#487 Tony Thomas on Defense, Technology, and Leadership

Tony Thomas is a retired 4-star General and was the 11th Commander of U. S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). General Thomas is one of our nation's greatest warfighters and he also happens to be an even better human being. In this conversation, we discuss the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the modern battlefield, the greatest threats to the United States, Tony’s leadership lessons, and the intersection of defense and technology, including drones, machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and the newly formed Space Force. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= The Rodman Law Group is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs realize their vision by helping them operate defensibly in sectors where laws and regulations haven’t caught up to the realities of the industry. The Rodman Law Group’s legal expertise combined with its understanding of blockchain technology makes it the ideal legal service provider for the industry. http://www.therodmanlawgroup.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. Let's kick this thing off. Tony Thomas is a retired four-star general and was the 11th commander of US Special Operations Command. General Thomas is one of our nation's greatest warfighters, and he also happens to be an even better human being. In this conversation, we discuss the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the modern battlefield, the greatest threats to the United States, Tony's leadership lessons, and the intersection of defense and technology, including drones, machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and the newly formed Space Force. I really enjoyed this conversation with General Thomas, and I hope you do as well.

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is BlockFi. They provide financial products for crypto investors. Their products include a high-yield interest account, US dollar loans against your crypto collateral, and no-fee trading on their new crypto exchange. You can go to blockfi.com/pomp and sign up for an account today. You also, if you have an account, can sign up for the new credit card that will pay you in Bitcoin rewards rather than cash back or airline months. That's right, it's a regular credit card, but it'll pay you in Bitcoin instead of cash back or airlines' points. So head on over to blockfi.com/pomp. I'm an investor, I sit on the board, I'm a very happy user, and I think you will be too.

• 1:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Financial products for crypto investors at BlockFi. High-yield interest accounts, US dollar loans, and no-fee trading. BlockFi.com/pomp. Next up is Choice, a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you're listening to this, you're likely part of the 7.1 million Bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not Bitcoin. I used to be in that situation too, but Choice helped me out. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. It's an absolute game changer. So if you use Choice, you can have a self-directed IRA product where you can buy Bitcoin, you can hold the private keys, and you can use tax-advantaged dollars to do it. Head on over to retirewithchoice.com/pomp.

• 2:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, retirewithchoice.com/pomp, and you can get a self-directed IRA product where you can have Bitcoin in that retirement account. Retirewithchoice.com/pomp.

• 2:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Lastly is the Rodman Law Group. They're dedicated to helping entrepreneurs realize their vision by helping them operate defensively in sectors where laws and regulations haven't caught up to the realities of the industry. I'll be releasing an episode with Dave Rodman here shortly. And what you'll find is not only is Dave incredibly well educated, but he also has tons and tons of experience in the blockchain and crypto sector. The Rodman Law Group has the two things you need in a lawyer. Not only are they great when it comes to legal expertise, but they also deeply understand the industry in which entrepreneurs and investors are operating. So if you need a lawyer, please go check out the Rodman Law Group. You can go to therodmanlawgroup.com/pomp and get a pretty good discount on their

• 3:04Anthony Pompliano?

  legal services. Again, therodmanlawgroup.com/pomp. Go talk to Dave Rodman and his group. Not only have they have great legal expertise, but they also deeply understand Bitcoin, crypto, and the blockchain industry. therodmanlawgroup.com/pomp. All right, let's get into this episode with General Thomas. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:57Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got a very, very special treat for you today. I have General Thomas here. He's a retired four-star general and the former commander of the US Special Operations Command. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. Thanks, Bob. Good to be here. Absolutely. Let's just kind of start off with, you've got this incredible storied military career, one of the nation's greatest leaders. Walk us through kind of your journey in the military and then kind of transitioning out what you're doing today.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Well, at the risk of coming off with, you know, what seems like false humility, while a lot of people claim least likely to be here, I am pretty sure I could compete, you know, very well in that space. I'm the oldest of six kids, grew up in the Philadelphia area. And all the kids were progressively smarter than me. And again, it sounds, it sounds like false humility, but it's doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, RNs and biochemical engineers, you're literally in that, in that kind of descendancy. And so I literally mucked through 10 years of schooling. My parents thought I was the biggest unachiever on the planet. And, and I was very close to being detained for, you know, juvenile delinquency.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  And I got, you know, blessed by a bolt from the blue, visiting West Point with my little brother, a Cub Scout. I'd already quit the Cub Scouts because they were too regimented for me. And as I hit West Point between my sophomore and junior year, it just impressed me that I needed, I went back home and literally told my mother, I need this place. And she poo-pooed it. She was my biggest supporter, but she thought, no, there's no way you're going to, you know, correct yourself. And I say, the first thing I need to do is, I'm in Catholic school, the nuns will never believe it. I need to bump from Catholic school into private school. I'll get a haircut and start doing the right things. And that, literally, and I, I look back because I had just such an utter lack of maturity

• 5:50Speaker 02

  back in those days for anything, you know, down the road or what am I doing with myself? But I look back now to that one, you know, incredible seminal moment for me, that then, you know, birthed a four decade career in the military that, that, that was just, you know, pretty historic. I have friends that joke that, and it's probably not too far off, that I'm the Forrest Gump for the last 40 years of our military experience, because I literally have been in almost every, you pick a situation or, and/or a, you know, a, you know, historic moment in our military. And I've, I've happened to have been there by hook or crook. In that timeframe, in the four decades, I have been married to the same great woman

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Thirty six years. While we've been locked in for COVID for the last year, we've discovered that the secret of our longevity is that I was gone most of that time. So she's even more revered for having put up with me for all those years. We have two great kids. She gets the credit for raising them. They're both West Point graduates, both have served our country as soldiers. I'm very, very proud of them. And then, most importantly, we have four grandkids now. So, you know, it's, that's where we are now at this point in time. And I'm learning what I need, you know, what I'm going to be when I grow up after the military, because I'm now in that phase of life.

• 7:12Anthony Pompliano?

  You've had a full life for sure and much more to come. I want to talk a little bit, just let's start with the kind of the military experience. You were able to really experience a number of different situations, both foreign and domestic. And when I asked for questions on Twitter, one of the main topics is just kind of the wars in the Middle East, right? So Iraq, Afghanistan, maybe kind of just give us a quick lay of the land in terms of your evaluation of just where are we with those? And kind of what are the things that people should be paying attention to or talking about today as we look at kind of the wars that we're currently engaged in?

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is incredibly tough topic. I don't think it's discussed thoroughly enough, and that's part of the problem. I feel expert in terms of experience in that I served every year from 2001 to 2019 when I retired. I was there for all of or parts of every year in Afghanistan. And then I have about four to five years across that timeframe of experience in Iraq. So I'm both an expert and I'm to blame, right? I'll accept that, that I was not part of the solution. First of all, I think it's too cliche and it's very easy for politicians to disparage endless wars.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  When reality is, it's kind of like the old theory, if you don't know where you're going, any path will get you there. But in some of these cases, we didn't have a strategy for war termination for what it was going to be like at the end, or at least what we wanted to be like, and we Afghanistan was sort of righteous. We got attacked from there. We went with our blood up. It was a punitive raid and then we progressed into nation building and things like that that we never wanted to get into. In Iraq, you could argue that we all did a student body left at a particular point in time for reasons that politicians laid out to us. I was a relatively junior officer at the time. And then we created our own worst nightmare. We created an insurgency as the occupiers in Iraq after we had dismantled all the security apparatus and we got stuck there.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  And so these things have just festered, mostly because, and I don't mean this in any way political, we've had an end date instead of an end state type approach. And so across multiple administrations, we have anchored a hard date that we're done by this date. Well, what's that do for your adversary? Which just tells them, hang in there. The United States will lose patience and then they'll leave. And in every case, we've emboldened them. So we have mucked along like this for 20 years now, specifically for Afghanistan. And it annoys me. I take it personally when there's commentary that general officers thrive in the military industrial complex thrive on this. I can't speak

• 9:56Speaker 02

  to the military industrial complex. I'm not part of it in the afterlife either. But every general officer or admiral that I know has a son or a daughter serving in the military. We're very cocooned in it, in kind of our relationship. And the good news is our kids like the profession from their attachment or their connection to it. A lot of them join, but none of us are advocating for endless wars or these situations where we're putting our kids in harm's way, literally with skin in the game. But that's very, again, it's easy for that to be played off in political discussions is, oh, those generals who want war. I was a colonel when I went to war in Afghanistan for the first time. And then your rose to my ultimate rank.

• 10:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's one of these things where I always tell folks and most of the people on the podcast, but for those that don't, I served in Iraq for a year. And you just talk to a veteran, especially somebody who's been to a combat zone, and they are usually the closest to a pacifist that you will find, right? In the sense of, they don't want to go, they don't think that we should be sending soldiers, but if you send them, they will do their job and they will do their job well. And so I think that it's kind of a very nuanced conversation. Talk a little bit, this idea of kind of an end date versus an end state. There's a lot of folks who just say, well, you know, end of 2021, let's just pick up and leave. Kind of what would the, uh, the, the negative side effects of doing something like that be? And then I guess, you know, fully understanding that it's a complex issue, but just kind of,

• 11:25Anthony Pompliano?

  how do you think we get out of those two wars, if at all possible?

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I probably should have started with and, and well state now that everything I'm saying is my opinion. Interesting phenomenon in the United States these days. You have a lot of former generals and admirals who are very prominent. It's bred two rabid thoughts, you know, go figure on either side of the spectrum, that we should keep our pie holes shut forever and never be heard from again. Or we are somehow uber citizens who know more about, you know, this great American experiment than anything else. I, I don't consider both those, you know, discards. At the end of the day, I'm a citizen. I was a citizen before I joined the military. I'm still a citizen. I don't represent some cabal of retired general officers or the SOCOM secret society or any of that. I think these are my opinions.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  You could take them or leave them. You know, um, for the, for the discussion about could we pull the plug? And here's the other, and I tell this to actually folks in the private sector now. Here's the problem with being a military professional thrown into one of these conflicts. We desperately want to win for the nation. So we're way too close to the problem. We probably are the most myopic bunch out there that, hey, we're making progress. We, we want to see progress everywhere. I mean, the, the most, uh, refreshing thing for me to see in Kabul, when I was back there the year 2012 to 2013, for the entire year in charge of special operations, was the multitude of young Afghan girls, all in their uniforms, going to school, which we enabled. It, it, it would not have happened if we hadn't done that.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  And it will absolutely be, you know, turned back, I believe, if, if we just pull the plug. But the bigger, as you pull up from this thing, is the acknowledgement that this is an ideological struggle. This was a group of people that attacked the United States of America for, for their reasons. The ideology is still very strong, even though we have crushed Al Qaeda, even though we have crushed ISIS physically, from a military standpoint, we've done little or nothing to, to really get at the ideology. And so if you pull the plug. I think that Afghanistan will trend badly to become a sanctuary again for bad people who will actually be celebrating that they defeated us, much like they defeated the Russians or the Soviet Union back in the day. And you should expect more of it to come at us.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  So what should be the end state is some sort of sustainable security where you and I never have to worry about, you know, working in high-rise buildings in New York City or the Pentagon again. Ironically, one of the companies I work for is on the 80th floor of One World Center. I mean, they have difficulty still renting above the 80th floor because people think that there might be, you know, another, another episode that, that, that might occur. So we're in that dilemma of how do you, we should pull out. We, I mean, we should absolutely reduce our, our signature as much as possible, enable and empower the host nation to take care of their own security, but absolutely leave some sort of insurance policy in so that we never get surprised again like we did it in 9/11.

• 14:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and, you know, obviously, to put this entire conversation, there's so much nuance, there's so much complexity. We're going to spend about an hour and a half talking. So for those that are listening, just bear with us as we kind of move from topic to topic and, and please don't assign any malice if we skip over something. It's more so just us trying to get everything in. General, talk a little bit about just kind of technology on the battlefield. Obviously, having the seat that you sat in from the special operations side, usually those warriors are, you know, have the access to the top technology. They see kind of things before the general military would see it. How has that evolved through your career, especially while we've been at war for the last 20 years? And kind of just maybe what's like the state of technology on the battlefield today?

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Great question. And I was lucky to serve with folks who, and I saw one of your previous podcasts where someone acknowledged people being the difference. People are the decisive advantage. I don't know why that's an epiphany for some, some folks that we have to rediscover that. And so I was blessed by working with teammates who were always trying to come up with new, better ways to, you know, to gain that, that tactical technological advantage. Constantly the hardest thing to do, and actually the- Higher our Rosen rank was to harness the, you know, the good thought fairy and say, okay, money's into that program, but with, with some sort of agility to, to springboard elsewhere when something new or better came up. And then to be able to scale it to the entirety

• 15:48Speaker 02

  of our force, uh, so that we were interoperable. Um, so to your point, um, the, the, the folks that I work with in the special operations community are riding leading edge technology real time. Um, you know, almost, you know, not quite to the degree that, you know, uh, you're some of the folks I'm associated with now, but right in trail with that where they know what's out there in the end, they're already applying it, you know, uh, tactically or operationally, uh, in, in the living laboratory that we've been afforded for the last bunch of years. Um, so it, it is, you know, it, it was very refreshing to see how they, uh, understand the technology can, and can implement it. It is incredibly frustrating, even more so for me now that I'm out of the military on how inept the department is in leveraging the

• 16:33Speaker 02

  technology that's available. Um, for all the things I just described, if it's thrown in, into the milieu of, of the Department of Defense and its programming approach and acquisition approach, that's a five-year, seven-year at least acquisition cycle. And you know how fast tech is changing inside that cycle. That, that's, that's a recipe for being, you know, an anachronism right, right from the beginning. So we have to smash that, um, you know, that gap, and partly is the discrepancies to the department, uh, to be able to, to really leverage, uh, the extraordinary technologies that are available today and in the future.

• 17:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I want to throw out the names of a couple of types of technology and just have you riff on, you know, your, your thoughts and how that's evolved. Uh, maybe probably the, the most famous one, when people think of technology in the military is kind of all the drones and, and unmanned area of vehicles. Uh, kind of how has that evolved over time? And how do you evaluate where we are today with that?

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. You talk about a technology that was turned on us a little bit. Um, and, and if you'll remind me later on, because I, I was as, uh, myopic and, and dawdling as anybody else in, in, in service until I had a, you know, the epiphany moment with courtesy of Eric Schmidt, and it's been written about, but I'd like to come back on that. But the drone piece, it was kind of fascinating in that. Early on, in places where we didn't have access, we leveraged our drone technology to great, you know, to great success. Think of MQ-1 Predators, think of MQ-9 Reapers, think of all the exotic, you know, space-based stuff we had to see into places and to discern targets, if you will. I know that's unsavory to some people, but that's the nature of warfare.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  And then, apply in the most precise way possible, and I can't emphasize this enough, that it was a, it was a non-starter. It was a mission failure for us if we had any collateral damage. We wouldn't take that shot if we thought we had any collateral damage in terms of innocent civilians that, you know, in the mix. But we leveraged that stuff to, to a great extent. Where I say it was turned back on us, I was out in vicinity of Mosul, Iraq, in 2015 or 16, and Mosul was my hometown for 15 months, from September 07 to December 08. And in this timeframe, in 1516, ISIS was now taking DJI quadcopters and equipping them with little 40mm grenades

• 18:49Speaker 02

  on, on the bottom of them. And they would literally just send up these off-the, on the, off-the-shelf quadcopters, find your locations, and then drop these, uh, these 40mm grenades with a little shuttlecock device to stabilize it. The day I was out there, or shortly before I was out there, was called "The Day of the Drones" by the Iraqis. And the, and ISIS, on that day, in a city about the size of Philadelphia, had put up about 70 different quadcopters, many of them armed, and at one point in time, they had a dozen to two dozen up, and we had no response for them. And think of this, we had air superiority. Every pointy-nosed fighter in the world was above us to provide us that sort of air cap, but underneath that, you had off-the-shelf technology that was wreaking havoc for us, and, and caused us to,

• 19:32Speaker 02

  you know, do a, a complete turnaround. That is only the precursor for swarming unmanned technology in the future. And this, this, this is not just a warzone challenge. This is a New York City challenge. This is a Philadelphia challenge. This is any city that's out there that some yahoo wants to leverage that technology, uh, you know, again, to, to do bad things. It, it's something that we need to roll up our sleeves and, and understand as a threat, and more importantly, to, to come up with appropriate counters that, uh, that will keep us safe.

• 20:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What you're really highlighting is there's almost this element of as we improve, we're also teaching the insurgency, kind of some of the techniques and techniques that they can pursue as well. Another type of technology that has become more prevalent over the years is everything from artificial intelligence and machine learning. So kind of just the ability to use software to become smarter, to analyze data, more predictability to it. What's your evaluation of where we are there?

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you've actually, you're a great street man, excuse me. You've got me back on the one epiphany moment I had. About a month after I took over SOCOM, I was very busy as the JSOC commander before that, the Joint Special Operations Command for those who aren't acquainted. Phenomenal command that I really did not want to leave. It was the best job I ever had, but I got pushed up to, it was probably the Peter Principle play, to the four-star level to be the SOCOM commander. But in my first month in the job, I hosted a visit headed up by my former mentor and friend, Bill McRaven, former SOCOM commander, who was in charge at the, at the direction of the Secretary of Defense of the Innovation Group at, in the Department of Defense.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  And it had the Eric Schmitz of the world and a bunch of other, you know, very, very bright and talented folks to look at the department and to honestly try and help us leverage technology. And so a month into command, I get this coterie of people descending on SOCOM. They spent a day with us and at the end of the day, we were riding down Bay Shore Boulevard, not too far from my home here, in a typically black suburban, right? And Eric Schmidt felt compelled to give me a report card on special operations. And in short order, you know, not lacking any confidence, he said, "Your people, you're amazing people." I thought, "Check. If you took nothing else away, incredible talent." He said, "You prototype pretty effectively." And we had taken him to our soft works facility where we try to do, you know, rapid, you know, prototyping, et cetera.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  And I thought, "Yep, we've been failing fast long before I ever read about, you know, that, that thought, you know, failing fast." He said, "You absolutely suck." And he was actually more colorful in that, in terms of applied predictive computing, machine learning, et cetera. I thought, "Whoa, where's he going with this?" He then went on to say, General, I know you live in a very complex problem. But if I got in your tent for a couple of days a week, I think I could solve most of your wicked problems to simple up-down switches with advanced algorithms. He might have said quantum computing, but about that time I was ready to kick him out of the car because I thought, oh, you're so arrogant. How could you not understand the complexity of what we do? Luckily Admiral McRaven engaged him because it allowed me to think for a moment and it smacked me in the head that, oh, he's absolutely right.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  What Google, what these companies are doing in terms of applied machine learning is absolutely apropos to almost everything. I can't think of any exceptions, to be truthful, of what we do in the military is if we embrace and leverage this technology. And so we went down the road. I hired a chief data officer for SOCOM, phenomenal talent, who's now the Defense Department's chief data officer. And then we proceeded to try and educate our force because, as you know, the biggest challenge is a lot of people can spell AI and they know nothing about neural networks. They know nothing about Bayesian analysis. And I'm the dumbest guy in the room, but you need to wrestle with this every day to understand it, especially as it's mated with what problems are you trying to solve? What's the data that's pertinent to it? How do you arrange that?

• 23:20Speaker 02

  Because most importantly, and this is where I think for all those that are opposed to leveraging and enabling AI, we've had the luxury for the last 20 years of not having to make, for the most part, time-sensitive compressed decisions under incredible duress. Our future adversaries are not going to give us that luxury. In fact, they are hell-bent on getting AI. Putin has said, he who gets it first wins, to be able to make the most rapid decision-making, be the most influential in the information space, et cetera, going forward. And so we need to embrace this and then ride that ragged edge up till, do you hand the keys to the car to enable the AI to take the shot or not? And that is the crux of debate, but I think you should run, you know, well up to that

• 24:05Speaker 02

  before you turn over trigger and then embrace the situations, the one-offs, where it might be advantageous to say, yep, in those sort of scenarios, AI must, you know, be enabled to take the shot or we will, or it may be an existential, you know, threat that you will rue the day. You won't have the chance to rue the day. You'll be gone.

• 24:25Anthony Pompliano?

  What's so fascinating to me is there's kind of like, how effective is the technology? How would we apply it? And then ultimately, how do we almost go through the governance of the technology? Right? Who gets to take the shot? Is there a human override? Do we trust the software? How accurate is it? What's the efficacy? All that kind of stuff. Another technology.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  For two, and there's an event that I'd encourage everybody to get online and look at. DARPA, you know, who's enabled some incredible technology into our force. Recently hosted a dogfight event with the Air Force. And to the Air Force's credit, they signed up and said, okay, we're going to let you throw an unmanned AI-enabled capability against our very best. Think of Nellis guys, you know, Top Gun kind of guys. And it almost, it had me torn because you watched an incredibly talented human being pilot, literally perplexed by an AI-enabled craft that beat them five out of five times.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  And you could see this, you can find this on YouTube. It's at the end of the session. So if you want to cut to the chase for that video. And so the takeaways were clear. Man, you know, this AI in a dogfight scenario, if we think we're going to be in those kinds of scenarios in the future, is a considerable technology. What I was, now I shouldn't have been surprised because it's human nature on the backside, was essentially the pilot lobby that came on and said, whoa, not ready for prime time. And by the way, that craft was doing suicidal tactics to get the win. And you're thinking, stop. You know, stop for a moment and think what you just said. The AI does not know fear. The AI does not know fatigue.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  The end, and I hate doing this to, whether it's fighter jockeys or aircraft carrier captains and all, is to pose the next hard question of, okay, I got it that you're beholden to your current craft, your current platform. Do you want your kid to go up against an AI? Airplane, missiles, whatever it might be in the future with the technology that we're leveraging now. And the answer is clearly not. Then when are you going to do that leap ahead to have that capability where we're going to reduce the threat, which is kind of an American ideal, but also be at the fore of this technology? And folks have used the nuclear analogy, and I agree.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  It is part and parcel to the seminal moment of the development of nuclear weapons. And we should be thinking about it as aggressively and solving it, not get caught up in the policy conundrums, et cetera, that will presage actual discussions.

• 27:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, something related to the AI, machine learning, computer vision, the drones, et cetera. It's just robotics in general. And it feels like there's a big push right now where people are saying, well, why are we risking human life? Let's just send the robot army out and we'll trot them out and they'll do a great job. And hopefully they don't turn against us. What's the evaluation of where we are on the robotics side?

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, again, for every place you trot out robots as a solution or unmanned as a solution, there is a man lobby that's holding on for dear life against that. And you think of the number of things that have changed over time where I gotta believe it's inevitable, but you gotta overcome that obstacle. But I think the most constructive way to get at this in the future, and I'm hoping the armed forces embrace this, is simulation and/or testing, where you literally say, hey, I'm going out to the National Training Center or the Mojave, or wherever it might be, come fight me. And we invite leading-edge technology companies come in with all the widgets and gadgets and tech and kick our ass.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  I mean, literally, free play, show us where our vulnerabilities are so that we have that, again, seminal moment to adapt and go forward. Too much of it, and I mean, the DARPA situation I described was extraordinary in that they took the gloves off. It was a dogfight and the Air Force was beaten badly. But we didn't come on the backside and say, okay, how do we? Get that company or that technology into the force as soon as possible. So I think, I think, you know, the department needs to embrace and not chase technology. That was one of the lessons we learned at SOCOM that you can chase technology everywhere in the valley in Austin and Boston, Carnegie Mellon, you name it, you'll chase forever. You'll be chasing individual companies too,

• 28:57Speaker 02

  by the way, or you flip the paradigm and bring them under the tent, bring companies on the tent. Mostly venture capitalist companies, I think, are really powerful in that they have a broad array of portfolio companies that, you know, hey, anybody interested in this? Good. Here's, here's the opportunity, the environment to get in and help, you know, help our national security. The Google experience with Maven, I thought, was really cathartic for, you know, for DOD. Because you already had the Google workforce, at least a portion of it, saying, whoa, whoa, we don't want anything to do with, you know, drone warfare and this sort of national defense, get us out of this. And Google, they didn't, people mistakenly said they bought. They completed

• 29:42Speaker 02

  their contract. They just didn't go on to the next phase. It was picked up by somebody else. Interestingly, who's back in business more, you know, adamantly than ever? Google, in the form of Eric Schmidt and others, saying, hey, we had that moment. We've had a chance to chat amongst ourselves. We will always have a portion of our people that don't want to do this. But they're back in. But more importantly, in the wake of that, I can't count the number of companies, both startups and established companies, who are anxious to help the department. They want in, they want to be able to, you know, to help us going forward. The difficulty is, you know, you're the devil's in the details on how they get under the tent and get integrated. But, but there's not any shortage of companies that want to be involved in solving these wicked problems.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, when we talk about innovation, kind of on the battlefield and within the military, one of my favorite stories is

• 30:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And I don't know exactly how accurate every single detail here is, but the the general story is that the Rhino, for those that don't know, is a uh it's basically a um a box that has got a uh a set of um heat that comes out of it. Uh and it's extended out in front of vehicles and and it's there to uh kind of defeat uh infrared type IEDs. So basically, rather than have the engine block be the trigger for an IED and kind of put human life at risk, uh this is a box that literally just extends the heat signature uh out in front of the vehicle. And uh the story that I had heard when I was uh deployed was basically a very young soldier came up with the idea by putting spark plugs inside of a ammo box and

• 31:08Anthony Pompliano?

  put it on the front of his vehicle and next thing you know, the military said, hey, that's a great idea and let's kind of, you know, get that rolled out as fast as we can to save as many lives as possible. And uh, you know, regardless of the accuracy of the the individual details, uh there is this debate between can the innovation come from, you know, people who are actually in uniform, who have the experiences and and kind of have the ground truth and and knowledge versus uh folks who have the technology experience and they can come look at the problem set and then develop the uh the solutions. What was your experience um kind of in the military in terms of innovation happening internal versus external? And how do you kind of look at the balance between those two things moving forward?

• 31:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I would be suspect of any initiative that was started at the higher level. Um and the the the classic that was before my time here at SOCOM, uh that people tried out was called the the Special Operations Handgun. And as you might imagine, by the end of the day, this thing looked like the Rube Goldberg, uh you know, Hubble Telescope of pistols that you could never use in in, you know, in combat, but it was designed by this headquarters instead of and and and I I think we try, I certainly know we try to, we don't always stay true to mating operators, practitioners, you know, uh you know, uh of the trade, you know, at the tactical level with our with that, you know, the technologists, the acquisition experts to really get that symbiosis for, you know, for uh technological development.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  The harder part, though, and I mentioned earlier, is with all that going and and SOCOM is seventy five thousand strong across the planet. A lot of great uh individual problem solving going on. How do you? Identify absolute leading edge technology tactics, techniques and procedures as you and I would call back in the day and say, okay, that that's where we need to invest and I provide the resources, obviously, to what, you know, to what scale and to and for how much, for how long to to bring it into the force. And so you've got that conundrum of the higher headquarters with the with the resources and with the budgetary requirements and the the problem solving happening at the tactical level, how do you, how do you mesh it? I, I, I used

• 33:15Speaker 02

  to use this technique at SOCOM and it would drive some people nuts and I didn't do it to do to drive them nuts. And some would call it the old directed telescope, but on any given day, and I tried to get away from my headquarters as much as possible. I didn't like sitting in an office and we had people in 80 different countries around the world, a lot of them in harm's way. So I'd spend a lot of time on the road, but I couldn't always be there. So in the morning, if I read a situation report that said, hey, Pomp and his guys yesterday just crushed it in this. And when I say crush, people always think I'm saying kinetic. It could have been the greatest humanitarian assistance effort or whatever. But as I got that report and said, wow, that's great. Can we reach out and talk to them? And I don't want anybody in their chain of command in between. It's

• 33:55Speaker 02

  going to be just like I'm visiting them and you pick the location. Again, that's the part that a lot of people didn't like, but I say, just imagine if I were on the road, I'd get that opportunity. And I'd sit down with our, our teammates and say, hey, I read last night you did this. Please give me more on it. And my, my sergeant major would sit there with me, a great former Delta operator and we'd sit and one of it was selfish because we would get the buzz of, man, what a, you know, these are our teammates. Don't you love being part of this organization? But I would always have this one question loaded for him at the end of the day and say, hey, is there anything I can do from up here on Mount, Mount Olympus, Mount SOCOM to help you do your job better in the future? And every decent teammate had that, that answer ready. Oh, just in case you might ask. And

• 34:39Speaker 02

  it would invariably be if I only had the gonkulator, or if I had these authorities, or if I had whatever. And so I'd say, good. Have you asked, have you pushed that request officially up through the, you know, through the system? Oh, yes, sir. Three bags full. Okay, great. I will get back to you. You know, you monkey transfer. I've got this now. I'll get back to you. And so we'd meet after that session. I'd have my staff in there and say, okay, Team X on the ground, wherever, says they need this thing. The request is out there officially somewhere. Find it. And we would find it at one of our many, too many, intermediate headquarters, stuck with a lot of well-meaning people who were trying to move the rock uphill, but didn't have the wherewithal to do it. And I used to joke that, hey, Jeff Bezos is not running Amazon like this.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  He is running a flat enough situation, a where enough organization, that he knows the pacing items for his organization and he's able to shift resources. And so I would try to get our headquarters, both my headquarters at the macro level, not to sit back wondering what the men need today, or the men and women out there need today, and those at the tip of the spear to crush that space down so we actually could provide the resources necessary. We did not, and I would tell my guys, as many painful sessions as I had at Congress, you know, testifying in front of McCain and others, we never lacked the resources for what we needed to do. I mean, I had a $13 billion budget. That was just our operating, our annual budget. We could get the resources and more if we needed it.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  All I needed to do was be able to present that, hey, here's the wicked problem, and I don't have the resources for it, and I can't cross-level internally. So I was disappointed that we had our own bureaucratic challenges, even in a force that was considered to be pretty agile.

• 36:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, one of the things that you're talking about here is kind of just the efficacy, I think, that a lot of these technology firms have had, right? They obviously, they grow because they're efficient, both in communication, operations, and the production of whatever the line of business is that they're in. What we've seen in Silicon Valley specifically, and you mentioned a little bit with kind of the Google situation, is a fairly polarized population of workers, right? So there's some people who say, I want nothing to do with helping the United States and kind of our defense operations. I disagree with that body of work. And so if the company I work at does that, I'm going to, you know, on the light end, basically protest it in some form or fashion, or on the kind of more- More aggressive and I'm literally going to quit my job and go somewhere else.

• 37:05Anthony Pompliano?

  But there's also another group of people, and this is kind of the Palantirs and the Andorils and a number of other technologists who say, no, listen, if we do not use technology to protect our country, to give that capability to our warfighters, then we actually are doing ourselves a disservice. And so I'm going to go build a company, I'm going to go work within kind of government and defense and I'm going to go kind of do my part. How do you think we get kind of a little bit more of a centrist view, right? So rather than have kind of that polarized kind of divisiveness, if you will, how do we start to get folks to understand that the public and private sector can work together, kind of do the right things, but it's also not an unchecked power for the the public sector and that there is

• 37:49Anthony Pompliano?

  kind of the ethical conversation happening around technology and some of the other concerns that they may have.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I actually think there's an overemphasis on this small group that is adamantly opposed to, you know, to do anything that that aligns them with national defense and or going to war. And I get, I mean, go back to first point, nobody more opposed to going to war than me. But, you know, sometimes it finds you, whether or not you want it. There's a, there's a more eloquent quote that goes with that that you're aware of.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  So I think the best capture of this that I've read consumed over the last couple of years, Trey Stevens did an editorial that talks to your point that you might not want to do this, but our adversaries are actually going in this direction. Again, some don't think we have any adversaries out there. I'd love to live in their netherworld. But so it's a compelling discussion that, please understand the nature of the security concerns for the country you live in. And I got it that most of these companies are global. But, you know, if you're, if you put your marker down in San Jose or Austin or wherever it is, you know, you know, there's an expectation there and I'm not, I'm not wrapping myself up in nationalism either here. But it's more of a practical thing.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  But, but the bigger challenge and what's interesting, my, my experience over the last two years has been to meet companies. That had no intention by design to compete or to provide solutions in the national security space, but their technology is so compelling that in discussions we've said, you know, this could be integrated into national security. Have you thought about that? In a couple of cases, I got immediate pushback of, whoa, that wasn't our founders' vision. But then they come back a couple of weeks later and say, hey, we actually would like to do things for the government. How do we get in that space? And there begins the journey. So again, how do we, you know, the, how many times have you and I read that the paradigm is flipped?

• 39:45Speaker 02

  DoD, it used to be the center of gravity for a lot of technological development, the internet, blah, blah, blah. The paradigm's completely flipped. It's no longer the locus of all that. There's some good innovation going on in DoD. The majority of it is in the private sector. How do you, how do you establish the dialogue and the venues to match, you know, match the two as constructively as possible going forward? I have not, I mean, I would be very concerned if I were, I was bouncing off a lot of companies that were no at hello. I don't want any part of this. I am experiencing the exact opposite that, one, they're, they're appreciative of the national security challenges and concerns now and in the future. They want to be more informed about it. And the majority of them

• 40:28Speaker 02

  who have technology that's, that's apropos to it are interested in how do I, how do I help? How do I, how do I, and of course, there's the pragmatic aspect of, of making, making a dime or two on that. But that's not where the money is. That's part of the problem is, you know, the companies that are successful, for the most part, have serious, serious private sector success. And they, and they'll realize that, you know, the government's success will be less, you know, less beneficial to them, but they, they want to be in that space.

• 40:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. My friend Bill Perkins had a great question on Twitter where he asked, kind of, in your opinion, today, what are the three greatest threats to America? Right? Are they, are they nation states? Are they technologies? Just when you hear that, what are kind of your reactions to the three greatest threats?

• 41:13Speaker 02

  You know, we wrestle with this all the time. So and interestingly, the same five threats that are captured right now with the new administration are the same five threats that four years ago were presented to a different administration. So in terms of nation states or ideological threats out there, everybody knows the kind of road if you're national security is China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and violent extremism. That was a way of describing, you know, the Islamic phenomenon that we were dealing with at the time. I think, and we ironically, back then, we listed those pretty forcefully in documents to try to

• 41:52Speaker 02

  get us more balance from our counter terrorist, counter insurgent effort in the Middle East onto China as a, at least a budding adversary. And four years ago, our national policy, our stated national policy was to not refer to China as an adversary. That was, that was the administration, President Biden served in before. I think we've had that bipartisan, you know, acknowledgement that if they're not an adversary, they're sure behaving in an adversarial fashion. And if you read their literature, they do believe, Xi Jinping and others do believe that there is going to be a meeting engagement sometime down the road here, where it won't be ships passing in the night kind of evolution. And it may

• 42:37Speaker 02

  not be peaceful. That's where, I mean, it's just to read what the CCP is saying about where they see themselves now and in the future. So I do see China, it's irresistible. You just have to read the first chapter of Graham Allison's book, just to understand the demographics and the magnitude of the economy. You know, this is not something the US can take on mono a mono. It is, it is, you know, an incredible challenge from that standpoint. So we need, you know, the point being, we need partners. We need, and I read something, I think, in the comments the other day, the good news is, the Western world is still, you know, 60% of the, you know, the GDP. So you do have leverage now, unless you let it wane and die off. So I think China's out there.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  Russia is not going away and unfortunately you're seeing it now with Navalny is, you know, the joke, which I don't think was said jokingly a couple of years ago and continues to play out is that Putin is not going to go out, you know, uh, vertical. Um, so you've, you've got the power personalities, whether it's Xi Jinping, uh, Putin, uh, and others and KJU in, in North Korea. These personalities, uh, that are variables that you just have to consider, uh, you know, will, will, will be disruptive going forward. So China and Russia kind of in combination because they're existential threats. And then, you know, people think I'm being too fluffy now, but I would go on to two venues, uh, that I'm concerned without the specific threat. One is space and

• 44:04Speaker 02

  I saw the to do on Twitter today, uh, disparaging Space Force and all, you know, the news flash without getting into classified levels of discussion is we are terribly keep you awake at night kind of vulnerable in space right now. We're way behind. Um, so if it, so if you like, and if you're beholden, as we are from a national defense standpoint, on satellite enabled communications, expect that to be the first lights out shot fired in a future conflict unless we, you know, start, you know, start stepping up the plate and understanding that venue. And then the other part that's pertinent to that is the information space. And that sounds really fluffy, but right now the amount of disinformation that is running around the world, um, and, you know,

• 44:49Speaker 02

  again, on your previous podcast, someone was talking about information anxiety, where there better be information anxiety because, you know, who knows what's factual in this day and age to base your decisions on, but we have to sort through that.

• 45:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So I know that there's, um, a lot of sensitivities here. So just kind of whatever you're allowed to say, uh, but I want to go a little bit deeper on the whole idea of space and, uh, obviously the idea of a space force and all of that. I think people, uh, immediately jumped to, oh, what are we going to do? Protect ourselves from the aliens, right? Or some kind of some, uh, um, you know, outrageous kind of, uh, edge case types of situation. But really what you're talking about here is, uh, one, there's a lot more communication infrastructure. Uh, there's a lot of companies that are trying to do, uh, multi-planetary travel or they're trying to do now Space manufacturing, you know, look at somebody like Varda. There's all sorts of different technologies, whether it's reusable rockets or some sort of 3D printed rockets, you just kind of go in a line. There's a lot of innovation happening here.

• 45:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And most of that is happening in the Western world. But when you talk about kind of the vulnerabilities in space, kind of just from a very high level, like what exactly does that mean? And so for people at home who are thinking about, oh, a space force, like, why is that important? And kind of how do you just think of space as a, you know, maybe a battlefield that isn't necessarily contentious today, but could become contentious in the future?

• 46:07Speaker 02

  I think the Space Force has been cathartic. And it has woken us up from this naive dream state assumption, whatever it might be, that space will not be an area, not be a contested area, that somehow that was going to be off limits. We're not going to do bad things up there. It'll be restricted to the normal domains of land, sea, air, etc., and cyber. Wrong, wrong, bad assumption, flawed, and has been proven to be flawed. So without even going into classified stuff, you know, just look at open source on what the Chinese and the Russians have already put up there that is not intended to be good. It's not intended to play nicely with others.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  And ask yourself, okay, what have we done to protect ourselves, much less to balance, you know, that playing field there? And so I think your Space Force will help us focus on that. I don't think that Space Force was sufficiently birthed with enough of its own wherewithal. It's still way too tied to the Air Force. Now, you could argue that it was part of the Air Force before, but but both from a process and a kind of a, you know, a linkage, budgetary, etc., it's still very much a kind of an Air Force baby, even even as listed as a separate department or separate service.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  It's it's not free, it's not running free yet. I hope I hope it will eventually. But I think I think it's some an area that we absolutely have to have this discussion, this honest discussion of why do we, you know, it's today in Twitter, it's still a little too political on was this just a wild idea from the previous administration? Hopefully, people will pull up and say, okay. Do we need to compete up there? The answer is yes. How, what's the best way to do it? Whether establishing another service and a combatant command was the way to do it. You can, you could cut that thing every which way and come up with other solutions, but we absolutely need to compete.

• 48:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So I want to go from space and kind of bring it just domestically. Uh, over the last couple of weeks, we obviously had a whole bunch of um, kind of concerns. And then also a couple of different events. One that kept coming up on Twitter was specifically was around the, the Capitol building. Um, and some of the activities there. I know you've got some thoughts just on uh, kind of the military's role in a lot of domestic activities. Right? So that, that's kind of serving as one exact example. But maybe talk just a little bit about how you see um, soldiers and other military members and kind of their role, uh, both foreign and domestic and kind of how that's evolving or becoming a bigger focus or more important uh, in their kind of day to day operations.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, what I mean, really, it's hard to believe that for me still that that is in the wake of our recent history, that the whole events of, of 6th January. Um, you know, for those who are not familiar with mil, the military, and there will be a few that listen to your podcast. I mean, we enjoy incredible support from the American public and we should never take it for granted. I, I have actually, the older I've gotten, the more sentimental I feel for Vietnam veterans who, who did what their country asked them to do and were treated like crap when they came back home. Our, my generation has never had that experience. We've always had yellow ribbons around trees. Uh, we've always had thank you for your service everywhere you go. Um, as a SOCOM commander, you know, the most rewarding thing I do now in the private

• 49:33Speaker 02

  sector is I'm the chairman for a nonprofit uh, that sends our Gold Star kids, the childrens of our, our surviving, uh, of our fallen warriors, our teammates, uh, to college, full rides. We put 41 into colleges last year. We put 400 so far, 800 to go. But that's all enabled by great American benefactor or uh, you know, benefactors out there who give us the wherewithal to do that. So we, we're very lucky. Now I say that. Acknowledging that I don't think most of America has any idea what we do on a daily basis. They know, they do know that $700 billion is spent on, on our armed forces every year. That's a big, big budget. And, but when you'd start checking down the, the list of what

• 50:14Speaker 02

  that budget buys, you know, aircraft carriers at 13 to 15 billion dollars a pop, F-35s, et cetera, et cetera, nuclear triad that keeps you safe against other nuclear threats. It ain't cheap to, you know, to have this, you know, keep this country safe against all threats. We could do it better. We could do it a lot more efficiently. Uh, there's a lot of waste in our, in our budget, but, um, it is what it is. But in, in that milieu, uh, and in the context of, hey, we've been in combat for the last 20 years and some people wonder why we're still there. Uh, we're, we're about keeping the country safe. We are also, for the unacquainted, a great reflection on the American public. I mean, forced, uh, social experiments, as, as, as they're so-called, have, have occurred in

• 50:58Speaker 02

  the military long before they've ever been manifest in, in, uh, you know, in our society. And you serve, you know, with the, with the, you know, the Pency National Guard there. I mean, we, we serve with people from every walk of life, every, you know, every persuasion and, and whether or not you liked them personally, you got along on Team America and did your job. And, and, and I think we're all better, better, uh, better from that exposure. You know, we were all exposed to people from other places in the United States, other thoughts and, and, uh, and, uh, and everything goes with it. And it's, it's, it's one of the more rewarding things. Um, but we're not a special interest group. And I, and it really annoys me that too many politicians want to leverage the military as a special

• 51:40Speaker 02

  interest group. I mean, I, I don't know how, what your experience was. We never talked politics when I was in the military. It was something, you didn't care. As much like, you know, uh, sexual orientation, you didn't, uh, didn't care. Um, color of your skin? Didn't care. Um, we still had some hangouts. We still have some people that didn't quite get the message, um, and needed to be brought along or moved out of the service. Um, but we all, you know, we all, you know, accepted those, those differences. So we're not a special interest group. Um, that has really come to Play this last year in terms of what what's the military's role in domestic disputes? And you know what for people use charged language like civil war and things like that. And we've had a civil war, you know, do your do your homework, do your, you know, do do some studies here.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  I mean, the thing that almost ripped us apart 140 years ago, 160 years ago, we we lived that, you know, we 180 years, I guess, of public math. Yeah, we've lived that hard. We don't need to relearn that lesson. But where it came to the almost tipping point was, hey, should our military have some role in these domestic disputes? And here's where, again, a very charged discussion, but but something that is absolutely being reinforced in the military is every one of us, whether officer enlisted, swears an oath to the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That's not a personal oath to anybody. That's not even an oath to the flag for all those that want to wrap themselves about.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  That's a that's a commitment to our constitution and to the aspirational goals that were listed in there. And people can disparage the Constitution about being written by a bunch of white slave owners. Yes, it absolutely was. You know, shame on them that they could write a document and not live it at the time. But it was to push us on this arc to be that that shiny beacon on the hill. And, you know, people disparage when I've used that term. I said, hey, that's not something America, I think, sought to be the shiny beacon on the hill. But when I when I have been in dozens and dozens of countries, especially towards the end of my tenure as a as a four star, I can't count the number of times I would sit down with heads of states or heads of defense,

• 53:49Speaker 02

  and they always had some complaint about the United States. There would always be something that, oh, you Americans, you did this wrong, and it usually had something to do with their country, some decision we made or whatever. But in every case universally, and there was not a single exception, the last message they would ask me to take back home to our leadership was, please stay in the lead. Please stay involved because warts and all, your country.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Provides a sanity, a balance to this wacky world out there. And that's not to say, you know, we're the greatest country in the world, or you know, we're, we're, we don't have our own problems. We just demonstrate that, you know, terribly over the last, you know, year or so. But, but the world, sounds pretty onerous here, is kind of depending on us to, to provide some semblance of leadership going forward. And it's, it's something that was part of our, our development, part of this great experiment that we live in. Again, there are a ton of people in the United States that think, I didn't sign up for that. Okay. You need to go, you probably need to go outside us and look back in every once in a while and get, you know, get appreciation for that. My, my best buzz comes from Eastern European countries where a guy my age lived for three

• 54:57Speaker 02

  decades under Soviet oppression. And they are, they are just so jazzed with being liberated, it's not funny. And to touch that buzz, it gives you a buzz of whoa, well, that spark is, is something special and we've, we've forgotten it.

• 55:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Is there any idea that what we can do to kind of just better educate, I think, or inform folks here in the United States who maybe aren't fortunate enough to travel to other parts of the world and kind of see it firsthand? Is it just telling more of these stories? Is it somehow trying to take people from different backgrounds and experiences and get them together so that they can learn from each other? Just any thoughts in terms of how do we almost create more of the empathy and really recognize, I think, some of the advantages that the country has, both from a defense standpoint, but also kind of from a democratic and societal standpoint?

• 55:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of ways it could happen, but people need to be open to the thought. I mean, you know, what if we picked this scab the last year that every one of us came from somewhere else? You know, you weren't a native here, you know, you weren't a native, you know, for the most, than that select few who were natives here.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  And, and can you reflect on that at all? That you all came from somewhere else? In the tech circles, you know, even with the, with the vaccination, you know, the number of, you know, immigrants who were integral to solving that problem, who proudly call themselves Americans now. And again, I, I work with a bunch of folk. Who are either, you know, first generation expats or the sons and daughters of expats. And you get a buzz from them. I mean, that they really appreciate warts and all, you know, what, what, what we're about. And they're actually more offended when we, when we, when we lose that, that direction, that, that, that vector. So those kinds of exposure, but I do think you just, we have to cut through, you know,

• 56:48Speaker 02

  just the visceral opposition to we're not the world's policemen, we're not the world's. You know, I, what was it? What's the sporting guy's commentary? I didn't, I didn't sign out to be a role model. Charles Barkley. I'm not a role model. He's actually a pretty damn good role model these days, you know, so Charles is, is, uh, has evolved over time. But, you know, but there are a lot of people that don't think, hey, that's not, that's not the essence of the United States. I'm, I'm not, we don't have to do that and we don't have to. I just don't like to think of what might happen if we don't.

• 57:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I tend to agree. I want to talk a little bit about your transition out of the military. You're spending much more time in the private sector. You talked a little bit about the, the nonprofit work you're doing, but also you're spending time with Lux Capital and a number of kind of venture backed companies. Maybe just talk a little bit as to, you know, as you were transitioning out, what were you looking to do? Why Lux? And then kind of what you're doing on a day to day basis with them?

• 57:48Speaker 02

  Yet, um, again, I'm blessed by opportunity. So part of our problem in the military and, and I'm, I'm a representative. And it's not a pity party for a retired general officer because, and I know that will come up, is none of us is thinking about life after, for the most part, some of them are, some people come in the military as a springboard to go elsewhere. But a great number of us are thriving in the moment. We're laser focused on what we're doing, our nose is to the grindstone. And then what do you know? It's time to retire. It's time to get out and. Some have thought about it. We don't adequately prepare people to get out. My seminal moment was sitting down in the space of a week with a retiring Colonel and a retiring Sard major

• 58:31Speaker 02

  from SOCOM and realizing that both of them had short-sheathed themselves in terms of transition time. And partly that's on us because we say, "Oh, it's about a two-year process to retire and leave the service," yet we let them work themselves up to the last day. We haven't hired their replacement to force them into that transition mode and give you time. You know, go figure out what you want to do when you grow up. So I entered into that transition kind of the same way of, "Ah, boy, I wonder what I'm going to do when I get out." I absolutely did not want to go work for one of the defense establishment entities, which, interesting, for those who are not acquainted, we're actually precluded. We're put in a two-year timeout, which is a good thing

• 59:14Speaker 02

  as retired general officers, from selling anything back to the Department of Defense. I think that's good. It should apply to other agencies and entities out there, which it doesn't necessarily apply to them, but it puts us in timeout. So that kind of forcefully had me thinking, "What do I want to do besides this?" And then I was presented some opportunities in both venture capital and artificial intelligence, which fascinates me. Again, I'm... You'll be humored. My advantage to speaking with someone like you today, and I get a buzz out of that as much as I get a buzz out of talking to newly liberated guys my age in Eastern Europe, is I have sons your age. So they keep me, what I'd say, tragically hip. But there's a good example. I was testifying

• 59:58Speaker 02

  in front of the Senate Armed Services one day, my last testimony, and a senator asked a softball question about the importance of AI. And do you think it's important and where are we? And I think it's transformational and important, should lead a revolution in how we do things. So I asked my cohort in crime, Paul Nakasone, who's the brilliant CyberCom NSA chief, I said, "Can I answer this question?" And I said, "I'm a huge zealot for AI. I think we're moving way too slowly, and I'm concerned." Well, I wasn't five minutes off the floor. And if you guys ever watch C-SPAN, it's a lot of theater. It's for the...

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  Consuming American public out there, it's not very substantive. The better sessions are in separate offices or private offices. But I was five minutes off the floor of the Senate, and my youngest son, who's mini me, his sarcasm puts me to shame, texts me, and he said, "Hey, Dad, if you're a zealot for AI, I'm Steve Jobs." And because he knows I have difficulty making my phone work. But the point being, you know, it's something that my generation needs to appreciate. We're not digital, you know, we're digital voyeurs. We're not, we're not, you know, brought up in it. And it is the way of the world now. So too many, my disappointment in the private sector,

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  I'm amazed the number of companies I bounce into where seniors, you know, what McAfee and Brinjofson call it the hippo syndrome, the highest paid person's opinion, they're in that corner office, and they give the big hand wave for AI. But it's, please don't make me wrestle with that, because I'll show you how stupid I am with it. You know, I just am not intellectual about that. But that's the point. Get intellectual, get, you know, get to understand it. And too many companies just won't. It's the five-year-out problem. I don't have to deal with it. Somebody else will pick it up on their watch.

• 1:01:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating to hear, you know, your son texts you, right? And it always reminds us that there's more to learn. There's kind of always some other angle. When it comes to the companies that you're helping today through Lux and some of the work there, are there specific things that you try to position yourself in terms of being able to be helpful to the companies? Is it leadership, which obviously you've got a plethora of? Is it kind of defense in some of the mental models and the ways to navigate that space and kind of some of the problem sets? Is it more so from a technology standpoint, capital raising? Just how do you think of yourself, you know, as you interact with founders of these businesses

• 1:02:34Anthony Pompliano?

  in terms of being able to be helpful while also learning from them at the same time?

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, again, I'm very grateful and thankful that I've been hired on in various capacities for some of what you described, you know, strategic insights, leadership, things like that, a hope for that I can keep pace technologically, and that's where I wrestle as hard as I can. I'll sit through some of that. You mentioned Lux. I'll sit through some of the Lux sessions. And, you know, one of my sons is endeavoring to go to med school here, and I'll say, okay, here's the topic for today. And my head hurts so, you know, hard right now, because we have the experts there who, oh, you know, literally have PhDs on the subject. And, you know, I'm

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  not, you know, I'm not. But, but it's just selfishly, it's fascinating that because to, you know, I know, you know, literally, I can't create any more creases in my gray space, but something's making some, some of that RAM is getting ejected and something else is being inserted there to make me think more about the future. But I think the other part too, and I tried it. In fact, I'm more conscientious about this now, unfortunately, than I was during my 40 years. To my point earlier, that a great, great slice of America has no idea about their military. I want to make sure that they can, you know, point to somebody, hey, I know somebody in the military, and they walk and talk just like we do. They have

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  the same, you know, challenges, same different perspective, whatever it might be. But just so that we're not, you know, left in this little cocoon of, I love my military. I can't name one person, you know, other than my distant cousin who served there. So I try and break down that as much as I can as well, to make sure they understand their military, you know, their, their national security challenges as some of these things come to play. So I'm, again, I feel grateful that I have the opportunity to, you know, to participate in that regard. And then the tech part, I mean, it just, the amazing world of technological development right now, to be in a company that is, you know, post-seed, you know, not, you know, not, not too far down the road. Boy, I mean, I look forward to every Monday when we have

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  our sessions where it's, you know, get ready. To scribble and Google a bunch of stuff you've never heard of before. And again, to the, you know, credit to the leadership there. They want to know my opinion and if I don't, and I, one of the, one of the things I provided to, you know, to some leadership sessions. It's okay to say, I don't know. In fact, that's a really powerful statement sometimes and when you're dealing with a wicked problem, I don't know. I don't know. Let's, let's sort, let's sort through this together. I, I encourage people, don't make that your default. You will look like a dumbass eventually. Uh, but I don't know is an okay commentary. And often I will come back, you know, to these discussions, say, whoa, I don't know. About that technology or that team or whatever might, you know, because we look at it from a couple tiered optic.

• 1:05:29Speaker 02

  Uh, but just to be part of that discussion, I mean, it can't help but make you blossom. Um, in terms of the forever learning approach that certainly compels me.

• 1:05:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. You've got a 40 years or so of, of great leadership experience in one of the, the organizations in the world that's known for a great leadership. You've probably been to, uh, more leadership schools, training and real world experiences than, than most could ever dream of. Uh, when you sit down with a CEO, a founder, what are some of the lessons that you really try to kind of hammer home on the leadership front? Whether they're actual kind of tactics and techniques, or just more so kind of philosophical mantras. Uh, that you think are important for, uh, for founders of organizations and leaders of those organizations to kind of embody and, and take away from the conversation.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  You know, I, I am absolutely guilty of, uh, late life development for actually having sat down to acknowledge. Uh, the extraordinary leadership experience that I've had. I mean, I, um, if anything, early on I kept book, unofficial book. On what not to do. I'm not going to do that. That's a terrible example. Not going to do. So you made that mental check. To reinforce the good life, because that, that was the aberration. Those were the one offs. But they were, they're out there. I mean, and, and I think there's some good, uh, learning involved with that. But it wasn't until much later in life that I just had that dumb moment of, man. I, I need to sit down and, and put my thoughts together, my experiences together, my insights gained from other people, you know, no, no credit to myself.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  And whether it's, you know, it's, there's a whole compendium of leadership perspectives that I've put together. I don't know what I'm going to do with it someday. And I often share them liberally with, with audiences when they're asked, they ask me to speak about leadership. But two, so one thing I offer to folks is especially senior folks, have you sat down and reflected on leadership? What you, you know, there's, there's tomes written about it. What's your personal experience? What's really resonated with you? It's normally the same sort of things that the Simon Sinek's of the world will trot out that are, yep, that's, that's intuitive, but he at least took the time to write them down and present them back to us. But the two areas that I think are intuitive that, that get too

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  much of a hand wave. And one is, you know, and the mantra I use to try, because I am terrible, I mean, this was a shortcoming for me, that I thought I knew the answer before the discussion even started, or, or I didn't need to wade through some discussion is, and I forget who imparted to me, but are you listening? Or are you just waiting to talk? And I try and let that little mantra play on my shoulder all the time that, oh, hang in there, there, there, there's something here, you know, just, let's just hold on. You don't have every answer, otherwise you wouldn't be here. And the other one that I hear too often is the need for caring leadership. But, but my point, and it offered to people that if you don't, if you don't know your people, you can't care for them.

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  And the best example that was trotted out to me, and I think it was Michelle Flournoy, when she was speaking when I was working at the CIA, she mentioned that in one of her introductory counseling sessions for a company, and I think this was played to her, but it could have been something that she experienced with somebody else. But as the typical, you know, senior subordinate, whatever relationship you want to think of here, as they did the initial counseling, it's often really perfunctory of, hey, pump, what's, you know, what's important to you? You know, okay, good, get, get out there and you'll get him, killer. And in this case, the individual said, What's important to you, but I'm going to ask you, I want, I want to hear something substantive.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  I want to know the weekly activity that come hell or high water, you want to attend outside of work. That's important to you. And in this case, it was your son's baseball game, daughter's soccer, whatever it might have been, you know, piano lesson, whatever. Boy, you know, I, I, I'm really proud of the way my kids develop in this regard, or my, here's my personal thing that I'd like to do. And that was the contract right from the beginning, from that boss to that individual of, okay, good. Tuesday, when you say that happens Tuesday at, at seven, five o'clock in the afternoon, that's sacred. You never have to come ask me about that. That's on the calendar for you to be there. Now, you're, I'm going to, I'm going to work you to death. We're, we're busy as hell, but you've got that squared away. And by the way, if there's other important stuff like that, it's on, you, you need to tell me, don't, don't let that, you know, sit on you.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  But to me, it kind of cracked through that veneer of, oh, caring leadership and knowing your people. You, you gotta know them. You, you literally, uh, the one I've, I've trotted out, um, and it much, what I appreciate what you do, you know, in Twitter and other people. Is you make us think, but the one experience that I tried out that was really, I mean, I just changed the way I see things. Is, uh, at one point in time, I asked my guys, I was a big fan of Anthony Bourdain. And I asked my guys, uh, I think I was, when I was a JSOC commander, I could never make it happen. But I said, hey, guys, he is everywhere I want to be and he, and I can't go. He's in Libya at the, after the fall of Al Mar. He's in Iran, you know, hanging around in Tehran. I can't go there. He's, you picked a place.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  And I said, I'd look, see if Bourdain will meet with me, just whimsically, see if Bourdain will meet with me. Well, I didn't realize that Bourdain is a student of Vietnam or was a student of Vietnam. You, you, the great episode is when he meets Obama in downtown Hanoi, which is to me, oh, I mean, powerful.

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  And so he agreed to meet with me at a restaurant up off Columbus Circle in New York. And we had three hours of rolling conversation. I joked, we both spoke Jersey, although he would summer over in Paris or France. I didn't summer over in Paris. My family wasn't of that, you know, that kind of altitude, but, um, but we, it was a rambling conversation all over the map. And I, and I walked away thinking, man, this guy's got it together more than I thought he had it on TV. And what I liked about him is he made you think. You didn't have to agree with everything he said, but he made you think. Well, as we all know, Anthony Bourdain killed himself about two months later. And what struck me at the time is, again, back to this caring leadership, is everyone, I actually wrote up, wrote up a description on Facebook of the meandering

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  conversation we had. Um, but at the end, what someone had imparted to me in the wake of that was, hey, every one of us is wrestling with a demon that nobody else knows about. And my point being, and I, we, my sergeant major and I were adamant about this with our, with our guys, especially as we dealt with tough subjects like suicide, et cetera, that everybody you meet and touch every day is struggling with something. Not, I don't care how happy they are. Every person you know has a challenge they're dealing with. How do we relate that to each other? Or do we just continue the rat race of, you know, daily existence until you wonder, whoa, Johnny just did something, or Jane went sideways. And almost invariably, we could see that coming,

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  but nobody took a time out and said, how you doing? Or, or, you know, where can we help you? Where can we, you know, alleviate your burden here? So it's, it's, to me, it's, that's the aspect of leadership that, that is underemphasized, that you, you can play a pivotal role if you're inclined to.

• 1:12:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think it's fantastic. And it really is the difference between kind of the academic exercise of leadership, right? Uh, of kind of, hey, I'm in charge, or I'm gonna influence you to do something. Uh, but once you actually kind of put it into practice and understand that, uh, it's not as easy as maybe the books say. Uh, there's a lot of good principles in there, but you still have to understand people. And, uh, we started off the conversation with, uh, you know, some of the best technology on the battlefield is people. Uh, same thing here in terms of, uh, leadership. Before we wrap up, I always ask everybody the same three questions and I'm really looking forward to your answers because I think you're gonna have a unique perspective. You're one of probably the most well-read people that I know. What is the most important book that you've ever read?

• 1:13:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Whether it's importance in terms of just changing your worldview or informing it, or just personal impact on you. When you hear what's the most important book, what comes to mind?

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  Geez, I mean, I've got my, my library is right over next to me and I, and I continually have people throw things at me that are, you know, one better than the last thing I read. You know, one of the guys I worked through before, and I don't know why I missed it, but send me Shackleton's Endurance, which to me is just incredibly inspirational.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  I mean, it's, I, I have a hard time saying a specific one. My, my assortment is everything from AI superpowers like war, the sunset machine, burn in, speed of trust, great by choice, you know, all these things that I've, and here's what's bad. I think you've mentioned before others. I, I write in the margins of every one of these books, you know, because they all, they all resonate with me. And I hardly ever go back or have the time to go back and, and look at those. So I'm now going back through some of the books to pull up some of my margin notes and dumping them into whatever I might produce someday to say, ooh, God, there's, there's just so much information out there. But I, I'm laughing at you. You've described me as one of the better read. I am, I always feel

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  that I'm one of the less, you know, I'm more, more literate people of, of the, of the folks, especially that I'm dealing with now in the private sector. They're all, they're all, you know, very well-read.

• 1:14:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I think you're doing just fine. The next question is, is brought to our friends by

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  One that I would recommend especially these days and time, and I don't think I got up here is April nineteen, nineteen forty-five, and it talks about how Lincoln holds the country together right at that critical moment of civil war. He's got a bunch of generals that want to drive a stake into the heart of the Confederacy. And he's lit, think of this, and the guy's gonna get assassinated unfortunately a couple of months later. He's literally holding the generals in to say, whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't want it to go to A guerrilla war, you know, if we drive it too hard, you know, you'll have some places you'll be fighting forever. We want to bring them back together. But you think of that, you think of Lincoln's second inaugural, when you walk through the Lincoln Memorial. I mean, what an incredible leader, you know, just so it's just too many, too many books,

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  whether it's history or other things out there that resonate with me.

• 1:15:31Anthony Pompliano?

  I love that answer. Sleep. If you are the four star general in charge of Special Operations Command, I'm assuming you're not sleeping a ton. Maybe now you're getting a little bit more sleep, but our friends over at Eight Sleep, they've got this thermo regulation bed that I've been sleeping on. And I'm now, I say convert to the sleep religion, right of I realize how important it is. What's your sleep schedule today? And then how has that changed over the years?

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  It's much better now, although I have two colleagues that are my alarm clock too early in the morning, every morning, whenever they hear the trash throw out there, that's when they start woofing doing Timmy's in the well routine. So it's much better now. Unfortunately, I grew up, and I'm sure you had that experience in your service time, where the mantra was, hey, you can sleep, you sleep when you die, you know, three hours, four hours is good enough. And back to kind of the AI piece, think of the number of boneheaded decisions you're making when you're on the ragged edge of, you know, what you really need, what your, what your body needs. And I've seen people function on little no no sleep, but you got to wonder the longer term effects. So it's better, it could be, could

• 1:16:37Speaker 02

  be much better. I'm a night owl, and I, I have a tendency to stay up to midnight or beyond almost every night, only because that's when I do some of my better thinking or reflecting. And I'm trying to curb that back in to force myself to go to bed and, and jumpstart the morning because I'm not, I'm not a morning person.

• 1:16:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. My last question for you, and then you'll get to ask me a question to finish up. We talked a little bit about Space Force and some of what I would consider the very practical kind of challenges that we face. But on the topic of aliens, are you a believer in aliens or a non believer?

• 1:17:13Speaker 02

  I don't think, and I'm fascinated by these discussions, which literally has Department of Defense attribution dripping from them, you know, pilots and whatnot. I, I'm a show me the money kind of guy for anything that has happened here on Mother Earth. Because I, you know, I think that, one, we can't keep a secret. We can't, I mean, I lived the Osama bin Laden piece where we actually did keep a secret up through execution, and then it went to a movie right away, right? So I don't believe that we're capable of keeping a secret. And so if there was a there there, you know, we'd all, we'd be a little bit more conversant on it. Do I think there's something out there? Absolutely. I mean,

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  I think, you know, whether we're the, you know, the fingernail in the big scheme of things, I don't know. But that's, and that's why I'm jazzed by the thought of space exploration, and just, you know, seeing what's out there. But I don't know. I don't know what's out in the cosmos, and I'm like everybody else, I'm interested in finding out.

• 1:18:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I feel the same way. It's probably somewhere out there. I don't think anything's happened on Earth. I'm gonna cheat, I'm gonna ask you one more question, because you brought it up. What were you doing in terms of military position for the whole Osama bin Laden raid?

• 1:18:29Speaker 02

  I was McRaven's number two. So if you read his book, he even tells you that the humorous part was, and I give President Obama absolute props for making a tough decision when half the room was telling him, just bomb it, just bomb it, and we'll see what happens. And because he listened to McRaven, because he listened to Panetta, he decided, that's not sufficient. We're gonna do this thing, we're gonna confirm or deny that he's there, and we're gonna have that moment, if he is there, we will at least, you know, realize that we dealt with some unfinished business. Although, I'll point out there, but hey, that was one man. There was a network, there's still a network out there. And so to get caught up in one person is, is typically US. We always have public enemy number one, whether it's Noriega or

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  Saddam, or UBL, or whatever. But I was his, I was his number two. The funny part, and he describes it in the book, was he kept that very secret. I was his deputy, I was his number two. I found out a month and a half before we executed that he had been planning this for several months with two other people and with Panet, you know, so working with Langley. And that's when I got read on, but he didn't have the green light. He didn't have permission yet. So a week out, he said, hey, you, me, you go over, do the final rehearsal. I've been part of the previous rehearsals. Go to the final rehearsal. You may actually have to command it over there because I still have to brief the president unless he says,

• 1:19:57Speaker 02

  go and with enough time for me to get over there, you got it. But it says a lot about Bill McRaven that he had no problem saying, you know, here, one of the bigger things we're gonna do lately, I may have to hand it to you. He got the green light in sufficient time that he came smoking across, took over the main command and control. I was his backup. And then I joke with him that he went back to all the victory parades. I stayed over there in Afghanistan for another month and a half and doing my duty and then came home to my wife who was pissed off that I hadn't told her about it and others, but pissed off in a humorous way that you kept a secret, you know, you didn't tell me.

• 1:20:34Anthony Pompliano?

  So when all this is going on, you know, for those who've watched many of the movies, read the books, basically there was an incredible amount of obviously planning that went on. There was literally the recreation of some of the physical structures, both I think in the United States and overseas and kind of preparation. What exactly is going through your head when they get on the two helicopters and they're gonna go fly into, you know, what could be, you know, a pretty combative airspace and kind of go execute what, you know, at least in terms of headlines is probably one of the most notorious raids in, you know, recent American history. Is it excitement? Is it fear? Is it, we better not screw this up? I mean, just kind of what's going through your head?

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  But I think McCraven describes it. We did, I think, 12 or 13 other missions that night, not in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, and at least half of them were much more harrowing or difficult. That's the kind of level of operational tempo that we've lived for a long time of, you know, things that used to take months in preparation for a one-night special, we were routinely doing. That one, you know, the hardest part, and McCraven talks about in the book, was the potential that the force might get stuck in a bad a bad, ironically, if helicopters, you know, had mishaps. And as you might imagine,

• 1:21:58Speaker 02

  we had a plan for that, and it worked for us. But the discussion on that was all over the map in terms of, would we actually, you know, hunker down? Would we surrender to Pakistani forces? You know, what would we do? And that would have been, that would have been a pretty anxious moment. But luckily, again, we planned through some of those contingencies, and we were able to avoid it.

• 1:22:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, you guys did a fantastic job. So we appreciate it. We've got five minutes. And you alluded on Twitter that you want to ask me questions, which scares the hell out of me. But what question do you have for me?

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  Well, you, again, in my effort to be tragically hip, you've certainly made me think a lot about Bitcoin, about, you know, digital currency, et cetera. My son, my oldest son, has played a key role there as well. And as you might imagine, a good number of the discussions came back to, not to challenge you so much on that. And I think the good news is you've caused people, you know, I'm looking at Michael Saylor and Chamath every day. Guys, I know I do, they were before, just to gain more and more insights into, okay, what is this phenomenon? There's still a hell of a lot of speculation involved, but, you know, so has every, you know, huge new trend had, you know, those sort of considerations.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  But, so the practical question came back is, and I think you've answered that you think that we'll still stay based in a gold and, and digital currency kind of basis. But with the emphasis you put on Bitcoin, how do we safeguard that, other than its inherent... You know, trust system, you know, if it if it migrates to where you want it to be as part of our both our institutional and our DOD and national security approach to, you know, currency management going forward.

• 1:23:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think one of the key pieces to it is, yeah, there's the obviously the technical kind of system, right? And it's got more computing power pointed towards it than any other computer network. It's, you know, in some measurements, the most secure computing network in the world. It's decentralized, kind of all the things that I think I'd kind of label is just like the headline comments about the actual technical infrastructure. One of the key pieces that I spend more time thinking about today and started to talk about more publicly is just this idea that when you have an open decentralized protocol, you can't prevent somebody from using it, right? What I mean by that is not so much your own citizens, or you can make something illegal, you can enforce on, you know, certain people, but on a global scale, that means that other countries are going to use it,

• 1:24:32Anthony Pompliano?

  right? And so what is the reaction to that, right? And if you kind of look at the Internet as an open decentralized protocol, one reaction is countries that you, you know, mentioned as threats, China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, et cetera. If they use the Internet, that could potentially be a negative outcome for the United States. And so we can either, one, say, hey, as the United States, we're going to opt out, we're not going to use this open decentralized protocol. Or two is we can say, no, actually, we're going to use it too, but we're just going to make sure that we use it better, right? And kind of further our position of leadership on on kind of that global landscape. And so I think that Bitcoin is actually somewhat similar in the sense of it's this open decentralized protocol that other countries are going to use, right? And so the first reaction when

• 1:25:14Anthony Pompliano?

  people hear that is like, well, let's not use it ourselves, or use for terroristic financing, or money laundering, or whatever it is. But I actually think that the reaction that we had to the Internet, and we had a hand in creating it, obviously, so that helped. But same thing here is we should embrace it, and we should say, well, anyone's going to benefit from this. Let's make sure we're the biggest beneficiary, right? Let's make sure that we kind of further our position. And so when it comes to kind of the geopolitical stuff, I think that's actually where there's probably less work that's been done so far. And kind of less maybe consensus around kind of how the situation plays out and what the outcome is. From a technical standpoint, I think that there's always the concern around quantum computing or some sort of kind of leap forward in a technical capacity.

• 1:25:58Anthony Pompliano?

  But also, you know, you, as many others listen will know is like, just as much as the nefarious or malicious technology can improve. So there does the defense technology as well, right? It's kind of this constant cat and mouse game. So. Yes, there are improvements in terms of the offensive technology, but there's also simultaneous improvements defensively. And I think that. With Bitcoin specifically, there's the the technical advantage it has in terms of it's so far ahead by being the strongest computing network. That it would take quite a bit of technological innovation to be able to attack it without there being any sort of improvement in the defensibility of the network. So I see that as kind of unlikely, but even if it then happened, then you get into this world of like, well, if you have the technical capabilities to attack the Bitcoin network.

• 1:26:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that really the thing you would attack? Right? You almost get to the point of like, well, if you attack and violate the Bitcoin network, then you kind of erase all of the value. The whole value is that it's decentralized. It's the strong computing network. And so would you be better off attacking an electrical grid or a, you know, banking system or some other kind of apparatus? And so I, I just think that it's a somewhat of a foregone conclusion that this open decentralized protocol will persist globally. There's tons of questions around, you know, who adopts it, how, what's the impact of that kind of stuff? But I kind of throw my hands up at some point and just say, look, that's how a market gets made, right? And people are literally going to essentially wager hundreds of billions at some point in the future, trillions of dollars on those outcomes. And we'll kind of see what happens.

• 1:27:29Speaker 02

  I was gonna ask you a follow up, but I think you addressed it there. I was exposed to an interesting theory recently that. That we, the US, the Western world should be very concerned with the amount of mining and computational power that the Chinese are. Are addressing this phenomenon with from a, from a state sponsored standpoint. But I think your, my takeaway from what you just explained. is if you're not going to compete, you won't, you know, you won't flat out. And so advantage them. Whereas if you acknowledge, yep, a lot of, lot of effort. And the rest of that theory was that they're mining and producing that get US dollars in to pay for, pay for things, which again, fascinating theory. Anybody want to challenge this? Anyone want to get?

• 1:28:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Here's what I, here's what I say is if every time, you know, another country got an advantage on us, if we just threw our hands up and said, oh, they're going to win, you know, uh, let's not play, then we probably wouldn't be the United States of America, right? So I think that, uh, we definitely like to stack the deck in our favor. Uh, we definitely like to ensure that we're going to win. Uh, but, but sometimes it does take competition. And so I don't think that we should, uh, we should shy away from it. So.

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  And I probably should put a wrapper because I'm, I'm looking forward to, you and I were talking earlier about all the negative things that will come out of it, the social media thing. I don't see China as this terrible boogeyman. I do hope that people acknowledge that this again is an ideological issue. Um, their thoughts on human rights and human values relative to ours. And it really, you know, boils down to what kind of world do you want to live in? And you can cherry pick the Uyghur experience or whatever it might be. Uh, and, and other Chinese approaches to, uh, dealing with human beings. And you could also just, you know, disparage as they are right now, our Western ways of, of dealing with the human experience. But

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  you know, you're, we're going to have this, you know, this, this clash of ideologies in the form of economic, military, diplomatic, informational, uh, you know, nuances that, that I don't think we're ready for yet. I think we're getting there, but um, it, it, it's, it is a compelling issue short of a threat, if you want to accept as a threat, that's going, that's going to crop up here in the very near future.

• 1:29:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that is very well said. Listen, General, I really appreciate the time that you've taken today to kind of go through this. I think people are going to learn a ton from it. Where can we send people to find you on the Internet, hopefully for all of their positive feedback and great questions? But where do you want to send people to find you?

• 1:30:05Speaker 02

  God help me, I'm on Twitter. Although, what's funny is I can't get one of those blue checkmarks. So I've had people come back to me saying, "Why the hell are you operating without one of those?" You know, Twitter put an end on the qualifications for that. So if you have inroads with Dorsey, tell them that, you know, there's a plaque there. But I'm open and available on Twitter. And then people have ways of finding me otherwise. I'm going to give away my email address or things like that. I'm up on LinkedIn for more, I hope, more

• 1:30:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't give away the email. Just stick to Twitter and LinkedIn.

• 1:30:41Speaker 02

  But, and I'm all about it. So I'm, to your point, in the forever learning mode, I am wide open to constructive criticism. So there were already some precursors when you said you were interviewing me today of, you know, that show people's bias, and I get it. But I'll probably, I will turn them off more than likely. But if it's constructive, it'll make me think. And that's, I'm all about that.

• 1:31:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I really appreciate that view in the world. So thank you so much for doing this. We'll have to do it again in the future.

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  Thank you. Continued success out there. Keep making us think.