#1092 Tech Insider Antonio Garcia-Martinez Reveals All The Secrets

Antonio Garcia-Martinez is an author of best-selling book “Chaos Monkeys”, the Founder of “Spindle”, and was previously a product manager at Facebook. In this conversation, we talk about American states going in opposite directions, why the people of Miami understand capitalism, what the tech industry gets right and what it gets wrong, user growth in the new digital age, going to Ukraine during the war, thoughts Balaji Srinivasan’s “Network State”, and “dying for the DAO”. ======================= The bridge between iGaming, online sports betting, and emerging technology, such as Blockchain, NFTs, fintech, GameFi, metaverse, and AI, is loud and clear. The largest global summit of this kind is heading to Malta from November 15 to 17. Over a thousand exhibitors and 25,000 industry leaders will be there, including top executives from Draft Kings, Bet365, Socios, crypto exchanges, betting software providers, operators, gaming affiliates, and more. Log on to AIBC. WORLD and SiGMA. WORLD to see all our upcoming global summits! See you in Malta, November 15 to 17 for the leading global event in Gaming & Emerging Tech! THIS IS SiGMA! ======================= If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money. Alto CryptoIRA lets you invest in more than 200 different coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA. They make it easy to fund your Alternative IRA or CryptoIRA via your 401(k) or IRA rollover or by contributing directly from your bank account. So, ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp ======================= 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. 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! ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast. Simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Antonio Garcia Martinez is the author of bestselling book Chaos Monkeys, and he is the founder of a brand new company called Spindel. Antonio previously was a product manager at Facebook, and he was a quant analyst at Goldman, among many other things. In this conversation, we talk about everything, including how people in Miami tend to appreciate the United States of America, what it was like growing up with two parents that were exiled from Cuba, what the tech industry gets right, what it gets wrong, how to think about user growth and attribution in the old world and the new digital world we seem to be moving to.

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  We talk about his time going to Ukraine during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, how it fits into the narrative around Balaji Srinivasan's network state, and many other things, including would you die for the Dow? I really enjoyed this conversation with Antonio, and I hope that you guys enjoy it as well. Once you get done listening, let Antonio and I know exactly what you think about it on Twitter. We're, both of us spend way too much time on a daily basis. All right, let's get into this episode. I hope you guys enjoy it.

• 1:13Speaker 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.

• 1:22Speaker 02

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• 2:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:01Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Antonio here with me. I thought a great place to start this conversation. You recently came to Miami, which you've done many, many times before, and you took a photo. And it's a guy with a American flag draped over him. And he seems to be walking kind of away. And the tweet was like, hey, there was no English spoken, but these people obviously appreciate the freedoms that are afforded them in the United States. And they seem to be incredibly happy to now be in Miami in the United States. What was the significance of that to you? Like, why did you, one, notice it? And two, think that, hey, look, if I share this, like, it might start a conversation?

• 3:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I do come to Miami a lot. And I was actually raised here. So I started coming here pretty early. But yeah, so I just came into the airport. Miami Airport is always fascinating, because Miami is fascinating, right? And so it's just the amount of people and God knows what else that flows through Miami is just incredible. So I get off and it was like late on a Saturday. So it was pretty quiet. And I see this sort of family ambling through. And there's a number of American flags, like the one behind you. The guy's kind of wearing it almost like a shawl. There's a number of balloons. There's a sort of celebratory atmosphere. I'm like, what is going on? And I sort of like follow along, kind of eavesdrop a little bit. It's like fresh off the island, very, you know, Cuban, common Cuban accent. And I think they had just arrived and, you know, basically they had gotten out somehow. That's a lot of the balloons said, welcome. And, you know, as you know, Miami's

• 4:19Speaker 04

  It's interesting because of course it's this weird Venn diagram intersection between Anglo-America and Latin America, and yet it is super patriotic. You see American flags everywhere. And yeah, I think it's people that had just gotten from Cuba and they're starting their new life in America.

• 4:32Anthony Pompliano?

  When a lot of, let's call it the tech and finance industry started to rediscover Miami, which people had in other generations known about Florida in general. But over the last two, three years, a lot of people moved here, a lot of people started to visit more often. One of the things they always talk about is like, hey, this doesn't feel like America. And they're talking specifically about language, about culture, about even the way that people act, the thoughts that they have. How important is it for the United States still to have these pockets of areas where it is the melting pot of so many different cultures?

• 5:03Speaker 04

  So I agree with that. On one hand, it doesn't feel American. On the other hand, it's like the most American city in America, in my opinion, right? It's funny, so I was raised, I lived until I was 18, and Miami in the 80s and 90s was very different than what you see today. In some ways, it was similar, in some ways, it was very different. But I remember thinking, oh, I went to the United States for college, right? I went to school in the Midwest, and finally, when I got there, I realized, man, I was not raised in the United States of America. Like, Heartland America is very different than Miami, a lot of different cultural assumptions. But on the other hand, there's something so American about Miami, right? Like, no one cares where you're from, there's a super-strong hustle culture. I mean, talk about diversity. Here, you have real diversity. So yesterday, long story, I was here for a political conference that I'm doing a thing on, and I'm in Aventura, which is a very Jewish part of Miami,

• 5:47Speaker 04

  and I go to a judaica store because I was buying some stuff, and then I go to a kosher pita place, and the woman greets me in Argentinian Spanish, right? And there were Latin American Jews that ran a kosher falafel place in Miami. And it's just this constant weird mix of anything, of everything, right? Happening, and it's very business-oriented, right, as you know? And so, yeah, aesthetically, it feels not American in that, good luck getting by without Spanish. But on the other hand... It is so American.

• 6:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but it's just capitalism, right? Like capitalism is the DNA that runs through this entire place. And it feels similar to like, maybe when I was growing up, people were like, oh, get to New York, Wall Street, like that whole world to some degree was aspirational, but it was unreachable. Whereas it feels like here, this whole like hustle culture or whatever. No, man, it's not about like, how do I create an asset management firm? It's like, I literally might go start a car wash, I might start a restaurant, I might start, you know, whatever, but like, there is a path to the quote, quote, American dream.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think so. And I have to say, I think that hustle culture probably came, so my parents were Cuban exiles who came when they were teens, I was born in the United States, but they came right after the revolution in the sixties, as many did. My father walked out of what's now called Freedom Tower, which you've probably seen, which is this old kind of ornate, it now looks dwarfed by the other buildings in Miami, but it was the original skyscraper in Miami. And he walked out of there, what was then the Cuban Refugee Center, which is now a museum to the Cuban exiles. And, you know, as he would often remind me, he walked in here with three things in his pocket, a bus ticket to Chicago, a Spanish English dictionary, and a plastic safety razor. That's it. That's what he came to the United States with. And, you know, he worked in real estate, which is like a whole thing here. And, yeah, I mean, it's very much that hustle culture, that build, that get ahead, that the city has just had for decades.

• 7:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Did he talk about Cuba at all growing up?

• 7:27Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 7:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, I think a lot about, so a family comes here and they're kids, so they're first generation American, but obviously they have a very different perspective of what America is, what it means, the significance of it, the whole idea of like draping a flag over yourself, walking through the airport. There are parts of the country who would call you racist, right? For the flag kind of becoming this like symbol in some people's eyes. On the other hand, it is the symbol of freedom and it's a single physical item that frankly has no thoughts, has, you know, it's not sentient being, it's just being used in these different ways. Like, what was it like growing up with Cuban exile parents?

• 8:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, Somewhat less so now because again Miami's become so cosmopolitan that there's lots of different influences that you see here. But back in the, I mean, the Cuban part of Miami very much feels like this weird American suburban reboot of like pre-revolutionary Cuba. So one of the weird sort of almost contradictions of the Cubanized experiences, on the one hand, they're super patriotic, often tend to vote right of center, but on the other hand, they absolutely maintain in the most like shameless way their Cuban identity. So I went to Belen Jesuit, which is a prep school, which was the same high school that Fidel Castro went to when he kicked out the Catholic priests, when he took power, they came to Miami and they set up the exact same school and it became exact same thing that it was in Cuba, which was the sort of, you know, whatever, a very conservative Catholic school.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  And the same networks, the same families are often here as they are on the other side. And so they recreated in many ways pre-revolutionary Cuba and then they've maintained alive, like they will just shamelessly expect you to drink Cuban coffee like Starbucks. What are you talking about? Of course not. Like this is just the way the world works. There's like, everything is suffused by Latin American culture, American business culture and global law, and this is the way the world works. But on the other hand, American flags everywhere and they definitely don't have, the sort of, I think what you're getting at is the sort of fashionable, sort of self-loathing or almost questioning of the meaning of America, doesn't have any play here because again, here they actually know what the alternative is. The alternative is Cuba, the alternative is Venezuela, the alternative is all sorts, you know, a world of pain that they left behind and to, and to them, this place seems magnificent.

• 9:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. One of the things I've heard people in different ways say over and over again is like, America seems to want to experiment and we don't need to do that. Like we, we've already seen how those experiments run and so like this is the best any human group of people has figured out so far. Like let's keep riding this wave. But what was the big difference when you went to the Midwest? Like that's fascinating to have Cuban exile parents grow up in Miami and then you go to the Midwest, like are you just lost?

• 9:56Speaker 04

  Well, it was, it was weird. Well, it was, it was probably a mistake in the end for other reasons, but it was weird in the sense that my parents went to the Midwest. So the way the exile thing worked, if you had family here, you'd be sent to wherever your family was. Both my parents were sent to Indiana and Illinois and then they eventually ended up going to UIC, University of Illinois, Brad Champaign. So in their Mind like regular America was like frozen in amber. It was like post Eisenhower mad men 1960s America where you went to like a midwestern state school and everything was fine and America just functioned that way. And that was just like the image they had of America. Of course, after after college, they went to California in the seventies. So like they experienced some of greater, but then they came here and that's it. That's the image that stuck in their head. So to them, going to a big state school in the Midwest is just what one did.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Of course, in reality, it's not kind of the case anymore. But yeah, no, I it was, you know, it was one of these rural college town type things. Dated a local girl who was raised on a farm. I mean, the full, the full picture, the full sitcom, right? The full Netflix show. I don't know. It was just, yeah, it was wild. It was, it was different. And then I, and then I went to California and again, I was still kind of a Miami boy in that I didn't understand, you know, California has a lot of Hispanic culture as well. But it's a very different, it's a very different interaction than it is in Miami. And so, yeah, it was, it was a learning experience. I mean, again, Miami was just very different. It was much more provincial. I mean, there's also pre-internet, right? If you want to read the New York Times, you have to find a copy and buy it. Otherwise, you wouldn't get it. And so, yeah, in many ways, I lived, I did lead a sheltered life until, until later.

• 11:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's interesting because when I was in Silicon Valley, I worked with a number of people who had family in Miami. One person I'm thinking in particular is Venezuelan, you know, full Venezuelan experience, has friends who are not so well liked in the country by the existing political regime. And I remember saying to him at some point, like, yeah, I think I'm going to move to Miami. And he was like, why would you ever do that? Right? Because he was just like that, like everyone who gets there then wants to leave. It's heat, it's this, it's whatever. And so it does feel like there's almost this rediscovering of some of this.

• 11:52Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 11:53Anthony Pompliano?

  To some degree. But it also pits it, and I've seen you talk about this before, where Florida and California seem to be headed in two different directions and like highlighting two different futures. Like, when you analyze those two things, like, how do you break that down?

• 12:08Speaker 04

  So for starters, I think your Venezuelan friends thing is a very common experience. I had that same experience when like Delian did his tweet and everyone got excited about Miami. Like, I hadn't been back very often, to be honest. And again, Miami used to be somewhat provincial and a little backwater-y. I mean, cosmopolitan in its own way, but also like not part of like the New York SF Continuum. Nobody who was ambitious, like super ambitious, would stick around. It was usually your more normal friends who stuck around, everyone else left. So, but that's, that has radically changed. Right? Just, I mean, I just came from Panzer Coffee in Wynwood, which Wynwood used to be kind of a ghetto, by the way, was not a nice place to live at all. And there's some like, somebody yammering in German next to me at this like third wave coffee place. That did not exist 15, 20 years ago. Right? It was impossible for that to exist. But yeah, in terms of the futures, it's funny that like, I wasn't going to tweet this, could I get jumped on it?

• 12:53Speaker 04

  But your followers probably don't care. But it's funny, like when you used to go from Miami to like the United States, once again, you used to feel you're going a little bit developing world to first world, a little bit because Miami was a little rough on the edges. And like now going from San Francisco to Miami, it's like the opposite. It's like going from third world to first. And it's like, oh, look, everything kind of works. There's law and order. It's not like a disaster.

• 13:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I forgot who I saw it, but just recently I saw a tweet, it was going viral and it was a thread, but the first tweet said something to the effect of like, Silicon Valley, everyone was moving there. There was tons of growth. There was actually quite a bit of housing being built in various ways. You saw cranes all the time. Like all these things, everyone's like, okay, things are going well. And now they went back three years later and they're like, holy shit, there's crime everywhere. This is an absolute declining city from an infrastructure standpoint, from a safety standpoint, all these different things. And like, people have left. And it reminds me, I think it was Keith Raboy, who talked about like Detroit. Detroit used to be booming, now it's not. Go ahead.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't quite, I mean, yeah, I don't quite buy Keith's line. I mean, he obviously has very strong views.

• 13:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do you disagree?

• 14:00Speaker 04

  Well, because Detroit isn't like embedded in the middle of a natural paradise called Northern California, for one, right? For as much as trash you might talk about San Francisco, and it definitely has real problems, the surrounding area is basically paradise. I mean, you can go skiing and surfing on the same day. You've got wine country. I mean, it's, the city itself is still gorgeous in its own weird way.

• 14:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  It's not going to be Detroit. Right? And, and to be honest, San Francisco has been in a boom bust cycle since 1849. Right? This is hardly new. This is just another downturn. But, but I do, but I do agree that something has kind of flipped and Florida has become much more serious. Right? It's like, it's weird because in the outside world, you have like the Florida man trope and Florida man definitely does exist by the way in like northern Florida in the panhandle like Florida man is wheel. But guess what in South Florida, Florida man has high speed rail. Florida man can afford a house to raise a family in Florida man has pretty good public schools, right? Florida man has law and order California man, not so much, or at least SF man doesn't right? And so like the tropes about like Florida is this joke. It's like, no, Florida is actually pretty well run. And so, yeah, I mean, things have have have definitely changed.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  And again, I, you know, I don't wish California ill like I have to stay there. I have family there, so I hope the city sort of recovers. But it's it's weird walking around like South Park, Soma, which you probably did back in the day 10 years ago. Like literally the entire consumer internet that you cared about was within like a three by seven block area. And you'd walk through South Park and there are the founders of Airbnb and there's a Sequoia partner. And it's like, there was this vibrant hum of like everything happening in one place. And that's no longer the case.

• 15:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I literally remember when I flew out to interview at Facebook and they were like, yeah. And then you're going to stay in Mountain View and you're going to come to the campus. And I remember walking on campus and being like, holy shit, this is literally a different world. I grew up in North Carolina, like there's nothing like that, right? And when you then saw how many people, the other thing that was really interesting was everyone was in person. And I was recently talking to somebody I worked with at Facebook and it was like, there was all these people who were there. And you kind of sort of knew it was a special moment or a special group. Like no one knew what everyone was going to go do later, but like, you're like, I have never worked with this many smart people who have this velocity and just seem to like get shit done like this.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 16:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And now those people obviously have gone and done amazing things. You worked at Facebook, you worked at a number of different tech companies. Does it feel like the like in person, high octane group of people all there together? Like, is that changing now? And now you've got remote, you've got people in different geographic locations. Like, how do you think about it?

• 16:20Speaker 04

  I mean, if you look at the occupancy raise for commercial rosy in San Francisco, they're super low. So like the numbers don't lie that a lot of people have moved out of the city. That said, I've started, so I just raised around for a company and hopefully we'll talk about it. One of the investors is this thing called South Park Commons, a bunch of Facebook, but you probably know who it is, Aditya and Ruchi. And so they've got like a space literally on South Park. I think either inside or next to the building where Twitter was founded. And, you know, there's also a lot of like great talent in San Francisco that hasn't left because A lot of them still have family or, you know, real estate. And there's a lot of like really smart Fang people who've like dealt with global scale. And for kind of sitting around waiting to see what's next, right? And they're not going to move and they're still there and they prefer in-person work. And I don't know, I plan on staying in San Francisco for the company again.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  I sort of have to, but I don't think it's a terrible idea either from a recruitment perspective.

• 17:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What about the leadership? So obviously DeSantis, I know that you saw him speak yesterday.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yes, I saw him speak.

• 17:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And then Newsom, I saw he's been running ads in Florida. He gave a speech recently.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  What is up with that? Why is he running ads in Florida? What is that? Well, I have my theories. I'm curious what you think or what the viewers from Florida.

• 17:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know, but let me tell you what he said in a recent interview, which in a very politician way, he was like, I don't like bullies and Abbott and DeSantis are bullies and therefore I need, somebody needs to stand up to them. And he was like, well, are you going to run for president? And he goes, right now I'm focused on California and like, you know, all the talking points, whatever. And they're like, so like, why are you running ads in Florida? And he's like, I don't like bullies. And so it was like, okay, either you're running for president or like you're wasting money, maybe both, right? But like, what is going on here? What is your theory?

• 17:49Speaker 04

  That's as if DeSantis is like running around wedging people like, what does he mean? Like, DeSantis is being a bully. Yeah, I mean, I think, I tweeted yesterday that I think SF and Miami are kind of like peaks into the future for those respective political philosophies, for better and worse. And I think, yeah, I think Newsom, DeSantis have come to be the face of those worlds, right? Now that Trump is kind of fading to the background and the whole Trump machine is kind of falling apart. You know, I think DeSantis and Newsom are like the sort of the face of those different movements. And it's, it's very different attitudes. Like DeSantis's speech yesterday, you know, he hits on all his points and he hits on, you know, he's released campaign ads that more or less hit his talking points. And it's a very different message than Newsom.

• 18:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What's fascinating to me also is obviously people self-select into certain political ideologies. And if these two things are going to go in opposite directions, they'll go live in certain cities. But the people in the middle, like there's a lot more conversation around inflation, around taxes, around like, like what happens to my personal wallet or pocketbook? And I have a friend who's Lived in California his entire life and he's like, dude, when it went over 50% taxes. He's like psychologically, I was like, this sucks, right? Like, like, like enough. He's like 49, I was chill 51, I'm, I'm out, right? Like, like whatever, for whatever reason. And I do think that there's a lot of things on both sides of the political aisle that like people are just waking up to it. And it's less about like, is the difference between 49, 51 really that big?

• 19:16Anthony Pompliano?

  No, psychologically though, huge, huge difference. And obviously it's exasperated by things like locking people in their homes and how they treated mask, no mask, whatever. But like, you are just watching the polar opposites play out here. And I do wonder like, do we ever get a return to the center? Or is it just going to be more and more extreme over time?

• 19:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, the tax thing is kind of interesting. So I, I, you know, I have a house in Northern Nevada, which is where I officially live. And the real estate brokers was like, yeah, we have so many California clients and they just show up saying 13%, 13%. And that's the top state income tax rate in California. It's like 13%. So the, the tax thing, yeah, that, I mean, I don't want to.

• 19:50Anthony Pompliano?

  They want to go to 18.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  And I'll do that. Okay.

• 19:52Anthony Pompliano?

  That's what they put forward. I don't know if they're going to get it passed, but 18 would put it at like, people would be paying like 56, 57%.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I think the weird thing is like, people don't necessarily mind high taxes as long as they get something for it. But then you look at California's infra and it's like a joke. I mean, Floater is a lot, I don't mean to be a disanush, but just reporting on what he said in his thing and kind of stack is like, look, we have like better roads, like better public schools. You can go to college for $6,000 a year here and no state income tax, right? And you look at that and you compare it to the California deal, it's like, well, what are you, what are you getting for that? I mean, as a side thing, by the way, it's just kind of interesting. I tried living in Europe, but I'm one of the few people who actually lived in Europe. I have new passports. I can go live there. And it's how you think, I actually penciled out the taxes. The US is actually not a low tax regime at all. Like the total taxes you pay in California are comparable to the taxes you'd pay in Spain and Germany. But again, there you have sort of a national fabric and infrastructure that you pay for. And like in, in the United States, you don't.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  So yeah, I think people are like, yeah, I think it's a symbolic thing of like, wait, you're selling 51 cents of every dollar goes to the state. And like, in addition to that, I'm paying for private schooling and this and that to actually avoid the deteriorating infrastructure of the state. Well, I'm out.

• 20:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, this idea of like, you are buying something, right? Most people don't think of it that way, but when you start.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  But you are, you are buying something, right? And I don't know, I think American federalism is good and I think different. Should run their affairs different ways. And I, yeah, why is Newsom writing ads in Florida? It's like, what do you care? Like, if you don't have to deal with DeSantis in Florida, then don't deal with it. Go run your own state and we'll see, right? And if you look at the numbers, the numbers don't lie. California has led the leaderboard in like domestic immigration. And Florida and Texas have been tied for first and second in domestic immigration. And so California is a great place to live. Why is everybody leaving?

• 21:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, how do you feel about some of these? Let's take Florida and Texas as an example. And didn't mean to talk so much about politics, but whatever. How much of like their interjection into like social issues versus like more of the legislation and business issues? Like, is just a natural product of the time that we live in and social media? And that gets headlines and drives conversation versus like, I don't know, going after Disney? Or having certain types of policies like those actually keep people or attract people to come move to your state and drive more revenue?

• 21:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think it's funny. Again, I sound like I'm some sort of DeSantis show or something, but it's, you mentioned his speech. Definitely not, no, I'm not, absolutely not shilling for any politician. But he didn't, in terms of the thinking, it's interesting. One of the numbers that struck, stuck in my head, because he cited a bunch of lists of like Florida victories. And one is, and I don't even know where you pulled these numbers. A total influx of adjusted gross income. Apparently you can measure that somehow, which, which, you know, is rather than people, it's like dollar signs. And I forget the numbers he cited and I have a recording of it. But basically he cited that Florida has one of the highest influx of adjusted gross income. As if he was a growth marketer and like an app developer saying, oh, the ARPU's are really high.

• 22:39Anthony Pompliano?

  ARPU and AOV went through the roof.

• 22:41Speaker 04

  Right, no, it was like DeSantis giving like a growth, he's like, wow, that's, I guess that's an interesting way to think about it. And I guess Florida does think about it that way. Because, you know, there is a lot of fast money in Florida in the sense of like, you know, people come here because they like the financial climate. And there's a liquid real estate market and condos and stuff. And a lot of Latin Americans have the same thing, right? And so it's interesting he thinks about that.

• 23:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you even see like, you know, it's important for us to talk about the downsides as well. So just in the city of Miami. Prices have skyrocketed for real estate rent, even just everyday items. Some of that is being experienced on a global scale, even a national scale, in terms of the loose monetary policy, like all that type of stuff. But like, there's very much a thing of how many people made more than, I don't know, $200,000 a year that lived in Miami three years ago and then now, like, a lot more. I don't know what the numbers are, but a lot more. So naturally, the average price of a lot of these things goes up and continues to trend upwards. And so the impact on the people who have been here before that happened is not good, right? They start to feel like, hey, I can't afford this. Why is everything getting so expensive? My income is not going up at the same rate.

• 23:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And we've seen that on a national scale, but I think it's exasperated in Miami. And so you start to look at this and you're like, okay, cool. Like, yes, that is a great stat to point at and cheer for, because as a state level, like, you're improving, but then there's real impact. And like, how do you deal with that? I don't know if there's states or cities that know how to deal with some of that going on.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  I mean, build more housing, I don't know how you do it. Although in South Florida, you're somewhat limited, right? Because Miami expands to the west of the Everglades and then that's it. There's only so much space west you can go. Yeah, I don't know. You know, it's funny, one of the weird things about like this whole tech thing, when Delean did his whole Miami Tech Week, I guess there was a pre-existing Miami Tech Week that got pissed off that like the founders, some people came in. I don't even want to interject myself into that drama, but I found it interesting that people were assuming the tack of like, oh, these are like gentrifiers who are coming in. It's like, and it's odd that people were claiming like, oh, I'm the real Miami, when like, that is the most un-Miami attitude ever, right? Because like, people have been coming here and gentrifying or carpetbagging since forever. I mean, that's what my parents did, right? Everybody, everyone, there's always a new generation that everyone finds obnoxious that shows up and kind of, you know, projects their reality on it.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  I remember when I was a little kid, it was funny, you know, again, Miami used to be very different than now, but I used to remember there used to be bumper circles on cars that said, can the last American who leaves Miami, please bring down the flag, right? Because Miami was getting totally dominated by humanist paddocks. And again, I, you know, they're completely, just unselfconsciously what they are. They're a little obnoxious, frankly, and they just impose like their culture, not impose, but they just, they don't give a shit. They're not going to try to meet, they're super American, but they're not going to like, you know.

• 25:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Which is American.

• 25:13Speaker 04

  Which is American.

• 25:14Anthony Pompliano?

  That is American.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  Right, right. It's like in Godfather 2 when the Italians are having like their San Gennaro festival and like no one's sitting there trying to integrate with anything. They're just like, oh, of course we're gonna carry this festival from Naples or whatever and have it in New York. Of course we are. It's the same thing in Miami.

• 25:28Anthony Pompliano?

  But I think that this, and when I saw your tweet, like, I almost tweeted and then didn't, and we could talk about why, but I was like, man, Miami seems to be one of the places where like people are still understand the importance of America, the value of like true freedom. Not, not the bullshit like, hey, I can go outside, whatever, but like actually, hey, I just came from a really bad place. This place is way better. And I am proud of the fact that I either got here, that I live here, that these ideals are what I am choosing to go and live within. And it does feel like maybe Florida and Texas specifically, but also some other places around the United States, like, they're trying to amp that back up because they feel like that's being lost on a national scale?

• 26:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's funny, I remember one of the sort of boomer phrases my father used to use a lot. Somebody mentioned this on Twitter as well. That's like, people used to say, oh, it's a free country, right? And the ideas typically like usually say something's like, well, that sounds kind of dumb, but whatever, like, what do I care? No skin off my back. And so we don't say that anymore. We don't say, you know, somebody does something dumb, but you know, it's a free country. It's like, oh, no, that person's a bully. They need, their behavior needs to be corrected. It's like, why?

• 26:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Speaking of the people that get accused of being a bully, whether they are or not, you mentioned earlier, the Trump machine is falling apart. You think he's done? No way he can be president again?

• 26:37Speaker 04

  You know, I hate to make political predictions because my ability to make them is bad. I don't, I don't know. I just, I don't know. I'm here to report on political conference, so I'm kind of thinking about what the future of the American right wing. I think what I see in the Trump movement, to the extent I can diagnose anything, is a sort of Jacksonian populism, which has been a strain in American politics.

• 26:56Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that? That's a smart thing. I don't know.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, you know, Andrew Jackson, obviously, Old Hickory, obviously a colored, a colored record when it came to many things. But There was an essay by Walter Russell Mead that came out right when Trump got elected. It was very good. I wish I could quote it from memory. But basically, the idea behind Jacksonian populism is less, it's definitely not like Yankee New England, that's for sure. It's obviously more Southern orientation. And it interprets the United States of America as being less a creedal nation, less defined by a document, and more, you know, a nation in almost the European sort of blood and soil sort of way. And it's a very populist sentiment, right? It's kind of what was behind the Tea Party movement and the Trump movement.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  And it's just this, there's very strains in American political thought, and occasionally they kind of erupt, right? And arguably, Trump was an eruption of that Jacksonian populism. And I think that strain exists. I mean, Trump could get hit by a bus or keel over from a heart attack tomorrow, and that strain will still be there, right? And the question is what expresses it? Anyway, and so I think other politicians can, you know, look at people like J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, DeSantis. They're all this kind of new generation of politicians who are all very well-educated. They all have a lot of Ivy League degrees and what you would think of as being sort of the elite background. And yet, what I find interesting about them is that they've turned their back, to some degree, on that elite background, right? I mean, you know, Blake Masters is casting himself as the populist, and he, you know, he actually is from Arizona, but he's also, you know, Peter Thiel's wealth

• 28:24Speaker 04

  manager. It's hardly, doesn't exactly work out of Cabellos, right? So, yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting crop of politicians.

• 28:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Cabellos.

• 28:31Speaker 04

  I always think of Cabellos because I used to shop there more than I do now, but I always see it as like, it's like, you know, the United States is divided into either REI people and Cabellos people, or Bass Pro Shop people. You're either one or the other, right? And it's funny because you go into those stores, and they're supposed to be outdoorsy stores, but the products they sell are completely different, right? And REI is like mountain climbing, super expensive mountain climbing gear, all these fancy bikes and shit, and that's it. And then you go to Cabellos, and it's like basically guns and boats and camo and camping equipment that's a lot less fancy, right? And it's just a different conception of nature, basically, is what it boils down to.

• 29:04Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great framework. I've never heard that before. That is fantastic.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. You either shop, you have, I'm actually, I have both REI and Cabellos loyalty card cards. I'm one of the few, but I think most Americans have one or the other in their wallet.

• 29:16Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about this rise of populism and all this happening, is it, again, just a product of the times we live in and so people are being opportunistic in seeing it? Or do you think that these folks with Ivy League degrees and all this stuff and kind of like they're turning their back on maybe what got them to where they are or whatever, is it more so like, hey, I grew up a certain way, I see that that's no longer here and like, I have to go be the one to kind of bring it back? Or a resurgence of some like past component of American politics?

• 29:47Speaker 04

  I think that's right. I think if you look at the family bios of people like DeSantis and certainly Vance, whose background has been a whole book, I'm not so sure about Masters', but there is a connection to not that elite class. And so I think something rattling around in their heads is part of that. Yeah, I don't know. I think a lot of what's going on this right is kind of interesting in that, you know, the left is sort of, it's a bizarre inversion of European politics, right? In European politics, the left is typically kind of Marxist and classist in orientation, and the right tends to be nationalist or even racist in orientation in an extreme form. And in the United States, it's kind of the reverse, right? The left is kind of weirdly ethnically and racially obsessed, and the right, I would say, here is kind of a class-conscious movement, right? This feeling of the middle class feeling they're getting screwed by the upper class, right?

• 30:29Speaker 04

  And the weird shaking out of like the left coalition is basically, you know, I would typify it as like, people who live off of DoorDash and the people who deliver it to them. That's the left coalition. People who shop at Whole Foods and then people who get welfare. While those on the right tends to be them. In fact, Peter Thiel, one of the quotes from his speech was, you know, the Republicans are the party for the middle class and the Democrats are the party for everybody else, right? And so that's a strange split in American politics. And I think other thinkers of, you could cite people like Burnham, Samuel Francis, you know, thinkers who sort of framed, at some point, there would be a middle American revolt, right? That the American middle class would revolt against its sort of elite overseers. Another book that I love is Lashes, The Revolt of the Elites. He describes how, again, there was this elite class that would turn its back. Like, back in the day, right?

• 31:14Speaker 04

  A, you had more regional elites. Every little state had its own little elites. And then the sort of consumption and lifestyle patterns of a wealthy person and a middle-class person weren't that different in America. Like, everyone kind of shopped at Macy's and it was this very middle-class mass-market society. And at some point... That's split. And now you have an elite that lives very, very differently. And someone in San Francisco, an elite in San Francisco lives very, very differently than my neighbors in the desert highlands outside of Reno, right? They're kind of, they're completely different. They live in totally different worlds. And that wasn't so much the case. So I think that's causing, that is at its core what's causing this friction. And I think a lot of this new right is a rebellion against that elite.

• 31:51Anthony Pompliano?

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• 33:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I think a lot about what you're calling elite-rich versus like redneck-rich.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 33:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Growing up in North Carolina, like there was people who they had money, but they didn't have Ivy League degrees or Ferraris. They had a tricked out truck with a lift and like the whole thing.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  Which by the way, can be expensive as shit, by the way. Like you see, like in Reno, you see somebody that's like, dude, that's an $80,000 like Jeep. Rubicon, like 60K base at least, and you've put at least 34K into it. You are not poor.

• 33:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, redneck rich, right? Like, like the whole idea of redneck rich was basically like, it doesn't mean that you necessarily don't have means. It just means that you express the wealth in a different way. And I specifically remember there was kids that went to like local high schools and stuff like that. And there was one area, they would take these trucks and they would go like muddin'.

• 34:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 34:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And like, you're like, okay, cool. Got it. Like, you have to have a truck that can actually like, go into the mud and come out. Right? Because if you just take a, a stock truck in there, like, it's not coming out. And so to some degree, the country feels like the redneck rich now have a voice with the internet, whereas maybe they didn't have that before.

• 34:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I know. I mean, when I say elite, people often kind of call bullshit. And what, what are you calling elite? Aren't you an elite, this and that? It's like, there's something different about it, right? Like, you know, some guy with like, you know, a Dartmouth degree and $150,000 in student loans, who writes for an East Coast literary thing and lives in Brooklyn, that are part of an elite class. The guy who has four car dealerships in Asheville, right? And makes 600K a year, he is not elite, even though their incomes are very, very different. Right? Yeah, it's, that's, that's the delta.

• 34:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you, like, when you look at those two people, like, what do you think makes up the difference? And is it, obviously money's not one of the things. It could be a thing, but, but isn't the thing. Is it education? Is it like view of the world? Like?

• 35:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, view of the world, politics, you know, the whole wokeness thing, which I don't typically like getting in the middle of. But yeah, there's, there's a difference in attitude. There, somehow you stare at the world from the elite pedestal. You know, you and I have lived inside this world, right? And there's a set of sort of moral assumptions about the world, and you step outside of it, and there's a whole different set of moral assumptions, right? Like, the fact you've got the flag behind you, right? Like, you wouldn't, you probably wouldn't do a Zoom at a, at a fan company nowadays with like a flag behind you, right? And.

• 35:33Anthony Pompliano?

  You wanna hear a crazy story?

• 35:34Speaker 04

  Let's hear it.

• 35:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I've never said this before.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  Okay, let's hear it.

• 35:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I say this in the most unidentifiable way possible. There is somebody that we work with, who, not a person, an organization.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 35:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And I made a video, and the flag was in the back. They're like, hey, can you not do that again? And I thought, I was ready to go off. Like, I had the tweet locked and loaded. I was gonna fucking go to town. Like, this was gonna be the Super Bowl. It was like, draw the line in the sand, like, fuck you. And then it came out, like, the company, I don't know, 5% of the sales or something is in America. And this video was gonna be put on a website, and they didn't want it to think it was only for America. So, like, we have no problem. Like, if you want part of it to have it or whatever, but just like, can you do it in a way so that, like, they know that it's not just an American thing, like, it's available globally? I was like, okay, fine. Like, let me, you know, put the tweet in my drafts and keep it warm in case I need it later. Kind of like, put the gun back in the holster, but it's still loaded. But, uh, but, but it was this, like, weird thing. Like, my first reaction when I saw it was like, no. Right?

• 36:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And to your point, like, I don't think if you work at some of these companies, you can do that, or somebody would say something. Again, you can buck the trend, whatever, stand up for what you think is right, but you might not work there very long for other reasons, whatever. It does feel like this weird thing where that is now a contentious point.

• 36:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I think for the longest time, the company Andro, I'm probably mispronouncing it, on their careers page, used to have this massive American flag in it. And I theorized that it was, like, basically not-

• 36:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Filter.

• 36:59Speaker 04

  Right, it's basically a filter. And I think I actually tweeted it at Palmer Lucky, and he replied, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was intentional." Or somebody from Andro said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, that wasn't an accident." Because they have this enormous flag, like, I'm sure you've seen Patton, right? When George C. Scott comes out with, like, a flag the size of a wall. They had, like, that hanging in the general area, and then they had a photo of that on their careers page. And I think that was intentional. That was the garlic to the vampire.

• 37:20Anthony Pompliano?

  So, I, I'm fascinated by this whole, like, how do you communicate implicitly? Especially when you start finding the intersection of technology, politics, like, nationals, like, all these different things that come together. And sometimes the best way to understand, like, what's happening in America is to look elsewhere. And so, I saw a tweet, I think, two days ago yesterday, Zelensky from Ukraine, he gave this whole speech, and it's translated, and, you know, who knows how accurate it is? But the general idea was like, you know, fuck you, Russia. If you give us the choice between gas or you, we will take gas, uh, no gas or you, we will take no gas. If you give us the choice between you and no- Water, we will take no water, like all these things. And like, by the way, history proves that like,

• 38:02Anthony Pompliano?

  at the end, we will have gas, water, electricity, like all stuff, and we will be without you. Right? And you listen to the speech and the person was like, oh, he's going full like Winston Churchill. And you're sitting there like, oh, okay, we have an actor comedian who is now communicating in a way that is obviously very compelling to a lot of people. He is essentially going in front of the American markets and saying like, you should invest in Ukraine, the global war. Like all these things. And he's doing it with like, a flag behind him. He's doing it dressed very specifically. Like, you're meeting American politicians who, they had time to put on their suits and ties, but you look like you literally just got off the battlefield. And like, you're, you're standing inside of the government buildings in Kiev or whatever. How do you like, break that down? You literally went to Ukraine, so you have more insight.

• 38:43Speaker 04

  I spent a little bit of time there. Yeah, I spent a little bit of time in the western part of the country. Cause at the early part of the war, it was kind of exciting. And it felt like the image we're having in the United States was, you know, was obviously misinterpreted. And so, a colleague of mine at the Lincoln Network, this DC think tank that I'm a part of, he's reported from conflict zones in the past. He's like, hey, why don't, why don't we go? I'll, I'll set up the fixtures and stuff. You just come along and split the cost. I'm like, okay, fine. I'll ride with you. He ended up, he ended up eventually interviewing Zelensky for Wired Magazine and going all the way to Kiev. I had to go do a podcast of all things. So I had to go do Rogan. It was kind of funny. I was, I was literally in,

• 39:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe Rogan pulled you out of a war zone?

• 39:18Speaker 04

  No, I was, I was in, I was in Lviv in, in western Ukraine with like a Starlink hanging out of my window. Like, like texting the Booker guy. I'm like, dude, like, I hate to break it to you, but I'm, I'm like, actually in a war zone. Like, it's gonna be hard for me to get back in time. Can we just like zoom it in? And it may be kind of cool, because I'm like zooming from Ukraine. He's like, no, you have to physically be here. Like, we can reschedule, but it'll be months ahead. So like, you decide. I'm like, fuck. And so, I like pack up the Starlink and spend the three or four days it took to like get back. And again, I wasn't that, I wasn't that deep into it at all. But it's weird, like, I mean, you served, right? So you, yeah. And so, you know how your risk threshold kind of changes? It's like, it's kind of scary when, when I was like humping my bag with like, body armor and the Starlink and shit across the, because you can't take cars across the border. So you're literally walking across the border into like this unknown future. I'm like, man, I'm,

• 40:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Antonio walked into war zone with Starlink on his back.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  Right, no, well, it was fucking scary. And then it was weird too, because like the border checkpoint, there's like this line that stretched for miles of refugees to get out. And you're like walking alone and they're like staring at you like, are you fucking crazy? Like, what are you doing walking in that direction, bro? I'm like, and like walking across like, this, this feels really dumb. Like, I don't know what I'm doing.

• 40:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Was it just you two or?

• 40:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was, no, it was just us two. It was me and,

• 40:25Anthony Pompliano?

  No, like when you're crossing the border, there's literally nobody going in.

• 40:28Speaker 04

  Oh, no, no. You would see legionnaires at the time they were recruiting the Foreign Legion, and then you would see other media. And so you'd see other press with their bulletproof vest with the press tag on it. And you'd see young, healthy men who had kit from various camo patterns, who are clearly from different militaries who are showing up. And there's nobody else.

• 40:45Anthony Pompliano?

  The few people that I've seen go, they're former US military, defense contractors, whatever. When they're there, I'm like, looking around, I'm like, man, that looks kind of crazy. Like, you got a bunch of people with guns and kids, and they're like, running around and everything. And then you see the media, which obviously, when I was in Iraq, they were there. Very different time. Like, it was kind of like, hey, get in the vehicle, shut up. And like, you know, if you put us in danger, like, we're gonna fucking freak out. But here, like, there's like, walking down the street. And I don't know, it just seems kind of different.

• 41:17Speaker 04

  Well, it was, I mean, it's a country, it's a country, it's something I'd never experienced before. I suspect none of us have ever experienced. It's a country in total war, right? It's a country, it's a European nation that has gotten invaded, and social order is kind of not totally broken down in an anarchic way. But but most of society is either trying to get out, women, so men couldn't get out. So it was like, if you're at the Polish border, it's just literally like, women and children, like a woman with like, two kids, and a little cat in a bag, and a little rolly bag, like, basically, all they have, and the clothes on their back, just like, walking across the border to an unknown, like, that's it. And you just see like, this endless stream of such people.

• 41:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And what's going on on the other side of the border? Because I think a lot of people don't realize this. Like, once they get over there, are they meeting, like, family and friends? Or are there just like, random people trying to help them?

• 41:53Speaker 04

  Some are having, like, tearful reunions. But usually, it's amazing, I mean, it's a little dated now, I'm sure it's quiet now compared to what it used to be. But there was enormous number of, like, Jose Andres, the Spanish chef, his world, Central Kitchens, I think it's called, was all over the place. I interviewed just a random Polish woman from the village. She was like, oh, yeah, the refugees are coming. So like, she had this big thing of soup that she was...

• 42:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Doing her best to help.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So Europe really just mustered in a huge way. I mean, every train station in Poland became refugee camp, basically, because they're all camp, like, the Warsaw train station was totally taken over by refugees. You know, it was, it was literally millions of refugees, like, a quarter of the Ukrainian population fled. So it was, it was a chaotic situation. Then you got on the inside, and there's again, more refugees coming out, but then also men and material going east, right? And then all of society, like, there's a scene there, it was on a Sunday, a bunch of high school kids, like, having fun, joshing, like, you think, oh, they're having... Like, no, they're filling sandbags and pulling the sandbags around statues because they thought airstrikes were happening. And there were a few airstrikes in Lviv later. And so they're, you know, and they're shuttering everything. It's just like those scenes you see in black and white from World War II was kind of the vibe, right? Um, even though this is far away from the front lines, to be clear. Um, yeah, that that was the feeling and it and that's when I kind of realized like, man, I don't know.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  Like, I think the Russians can have a hard time winning because everyone was so mobilized. They would literally punctuate said, you know, sentences with, we will win. And like these steely eyed gazes and everyone kind of mobilized like, I don't know, man. This Ukraine's a big place.

• 43:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So when I saw this happening, one of the first things I thought about was, uh, God forbid that this happened in the United States. Somehow somebody figured it out and they invaded the United States. Would we have the same response? And I don't think we would.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  I think, well, I think, uh, I might show my political stripes. So I, I think, I think you would have that, I think you would have the response.

• 43:27Anthony Pompliano?

  You think so?

• 43:29Speaker 04

  I think it wouldn't be the people you'd expect.

• 43:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, interesting.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is, this is where the redneck side of me comes out. I think, uh, I think the people you see at shooting ranges in California, uh, who tend to, those guys are going to the Sierra and Red Dawn, the whole fucking thing. I think the people is, you know, a lot of people, the urban dwellers absolutely would not. And they would just go along with whoever the regime is. Yeah, I think, um, you know, you've probably gone shooting in California back in the day. And it's, you know, mostly rural whites, a lot of Asians, a lot of Hispanics. Like those guys would hole up and like smuggle arms around and like muster for a militia. And a lot of people would just get on the first plane and get the fuck out.

• 44:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It, it's, um, it's fascinating because if you really think about, uh, Ukraine, like, again, this is a story as old as time, but like you're there, you've got your family, you've got a business you're running, whatever. And next thing you know, like literally your family's refugees, right? And it happens in a matter of days. What was the most surprising thing that you felt like you saw on the ground? That maybe wasn't being told in America or was like being misrepresented, uh, in America?

• 44:26Speaker 04

  I guess, I think the level of, the level of mobilization and sort of national solidarity that there was, right? I know, I knew nothing about Ukraine. I still don't know very much about Ukraine. Don't speak any Eastern European or Slavic languages. So to me, it was a vastly foreign country. And I guess, you know, once I was there, I did start reading about it. Ukrainian nationalism has been a thing. It's had very much a checkered past, um, as, as many movements did during World War. But there's been this Ukrainian national movement for a couple centuries now. And it's odd that nationalism, we think of countries as having existed forever because like France has existed forever, but its politics have been very different, or Spain has existed forever, but its politics have been very different. And the emergence of what we now call the nation state with sort of a secular, mostly secular administrative state with a notion of national unity and you're a citizen of

• 45:10Speaker 04

  a certain country rather than an empire or dynasty, that's kind of a novelty, right? And that struck all of Europe. The United States is one of the great experiments in nation state creation. But a lot of countries didn't get their own nation for a while, right? The Poles, the Czechs, the Serbians, the Slovaks, et cetera. And somehow the Ukrainians never got theirs either. And somehow we're seeing the fruition of this nationalist movement. And I think if you talk to Ukrainians, a lot of things changed with the protests against the previous, what was considered a Russian stooge. And it's odd to see, well, I'll go fucking angry and crazy and yelling and screaming your podcast if you go that direction. There's a lot of, a lot of American commenters, particularly on the right, who were remarkably sympathetic to Putin and thought the Ukrainians should just roll over and who have frankly

• 45:54Speaker 04

  shut the fuck up about the war since then, since they got it so completely wrong, clearly. But, you know, who wanted to just deny the fact or claim that the 2014 was like a CIA op. It's like, dude, look at the photos, there's like a million Ukrainians in that protest. Like, the CIA crisis actor budget must have been pretty goddamn lit if you claimed this is a CIA op. It's like, no, like, I hate to break, and Americans often have this attitude, it's like, they think everything is a projection of their own domestic political neuroses, right? Like, if the CIA lifts a little finger, oh, then like, a million person riot happens and keeps like, dude, if only, like, no, that's not how it actually works. They have their own political processes, they have their own political crises, and they have their own thoughts and views about the world that don't line up with American domestic political priorities. That's just the reality of it. And if you want to understand that world, you have to get out of your American attitude to understand and see the world from their perspective, right?

• 46:38Speaker 04

  And if you talk to them, it's like, dude, we've had democracy for whatever, seven or eight years, we're not giving it up now, we're not going to be under Putin's heel, that's it, I will, I will die for this country, right? And that, yeah, and that's, that's something that I think caught everyone by surprise. Funny, a friend of mine, I won't name names or whatever, he was a Mormon missionary to Ukraine, he was there before the previous Russian invasion and the war in the east. And he was surprised at how much Ukrainian nationalism resilience there was. So a lot of it clearly was a very recent phenomenon. But I think, you know, Zelensky not leaving, everyone, you know, he's supremely popular there. I think Zelensky, this whole business of like, I don't need a ride, I need ammo, right? I think that rallied a nation in a big way. And

• 47:13Anthony Pompliano?

  It was some baller shit.

• 47:14Speaker 04

  That was, I think, I think, yeah, I think it's some baller shit. Yeah.

• 47:17Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the other piece that I saw a lot of people talking about is like, dude, what are you talking about? Like, he's acting like, you know, people are dropping bombs on his city and like, he's like, literally like, running from bunker to bunker, like, he's, you know, got politicians coming to visit him, he's in this or whatever. I was like, I don't think that this was like, hey, I'm going to die if I stay or not. It was the symbol of like, we're not, we're not running, we're gonna fight. And to some degree, like, the morale of the country seemed to shift. And I think that part of it also was like, he seems to very well understand American culture and like, how to kind of pull the strings. Because when he said that specific line, it felt like America was like, fuck yeah, that guy sounds awesome.

• 47:53Speaker 04

  Right. Oh, his marketing's incredible, which is a good thing, right? Every, everywhere has propaganda, right? That's part of the war. I mean, America did in World War II. And so that's definitely part of it. But I, I would clarify that, I mean, he was in bunkers hiding from bombs in the early part of the war. Kiev was encircled, right? The thought that he would survive, you know, Wagner mercenaries were dispatched to try to murder him. Like, I mean, nowadays, yes, you're right. I mean, Vitalik can just go to the Kiev blockchain thing and it's not that hard to get to. But that was not the case in early March, when things were much more sort of loosey goosey. So

• 48:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And when that happened, like, what do you think was the big shift? Was it literally that they've pushed the forces back? I know now we have that kind of an advance that's happening that, that everyone believes has a lot of momentum to it. But I, I don't think people quite understand. It feels like the story in America has been Russia has tried to invade, they've had some successes, but they're running into resistance. And like, that's the story. Not so much that like, no, maybe actually they're like, losing ground. Now there's this advance. Now there's like, almost a, a, a counter punch that's occurring. And like, if we know anything about military history, like, that's usually if you can keep that momentum, like, that's how you end up victorious. It's not so much like, hey, we resist in the beginning. It's no, we resist and then we counter punch. And that seems to be happening now?

• 49:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, yeah, the big news there is obviously that the, the question was, can the Ukrainians go on the offensive and recapture territory? It's one thing to actually defend territories. To actually take territory. And yeah, I think rolling back the Russians from Buka. It's funny, did you ever work with Dwight? No, you didn't. He probably left. Dwight Crow, Facebook PM.

• 49:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I did, yeah.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  So I ran into him like a week ago at South Park Commons in South Park.

• 49:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 49:19Speaker 04

  Last time I talked to him was through a Starling connection. Dude, that guy was actually in the shit. He was serving. I never published an interview with him, I probably should. He was serving in a volunteer ambulance crew on the front lines, actually, in Kiev.

• 49:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Shut up.

• 49:30Speaker 04

  No, absolutely.

• 49:31Anthony Pompliano?

  He would do that.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  He would do that, and he did that. Like, I saw the video, dude, he was like losing. He was in a hospital, in the front lines. He'd go out, volunteer basis, and go pull the civilian dead bodies from the injured from the front lines.

• 49:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I wish we were having this conversation not on air, but he always struck me as the type of guy who like, he's gonna live life, right?

• 49:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And the one thing I remember about Dwight is, I think he posted on Facebook. He like went and he climbed maybe Mount Kilimanjaro or something.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  He did Everest like a month ago.

• 49:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, yeah, so like, he'd been climbing these things or whatever, and I think it was Kilimanjaro when he did it. And he was like, "I got to the top and I couldn't fucking breathe. And I like crawled my way to the sign, because I was gonna get this fucking photo." And he had like, you know, like, "selfie" or whatever. And I remember just being like, "Yep, that checks out." Like, that is the type of person he is, so to hear this is not shocking.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, you know, I should go back to him, we should probably publish that interview. But yeah, no, he was in the front lines, and then he survived, though, he came back. And, but yeah, no, getting back to the Ukraine thing, yeah. I mean, the business of being on the offensive, will they reclaim territory? Will they take Odessa? You know, there's a lot of questions, right? Because it's clear that attitudes in the Ukraine have hardened. Like, they're willing to compromise and more or less give up much of the Crimea to the Russians. But that's no longer true. And part of their national conception is actually coming it all back. We'll see. I mean, I, you know, I have no, obviously no insight to what they're actually thinking. But I have to imagine that they understand that European resolve might waver, given their energy costs. Europe's gonna freeze this winter, it does not look well. I think I retweeted a pretty harsh joke that said, you know, what did the British use to?

• 50:59Speaker 04

  To light their homes before candles. Electricity. It's like, oh, oof. I take no joy in that joke, by the way, but it is. It's one of these jokes that like reveals the greater truth.

• 51:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, yes.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  Like, ooh. So, and he must understand that resolve for the war has to waver in European politics, given the privations.

• 51:19Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the story that, uh, from Russia, and again, I want to be careful. I don't get all of this, uh, data points wrong because everyone in the comments will definitely let us know. Uh, but, um, it does feel like, uh, there's this thing, like, there's like been like eight Russian, uh, energy executives, oil executives, whatever, who have mysteriously gone missing, died, whatever. Uh, and then we get pipelines shut down and like, hey, we're not turning it back on. Like, there, there's all this stuff going on. And I think that Americans are like, oh, that shit that like we thought actually happens, like, that does happen. Like, you know what I mean? You can kind of almost see like, oh, I thought that was just like in history or I thought that was like in, uh, fiction books. Like, that's like real stuff. And I've talked to a couple of friends and they're like, oh, and I'm like, yeah, it's a fucking war. Like, they're literally trying to kill each other.

• 51:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 51:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and to some degree, I think America got so, uh, blunted to like the realities of war because we were at war for 20 years and it was just kind of like this thing that happens and every once in a while, there's like a news story or whatever. But like, if you're, you know, 18, 19 years old, like you did not live a single day without America at war in the Middle East.

• 52:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 52:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, America, well, technically is not fighting in the war.

• 52:19Speaker 04

  Uh, well, they are. It's a proxy war. How many billions have you given to Ukraine?

• 52:24Anthony Pompliano?

  You said it, I mean, well, the, the, the thing that I saw, which, uh, just blew my mind is like, hey, we have billions of dollars for, uh, Ukraine to fight a war, but we don't have enough money to solve the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi. Right? And so like a little bit of like, hey, why are we so worried about all these other problems around the world, uh, uh, which, uh, is up for debate. But it does feel like America, to some degree, like the initial invasion was a big moment. And then like, we just go back to like, kind of being blunted to the realities of it.

• 52:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, right. Cause you're right. Cause that, the United States has been continuously at war. In fact, is involved in what? Six or seven different conflict regions, at least right now. And nobody thinks about it because he's basically outsourced it to a small minority of people since we have a professional army and there's no conscription. And I think it creates this level of media cynicism about war that it literally is like the current thing. Like, one of the things that most pissed me off about the Ukraine is like, oh, I don't see Ukraine in my feed. I guess it's the current thing. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Yeah. Cause a fucking shooting war is just a media cycle to you? Is that, is that what you think it is? It's like, no, it's a little bit more than that. And by the way, no, the war is not over. We're still giving them billions. There's still people dying. There's still this whole thing going on just because you don't see it in your feed. It's not, it doesn't mean it's not real. And so. Yeah, I mean, but of course, the media side of it does matter. And Zelensky understands that, which is why he's leading the propaganda word that he is.

• 53:28Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned that a big part of this was like Ukrainians were like, I'll die for my country.

• 53:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 53:34Anthony Pompliano?

  You also wrote a piece, Would You Die For The Dow?

• 53:35Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I think, or something, right? And Dow.

• 53:38Speaker 04

  Slightly snarky headline.

• 53:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Literally being decentralized autonomous organization. And it was somewhat of a review, summary, critique, whatever you want to call it, of Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State. So talk a little bit about, you know, the United States, Ukraine, Russia.

• 53:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, now there's this new idea of like, let's go create like cities in the cloud, right? Which I think Balaji's done a great job of articulating and kind of laying out. What did you kind of take away from that?

• 54:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was a review of Balaji's Network State and also Vitalik's response. Vitalik wrote a very long piece about it as well. And I think it's a fascinating concept, and I recommend reading the book, actually. I also interviewed him on my podcast, The Pull Request. You can get it on Apple Podcasts. I had a long conversation with Balaji about it. And to be clear, you know, Balaji and I don't really disagree. At some fundamental level, he understands. So let me just frame what the problem is and then what the debate became. So Balaji's idea, I mean, there's a lot of Balaji in there. And if you know Balaji, I'm sure you've had a lot of interesting conversations, as I've had with Balaji. He's an interesting character. So like, the first half is like pure like Balaji's brain and view of the world, which is fascinating. There's literally like seven links in one sentence, like various things.

• 54:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Which is why we all love him.

• 54:38Speaker 04

  Right, no, he's amazing, he's amazing.

• 54:39Anthony Pompliano?

  The guy, I don't know how he manages all the tabs, but he's got to have some, he, Balaji Srinivasan has some sort of tab management system that none of us have yet figured out.

• 54:47Speaker 04

  I mean, you're right, his brain has 200 open tabs at all times. That's the reality. And his CPU still runs somehow. My Mac Pro can handle it, but Balaji's brain can. Yeah, and then at the end, I wish he had spent more, I mean, he's had, you can find it online, by the way, it's a beautiful website online, and he's added chapters to it. But in the original book, he gets into what he called The Network State. And the idea here is that imagine a sort of federated, I mean, in the same way that like, I made this comment in my critiques, like, imagine Balaji Stan, let's just give it a name, existed, right? And we're Balaji Stanis, right? And we literally just move from three or four neighborhoods in San Francisco to the same three or four neighborhoods in Miami, the same in New York. And let's say there's actual borders, passports, the whole deal. Would we even notice? It's like, no, because we'd never cross the border. We would literally just fly.

• 55:31Speaker 04

  From one to the other. And so I think Balaji is absolutely right that like de facto, this is it's already the case that there's a self sort of selecting set of people who live in this weird disembodied somewhat elite realm, to be honest, that fly between these various cities and live a different life. And they have much more in common than they do with even people like Down the street. That right down the street. Right. And some could say that's a bad thing, and maybe it is. I personally, one of the things, one of the weirdest things I think that's happened in 200 years, and you and I are probably roughly the same age. So you probably remember the analog era a little bit, right? It's like you remember getting letters, right? Like information used to move as fast as like physical objects would move. And now they don't. Information is uncoupled from from physical movement, which means

• 56:11Speaker 04

  who you are, what you think, what you believe is uncoupled from your surroundings. And that means the little colored squares on the map called Miami, Florida, State of Florida, United States of America, are uncoupled from what who you think, believe, talk with, et cetera. And I think that's a major change. And somehow a lot of the getting back to the whole DeSantis versus Newsom war and everyone moving to different states, like that's, I think Balaji called it defragmenting a disk. Like remember back in the in the in the DOS days and or even current Windows? Like the memory is written all over and then at some point you've got to take all the app's memory and take it to one place so that gets too inefficient. He's like, yeah, the network state is basically defragmenting people and putting all the people that actually have common values and are willing to live under the same rules

• 56:49Speaker 04

  in the same physical place because the physical, so to be clear, this is not transhumanism. This is not VR. This is not uploading your brains. Like, no, no, no, no, we need like physical boots on the ground, so to speak, place to live, seat at the UN, laws, people who take out the garbage, but for a self, you know, sort of selecting set of people. That's his thesis. And, you know, again, like I said, like I'm I'm partial to it because I think the political crisis that he highlights is very real. The question is, would you die for the Dow? Right? Because not that everything is like in war and fighting these days, obviously very little of life is. But at some level, you have to say, even if it's not like I will die for the die, it's like I will raise my children inside this environment, right? That's the real bet you make. And are people actually going to do that? Because, you know? You probably know the same people, dried in at Praxis, there's a lot of, you know,

• 57:34Speaker 04

  the Prosper people, like, all very interesting. I'm like, super pro makers and builders and doing cool new stuff. I don't want to ding them at all. But I do wonder, it's like, well, you need some oomph there. And it's funny, I like joke tweeted a few months ago, a lot of this charter nation business is like Zionism without Judaism, right? And then like, literally just yesterday, Balas, she said, oh, no, no, I wasn't inspired by Neil Stephenson, I was inspired by Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, right? And it's true, right? And the Zion, for those who aren't familiar with Zionism, or with Judaism, for that matter, right? A lot of Zionism, getting back to the, the national, all these nationalist movements sprung up in late 19th century Europe, right? Including a lot of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. And in the case of the Jewish one, it's a little strange, because it's not like, oh, the ground we sit on should become a country, rather than the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It's like, well, we're not even on the ground, but we are a people, because

• 58:19Speaker 04

  we've been living in exile for almost 2,000 years, and therefore, we should move somewhere else. And before, the current location of Israel was the thing, there was plans of Argentina, Uganda, all sorts of places where the Jews had moved to. But there was always this feeling of like, the Tao, so to speak, was the feeling of Jewish identity, right? And there was, you know, for again, almost 2,000 years, drummed into their heads, this feeling of exilic despair, right? Some of it stemming from previous exiles, but like, the Israeli national anthem, you know, says, looking to the east towards Zion, which echoes the Psalm, which reflects the Jews being exiled to Babylon, you know, 500 B.C. And so there's this feeling of, of, of, and it's odd, because a land that they weren't even a part of, like, nobody had been a part of for generations. And so it's like, that feeling

• 59:03Speaker 04

  of like, belief, does that exist for these charter nations? And do you even need it? Maybe you don't. I've talked to some of the Prosper people, which is this thing in Honduras, that's like a special economic zone. They're like, you know, you don't really need a whole new country, you just need like, special economic terms, and the ability to move there, and that's all you need.

• 59:18Anthony Pompliano?

  So, I've talked to a lot of these people as well. And when you think it's hilarious that we're talking about charter nation business, right? Which is an important part of it as well. Because you do need to make it sustainable. And these, I think, have gotten a lot of attention, because they are like, planting a flag on the ground, like, we're going to create a special economic zone, we're going to create a whole new city, or a country, or whatever. But like, there's also kind of watered down versions, I think. There was the mountain. Powder Mountain or whatever that a whole group of people, they went bottom mountain. They started cut up all the land. They were selling these pieces or plots or whatever. And they were going to like build like basically a neighborhood, right? Like if you kind of think of like the the most watered down version is like, hey, we're going to go create a neighborhood. You can also go try to create a new nation. But what I do think we've like seen an example of this kind of play out in front of our eyes, which is Miami.

• 1:00:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Which it actually had almost nothing to do with like the physical infrastructure and all this like, yes, there were some things that were advantageous. But I think if you were to ask some of the people who moved here first, uh, there was like, no, like we just like, there's 300 people. And if we could get those 300 people, it wouldn't even like you. It was like somebody like you to fill this seat and we get 300 of them. Then like we have momentum, we have like a nucleus and like we're off to the races. And it is a higher probability of like escape velocity. And like this will be a thing that will stay around for a long time. It feels like most of the other folks who are trying these like new nation things. It's more about the like physical location. It's more about like, what are the rules than like just the people? And I don't know if you've thought at all about that in terms of like pros or cons between the difference.

• 1:00:45Speaker 04

  I mean, I've thought about Miami, right? Miami is almost its own little sort of city state. It feels weird like for those who who don't spend time here, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, but it feels very different than like Fort Lauderdale. Fort Lauderdale is great, nice airport to fly out of, but you, there's some sort of border you cross between Dayton, Broward County when you go north. And this is not like Orlando, right? It's and nothing wrong with Orlando, but it's different. And like, I don't know. It in my ideal world, there would be some like maritime republic of Miami and Mayor Suarez's doja. And it's like, it's like, it's like the Northern Italian city states. And it's just like this weird little place with its own laws. And, you know, I don't know, they'd be kind of cool, frankly. I think we need more of those experiments like I, you know, a lot of these people like the practice people's like, dude, why don't you just like, why don't you just take over a county in Florida?

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  Just convince DeSantis now that he's like, you know, smacked around Disney, convince him to give you some counters. Or like even these retirement communities, like the villages, right? Like, you know, they have like 200,000 people, they have like their own police force. It's like a whole city in there.

• 1:01:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  It's like, you know, in Florida, you can

• 1:01:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the island? Uh, there's um,

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  Fisher Island?

• 1:01:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it Fisher Island? No, there's a Indian Creek, right? It's like super wealthy, right? You and I have never been there. And it's got like a golf course on it. There's like 30, 40, 50 homes, whatever it is. And they have like a 13 person police force and they patrol not by only land, but also by sea. And they have like a boat and like, like the whole thing. And it's like, of course, you know, I think Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump bought a place there and there's all these types of people, whatever. But you're like, okay, cool. It's not 200,000 people, but it's like 50 homes and like, again, they don't have special laws, but they sure as hell have an army that'll show up if you try to like, you know, you try to get on the island. And so like, yeah, what is the difference between 40 homes and, you know, 100,000 homes? Like, I don't know.

• 1:02:30Speaker 04

  It's not that big a difference. Yeah. But yeah, but we should do these experiments. I think it'd be cool.

• 1:02:33Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think is stopping it? Or what are the obstacles? Is it just like, that sounds insane to the average person?

• 1:02:39Speaker 04

  I think people have, I don't know. I mean,

• 1:02:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Or it takes hard work and somebody has to believe to be the first to like try it?

• 1:02:44Speaker 04

  Right. There has to be a sort of generative faith in some future community that you're trying to build. There either has to be greed or faith. And there's the two driving things. Like you have to believe in some national, you know, vision or just say, you know, I'm sick of taxes and these fucked up laws. I'm going to like make common cause with these 500 other rich people and do this thing. Right? Yeah, that's, that's what I'd say.

• 1:03:04Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:03:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And with world-class customer service available to you 24/7, Exodus always has your back. Run, don't walk. Over to exodus.com/pomp for your free download today. Again, that's exodus.com/pomp. Go check him out for your free download today. The, the thing that also jumps to mind is, remember, was it Clive Bundy? Remember in, was it Nevada or Utah?

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  Oregon, the Malera thing, the, the like the,

• 1:04:10Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that was after the original standoff, but

• 1:04:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, I don't want to get all the details wrong, but essentially, I think his name's Clive Bundy. He's got like a huge geographic area. I'll call it a farm or a ranch, but like basically a city, right? In terms of size and the federal government came and was like, you know, eminent domain. Like we're taking some of this or whatever. And he like called his buddies, I guess, and they like showed up with horses and guns. And it was like a standoff. And I remember seeing on the news, like you're like, holy shit. Like, these are like ranchers and like that looks like a SWAT sniper set up on the highway. Like, you know, with a scope and you're just like, is this, you know, the OK Corral? Like, what is going on here? I don't think that anyone generally in the American public is like, that's what I'm willing to go do to like, set up a new city.

• 1:05:01Anthony Pompliano?

  But like, it does become interesting if you go and you get a governor or some sort of special treatment. And they say, hey, you can try the experiment in this location. I think there's a lot of people who would say, yeah, I'll opt into that.

• 1:05:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, particularly in the West, there's so many open spaces. So where my house is in Story County, outside of Reno, which is where Virginia City is, which used to be like the Gold Rush Town. And there's, I forget his name. Oh, it's like I who founded Jet.com, one of these e-commerce.

• 1:05:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Mark Lor.

• 1:05:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:26Anthony Pompliano?

  He's trying to set up a city, right?

• 1:05:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, he tried to set up a city and which, by the way, man, good luck to him because I live in the high desert. It is a harsh environment. It gets, you're going to freeze your ass off in the winter and it gets hot as hell in the summer. And it's a very harsh environment and there isn't much water and it's hard to live out there. But yeah, I mean, you know, you can buy tens of thousands of acres for not much money in the Western Americas. And if you can convince people to move there, we'll see. But again, I think, and again, getting back to the Balaji conversation, he freely concedes that there needs to be a moral case made for the state. And the weird thing that I've always tried to push Balaji on, it's like, dude, but what is the moral case? Tell me, what is the moral case for your network state? And he kind of talks around it, doesn't, you know, I think he just doesn't see himself as that person. Maybe providing the moral cause.

• 1:06:06Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think it should be?

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  I don't know, man. It's, I don't know. I wrote this piece called Side Thing on my experience in Judaism. I had this whole Judaism religious thing. I think there's kind of like a God-shaped hole at the heart of a lot of secular liberalism. By God, I don't necessarily mean like, you know, guy with a beard in the sky. I just mean some notion of transcendent good, you know. I think it was, I think it was not Walter Benjamin, who's the other guy. Anyhow, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, who said, you know, that at its core, religious sentiment is the belief that there's some sort of moral order towards which we should be striving, right? That there's some unseen moral good that we should arrange human affairs according to, right? And if you frame it that way, everything's religion, right? Literally, the traffic laws outside that say I can't park for longer than three hours are a form of religion because there's some greater parking good,

• 1:06:54Speaker 04

  right? That, again, empirically, it doesn't exist. There is no good, right? There's no good in the microscope. We invent these things, right? And so, how do you invent a moral good that says, yes, we should have this like, modern-day Hanseatic leagues of federated crypto cities governed by tokens? I don't know. How do you make that case? It might just be a capitalist case of like, hey, there's lower taxes, things work better, move here. I don't know.

• 1:07:14Anthony Pompliano?

  What's funny is the intersection of religion and new cities. I've always thought that actually the better way to try to do this in the United States, I don't think internationally this holds up, but in the United States, it's actually to take one of the pseudo-religions, take ESG, and basically use that, which we do see companies like, I think there's one called Cul-de-sac, which is like, hey, we're gonna build a city, but like, there's no streets for cars. It's like, walkable only, there's no cars allowed, that kind of stuff. And like, actually, if you went to somebody in the government and was like, uh, we're anarchists, we're gonna like, take down, you know, whatever, we're gonna like, build our own thing, or even a watered-down version of like, we're building our own city with our own laws and taxes. They're like, we're gonna put you on a list somewhere, and like, we're gonna watch you guys, and like, that's not allowed? But if

• 1:07:56Anthony Pompliano?

  you show up and you're like, hey, we're gonna build a new city, and, uh, no cars are allowed. They're like, oh, great, how much money do you need? Like, what land do you want? You know, and like, there's a conversation.

• 1:08:06Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the difference? Like, moral good, no cars. It does feel like there's like this whole world.

• 1:08:12Speaker 04

  Carbon zero is the new moral good, man. That is the new moral good towards which we should be striving.

• 1:08:16Anthony Pompliano?

  There are people who are headed that way.

• 1:08:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Another thing that's interesting to me is this new world. So you take like network stakes or whatever. A lot of times are critiques on the old world. But we do see in the technology world, like it seems that some of the new world is just recreating problems of the old world. So if you look DAOs.

• 1:08:36Speaker 04

  Crypto's one, by the way.

• 1:08:37Anthony Pompliano?

  That's exactly where we're going. So DAOs, somebody recently pitched me on this like DAO thing. And I was like, I don't know, like, what is your DAO got that's so special? And he's like, well, let me explain. One of the problems in DAOs is that there's a lot of people and there's no like structure. And so nobody really knows what anyone's working on. And there's like no strategy and all stuff. So we have this concept. We're going to create sub DAOs inside of the DAO. And I was like, what do you mean? And they were like, well, like all the product people are going to be in one sub DAO to work on product and marketing. And I was like, so divisions in a company? And like, again, I get it. There's tons and tons of people out there. And one anecdote does not necessarily kind of sentence all of them to like, this is stupid. But I literally was like, this, like, where's the hidden camera?

• 1:09:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, this has got to be a joke that like, you're literally describing a corporation to me, just using DAO instead. And I think that the critics of the broad crypto industry would say like, hey, that's just like one example, like there's 100 others of just recreating the problems or recreating some of these things. How do you think through like some of the naiveness or like the stupidity that goes?

• 1:09:43Speaker 04

  Well, I wouldn't call it stupidity, but.

• 1:09:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Some of it is stupid. Some of it is not, some of it.

• 1:09:48Speaker 04

  Harsh words, Bob, harsh words.

• 1:09:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Come on. By the way, I've talked to people and been like, that sounds kind of crazy. Like, yeah, we know it's stupid, but right? So like, it can be a lovable thing as well.

• 1:09:56Speaker 04

  I mean, I think the fact that like, for example, DeFi is speedrunning a lot of the problems of like. Conventional 19th and 20th century finance is probably a good sign in a way. It's like you've had bank runs, you've had speculative bubbles, like, oh, like the entire history of the stock market, basically, for the past century and a half. It's like, yeah, I mean, it's kind of dumb to be stepping on the exact same landmines that the previous world did. Ideally, you could kind of avoid that. Part of what my company hopes to do is like, okay, let's not do the stupidity of web two attribution again, like, let's just get to the real answer. On the other hand, I don't know, man. Yeah, look, I so I just got to this party, so to speak, so it's hard for me to sit here in judgment, but it does strike me that there's a lot of interesting energy and innovation going on in web three and crypto, and a lot of things that are like, super naive and like, whoa, you've never had like, a real job before, have you?

• 1:10:38Speaker 04

  You've never been inside like, a real tech company and seen how the sausage is made, have you? And again, that's both good and bad, right? That can mean that you can invent new stuff and like, yeah, you don't give a shit how it was built before. On the other hand, it's like, you invented an organization chart.

• 1:10:51Anthony Pompliano?

  It is true, but I think it's important also. It can be an amazing thing, because you're going to get people with new ideas who frankly don't know that they shouldn't try something or whatever, and like, get breakthroughs. But then also, the other side is the crazy stuff.

• 1:11:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, specifically in my example, just to cut to it, right? So just raise money, I guess this is my, I said it before, but whatever, raise money for a company that's in web three attribution and user acquisition. And for those who don't know what that means, a lot of people in web three don't, I've had to explain it. It's like, you know, you do a token drop, what's the ROI on that? Was it worth?

• 1:11:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, let's just go to web two. Explain kind of like, how these web two companies, so Facebooks, Twitters, Googles, all this stuff, like, many people, I think, outside of the tech industry will be like, oh, Facebook's amazing, like, I get on their software, I connect with people, and like, they don't realize, like, no, literally, somebody is watching, did you click or not? What color is the button? Like, when I was at Facebook, I remember the create page button on Facebook, if you go, assuming it's still there, is green. Every other button on Facebook's blue, but that one's fucking green. And people, there was a huge debate.

• 1:11:56Speaker 04

  Increase click through rate 10%.

• 1:11:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Can we make it green? Like, does it violate our design standards, like, all this stuff? And like, guess what? We showed up and we were like, look at the click through rate, and like, here's data. And people were like, well, fuck the design standard, like, make that shit green, because that's the top of the funnel. To make money, right? And so like, explain a little bit as to like attribution, like how some of this stuff happens in the, in the old world.

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  Right. And so just to be clear, when Facebook is watching you, it's not Zuck sitting, like literally sitting there laughing at the, at the DM to your girlfriend. Just because people seem that's like, yes, Zuck is sitting there and listening to what you're saying right now and making a joke at your expense. It's like, obviously it's, it's much more high level aggregated. There's no individual much of anything going on. Yeah. So, so the funnel, you said a lot there actually, right? So like, what is the funnel? So the funnel, obviously white on top, narrow at the bottom. And it's the central metaphor for like everything and almost everything in web two and marketing, right? Seen from a very mercenary point of view, every company is actually a marketing company with like a little side hustle. Like a game company is actually a market, and this is actually true. Most game companies are actually marketing companies that happen to just create games to have a thing to sell. And how they navigate that funnel, what, what does it mean to navigate the funnel? So what's at the top of the funnel?

• 1:13:01Speaker 04

  Top of the funnel is things like Facebook posts, Instagram posts, tweets, random browsing on the internet. The, the very high level touch surface of, of your media experience. I mean, in the real world, it's seeing billboards, listening to this podcast, whatever it is, right? Then you go further into the funnel, right? You've, you've responded to some call to action. You've clicked on a thing, you've installed an app, right? CTA to use the, the term of art. You've installed the app, right? So you're kind of mid funnel, like you, you might convert, right? Note the religious language. When you buy a thing, you convert. It's like Mormons, like trying to save your soul, right? This is capitalism is transcendent, speaking of organizing principles. That's, that's where we've gotten to. The only thing we believe in is capitalism. And then you get deeper into the funnel, you're in the app, you upgrade to the paid plan, you buy the NFT, you do whatever it is. Ka-ching, the cash register goes off. How do you join all that shit?

• 1:13:45Speaker 04

  Cause I've mentioned like three or four different platforms or more than that, that it's happening. How does the person, you running the pages team or whatever at Facebook? Or me with the exchange or like, how do you, or somebody inside a DeFi exchange now? How does, how do you actually think, how do I figure all that out?

• 1:14:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And what they're trying to do is they're trying to understand, okay, we reached at the very top of the funnel. Somebody somewhere saw something about us and that was a million people. How many of those million people then went to the like, uh, website? Then how many of the website clicked the button and then how many people bought? And can we then start to tweak? Well, if a million people saw it and only 40% came through, can we get it to 50%, 60%? Actually move the metrics.

• 1:14:21Speaker 04

  Right. So those are the high level analytics. So that and then so there's a lot going. And then there's like a compute step, which is like, who do we give credit for the for the conversion? And I had like, in my pitch deck, I had like a joke, apocryphal quote, actually, from Stalin that said, you know, who votes in an election doesn't matter. Who counts the votes matters, right? And in attribution, it's also true.

• 1:14:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Dangerous in today's day and age.

• 1:14:41Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, you know, who clicks or where kind of doesn't matter. Who counts the clicks is what matters, right? So I always cite the example. I also had this slide in the deck, by the way, and Jason Calacanis, who we all know and love, not really. But no, we do. We do love him despite his many personality flaws.

• 1:14:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I love you, Jason. You can come on anytime. And you and Antonio, I'll gladly sit here and just shut up and let you guys talk.

• 1:15:05Speaker 04

  He's gonna come and give you a hug and then make a tweet at your expense, like I do with Palmer. But anyhow, in any case, I just just.

• 1:15:14Anthony Pompliano?

  I just, just, just know for a second that Jason, I know he's in pain because I've seen him tweet like multiple times now. I don't know if you've seen the All In Podcast, which is excellently done. They they continue just to crank out great content. But now there's been a couple of times where either Chamath or David Sacks has worn something on the show. So like a hat, or I think one of them had like a sweater. And these are like high end brands. And because the All In Podcast audience is insane, they go and they start buying that thing. And they're like selling out, like literally, there's like some random elite sweater that like is sold out.

• 1:15:50Speaker 04

  You're telling me David Sacks is wearing like a Louis Vuitton baseball cap with the symbols and shit on it?

• 1:15:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Like something like that. I forget what the brand was. And like the hat sold out, no one could find it. And so of course, like somebody goes and they screenshot it. And they're like, hey, you know, all in folks, you guys are like, you know, driving all these sales. And she's just like, are you kidding me? We created this podcast and now we can't monetize it. But yet we're like driving sales to all this other shit. And so he is in pain right now, even though they are having the success of the podcast, the fact that they won't let him monetize it is him excruciatingly sitting there saying like, this is a missed opportunity.

• 1:16:21Speaker 04

  I mean, that's such a weird thing. I have actually spoken at the All In Summit. Actually, I debated Ben Greenwald and Ukraine at their thing. What an odd bunch of characters.

• 1:16:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. I listen every week and I think that it is exactly the thing that was missing for a lot of people is like, they're like, okay, like, what are like, some of the people who are not media people talking about? And most of the time, people have tried to create that, like, there's no trust. So then, nobody who says anything interesting, these guys are just like teeing off on each other, which I think makes it work.

• 1:16:49Speaker 04

  It's super amusing, but if you got locked in an elevator with those four, you'd like kill yourself. After enough time. All right, attribution. Getting back to attribution. Sorry. I don't know how to fucking see. Look, this is Jason laughing. So like, he's just, he's completely derailed your podcast.

• 1:17:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you know what he's doing. He's counting this as top of funnel marketing.

• 1:17:04Speaker 04

  Top of funnel marketing. So getting back to marketing. Right. Getting back to marketing. So I actually cited this example in the pitch deck. I, in Nevada, I go mountain biking, my little e-bike, you know, I got convinced to buy one of these e-bike things, they're super cool, by the way. I'm part of the e-bike revolution. I think e-bikes are amazing.

• 1:17:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Is e-biking, do you pedal at all?

• 1:17:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, you do. But it's like a boost. So if you're like, not in the most amazing shape, like I'm not, and you're going up and down hills, it makes it like, super fun.

• 1:17:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 1:17:28Speaker 04

  And where I am is super hill, like, I basically, you couldn't mountain bike this unless you're in exceptional shape.

• 1:17:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 1:17:33Speaker 04

  And so this makes it such that someone who's not in exceptional shape can actually do it. And it's kind of fun and cool. And it's like, it's a cool gizmo. And anyhow. So I just posted a photo of it. And like, oh, cool. Like, from where I ride or whatever. And then J Cal pipes in, oh, that's cool. What is that, man? Tell me. And someone like, tells him the model name with like, a review. Fuck it. He goes and buys it. If you go to Jason's like, page now, he mountain bikes, he has my exact same bike, Specialized Turbo Levo, whatever, which is a great bike. And if you ask, okay, do the attribution problem, who takes credit? Like, these things cost like, by the way, like, I bought the entry level, which is like, six or seven K. They go up to like, 20, 25 K, these damn things. So who knows what model he bought? So who gets credit for like, the several thousand dollar bike? Is it me, using presumably my influencer audience? Is it Twitter? No,

• 1:18:15Speaker 04

  no. Almost certainly, it's Google. Because I'm sure Jason, you know, didn't go to Specialized.com. He just like, Specialized Turbo Levo. And then, you know, Google acts navigationally. But it takes, if there was an attribution system, they're run by Google, of course, they would take full credit for that attribution, even though causally, they didn't actually add that much to the thing. And so that's the magic of attribution. You determine what is the ground truth. Ideally, that ground truth, and this is the brave new world of Web 3, would be a little bit more tied to like real causality in the world. Because where we've arrived in Web 2 with a lot of this funnel stuff, it's very sophisticated, a lot of it. A lot of it is also very mythological, right? A seven-day attribution window for app installs. Why seven days? You're telling me if I go seven days and an hour later, it's not causally related, but six days and 23 it is?

• 1:19:00Speaker 04

  You know, it's kind of like a made-up thing. That's not really how it should work, right? And so at this point, it's like congealed into a system. The way that Web 2 works, and it's this machine, right? You target people with a message to some level of accuracy. They come in, you learn new things because they buy things. You re-target them, and there's this whole flywheel, right? And if you can figure out how to get your LTVs above your CAC, i.e. your lifetime value above your customer acquisition costs, to use the terms of art, then you've got a positive fraction and you're gold. Then you've got some ROI target, and if you can't, and you run out of money, you lose. And that is basically, that is the core.

• 1:19:33Anthony Pompliano?

  That is literally how like half or more of the technology she works is like, give me money, I light it on fire, but if I get more back, and then it's like a thing that I spend a dollar to get to, I'll do that all day long and just light more and more money on fire. But if on the outside chance that I light the money on fire and none comes back, then I'm fucked.

• 1:19:50Speaker 04

  Right, right, right.

• 1:19:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, that's literally the game.

• 1:19:53Speaker 04

  Right. What you have to create in marketing and in ad tech is a machine where I put in a dollar and I get out a buck 30. And if that's true, then I'll be doing this all day. And if it isn't, it's just like, oh, nothing came out. It's just gone, and that's it, I'm out of money now, right? Like, that is how all of Web 2, most of it works.

• 1:20:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And to be clear, one of the reasons why so many investors have gone and bought Amazon, Google, Facebook stock, et cetera, is because who are you putting the money into the machine? It's usually Facebook, Amazon, Google. And they're sitting there saying like, maybe you get a dollar 30 or maybe you get zero, but like, we're just the machine. And like, it's somewhat on you to be able to figure out how to use our machine correctly to get the revenue.

• 1:20:29Speaker 04

  And there's this whole stack of technology that sits on top of these players that makes sure, tries to make sure that you get a buck 30 out of the machine instead of 80 cents, right? And so... What's the problem here, right? That doesn't exist in crypto and web three, right? And like, if you want a billion real people actually using web three, the reality is, A, you're gonna have to like drink the web two user milkshake, right? And basically take users from web two, like web two and web three, there's never gonna be like a flip over moment, obviously, they're gonna coexist for years from now. And in fact, a lot of, I suspect in the future, a lot of people will be using crypto not even realizing it.

• 1:21:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:21:02Speaker 04

  It's like, oh, I have some cool new experience. You know, I don't know how it magically works that like the same shit I bought on this game works on that game, but somehow I actually own it and it just works.

• 1:21:10Anthony Pompliano?

  I always ask you, I say, uh, explain to me Google's tech stack. Like, what? I'm like, yeah. And they're like, what protocol does it run on? And they have no clue. And it's like, that's where we have to get to.

• 1:21:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:21:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And I actually even think with Bitcoin to some degree, like there's a number ones strike and these other companies have popped up. And it's like, uh, can I send you dollars across the Bitcoin network? Like, you don't know if you're using Visa or Mastercard. Well, Visa, Mastercard, Bitcoin, like, who cares? And so getting there is gonna be pretty important for a lot of these technologies.

• 1:21:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, again, I understand, you know, tribalism and geekery is what it is, but like all this chain love and the tribalism of like Solana versus Ethereum. It's like, dude, it's like caring about, um, you know, whether your favorite tech company uses like Amazon or Google virtual servers. Like, who gives a shit? You don't care and you shouldn't care, right?

• 1:21:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Only the salespeople at those two companies care because they're gonna get attribution of the sale and they can get paid.

• 1:21:56Speaker 04

  Right, right, right. And so, yeah, the idea here is how do we create that system for a blockchain world, which is very different. Like web three, in my opinion, again, I just got to this party, so to speak, but is like the inverse of web two in all sorts of interesting ways.

• 1:22:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:22:10Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, getting to this funnel business, right? In web two, when you, when you build these systems, and I've built these systems buy side, sell side, at every level of sophistication and scale, from tiny Y C startup to Facebook, right? A lot of the complexity, the ad ranking, the serving, the optimization, the track, all that shit is happening top of funnel, like at the Facebook level. And the downstream attribution, like the event, like, oh, you bought a thing. You bought a hundred dollar thing. Okay, great. But that's like, I mean, it's important, but it's not that interesting to model. Like, it's literally an event fired from like your Facebook app to S D K to Facebook saying, they bought thing one, two, three, four, and it costs five dollars. Like, that's it, right? Web, web three, and again, like, I swear. I know we're like one of the few companies doing it, so and we're just figuring it out. A lot more the complexity is down funnel, right?

• 1:22:54Speaker 04

  Like modeling Uniswap's ARPU. It's kind of hard, right? It's like, oh, there's this 0.3% swap rate, but then 0.5% is in this governor's token that they give back, which by the way, whose value is fluctuating like more wildly than the fucking NASDAQ. You know, what is the ARPU? What was the acquisition cost? What is their total monetization, right? These aren't easy questions to answer, right? And while the upstream side of things, to the extent there even is any, it's like, well, these wallet got the uni drop. Like, that's it.

• 1:23:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of the things, speaking of like recreating the world, right? That we were talking about earlier is YieldFarmy was massive and has tapered off a little bit, but still exists. And for those that don't know, or kind of the elementary explanation was basically like somebody be like, hey, cool. I'm going to create a coin and that coin is associated with a protocol and that protocol has some amazing dream of doing ABCD, whatever. But I have a problem. I wrote the code. I have the protocol, usually it's just a fork or something, or taking some open source code and just copying it. But nobody knows I exist. How do I get people to come use it? And so what a bunch of the people did is like, well, let's create coins. Okay, we got a bunch of coins. What do we do to coins? Well, let's take a portion of those coins and we'll give them to people if they come and they use it. And it's like, okay, so the users are sitting there saying like, wait, there's free money.

• 1:24:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And so they show up and they're like, cool, what do you want me to do? And there's always some crazy thing like, well, buy some of our coins and then like stake them, say you won't spend them. And then you'll like earn a thousand percent APY. But there's only so many coins available for people to do this. And so the more people who join, the lower the return gets. And so naturally what occurred is, well, guess who was coming first? It's like the mercenaries, not the missionaries. They don't give a shit about your product. They just want the return. It gets commoditized down to some level and then they just move on to the next one. Now, a huge piece of that is these projects were essentially doing this, which is like, that is a customer acquisition cost that they don't know.

• 1:24:43Speaker 04

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:24:43Anthony Pompliano?

  They have no clue where those people came from and they have no clue how to remarket to them. Like all the problems you're talking about. And there was, I'm going to put in big, big air quotes, billions of dollars here because they sometimes usually, almost always were like invented dollars, coins, whatever. But still, it's a big business, whether people think it's sustainable or not, and there was no data around it.

• 1:25:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, it's right. When I first started looking at youth farming, it's like I couldn't get my head around. It's like, wait, no, no, I understand it. There's just very little to understand. Right. Like, if you've got a diagram in which you're not either creating value, or there's an exogenous arrow called money coming in this way, then you're kind of in some sort of weird Ponzi-like environment. And but

• 1:25:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, it's wild, right?

• 1:25:24Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:25:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And again, like, put aside for a second, uh, is it a Ponzi? Is it not? Whatever. But just like, if you were an investor, like, let's say you're a crypto VC that's like investing in these things. What do they put in the investor update? Right? Like, like, there's no, there's no measurement. There's no data. Like, it has to just be about Well, no, but it's like super elementary stuff. Like, here's how many people are staking. Right? And it's like so surface level.

• 1:25:50Speaker 04

  It's an engagement. It's like, it's like DAU is sort of, I mean, yeah. It's weird, right? Like, you're basically firing money out of a cannon and hopefully, like, hoping somebody picks up the $10 bill and like walks in the store. Right? And of course, almost everyone just walk, doesn't even walk in the store, but it's basically kind of free money. So you don't care. Right? Like, you know, when money is free, acquisition costs are zero, definitionally, and you just don't care. But then what happens when money stops being free? Right? And you have the crypto crash and suddenly

• 1:26:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So how do you guys think about like the attribution? I guess like, what is the overlap with kind of legacy world? Like, what are the things from that world that you think you can port over versus like, what are like new things you think you have to figure out?

• 1:26:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you're right to frame it in two different ways, right? So again, there's, there's the web two versus web three attribution problem. And then there's like the sort of endogenous web

• 1:26:30Anthony Pompliano?

  The native stuff.

• 1:26:31Speaker 04

  The native, right. So if you talk to a lot of web three companies, we've talked to lots of web three companies, a lot of them are actually doing conventional web two user acquisition buys. Like, they buy ads on Facebook and YouTube. And, you know, they're fairly untargeted. They're using a lot of the ad exchanges targeting. They come to the wallet sign in page, they sign in, and then that's it. Like, the trail goes cold. They don't actually join anything from, and for those who don't know, on the web two side, there's a whole, and again, it's all privacy, GDPR compliant, et cetera. But there's a whole tracking mechanism there through the click link and cookies and device fingerprinting. They're basically, if you click on a Facebook ad and arrive on a landing page, they know it's you and that you came from Facebook ad 1234.

• 1:27:06Anthony Pompliano?

  But it doesn't stop there. I think there's a key piece to it is like, let's say that I was running ads to a Shopify store.

• 1:27:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:27:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Then they know that, cool, you hit the homepage. You clicked on two products, you didn't buy those, you went to a third product page, and then you converted. And then they realized like, okay, everyone who clicks on those two product pages and then converts, we probably should go show those two product pages at the front of the website to get higher conversion rate.

• 1:27:26Speaker 04

  And the way that works is those events that were down from the landing page, whether they were in in-app or on a web experience, they were firing SDK events, and SDK is just like a tracking package, basically, back to Facebook saying, this user, in an anonymous way, did this thing. And so Facebook can actually join all those things together. When I was at Facebook, I mean, probably when you were at Facebook, a little bit later. So when I was at Facebook, most of the time, there was no attribution system. You clicked away from Facebook, and Facebook had no idea what the hell was going on. In fact, some of the products they built were the first time that you could actually see outside of Facebook. And that's when Facebook ads started getting good, because you could actually detect that. The problem is that Web 3 right now is stuck in like Facebook circa 2012 land, in which there's like this basically great wall between the Web 2 data trail and the Web 3 data trail. And it's really odd, because downstream on the blockchain, there's all sorts of data being written, right?

• 1:28:09Speaker 04

  A lot of this gets into the whole privacy angle, which is a whole other conversation we can have, which is that Web 3 is weird in that everything that actually happens is in a public ledger. Hard to query, because, I mean, the blockchain is fascinating for many things. It's a terrible user data store. It's horrible. So you have to do a lot of repivoting and querying of data to actually get at it. But everything is stored, but of course, everything is anonymous, and everything upstream of the blockchain is completely unknown. So, you know, one of the first things we're going to work on is actually joining those two things.

• 1:28:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:33Speaker 04

  And it's not that hard to do. It's non-trivial. But you're going to have to have, if Web 3 is going to succeed, and again, have a billion real people on it, it's going to have to get into the sort of iterative flywheel of targeting people on Web 2. They come in, they convert on-chain, things happen, you learn new things, you retarget them on Web 2, they come back in, like, you need that cycle. Without that cycle, Web 3 is not going to succeed.

• 1:28:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So the whole idea here, in the most primitive sense, is get people into this new world. Understand who they are, either retarget them, or people who look like them, Facebook Lookalikes audiences.

• 1:29:05Speaker 04

  That'd be amazing. Imagine Lookalikes in the blockchain, right?

• 1:29:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I mean, people, until you understand how the ad systems work, I don't think people quite realize, like, Facebook Lookalikes audiences is a great example. You can take a email list, and you can feed it into Facebook, and you can say to Facebook, Do you know who the people who use these email addresses are on Facebook? And there's a whole bunch of reasons how they may know or what their Facebook profiles are or whatever. And they say, cool, we have put 100,000 emails in. We've now identified 30,000 of the users. Those 30,000 people, can you go through and strip all the similarities? So, uh, mail, location, income, job, high school, all this stuff. Cool. Now can you find a bunch of other people that look like those people on the internet based on those priorities?

• 1:29:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And you come up with, you started with an email list. Now you come up with a whole different set of people that you can go target that likely are similar to those folks. And you go do that. There's none of that going on here.

• 1:30:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:01Anthony Pompliano?

  But in some ways, there's more data.

• 1:30:02Speaker 04

  Right. And just to stress your point even more, lookalikes are probably one of the most underreported, underrated, but most successful Facebook ads products ever. I didn't work on it when I was there, but I remember the guy who first pitched it. And at first I'm like, oh, I know, sounds kind of cool. It could work. It works amazingly well because one of the biggest pain points in Web 3 isn't there yet, but it will get there. Is that if you talk to Web 2, if you go to the QBR business meeting as the PM and you go talk to the big retailer who gets the PM FaceTime, they're like, we're smart. We have an in-house marketing team. We know how to reach all of our audience at whatever the actual match rate is at every outlet, including you, Google, everybody else. I've got this million, this set of million golden whales. Find me another million just like them. That's the one thing you can uniquely solve. And if you ask the questions like, oh, how is Facebook monetizing my data? They're not fucking listening to your phone.

• 1:30:47Speaker 04

  They don't give a shit about what you wrote to your girl. They don't give any of that fucking shit, right? It's just ridiculous. They don't give a fuck about any of that shit.

• 1:30:52Anthony Pompliano?

  You got cash, though? They're interested in you buying.

• 1:30:55Speaker 04

  What they care about is like, you're the guy who just, you're like the guy who just dropped $400 on an REI tent and you guys chat all the time, you know each other. That's important, right? Then you can be a foreign part of look, or it turns out your politics are very like similar to somebody else's or whatever the case might be. That's where your Facebook data actually gets used in terms of the similarity metric between users. And so, yeah, at some point in the blockchain, hopefully sooner than later.

• 1:31:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So you think that that will definitely be a thing that happens?

• 1:31:18Speaker 04

  Lookalike audience with a similarity metric among wallets in, I'm shocked if there isn't somebody working on it. We're probably going to end up working on it at some point, yeah.

• 1:31:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And so let's just go through a very elementary example here, right? So let's say that person A has a wallet. They've got certain types of NFTs in there. They've done certain on-chain. Activities and maybe they have a bunch of Bitcoin and other assets, whatever. You can basically go look at that and then almost score it to some degree and then compare it to other wallets. And then find, okay, what other wallet has the same NFT, same kind of balance between certain types of assets and has certain activity trail. And then, okay, these two wallets are different people, we believe, but they actually are very similar. And so if this person did something with you, maybe this person's interested.

• 1:31:58Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:31:58Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you then go and find who that person is or communicate or market to them?

• 1:32:02Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, if you're using the web three tools, a few that exist, it's like, oh, let's hit them on an NFT or a token rep. Which again, like, I know a lot of people.

• 1:32:08Anthony Pompliano?

  You just airdrop them some shit.

• 1:32:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, airdrop, like, which, it's funny, I talk about ads in web three, people get shocked. It's like, dude, you've already got ads in web three, like, an NFT is an ad. Like, if you define an ad as a piece of paid media that prompts a user action, which includes lots of things, we already have ads in web three. And so like, in web three, that's the only targeting mechanism you have due to this weirdness that you can send things to random wallets. But again, if you were to join web two with web three, you could hit them on web two as well, right? I mean, I'm curious how creepy people would find this. Here's a, we're gonna float the idea. You buy a thing on chain and you get retargeted for that inside your Instagram feed, right? Imagine that, which happens commonly in web two as it is, right? Instagram ads have sky high click through rates because the ads are actually really well targeted. Imagine doing that with blockchain data, right? That, that would change the game.

• 1:32:49Speaker 04

  And which, and again, it would be good for new user acquisition, what's called prospecting, like new users coming into user thing and also re-engagement. One of the biggest problems you have is like someone comes in, uses the app, they get bored, they churn out, right? Like, the end of the funnel is usually a terminus, like they churned out and they're gone. You've got to re-engage them, you know, they like your product to a certain degree. Maybe you have to hit them with a different offer, maybe they just forgot and they have a new device and they didn't download your app. You have to re-hit them, right? Like, again, this is just like the bread and butter of how web two growth works and web three has very, very little of it right now.

• 1:33:16Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think are the downsides or the risks here? Like, is it just, is everyone's wallet, they're just gonna get fucking spammed with a million airdrops and like?

• 1:33:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, but then they'll be, yeah, but there'll be a tool that basically scrubs all that shit from your wallet automatically and you'll be fine with it, right? Like, that, that's just the arms race of how these things go. I mean, I think privacy is interesting, so privacy is one thing we thought about. I've actually, I did a Substack post about it. That's another place where like web two and web three are totally inverted, right? In web two, it's mostly the real, unless you're like in a non-account, it's the real you online, but then what you do financially and. commercially, everything else is kind of private and it's actually heavily regulated. Web three, it's the opposite, right? Everything you do is public, which is odd, but the real you is at least pseudonymous, right? You know, if Amazon went and published on a public ledger, everything you bought there, you would have a fucking meltdown, right? And yet somehow by default, that's how web three works and everybody is cool with that. Weirdos! It's like, what?

• 1:34:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And I've always thought that does Amazon have like a weirdo score, right? Like, like just sure, if you buy groceries, if you buy, you know, books, whatever, like you're, you're in one category. And then they're just like, oh, these people, listen, look what they're fucking buying.

• 1:34:17Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm sure they, I'm sure they had them, but they renamed it in the same way that Facebook used to have the stalker coefficient, which was a simulator. And now that you guys like, no, no, no, it's just coefficient. It's not stalker coefficient. How many times someone looked at your page?

• 1:34:29Speaker 04

  So yeah, I mean, it's, it's weird. How do you merge those worlds, right? And if you look at, to get wonky for a second, if you look at things like GDPR and CBA and privacy regulation, there's, I mean, it's, it's very difficult to comply with that. And how, and the blockchain just basically flies in the face of GDPR. So how do you actually reconcile those two worlds as you will?

• 1:34:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that a risk? Is that a risk for some of these networks where GDPR is weaponized to basically call the bluff on like, are you decentralized?

• 1:34:53Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and dude, I, people will like doubt it, but I will be saying, I told you so in five years. Like crypto and privacy are like these two trains that are headed on the same track towards each other. And the only question is how far apart they are before they collide.

• 1:35:08Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:35:53Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:36:03Speaker 04

  I've thought about this a lot from the Bitcoin perspective of like it again, let's hold the assumption, which I think 99.9% of people agree Bitcoin is decentralized. All of these things that are like, oh, you can't do that, or this is the rules or this or whatever. Like, at the end of the day, it's just a decentralized thing that there is nobody who runs it. And like the fact that the founder is unknown, walked away, and there's you have a decentralized network, like kind of checks the boxes. A lot of question marks on everything else. And I think that GDPR, like I hadn't thought about that being one of the things that kind of sniffs out, like what is actually decentralized and what isn't? Yeah, because at a high level, GDPR is surprisingly readable. You can just go read the thing, although it's very vague. There are two key points to GDPR. One is who owns the data, right? And like basically who takes the liability bullet? Who gets dragged to Brussels when you fucked up, basically?

• 1:36:47Speaker 04

  And there's two positions. There's a controller and a processor, and there's different terminology in CCPA, but it's the same thing. It's basically first party and third party. So if, you know, if, again, I don't know why I keep on citing REI, but if you're REI and you buy there, they have a first party relationship with you. If I'm their attribution system or Google Analytics, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a processor, not a controller. And so the rules are slightly different. You can't get away with murder just because you're the processor, but it's a little bit different. You want to be a processor rather than a controller by and large. And then there's also the sort of deletion immutability side of it. And there's a bunch there, but basically at the end of the day, if you want your data gone, modular some restrictions and there are some restrictions, you can have it go away, right? So does that mean that every single blockchain is violating GDPR? Oh, a lot of them probably are, yeah. Well, just every single one of them probably. If you can't delete your data.

• 1:37:27Speaker 04

  If, well, if personal data is on the chain to begin with, like the, so step one is don't put personal data on the, on the chain, right? And so what does it mean to delete? Could it be the case that you encrypt it and burn the private key? Is that deleting? Could be. From my reading on it, in the, in some jurisdictions, that would count as deleting and some it wouldn't. The problem with GDPR is that it's A, it's worded very vaguely. And so it's basically left. I'm sure that wasn't intentional. I'm sure that wasn't intentional. And then it has to be decided by legal precedent. And there's very little, there's no precedent, almost no precedent in the case of blockchain. But yeah, if you've got personal data on the blockchain, you're basically in violation. And then not only that, there's restrictions around moving data, you know, overseas, obviously. And if it is decentralized, you've got these nodes all over the place. And this is not even going into content moderation, things like. See Sam, I eat kiddie porn, you know, violent material.

• 1:38:11Speaker 04

  The news came out that ISIS put an NFT on, I forget which chain, I think it was Ethereum. And there's no way to get rid of it now. Oh, no, no, it was IPFS, I think.

• 1:38:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Wait, what did they do? I didn't see this.

• 1:38:21Speaker 04

  Wall Street, I have no direct experience, it was just the Wall Street Journal thing that I read. But apparently ISIS put some sort of recruitment NFT, whatever that means, on, I think it was IPFS.

• 1:38:31Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, I'm scared to even think about this, but like, what have they got, like a fucking image of like?

• 1:38:35Speaker 04

  Dude, no, it gets worse. So I was talking, I was in a debate with Alex Stamos, who's the head of the Stanford Internet Observatory, former head of security at our former employer. And I kind of floated the thought, I was like, yeah, what if someone puts like child sexual abuse material, which is obviously horrible, on chain? What would you do? And he's like, oh no, it's already happened. And I forget, I don't know, I didn't check his references, but he's a pretty informed guy. So I'm sure he wasn't talking out of his ass. Someone apparently has put like horrible stuff on chain.

• 1:39:00Anthony Pompliano?

  So there was a story, I think it was the, on Ethereum. Hopefully I get these details right. There was a woman who was involved in some sort of sexual assault or sexual harassment case in China, or it was the woman's friend, I can't remember which one, but somebody that had understanding of the details. And it was basically getting kind of quieted, wasn't a lot of coverage of it, whatever. They took the details, they put it on the blockchain as like an immutable ledger. And so like, you know, censor me now, type, kind of calling the bluff. When I saw that, I was shocked that we hadn't seen that over and over and over again since. And I'm sure there's been some cases, but people just don't talk about it or whatever. But yeah, you can extend this to like way more extreme things than just like, hey, I have words

• 1:39:43Anthony Pompliano?

  that nobody wants to get out.

• 1:39:47Speaker 04

  And if you're earning a node, that material's on your machine, right? Think about that.

• 1:39:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And so like, yeah, like what happens then? You're not a lawyer, neither am I. Neither one of us slept at Hampton Inn. But like, I assume if you are a politician or in law enforcement and you want to make a dent, you probably go towards the nodes, right?

• 1:40:09Speaker 04

  I guess so, but how do you track them down?

• 1:40:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of complexity.

• 1:40:13Speaker 04

  150 jurisdictions are in, yeah.

• 1:40:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, right? So like decentralization again becomes really fucking important here. And I guess it also begs the question of like GDPR, I think a lot of people are like, oh, this is annoying. I have to collect, you know, hit, accept all cookies every single time I go to a website in Europe or whatever. But at the same time, like GDPR is probably like the watered down version of like some of this other stuff. And so could they then start to shut down all these blockchains or a lot of them? Because you only need one violation for the entire thing to be kind of out of step?

• 1:40:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I'm a little bit in the policy world through the Lincoln Network, which is this DC thing.

• 1:40:44Anthony Pompliano?

  What is Lincoln Network?

• 1:40:45Speaker 04

  It's Lincoln Network, which by the way is not the Lincoln Project, just to get that out of the way. It's a completely different organization, just to be clear. Unrelated, unrelated organizations. Let's just get that straight.

• 1:40:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm assuming there's been some accusations, given the need to clarify.

• 1:40:58Speaker 04

  When someone mistakes the two, I see the director's soul kind of shrivel and die every single time. So it's basically a think tank, nonpartisan, although obviously pro-business, pro-tech, that tries to bring together like actual tech practitioners with policy in DC.

• 1:41:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 1:41:14Speaker 04

  Which is like this yawning lacuna that exists that should be reconciled. And so, yeah, I help them out because, you know, I think, look, DC is going to exist. Regulation is going to come in some form or another. At this point, you know, GDPR is real and so better to inform it rather than have it off in la la land. And so, you know, it's weird that like they're still fighting the Facebook fight to like the shit we worked on 10 years ago, right? Becomes like the media thing five years after and then becomes a DC thing like 10 years. So they're still fighting over the shit that we built, put it that way. And so they're not going to fight about the thing we're building now for another 10 years or maybe five years. So we've got some time, okay? But at some point, yes, they will, they will catch up and but.

• 1:41:55Anthony Pompliano?

  What's fascinating about the conversation though is it seems like the crazy thing, like no, they'll never weaponize GDPR to go after like centralized blockchains, but like, fuck yes, they are like that. Like that's a layup.

• 1:42:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:07Anthony Pompliano?

  If you don't like a certain industry or a certain piece of technology, all you have to do is literally find one instance.

• 1:42:13Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:42:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And what also is unique here is that in order to figure out, did Facebook do something wrong, right? Whatever wrong ends up. Being like you essentially have to either have a whistleblower. You have to have somebody who like shows up and is like, I was a Facebook user, this, this, this, and this, whatever. Like, here's the information, or you have to somehow subpoena the information from Facebook. Like, it's not like, oh, let me just go on my computer, do a Block Explorer and start, you know, screwing around and then finding something. And then, you know, there you go. And obviously, this is why law enforcement likes people transacting on an open ledger that they can fucking look at. But yeah, it feels like this is like such a no brainer that of course they're going to weaponize this stuff.

• 1:42:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, again, I don't know how much to overstress it. GDPR is real. When you develop product these days, you know, back in the day at Facebook, they thought about it. There was Privacy Council, but it was kind of like the last check mark before you shipped, right? Now, like you

• 1:42:59Anthony Pompliano?

  You didn't want to do something egregious

• 1:43:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:43:01Anthony Pompliano?

  That was obviously in, not in the interest of the user.

• 1:43:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:43:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Now it seems like people are designing products with privacy at the heart of it.

• 1:43:09Speaker 04

  On day one, you don't want to build yourself into a corner where like, oh shit, now we can't comply, we can't ship. It's like building a thing that won't run. And so it's like, I cannot stress enough to web three people, privacy is real. It will come to your house at some point soon. You have to take it seriously. You're not going to just talk around it. It's like, it's like, you know, you've seen, I'm sure you've seen like the X K C D cartoon around like the wrench thing where it's like how crypto people think it works. Oh, it's like in crypto, it's like, no, no, no, here's this little $5 wrench, just hit the guy until he gives you your password. Guess what? You're dealing with people with the wrenches and the guns and the jails and all the rest of it. Crypto can only shield you to a certain extent. So, yeah, I mean, I, yeah, that, that's going to happen at some point.

• 1:43:46Anthony Pompliano?

  What else do you think is a threat or in the privacy areas? Like GDPR with like just the blockchain being open and candidly data, all that is one piece of it. Are there other privacy things that you guys are thinking about?

• 1:43:56Speaker 04

  No, I mean, I, there's a whole DeFi KYC side of things, right? Like, which I'm somewhat less familiar with in the privacy side.

• 1:44:03Speaker 04

  No, I don't, I don't see any deep existential risk. I mean, I do think there's going to, I mean, there obviously is some like organ rejection around like the culture of crypto and like unfettered freedom and movement. That just doesn't jibe with our current globalized world, but everyone knows that.

• 1:44:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I do find it absolutely hilarious that everyone is attacking the thing. And I spend all my time thinking about Bitcoin, but like. It is probably the most American ethos like based technology that we have of just like, you can do whatever you want to do and you don't even have to tell people who you are. Right? Like, like that to me just screams American ethos of like freedom.

• 1:44:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And yet, America seems to be one of the most cautiously abrasive. Like, they're not China.

• 1:44:47Speaker 04

  Well, I was gonna say, they're not China.

• 1:44:48Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but they definitely, the default is like, we don't like this thing.

• 1:44:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And now there's some education happening and there's some politicians who maybe, you know, are kind of on the pro side, but like, it would feel like if they understood it to, you know, the absolute minute details, they would be like, man, we should do everything we can to make this successful. Now, there's downside and potentially risk some of the benefits that they already enjoy, but like, it does feel very weird.

• 1:45:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, there's that viral thread from, who was it? Punk, I forget the number, actually. 6259, maybe?

• 1:45:17Anthony Pompliano?

  6159?

• 1:45:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe. Who said, you know?

• 1:45:20Anthony Pompliano?

  If I got it wrong, I was talking about somebody else.

• 1:45:22Speaker 04

  I'm sure we're gonna get pounded on it. That's it, we got canceled, we're done, because you forgot the number.

• 1:45:27Anthony Pompliano?

  But yeah, you're trying to remember IP addresses rather than human readable domains, like 121.69s.

• 1:45:32Speaker 04

  I still remember some of those, actually, back in the day.

• 1:45:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:45:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, because, you know, you had like EarthLink and you had your stable IP. You'd have to enter in the DNS table.

• 1:45:38Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like, you ever try to think about how many phone numbers that are in your phone book? Do you actually know by heart?

• 1:45:44Speaker 04

  Oh, God, none at this point. Zero. Like, zero.

• 1:45:47Anthony Pompliano?

  There are people who like, I absolutely should know them and I don't, and it's kind of scary, right?

• 1:45:50Speaker 04

  Right. If you're in jail, I'm like, call your wife. It's like, uh...

• 1:45:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Have my phone?

• 1:45:55Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:45:56Anthony Pompliano?

  I promise I won't go on the internet. I will not tweet. I just need the phone.

• 1:46:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, but getting back to his tweet thing, it's like, his point was like, you know, crypto is so American in so many ways. Like, if there is a crypto century, America should dominate, right? Because it's like the most American thing ever. And I agree, it's true, right? Like, I mean, yeah, China just will never accept a truly crypto reality. It's odd that... This is a free country, man. We should be able to say that more, right? Around crypto, but that's weird. This need for control. I don't get it.

• 1:46:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And how much of this is a misunderstanding or like lack of education versus like, no, they actually do understand? And I'll give you two examples. So like Brad Sherman, one of the politicians in California. He was one of the first ones to be like, we should ban Bitcoin and crypto, like, like, get rid of this stuff. It's a threat to the American dollar. And like, and he was just went like full extreme on the, on the other end. And then you have people, like you've got Warren Davidson, you've got Senator Lummis up in Wyoming. You've even seen mayors, you got Suarez, you got governors, like all these other people who are like, no, actually like we either want to embrace it. Or like, I'm agnostic. Like, I don't want to ban it, but like, I also don't, don't want to run headfirst. It feels like the Brad Shermans of the world are like, very well educated.

• 1:47:09Anthony Pompliano?

  It's not that he doesn't understand it. It's like almost that he understands it so well that he's trying to play chess like three, four, five steps ahead. And he sounds insane, right? And people are just like, that's stupid. You're just like an old man yelling and screaming.

• 1:47:21Anthony Pompliano?

  But it seems like everyone just gets labeled with like, oh, you don't understand. Congress doesn't understand. Politicians don't understand. But like, the more I listen to them talk, like more of them seem to understand than maybe they let on.

• 1:47:31Speaker 04

  Maybe so. Um, yeah, it's unfortunate. I haven't actually followed that politician's trajectory.

• 1:47:37Anthony Pompliano?

  He, his biggest donors are credit card companies. So a lot of people are.

• 1:47:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. I like the idea of actually politicians should dress up like NASCAR drivers with like all their donors as like little logos. So every time he goes in front of a cannon, he's got a little Visa logo, like he's a fucking point of sale system. That, that would be idea.

• 1:47:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think, you think they would change their actions?

• 1:47:54Speaker 04

  Oh, of course they would, because it would look so ridiculous, sitting there like shitting on crypto with like a Visa logo. Like he's a little square check out.

• 1:48:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I've always thought that they should have to take like a super elementary test before they go to these hearings. And like, remember the guy who was like, you need to shut down Finsta, like the fake Instagram? And they were like, sir, like, that's not a thing, whatever. Like, they should have to take like a five question, multiple choice question, uh, test. If you don't get four out of five right, like you're not allowed to question the people.

• 1:48:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Because you just literally don't have the basic understanding of like, what is Instagram?

• 1:48:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, one of the things I learned, so I have gone to DC, again, in the context of Lincoln Network and talked to some of these staff. I wouldn't name the staff, it doesn't matter. But, you know, people who, senators who make loud pronouncements about the internet. And you know, they're not as dumb as you might think. Great, to be honest, like a lot of their staff, so by the way, DC, so like the figurehead is whoever. But their staff are like 23, right? And just got out of American university and it's like their first job and they're a staffer. And they've been told to go figure out crypto.

• 1:48:46Speaker 04

  And then like Lincoln Network shows up with like, oh, here's Antonio who came from the industry, did, did, did, talk to him. And like, yeah, explain to us web three. Like, oh, okay, where do I start? And so like, they're not necessarily dumb and they're not necessarily anti. But yeah, I don't know, somehow between that 23 year old getting the memo and reading on the internet, whatever, and what comes out of the mouth of whoever, Josh Hawley or whatever, there's a lot of steps in there. And obviously that politician knows that, you know, he needs to sing for his supper, so to speak, to keep his job. I don't know. I think one of the other things that's happened in American life, I love zooming out to 30,000 feet. It's like, at some point in the 60s, we decided that we're no longer a frontier society.

• 1:49:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. What do you mean?

• 1:49:24Speaker 04

  Like, so there's this, there's this famous essay by, I forget his name, written in the early 20th century about the frontier in American life, right? The notion of there being some untrammeled frontier where a man and a woman, a family can go out and create their new reality and stake in you home. And like, we had the Homestead Act in Alaska until the 60s and 70s, where the government would literally give you land and say, as long as you live there for five years, it's yours, right? Like, United States had that many, right? I mean, think about that. When I was buying land up in Northwest, I was thinking of buying in Alaska. They don't have the Homestead Act anymore, but the state does basically raffle out like land, basically way cheaper than.

• 1:49:57Anthony Pompliano?

  In the 1870s, I'm reading a book right now, and basically as people pushed west, like, you just got to get it put into the land deed, right? That like, that's yours.

• 1:50:06Speaker 04

  That's yours.

• 1:50:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And, uh, yeah, that's how you got it.

• 1:50:08Speaker 04

  Right. I mean, the football team, the Oklahoma Sooners were the ones who got there soon, sooner, who like jumped the federal like date to actually claim land or whatever, because they were stake jumpers, as they're called. Anyhow, at some point in the 60s, after the Apollo program, we decided that's it. We're no longer a frontier society that pushes into the unknown. And everything's about control and safety and security. And I think those things have just gotten worse in time. And I think web three is an interesting new frontier. One of the things that draws me to it, makes me think of, I had a bit of a bust up with. Our friend Keith Raboy and Max Levchin, we could go over the differences between Web 2 and Web 3. And what did you say? What did I say? What did I say? I'm such an asshole. What did I say? I didn't try being an asshole, but I did say, it was a sentiment I actually honestly did feel,

• 1:50:54Speaker 04

  which is that Web, again, using Web 3, this kind of hazy term, just to refer to this thing, feels kind of like what Web 2 felt like 10 years ago, right? Like, when you were walking around South Park in Soma, which now is just empty, by the way, it's like, oh, there's the founders of like this weird Airbnb thing, and there's Uber, and then there's this part, like, there was this thrilling, bracing feeling of like, lots of weird shit is going on, right? Like, we're replacing every service, and like, it's part of what led to Chaos Monkeys, right? Where like these Chaos Monkeys that run around and completely rejigger everything. And there's this tremendous feeling of energy and enthusiasm and forward-looking. And, and there was a lot of, to be honest, and I wouldn't say religious jossity, but a lot of ideology around, like, things are worth disrupting for the sake of disrupting.

• 1:51:36Speaker 04

  And even if it isn't obviously clear why this is better now, it's still worth doing, right? And somehow, Web 2, for a bunch of reasons that I can speculate about, just no longer has that feeling. And it's like, well, a lot of it was like the anti-tech turn, I think, of media in 2016 with the Trump election, that there was this tech backlash, which I think is a lot, is very inventive. If you look at most polls, most Americans like the tech that they use. They don't actually hate Facebook. And certainly, if you look at Facebook's usage chart, they don't seem to hate it.

• 1:52:04Speaker 04

  Part of it was, I don't know, maybe something gets tapped out, right? Like, dude, how many services can you put on this phone? Like, how many things can I buy on this phone? Like, how many people can I make appear with shit on this phone? At some point, it's like, a new user flow, a new sign-in process, a new sharing button. Like, it's all the same shit. You need to refactor things. Like, to me, like, literally, I said this in the thread, even if Web 3 ends up being, and I suspect it will converge to that, like, yeah, it'll be an interesting new set of infrastructure, and like, a new way, like, it'll enable some new interesting use cases. But to be honest, it could end up being something somewhat similar to Web 2. But as long as we get rid of the fan companies, it'll be good, right? Like, because it's like, any company that starts now is literally like a little, a little, a little, you know, a little dwarf, a little miniature person, kind of jumping in between the legs of these elephants.

• 1:52:47Speaker 04

  And as moment, the moment you get any level of traction, you know, Apple's going to show up and expect it's 30% on the App Store. And by the way, you have to use its ad because they nuked attribution through its ATT thing, fucking it up for everybody else.

• 1:52:59Anthony Pompliano?

  All in the name of privacy.

• 1:53:00Speaker 04

  All the name of privacy.

• 1:53:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Probably one of the craziest business strategy moves that we've seen in a long time and it appears to be working and no one seems to be talking about it outside of like a very small group of people who pay attention to this.

• 1:53:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I'll say it again because I say it everywhere. It's like, dude, it's like, privacy is one of those things like secure. Like if you turn the knob that says privacy, on the other knob, on the other side of the knob, it says competition, right? And that like, there are no solutions in this world. There are only trade offs, right? There is no perfect privacy solution. You have to find a trade off. And if you can crank up the knob to 11, but that means there's only be two games in town, Google and Apple, and that's it. If we go for a max privacy world. So think about it if you want a max privacy world or not, because that's not going, I think it's not going to be a good world. But that, that's also one of the things, right? That we're in a max privacy world. Like, I had this conversation with the Stanford people, Renee and Alex last week at a Lincoln Network event. It's like, you realize this regime of like, content moderation, combating misinformation, privacy, all that does is like, super fucking raise the bar, such that only in

• 1:53:58Speaker 04

  the Googles and Facebooks can actually comply with it. Can you imagine starting on Instagram now?

• 1:54:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Impossible.

• 1:54:02Speaker 04

  And, and, and having to field a content moderation team with like, the expected standard of everyone feeling nice and cuddly and safe all day. It would be impossible. It would be impossible. There's no way to do it. Right?

• 1:54:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The, the other, I, I've always thought of this, or these are borrowed ideas. Bitcoin was started in a way where no one was paying attention for five, six years until like, crypto showed up, or you know, whatever you want to think about it. Now, you could never recreate that. Like, there's too many people, there's literally venture capitalists running around the world, right? Trying to find the next thing, like whatever, like it just would be nearly impossible to do. Same thing with a lot of these companies, right? Is Instagram, nobody cared about content moderation for like, almost a decade, right? And then all of a sudden, it was like, hey, why is this person on here? Hey, what about this? What about this? And like, you see it now, like, we, I mean, this is crazy. We had a interview with Andrew Tate, in person, live, whole thing, it's up for a whole

• 1:54:56Anthony Pompliano?

  month, 1.4 million views or so on it. All of a sudden, we get an email, take it down by YouTube. Why? Misinformation. No other details, no anything. I see him saying the same thing on other channels, on other videos, like all this stuff. And all I could think to myself was like,

• 1:55:13Speaker 04

  Who gets to decide that?

• 1:55:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Right.

• 1:55:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, by the way, there's things that you and I probably were tweeting two years ago that like, people were like, that sounds crazy. And now they're like, duh. Right? Like, it's all changing. I don't know. It's just a weird world that we're moving towards.

• 1:55:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, misinformation is funny. You know, there's a crack about like, you know, people don't believe in God anymore, but there's certainly a lot of devils.

• 1:55:34Speaker 04

  And misinformation is like this catchall. It's like, oh, it's just, it's evil. It's just misinformation.

• 1:55:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, it sounds bad, right? Like, I don't want to share misinformation.

• 1:55:42Speaker 04

  I mean,

• 1:55:42Anthony Pompliano?

  you don't either. It's like, you ever seen the comedian, I think it's Chris Rock, I think does it. He's either Chris Rock or Cat Williams, can't remember. He talked about insurgents and war. He's like, the greatest marketing thing ever was to call them insurgents. Like, they were like, hey, we're gonna go kill the insurgents. Everyone's like, I'm not an insurgent. I don't know any insurgents. Like, kill them all, right? But if they're like, hey, we're gonna go kill humans, people are like, whoa, timeout. Who are they? What'd they do? Like, why are we gonna do this? Same thing with misinformation. Like, you just label it misinformation, and everyone just walks away and says, yeah, those people are bad. They spread misinformation.

• 1:56:09Speaker 04

  Misinformation. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:56:11Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about the censorship, how much of that is gonna come as well? Except for GDPR and the privacy, like, do you think that that?

• 1:56:17Speaker 04

  I mean, ideally, right? Like,

• 1:56:18Anthony Pompliano?

  will come?

• 1:56:19Speaker 04

  Isn't, wasn't it Chris Dixon who said, can't be evil is better than don't be evil? And that, you know, don't be evil was obviously Google's mantra for a long time. And obviously, I don't think they're living up to it now. And even they themselves would probably concede that.

• 1:56:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, they don't use that terminology.

• 1:56:31Speaker 04

  They don't even use, right, yeah, that's a good reason why they don't use it anymore. And so if you design systems that are kind of uncensorable, of course, like, uncensorable in reality is often not uncensorable in theory, to be honest. But, yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's, so another divide I've seen in society, I've talked to lots of people with weird ideas, and you hang out with weirdos long enough, you hear a lot of weird stuff. But it's interesting, one of the divisions that you see, like, I do think there's this notion in like, statistics and machine learning of like, latent variables. And what that means is, you've got a model that's got like, features A, B, and C. And then they're behaving in weird ways. But in fact, there's this latent variable that is actually the thing driving the phenomenon that are highly correlated and maybe actually lead to A and B. But you're looking at like, the wrong thing, right?

• 1:57:13Speaker 04

  Or you're looking at the, it's almost like being in Plato's cave. You're looking at the shadow of reality, you're not looking at the reality. So I think one of the sort of latent variables in society is, what is your orientation towards institutions? You're either an institutionalist, or you're like, an anti-institutionalist. And it doesn't necessarily mean against institutions in general. We're not in an anarchist book collective in Portland or whatever. It just means like, the current set of institutions, do you think there's a salvageable middle that, like, we have to preserve? Because you talk to a lot of people who, again, some of them have even like, chewed up and spit out by institutions. And you can tell like they still believe in them. They just wish they were running them.

• 1:57:47Speaker 04

  Which is different than saying, well, kind of burn it all down. Or actually, I have like a completely different institutional model that I actually want to realize.

• 1:57:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, this is my problem with like the hardcore, extreme anarchist view that just naturally shows up with some crypto, Bitcoin, whatever, is like, no, we want some sort of order. Again, we can have different order, we can agree on different rules, we can do like all these things and everything, but like, I don't think we want to go back to, again, go to like the 1800s, where like literally your defense system was essentially like, could you pull your gun faster than whoever showed up to your house in the middle of the night?

• 1:58:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:58:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, that doesn't seem like a world we want to live in. And then also, like, there's a number of different things that, especially local governments, do that make life easier. Again, you can argue, should they exist, should they not, whatever, but like, it does make life easier. But institutions are the kind of same thing. Like, it goes back to like the DAO thing. Like, okay, we're gonna have this thing, we're all gonna like work on something, but like, there's no organization, there's no anything. Like, what do you end up getting? Like, oh, we should get sub DAOs, we should get divisions of companies, whatever. And then you get also like Bill Gates, he's the pirate in the garage, but lives long enough, and now like, he is the man. Right? And everyone is like, this guy, you know, the evil billionaire, or whatever.

• 1:58:56Speaker 04

  But I think that's a common thing, by the way.

• 1:58:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Fifty years ago, he wasn't.

• 1:58:59Speaker 04

  Right, right. I think that's a common thing. It's funny, I, so we have job listings that are gonna go out, that hopefully will be live by the time this episode goes out. But one of the taglines is like, you know, come be a pirate now that Web 2 is the Navy, right? It's kind of a spin on the Steve Jobs line, right? Because, and again, getting back to my debate with Keith and Max Levchin and some of these, what I call Web 2 boomers, right? Where it's like, you used to, and I'm like their same age or even younger, or older, but it's like, dude, like, you used to be the crazy pirate in the garage, and now you're like, fat and happy and sitting on the top of like, the Web 2 pile, and you think you still are that rebel, but it's like, no, you're not. And it's like, what I wanted to ask him is like, think about the younger version of you, like, literally the 18-year-old

• 1:59:42Speaker 04

  version of you. Are they working at the companies that you're running now? Or are they working in a completely different ecosystem? Where, you know, the...

• 1:59:49Anthony Pompliano?

  But I do think that it's...

• 1:59:53Anthony Pompliano?

  It's split. So like, I, I, I agree with the sentiment. What I would say, though, is there, it's not just exclusively like Bitcoin crypto world is like where all of the quote unquote pirates are going. I think a lot of them are. I talked to, I guess it doesn't sound as weird with tech people, but like the average person, like I talked to a lot of 18 to 22 year olds, but like, yeah, they're super excited about this. But you know what else they're really excited about? Like the whole like American dynamism.

• 2:00:18Speaker 04

  Are they? Okay, cool.

• 2:00:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And they want to go work on defense stuff or space or like whatever. And like there's probably two or three other industries that we sat down and like, I really thought about like, hey, where are some of these people going? But they're not going to work at Facebook. They're not going to work at Google. They're not going to work at these places. And in some way, the people who are going to work there who are young are like, uh, the people who historically would have gone to IBM or wherever. It's just like now these new companies are like a little bit shinier, but it's same thing.

• 2:00:43Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:00:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I do wonder how many, like fintech is really interesting, right? Like fintech, not crypto stuff. Is that still seen as like cutting edge? Or are young people saying, I don't want to go work at another banking, you know, like legacy banking type thing. I don't care if it has a digital kind of skin around it. Or are they saying, no, like, fuck it, I'm gonna go do the crazy DeFi thing that like, you know, has a 1% chance of working?

• 2:01:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't, I mean, obviously I'm not in that age bracket, but I would speculate that they're probably not, they're not going. I mean, I don't think, I don't think the world's most aggressive, ambitious talent is going into fan companies. No, I said, that is not my vibe.

• 2:01:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. But I think most venture capitalists would agree with that.

• 2:01:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:01:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Why, why did they push back?

• 2:01:27Speaker 04

  Well, because, because Web 2 has become the man, right? Like, I often think of, um, John Perry Barlow, uh, one of the founders of EFF back in the day, um, back when it was EFF and not what it is today, um, wrote, uh, EFF has kind of gone the way of ACLU. It's like, wait, you used to defend all these crazy people in the name of free speech and now you're actually part of the man. And so like, anyhow, but back in the day, right, when EFF was the thing, he wrote this famous cyberspace manifesto that I think was very impactful. I mean, even earlier than me, but it was written in the 90s. Um, and, you know, he railed against these weary giants of flesh and steel, right? Of like the industrial world and that cyberspace and tech was going to be the antithesis of that. It's going to be the reaction against that. Like they're the Navy, we're the pirates and we're this new world. And the reality is

• 2:02:09Speaker 04

  that companies like Facebook and Google have become the weary giants of not necessarily flesh and steel, but whatever. Um, and they've, they've become part of that Borg. They're no longer the response to the Borg. They're part of it. And, you know.

• 2:02:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Will that happen at crypto?

• 2:02:22Speaker 04

  Ah, at some point.

• 2:02:23Anthony Pompliano?

  If it lives long enough.

• 2:02:24Speaker 04

  That's probably the natural life cycle of everything.

• 2:02:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:27Speaker 04

  But that's a long way. We're a long way to go from that.

• 2:02:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Thirty, forty years.

• 2:02:31Speaker 04

  Thirty, forty years. Yeah, probably a long way.

• 2:02:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I do think a lot about, um, in some ways, this specific industry has re-taught so much about economics, technology, but also just like, how did America become America? Really, you go back and you read and you're like, oh, wow.

• 2:02:47Speaker 04

  A tax revolt.

• 2:02:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, yeah, like, oh, shit, right? Like, wow, okay. And then like, oh, uh, I don't know, uh, the Federalist Papers. Like, you go and you like, read it and you're like,

• 2:02:56Speaker 04

  Published anonymously, they're all a non-account share posters. All the Finding Fathers were a non-accounts. They'd all get content moderated now.

• 2:03:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I wasn't gonna go down that rabbit hole, but like, again, it goes back to if you really-

• 2:03:06Speaker 04

  George III would have worked at Facebook.

• 2:03:07Anthony Pompliano?

  If you really start to look at a lot of American history, like, there are things that I think today's, uh, kind of pro-America, elite incumbent, uh, believes that is in direct violation of kind of the original ideals of, uh, what America, uh, was supposed to be. And I would argue still in many places is.

• 2:03:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:03:28Anthony Pompliano?

  But that bifurcation is wild because like, go read the documents, go do the work. It, it's just like, no, I tick this idea. Now I have a different idea of where we should go.

• 2:03:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know. I mean, there were radical ideas. Um, I read a piece for Wired in like 2017 that was like argued, you know, we're not, this change in model of journalism from like, fact-checked reportage coming from the New York Times, all the news that's fit to print, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, dude, the Finding Fathers didn't live like that at all. For starters.

• 2:03:54Anthony Pompliano?

  They all had newspapers.

• 2:03:54Speaker 04

  They all had newspapers. They're all pamphleteers. I forget if it was either John or Sam Adams, that he, he was actually at the Boston Tea Party, like literally throwing the teeth, and then he reported about it as if he wasn't there. He totally lied about it. And then he held the meeting for it in his office, in the printer's office, before it actually happened. He was completely engaged. There was no neutrality, there was no anything, right? He was like a total joke. Benjamin Franklin wrote on there, at least whatever it was, ten or fifteen different pen names. Um, they all attacked each other.

• 2:04:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I did read that recently. I actually didn't like, that is wild. That Ben Franklin literally had, like, it's kind of like having a message board and having a bunch of pseudonyms and then just talking to each other.

• 2:04:25Speaker 04

  Talking to each other, exactly.

• 2:04:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Until all of a sudden, like, oh shit, this is community. Which, by the way, a lot of crypto companies are doing as well. And, and, uh, also, if you kind of think about it, like, uh- There's nothing new. Like, this is all human nature shit. Like, how do you solve the cold start problem in, you know, 1850? Like, I don't know, just fucking just get out my feather and just start writing from different names and I see no people come show up.

• 2:04:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, but, you know, I think we're maybe a bolder people back then. We're willing to put up with just confronting. I don't know. It's hard to say. On the one hand, I think one of the bad things about social media is that you're constantly forced to defend, like, your basic moral foundations. Like, it's like, you go to Twitter and it's like getting kicked in the face, right? And it's like, I've gotten gotten used to it a little bit, and we probably both have, but it kind of sucks. Like, your average normal person would never do this, right? And like, at some point, it's like, you know, it's like running a company, right? If you have debates about foundational everything in a company, your company goes nowhere. Like, there's some things you have to say, look, these things are beyond debate. We're just not going to address these things anymore. That's it. We talk about these things, which is where we think the alpha is. And somehow, yeah, we've lost it as a society. It's weird, because on the one hand, they put up with an enormous amount of disagreement. Like, everyone thinks, oh, everyone just agreed on everything. But it's like, are you kidding? Absolutely not. I mean, literally, we had a sitting vice president-

• 2:05:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Fucking American Revolution.

• 2:05:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, well, Aaron Burr, literally, a sitting vice president shot a former secretary of the treasury and then just went back to work as if nothing had happened, right? He, like, laid low in Georgia fro, and they just went back and said, well, sorry, oops, I killed Alexander Madison, Hamilton, sorry. And it's, um, yeah. So, but, yeah.

• 2:05:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you feel like, uh, things like Substack and kind of like the rise of the individual, whatever, like, what is going to be the impact? Is it just like, no, we have coexistence, there's like, uh, kind of like college, everyone's like, oh, let's disrupt college, and it's like, dude, Harvard's not going anywhere, right? I don't care what you say, Harvard, Yale, MIT, whatever. And so, like, sure, you might disrupt, like, the, uh, third or second tier, you know, colleges. Same thing here with media, is like, you'll get the independent voices and you'll get the concentration of, like, two to four really big organizations, they survive, and everyone else is fucked?

• 2:06:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, when you, yeah, when I've had this debate about institutionalist versus anti-institutionalist, with institutionalists, they're like, okay, Mr. Anarchist, so what are you going to replace New York Times with, right? Like, I still need to know what's going on in the world. And it's a good point, right? Like, again, obviously, I'm on Substack, they've, they've done very well by me, like, I'm very pro the company, I know the founders, you know. That said, are they going to fill the hole of conventional media fully? Not necessarily?

• 2:06:43Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know if they want to, right?

• 2:06:44Speaker 04

  They probably don't want to.

• 2:06:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I've never specifically asked them that, but like, I, I get the sense that they're just like, no, we just want individual people to write, and, uh, there's a lot of value to that.

• 2:06:54Speaker 04

  I mean, look, the MSM does do some good, like occasionally you'll read a piece in the Atlantic and the New York Times, like, wow, that was actually pretty good. Like, I remember, like, the Afghanistan pullout, which was a total disaster, and when they, like, vaporized an entire family and killed a bunch of people, which no one had any accountability for, which was a complete disgrace. The New York Times actually did this amazing reporting, and like, okay, no, here's the shot, here's the thing, this is what happened. We interviewed the families, like, oh, this felt like an actual, like, on-the-ground report.

• 2:07:16Anthony Pompliano?

  It was like Clarissa Ward, the CNN journalist. She's on the ground, and she's surrounded by Taliban members, right? She's, like, reporting, and you could tell, you're like, yo, that's fucking dangerous, that shit, right? And I remember people just, like, taking pictures, being like, this woman is risking her life to tell this story right now. And like, I don't care what you think about that organization or whatever, you just gotta tip your hat and say, hey, that woman's doing work that is important and should be blasted out by everyone possible, because there's not very many people willing to go do that.

• 2:07:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, of course, the counterargument's like, well, you know, like, in Ukraine, they use Telegram a lot. Like, when I was in Ukraine, I was just, like, listening to, like, you see a lot of these videos come along, so you have the Clarissa Ward experience. You don't feel like it's this embodied voice telling you a coherent narrative. It's like this blurry video of some weird shit that happened in some random town. Yeah, but hard to say, hard to say, right? Because, yeah, I mean, if we return to that previous journalistic model of basically advocacy journalism, things are very different, right? The notion of there being some objective truth in a national narrative kind of goes away, and things get very fragmented. And again, to the extent that, like, your regional newspaper had a, like, I'm sure southern newspapers were very different. The northern newspapers, and like, the Miami Herald in the 80s was very different

• 2:08:28Speaker 04

  than the New York Times, the LA Times, but there was still a cohesion around it, and, like, your area of concern was relatively limited. And now that your area of concern is global, it's odd that we don't actually have a global reality, and we should discuss it. I think that's part of what you see when, like, red and blue, just to give them two broad labels for debating online, they're talking about different realities, right? And it's the clearest proof of that, and I think this started in, like, the Beto Cruz race. I don't know if it started, but at least I noticed it, is when, like, remember what, I forget which, it's funny, they blurred in my mind, I forget which was which, but, like, literally, one's, like, actual ad was the attack ad for the other side. Like, literally, it's like, our moral foundations are so different. What you consider to be, like, the sum and bonum, like, political good, is this person's absolute evil. And, like, literally, he just ran, like, the Beto ad, it's like, this is what Beto is. Like, that's my, my attack

• 2:09:12Speaker 04

  ad is his ad. That's how different we are. That seems untenable.

• 2:09:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I do, I do believe that American politics is on the precipice of absolute full plunge into like what I call meme warfare. So everything that we've seen so far has been like the extremes of kind of like a web two fiat world or whatever you want to call it. I think that Trump was the first to kind of break, he was selling the hats and he was, you know, saying all bombastic shit and the debates, he was more so an entertainer to some degree and like you could start to see it happening. But I think within the next two to three presidential elections, we're just going to see a level of in the trenches, internet native like warfare and like information kind

• 2:09:59Anthony Pompliano?

  of battle that will blow the 2015 versions of ourselves out of the water and be like, how is this happening? And part of what I think is fascinating about it is like, so like that is pretty simple. But I think a lot about like Coinbase ran that super kind of genius ad where they just had the QR code bouncing around. Like, what is the political equivalent of that? And like, somebody's going to figure out what it is and they're going to start doing that stuff. And then you're going to see all this stuff on Twitter. And what you realize in some ways, like now everyone's an actor, like everyone on the internet has something. When the politicians like figure out the game, we're going to want to get off the internet. Like, it's going to get to the point where we're just like, holy shit.

• 2:10:40Speaker 04

  You know, that's a deep, so a couple, a couple of reactions to that. One, to steel man it for a second, right? It might be a good thing that like, we're never going to have a civil war because a civil war is going to be on Twitter. And to be honest, we're all like too fat and happy and lazy to actually like run a mile on fire rifle anymore. Like Antietam is not happening ever again, right? And so it's going to be like, it's going to be like Twitter Antietam, which obviously has a lower body count. So maybe arguably, it's a good thing that we're creating this virtual reality, although it means that I think when reality does intrude in the form of pandemic or the Ukraine war, we just like can't rock, like we just don't understand it. And again, this

• 2:11:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Full on meltdown.

• 2:11:11Speaker 04

  Right, right. And again, I think it's real, like current thing theory is real and that there is like this pseudo event thing. On the other hand, if you think everything is a current thing, then reality becomes, but you know, I don't know if you know the thinker Bruno Masai, he's this Portuguese, he wrote an issue, I interviewed him on my podcast a couple of years ago. He wrote a book called, History Has Begun. And it's, it's, the thought is that the US has decided to wrap itself inside virtual meme warfare, basically what you're saying, and make reality kind of optional. But then, of course, when reality becomes non optional, the problems begin like with a pandemic or a war. So again, I suspect you're right.

• 2:11:44Speaker 04

  But yeah, the other thing I would say, I lost my train of thought. What was the other thing?

• 2:11:49Speaker 04

  Anyhow, but yeah, I agree with you that in some sense, that's gonna be the problem.

• 2:11:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the piece that I think is concerning about it is like, right now, all the politicians are like a gazillion years old and like they use flip phones and don't have email or like, well, you know, whatever, like we like to make fun of them. What happens when like the 30 year olds are rampant and they're now like 40 or 50 and they understand the internet really well? Because I actually think that a lot of times what we're seeing, so like I have this theory that like Trump and AOC are the same person.

• 2:12:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:12:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like they both understand the internet, they understand how to entertain, they understand how to get attention, all that stuff. And I had Mike Solana on and we were talking about the "arrest," I'll put that in air quotes, of the congresspeople. Did you see this?

• 2:12:33Speaker 04

  Oh, the business of, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And they like, they like had their hands behind their back, but they weren't arrested.

• 2:12:37Speaker 04

  Oh, I remembered. Okay, I remember what I was thinking. Sorry. But yeah, no, so, okay, sorry. So I get excited, as you can tell, case in the pump.

• 2:12:44Anthony Pompliano?

  That's why I'm excited to talk.

• 2:12:46Speaker 04

  There is this really overlooked and underrated book called Mediated by an anthropologist named Thomas, kind of a weird last name, De Zongatita is his last name. And it came out in like the early aughts, kind of ignored now. And he just talks about exactly what you just said, everyone being an act, the thought of being mediated is a weird thought. And we've all taken it as normal, but it's strange. And it's only when you pull yourself out of the matrix, again, to kind of repel yourself, that you sort of, that you sort of realize it. The example he cites, which is interesting, it's a couple of examples. One is, you notice that back in the day, nobody asked themselves the question, where were you when you heard about Pearl Harbor? Right? Because the notion of you almost in a phantom limbo way experiencing something at a distance

• 2:13:28Speaker 04

  and your personal experience of being a thing, wasn't a thing yet. People heard about Pearl Harbor because they literally, it was like a rumor on a radio two days later. Like it was not a thing they directly witnessed. However, the JFK shooting was the first time, similar to the 9/11 thing, it's like, where were you when that happened? Because there was this feeling that like you saw the towers go down or you saw JFK get shot and you felt you were sort of physically enmeshed in it, even though you weren't. Right? So something has happened there. The other example he cited, which is interesting. He was at one of these, I guess he was interested in acting when he was younger. One of these acting studios in New York, one of these method acting things in which you've probably never done acting or stand up, neither have I. I'd be too embarrassed.

• 2:14:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What are you talking about? We're doing stand up right now.

• 2:14:02Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I know, but unfortunately I have to do it. But, um, but he's like, you know, it's one of these things where they give you an assignment like, oh, you've just been shot or you just heard that your uncle died and then you're supposed to channel the emotion and do it. And like literally, as I understand it, everybody in the acting school starts acting as if their uncle just died. Right. Which sounds very weird and fake, but I guess in acting, that's what you have to do. And so anyhow, it was, I guess, what, November 22nd, 1962 or 61 or whenever it was. And someone opens the door and says, the president has been shot. And everyone starts acting with the grief of it, right? For like 10 minutes. And the guy comes in and is like, no, no, no, the president actually got, like he got shot right now, like it's on TV. And then everyone just like freaked out because they realized they were supposed to be acting about the thing, but then they had the real flood of emotions of actually being the thing. And the guy said he was so freaked out about it, he like ran out the room and never did

• 2:14:47Speaker 04

  acting again because it was such, he realized that the media had made us all actors. We're all kind of on TV all the time, right? Whether it be for like a selfie or a Tik Tok or this podcast or whatever. And it's, it's a very different mode to be the real you and act in a very unselfconscious way versus the thought that there's the external other looking in, that there is this fourth wall that you're addressing all the time. There's a very different reference frames and humanity didn't used to think they were on stage all the time, but yet now we do.

• 2:15:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I see the biggest place is the self censorship.

• 2:15:14Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:15:15Anthony Pompliano?

  It happens to all of us.

• 2:15:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:15:17Anthony Pompliano?

  We're all victims of it. Uh, I've been talking to a couple of people, uh, mutual friends of yours and I's that, uh, it's like becoming so prevalent where we've even in this podcast, probably multiple times said like, oh, I didn't say this or I was going to tweet it, but then I didn't. Or, uh, you know, can I add, and then let's steer away from this or whatever. And like, it's not necessarily like bad, like in the sense of, oh, if you would have said it, it's just like, I don't want to deal with the headache of that. I don't want to actually have to defend why I believe something. And so self censorship, uh, is like a huge fucking problem that is only going to get worse and worse over time to the point where like, does 90% of the society just say the same things over and over again? Not because they actually believe it, but just because they just don't want to deal with it. Like, yes.

• 2:16:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, this is all about like Havel's greengrocer thing in which for those who aren't familiar with it. I think it was Havel, Baklav Havel, the Czech president, or, or, anyhow. It was, it's an essay about a greengrocer who basically hangs a sign with solidarity for whatever the communist cause was, not because he deeply cared about it, he just didn't want to deal with the hassle. Speaking of communists, you know who's really good at the self-sumptuouship? People who live in dictatorships. So, one of the stories I did for Wired, actual reported story was in Cuba, so I went to Cuba. As you might know, Miami Cubans typically don't tend to go back, by and large, unless they have family there or something. But I went back for the sake of Wired magazine in 2017 to talk about Cuban internet, which is a whole nother story, how they get internet and mostly don't get internet. But one thing, I was just, I was in Havana, in El Bedell, which is kind of like the nice part, and there's, you know, there's kind of a media, very small media and tech scene

• 2:16:43Speaker 04

  there, and there's just starting to be like bloggers and, you know, the equivalent of, you know, Matty Glacius, I'll draw a random example, of people who have like an online presence, and they sort of do reporting, right? Which, again, in Cuba is big news, because officially, you can't do journalism, you have to be part of the guild, and it's super censored. And I was sitting in a cafe, like a reasonably fancy cafe, and the guy was going on about how he had done reporting from the eastern part of the country. There had recently been a hurricane, the government's response was obviously terrible, because the government's kind of incompetent. Shocking. Shocking, but of course, saying that is like, you can't say it in public. And so, you know, I was trying to get at the guy, I was interviewing for the piece, it's like, so what do you, you know, what do you hope to get out of it by reporting on this thing? It's like, well, you know, by, by highlighting the government's, you know, lack of, of response

• 2:17:26Speaker 04

  to it, we hope to impact, you know, the Cuban democracy and the Cuban election, and I'm like, and of course, I did not self-censor, because I had not been raised inside a tent. It's like, what are you talking about? Cuba isn't a democracy, this is tyranny. And I just blurted out in the cafe, and everyone just stops and stares at me. And it's as if I had like ripped a fart in the elevator, and everyone just like pretends it didn't happen, and the guy just kept on talking as if I hadn't said anything. And it's just like, ah, I'm like, oh, fuck, I'm sorry, I forgot, I forgot, this is not how this works here, I have to like shut the fuck up. And then you realize, as I got there, and I hated the place, it was terrible, I, I, I mean, the Cubans are great, but the, the situation is terrible, I don't understand how a terrorist could go there, unless you're a total moron and like just shield yourself from the reality of what's there, because everyone is living a lie, right? Like, when you, in a dictatorship, everyone lives a lie, there is no truth, right?

• 2:18:11Speaker 04

  And like, the sort of lie and world of lies I tell you is different than the world I Lies I tell somebody else and then somebody else and there's these running realities. You have to remember it all and keep it all straight in your head to make sure that you don't step in the landmine. In fact, one of my sources, who I was pretty open with and I was reporting a piece, like I didn't lie to them. The piece came out and I wasn't that anti-government, but I said, this is what it is. They had to like denounce me on a Facebook post and they said, oh, I had no idea that when this journalist, I'd work with them and gave them a quote that this would happen. And so they had to like denounce me because I had like violated like the, the, the matrix of lies that is living in Cuba. And so that's the reality. And again, we're not, this isn't Cuba by any stretch, but it's kind of a taste of that feeling of, oh, I have to worry about what I say and yeah.

• 2:18:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you ever seen the Vice documentary with Dennis Rodman in North Korea?

• 2:18:55Speaker 04

  No, but it sounds pretty lit. I want to see it.

• 2:18:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Dennis Rodman goes to North Korea. I'm pretty sure it's Vice does it. Uh, and this is like when Vice was like real Vice, not like corporate, uh, Vice. Um, and in it, I just remember this one scene where, uh, they walk into a computer lab and, uh, they have a bunch of people on the computers and they're like, but nothing's happening on the computer. And like, they like call it out. I can't remember if Rodman says it or like the, the, you know, voiceover or whatever. But like, it is like very obvious that like they are trying to put forward a view that like we have the internet and it's like, let's put some people into a computer, but it almost looks like they don't know how to use the computers.

• 2:19:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:19:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're just like doing this action. And so that's kind of how I think of some of these places of just like, yeah, it's a play. And by the way, like if you were that person ordered to go do that, like you go and you do it, right? Like, of course I want to be a good soldier. Like, you know, let me just type away on the computer and not, it's not even turned on.

• 2:19:50Speaker 04

  Right. Because if you, because if you don't, you're not going to get your ration card. If you don't, you might lose your job. Not that anyone ever loses their job in America for what they thought or wrote. No, that never happens.

• 2:19:58Anthony Pompliano?

  That is a great place. That is a great place to end this. I will let everyone use their imagination on that. Uh, go to Wikipedia. Um, where, where can we find, be able to find you on the internet or find out more about Spindel?

• 2:20:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I spend way too much time on Twitter as, as, as we all do. Uh, Antonio GM at Twitter. I've got a sub stack at the poor request.com.

• 2:20:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And then fantastic. Highly suggest people.

• 2:20:23Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you. And then, uh, yeah. Company Spindel without the E with the E was too expensive. I don't want, I was like, I was gonna pay a Tesla three for a fucking domain. No way we're dropping the E and now it sounds like a German metal band. I might even add the umlaut to have the Motorhead effect. But in any case, it's Spindel without the E dot X Y Z is where it's at.

• 2:20:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Listen, thank you so much. I could talk to you literally forever. Hopefully we both don't get canceled for like the 19th time, but.

• 2:20:48Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 2:20:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm sure we'll do it again in the future.

• 2:20:50Speaker 04

  Okay. Thanks, Tom.

• 2:20:53Anthony 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.