they said, what is going on, John Cena? What are you doing? But then also, we recently saw Apple has reportedly asked some of their suppliers to stop labeling the products made in Taiwan and instead replace them with labels that say "Made in China." Now, it's a report in the mainstream media.

• 36:22Anthony Pompliano?

  You can question the validity of it. But if we accept that that is a true thing that's happening, are American companies and American culture almost playing right into what the Chinese CCP wants to actually occur?

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Well, they absolutely are. There is no question about it. I think it's really hard to argue that we have a lot of companies today, a lot of influential leaders, that are actually doing what is best for the CCP and not best for their own country.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  And it's really bizarre that something like this is happening. You know, if you go back to World War II, right? So World War II, the US gets attacked, the US goes to war. And you see companies like GM, okay? All the big car manufacturers, all the big manufacturing companies of the US basically get the message, you know what? Our business just changed. We're not producing cars. We are now producing war weapons. We're producing airfare, like aircrafts.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  And GM even changed its tagline. GM's tagline during the war was victory is our business. And fast forward, you know, where we are now, we have companies that are more than happy to, you know, follow along the mandates of the CCP that are literally telling them what they should be saying. And then go back in, you know, in the US and, you know, give us some, you know, moral superiorities spiel on what we should be thinking, right? I mean, take what's happened to Hollywood, right? Like, there was an amazing book that came out in the last year called The Red Carpet

• 38:06Speaker 02

  that documents the relationship between Hollywood and China. And, you know, put aside the fact that you've had a lot of, you know, Hollywood movie studios get acquired by China. You have a lot of studios that were more than happy to put in movies what China told them to put, as long as they could get access to the China, to the Chinese market, right? I mean, I remember, there's two examples that happened here that are very funny, very interesting. One, you have, there's a movie called The Red Scare. It's actually a remake of a sixties movie. And it's this idea that you actually have, you know, someone from the Soviet Union infiltrate someone in America in a small town.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  And then there is a communist movement that goes on and tries to overtake the US government. And it was, you know, Cold War, so it was obvious that, you know, US was going to fight against the Soviet Union. And about 10, 20 years ago, I don't remember exactly when, they tried, they decided to remake that movie. And there was, you know, an obvious question, like, who should it be? You know, like, okay, like, Soviet Union's gone.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  Russia doesn't seem like as bad as the Soviet Union was back then. It should be China, right? Like China is still owned by, it is still ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. And it could be the major challenge to America. So they tried to remake that movie. I think the movie was with Brad Pitt, actually. And when they put China as being the main challenger to the US in that movie, China decided to basically say, you're not doing that. And they fought hard against that. And they basically, if you watch the movie, the movie actually did come out. And I think the, I never watched the movie, but if you look at it,

• 39:55Speaker 02

  the main competitor that the US is fighting in that movie, I think it's North Korea. It's like this really weird idea that, you know, the small nation of North Korea that had not really done anything for the last, you know, century is now gonna try to overtake the US. And why did they do that? Because China basically told the US movie studios to do that. Now, the other example, which is interesting. I mean, if you remember, if you remember when the Star Wars, the new franchise came out with the last three movies, right? Very diverse. You know, they have characters of a lot of different ethnicities. They have characters with a lot of different skin colors to reflect, you know, the reality that, you know, the US has changed. And we really value those things and we want to have those things in our movies now.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  And, you know, we're lectured by the movie theaters, by our elites every day that, you know, we need to do these things. That's culture, that's the culture that we wanna live in. And that's what we're being told by them all the time. And then when they took that movie to China, they actually removed the black characters. They removed, you know, the diverse characters from the posters, from everything. Because, you know, China is not on board with that. And they wanna make money on China. So that's fine. And it's just this gigantic double standard of what we're being told by our elites, of what we're being told by our companies in Hollywood and beyond about what you should be told, about what you should believe in. And when it comes to China...

• 41:24Speaker 02

  And it's just business as usual. I'm just here to make money, right? Like, there was this amazing, they, you probably remember this, this amazing speech by Rick Gervais at the Oscars.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  And he was talking to Tim Cook, because he was there, Apple TV was just launched. And, you know, he basically just said, you know, if you get an award today, don't, you know, just don't be so sanctimonious about how good you are, or how terrible our country is, because realistically, you're just, you know, operating off slave shops in China. So just take your little award and go home. And we need, realistically, we need more people to speak up to that. Because it's, it's, it's a really bizarre situation that we're in. Really bizarre.

• 42:14Anthony Pompliano?

  What about the supply chains? Like, we've talked a lot about mobile apps, we've talked about some more psychological stuff. You have TSMC, which isn't in China, it's in Taiwan, but there's a risk there that something could happen. But we have a lot of supply chains and manufacturing in China itself. What can the United States do to lessen the dependency? Is it just reshoring, bring back manufacturing, bring back labor opportunities and supply chains to the US? Or are there other opportunities for us to lessen that dependency?

• 42:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, a couple of things. There are two big issues with supply chains happening today. The first one is, you know, we actually have a lot of dependencies on core rare earth minerals, things that we already covered. The other thing that's still happening is, even though, you know, we're here in Miami, and realistically, like, life is normal after COVID. For China, China has still decided to, you know, continue what they call the zero dynamic zero COVID. So China is still having a lot of lockdowns, including in cities that are core industrial cities for China. So because of that, you effectively have a lot of delays.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  You have a lot of issues with getting stuff that we're manufacturing in China here. So those are the two big issues. One part of the supply chain is getting weaponized. The other part is still suffering from a lot of COVID disruptions, even today. Now, as for things that we can do, I do believe that this idea of reshoring American manufacturing will be a big thing over the last 10, 20 years. Like, we absolutely believe in that, excited to invest in companies that are doing that, because we absolutely need this to happen. Now, is it only in America? Not necessarily. You know, I think that, you know, one of the things that America should think very deeply

• 44:05Speaker 02

  about is who are the allies that will stand by the United States in this new divide that we're going to be living in? So we should absolutely, you know, be sending, you know, more manufacturing to Mexico, to, you know, countries in Latin America that are supportive of the government, of the US government. But, you know, for sure, we need to rebuild a lot of infrastructure and manufacturing here in America.

• 44:32Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of the difficulties in reshoring around supply chains manufacturing is the cost of labor in the United States is just astronomically higher than, obviously, in China, but even places like Mexico and some of our other allies? And so do we have to make a choice if we want to actually reshore? Not move from, you know, China-based manufacturing and supply chain maybe to Mexico or somewhere else, but we actually want to bring it back within the borders of the United States? Does this give rise to robotics and basically says, hey, we're going to take the American kind of blue collar worker, and we have to put them on the sidelines when it comes to supply chains and manufacturing, because we just can't pay them and still compete from a cost perspective with some of these other areas?

• 45:12Speaker 02

  Right, absolutely. You know, we're investors in a company called Hadrian. And, you know, what Hadrian is doing is effectively rebuilding the supply chain for the aerospace and defense industry. And, you know, there's a lot of companies that tried to do this before. And they tried to do this just with software. And it's just, you know, tried just robotics, just autonomous machines. And part of the founder's insight is you actually need both. You need machinists, you need people who are extremely good at this, that work better with machines. And I believe that is going to be the future of a lot of industries too. You know, realistically, absolutely, you're right, that we can't have, you know, manufacture

• 45:52Speaker 02

  everything in America with the cost of living and with the, you know, wages and things that we have here today, it would be prohibitively expensive. However, we do have the room for technology to not get rid of, but partner with blue collar jobs to, you know, really rebuild a lot of the things that we need. I think a narrative that we unfortunately believed in for the last 50 years is that this idea of college educated workers are somehow a superior class to blue collar jobs. And I think we, hopefully, we might go through a renaissance where we see, you know, a lot

• 46:33Speaker 02

  of people that are working on really hardworking, like really hardworking people that are working on these jobs to help rebuild the infrastructure of the United States.

• 46:43Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, there was the Industrial Revolution, which obviously laid the foundation for the world that we know today in the United States and incredible economic prosperity and growth as a nation. It feels like there was a shift, maybe in the 90s to Wall Street, and then in the 2000s and early 2010s, more to Silicon Valley, but it was all about optimizing ad systems or getting people to click on things. And, you know, I would argue that Facebook is a net positive for the world and it's not so much like these things are bad, but it does mean that many of our smartest, most capable people were not going and working on these really hard manufacturing, supply chain, kind of industrial type problems. I think that's changing, right?

• 47:27Anthony Pompliano?

  I think you, myself, and a couple of other investors have spent quite a bit of time making investments in companies, you know, some that come to mind immediately are obviously Hadrian, Vart. Anduril, Traba, like you can just go down the line. Is this the next trend that will kind of lead to that Renaissance is basically Silicon Valley style entrepreneurs saying, I understand how to build teams. I understand how to raise capital. I understand how to solve problems and think from a first principle standpoint. Now I'm not going to go do this in just a pure software kind of consumer product space. I'm instead going to go to the industrial space and try to solve problems there.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  It is our best hope. You know, I think there's a lot to be talked about institutional decay and what has happened to government, what has happened to our other institutions over the last 20 plus years. But realistically, if we are to fix this, we need the most talented people in the world to help us fix those problems. And the most talented people in the world are working in technology today. I think that is a very fair statement. And I think is you probably agree that, you know, the most ambitious people, they want to start companies. They want to start, you know, the next unicorn, that kind of stuff. So we need to find them and we need to partner with them and we need to throw all of our weight behind them to help solve those problems.

• 48:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And when you see that, how much of this is psychological or cultural need to make people understand that this is important and it's okay to want to make the United States kind of this great country that can continue to lead in manufacturing and kind of these industrial industries versus actually solving technology problems or solving other types of things. Can we just change people's mindset and then that will be 80% of the solution? Or are there really hard manufacturing, supply chain, you know, type problems that need to be solved? And psychology is great, but like we still got to just solve the problems.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I think realistically, there are absolutely, you know, real problems to be solved. And thing is that, you know, we may spend billions of dollars in trying to solve them and still fail. But I think that it doesn't change the fact that throughout history.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  You just had to do hard things and hope that something would work. So I don't know how to answer your question, other than say, yes, those things are hard. They might not work, but if we don't have the most ambitious people with the most impressive visions of the future to spend all of their time, all of the blood, sweat and tears on these things, we're not going to figure it out. That part is very clear. So all I can do is to hope to find the best people and try to rally them to help work on these issues and do that myself, too, of course. Because if we don't do that, then I don't think we can expect anything to be solved.

• 50:26Anthony Pompliano?

  So what's interesting to me is the government in the United States, for quite a while, helped to build a lot of these industries and they pushed forward innovation and progress. It feels like we reached an end point of government programs being able to do certain things. So obviously, the quintessential example is SpaceX was able to do something that NASA wasn't, right? And they're collaborative, they work together, but without SpaceX, I don't think that we are anywhere near where we are from a space kind of innovation standpoint. We now see other private companies starting to push the pace of innovation and progress and drill, obviously, when it comes to defense and many other examples.

• 51:11Anthony Pompliano?

  You had a conversation with Steve Blank recently, and he basically was like, we need to recreate or rebuild the Department of Defense. And I didn't get the sense that he's like, let's just go get trillions of dollars from the government and hire a bunch of government employees and like, that's going to be the solution. What were your takeaways from talking to, you know, what many people would consider a great investor, a great kind of entrepreneur and coach, but also a military veteran in Steve Blank?

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I think just the one thing I want to say about Steve Blank that I think is really important for people to know. I think Steve Blank got very famous about the lean startup, which, you know, a lot of people tied to, you know, the rise of consumer apps in the early 2000s. But, you know, Steve Blank is someone that has spent more time than basically anyone studying the relationship between Silicon Valley and the defense industry. So if you look back at the history, Silicon Valley has always had ties to the Department of Defense. And, you know, hopefully, we're going through a renaissance of that. Now, to answer your question specifically, you know, On what Steve thought it must be done,

• 52:16Speaker 02

  it's it's hard to believe that the people that are going to fix the issue are going to be the people that created the issue. And I think, you know, a lot of what happens today with government is we have the same people that have been there the entire time. So I do think that there is a massive problem that we have today is that, you know, to your point, like the the next Elon Musk is going to start a company. He's not going to work for NASA. That is a positive thing. Overall, the world is going to be better off because of SpaceX than if he had not done that. But we do need a new generation of people who are interested in rebuilding those institutions.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  You know, when I look back, as you know, you used to be the sort of libertarian guy. There's a Ronald Reagan quote, you know, the eight most dangerous words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. And, you know, I I used to think that those things are fun. And as I as I watched the institutional decay happening for the last 10, 15 years, you probably remember this, there was a lot of people cheering for that, like, right? Like, there was a lot of people saying, the government sucks, you know, let's let it fail, and we'll probably be better off because of that. I think sitting here in 2022, it's very clear that we're not in a better position. Right? So we better have new people.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  We better have new extremely talented people that have the ambitions of rebuilding institutions. We need new companies, we do, but we also need competent, highly, highly competent institutions in the Department of Defense, but also in other areas of the government that need to be that they need to be better working with startups, but they have an ambition of building a great country.

• 54:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What's the role of government in these innovative fields? Like, should the government be the one trying to invent new things and kind of commercialize them? Should it be like a public-private partnership? What have you seen kind of be the most effective role for government? And, you know, there's the modern day environment and there's kind of history. So maybe we can take some lessons from history and apply them to today?

• 54:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, you know, in a lot of, in a lot of industries, I do believe that it's true that government needs to mostly stay out of the way.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  That's probably the answer for the vast majority of industries. But in industries like defense, where the government is the ultimate buyer of basically every product, the government does need to step up and show the path for these companies that are trying to innovate in the industry to be able to work with them. You know, a lot of these companies today, they, you know, spend years getting grants from the government and, you know, just trying to build something, but in reality, they're never able to actually get a program of record and get the government to become the ultimate buyer. So we need, like, we absolutely do need to change that.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  You know, we had a podcast recently with Pete Newell that he goes very deep on, you know, how do these SBIR, STTR programs work? What do we need to do to reshape them? Because realistically, startups today, if they're working on these really hard problems and the government is the ultimate buyer, they absolutely need to be able to, you know, get a path from the government. If you do these things and if you actually execute, we're willing to buy this. And that maze is way too complicated. And I think it is the government's role to be able to fix a lot of those issues.

• 55:56Anthony Pompliano?

  When we think about that government role, how much of the problems we're facing are rooted in a lack of math, science, and engineering education in the United States, maybe compared to other countries? If we just beefed up kind of the way that we trained people and we got more math, science, and engineering graduates or people who are interested in these fields, would that permeate all of society, both public and private market, and we would just kind of have a better educated workforce that then could go work on these problems?

• 56:26Speaker 02

  Well, I think, to be clear, I think startups would definitely benefit from that. New companies would definitely benefit from that. And absolutely, I think we would have a lot more, you know, potentially great tech companies, great tech companies working in the defense industry if we had more engineers. But I think a lot of problems with government and how we work with startups today are due to incentives more than anything else. So realistically, you know, what we need is not necessarily people to, you know, be smarter than they already were, is to realize that the set of incentives that we have in place are leading us to a path that may not be great for the country overall.

• 57:08Anthony Pompliano?

  What are the incentives?

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Well, realistically, you know, the US government works mostly with defense industries, in the defense industries, work mostly with the big companies, the primes. And, you know, they are the ones that have the power to lobby, that have the power to, you know, know the right people, get the right people to do things for them inside of the government. And it's really hard, it's impossibly hard for a startup to break in. And the reality is, you know, when you have a set budget, these become very zero-sum games. And, you know, when you have, you know, the five primes fighting for a certain budget and then you start, startup wants to come in, the system is designed for the startup to fail, right?

• 57:54Speaker 02

  Now, what happens is, if we do need innovation, and if we do believe that innovation is the only way that we're going to get out of this thing, out of the situation that we're in, we do need the government to understand that, you know, the breakthrough innovations are going to come from these startups. And we need to nurture them and we need to help, to help them succeed.

• 58:17Anthony Pompliano?

  When we see that, why has Anduril been able to break through to some degree? I know that one of their aspirations is to become the next great prime contractor in the defense industry. Why are they able to break through as a startup where maybe others are failing or designed to fail?

• 58:33Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, to be clear, it's probably one of the most incredible teams that came out of Silicon Valley, and I see they're based in LA, but I see Silicon Valley broadly in the last 20 years, right? Like, if you look at the founding team of that company, you have an incredible visionary and technologist. You have people who know the VC industry extremely well, but also people that came from the government, right? Like, a lot of that team that came from working with the government. So, a lot of that team came from Palantir. And Palantir had to sue the government at some point to actually be able to succeed. So, I think it was a combination of the right team at the right point in time, at a point

• 59:16Speaker 02

  that America and people here, investors, were seeing the problems that we had from a geopolitical standpoint and saw that we needed a company like Anduril to start the wave of new companies building in the defense industry.

• 59:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Why did Palantir have to sue the government? I don't think a lot of people know that story.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I don't claim to know the details. I would have to look it up, but ultimately, and SpaceX did the same thing, by the way. So, the way that, because of the way that government procurement processes work, the government makes very clear, like, you have to bid for this project at certain amounts at a given timeline. And they were able to prove that, even though they were able to meet those things, ultimately the government still went with the old way of doing things, with the traditional primes, with the traditional contractors. So, like I said, it's a system that is designed for these new companies to fail, and we need

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  a new generation of officers that are able to recognize that we need those new companies to succeed and that we're all going to be better off for it.

• 1:00:25Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:01:54Anthony Pompliano?

  of doing things, move fast, break things, like all these kind of anecdotes. Actually, when it comes to the Palantirs, the Andorils, the SpaceXs, many of them, they work directly with the government. And what they're actually asking for is enforcement of the rules and frameworks because they believe they have an advantage and they see that maybe those rules and frameworks aren't being applied equally across the industry. And so it runs counter to, I think, what the mainstream narrative of like, oh, these people all just want to break the rules. Now, to be clear, there are plenty of companies, you can Uber, Airbnb and others, who show up and they say, hey, we're going to break the rules because we don't think the rules are right and we're going to lobby and try to get them changed or whatever. But it goes back to like, the world's not black and white, right? That there's kind of a full flavor across the industry of people who want to work within the rules

• 1:02:39Anthony Pompliano?

  and then some people believe that, you know, breaking the rules is important.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  I agree with you. You know, I think the nuance for me is that at the end of the day, I still believe that the future and all the innovation is created by rebels. However, I think what we need to recognize is that in the world that we're living in, not accepting the institutional decay that we've been living through and trying to build a great company to go reinvent the defense industry, reinvent aerospace is in and of itself an act of rebellion. Now, you may not be able to move fast and break things in those industries, and I don't think a lot of people have.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  But, you know, we should absolutely be inspired by, you know, the fact that so many of these individuals, so many of these founders, were decided to go against all the forces, against everything that's at the status quo to try to build those great companies.

• 1:03:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What are other industries outside of just defense that you see kind of this institutional decline, and you now believe that startups or kind of private enterprises will be a key ingredient to helping rejuvenate them?

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, I don't have as much depth on it, but I think healthcare, for sure, is a big one. I mean, construction, real estate, all of these areas. I mean, if you look at healthcare, healthcare is what, like, a fourth of the US GDP, a fifth? It keeps growing. We never know how it's going to stop, like, maybe 2050 is going to be half. So, absolutely, like, the US healthcare system is on its way to bankruptcy. This is very clear. So, if companies don't fix that now, if institutions don't fix that now, it's going to get pretty ugly.

• 1:04:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then what about the role of venture capital? We talked about the role of government, we talked about the role of private enterprise, but most of these startups are being funded by venture capital. It seems, I don't know, 10 years ago, it was not popular to go fund many of these types of companies that were now trying to rejuvenate institutions. Palantir maybe was one of the first ones where Peter Thiel and a number of others said, hey, this is important work, and we're going to go do this. There's a little bit bigger of a group of investors who are willing to do it, but still not a massive number. What do you see as like the financier's role in this entire movement?

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I think there's a nuanced answer to this. Realistically, at the end of the day, one could say that the role of investors is just to make money.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  But I would say more importantly, when people make that argument, a lot of what they try to say is, hey, we don't know where the next breakthrough is going to come from. Like realistically, it's so random in venture capital. Like when you're looking at those startups at day zero, everything is so random that you don't really know like what can really have the power to change the world. I believe in that. What I also believe in is that at the end of the day, you need to be working in something that matters. You need to be working in something important. And you don't know if that's going to be what's going to change the world. But there's a shot. And as a venture capitalist, you're

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  betting on the shot. You know that, you know, nine out of ten cases is going to fail, but when it succeeds, it's going to get really big. But if you don't have the conviction as a founder or as an investor, that you're working on something truly important to begin with, then I really have questions, right? It's not going to be the next FART app that's going to really change things, right? So I do think that there is a role for working on things that matter. And I think that investors do have a responsibility there.

• 1:06:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What's fascinating about this is, early on, it's betting on people. And we've seen over and over again, some of these companies are built by people who have industry experience, but more often than not, they actually don't have any experience in the specific industry, right? If you take Palmer Lucky and kind of his entire team at Anduril, they didn't have a ton of experience in the defense sector. Now, some of the people from Palantir, obviously, they'd worked there previously. But when you're evaluating these teams, like what are some of the themes that you've seen or kind of traits that you're able to pull out and kind of recognize in a pattern that you're like, yeah, these people have a higher probability? It doesn't guarantee success, but they have a higher probability of succeeding versus maybe other teams that you all evaluate?

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  Well, I think you need a secret, right? And I think a question that I always ask is, what do you understand about the world that nobody else has realized? In some ways, and it's sort of a cliche in venture capital, but you talk to these people and it just seems that they're living in the future. They see all the problems in the present, they see a potential for a future world, and the people around them have just not realized that yet. On your point about Andro, I mean, you have an absolutely visionary founder that, to your point, did not have a lot of experience in defense, but had a team that actually did, that really know the ins and outs of it. So that was a complete team, right?

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  And I think in a lot of these really complicated industries, really regulated industries, when you actually have a complete team that is able, one, like, has a visionary that is living in the future, but two, has compliments to that person, that really understand, like, how the system works, not necessarily always play by the rules, but to know how and when to break them, if necessary, is really important.

• 1:08:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then what about some of these folks who come from, I'll call it Silicon Valley, more as an idea rather than the physical geography, but we're now seeing more of those individuals go into politics, or go into positions of influence that aren't just running companies? Like, how important is that, or what are you seeing there?

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I think this goes back to what I was talking about. We need new people to rejuvenate the government, to change a lot of these institutions. I welcome that. I hope more of this happens. I mean, let's go back 200 years, right? Like, the founding fathers, a lot of the founding fathers believed that everybody should serve in public service at one point in their lives, right? Up until Nixon, every man in America was expected to serve the military, right?

• 1:09:21Speaker 02

  And now we don't have any of that anymore. I'm not advocating that, you know, we should be living, should be living in the world that we, that we lived in. But I do think that there is a role for serving a higher interest than, than, than yourself.

• 1:09:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  So I, you know, I, I think it's amazing. I think it's amazing that we're seeing so many of these people run for office. Ideally, we're going to be seeing more people working with the government, working to rebuild our institutions. And, you know, that, that's, that if we're going to solve those issues, this is part of the process.

• 1:09:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. You recently moved to Florida. Congratulations. And I've heard you say that the future of America looks very similar to Florida, which will put many people, their heads will spin when they hear that. What do you mean by that?

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  Well, look, over the last two years, you know, my girlfriend and I basically traveled, we did a nomadic thing that a lot of people did. We traveled over 25 states, you know, like saw over 40 states. And it's very clear to me that, you know, in Florida, people are the happiest people I've ever seen in, in the US, like by far. And if you don't believe me, just come, just come here and, you know, you walk around and it's in people's faces. You know, you walk around in California and you're trying to not step in human poo, right?

• 1:10:47Speaker 02

  People here don't really accept that. We refuse to think that's normal.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  And, you know, ultimately, it is the, the one city, the one state in America, that when you talk to people, they still believe, for one, that the US is a good thing, right? That which 20 years ago, nobody would disagree with that, that the US is a positive force, force in the world. But they also believe that there is a hope for a future in America that is brighter than what we have today.

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  And it's probably, there are probably other places in America that also believe in that, but people here really take pride in that.

• 1:11:24Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of that is because there's such a deep seeded kind of immigration and it's a melting pot of people from, you know, a lot of Central and South American countries, but also other, you know, countries around the world? Do you need kind of that diversity of origin in order to continue to have that ideal be persistently put on a pedestal and say, hey, you know, I came to America and so I believe in the ideas of the American dream? Or is it something else?

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  Um, you know, I'm, I'm an immigrant, so I, I recognize the, the role for, you know, America being the shining north star that everybody, that everybody aspires to. I think there is something to that, but I think if we are to, you know, take this country back to what it was, we need to put the responsibility, not just, you know, on immigrants, I think America could, America is a great place, but on the shoulders of every single person in this country to say, this is a great country, this country has great values, this country has a great culture, American culture actually stands for something. Um, and, you know, that's on everybody.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  So I, when I look at Florida, I, I, you know, I think there's a lot of, you know, like Cuban immigrants, Latin American immigrants that came here, that knew what socialism was. And sure, that's part of it too, but I think the average person here just takes pride in America being what it is.

• 1:12:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So you're unique. You're from Brazil, but you're here in America. And if somebody listened to the first half of this conversation, they would say like, man, this guy is very, very America first, almost as if you were born here. Why is it that you're from another country, but you believe so deeply in America and you're not living in Brazil and saying, hey, you know, Brazil should be the leading country in the world and we need to go do all these things to make that happen?

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, look, if you look at the history of Latin America, it just basically swings back and forth. And, you know, we have, there is a saying in Brazil that Brazil is going to be the country, Brazil is the country of the future, and it will always be. Because, you know, there is always great promises of, you know, Latin American countries becoming great countries. And at some point, they get taken over by the Communist Party of their countries, and they go back to being shitty. I mean, just look at what's happening in Argentina now. I like, I don't remember the exact numbers. I saw yesterday that the government of Argentina just raised the interest rates to 69.5% because they're having inflation rates, I think, in the three digits now, right? And if you look at the history of Latin America, that's always what it was.

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  So, you know, I came here because I do believe that America is the shiny North Star. I do believe that American values do stand for something. And I think that, you know, the promise of the American dream, that you can work hard and you will succeed, is really important. And even in the times of, you know, institutional decay, I'll say, you know, it's really flashy, especially in tech and S and P 100, to say that you're very optimistic about the future and you're very optimistic about America and the West. To be completely transparent, I'm not that optimistic. I think we have some deep-rooted issues. I think there's very good reasons to be pessimistic.

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  But if we're gonna go down, like, we better go down like kicking and screaming and fighting with everything that we have, you know? Like, realistically, like, America is the only hope for the West. If America doesn't stand up, if America doesn't solve its issues, I don't believe that there is any other country, there's any other nation that will have the power to, you know, prevent the world from, you know, living in a communist dictatorship and everybody speaking Mandarin 20 years from now.

• 1:15:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that's a possible risk?

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it's absolutely a possible risk. Like, we have a, like, we have a country that is run by communist dictators that have a very clear plan to becoming the, you know, one superpower of the world. At some point, that conflicts with American ideals. That conflicts with America as being the power that it has been for the last 50 years. So, do I believe that, you know, US and China will engage in a hot war? Not necessarily. I think the possibility is certainly there. But realistically, we have to recognize that, you know,

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  American ideals, or you know, the ideals that people who used to have 50 years ago, clash completely with the view of the world that China has. And, you know, something very interesting, and I watched this, is that, you know, I've observed this in the last few decades is, you know, it usually, it used to be that thinking that, you know, cultures can be better or worse in certain ways was not a controversial thing. Right? Like, you look at history, and realistically, when you study history, all that it is, is a lot of people trying to recognize things from previous cultures that they wanted to take with them,

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  and things from previous cultures that they wanted to reject. Right? When people are studying the Greeks and the Romans and the Romans, that's all it is. And for some reason now, we're not allowed to say that the values that the Chinese Communist Party stands for are horrific. We don't want that for ourselves, and we will stand up for what we believe in, and that we actually think that our culture is good.

• 1:17:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Why aren't we allowed to say that?

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  Well, because we've had a lot of, you know, in the last, ever since the early 2000s and since before then, we've had a lot of the elites, a lot of the leadership in this country to say, "Oh, you know, you can't say that China is bad. In some ways, that's racist. You can't say that, you know, America is good because, you know, that's white privilege." And we started regulating what people are allowed to say, what people are allowed to think. And then with the rise of social media, those problems all became significantly magnified.

• 1:17:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So this is a really interesting point that I think is becoming more obvious. In the last two and a half years, somehow, we condemned, either implicitly or explicitly, individuals who questioned mainstream narratives. And you can go through public health crisis, the solution, inflation, you know, just down the line. But those people are having the last laugh. And the one that just I think is hitting people over the head is within the last couple of days, the CDC came out and issued new guidance around the virus and the vaccine. And they're now saying that if you test positive, you don't have to quarantine. And they're saying that people who are vaccinated and unvaccinated should be treated the same.

• 1:18:24Anthony Pompliano?

  They're also saying things like if a child contracts COVID-19, they don't have to skip a day of school. And so if you had said that two weeks ago, you would have been condemned publicly, privately, and quite literally, you could potentially lose your job and many other pieces of blowback.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, here is one, right?

• 1:18:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  This morning, I think I saw this this morning on the way over here, Denmark just banned COVID-19 vaccines on children. Are they all Trumpists now? Like, are they all Trump supporters now? Or are we still not allowed to have that conversation?

• 1:19:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Why is it that we can't have the conversation? Like, in the United States, there's 100% a line that gets drawn that appears to be moving, but there's a line. This is allowed to be talked about, this is not allowed to be talked about.

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  Well, there's a person who has documented this better than anybody, Martin Garry, right, that wrote The Revolt of the Public. And in a lot of ways, the elites that we have today know that their days are counted. You know, with the rise of social media, and the fact that everybody now has a microphone that they can speak to, these people have completely lost their minds in a lot of ways, trying to save themselves from the fact that, you know, elites are not as powerful as they used to be, right?

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  It used to be 20 years ago that, you know, the New York Times was the paper of record, and you just watched CNN, and you had a view of the world because the elites told you what was true or not. Now you can't do that anymore, right? Like you have independent journalists, you have Twitter disproving things that the government said was true, you know, like a few hours ago. So because of that, you know, we're definitely living, ever since 2016, a very deep reactionary moment that these elites are not okay with seeing their power fading away. And with, you know, this institutional decay that's happening, right?

• 1:20:43Speaker 02

  So like, people don't care about what the CDC thinks anymore, right? So the CDC has been in this weird position of, okay, do we lie to save face? Do we lie because that would make us more credible? Or, you know, do we go back on our word of like two weeks ago? And some of this is malicious, for sure, but some of this is also the fact that, you know, it turns out that, you know, in those positions, you're dealing with incomplete information all the time. You don't know what's true, and things are gonna change. And we don't have a generation of leaders that really know how to live in this new digital world, in this new world of Twitter and social media.

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  And they're still stuck to their old ways.

• 1:21:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Would these people be better off if they just came out? Let's take the Federal Reserve as one example, maybe the CDC as another. During the public health crisis, if the CDC just came out and said, hey, there's a lot of stuff, a lot of moving parts, we don't know yet. Here's the things that we're doing to try to get a better handle on what's happening. Here's things that we're trying to do to get a better handle on what you should be doing. We'll come back to you with more information when we have it. And in the Federal Reserve's case, coming out and saying, hey, we had to step in, we mitigated short-term pain, it's likely that we're gonna get some high inflation, make sure that you're prepared. By the way, we're gonna do everything we can to keep it under control. We'll keep you updated as we go. Like, is that the better strategy in today's digital age of communication from the institutions to the people? Or is it better to do what both of those organizations did?

• 1:22:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And again, are they being ignorant or are they being malicious? Up for debate. But they definitely said something that was provably wrong, and it doesn't feel, whether right or wrong, it doesn't feel like they were actually being transparent about what their current thoughts were.

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I do want to be clear that I do believe that what the CDC has done and the degree to which we've been lied to is inexcusable. So whatever they tried to do was borderline criminal in a lot of ways. However, in the future, I do think that there is a role for doing what you're saying, admitting, simply because the alternative is not possible anymore. The idea that you're going to say something and the world's going to change and the world's not going to hear about it because of social media, because of all of these things, is not realistic. People have access to information. People are going to look at Twitter.

• 1:23:12Speaker 02

  People are going to read Substack. So you can't control everything unless you want to be China, right? So if you're not going to do that, then you absolutely need a new generation of leaders that acknowledges the world that we live in today.

• 1:23:26Anthony Pompliano?

  I think if during the early days of the virus, if somebody had stood up and said, "I don't know," two questions, said, "I don't know that answer. We're working on it. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." I think people would have trusted them way more.

• 1:23:42Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:23:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? But for some reason, it's like an egotistical or an arrogant belief of the world that you can't say that because if you say it, for some reason, you think that you lose credibility, you lose the elite status. But the internet, if there's anything that we've seen, it's the opposite. And actually, by presenting the arrogant elitist view of the world, you lose all credibility. And is there an institution now where the American people have the utmost trust? I mean, if you go through all of these institutions, the presidential administration, I mean, we had pretty much two different ends of the spectrum over the last, call it six years, eight years, whatever it is.

• 1:24:26Anthony Pompliano?

  50% of the country doesn't agree, right? If not more. I think right now, the president's approval rating is down below 40% or at 40%. Not good. If you look at all of the economic situations, I mean, there's a meme of the Federal Reserve Chairman just, you know, using a money printer. Like, in some ways, like, that epitomizes just the public's view of this. You can look at all of the public health stuff, and then you can even look at some of the law enforcement agencies. Like, one of the craziest things to me is when you look at, from an extremist standpoint, you had one side of the aisle screaming "defund the police," and now you have another side of the aisle screaming, like, "defund the FBI."

• 1:25:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:25:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so it's, there's almost no institution that is safe from the internet, and the internet is kind of coming for all of them, one by one.

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, it absolutely is. You know, I think that's a lot of what Martin Garry talks about. And I do think that the scary fact is that we don't know, we don't necessarily know how to rebuild them. That answer is definitely not clear yet. The internet is, in a lot of ways, this thing that breaks every institution, but is not very good at rebuilding it. And that will be, that would definitely be the major challenge of the next 10, 20 years. I mean, aside from the geopolitical stuff. I think from an internal perspective, it is possible, and I'm not saying I believe

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  this, but it is possible that we're gonna be sitting, you know, 30 years from now and say, like, "Hey, was the social media thing, like, actually good overall? Like, did it make it better or worse?" And we may not like what we see.

• 1:26:14Anthony Pompliano?

  There was a, an employee recently at Twitter, who's no longer at the company, who was found guilty of spying for Saudi Arabia. And the details aren't necessarily super, super important as much as the idea that a country has an individual working at a social media company is another kind of, you know, aspect of this battle that we've been talking about, where if China has mobile apps on our phones, and they can control what the algorithm says, that's, I think most people would agree, probably not the greatest thing. But then also, like, what about the employees that work at some of these organizations? Like, how do you think through that situation?

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I'm glad that it finally came out that Twitter has, you know, some people from working there to favor Saudi Arabia. But, you know, foreign intelligence, you know, trying to spy on startups is by far like, it's an extremely prevalent thing in Silicon Valley. And I use Silicon Valley broadly. I mean, think about it this way, right? Like, if you are a foreign intelligence, you know, a foreign intelligence agency working for a government like Saudi Arabia or China, why would you not try to spend

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  some money to get information or get, you know, agents working in tech or in Silicon Valley? Tech is a shiny thing on the hill that a lot of people aspire to. As you know, it's extremely unstructured. It's very decentralized in some ways. So much of it is based on trust. So much of it is interpersonal. So, you know, getting people inside of those companies is not that hard.

• 1:28:09Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:28:51Anthony Pompliano?

  All you need to do to start mining your own Bitcoin is go to compassmining.io today. Again, if you want to get into Bitcoin mining, go check out compassmining.io today. But are these large tech companies like the Googles, the Facebooks of the world? Or is the concern more about them getting into companies like Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX, that have a national defense bent?

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  Well, it's all of the above.

• 1:29:15Anthony Pompliano?

  You think it's all of them?

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it's all of them.

• 1:29:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And once these individuals are inside of these organizations, and I don't think you or I have an opinion as to, you know, is it one individual at all of Google or is it 5% of the workforce? Let's shy, hopefully we'll cross our fingers and hope it's on the smaller end. Is it just passing of information? Is it actively working against the company? Like, what is the risk that people are worried about in terms of if these individuals get hired at the business? How combative is it versus more as an information gathering exercise?

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  Oh, and this is where I may get accused of being crazy conspiratorial, but I 100% believe that there are people inside of Twitter that are trying to suppress content that is, you know, not in the interest of the CCP. I believe that fully, and I've sort of seen it happen. You know, I have a lot of friends, I have a lot of people who are, you know, deep in national security that have told me that, you know, you just look at the numbers, right? Like, okay, like, you know this, like, you have like a million, over a million followers on Twitter, you kind of know what to expect when you say a post, like, okay.

• 1:30:24Anthony Pompliano?

  There are certain words, and China is one of them.

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:27Anthony Pompliano?

  That on pretty much every platform we have, if you say it and you put in the title or you do whatever, somehow it's just not that popular.

• 1:30:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, really weird, right? Like, you can say, hello, good morning, and you're gonna get 1,000 likes. And or you can post some things that are, you know, adversal to Venezuela or Brazil, and you're still gonna get some likes. But you say the word China, and there's nothing.

• 1:30:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And you think that that is likely, again, we don't know for sure, but likely intentional?

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  I don't, I struggle to see what are the other options.

• 1:31:00Anthony Pompliano?

  How do we solve the problem? Or how do we evaluate that threat? Is it just hope that our national defense capabilities and national intelligence organizations are able to figure that stuff out? As it appears, someone along the way was able to figure out this employee that was helping Saudi Arabia at Twitter? Or is it something else?

• 1:31:19Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, part of it is that we need to cross our fingers and knock the table that Elon ends up buying Twitter against his will at this point. So, you know, I do think that having an individual like that is necessary to, you know, to solving this. But, you know, Pomp, to be completely honest, like, I think what we need to do is to fight back, you know? Like, I think, and this is part of the culture that doesn't let us say things that we've seen happen more recently, but, you know, I still come back to this. And I think the example of like the Soviet Union or GM in the 40s, these people would

• 1:32:02Speaker 02

  not, like, if those people were here today and they saw what's happening with, you know, companies lobbying to, you know, build chip manufacturing in China, that kind of stuff, that is so anti, it goes so against the interests of the United States. You know, these prior generations would not hesitate to call those people traitors, right? Why are we so afraid to speak up? Like, when we look at, you know, the example of Twitter, that, you know, there are people inside of Twitter that may be favoring interests that run against the interests of the United States. Like, why are we afraid to call that out for what it is and say that people in Twitter are, you know?

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  Doing something that could be treasonous to the US, right? And who has the courage to investigate that, right? We need more of it, which by the way, like, is partially why I'm bullish in Florida. It's partially why I see a lot of what's happening here and I think is encouraging. Florida is the one state in the nation that we've seen the interest in fighting back.

• 1:33:12Anthony Pompliano?

  100%. It feels also like the rest of the country, or many places in the country, look at it and they say, "That's insane. That's extreme. That is whatever." But I think people who live here are saying, "No, that is exactly what you would expect from somebody who has a very specific vision of the future." And if you disagree with that vision of the future, obviously you're not going to like what they do, but they're saying it's worth fighting for. And they're going for it. And I think, you know, we've talked a lot about the social media platforms, but there's companies like Disney, which those are the ones that absolutely blow my mind, right? Where Disney now has more subscribers than Netflix, right? From a size standpoint, obviously Disney has incredible intellectual property.

• 1:33:55Anthony Pompliano?

  It has the physical amusement parks, all these different things. But it is insane. I mean, if you look at some of the things, and look, we can talk about the geopolitical conflict and adversaries and all that, it's one component. But also just some of the information. You know, I have an eight-month-old daughter and there's been multiple times where we've turned on some cartoon and I look at my wife and I'm like, "Shut this off. This is insane."

• 1:34:21Speaker 02

  You know, Paul, we went from a world where, you know, the mainstream American left went from, you know, "Fighting wars in the Middle East is bad. Let's stand for peace and let's stand for equality", to a world in which we're now having a very serious argument about whether or not teaching gender ideology to five-year-olds is a good thing.

• 1:34:45Speaker 02

  Right? Like, that is the world that we're living in now. And people just went crazy. And COVID magnified all of that. But realistically, this has been the case for, you know, 10, 20 years at this point.

• 1:34:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I do think, and people hate when I say this, but I fundamentally believe it. We need to bring back the right to offend people.

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:35:06Anthony Pompliano?

  We have somehow condemned, if you offend anyone, regardless of if you're right or not, you're wrong. And what I think ends up happening is like, there is a right and wrong in many facets, right? If you ask somebody stealing, if you literally go to some cities in America and you say, this person stole something, there are some people who will say, well, why did they steal it? Do they, do they absolutely have to do it? Then that's okay. And you say, just like, whoa, a second here, right? Like, something that should be like, hard line in the sand, there's right, there's wrong, these are the rules for us to have a functioning society where people feel safe and feel like the future is better

• 1:35:47Anthony Pompliano?

  than the past. You can't steal. But as we've seen, San Francisco being one of those places, it doesn't feel that way.

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  And you know, and David Sacks has done a great job of this, but realistically, like, this is why, basically, you see every single different ethnicity now leaving the Democratic Party, right? Like, we talked a little bit about Latin America. We see this happening a lot now, that you see that, you know, his panics now disapprove President Biden more than white, more than white people do. It's by far the number one category. So we're definitely going to see a whole new wave of different ethnicities that reject American progressivism. Realistically, when you took, when you look at everything that has been

• 1:36:35Speaker 02

  done in the last 50 years with Alinsky and all of those things, in the way that, you know, we've communicated things to people, the way that we, you know, got new generations to believe that America was bad and that, you know, you're a bad person because you're white and all those kind of things. It turns out, like, if you're Hispanic, you don't give a shit about that, right? Like, you still, like, your culture is mostly conservative, you're not going to approve your children being taught sex at school with like, five year olds, and you're going to reject crime, right? So like, we're going to see that, you

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  A return to sanity in some ways because what we have right now is not sustainable.

• 1:37:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's the bullshit insanity of society definitely comes from a position of privilege. Right? Like, if you look around the world, the countries where they have the most stress, the most conflict, they have many of the issues where people are worried about safety, food, all that type of stuff. None of this should exist.

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so many, so many of these problems, they are just luxury problems.

• 1:37:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, 100%. If you have the ability to spend that much time thinking about and doing some of these things, it's just, yeah, life's pretty good for you.

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:37:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think part, again, I also think a lot about when you're evaluating founders and startup teams, one of the big questions is, you know, do they know some secret? Are they able to kind of figure out how to attract talent and all that stuff? But also just like, will these people not quit? Right? Can they just weather the storm? This shit is going to be hard. They're working on a hard problem. It's going to be a long period of time. Will they just not quit? And when you extrapolate that out to society, I do wonder in certain areas geographically, what percentage of people have lived through quote unquote tough times? And that can incorporate all kinds of different things, right? There are people who immigrated to the country. There's people who have experienced economic

• 1:38:38Anthony Pompliano?

  hardship. There are people who, maybe it's just they got bullied at school, right? I mean, there's all kinds of ways to evaluate kind of tough times. But I do think that because the United States and the economic prosperity that we've had and kind of the, I don't know, infiltration of some of these socialist ideas and also just the softening of the country, there's a higher and higher percentage of people never done anything hard.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so one of my favorite quotes of all times is Jeff Kennedy, "We choose to go to the moon not because it's easy, but because it is hard."

• 1:39:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:39:12Speaker 02

  And realistically, people today have become soft. Now, people have become soft and this is where it's a real paradox in some ways. People have become soft because we actually have some of the greatest times in history. Right? Like, we have, we have had, for the last seven years, we have had an amazing economy. We have had unprecedented growth rate, poverty at an all time low. So in some ways, the world is amazing. But because we have gotten rid of all of those ideas, all of those values, we're not allowed, really, well, we don't have a generation that really strives for anything. Right? By the way, we haven't really gotten into this.

• 1:39:56Speaker 02

  But, you know, with the decay of institutions, with the decay of religion and all of these things, right? All of the conversations that we have about society today ends up, ends up becoming a conversation about whether something should be legal or not. Right? Like, we have a conversation, pick every issue that it is, and it can be gun rights or whatever it is. And it becomes a hard line of like, hey, should this, should this be legal or not legal? In reality, we don't have conversations anymore about virtues and values. Right? Like, there is no conversation about, this is who we are, this is the culture that we live in, this is what is acceptable or not acceptable.

• 1:40:41Speaker 02

  And in a weird way, that is what liberalism has evolved into. And we, we need to bring back the idea of morals. We need to bring back the idea of virtues.

• 1:40:52Anthony Pompliano?

  I would take this even a step further. I think that there's a conversation on ethics and morals. I was recently talking to someone about this idea that it's being weaponized in a way that I don't think most of us originally agreed to or originally sought it. So, for example, in science, there are certain things that people say, hey, there may be some benefit for us to explore, experiment, or even potentially get breakthroughs in X. And then there will be people who show up and say, well, I am a biology ethicist. Right? You say, what the hell is that? And then they say, that is unethical. And so it's almost in some way, not only do we not have the direction

• 1:41:37Anthony Pompliano?

  and kind of moral compass of what we do stand for, it's been flipped on its head, and now it is used as a weapon to argue against certain things because it is unethical. And when you ask them, and what I've said previously, it's like, morals are important. But when you start getting into this ethics conversation and it's just, everything is unethical, you have to start to ask yourself, well, like, what is the framework in which we determine what our morals are? Right? And again, you go back to stealing, lying, cheating, these things that I think most of humanity, any culture and any society, they agree that these are not good things, right? We do not want to stand for those things. But then when you move to a sector like science, and I think actually in Silicon Valley, we saw this.

• 1:42:22Anthony Pompliano?

  There was a lot of people who argued it was unethical to invest in defense startups because it led to A, B, or C thing. And investors would opt out and say, our LPs do not want us investing in this. It's unethical. And then you turn around, you're like, that's stupid. Because, again, it goes back to you're using an attack that isn't actually rooted in an understanding of like, what is the moral compass? What is the things that we actually need? And another example of this is around energy and the whole ESG movement. And, you know, if you look at a country like Germany, like, they fell, you know, hook, line, and sinker for the, oh, it's unethical, oh, it's, you know, it's not good.

• 1:43:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And now they're basically begging for oil. And it's just, you know, I don't know. I don't know if it can be reversed because I think that it's become so deep seated, but, but we should try.

• 1:43:17Speaker 02

  Well, you know, this is where, and to be clear, I haven't given much thought to this, but, you know, it's funny to me that a lot of people keep saying, oh, we need a new renaissance. We need a new renaissance. And I was like, you know, maybe we need a new counter-reformation. You know, we, what we need to do is, we've had a generation of people trying to convince us that America was bad and that we should reject American ideals and that culture here sucks and that, you know, the world is about to end because of climate change. And what we need to do is say, hey, we've made some mistakes. You know, there are things in the past that we actually need to improve on, but we need to bring back the ideals and values that we had before. Right?

• 1:44:02Speaker 02

  That's, that's a With the Catholic Church with the Catholic Church. And I mean, you use the examples of like people in Silicon Valley like freaking out about investing in Andoril. You know, like people in Germany, all that kind of stuff. And the reality is like, what do those people believe in? Like, what do they stand for? Right? And when you look at it, it's not that much. The core ideal, right? Like, we've heard this word so much more than we had many years ago. Equity, right? Like, the idea of equity. And in some ways, like if you look at American history, right? Like, the American history inspired by classic liberalism, by, you know, Enlightenment ideals, mostly influenced by British culture, right?

• 1:44:46Speaker 02

  And there's actually a side of the Enlightenment that was pretty bad, right? Like, if you look at, you know, the French Revolution and like people talking about bloods of rivers of blood coming down, coming down the streets. And, you know, France talked a lot about liberty, but France also talked about equality and fraternity. And if you go back to these philosophers, they have a very different idea of liberty than, you know, the British ones did and the Americans ones did. And in some ways, like, I always think about the word liberalism, because liberalism in America means something very different than liberalism in the rest of the world means, in the rest of the world.

• 1:45:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain the difference.

• 1:45:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, in the rest of the world liberalism still means classical liberalism. So when you use a word in Brazil, or when you use a word in Europe, people think they were just talking about free markets, you know, individual rights, that kind of stuff. And liberalism in America today is a word that the left has taken over. And realistically, the world that we're living in is a world of liberalism, but is a world of liberalism that essentially prizes the values of equality and equity and fraternity much more than the actual individual rights and individual freedom that America was founded upon, right? And that's how you end up. That's how you end up with, you know.

• 1:46:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, certain things about biology being bad because people don't like the results and therefore it's unethical, right? It's how you end up with, you know, not investing the company in the companies that are going to stand up for your country because, you know, you think your country is a bad thing.

• 1:46:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So Those people never seem to move out of the country, by the way.

• 1:46:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no, never, right? Like, we could, we could make a program to fly them to Caracas, one-way ticket for free, and they would never take it, right? It's surprising, right?

• 1:46:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you know, they have family, they come up with a bunch of reasons as to why maybe that's not a great idea. I do think it's interesting, have you looked at all to Governor Abbott in Texas is taking migrants, putting them on buses?

• 1:46:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:46:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And busing them to New York and Washington DC?

• 1:46:54Speaker 02

  By the way, so I love to talk about this because it's, it's really interesting to me as an immigrant, right? Like, talk about ways that we've perverted American culture. And this is, you know, when you asked me about the immigrant question, I was like, you know, like, there's something about me being immigrant that sure revitalizes the idea of the American dream, but I actually think American people needs to stand up for their own. You know, ultimately, the debate around immigration in New America is just so weird and it's just so weaponized, intentionally so. You know, you go to any other country on earth and they're not having a debate about illegal immigration, right? That is just such an insane idea that we actually have a dominant political party in

• 1:47:36Speaker 02

  the United States that actually tries to defend like illegal immigration, right?

• 1:47:40Anthony Pompliano?

  The first word there is pretty important.

• 1:47:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Right, like, so like, to me, is like, by the way, Blake Masters got in a lot of heat for saying this, like, what is the right number of illegal, like, let's have a debate, debate about illegal immigration. What is the right number of illegal immigrants that should be allowed to in America? It was like, zero? Like, why is that controversial, right? Like, I had to come here, I had to follow a process, my family came here, they had to follow a process, right? Like, it's so funny because I talked about this with my immigrant friends, and the idea of illegal immigration is almost insulting, right? Like, do you know all the pain and process and money that we have to spend to come here? And I understand that, like, not all People may have the access to these things to come and you know, maybe there are, there should be government programs to, to allow people to come here, even you know,

• 1:48:26Speaker 02

  if they, if they don't have the, the ability to, to pay for some things. We could have that conversation, but I think the starting point is illegal immigration is not good, simply because we have institutions, we have laws, you know? And if the act that people come here, the first, their first act is, you know, moving, breaking those laws, then you know, that is actually not good for our institutions. That is not good for the system that we believe in. Right? So like what Greg Abbott did is actually like hilarious, right? It's so funny because we have all of these people saying, actually, we should allow, you know, illegal immigrants here. And he's saying, no, we shouldn't. And then he said, okay, like you want some, I'll, I'll send them over to you.

• 1:49:10Speaker 02

  And then they see all the issues that come up with it and they're like, oh my God, like what did you do?

• 1:49:13Anthony Pompliano?

  They want to send them back. They're, they're literally saying, we're going to send them back. We don't want them.

• 1:49:17Speaker 02

  Right, right. And like, listen, like I'm saying this as an immigrant, like I think it is important for, for, for a country to have an immigration system that serves the interests of the country. And we can have a debate about what that is, right? Like it is fair to have the debate, but the idea that like you can just take in anybody is a pretty insane idea, right?

• 1:49:38Anthony Pompliano?

  You're, you're proving a, a theory that I have after talking, almost all of my close friends are immigrants. Not intentionally, just for whatever reason. Uh, that's the situation I've ended up in life. Uh, very happy with it. But the people who came here legally, they're more pissed about the illegal immigration than Americans are.

• 1:50:01Speaker 02

  Well, it's because like you're making us your political tool, right? Like we should not be having this debate. You know why? Like the immigration system is not something hard to fix. The reason why people are having that debate is because they can get elected on those things. Let me take a, a different example. Voter ID, right? That is an insane thing to me, coming from, you know, a, a different place, thinking that America actually has an issue with that. Because the reality is it doesn't, right? Like it's very easy to fix in any country in the world that you go to. The idea that you have to show your ID so you can vote is not a controversial thing. But the fact that you can actually fight against that here, you know, use some really spicy words to call people, to call your opponents off if they don't agree with you,

• 1:50:46Speaker 02

  and then get elected on that, so that then you do nothing, and get elected on that again for years, is effectively what has happened with voter ID, immigration, and all of those issues.

• 1:50:56Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like, part of it is, the fact that we can have the conversation is the beauty of America, but also, the fact that we need to have the conversation is the stupidity of America.

• 1:51:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, Churchill has this quote, which is a pretty funny one, that is, you know, "America will always do the right thing, provided they try everything else first." And ultimately, there is something about the beauty of that system. And by the way, I think to some degree is why America has worked. You know, the idea of democracy is actually really fucking hard. You know, the idea of, you know, absolute democracy is actually not that good, which is why America is not a democracy, right? America is a constitutional republic. So, you know, you need a degree of federalism, you need a degree of freedom, and you need a degree of balance of power that America has figured out, but that comes with a lot of constraints,

• 1:51:51Speaker 02

  but that comes with a lot of balances and weights, so that, you know, people don't go crazy and try to, you know, write a new constitution every 20 years, which happens in basically every other country in the world. Right? So, it takes time, it's complicated, but hopefully, we get to the right answer, as we have in the last, you know, 20-plus years.

• 1:52:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Do you think that, given where we are right now, America's future is brighter or darker than the past? And not so much can we do different things to change that answer, but just, if you take a snapshot of where we are right now, brighter or darker?

• 1:52:30Speaker 02

  It's darker. Like, the trend line is not positive.

• 1:52:36Speaker 02

  Now, I'm not saying this to to sound the fetus, to sound nihilistic. That's not what I want. That's not, you know, when I wake up every day, like, I'm trying to, like, I to hopefully do something to change that. But I think we should recognize that we're in a pretty dire situation. Perhaps one that is unprecedented in history. And if we don't work hard to change it, then then then we're screwed.

• 1:52:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What are the one or two things you think are the most important to change that path?

• 1:53:04Speaker 02

  Well, I do think strategically, like, from a geopolitical standpoint, we absolutely need to find ways to stand up to China. You know, for example, like Nancy Pelosi going to Taiwan, I'm not entirely sure that's that's how we should do it. After she said she was going to do it, I'm glad she went. But, you know, we need to, you know, to to use the Chinese words, like, we need to hide our capabilities and buy our time to some degree. So that we sort out this this supply chain situation, the semiconductor situation. And we need five to 10 years to rebuild those things here and in our in our allies' countries. So we absolutely need to fix that. And then, quite frankly, like, we need to fix our culture, right? Like, we absolutely need to fix the culture.

• 1:53:48Speaker 02

  The the degree to which our culture has been destroyed in the last 10, 20 years is absurd. Like, it's it's only starting now, to be clear to people, you know, because, you know, the idea of being, you know, bringing kids to, you know, a drag drag queen, you know, thing, like, was not normal. And like, that that somehow, like, still, like, gets gets the average American really upset.

• 1:54:16Speaker 02

  But we need to fight back and and we're suing the early days of that.

• 1:54:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I I always think, just go back to, like, the Great Depression. Imagine that being a thing that a school tried to do. There'd be, unfortunately, there'd be violence.

• 1:54:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? I mean, they'd just be like, get my kid out of there. And, you know, I don't think violence is the answer, but I do think that there's going to be a kind of resurgence back. My last question for you, it seems like the American political system has had a lot of volatility. You know, one extreme, another extreme, back and forth, back and forth. Can a centrist actually become president and get a united front in America without having to evoke war or some sort of external threat to be able to do that? Or do you think we'll just kind of play this like ping pong game back and forth between the extremes? And the parties will, you know, flip flop every couple of years for the foreseeable future?

• 1:55:14Speaker 02

  I, I am very skeptical of the idea of centrism as being a political goal for someone. And I'm not sure that it is possible in the environment, in the polarized environment that we need in today, that we're in today, to have someone like that really succeed. I mean, talk about Joe Biden, right? Like President Biden came in supposedly to be that person, right? Like he campaigned on the idea of bringing down the tension. And then now he is, you know, either willingly or, you know, have become captive of this, you know, much far, you know, progressive left.

• 1:55:56Speaker 02

  So ultimately, I don't think, for better or worse, that, you know, the idea of having like a centrist is actually possible.

• 1:56:07Speaker 02

  And like realistically, right, like to be honest, like I'm not even sure who that person would be, right? Like, do we really want mainstream Democrats or mainstream Republicans to actually run the country? Like, I think there's actually bipartisan agreement that those people suck for the most part, right? Like, nobody wants them. So I don't, I think things will remain polarized. What I do think is you need to have a president with actually more executive power than before, that is not authoritarian in any way, but to actually reduce the tension everywhere else. So you need to have a president that actually has the power to say, you know, Soros funding every single prosecutor so that then, you know, these prosecutors, progressive prosecutors destroy our cities is not a good thing.

• 1:56:50Speaker 02

  This is why, like what DeSantis did, like we haven't really talked about this, but like what DeSantis did like last week or two weeks ago was one of the most brilliant moves of any politician in the last like five years.

• 1:57:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What did he do?

• 1:57:01Speaker 02

  Well, so he, Soros had backed a lot of prosecutors throughout the country, right? Like including a few that got elected, like somewhere in Florida. And those prosecutors basically said, we're not going to enforce the law. Like it was, you know, in the case of an abortion law, not to get into the whole abortion discussion, but like Florida passed a law that is actually much more lenient towards abortion than most countries in Europe, right? So like, we're not talking about like Mississippi or Missouri here. Like, we're talking about a law that is much more lenient than Europe. And these prosecutors said, we're not going to enforce the law. And DeSantis basically said, you know, I'm suspending you because you're here to enact the law and you as a prosecutor are not above the law and therefore you're not fulfilling

• 1:57:46Speaker 02

  your duty and according to the constitution of Florida, you're suspended.

• 1:57:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So basically, he said, here's your job. They said, I'm not going to do your job. And then he said, you're suspended, fired, whatever. And the prosecutors have a problem with that?

• 1:58:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much so.

• 1:58:04Anthony Pompliano?

  That's interesting.

• 1:58:05Speaker 02

  So I do believe that, you know, for these issues to be fixed, for a lot of the issues we talked about today to be fixed, we need to have a president that has the will to do some things like that. And it's this weird dichotomy that in one, in a few ways, you're actually, you know, saying that you want a president that has more power, but overall that will probably calm down tensions in America and it will bring the overall, you know, like size of the US administrative state, you know, it will shrink the US administrative state.

• 1:58:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I am generally a pretty big optimist, as I think you are as well. And one of the most pessimistic conversations I've had recently, I was walking and

• 1:58:52Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a couple of police officers and started talking and I said, I forget exactly what I said, but they basically made a comment like, oh, it's going to get worse. I said, what? And they said, you know, one guy said, I've been a cop in Miami for 10 years. And he's, I'm going on my 11th year. He goes, and I've progressively seen it get worse and worse and worse. And I said, you know, again, there's a whole bunch of complexity here, but like, why, why do you think that? And he basically made the point that there's some ridiculous rules. I said, like, what's an example? And they essentially were trying to highlight to me that there's rules, like if they see somebody commit a crime, but it's not a violent crime, they can't chase them.

• 1:59:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And like, again, there's complexity in that, but I think the average person says, if a police officer who, again, there's plenty to complain about, there's plenty to say, hey, they're, they're doing a good job, right? But if they see a crime occur, they just like, what are you gonna like wave to the guy?

• 1:59:52Speaker 02

  Well, not only that, right?

• 1:59:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Kind of crazy.

• 1:59:54Speaker 02

  You have, and by the way, like, not to sound too conspiratorial here, but I, I don't think the following things are disconnected, right? So on the one hand, you have, you know, all of these laws getting passed saying, don't enforce crimes, crime, you know, San Francisco, for example, effectively legalized crime. And then on the other hand, you have the complete bashing of that institution, right? Like the police, right? Like you, you basically had Minnesota, thank God it got rejected, but the idea of like completely, you know,

• 2:00:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Abolish the police.

• 2:00:22Speaker 02

  abolishing the police, right? So like, and then all cops are racist now. So like, who will ever want to work for an institution like that, right?

• 2:00:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the, the people who end up going to work there, once you've destroyed it, are probably the people that you didn't want to be the police officers anyway.

• 2:00:37Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. So I don't believe, and maybe that sounds too conspiratorial, but I don't believe those things are disconnected, right? And when you put the two and two together, like, that does not look good.

• 2:00:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And I also think, similar to the immigrant thing, where like, the immigrants who came to the United States legally are the ones who are the most upset about the illegal immigration. If you go to some of these police forces, it's the police who do the things. The right way that are the most pissed off about the police officers who do things the wrong way.

• 2:01:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:01:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And it highlights like, look, there are absolutely 100% if you go talk to a police force, police officers who do things the right way and police officers who do things the wrong way. And unfortunately, as in many things, the people who do it the wrong way give the entire set a bad name.

• 2:01:24Anthony Pompliano?

  But the ones who do it the right way are just as pissed off as the public. The thing, though, is we don't see that.

• 2:01:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:01:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Because they don't have a platform. They can't go on Twitter and say, "Hey, I'm a police officer at this, you know, police department in, you know, a random city in America." And like, the guy down the locker room is doing, you know, A, B, and C thing wrong and like, it's pissing me off.

• 2:01:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, we haven't really talked about this today, but you know, a lot of the underlying issues with so many of these things, I mean, you gave the example of biology, a lot of what's happening with woke culture in companies today, is the fact that effectively the system has, for the last 20 years, worked as a minority rule. So you have, you know, the 5% craziest people, you know, the wokest people, effectively say the most absurd things and get that framed as the opinion of the company, as the opinion of the police force, as the opinion of the whole institution. Right? I mean, we saw that, like, for example, like, Apple and Antonio Garcia Martinez, right? Like, you have like, a few individuals in this company of like 100,000 people who say,

• 2:02:29Speaker 02

  "Oh, this person shouldn't be here, like, he is terrible," whatever. And the company acts because of the opinion of like, this vast tiny number of people. I do think this is, you know, talk about optimism. I do think that this has become so evident, so clear, that we might see a sea of change. Because that doesn't work as well anymore.

• 2:02:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I couldn't agree more.

• 2:02:53Anthony Pompliano?

  I've enjoyed this quite a bit. We didn't talk at all about Village Global or anything else that you're doing. Maybe just share with everyone, kind of, the types of founders you guys were looking for and what you spend your day doing.

• 2:03:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:03:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So that if anyone is listening and wants to spend more time talking to you.

• 2:03:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. Always accessible. You can find me on Twitter. You know, I want to be clear, my Opinions here today and not necessarily the whole opinion of Village Global, but super excited to have that conversation. And you know, Village, we're an early-stage firm, pre-seed and seed, investing anywhere from 250K to a million, anywhere around the globe, not China. And you know, really looking for amazing founders, right? Like, we come in so early, it's so common for us to invest at day zero, to back founders when they have nothing, just an idea. That is even, you know, like, some people ask about, like, what metrics do you look for? It's like, none, because there are almost never any. So, you know, strong founders with a secret that have an ambitious view of the future,

• 2:03:53Speaker 02

  that's what we're looking for.

• 2:03:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I appreciate your time today. I'm a huge fan of you, Village Global, and the rest of the work you guys are doing. So, thanks so much, and we'll definitely do this again in the future.

• 2:04:03Speaker 02

  Appreciate it, Paul. Thank you.

• 2:04:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand-new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends, and I'll see you all for the next episode.