Julian Dorey Podcast - [VIDEO] - Deadly Military Ambush, Iraqi IEDs, & Navy SEAL Tragedy | Anthony Pompliano • 199

Episode Date: April 20, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Anthony Pompliano is an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran, venture capitalist, YouTuber, writer & investor. EPISODE LINKS: - BUY Guest’s Books & Films IN MY AMAZON STORE: https://amzn.to/3RPu952  - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://juliandorey.myshopify.com/  - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/pcVHhsVa  POMP LINKS: - TWITTER: https://x.com/apompliano?s=21&t=5fXT2gjxOw5SVv4h7J1URA  - INSTAGRAM: ​​https://www.instagram.com/pompglobal/?hl=en  - YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@AnthonyPompliano  - SUBSTACK: https://pomp.substack.com/  JULIAN YT CHANNELS: - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips  - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily  - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - How Julian & Pomp met; Pomp’s reason for joining military 13:56 - How Pomp handled joining military & going to college; Sepp 0110 & Pat Tillman 26:27 - Brutal military training 34:46 - Pomp gets deployed to Iraq; Landing in Green Zone; Military engagement controversy 44:43 - Nightime recon looking for IEDs and Bombs; Husky Vehicles & tourniquets 56:35 - IED explosion story; Ambush 1:06:25 - Pomp’s thoughts on Iraq War; America’s problem 1:15:19 - Iraqi attitudes on Iraq war & America 1:25:55 - Military recruiting down 1:31:26 - Legendary NAVY Seal & Silver Star recipient Mike Day’s story 1:40:04 - Anger towards US 1:51:44 - The New Era of Creative Taxes 2:03:17 - Desire to be rich & trade-offs 2:07:35 - Story of Pomp’s 2 companies before joining Facebook 2:18:54 - Pomp joins Facebook’s growth team; Making Facebook $700 million overnight 2:27:54 - Facebook’s Good Will Program; Pomp’s quick and nasty time at Snapchat 2:37:52 - How Pomp discovered Bitcoin; Bitcoin’s role in the future of currency 2:52:34 - Bitcoin adoption compared to the dollar; “We are a gambling society” 2:59:54 - Pomp’s correlation theory between the Mafia & the fall of America 3:10:48 - The importance of Pomp telling his story CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edited by Alessi Allaman ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 199 - Anthony Pompliano Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A bunch of guys get out of the vehicles, they walk down, and they're trying to find it. Because remember, the vehicles have a hard time getting down there. They get online, and as they get online, they start to walk through a field. And it's a wide open field with trees at the end. And they walk into an ambush. And so basically, as they're online walking through the ambush, all of a sudden somebody starts shooting at them. And they all hit the ground, jump back up, return fire. At some point, one of the guys doesn't get back up.

This guy named Sergeant Baum, he's part of the QRF force, and... What's up, guys? If you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. New York Pops looking like a million bucks these days. I'm used to the hoodie.

Like, what happened here? I can't disrespect you if I'm going to wear the suit and tie on CNBC. Then I got to come. If I'm coming on the most popular podcast in the world, I got to have the suit and tie here too, right? Well, you know what? You look good. You're one of the best top five all-time dressed on the podcast already. It's a good start. Does somebody wear a tuxedo?

Have we had a tuxedo? No. We haven't had a tuxedo, right? Johnny Russo. Oh, Johnny Russo came in here decked out what he wear i'll put that on the screen i mean he was he was iced out you know his his necklace i can't compete with that that was the chest was open guys like 83 years old he came in here he came in here with a with a with a gold skull cane and he doesn't need a cane but he just likes having something he has yeah he has a

gold skull sometimes they won't let you walk around town with a baseball bat so you have a cane just in case that's right you know you turn around you have someone on better than brass knuckles or something that's right that's right but actually before we begin i want to make sure i say this on the record you and i have known each other for around five and a half years. Okay. And we connected because my friends who were older than me in college were your friends who were younger than you in college. So we never overlapped, but I had heard about you through them. And, you know, one of the things I like is when people come up and do great things like you've done and also get a lot of attention and, you know,

to a degree, certainly have fame in what you do as who they are off camera and who they are as a person is very, very important to me. And when I was, you know, a young kid right out of college and got connected to you and went in to meet with you, I had nothing to offer. I remember coming in that day, December 2018, and you gave me an hour out of the middle of a Monday to sit with me and answer all my questions for no value to you. And I always appreciated that a lot. And then you checked on me when I, when I started doing this podcast, again, no kind of game to you, but I just think that's really cool when people do that, especially like when you don't necessarily have anything yet. So I appreciate that from, from all those times. And I hope people know that's, especially like when you don't necessarily have anything yet. So I appreciate that from, from all those times. And I hope people know that's, that's what you're like

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

to as many people as possible and kind of expose yourself to all those different perspectives is really important. And then, you know, I always say to people that when I was younger, I used to ask people all the time for help or get meetings and like do all this stuff. And I could name exactly who helped me along the way. I remember every single one of those people. And a lot of times they didn't realize they were helping me, Right. They thought that they were actually meeting because there was something in it for them or something. Right. And so there is this element of like, you want to pay it forward. Now there's also kind of a filter. You don't want to spend time with people who are going to waste your time, right. Or people who aren't serious or don't have something

they're trying to accomplish. And so it's usually either there's somebody you know that in common that's kind of vouched for this person. There's some experience they have that you wanna gain some sort of insight from. Or it could be, you know, this person comes from a world I don't know anyone in, I don't understand it at all. And I don't even know if they're successful in that world or not, but I wanna use them as my first kind of toe dip

to understand, is that something I should go learn more about? So sometimes I'll meet with people who I have no connection to, don't know anything about them, but they happen to be in a sector that I've heard other people talk about or something. And it's like, all right, well, let me see kind of what this is about. And time is very expensive to spend. But at the same time, if you can learn one insight. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered.

Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. I can completely change your life. And so it's worth it. Well, it makes sense because you're such a well-rounded guy. You have a lot of knowledge around a lot of things. I know you read like crazy, which is awesome. But, you know, that also goes to show like I constantly see you connecting in all different circles and learning from people. But at the beginning of all of it, you, as basically a kid, I don't even think you were 18 yet. You went to serve the country and you were in the army for how long was that?

You were in six and a half years, six and a half years. And you were over in Iraq for a year, year and a half, something like that. Yeah. What made you want to do that? I did like the watered down version of, of the army. So when I was in high school, I think it was a combination between, I knew I was going to go play football somewhere in college. I was a pretty horrible student, but probably not because I couldn't have done the work when there was a class that I was interested in. I did pretty well in it, but for the most part, I just was like, this is all stupid. Literally 95% of this, I'm not going to need in life. They're basically just teaching us things to try to get us to pass some test. I don't care about the test. I don't care about the credential.

I don't care about like the end result. And so when you're a teenage boy and you've already kind of figured out that what is supposed to take up, you know, 70% of your day is not, is meaningless. Essentially. You got a lot of free time. You got a lot of time to think about a lot of stuff. Right. And so where it comes out is like, you're always scheming to like, get out of class, get out of school, figure out things to do after school, figure out what parties you're going to go to on the weekend, do all that kind of stuff, but also figure out like, how do you make money? Right. And every every kid i think kind of always has some element of like they want to be able to do the things that they want to be able to do and when you're in

high school like go to the movie theater right it's nothing crazy but like that 20 to go to the movie theater is a huge deal and so i just remember spending a lot of time doing things that almost were like real world applicable when I was supposed to be paying attention in school. And so teachers took that as like, this kid doesn't care. He's really poorly behaved, et cetera. And I bet you, if you went back to high school and you asked some of those teachers, it's like the classic story. They're like, this dude ends up in jail or super successful, but like there's no in between, right? It's not like, he's not going to follow the traditional path. He's a smart ass. He like doesn't care about this stuff and so when you what did your dad do like what did you have

an example that you were looking up to with that but both my parents worked their asses off like if there's one thing my parents taught me it was that right it's just like you always have to work hard um and so uh when you see kind of that as the example the other thing that my parents would do is if i wanted 20 to go to the movie theater I remember times where my dad would be like – he would just look around and be like, go rake the leaves and I'll give you $20. And so it was like teaching you – again, no matter how stupid the thing was, it was very much like if you do something, you can earn money. Like you're getting paid for it. That's right. And so as kids, I mean, we did everything. I remember it would snow when we were in high school.

And I've got four brothers. There's five of us, which essentially is like a company. Yeah. Like some people are like, we have a basketball team. We're like, nah, we don't need five people to beat people in basketball. But like, yeah, we got like a mini company. And so. Five pomp brothers.

That's crowded, man. It would snow. And we would like race around the neighborhood. And I remember that most kids would go to one house and be like, hey, can we shovel your driveway? And where we lived, the driveways were – they weren't super long. They were like a mile long, but they definitely weren't kind of these short little driveways. And it was like a very wooded area. And so most people would be like, oh, I'll just shovel 100 percent of the driveway.

So our first thing was like, well, oh, I'll just shovel 100% of the driveway. So our first thing was like, well, why don't we just shovel tracks? Like the whole point of this is for you just to get out of your driveway. Who cares about the sides of the driveway? Like efficiency. Yeah. Like let's just do that. It's way faster. And then we realized, well, while we're doing this, like other people are getting these other houses. So then what we would do is we would like run around the neighborhood and be like, hey, agree. Like let's enter into a verbal contract that we're the ones who get to do your driveway. We'll be back in a couple of hours to do it because we've got to go do like the first three first. Right. But we would like essentially try to like build a monopoly.

And so like you're doing all these things. And again, you're talking about small dollars, but it's very helpful. Right. And so because I knew I was going to go play football in college um i got to my senior year and frankly i i didn't know what i was gonna do but i knew that i didn't want to continue going to high school and i knew that i was not in a situation where i was gonna like drop out of high school it was i'm going to try to make a move that is unconventional because I see a bright future for myself and I have aspirations and ambition. And so what can I do? And so going into my senior year, I, my dad had really helped go and talk to the leadership of the school and say, look, basically like you guys probably will enjoy not having my kid here for a full year. He's just like bullshitting around, right?

He doesn't want to be here. He's going play football in college all this stuff why don't we let him graduate a semester early and i had read about kids who would do this they would graduate in their uh december of their senior year and then they would enroll for spring football in college so they would so actually they're going to college early right one way is like oh you're trying to get out of school another way to describe it is like wow they graduated in three and a half years from high school and they're going to go to college. And so, yeah, so smart. Right. And the reason why they would do this, they want to go through spring football practice and then you could take some of the college classes. So when fall came around, you didn't have as big of an academic workload. You'd kind of eased your way

into college. You had already spent time with the football team, all these components. And so that was one option. A second option was I was thinking about doing what they call a PG year, postgraduate year, where I could go to one of these kind of like boarding schools, essentially. And you go in between your senior year of high school and your freshman year of college, and you go to those schools. And basically, it's a football factory, right? You go there for a year, you get stronger, you get faster. Academics, eh, you know. Do the bare minimum, right? You go there for a year, you get stronger, you get faster academics, you know, do the bare minimum, right? And then basically then you try to go play. And so I had decided, Hey, I'm going to graduate early. And so going into that senior year over the summer before I

had to go to school, I had to do extra classwork. So imagine the like kind of oxymoron of like the class clown who doesn't care about school. The summer between his junior and senior year is going to the school when everyone else is home on summer break, doing extra schoolwork so that he could leave early. Right. So it's very unconventional, but it allowed me to leave in December. And so most people would say that sounds insane. Why would you leave high school right when it gets good? Right? Your second semester, senior year. It's such a good time, man. I didn't go to graduation. I didn't go to prom. I didn't do any of that stuff. I was out, right? And what ended up happening is I want to go to Duke University. And coaches were incredibly kind. They said, hey, man, you're like on the bubble. See, you're still, even though you're fucking around a little bit,

you're still getting pretty good grades to be looking at places like this. I basically knew that as long as you got like Bs and you could sprinkle in a C or two, you're good, right? Like there's a sliding scale in college football. The faster you run, the worse your grades can be. Yes, that is true. And so like, I wasn't fast enough to have D's and F's, but I also wasn't slow enough where I had to have

straight A's, right? This is kind of the way I think about it. And so I really wanted to go there, but I wasn't good enough to get a scholarship. And so it was like, they're like, Hey, we got like one hanging around, maybe we'll get it for you. And so signing days in February. So like December comes, it's like, yo, you got to decide. Are you coming back in January or not? So I gambled. I said, I'm not coming back. I'm committed to this.

And so February comes. Hey, we don't have any extra scholarships left. If you want, you can walk on. Okay. What else could I do? And so there's a couple other schools, Davidson, Brown, et cetera, that I was looking at. They're all kind of like academically kind of high end. And I was definitely trying to use sports to get into these schools.

And I knew that I was not going to go play in the NFL. Like that was never – I was never confused by that. You weren't the next Julian Edelman? No. It was just like this was my ticket to the next step in the game, right? And so through a long-inflated thing, basically somebody's like, well, what about Bucknell University? And I don't even know anything about Bucknell University. Where is that?

And they're like, it's in Pennsylvania. Awesome. And we basically took a tape. We sent it to them. Did a couple phone calls. I think they kind of like, who the hell is this kid? He wasn't on our radar. I'm like, well, you weren't on my radar either.

Who was the coach then? That was before Susan, right? Tim Landis. Tim Landis. Tim Landis, yeah. And so long story short is I decided I'm going to go to Bucknell University. So while I was graduated until I decided where I'm going to go to school to play football, I got a lot of free time again.

And now I don't have free time sitting in the classroom. I got like real free time. So I'm like, well, this is not going to be good. Not only do I have free time, but I'm like free to roam. I got a car, right? I'm like, I could roll around. What number of brother are you, by the way? The oldest. You're the oldest. Yeah. So also I got four brothers who are like, yo, you got a car, you're not in school. What are you doing this afternoon type thing right so i ended up getting a job first uh i went i got a job at quiznos and um it was a job i think character building baby i got

seven dollars and 25 cents an hour yes and uh i loved it because i got free lunch i was like this is cake they're gonna pay me to go here they're gonna give me free I'm a genius, right? I'm making more money than all my friends in high school. Look at these fools sitting in the classroom. And so I started working there. And within a couple of weeks of working there, I knew this was not going to be a place that I should get boxed into because a guy showed up who was working there. He wasn't the manager. He was like the assistant manager. And he had a big, like, wrap on his hand. Like he had an injury. Oh. And I remember just being like, sup?

Like, what happened to you? And he said, my girlfriend stabbed me last night. And I was like, ooh. I watch a lot of cops, like, you know, on TV. This is like, got it. you're supposed to be one of the leaders here like okay uh quizno's great place i actually learned quite a bit because you got an interface with customers do all this stuff right but definitely not the place that i like i'm not gonna build a career yeah it wasn't an end plan so uh i was working five days a week

uh again a lot of free time um and you know at this time, we had all just gotten cell phones. And I think I got a cell phone when I was a sophomore in high school. Maybe some of my other friends got them when they were freshmen. So we could communicate, and they're sitting in class board, and I'm making sandwiches on board. And so I was like, all right, I got to figure something out. And this was a little bit further away from my house. And so I applied for a second job.

So I got a job at Chick-fil-A. Soa so i got two jobs i see the theme here yeah so i'm like i got experience i know how to serve customers make food do whatever you need right um and so i get a job at uh chick-fil-a and chick-fil-a paid seven dollars and 75 cents an hour i think they were high rollers so i'm getting paid more to work at chick-fil-A. But the difference was Chick-fil-A was like a corporation. Chick-fil-A, they were on it. There was nobody showing up with bandages on their hands. There was uniforms. There was on time. I mean, it was a system, right? And so very much, I think back to that experience and I found myself scheduling more time at Quiznos, even though it was further away, even though it paid less because I enjoyed the freedom of being able to do certain things versus at Chick-fil-A, I was just a cog in the wheel. And so it was my first time where I realized, like, wait a minute, actually chasing like the higher income but playing the wrong game may not be the thing that you want to do. And so while I was doing this, I was working two jobs at fast food.

All my friends were in school. They're like, what are you doing? You're insane. One day a guy walked in in a military uniform in Quiznos, and he – and I started talking. And I basically was like, what do you guys do? And he was like, we're in the military. And I think he was like maybe an Air Force guy or something. No disrespect to the Air Force guys, but I was like nah that's not for me he was talking about because he basically was talking about all like the non-combat rules

right and like it sounded cool yeah it sounded cool but i was like that sounds kind of not for me um and so uh for whatever reason though it piqued my interest of like well what about the mills i never thought about that and i only really had two data points that kind of drove that interest the first was i was in eighth grade when september 11th happened and i remember i went to a school where there was a lot of families from new york who moved north carolina and so many of these kids had extended family members people who lived in in downtown Manhattan, worked in the towers, like all these different things. And so they literally shut school and the parents came and got the kids. Right.

And I remember being like, what happened? Yeah. And when I went home, I remember talking to my parents and I think it was my dad who told me something to the effect of like somebody tried to kill a lot of Americans today. And for whatever reason, I remember just being pissed. Yeah. And then I remember just like, I'm in eighth in eighth grade like who am i to care about this right but but it stayed hit something in you yeah and then the second was uh pat tillman so uh pat tillman uh was a nfl player uh who he basically turned down a i think it was a three and a half

million dollar nfl contract to enlist after September 11th. He went overseas. The story at the time was that he had gotten killed fighting the Taliban. It turns out that it was actually kind of a friendly fire that had killed him. But I remember thinking if this guy who is an NFL player who turned down millions of dollars could go do this, why shouldn't I do that right why shouldn't I consider this as an option what a guy seriously I mean Savage guy right I remember that like as a very little boy like my dad like yeah this guy is leaving you know the Cardinals because I was a big sports fan I'm like seven years old whatever it was so he's literally leaving to go fight for America it's cool like imagine being in an NFL locker room and somebody comes in and is like, yeah, I know like we got the life. Like I'm going to go do this, right? And it was incredible.

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

And so guy sat me down and he basically was just like, yeah, like they needed a lot of people. And again, going back to kind of the economic incentive, they were offering signing bonuses. Now, how does that work? They stroke you a check if you sign the paper right there now the way that it works is uh to a 17 year old kid i was like well damn this is up from quiznos if i if i sign an nfl contract i get a signing bonus i'm basically like a free agent right now. How much you talking? And so it was $20,000. Oh, all right. That's, listen, you're making $725 an hour.

$725, $775, and I'm paying gas and all this stuff, right? Guy's got a thing on his hand, getting stabbed by his girlfriend. All of a sudden I'm like, $20,000, that's a big check, right? Hey guys, if you have a second, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends, whether it's Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, doesn't matter. It's all a huge help. It gets new eyeballs on the show, and it allows us to grow and survive. So thank you to all of you who have already been doing that, and thank you to all of you who are going to do so now. And so he goes, now there's a sliding scale for the signing bonus, $20,000. Those are the dangerous jobs.

I said, now you're talking my language. Not only are you going to let me do the dangerous stuff, but you're also going to pay me more to do it. You guys are dumb. Like sign me up. And so at 17, you can't sign the papers. Your parents have to approve it because you're 18. Oh, that's right. So pretty much up until this point, my parents don't know any of this. Oh, you didn't tell them you were going to the office? No, nothing. So then I'm like, all right, I want to do this.

So now I got all the materials. It's in like a nice folder. It's definitely directed at the young man who's going to be signing up, not the parents. Right. And so I go and I talk to my mom. Or'm sorry i go talk to my dad first and my dad's like i don't want any part of this i'm not being involved your mom is the only person who's going to give the thumbs up thumbs down on this um and i had like maybe four or five months until my 18th birthday uh at this point because i think i i left in march so this is probably like

february time frame or so and uh i remember kind of like in the back pocket being like, well, I can just threaten to wait till my 18th birthday. Like they can't stop me. And so I go talk to my mom and she's like, like two seconds into the conversation. No. Okay. Well, what about, and for like three days, every five minutes, what about, what about until the point where she finally was like, you know what?

You have a lot of free time on your hands yeah you've been fucking around in school basically like uh maybe this will actually be good for you right and oh she did a total 180 some structure some leadership training like all these things and and i think part of it was she was nervous but also she probably had some degree of like you know i'd be proud of my son to go and do this. And so she finally relents. She agrees. She signs the paper, and you got to pick a job. And so you take this test, and the test that you take allows you certain opportunities to go through.

It's called an ASVAB test. And I scored pretty well on the ASVAB, and so I also knew I was going to college though. So now I got like – in August, I got to be there for football at Bucknell University, and we're talking this February, March. So I'm like, all right, what job requires three things? It's dangerous, gets me a $20,000 check, and I can be done with training and back by August. And they're like – Inside of a six-month time period? Everything.

And they're like, son, we have just a job for you. Okay, what is it? You can be a truck driver. Why is that dangerous? They're like, oh, they try to blow you up. I'm like, great, sign me up for that. So literally, my original contract that I signed

was a truck driver. I was going to go in in uh i think it was 88 mike is what they called it uh which is the job description and i was going to be a truck driver i didn't know what i was signing to be honest getting twenty thousand dollars they told me it's dangerous i can get back by august i'm in um and i also had to sign a contract where uh i wasn't going to go to a full-time active duty military unit because I'm in college. Oh, so they were going to give you the flexibility on that. They're not saying just like enroll. At the time with the Army National Guard where you could basically go serve in a National Guard unit.

You would go once a month for four years, and then after you got out of school, you're supposed to do ROTC, come out as an officer, and then you would go serve your active duty time. So kind of reverse it. Most people do like three or four years active, and then they have some reserve time, and then they get out. This is kind of the reverse. It was a program – again, you're trying to get people who have some degree of intelligence, et cetera, come into the military. You want to train officers. You want to go, and they knew we were're gonna be fighting this war for a while um this is still iraq at the time obviously right it's like 08 something this is uh 2006 i'm going through all this okay and so um i go to

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

We're fucking doing push-ups. What is going on here? It's like, you're probably not going to make it. But it's a very testosterone-filled environment and all this stuff. But what you realize was, first of all, I'm 17 years old. There's guys there that are in their early 20s, mid-20s, et cetera. So like you have an advantage that you're just young and like profoundly stupid. Two, you're physically fit because I'm going to play college football.

And three is, it was the first time in my life I realized, wait a second. The better that you are at basically like they can't break me type stuff and I actually enjoy the pain, they respect you. And so then it just became a game right they they call it smoking you so if you did something stupid they basically take you outside i remember there's one kid this kid is fucking animal they would literally bring him outside and they have them do so-called iron mics which basically you put your hands behind your head and then you just do lunges and they would just be like walk to that like telephone pole out there and walk back like iron mic it like half a mile whoa right and like the dude be like falling over yeah he never complained

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

But I signed a contract. Excuse me, Mr. Army? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no like, just kidding. I'm going to Lewisburg. Yeah. So I met somebody in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where we were doing the basic training. And he was like, oh, I'm going home by August.

And I was like, what's your job? He said Cause I'm a combat engineer. I said, damn, that sounds way cooler. And you're out by August. All right. I got to talk to somebody. And so I literally got transferred. I changed my job while in basic training. And again, it was this game of like the rules apply until you change the rules. Right. And so if you're stuck in basic training in the army this thing that like you shouldn't be able to change any of the rules i just made the argument i said listen actually you guys need more combat engineers than you need truck drivers i looked at the numbers i see where a young pomp was i can see it now it makes sense and so uh they allowed me to change i went to job training and i was out i I actually got out like the last week in July and I showed up to play football in August.

And so all of that training, everything, by the time I roll up to college, they're all like, what did you just do? Because I hadn't told the football coaches. Oh, you didn't tell them you enlisted. It's none of their business. Something I'm doing for myself. And so I show up and when I was in high school, I think I weighed like 195 pounds. You know, I was training every day, lifting, all this stuff. Slot wide receiver? I was a safety mainly. And I was going to college to play receiver. Okay. And when I got

there, I weighed 170 pounds and I couldn't bench press 225 one, three times. And they were like, where did you go? Like you just withered away. Cause I had been in basic training in the middle of the woods in the heat of the summer in Missouri. And so that started the journey of like, I got to put on a lot of weight. I got to get strong again and I got to build it all back up, but it was worth it because it got me into the military and allowed me to play football at the same time okay so you play football i guess like freshman year maybe sophomore year at some point mid-career you were called into war yeah people people today i think are always surprised it's truck month at gmc tackle the open road with added confidence in a 2025 sierra 1500

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I mean, I've been doing this shit literally for two decades. Right? So when I was in college, I would go to classes. My freshman year, my parents hate when I explain this to people, I got a 1.8 GPA. Oh, that's good. Or, yeah, 1.8 gpa oh that's good or uh yeah 1.8 gpa i was like drake rogers numbers right there i i was uh trying to recreate my success in high school just you know take some numbers off of the gpa yeah so 1.8 and literally the

first semester freshman year i just didn't go to class like i was just like this is awesome we just play football like this is incredible and when the grades came out i remember the coaches called me in the office they were like like dude you you basically get a 1.8 uh and that allows you to play next year after this year you have to be above a 20 yeah and me being like oh there, there's grades. Like, you guys are going to get the grades. Like, okay, all right, got it. And so I forget what class it was, but I remember one of the teachers, like, after this meeting with a football coach, came back and was like, oh, I made a mistake. And he changed everyone in the class's grades.

And my GPA went from 1.8 to 2.1. Love that guy. Let's go. I rolled back into the football office. Like, I was walking down the red carpet. I was like motherfuckers i got a two one and they were like well uh your your trophy for getting a 2.1 is you now have to go to a remedial class five days a week for like three months oh it was me and there was like four or five other freshmen i remember sitting in that class and they checked every day to make sure we were there and uh it was this guy who wore

three-piece suit he had these eyebrows that looked like he had flames coming out of the side of his head and what was his name his i forget the guy's name but his whole thing for these like three months or or six weeks whatever it was was to teach us how to speed read that that was the point of this. And so I remember sitting there thinking like, yo, I really think the athletic department thinks that if we get speed read, we're gonna get better grades. Like that's obviously why they sent us here.

And so this whole thing was a complete waste of time. But after getting those first grades, I said, I'm never ever gonna be in this position again. And I never got below, I think I got three, five or three, six the rest of my college career. And so to this day, I'm pretty sure the football team is convinced that that remedial class taught us all how to get better grades. It was just an effort thing, right? Like if you don't study, you don't get good grades.

If you put the effort in, then you get good grades. And so while I'm doing school, I'm also playing football. So you can imagine early morning workouts, practice, games, all that stuff. You know, I was around all the, all your younger brethren there. I saw that schedule. And then once a month, I'm going to army training. I'm going to our local national guard unit for an entire weekend and doing stuff. Wow. And so there are times on game days where they overlap with these weekends. I would go to class on Friday morning. I would go to practice on Friday afternoon. I would go Saturday morning for prep for the game, play at like one o'clock, leave after the game, go back to the National Guard unit, do that until they let us go for the day, then go out and party with my friends.

Obviously, you got to get that in, right? Be up till two, three o'clock in the morning, turn around and go back to the National Guard unit, do whatever they needed me to do. And then depending on how the schedule works, some days we had Sunday off, sometimes we do Sunday and have Monday off, I might have to go back to play football or go to like football practice and film and stuff. And so you go through all this, and you're just like, you just got to get it done. There's no complaining, there's no selling people, I don't want to do it this weekend, you just got to get it done. And so from a very young age, it was just like, how do you have a high capacity for work and be able to do this?

So when junior year rolls around, I get a phone call. We're two weeks into the football season, and it is the lieutenant who is at the National Guard unit. And he says, calling to inform you that you've been selected as one of the members from our unit who's going to get deployed to Iraq. And I said to him, I said, yeah, there must be a mistake. Like I'm in college. I'm Gucci. Like I got four years. Read my contract.

If you need, I can bring a copy over. And he goes, no, that's only if you're an ROTC. Are you protected? Because ROTC is the officer training. I was an ROTC because football practice and ROTC stuff would overlap a lot. And so it wasn't possible to do football, school, ROTC, plus National Guard. So I wasn't doing ROTC stuff.

And so I said, oh, so what happens if I don't come? And they're like, you go to jail. And I was like, I'll be there. So this is, for about a week, I'd gone back and forth with them. And then finally it becomes obvious, like I'm gonna go. So on a Thursdayursday morning i walk into the football offices and i tell our football coach uh i said hey uh i'm not gonna be able to uh to plan the game this

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

And he was like, what? Wait, withdraw? How does that work? Like withdrawing from school or just saying like, hey, I have to go serve, but I get to come back? So there's a federal protection. If you're a veteran, you get deployed. The school can't not let you come back. Right? But you have to withdraw. You have to let them know, hey, I'm not going to be in classes deployed. The school can't not let you come back. I understand.

Right? But you have to withdraw. You have to let them know, hey, I'm not going to be in classes and stuff. Like, I'm not going to be attending. Got it. So I walked up. Dean's, the management at Bucknell was incredibly gracious. They understood.

They said, okay, great. So then I got to walk over to the football practice. And people have been practicing. And, you know, it's like a small college of, I don't know, 5,000, 6,000 people. The football team. Everyone's like, yeah, where is he? Right? like like anyone's missing at any point everyone's like everyone knows everyone yeah um so i walk out there and i don't have any of my equipment on so everyone's like did he quit like that i quit right like loser right um and so i walk out there and and the head coach says uh he goes uh he's got something to tell you guys. And I tell them, you know, I've withdrawn from school.

I'm going to be deployed, all this stuff. And I remember one kid, he just stands up and goes, yo, like you going to war? Yeah, I mean, to put it bluntly, yes. Like that's what we're doing. And so the next morning, I remember I went to the locker room. They were leaving for an away game. And it's raining outside.

I'm like saying goodbye to them. I literally don't know if I'm going to see these people again, right? And it was like emotional. It was weird, right? I think at this point, I'm probably 20 years old. And you're like saying goodbye to other 20-year-old dudes. And college football is very much, you know,

family oriented, like all this stuff. And you're like, I will like, see you later, big dog. Like, hope I come back.

Um, and so they leave for the game. I drive to North Carolina. I spent a week with my family. And then the following, like Wednesday or Thursday, I'm there. And,

uh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no In Iraq. No, no, no. I show up to go on this deployment. And the way that they do it is you basically go to training first. The thing about the National Guard is you're basically asking citizens to be ready at any time to do anything that this unit may be called to do. Very unique. It's unique, but it's also – it's very difficult for those individuals. If you think about it, imagine having one foot in as a soldier, one foot in as a citizen. And so it's very much the onus is on these individuals to be ready, to be physically fit, to stay kind of mentally sharp, all this stuff. And they may get called because there's a flood.

They may get called because there is some sort of other natural disaster other natural disaster or situation um in texas they may get called up to protect the border like all these different components or they may get called to go to quote unquote real war in the middle east and so um thankfully before they send you they send you some training right they're like hey maybe we should like treat you full time for three months before we send you over there and so we went through a bunch of training uh when you're going through the training frankly it kind of feels like you're playing, you know, cops and robbers in the woods a little bit. Right?

They're like, they're shooting at you. You're like, well, I know they're not shooting. Like that's a fake gun. Shut up, Jim. Like, obviously that's not a real gun. And they'll like, you know, set off a thing. It's like a sound machine, right? And they're like, a bomb went off.

And you're like, like, not really. Like, okay. Right. So like you're trying to take it seriously, but also you can imagine like it's impossible to recreate actual war. times. And so even though we were fucking around and you kind of looked at it as, hey, this is stupid, right? Like kind of like the cops and robbers in the woods type mentality, it worked, which was pretty incredible for, again, a kid who was playing football, going to college, going to parties on the weekend to three, four months later,

I'm sitting in the middle of Iraq, right? With a gun in my hand, being like, I hope the army prepared me. And so when you first got there, what was your role on the ground? And what kind of – were you with a unit of all National Guardsmen, or were you put in with guys who had already been there? Yeah. The way that they did it is this unit in particular was, I think, the only National Guard unit at the time who had this vehicle called the Striker.

And so a Striker is like – just think of it as like the coolest, badass vehicle that the army had at the time. And so as combat engineers – again, what does that mean? They pitch it originally as like we got explosives. We're going to like go blow shit up. Like awesome. When you get to Iraq, you sit in Kuwait for two weeks and basically they get you acclim not it's probably the number one thing that scared the shit out of me first in iraq they do not tell you that when you're flying in the helicopter is going to take like evasive maneuvers so it starts like kind of flying in like a like a unstructured

way and then all of a sudden it also upon land we came in at night it shoots off flares in case anyone's gonna like shoot like an rpg i guess uh or some sort of like uh you know like anti um uh like a missile or something and um so i'm sitting kind of near the back of the helicopter all of a sudden we start doing this and the flare starts going off and i'm like are they shooting at us we ain't even been here yet i have not even been on the ground and these dudes are already shooting at us wait till i get off this helicopter right and then like the guy who's like part of the crew of the helicopter is like pipe down kids like it's just the flares you're like okay well that'd be nice to know before we land yeah um and so there's a lot of that going on like when you're uh especially when you're um in some of these

combat roles it's kind of like shut up and get over here and like if somebody shoots at you shoot back right it's kind of like the mentality but get over here. And like, if somebody shoots at you, shoot back, right? It's kind of like the mentality, but there's not a lot of prep work sometimes. And so you got to kind of, you know, keep your head together and not just like react wildly to any situation, especially at this time, because the rules of engagement were changing quite often. So 2004, 2005, if you're going to a house and you think there's a bad guy in it and you kick in the door and somebody runs out the back you can shoot them it's target house somebody's escaping guys if

you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button please take two seconds and go hit it right now thank you um the first time that anyone got blown up in uh iraq um we saw guys running through a field at 3.30, 4 o'clock in the morning with guns. And we had to call for permission to shoot. Like, I don't think they're getting coffee. Yeah. Right?

A bomb just went out. They just tried to kill somebody. And running through the field that obviously the detonation device came from with guns. What do you think they're doing? I had to call for permission. And I remember the gunner of our vehicle called and got asked three or four times, are you sure they got a gun?

Like, motherfucker, I see they got a gun. I got night vision and thermal imaging on my gun. They definitely got guns. Do I have permission to fire? And so you can imagine the difference between one extreme, which is pretty much anything goes. It's like, quote, unquote, real war, and we are invading a country. To kind of the bureaucratization of war where now like you got to get permission to do shit. And so you can imagine like why do we end up in the situation we're in in some of these wars? Well, like if you train people with a skill but don't let them use the skill, you're not really going to get the result you want. Now you said in there – you mentioned when you're coming in the green zone.

There was a movie literally called that with Matt Damon. But can you explain that to people? Because this is kind of like to get inside the green zone who wasn't supposed to be there. Lots of checks and security and all this kind of stuff. And so the green zone also, when you have a very fortified position – and we talk about position. We're not talking about like a square block. We're talking about like we took over the heart of Baghdad essentially, right? And we have the full might of the US military, both the army and other armed forces protecting this area. That is where you are going to take off from. You are going to land.

That is where you're going to resupply. That is like the heartbeat of US operations in all of Iraq. And so from there, you then have outposts, which are areas that people may be. Some of them are very large, very large bases. We were based out of one called camp taji um literally there was a swimming pool on the base right like nice amenities the people doing the paper and pen i then learned i might have not taken the twenty thousand dollars and just hung out with them because they were fucking chilling right but then you have the combat arms who are going out and kind of doing things that they're doing

and then you have like very very remote outbases which could literally be one building or like an old police station or something like that got it so you what was the name of your job again combat engineer yeah is that right okay bait and you were bait why do you call it bait that's what we were we were bait we basically uh majority of what i did in iraq was something called night route clearance basically what would happen is there would be a road they knew five o'clock six o'clock in the morning someone's going to drive down that road they've got resupply um could be troop movement could be you know all kinds of different things and what we were trained to do was to go out in the middle of the night uh we would go out

what they call skeleton cruise so how many in a in a normal vehicle let's say uh like a striker vehicle i think it can hold like 11 or 12 people okay and so you got a driver uh you got you know kind of a commander of the vehicle you've got a gunner and then you can carry you know called eight to twelve people in the back uh we would go out with five people in that vehicle we'd have the driver we'd have uh one gunner on the actual uh kind of 50 cal machine. We'd have somebody as the commander of the truck, and we'd have two guys out the back. In other vehicles, we had specialized vehicles specifically for this task. There's something called a Husky. Basically, what they would do is we would drive them on the sides of the road out in front of us, two of them. And their job was to try to visually locate IEDs before we got to them. And it's exactly what it sounds like.

We're clearing the road at night for people who are going to come behind us. And so that bait is not just try to find the IEDs. It's also try to get them to attack you because if you can clear the road, then the people behind you will be able to go swiffer. How many days a week were you doing this? Every night. Every single night? Yeah, it was fun as shit.

I'd go back and do it in a heartbeat. Yeah, I mean, you got to remember, right? Like, you're doing this. There is something incredibly intoxicating about driving down the road in a vehicle at 12 miles an hour, slow as possible. Everyone else is going fast as shit. Speed deters a lot of attacks. We're going slow. And we have floodlights on the outsides of our vehicles to light up everything around us so we can see better, but also so they know we're here.

You want to attack somebody, attack us today. You got to rush from that? You are doing this with guys that you know very intimately at this point and you feel like there's no one who could fuck with you in the world and as you're rolling down the street when people try to whether it is they're shooting at you they're trying to blow you up or literally they're just fucking with you trying to make your life hard you there you get a feedback loop right and you realize like yeah we're good at this and so as you're doing the night route clearance, when you first get there, it's like any job, right? Like, okay, well, in the manual, it said this is what we do.

We see a potential IED. There's some trash on the road. Okay, everyone stop. Call it in. We think that we see an IED. And in training, they're like – we had robots. Like there was a guy who could control a robot. He'd like put it out.

It's called a talon. And he could like move it up there. And we remember being so impressed in training like the pincher on the robot could like pick up an M&M and not crush it. We're not getting fucking blown up in Iraq. We got a robot. Right? Oh, if you identify that IED, like call in EOD, which is the Explosive Ordnance Division. I think there was a movie about this guy.

He puts on the whole suit, walks down. He's supposed to actually hurt locker, right? Like call those guys. They're going to come and disarm the bomb. It's going to be this great thing. When you get there, there's trash everywhere on the road. You won't make it down the road if you stop for every piece of trash. So guess what our SOP, our standard operating procedure became run it over if it

blows up it was a bomb and so these vehicles that's what they're designed to do is get blown up they have something called a v-shaped hole so when the explosion goes off underneath it it basically dissipates the energy and pushes it out to the side this is where the military industrial complex comes up with some good shit i I got to give them a ton of credit. Shout out Northrop Grumman, whoever the fuck – Lockheed. So – Have to put that in there. The way that this – the way that our unit operated is you basically would rotate these positions, right? And so each squad would take certain roles on different missions.

And some of it is you're doing it – frankly, so guys just don't get bored, right? Doing the same thing every single night. Some of it is – again, there's like this psychotic element of like, well, if someone's going to get blown up, like, I hope it's me today, right? Doing the same thing every single night. Some of it is, again, there's like this psychotic element of like, well, if somebody's going to get blown up, like, I hope it's me today, right? Why do they get to have the cool story? Like, I mean, literally there's some of that stuff going on. And so when you get into these Husky vehicles, these vehicles are designed specifically to get blown up, but also you're the only person in the vehicle. So think of like a, it basically looks like a tractor and you're getting in it and you've got a little box around you. There is no gun up top. Your gun is the only gun on that vehicle. And you have your rifle in the vehicle with you. And when you get in this vehicle, you know that the probability of any

vehicle in this convoy getting blown up is higher in this vehicle, but there is no one to help you if you get blown up because there's no one else in the vehicle. You is higher in this vehicle but there is no one to help you if you get blown up because wait why is that there's no one else in the vehicle you are solo in this vehicle and so if you look up um is this it look up husky uh army vehicle it uh you'll you'll find it but that's a striker right there you were talking about that one too that's the striker so the husky vehicle is you're basically going to, yeah, just pull up one of those. You can see that top there,

those two flaps, you basically drop in to what is that kind of boxed in windowed area. And then you pull these flaps down on top of you like a fly trap and you're in that vehicle. And, and you can see that there's these panels on the side there that those panels actually come down and they can scan for mines underneath the ground this isn't like 08 this is doing this yeah this is uh 2008 what do we have now and so you have all that stuff guess what we

never put the panels down never takes too long my God. Drive over the fucking trash. If it blows up, it's a bomb. And so what ends up happening is when you get in this vehicle, though, here's where it really fucks with your head. When you get in that vehicle, we started to put tourniquets on our arms and legs before we got in the vehicle. Because God forbid you get blown up in that vehicle and actually get hurt, no one's coming until they can fight through whatever the ambush is and get to you to help you. So you'd have it already tied, ready to roll. So what you have is you have it loosely applied to the tops of your legs, like kind of near your groin area, and you have them on your arms. I have pictures of myself and other guys getting into these vehicles with it, and we would literally practice.

If I get blown up and my right arm is gone, how do I put the tourniquet on with my left arm and you got to practice and so you can imagine psychologically you're getting in a vehicle you're excited I'm out in front I'm leading the way right but I can't fight back and if I get hurt I'm on my own and so there's all these components to it that you go through it but what you end up realizing is it's a lot like life. There's like the way you should do things, but there's a trade-off efficiency, right? Cost, et cetera. And so if we're going to go do multiple miles of a route and clear it, and we got to be back here in three hours, we better be moving, right? We, we gotta be going, or we're going to just sit here all day. And now that route can't, people can't go down that route until we're done. And so going through that experience, what you start to realize

is like, oh, I see the real world is actually about people getting shit done, not what is in the manual, what was the training, et cetera. It's really just, okay, given all of the inputs, giving all of what I understand about our desired outcome, how do I make decisions? And at the end of the day, the people our desired outcome, how do I make decisions? And at the end of the day, the people on the ground, they're making the decisions. It's not somebody back in some command center. They got no clue. They got no clue we don't have those panels down. All they know is when I ask these guys to go do shit, they get it done on time. And when that route is hot next and somebody goes down that route, they don't get blown up. These guys always clear the route. So you just learn over time what to do and kind of what the on-the-ground truth is

versus what you're trained to do. You got blown up though while you were there, right? You were in some of those convoys when that happened? One of the first – the Army does a very good job doing transitions. So the two most dangerous times in kind of deployments are basically like the first two to four weeks and the last two to four weeks. The first two to four weeks, you can think about the fact that you're new. You don't know the routes. You don't know the people. You don't know that, hey, that cinder block's never been there before. That's different tonight, right? What's

going on over there? And then also the enemy pays attention. Every day a vehicle goes by and it's got the same marking on it. All of a sudden there's a new one. Hey, I've never seen that guy before. Wait, next day. I haven't seen that guy before. Oh, shit. They're transitioning. And they know.

And so attacks ratchet up during those first two to four weeks and the last two to four weeks. So it's very dangerous. And so what they do is they basically do like a left seat right seat at first it starts out like 100 old unit zero percent new guys then it's like 90 old unit 10 new guys then it eventually gets to 50 50 and then you kind of fully transition over and it's 100 new guys and so it was the first or one of the first missions that we went out uh as 100 our unit without the guys we were taking over from uh we're driving through in the middle of the night going super slow um i'm standing out the back of uh the striker um and

you know you're up there you're watching shit you got your gun uh hoping that either it's really quiet or like let's just get this shit popping you know second we get outside the gate like but anything in between is like death by boredom essentially. And all of a sudden, we're going through kind of a very small town. I just hear a just real close, like right past our heads. And growing up, I didn't play with guns a lot. I didn't do any of this stuff. And the guy who's standing up beside me from western Pennsylvania hunts all the time, and I just look at him. I go, what was that? He goes, I don't know, but I've been hunting they can see us easily. We're illuminated. And so now we're sitting inside the vehicle, but basically you, you gotta choose. You can sit inside the vehicle all night or you can get back up there and try to find this guy. And so, you know, we're searching everyone in the convoy searching. We can't find them. So, okay, keep moving. Um, that should have been the red flag. But we just thought, hey, you know what?

Maybe we're wrong. We have headsets on and stuff so we can communicate with each other. It's the middle of the night, 2, 3 o'clock in the morning. Maybe we're tired. Do we imagine it? All these things are going through your head. It was one. Why didn't he shoot a second time?

All this stuff. And so we keep driving. We get out onto a main supply route. And the unit we took over from, they had nicknamed a stretch of this road as IED Alley. Yeah. Now, IED Alley has become a phrase that people use for a lot of parts of Iraq. Yeah. Right? Each unit kind of has their own sector that they're responsible for, and there's usually a road in there that that's where the IEDs go because it's a great place to place IEDs, right? Yeah. I've had some guys mention this on the show. And so for us, there was this one stretch of the road and it was perfect for the enemy

because basically what it was, it was a very long stretch. There was nothing. There was just fields on both sides. There were telephone poles on the street so they could actually time how fast we were moving by. They could just time, okay, between telephone pole one and two, it takes them X amount of time to get there. Well, if they keep that speed, I know when I can detonate this thing and hit them. And then on both sides of the road, there were these big, like what we would call like wadis, like basically drainage ditches. So it made it nearly impossible for our vehicles.

If we wanted to pull off of the road and go into the field, we would have to go to a crossover, like a road or a bridge area to get over these things, to be able to go get these guys if we want to send a vehicle. And so, um, we're driving down same night and all of a sudden, uh, I just hear a massive kaboom and the shock and the energy wave that just goes through go back to the training all of the stupid cops and robbers in the woods every single person that convoy immediately starts screaming out ied ied ied you didn't even think it just the training kicked in and you're just like holy shit somebody just blew up one of the vehicles and so very quickly um we basically

were the first vehicle in the convoy that had a weapon system on it that could actually defend us. And so without kind of explaining too much of the detail, basically, we maneuvered ourselves near the front of the convoy, and there was a vehicle in the back that maneuvers. And so now we've got basically 180 degrees in the front, they've got 180 degrees in the back, the vehicle's in the middle, they're looking out each side, and we've created essentially a little bit of a circle that we're going to try to figure out what's going on here. Now, when IEDs go off, there's one of two options you have. You can basically stay in place and you can try to figure out what's going on, right? And try to locate the people, et cetera. Or if an IED goes off and immediately it's a complex ambush where people

start to shoot as well, one of the best defenses is just what they call get off the X, just get out of the kill zone, right? They've set everything up to try to kill you in this one area if you get out of the area they can't kill you right that's right um and so uh no one was shooting so bomb goes off it's the husky there's a there's a uh gentleman that's in there uh the vehicle literally gets lifted up almost perpendicular to the ground and slams back down. He – only thing he suffered, concussion. That's it. The engineering of these vehicles are incredible, right?

I mean think of a roadside bomb that is buried in the road. He ran it over. They correctly set it off right underneath his vehicle. He got a concussion. So you got someone in there and was he knocked out i guess sir because you're trying to assess the situation right again he's on his own and so there's this element of a lot of times when you're trained in the military and it's very um it's not applicable a lot of times in business because you're not talking about physical uh

kind of uh security or safety but let's say that you're in a firefight and if somebody is laying out in the middle of an area and they're wounded if i run out there and i go and try to save them before i've neutralized the threat and i get injured now we got two guys that are injured so a lot of times it's actually better for you to fight neutralize the threat and then go get them right and there's a rule in the military that for every one wounded soldier it takes two to carry them yeah so if you take one out of the fight you actually took three of them out of the fight and so again what you're doing is the training takes over I know this guy unless he is dead he's gonna be okay he's got the tourniquets he's got

the ability to communicate and he's in a vehicle that's built to go through this our job is not to look inwards our job is to look outwards right now find these guys so we find these uh idiots run through the uh field and um call it in um immediately command is like uh what happened oh i don't know we got fucking blown up right and so the credit of the people who are in the convoy they're all amped up like somebody just tried to kill somebody right like they're ready to fucking go um but the command back at the base is like uh are you sure and they don't have eyes on they can't see anything right they're like are you sure it was an id like you fucking yes we're sure right and so um it was the first mission we were on also where tempers flared. And you could tell that like, almost think of it as like the middle management and the executives, they're going to butt heads now, right?

Because the middle management is like, I understand the problem. I have visual confirmation of what happened, what is happening, and I'm trained to go do something. And they're like, did the doctor touch you in the wrong area? No, they're like, yo, if you do something stupid, like you could go to jail because now everyone's freaking out about Americans, you know, shooting people. And so eventually we get permission to fire. And now the striker has a 50 caliber gun on it. And that gun has almost like a video game type joystick. And he's able to switch between night vision and thermals and all this stuff. And so he fires. Doesn't hit anything.

Oh, shit. Imagine trying to hit a couple hundred yards away, two dudes running through in the middle of the night, and they're moving. And you basically got a joystick, and you're trying to hit them. So you can't shoot where they are now. You got to shoot where they're going to be. Yes. So now you're playing it literally like a video game right and so he eventually gets closer and closer and closer and then um shoots one guy goes down second guy keeps

running and so um as uh this is all happening we've called in what's called a quick reaction force and so uh in that quick reaction force um their job is to show up and basically bail you out of shit. They know they're coming because something happened, right? Their job is to show up and bring immediate violence of action to help us go from what could potentially be a fair fight to now it's an unfair fight in our advantage, right? And so those guys are showing are showing up right as all this is happening. And so a bunch of guys get out of the vehicles. They walk down, and they're trying to find it because, remember, the vehicles have a hard time getting down there. They get online, and as they get online, they start to walk through a field.

And it's a wide-open field with trees at the end and they walked into an ambush and so basically as they're online walking through the ambush uh as they're walking all of a sudden somebody starts shooting at them and they all hit the ground jump back up return fire shoot jump back up return fire again at some point one of the guys doesn't get back up. This guy named Sergeant Baum, he's part of the QRF force, and he was shot right in the head. And probably there's two things that happened that day that I don't think people quite understand. And it's kind of on the, maybe like the opposite ends of the barbell in terms of what American soldiers have to do in war. On one one hand you have an american soldier who runs over sergeant bomb he basically starts administering first aid while still firing

back because he's in the middle of an ambush right and so insular trying to take care of his soldiers he doesn't know this guy he literally never met this guy before right but that guy showed up to save him and so administering first aid while shooting back, incredibly heroic. At the same time, eventually, American soldiers push through the ambush. They get down into the trees, and they find the guy. It's one guy who is the second person who had not yet been hit, and he was the one who was firing at them. So one guy was ambushing from the trees? Because basically you couldn't tell, right?

It's still nighttime. He's just spraying. He's a ghost. And I always say that if I had been the soldiers who walked up to him, I pray I was as good as men as they were. I don't know if I would have been. They didn't kill him. They would have every right to do it. Right.

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

stop at nothing and so in that situation those soldiers saved this dude's life who just tried to kill them and that guy ended up having an amputated leg later on our um uh leader of our squad basically like my boss he had to go to court and testify in iraqi court that this was the guy who did it and when he came back um i remember asking him i said what what'd you think and he said i sat there the entire time and i thought about pulling my knife out and slicing this dude's throat fuck this guy right but again human emotion everyone has but the ability to control it, to be a professional, to understand where the line is, that is what Americans are held to the standard. Yes.

And so that whole situation, you look at it and you're like, man, that is not something that other countries normally have to be held to that standard. And so it changes the battlefield because now what you have is you have the ability and violence of action to do certain things but it's like doing it with cnn having a camera on you at all times and being like let me i'm gonna play monday morning quarterback and make sure ah you shouldn't have done that right whereas if the rules were reversed they wouldn't have just killed an american soldier in that situation they'd had a tortured them and then killed them and then paraded them through town right and as they deal with the blackwater uh uh contractors would have burnt their bodies and hung them from a bridge that's right so that's what you're up against is you you're allowed to have brutality

and do your job to align but you got to be able to literally pull a trigger and then know let me put it back on safe and capture somebody even though every single ounce of my body is telling me this is evil in a human body can't pull the trigger so that's just the the challenges of the battlefield today now you're there in 0809 it's been five years since we went into that war. And I'm always careful how I say this, especially with veterans who were there. I think sometimes we misappropriate politics with the military members who are following orders to go do what they do. And I think that the guys who went to these wars and fought obviously were doing their jobs and I don't have any issue with that whatsoever. But there's a lot of – speaking of Monday morning quarterbacking, there's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking about that war in particular.

Much more than Afghanistan or something. Iraq, it's like, okay, well, why did we go there? And you, in this case, aren't going there when it's fresh, Operation Iraqi Freedom or something like that. You're there when we've been there. Al-Zarqawi has now been around a while. He's dead at this point, but the remnants of him, which would later form ISIS, are all there. And it's kind of a hellhole at this point. Was there ever a thought in your brain?

Obviously, you're doing your job. You're told, I've got to go out and do this, and you're trying to execute it and save lives. But was there ever a thought in your brain of like, well, what the fuck are we still doing here? Yeah, of course. Right. And I think that's every soldier who's ever been in any war, right? There are Russian soldiers right now in Ukraine who are saying that there's Ukrainian soldiers in Ukraine who are saying that there's, you know, Israeli soldiers, there are, uh, uh, Palestinian citizens, right? I mean,

there's all these different people who, um, the politics overlay is very tough. One of my favorite ways to kind of think through this is Marcus Luttrell has a great speech that he did. Marcus Luttrell, for those that don't know, he's a Navy SEAL. If you ever watched the movie The Lone Survivor or read the book, he is the survivor. And he basically says, listen, your job as a politician is to do everything in your diplomatic power to keep us out of war. Do everything you possibly can to get along with other people, get deals done, solve problems, do all these things. War should be the last resort because God knows that when you call me, I am going to fucking kill everybody in my path. That is what I am trained to do. And I will bring hell with me because that's my job. So if you do your job, you don't need me. But if you can't do your job,

I'm going to do mine. And mine is a very different tactic. Right. And so when you think of it from that perspective, there is diplomatic things that were done that were great in the Middle East. There's other things where we probably failed. and so naturally um the whole invasion of iraq we are undefeated in invading countries the united states of america is we're pretty good at that part a plus yeah at invasions you there are a ton of books you can go read about the invasion we are stellar yes right there is not a fighting force in the world that would ever want to see the American flag coming down, looking at invading their country.

Those fuckers put down their guns and they run. Right? But we are not so great at nation building. We are really bad at it. Right? How many times have we said this on this podcast? I want to see. And so if you put those two things together,

it's called war. Yes. But we're real good at if you put those two things together, it's called war. Yes. But we're real good at starting them. But the nation building, it's hard. What does success look like? Think about it from a business perspective or think about it from anything you've ever done in your life. Okay, I'm going to go do something. Let's start with what is the desired outcome?

What is the finish line? What does success look like? And the problem with most wars that we fight directly or indirectly is that it is unclear because usually either leadership has not directly established and said this is what we're trying to do or we have multiple people in positions of leadership who have different ideas of what they want. Yes, exactly. And so to the average soldier, they don't care about that stuff. One of the things that people in the military will tell you if you talk to them is they don't give two shits about that. Once they're there, they're not really fighting for the thing on their shoulder American They're proud of a country and the ideals and the ethos and all these things that we stand for But when bullets are flying, they're not patriotic Right in terms of the bullet the bullet doesn't give a shit what country you're from Yeah, what language you speak which education level is what your story is? It just knows science and so those guys end up fighting for each other

because they want to come home. And so it becomes this very, very disconnected thing where the planners, the decision makers, they're looking at it from a strategic standpoint. The guys on the ground are looking at it from a survival standpoint. It's I'm here. I can't just call someone to get me out of here. I'm fighting to make sure that as many of these guys come home with me. And so that disconnect is probably one of the biggest reasons why there are a lot of veterans in combat arms who over the years have become very frustrated is it goes back to like what is happiness happiness is having as little difference between expectations and reality as possible right when you think about it from a soldier standpoint well the soldiers are less frustrated when their expectations of what they're doing meet reality but if you tell them hey we're gonna go conquer this you know uh area they're really evil people all this stuff and they spend 90 of their time they don't see any of those evil people like well what are we doing i've been driving around this town right i see women and children i see you know people

trying to go to school i see a guy trying to build a business right what's going on and so what you have to do as a leader of these ground units is you have to remember and remind your teams it's not about the every day 100 of these people are not evil that's right we're looking for the one percent yes because those motherfuckers are not going to be out in the street they're hiding in the shadows right and those are the guys we got to find and so again remember you're asking 18 19 20 22 25 year old men in many cases in these combat arms to make those decisions their brains aren't even developed. Exactly.

Right? And guess what? You got to have them be able to turn it on when they need to turn it on. And then you ask them to turn it off at certain times. That's tough. I know 50-year-old men who can't do that. Yeah.

Right? And so it's just, it's very complex. And I think the people who haven't lived through it, they just look at it and they're like, oh, I just don't kill good guys. Yeah, because it's easy to turn on the TV and watch three talking heads debate a topic for seven minutes and then think that you understand what the fuck is going on. You don't. I don't pretend to sit here, and I've been privileged to sit across from a lot of people like you who have been there, done that. I don't sit here and pretend to understand what that is.

I don't. I grew up in New Jersey. It's pretty good here, right? But there's an element when you look at it from the political ends of the people who are sending you there where first you can think of like the money and the military-industrial complex and constantly having war as a source of power and gain. Okay, put that aside for a second. The second layer of it is something that you kind of brought up in there that's a great point, which is that so many of these people sitting in Washington, D.C., seem to have it in their mind that in country X around the world,

as someone is dying at the hospital, hopefully they're not dying out there. But anyway, someone in these countries around the world, they're going to be what we want them to be. Of course. They're going to love democracy. We're going to show them how great – we're going to spread democracy, show them how great it is, and they're going to love it. That's not what it is. There's a line I talk about a lot in different podcasts that is from a show, Homeland. It was – I think it was season four or season five.

There was this terrorist in this show named Haqqani played by Numan Akar who played a fucking great terrorist by the way. But bad guy, awful dude, like your stereotypical blow people up kind of terrorist. But he was talking with the CIA director, Saul Berenson, who he had hostage in the show. And they're going back and forth. Saul is trying to have him see it his way, like why are you doing this, whatever. And he says to Saul, he goes, America hates what it can't understand and for a minute you know again it's just a tv show but i'm like there there there's a little dose of truth in that and what ends up happening is you get all the people who are a part of the war machine that are trained to do it caught in the middle of that while some dudes you know playing fucking gin rummy in the Capitol Club on wherever, K Street, are like, yeah, this seems like a good idea.

That never escapes me. I tell friends all the time, you want to know what the average Iraqi is like? They're like you, right? They're trying to live their life. They're trying to make a better life for their family. They're trying to pursue whether it is economic security, happiness, freedom, et cetera. But guess what? If somebody came here and tried to kill somebody we knew, whether it was intentional or not, where's the fucking guns? Let's go, right? Imagine the

American response if America was invaded. Oh, yeah. And so I always use – there was a point in time right around 2007 to 2009 that there was something called SOI, Sons of Iraq. And basically what the United States figured out was like, hey, we don't have enough soldiers to put checkpoints all over this country. We need to teach the Iraqi people how to do this. And so they created this coalition essentially and they went and they recruited people. And what they said was, this is your country. You young men, you sons of Iraq, you have to be able to defend yourself because one day we're going to leave.

Probably not anytime soon, but like one day we're going to leave. And so during this time period, they basically tried to train these people. They helped them set up checkpoints at the beginning and ends of their towns. They really kind of put a lot of time, energy, and money into this. And it probably changed the war for quite a while because now all of a sudden you didn't need American soldiers there to deter things because now what you had was you had the sons of Iraq who are willing to defend their own country. I've always said America is full of the equivalent. There's a lot of people. And you can look right now, how many people are willing to step up into roles in their local community? But also, even if you look at like the border crisis, there's a lot of people who are doing a lot of things that may not be quote,

unquote, sanctioned, right, by the federal government. But they're saying enough is enough. I'm going to defend my family, my community, my land, etc. And so I always think back to that push by the Americans is probably one of the most American things we did in Iraq. What I wish we would have done on top of it is we should have been able to teach them or to give them economic freedom. And the problem is that when you're the hammer, you're always looking for the nail. And so most of our soldiers, if you give them a gun, that's the mentality they're in. But if we would have been able to lift some of these individuals in these communities out of their situation without having to leave

their community, it would have changed the face of that country. And so actually- How do you do that though? Well, with the internet, it's much easier, right? Historically, you would have had to make physical things, right? You would have had to figure out how to operate a physical business, et cetera. But with the internet, right? What would have the impact been in, let's say Iraq, if you could have taken every 13 to 18 year old male and taught them how to code. Now,'s not like uh you know you see today an american kind of conversation people like oh learn to code it's not that right but it is with the internet you are able to democratize economic activity right and if you're able to take someone

off of the potential battlefield by giving them another path it's no different than in american cities where we talk about hey this kid's got one options. Either they find a way out or they're going to join a gang, right? It's very similar. If your entire family joins the gang, you're probably going to join the gang. Yeah, you're going to join it. That's right. Right. And guess what they're saying? It's a cycle. And guess what they're saying? We're going to defend our country. We're going to defend our town. Yeah, no shit, right? If I was a 14-year-old boy in Iraq, you know what I'd do? Give me a gun.

Tell me where to stand, right? Show me where they're coming from, and let's see what happens. I don't care what vehicles they have. Did you make a distinction on that too? Because obviously you're dealing with that 1% where you do have some people who before you got there were hardened terrorists, right? But then you have a lot of people who maybe after after the invasion happened again it's their homeland or like what the fuck you know all the door-to-door stuff is going on they came in my house they kicked in my door and they killed my dad and do you so when you see that was there some sort of distinction made between like those types

versus like the hardened types the the it's unclear because frankly you don't get to talk to a lot of them right you don't know like one of the things that miss is missing in society generally is just like we don't talk to each other right yeah twitter is a perfect example i hate you right it's a real tweet there's a guy uh maybe i don't know a year ago saying all kinds of crazy stuff in the internet i just dm'd him i say hey man you want to get on a call for five minutes? I'd love to just hear your complaints. Just tell me. I love feedback.

We got on a call. By the end of it, he was like, dude, I love your stuff. I literally wanted to take all the tweets and mail them to him for Christmas. Be like, dude, what the fuck are you talking about? That's so good and so um that is like the definition of society society is that we now it's all about like scoring like intellectual points right or like the internet points and so you you unfortunately uh there's language barriers right there's all kinds of things that are at play in the complexity um hey guys if you haven't

already please make sure you go subscribe to our other channels here on YouTube to support the show. We're posting different daily content on Julian Dory clips, best of JDP and Julian Dory daily every day, including mid form and short form clips. So if you haven't already subscribed to those, please go subscribe by out to Iraqi children, et cetera. And they were like false. They knew that we had candy or whatever, and we would throw it to them. And I want to be careful to not position like every soldier is great right yeah there are definitely so like remember you're at war you don't have a lot of oversight there are people who do dumb shit and frankly do stuff that are counter to um sure things that uh we should be

doing as a country right so it's not everyone but majority of the soldiers i would say 95 plus percent of them are there to do the right thing try to follow the rules you know do their job go home um and i remember driving and i don't know how old this kid was 12 13 14 years old it's the first time i ever saw a kid with actual hate and evil in his eyes he was looking at us he didn't have to say anything you just knew if this kid could he'd kill us thousand yards there just just the way he looked it just for whatever reason it just was a international if i was walking down the street and i saw this kid and i wasn't here in an armored vehicle with a gun in my hand i'd probably cross the street i don't want i don't want trouble right yeah but this guy he wants he wants the trouble and so

again he's 12 13 14 maybe 15 years old right and? And you see that and you're just like, man, that's a hard life, right? That is a hard life for a kid who has that in their eyes and their heart to then grow up. What do you think? That doesn't go away, right? And so it's no different than certain generations of Americans who, you know, if you go and you talk to them, you know, oh, I hate a certain nationality or something because back in the war, right? Yes. Same thing here. And so when I saw that, I just remember being like, man, this shit is just nasty.

And so it goes back to the Latrell quote. It's just like, look, we need politicians who are strong leaders who are able to go ahead and actually do what they can to prevent us from going to war because we have the best fighting force in the world. And when you send them somewhere, they are going to fuck shit up. And it is not always the direct damage that you're able to assess. There's a lot of collateral damage that is hard to measure. And so if you look today, you know, one of the big questions, and we don't know the answer, right? There's a lot of speculation, a lot of conspiracy theories, none of that. Just a very direct question of how many men did we piss off during the global war on terror

who now see an opportunity to come into our country and cause trouble? A lot. I don't know what the answer is. Maybe it's zero. I don't think so. But like it could be zero, right? Or it could be a lot. And part of it goes back to you can't walk around a battlefield with roses, right? Like it's war. There's bad people who are trying to do bad things. So you got to do shit to neutralize them. Yes. But there is this collateral damage.

And so this is a story as old as time. People used to infiltrate or invade lands, and they would rape and pillage and kill and do all this stuff. And guess what? There would be a lot of bad stuff there too, right? And so I think that's just happening now. Yeah, and that's kind of the endless cycle of it where no one – how do I say this right? It's like it's just human nature it's not really that someone's at fault there like if you are put into a situation where war actually is necessary and you can argue some wars maybe they're not but let's say world war ii for example pretty goddamn

necessary the people who are sent there both have their job to do. And then as a result of the – that's the highest emotion situation you can be in, literal life and death. Bullets flying by. Your buddy is getting killed. Like rah, rah, rah. You're going to have feelings about that afterwards. You're just – like there's no way around that. So sometimes cynically I'm like there's kind of – because that's going to then affect the next generations because those people go home. They have kids.

They tell their kids about the war. There are certain emotions and attitudes that are formed socially towards perhaps other people or areas of the world. Cynically, you kind of have a spout of an endless cycle of there will always be some form of war in the world and i hope we get to a point where yay world peace we don't have that but like i do try to live in reality and i don't think i'm going to be alive on this earth at a point where there is not some form of serious conflict that involves people on the ground against other people on the ground in some way hurting each other well not only is that true i would take it even two steps further which is the

reason why military recruiting numbers are down so much is because there's a bunch of guys who understand reality and they realize that leadership is trying to optimize for something else. So when you get into all the DEI stuff, when you get into all the transgender stuff, when you get into this thought process that certain people or genders, et cetera, are going to be able to go and fight at the same degree that American males 18 to 25 years old are, right? So stupid. And look, it's always in my experience in dealing with this stuff, it starts with somebody who has good intentions. But damn, there's a lot of good intentions that lead us to bad places, right? So it's never somebody who's like, aha, I'm going to figure out a way to like eat the American military from inside. That's not what's happening, right?

They're trying to do the right things. It's just you make one bad decision that's compounded by another bad decision that's compounded by another bad – and the next thing you know, you're 10 years later. You're like, holy shit. How did we get here? Yeah, we're kind of at a point in society where – again, you talk about intention. Great point. We want to be in a place where we don't hate on other people. Totally agree.

But we've taken that to such a point that we'll celebrate things that you don't need to celebrate, so to speak, meaning they will they'll they'll get injected into things like our military. We're suddenly we're worried about quotas with, like you said, you know, how many transgender soldiers do we have? Listen, if someone's transgender, I love them. That's great. I'm not concerned about whether or not they have representation in the military. And actually, like it's somewhere where you may go and get shot and killed. So I don't feel bad telling you that you might not have the best representation there. These are first world problems. Yes. And it always cracks me up because whenever I hear people talking about some of these topics, it's always like you haven't spent time around blue collar industries, blue collar people,

or the military. You want to know who some of the most quote unquote racist from an external view people in the world are? Soldiers. You put a black soldier, a Hispanic soldier, an Italian soldier, all these people in the American military together,

they don't have anything to talk about other than racist jokes. Right? I saw where you were going with that yeah that's that is the like through line of their conversation right is they will say something like oh uh make him do it you know because uh that's all his people do is they just carry shit around right and he'll be laughing like oh shut the fuck up you know uh you're what and like and they'll just go back and forth about it. And it's endearing, because they're actually friends. Yes, right. And if you go onto a construction site, if you go to these areas, right, people who have respect for each other are actually building deep bonds. And again, I'm not talking about racism, where like, one person is saying something and the other person

feels offended etc there's no offense being taken here right and so when you look at that you say to yourself wait a second that is just a reality whether we like it or not like that is how these groups of people operate together um so when you have the like quote-unquote coastal elites who sit and say well you guys can uh can't talk like that. Oh, God. You know what these guys do? They're human nature. Fuck you. Yeah, we had Dale Comstock sitting right there saying that.

Right, literally. That is their reaction. How are you going to tell me how I can talk to these guys? That's right. Because guess what? When the bullets fly, guess what I need to know? I don't give a shit what the color of the guy next to me is. I need to know that he's not going to put his gun down and run away. That's right.

Right? next to me is i need to know that he's not going to put his gun down and run away that's right right and that those are like the realities on the ground versus kind of this top down uh perspective and so i don't know what the right answer is right yeah we would love to all wave a magic wand and be able to achieve all of the objectives that these you know kind of coastal elites have and also keep the reality on the ground it's just you can't do both it's a trade-off life is full of trade-offs and so i do go back to this idea of like what is the point of the u.s military the point of the u.s military is defend this country and at a moment's notice go anywhere at any time and execute immense amount of violence on our behalf that is what the point of military is the point of military is not to fucking check boxes on you know different things etc so if you go and you talk to soldiers on the ground they don't give a shit i don't care where

you're from i don't care what language you spoke i don't care your education your wealth any of that shit can you fucking shoot straight when we go in this house if i go right are you going to go left right when you pull that gun up as you go left and you're presented with two targets and one's got a gun and one doesn't, are you smart enough to not shoot the innocent person? Right? When I get shot, are you going to be able to carry my ass out of here so I don't die? That's the shit that they care about. Yes. Right?

And there's stories that I wish more people would tell. And I know we're going to talk about some business stuff, but one of the ideas that I would love to would tell. And I know we're gonna talk about some business stuff, but like one of the ideas that I would love to see come to fruition, and if there's somebody out there that wants to do this, I would love to talk with them and figure out how to make it a reality, is I would love to see a movie production studio get built

that only tells these stories of patriotism to help inspire an entire new generation of Americans to understand what America stands for, why it is important, and what many men in combat arms have done in order to preserve it. There's a story of a gentleman named Mike Day. And a lot of people don't know this story,

but Mike Day is Navy SEAL. He went into a building and was shot 27 times while in that building. he walked into a room there's an ambush shot 27 times he was hit with a grenade got knocked out he neutralized I believe was for wait there's no way he lived and he walked to the helicopter to get airlifted out Mike day is one of the biggest fucking American savages that ever walked this earth. Whoa.

And most people don't know his story. And so when you look at that, he got shot 27 times. Mike Day took his life a couple months ago. Oh, my God. This guy not only was a great American in the sense of being able to go serve our country, develop other young men as soldiers, be a great leader, but he also – one of the most heroic events in the war. Most people don't know. And so when you see that, why did he walk to the helicopter? That's like the most heroic part, right? He got shot 27 times.

Holy shit. The story is that they went into the building. He went right into a room. There were four guys in there. As soon as he walked in the building, they killed, I believe, the guy in front of them. He walked in second, gets shot up a bunch of times, falls to the ground. They think he's dead. He pulls out his pistol.

His hands are like shot up and stuff. He pulls out his pistol, kills two of the guys while laying on the ground. Somebody throws a grenade. He gets hit with it, gets knocked unconscious. They now think he's for sure dead. friends and he kills both of them he gets up the there was so much fire going on in terms of firefighting that the seals had backed out of the house he calls his friends and says hey i'm alive come get me and then he proceeds to get up and clear the rest of the house goes room to room making sure there's no other bad guys and there's no innocent people if i remember the details correctly he finds a family in the house rescues them brings them outside and the way he told the story is the reason why he walked to the helicopter because it would hurt more if his guys carried him and so you sit there and you say

and you go back you know why did i go in the military if i could pat tillman can do it right how many people who didn't want to go into the military who didn't get told the stories of heroic uh heroic actions by our soldiers hear these stories and then say to themselves you know what maybe it's pretty damn important that we have people go into the military ranks and in the most extreme case you're going to war right that is a potential option but in the like lowest watered down version you're actually going to get leadership training. You're going to become disciplined. You're going to be able to get all these life skills, right?

And everything in between. We just don't tell a lot of stories. It's a high price to pay to get those, but you get it at the highest level as a result. That's wild though. So this guy just committed suicide. He just committed suicide, which, you know, again, you kind of, you hear that whole story, right? The guy lived for almost a decade, I think, since it happened. Yeah, it was 2007. So, you know, the guy lived for what,

15 plus years after that incident. Imagine what you went through. And that was one incident. He, Navy SEAL, right? Like how many other things he went through in his life and eventually couldn't take it. And so you get to that point and you just say to yourself, man, these guys are willing to dedicate their lives to this stuff. And it feeds into like, okay, look at the American economic situation. We're spraying money around like we're Santa Claus around the world. We got plenty of problems in our backyard. I'm not saying you got to pick one or the other, but I am saying that if given the choice, we got to make sure we take care of our people.

And then, trust me, we got plenty of money. We'll be able to help other people too but we can't do help other people at the expense of our people it's the same thing as like a relationship right if you are really fucked up and you have things going on and you do not help yourself with that first how are you going to help your girl right i i don't i i view it when it comes to the u.s and we're going to about this in a little bit in more detail because you're a financial genius as well. But that is a great point. Like we really – that train at some point will crash because we are on a one-way road to do that and i think that you know it just it really affects me when when i hear stuff like that because you you just look at the numbers of it shot 27 times clears a hole i forget how many rooms you said but clears all these rooms in a house

walks out to the helicopter whatever the guy is is a is literally supposed to be like this bulletproof American warrior savage. But then for whatever reason, because again, he's unknown to people like me, and years later, after surviving all that shit – that's just one story. I'm sure there were a lot of others too. He can't – he's been put in a position where he feels like he can't take it. And that's so heartbreaking to me. Yeah. And look, part of it is Mike Day is not the guy who's plastered all over the news. Right. But if you go and you talk to SEALs, people in special operations, that's who they look up to.

Yeah. Right. So I go, that guy is a fucking savage. Right. And so it's all relative to some degree in terms of everyone has someone they look up to. And at the highest degrees or levels of the military, sometimes they look up to each other, right? And when you think of how does a great organization operate,

usually it is you get a bunch of A players together, you set the standard really high, and then they hold each other to that standard. And that is the epitome of what special forces, Navy SEALs, et cetera, do is you have A players who have gone through immense amount of training and selection to be in the room. And then they are all filled with imposter syndrome that I may not be good enough. And if I'm not good enough, if I'm not on my best today, the guy next to me dies. Right? That's a pretty good incentive to make sure that you're on top of your shit. Oh, yeah.

And so I think a lot about, now bring that into the business world. How many organizations can actually say they have A players? Everyone likes to think they're an A player, right? But an actual A player. These days, not as many as I'd like to see, I'll tell you that. Well, part of it is there's probably a societal thing going on. Yes. But even more so, let's just hold constant. And I probably think it's more true than not.

It's like there's just as many A players today as there were 20 years ago in the aggregate number. The problem is that usually companies don't get a lot of them together, right? Yeah. of them together right so what ends up occurring is you have maybe one or two a players in a company then you got you know a good number of b players and you got a ton of c players well you're only as good as your worst people yes so you get a c plus organization even though you got those two a players and those two a players will leave at some point right and so i think that the best companies in the world what they figured out is like why don't we just collect all the a players and just make it really tough right so when you read you

know elon musk's biography about walter isaacson people are like that's always that i haven't read it yet people are like oh my god that sounds insane how could you work in that environment well it's like well if you got to ask that question you're probably not an a player that's right right because guess what a lot of people would say why would you ever want to be a Navy SEAL? Why would you want to work in special operations? Why would you want to, you know, go into the military, right? All these different things. Well, like that environment's not for you. Play with the best. Yeah. But there are some people who are drawn to that. And the same person who might be drawn to go into the infantry or into some special operations role may not be the same person that's drawn to go work at Tesla for

Elon, right? But there's also a lot of people who are an A player in sports and they couldn't care about business, right? And so it's really just like, if you are A plus, there is something that you are called to or something that you really desire being involved in. And it's usually some degree of excellence. You just want to be around excellent people doing excellent things. And that in our society has gotten pressure when people come out and say, we want to be excellent. We want to have excellent people. Well, this is tying into a bigger point you made a few minutes ago that I think is really important. When you were talking about Mike, you mentioned you had the idea that you wish one Hollywood movie house or something was dedicated to telling these stories.

I think that's a great idea. But we are living in a time where we've turned in on ourselves, and it feels like when you – we are disincentivized from celebrating America. Now, I didn't even serve in the Army or anything, so you have even a bigger appreciation for it than I ever could. But, like, I think I'm the luckiest dude in the world to live in this fucking country. I think, yeah, we have our flaws. I'll call them out when we do. We want to fix them. But, like, this place is – even when we're fucked up, this place is so great compared to other things I've even had the chance to see around the world. And yet it feels like sometimes people will make – they will make it their habit to be able to just say everything that's wrong with this and why we suck and why we hurt everything we touch and whatever.

What do you think that is and how did we even get here? There is a whole new perspective on America. And America is not perfect. But America is still the greatest country ever assembled. Democracy and capitalism are the two best systems ever created. There's a lot of people who have experimented with a lot of things but we ain't seen one that's better right right and the only thing that you need to measure as to whether america is still great or not is is there a line out the door of people trying to get in yes because there's a lot of countries where the line is headed out

they don't want to be there they They're leaving. They're voting with their feet in their wallet. Yes. America is still the greatest beneficiary of that movement in terms of people wanting to come to our country. And our country really was built by immigrants. Yes. And when you look at how the country was built, we used these systems around democracy and capitalism to drive performance. And if you think about in companies, right, there's a huge study done, there's a book called The Outsiders, I think it is. And what they talk about is I think they follow eight or nine different CEOs. And they basically say, why are these companies so great? There's a couple commonalities. The first is they have very decentralized governance.

So the CEO doesn't make all the decisions. CEO says, you're a smart person. You're an A player. You manage this division. Make the decisions. We're going to live or die with the decisions you make. The second thing is they push that decision making as close to the problem as possible. Why should the person working on the problem have to come to you and then you come to me?

That's the person who understands the problem better than me. Let them make the decision. The third thing is they're great at capital allocation. Capital allocation ultimately is just a game of incentives. If I put money here, what happens? If I put money here, what happens? And thinking through that. And so there's a couple of these different components that go into what make you great.

Well, as a country, we basically are the epitome of the same strategy. We have decentralization, we have 50 states, we have pushed decision making as close to the actual problems as possible in structure, maybe not in practice, but in structure, we have local governments, we have state governments, and then we go up to the federal government. And then on top of that, what we usually try to do is we try to actually make it better. Capitalistic incentives, right? The whole point is if you come to our country, you have the opportunity to build a life of value, happiness, economic prosperity, and probably one of the most important things,

freedom to the degree of if you don't like it here, you can leave. And so when you see all of these components going into it, we're like, wait a minute. We're just a great corporate structure where we have incentivized our quote-unquote employees. Those employees produce actual economic productivity for our country. They pay our taxes. They're part of our income. And what we are incentivizing them to do is if you win, we win. And then from a governance standpoint, we don't just say you're the king.

We have a democratic system. Now, in practice, what I think a lot of people have actually gotten very uncomfortable with when it comes to government is that the local politicians seem to be distracted with stupid things. In many of these cities, they're worried about let's build a million-dollar toilet rather than, hey, let me actually figure out what are the problems my citizens are facing and how do I solve those problems. The state level, similar. And then the federal government comes in over the top and acts like get out of my way. I'm the federal government. I'm going to tell you guys what to do. And you see this with public health crisis, southern border, etc. And so as a country, what we actually would benefit from is to simply say, listen, all we're going to do is we're going to make your vote actually matter. When you go into the ballot box, when you vote for that local representative, they're going to make the local decisions. Make sure you choose wisely. We're not going to tell you who it should be you as the local do you think that realistically will happen

i think that what the only way that it can happen is you actually need a president and an administration that has the intellectual humility to say i'm not going to overstep but do they but does the president and administration really have – this is not like a conspiratorial stuff, but do they really have that level of control over things? Do you think so? I think that leadership matters, and I think that there are certain people who frankly – I don't know if I'd be like, oh, this would be the best president, right? I don't think that we know enough about different people who want to be president, et cetera. But I think that if you put the right people in place, they will get things done. And part of getting things done is knowing what not to work on and also when to delegate.

And really having local politicians at the local and state level do work and actually focus on important things is a form of delegation. It's to say to them hey it's not up to the federal government to make this decision all's in your court yeah what do you think your people should do and then what you end up doing is now you allow the states to compete and we saw this a little bit during covid yes we saw california and new york lose a lot of people to texas and florida that was straight competition they got you back though well got you back here

here's here's part of what i think is really interesting right is um individuals then start to ask themselves what do i really care about do i care about paying 10 lower taxes do i care about some degree of freedom that may not be afforded to me somewhere else. When I left New York, they were doing all kinds of crazy stuff around public health, things that I didn't necessarily agree with. That was what, like December, January, 2020? Yeah, December of 2020. So before Miami and all that got really hot, and I thought I was going for the winter. I literally was like, hey, this is gonna blow over in three or four months. I'm just going to go down there. My wife and I, we're going to hang. We're going to come back. And then more people started showing up.

New York kept getting crazier. And it was just like there's night and day difference here. But then at some point I said to myself, wait a second. Actually, they're kind of back to even ground. New York isn't doing all kinds of crazy nonsense. Florida's doing what Florida's been doing. um so on that standpoint they're actually equal um there's crime all throughout this country and when you look at the crime statistics uh it is actually very telling guess where a lot of the crime happens where there's a lot of people yeah no shit right

california's got crime texas got crime new New York's got crime. Florida's got crime, right? And so like the narrative is actually very different than when you look at the statistics. So you kind of like can't get away from it if you want to live in a big city. That's right. And then from a business perspective, I said to myself, am I optimizing for 10% or am I optimizing for 10X? And so I can save 10% of my taxes on living in these low-tax states, but is it actually what's best for my business? Or could I just make 10x more for my business by being in a California or New York? And sure, you got to pay more taxes, but your tax revenue that you pay, you're buying something, right? So yes, you But I'm buying the ability to live in New York City. I'm buying the density. I'm buying the energy.

I'm buying the ability to walk to the corner store. I'm buying the ability to go to Central Park. It's like the most expensive park in the world to attend, right? But damn, is it awesome. It is awesome. And so you look at that and you say, okay, what are you optimizing for? And the reason why people argue about it on the internet is because everyone's optimizing for something different. Somebody who lives in Texas can't imagine why you would pay taxes in California because they care about the taxes. But the person in California may say, I can't imagine why you would live where the weather isn't perfect. Right? They don't care about taxes.

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

Yeah. The incentive system works. I always joke, they got a bunch of friends who moved to Puerto Rico, right? And I ask them, they're like, well, I pay 0% taxes. I'm like, okay. You live in Puerto Rico. Well, beautiful place. A lot of friends I know actually are from Puerto Rico, but they've left. And the reason why they're giving you 0% taxes is similar to why the military paid me $20,000 to sign up. If you're dumb enough to sign the contract, we'll give you 20 grand. That was kind of the jokes on me in hindsight. Dan, they got me for 20 grand. They got six and a half years of my life.

Same thing here. It's all incentive systems. I do think that a huge issue of our time is none of our smartest friends are going into politics. Oh, yeah. It's all the dumbasses. How do we get them to do it?

Now, here's the other thing. Who wants that job though, Pomp? Who wants to do that now? So that's the thing is people ask me all the time would I ever do it. And I say to them, absolutely not. Right? One, the structure, the bureaucracy of it, I don't actually think you can get that much done right now because you at the top don't have the leadership that pushes it down. The second thing is it's very stressful, right?

Like it's incredibly stressful. And so there's an element of like serving your country. And you can do that in a lot of different ways. I actually think finance and tech get a bad name because people are like, oh, you're just trying to get rich. But another way to view it is that they're serving their country by being able to drive as much tax revenue for their country as possible. I see what you did there. Well, think about it, right? Is right now the United States government runs a $2 trillion deficit, meaning that they spend $2 trillion more than they make every single year. Sounds good. And so that's unsustainable, right? We have $34 trillion on its way to $35 trillion of national debt that we owe to the earth, right?

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

What is going to happen instead is they are going to keep ratcheting up the percentage that they take from you. So if you live in New York City and you have the highest tax bracket, you don't work for yourself until July. Oh, yeah. January through June, that's for Uncle Sam, right? July through December, that's for you. If you live in California- I never thought of it that way. That's interesting. If you live in California, I don't think you start working for yourself until like July 15th, right? So you got two extra weeks going to work for Uncle Sam. Boy, that's interesting. If you live in California, I don't think you start working for yourself until like July 15th.

Right? So you got two extra weeks going to work for Uncle Sam. Right? And so you look at this stuff and you're like, okay, there's different ways to view taxes, et cetera. But I tweeted it recently and people got all worked up. I said, but you should stroke it. You should smile every time you stroke your signature on that tax check. Live in the greatest country in the world that has given you freedom and economic opportunity. And if you weren't writing that check, there's a lot of other countries that would say,

you don't have to pay us anything, but you don't want to live. That's an interesting way to say it. And so it's not about, oh my God, I want the government to take all my money. No shit. I don't want to pay extra money either but it's the framing of i gotta pay the money i gotta pay you're you're doing the classic glass glass half full thing right is the glass half empty or is it half full it's half full because i get to live here i'm with that like i like that you know pick your favorite country

that people like to dunk on that is not safe has no economic opportunity you know kind of would can be considered like a third world country just whatever country chicago set you up for that one um and i said to you you don't have to pay any taxes but you get to live here in this country or you have to pay between 30 to 50 percent of your income every year you live in can live in the United States. Now, if I could reinvest my tax losses into a really good investment that

like 100x's and higher private security enough for a compound for my family and all of my friends with a private jet and possibly like a landing strip there that I could get in and out to any country at any time to visit. You still wouldn't do it. It's possible. You wouldn't do it. You know why? Possible. Cause none of your friends will come. Your family won't move. They might.

They're not going to do it. They might. Right. Because what ends up happening is all of this sounds good in theory. I have a lot of friends who have been immensely successful none of them left the u.s right none of them even some i know one guy who uh is very famous now i'm not a friend of mine but somebody who uh renounced his citizenship they literally changed the law after he did it and um because he had a lot of money in billions of dollars and he was able after rencing his citizenship, he didn't have to pay American taxes because he wasn't an American citizen anymore. You can't do that anymore after this guy did it. He spends a lot of time in the US. Right?

So when you think about that, you're like, wait a second. Taxes are like this really stupid thing because guess what? The government knows how much you owe. They don't tell you. You got to guess. Right? And then they can print as much money as they want. So people get very frustrated by it.

But at the end of the day, you can try to change a system, but the system isn't going to change. So just put a smile on your face. Put your name on the dotted line. Move on with your day and enjoy America. That is a whole new way of looking at it. Right? I've never heard that one before, but I like that. And yeah, I think it does still go back to there's elements of push and pull where we can try to improve things.

But what's the bigger picture at the end of the day? Great to live here. It's just an day great to live here it's it's just it's an awesome place now listen i'll be the first one to say we ain't seen nothing yet on taxes right what do you mean oh we are entering the era of creative tax uh for the u.s government what does that mean a perfect example is the congestion tax in new york city it's the first time in the united states that any city has implemented a congestion tax there There's some in Europe that have it, but for some of the United States. Can you explain this to people? So in New York City, there is Manhattan, the actual island, and there's five boroughs, but in Manhattan is where most of the businesses are. And so between,

I call it 8 a.m. and maybe 6 p.m., there are quite a number of people who come to those businesses. And some of those people live in one of the other boroughs. Some of them live kind of above 59th Street. Some of them live in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, et cetera. And they come into that area. Well, the city of New York City needs more tax revenue. And so rather than hike up the income tax, they're looking for opportunities to get creative. And they found one. And so now I think it starts this summer. If you drive below 59th Street basically during work hours, they will hit you with like a $15 or $20 tax. One time a day. So guess what happens? They just read your plate they have a they already have installed the like camera things and they're gonna hit you no different than paying a toll

to go on the road the problem is this is smart if you're trying to get creative and get more tax revenue it's genius it's like evil genius right yeah they think that they can raise i think the latest estimates are somewhere between 12 to 15 billion dollars in tax revenue i believe them 15 20 bucks at a time now guess what the ramifications of that are you think uber fares are going to go up oh yeah of course uber's not going to pay that well if you're the third rider of the day you don't know are you the first one where they're going to get hit with the tax or are you the third time and they don't have to pay the tax? Everyone's fares are going to go up. Get in that subway, baby.

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

take more money from the people that's right they're not working at quiznos no they're thinking about your pockets no they're thinking about the franchisee who ran that quiznos location how the hell can we get another three percent of the revenue that goes through that business? You know what we're going to do? We're going to create a sandwich tax. The fuck is a sandwich tax, right? You're like, every time you sell a sandwich, you have to pay us 2 cents. Like, literally, I mean, this is the stuff that they're thinking of, right? And you're like, why is it a sandwich tax and not a soup tax? Oh, because the soup industry paid us off, right? I mean, like, that's the crazy shit that goes on.

And so I just think that people are not yet ready for that creativity because we overestimate how conspiratorial the government is and we underestimate how creative they can get in the evil genius stuff. Wait, can you clarify that? So we give most government conspiracy theories way too much credit like you know oh i i go talk to some of the people who run these organizations uh they can't figure out how to get people to show up on time to their office that's right right uh a friend of mine always says uh government's like doing any conspiracy theories like they can't even get tsa to get you to the line in 15 minutes right there's some that are true but then there's a lot that it's like people you don't have too

much time on twitter of course so like we probably give too much credit there right and we we see one that actually ends up being true and then we extrapolate out all of them must be true yeah right you know um recently the ship hit the bridge in baltimore yeah and incredibly sad right um you know brandon was almost on that he's driving back from new york city i had brandon buckingham in here doing a podcast come on after yours he was like driving back from new york city going over that because he lives in carroll county and i guess it was like a few hours before incredible scary well the the my understanding is that the police officer stopped traffic so there's actually only a pothole repair crew that was on the bridge, no one else.

Yeah. Saved a lot of lives. But you look at that, and the first thing every single person on my timeline said, sabotage. Dude, right away. Immediately. Group text, all of it. Now, here's the thing. Maybe, right?

I don't know. I don't know what happened. Like, we don't even have all the details, right? We don't understand. But they jumped to that right away. Now, it's intellectually stimulating. What if, right? Humans have been doing that forever.

Dun, dun, dun. But also, I think there's this element of, you know, you start getting some of the details. You're like, are people really that smart? Are we really intelligent enough to understand what bridge what port how many you know cars go in and out i saw one guy was like they did it to uh get tesla uh stocked up and i was like all right i gotta read more like that'd be crazy and it took me 10 seconds to be like this is ridiculous but basically there's a lot of cars that go into the Baltimore port, right? And so if you stop cars from being able to come in, Tesla can't sell them, right? It all comes back to Elon!

And so you're looking at this, you're like, okay, that's the insanity. But at the same time, we underestimate the ingenuity of this, right? Like, remember, these people literally ordered a national lockdown. I saw people that are very, very well respected when there was lockdowns in other areas around the world who tweeted and later deleted and said that will never happen in America. People covet their freedom too much. Happened quick. Of course. Right? And so when you look at that, you're like that – like if anyone had ever told you before 2020, like the government is going to mandate you to lock in your room, like, okay, prepper.

Yeah. Like, what are you selling? Right. Like, yeah. What was the movie called? Like quarantine or something like, yeah, that'll happen here. And so you look at it and you're just like, investors in today's world is we live in a dynamic world. You've got to be able to critically think. You've got to be able to independently think and take in all this information, sift through it, synthesize it, and then make good decisions. That is the challenge. And it's really hard to do if you're unprepared either in the information you consume, in your ability to synthesize information, or your self-confidence in the decisions that you do make.

Because usually what ends up happening is people are just sort of like, oh my god, all this information, the world's ending, I'm just going to go crawl in a hole. But the people who get shit done in the world, you can't do that. And there's always going to be people who do get shit done in a way, but where are they doing it? Right. And you're looking out at the future and, and if we're going to have an environment where good corporations can thrive and good innovations can thrive, it's, it's worth the question just because of some of the things we've been hinting at today throughout the conversation, which is the endless path to devaluation. We seem to be putting ourselves on economically so if you don't mind for one sec i just have to go to the bathroom that's really it but that's the thing we now live in a society where people

they'll pull up next to the ferrari and they'll say i want that i should have it too right whereas it used to be i don't know how many years ago but i don't know 20 30. Whereas it used to be, I don't know how many years ago, but I don't know, 20, 30 years ago, it used to be, wow, I want that. I wonder what that guy had to do to get that. I want to do that too. There's some, there's something that shifted there and it, and it's created a, it's a widespread social problem to the point that I think it has infected the mentality of people who maybe would be those self-starters you know and it's not to say we don't still have a ton of them i mean look around there's a you see it all the time there's innovation happening everywhere there's people doing amazing shit but i wonder sometimes

if like people feel disillusioned with the system because of what is presented to them on their social media or what their friends fucking talk about even when their kids in school life is about trade-offs and the internet brought access to information to exposure of other societies economies lifestyles etc the trade-off is the internet through accessibility also made it seem easy yeah because guess what people only celebrate their wins. That's right. Right. And so then people get frustrated. It goes back to what is happiness, difference between expectations and reality. You think it's going to be easy, but it is hard. So therefore you get frustrated, you're unhappy and you give up. I was having dinner recently with two friends. They run a business, do over a hundred million dollars in revenue. Literally both of them immigrants came

to the United States, built an incredible business that people would have heard of. And we were talking about what are some of the things that they've seen that have been successful in the sense of founders. Is this GoPuff? No. No, they're even bigger. And one of the things that they pinpointed was persistence. So many people give up. Yeah.

Right? NVIDIA is like the talk of financial markets right now. And for those that don't know, NVIDIA basically makes computer chips. Those computer chips are used for artificial intelligence, right, in the most basic way. And it's gone up a lot. The stock is really high, right? People are like, oh, my God, this is amazing. This this guy jensen who's the ceo he's a genius diamond hands baby jensen's been working on this for 30 years yeah right yep like he deserves because he worked at it yeah you can

plot all of the hours and days and weeks and months and years that he toiled away and nobody cared. That's right. But he also did something that is essential usually for people to create value in the world. He did something that other people didn't do and he was right. Being different and right is where most economic value is. It's true in investing and it's also true in business. But what you need at some point is the different thing to eventually become the consensus thing. So just because you're doing something different, if no one else ever believes that you're right, it doesn't matter. You could buy a stock and you're like, yeah, I bought it. It was a great

price. But if no one else ever buys it, stock ain't going anywhere. But if you buy it before the people find it, right, or you buy it at a great price when everyone else doesn't want it, and then in an NVIDIA's case, all of a sudden you're like, oh, my god, artificial intelligence is going to be a big deal. I want that stock. Jensen's like, yeah, I knew this 30 years ago. Like we're doing pretty good. about when it comes to like economic security and financial freedom, most people, they get sucked into the world of like, oh, don't buy my $5 coffee. And sure, there are some people who have spending problems without a doubt. Sure. Right. But for the majority of people, you're probably better off trying to figure out how to make more money rather than spend less money.

Yeah. Yeah. People are penny pinching rather than dollar gaining. Yeah. And so it's just like create value in the world and you will receive value is like a law of the universe. The hard part is how do you create value? And that's ultimately entrepreneurs who are successful. They figured it out. And then the ones who are trying, but haven't yet hit success, each combination of what they're doing is not yet the one that unlocks the value in the world that will give them that economic gain. Where did you develop this worldview and this thinking? I would imagine when you were fucking around in high school thinking about more important things, you were a smart guy naturally. So you're thinking about a lot of stuff and then

obviously you go over literally fighting a war. That's crazy. But you came back and I believe you started off in Facebook working your way up through there. What was it? The growth team? I started two businesses before that. And I think I didn't know that. Yeah. So when I was in, when I came back from the military, I had four semesters left. I missed three. So I basically basically my junior year fall get deployed. I don't come back until the spring of what should be my senior year. So the last semester of my senior year. So all my friends are leaving.

Right. And they're partying. They're having a frigging blast. And I'm like, man, I got four semesters. I got two years. I got to finish school. And so a lot of the younger guys on the football team or in school I was like well I don't know

any of them these are gonna be my new friends right like what's up have you ever seen the meme where like the guy the old guy shows up with the skateboard and he's like hey how do you do fellow kids yeah that was me right literally some of them called me grandpa right and I'm like

I will whoop your ass, right? And on top of that though, I didn't know this at first, but I came back, right? Football team dynamics are really important. And you're playing football again. That's so wild. You go from war to football. It was one of the best things that ever happened in terms of the mental component. So if you think football is a team-oriented sport, all male, you put on armor and it's combative without like true violence in the sense of like guns, etc. back into regular society i don't know how i would have done but instead i gotta step down go back into it all male environment uniforms team armor you have been combative right and you kind of step back down into it so i actually credit going back and playing football with a huge part of a successful transition back um because it just allowed me to kind of process stuff right

um but i remember there were there was a couple of guys and if they hear this they'll die laughing but uh when i came back maybe i don't know a couple months after i've been back in school um i went over not to talk to him and ask him a question or something you know play or something and uh and they were really nervous and i was like you good and they were like yeah man i just i would have never talked to you unless you talked to me first and i was like why and he was like i don't know dude you're like a white dude with a shaved head and they said you went to war i ain't fucking with you right and so like if you think about it from that perspective like there's also these dynamics of like now

especially on a small campus everyone knows yeah right and you know the school at the time was like trying to parade me around because like now it's like a recruiting opportunity for them so they've got me like you know trying to do all this press stuff and all this bullshit whatever um and i'm just like man look like i now i saw the real world right like i know that this ends and so like i'm really serious about school now i'm really serious about like trying to figure my life out and figure out what I need to do. Um, and so I decided I'm not going to take four years to graduate from college either. I'm going to do it in three and a half. So I'm gonna do seven semesters. And that last semester, uh, I remember, um, having a conversation with somebody, uh, and, um, I think it was my dad

said to me, he goes, you have two options. You can get a job or you can create a job, but the finish line is here. You're four or five months away. You're getting kicked out of school once you graduate. They don't let you stay. Figure it out. And it's just my nature. I was like, what do you mean create a job?

He's like, well, you can start a business. Bingo. That sounds fucking awesome. I am definitely not getting a real job um like fuck those few idiots so i started a company and um it was an online advertising business i started with three of my best friends from high school uh and the whole idea was tons of web traffic on the page where parents and students sign in in public school school kind of portals to check their homework. Those websites with the login page has immense traffic and no one monetizes it. And so we decided that we were going to basically build like a business directory or put a link

there. And then we would sell people to get listed. We would split the revenue with the school district. And that was like the idea. Now, I knew nothing about business. To give you a sense, I literally started my professional career out going door to door in local shopping centers, walking into businesses unannounced and saying, hey, is the owner here? And I did it for months. 10, 20, 30, however many I could do in a day. Character building, man. for months yeah 10 20 30 however many i could do in a day character building man and what you start to learn in hindsight like damn that's a great way to start your career because you do you learn all this stuff right you learn sales you understand people's problems like all these components that

go into it at the time my friends are balling who aren't starting companies they got you know 100k jobs we're gonna have banks they're doing the equivalent of posting on Instagram every single day, you know, on the weekends, partying, all this shit. And I'm like, dude, this sucks. But, like, this is the life I chose, right? And so either I make it work or I don't. And so we basically forced that business to have some degree of success. But in the grand scheme of things, like, in the way I look at it, it's a failure, right? We didn't know how to build a business. we didn't know how to actually scale anything etc

and so i started a second business second business i was like all right how soon after the first one the next day yeah but i'm sorry how long did you spend on the first one uh more than a year less than two years okay right but but like it was clear at some point like there was multiple dynamics there was like the dynamic of um this business probably can't scale that big. And 1A was like, we don't know how to scale it that big. And then 2 was I picked my best friends because they were my best friends. And they picked me because I was their best friend. And I think at some point we all kind of realized like, if we were drafting the first round draft team for business team, I don't think the four of us would pick each

other. Yeah. So like, let's be friends, not like business partners. Right. Like that's actually what we enjoy doing. Uh, let's not like force this. Um, so I started a second one. Uh, and this time I was like, all right, I want to be software related.

Like that seems way more scalable than like walking around fucking local you know shopping centers um and that one we had a bigger degree of success that's how i actually met some of the folks at facebook was uh we were hitting uh the social media apis and we had built a piece of technology that essentially allowed you to draw like a box around a area on a map and you could look at all of the social media data that had been created inside that box in like a two hour period. So think of like a sports stadium. This is back in like 2012, 2013. They would love to know what are the 60,000 fans in our stadium saying? And then we could even do things like, okay, when you go home, we see that you keep tweeting from this area, this specific neighborhood every night between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m. It's probably where you live.

Oh, yeah. So, okay, what's the average salary of people who live in that neighborhood? What's the occupations? Like you start to get all this information that you can then give to businesses. Was this term geotagging? Geotagging is when you're tag tagging the tweets like you're creating the tweets at the time only five percent of tweets geolocation sorry that's what you have on your phone so geolocations on your phone when you actually tag a place that's geotagging um but

the whole idea is like the geography that you're in the location right um only five percent of tweets had what they what you consider consider coordinates, right? Like they had a tag on it. So what we started to develop was something called identity stitching, a phrase we came up with, which really just said, okay, what are all your social profiles? You have a Twitter, you have a Facebook, you have a LinkedIn, you have a Foursquare, you have whatever. Let's suck all that information in. And then if you tweet and say i love ice cream and five minutes ago you checked in an ice cream store you probably liked that ice cream wouldn't that business love to know that you're the person who came in and you tweeted saying that you loved the ice cream right but you

didn't tag the business so they would never find you so you start stitched together now we then expanded it more so law enforcement became very interested in this. The military, the intelligence community, because if you can basically take this social media data in, you can use it for offensive or defensive purposes. let's say that a shooting happens. If all of a sudden they show up, but everyone's ran, they don't know who was there. They go to the shop owners, hey, did you see anything, whatever. But if they know that you tweeted three minutes before the shooting, well, you were there, they can digitally canvas. They now can reach out to you and say, hey, there was a shooting. Did you see anything? Do you have any idea who the suspect is? Like all this kind of stuff. So they love this idea. It's all publicly, so it's all public information. At the time, I wasn't as aware of what Palantir was doing, but think of palantir's doing it with private data sets

we basically were trying to use the public data sets and the social media apis were really less spooky yeah i was too dumb to know that there was private data sets right i just knew what was publicly available um and so then imagine the intelligence use cases. And so again, we had a degree of success, but it became clear like I don't know what I'm doing. Right? It's a good idea. Obviously people want this. We can kind of force this thing, but how do you actually scale these? It's unclear.

So that's when I decided, all right, I have two options. I can either go to business school, be a good little boy, put on my suit and tie, go to fucking business school, pay a bunch of money, figure out how to do that. Or the real world school. Yeah, I can go somewhere and they can pay me to teach me. Right. So I like that option, obviously. And so people always laugh. How did you get the job at Facebook?

I literally – a recruiter asked me, what are you going to do now after we uh we're doing the second business and um i said i don't know he goes why don't you come out here do an interview i said cool what's the position he said product manager i didn't know what a product manager was so i said i'll be there tell me when like hook up the flights never never as an adult been to california like sounds awesome i flew out there and on the flight um i had purchased in kindle form the art of product management it's a book and i read it from beginning to end on the flight and i went in the interviews and i repeated back every single thing in that book to the people interviewing me i was on my a game but like if you go back it's like the same thing from high school you're like constantly

you're trying to figure out how do you hack the system? How do you figure out what is the thing to find success? And they probably were kinder to me than they should have been. I think that there was an element of I was saying all the right things. I think they knew that I really wanted to work there and I was excited about doing it. And then also I think the recruiter really went to bat for me. And he was like, hey, I think this guy is legit. You should really take him seriously. And, also I think the recruiter really went to bat for me and he was like, Hey, I think this guy's like legit. You should like really take them seriously.

And so somehow I got the job. And I remember, um, when I got the job, uh, a friend called me and he had played basketball at UNC and he was managing money for one of his teammates who's very famous basketball player. And he said, you hit the lottery. What do you mean? He goes, dude. He goes, so-and-so.

Plays in the NBA. Average career is three years. Let's say he pays six years. He's getting paid, I think at the time, like $800,000 or $900,000. Here's how much money he's going to make. He also has a lifestyle where he's spending tons of money. You think you're only going to get paid. I think I was getting paid like $150,000 or something.

And you're going to get some stock options stock options he goes your trajectory is only up his is only down from here yeah and it crazy changed my mind right it completely changed the way i looked i was like oh my god actually being a professional in the business and investing world is better long term than in the sports world now there are tom brady made a lot of money right if you're at the height yeah at the highest that's different but the average player versus the average successful person in business is very different because longevity you have in the business career and so um when i went to facebook i got a world-class education and they paid me for it but you also rose up through the ranks like crazy no i did but um when i joined uh they have a very interesting interview process they basically say go pick your team and the team it's like a double opt-in the

team has to want you and you have to want to work on the team and so i picked a team um it was internet.org and i picked it i was so excited two days later they're like we're shutting down the team i was like that's lose my job and nah, it's like, just go pick another team. All right, this place is awesome. You guys just like, go pick another, okay. And so I ended up getting onto this team, Facebook Pages Growth. So the Pages product is not Profile Office Business Pages. It's the top of the funnel for their advertising revenue. I didn't know at the time.

Again, young and dumb is a very big advantage when you're at that point in your career. No one had ever worked on this before, and they probably didn't think it was an important job. Okay. Step in like two or three people on the team. I'm now the leader, right? Like, yeah, okay. Let's see what this kid can do. In less than six months, we doubled the number of people who had Facebook pages on Facebook uh and that combined with

another team that was driving converting those people to advertisers we drove something like 700 million dollars of unforecasted uh revenue onto the financials how'd you do that stupid stuff for example um Facebook color scheme is blue and gray. We would do a lot of testing, very A-B testing type culture. So we would take the button that said create a page, and we would put it in a bunch of places on the website, and then we would test things. Should the corners be square, rounded?

Should there be a shadow, not a shadow? Should the font change? What is the shade of blue or green? Whatever, right? Like? Should the font change? What is the shade? Unless he's getting PTSD over here, whatever, right? Like all these things, right? Now, Facebook also has a system where you can put a bunch of variables in and it does the multivariate testing for you. Cause one of their great advantages is they have tons of traffic. So if you have a startup and you only get 10 people a day, it may take you a year to get a statistically significant result. Facebook can get that in an hour, right? And so they can learn faster.

And so we just kept tweaking, kept tweaking, kept tweaking. The other thing is Facebook has a very big international audience. So one of the things that we did is, remember like T9 texting? So you would like press button. Do you know what T9 texting is? Okay. Wow, I'm old as shit.

What is T9 texting? T9 texting is basically like on your phone, you know how it's like one, it's ABC? When texting first came out. Oh, like call 1-800-AT&T? No, no, no, no. So like when you first texted, what you would have to do is there was no letters.

Oh, you got to hit the number? So you hit the, like to get to C. Oh, like in The Departed when he's fucking, right? No, like in real life when I was in high school. So what you do is you would hit like the number two here at three times to like type the letter C. And then if you wanted to type the next letter as a, you would wait a second, let the cursor move. And then you would press it once and then you get an a, and then if you wanted a D you would go, you know, and you would just go and you would do T9 texting.

So in emerging countries, all of the phones are still like this for the most part. And so what would occur is the more clicks you have to do to get to a button, the less likely you're to get there. So me being an enterprising young man who is gold on getting more people to download pages, I went to the team who built that for emerging markets. I said, yo, I think we should move create a page to the front of the line. And they were like why i was like well we're trying to you know drive more money to the business and you know all these reasons whatever and they're like okay no one ever went to them before they were ecstatic that someone cared what they were doing moved that right to the front of the line exploded the number of people who clicked on it and so it's like a cheat code yeah it's just it's just figuring out like what are all the like what are our tools in our toolbox? We have a global audience. Okay. Well, we're all

focused on the U S what about the 83% of users that are outside the U S at the time? How do we get them to create more pages? What phones are they using? What is the internet connectivity? Like, like just really trying to understand this stuff. And to the business's credit, like they sent me to Indonesia at one point, go like learn more about this and stuff, right? So like really trying to understand. And I remember at one point I got an email from a well-known executive, and they basically were like, stop growing so fast. And I remember being like, well, that's weird. Like I'm on the growth team.

We grow. We grow everything. And so one of the leaders, a guy who was a mentor of mine, he goes, hey, don't worry about it. It's good. They don't like us growing too fast because it's public companies. They like to say, hey, this is how fast we're going to grow. And then they want to slightly beat expectations. When they say a number and then we like triple it not really easy to kind of

build true uh trust with the public market so i was like well like i don't give a about that like do i get paid more money because we just made 700 million dollars and they were like no and and i was like oh i'm like i'm like a real live employee like yeah the business made them no incentive yeah so i remember like all right i'm like a real live employee like yeah the business made them no incentive and so i remember being like all right i'm not gonna be here forever like that's bullshit but like that is how business works right is that i just can pay my salary i get some stock options whatever and so uh from there um after the first year i was asked to go work uh on a team there's three people uh with uh mark zuckerberg and cheryl sandberg and oh um they specifically in end of 2014 beginning

of 2015 wanted to learn how to what we now would call go direct they realized uh i remember zuck saying uh 1.5 billion people on facebook he only had like 9 million followers he can't talk to the user base everything he does to communicate he's got to go through the press and they weren't attacking him actually loved him right but like i want to talk to my users how do i do that and so he wanted to learn as a user of facebook how to grow his audience and that's what we that's what our job was um and it's like stupid stuff right like people think it's like oh my god you guys must have like some major magic wand it's like no we posted a photo one had zuck's dog in it and one didn't the one with the dog did better let's do that again right uh zuck's face in it versus not zuck's face works right like like

stupid stupid things you just learn you mean there's not an there's not an internal button there it just says follow zuck i will say this um he had the opportunity to change the rules of the platform for himself myspace tom friended everybody right uh he could have done shout out myspace tom legend yeah he could have put an interstitial and like made a follow i could do all this stuff both of them were very very concrete on they did not want to change the rules of the platform for themselves they thought it was important that they learned how to do it and didn't give themselves an Both of them were very, very concrete on they did not want to change the rules of the platform for themselves. They thought it was important that they learned how to do it and didn't give themselves an advantage. That's cool.

Right? You're talking about Zuck and Cheryl. Yeah. And again, everyone's like, oh, are people good people, bad people, whatever? I can only tell you my experience. That was a pretty good guy decision up to not MySpace Tom and like everyone else Zuck's friend. So he can push his stuff, you know, into their feeds. Um, and so then before I left, uh, uh, that, that was like a 90 day project basically. Right. Cause once you kind of learn, Hey, put, put my face in the photo, put my dog, whatever, like you kind of know those things. Take up jujitsu. Yeah. I mean, incredible glow up. Right. Yeah. Um yeah um but but i will say uh there was one meeting he

came to um he's kind of flush in the face and he had a uh protein shake he was like doing his like 10 o'clock in the morning and remember being like we're just working out like you know i'm not gonna brag but like i work out like are you working out and he was like yeah and i was like how often he was like you know three times a week like what are you mark zuckerberg multi-billionaire doing the gym he's like bench press and i was like that's respect yeah like i don't know how much you bench but like that sounds cool yeah so now see this like it's not a oh recently like he was working out the whole time um that's pretty cool um and so before i left then uh there was a team called social good and goodwill and again to facebook's credit to some degree uh they basically said look let's use the system of facebook to do good in the world and don't worry about making

money it's people like that sounds kind of like what like what do you want to do um so products that we launched are things like uh voter registration so don't care how you vote we just want you registered to vote um when we launched that product in the uk i think that it was responsible for like 30 or 40% of all voters who registered in like a week. Just think everyone on the, in the UK is on Facebook. Click a couple buttons way easier than like go to your local polling

center or whatever. Right. So like social media platforms have plenty of problems and things that they got to improve, but there are things when you have massive distribution and there's people inside the company that want to use it for positive impact that can happen that just isn't possible elsewhere. And then another one was Amber Alerts. And so everyone's familiar with Amber Alerts like on your phone or you see them in the highway or whatever.

There's this woman, Emily Vacher, who's an FBI agent. And she was working at Facebook. And her – this was like her passion project was I want to figure out how do we use Facebook to help on these things. And so I just happened to be somebody on the product team who was sympathetic to what she was trying to do. She was more like in a policy type position, if I remember correctly. And we launched it. As you can imagine, people were very excited in the press because it's like a feel-good story. I don't think we really thought we were going to find any kids. Like, I mean, we hope that – You're going to find some. We hope so. The data says you're going to. Yeah, we hope so.

But, like, you just don't know if it really works. Like, you kind of want low expectations going into it. But at least we're trying. But if you find one out of 1,000, that's one more than was going to get found. So six weeks after we launched the product, I get into the office and she's on the East Coast on the West Coast and she's like did you hear oh my watch that we found a kid yesterday all right whoa what happened so what happened was I think was in the state of Washington there was a guy why do FinTechs like float choose visa as a

more trusted more secure payments network, Visa provides scale expertise and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. I, who his girlfriend and her mom came over, they had a baby with them. They said to him, it's so-and-so, a friend's baby. We're babysitting it, we gotta run to the store watch it for 30 minutes or something and we'll be right back they left him with the baby he is

sitting there on facebook and he sees the amber alert and does one of the like i got the baby holy and he calls the police and he says i was just on facebook i saw a missing kid i have the kid and he's like doesn't take it though yeah like of course by the way i didn't steal the kid right like i don't know where it came from so he does an interview and the interview is like internet gold like he's like do we have this i don't know you could try to find facebook washington amber alert man like recovery or something um but keep going but i remember him just being like and then i was on facebook and then i saw the picture and i saw the kid and like he's just like stunned that he had the kid and then we're there we're stunned

we're like oh my god we found the kids like who cares how long it took to build who cares about it like if we never find another kid it was worth it one kid right and so it's just like it left me um i think now i look at like a lot of the critiques of the social media platforms and like again they deserve some of the critiques for sure but there's a lot of those stories that people don't share because they're like people internally and they tend not to try to brag about that stuff. So I think that's really like where I learned how to build products and companies and stuff was at Facebook watching people who were exponentially better than me at it and just saying, all right, well, I'm just going to emulate what they're doing. And you did this at a really high level across multiple projects.

And then you ended up at Snapchat for like five minutes, right? 17 days, I think. 17 days. Is there still litigation going on with that? No. There's not? No. Do you want to talk about it?

Everything's out there. People can go read it for themselves. Okay. I'll leave that there. But you disagree with their assessment, I take it. I said what I said. Okay. All right.

Fair enough. So you ended up – we really got through a lot of your story. This is great. But you ended up going out on your own again after this. You come back east. You start Full Tilt Investments, right? And I think it was – how many companies did you invest in the first 90 days? So I didn't know what I wanted to do after that.

I can say that there's only been one time in my career that I ever made a decision for money. Um, and not like this, what I want to do. Um, I, I pretty sure that it is publicly known. Uh, I got offered a million dollars to go work, uh, at another company. Um, I was 26. Mm. She drove me a million bucks. What y'all doing? I was willing to put my life on the line for 20K at 17. A decade later, we're at a million. Shit, at 37, I'm going to be getting 10. Move it up in the world. One of my big lessons in life has been there's no such thing as a good or bad culture. I think a lot about you can have a company. Let's say a company that I start. I can have both of you work at that company.

You may love the culture. You may say this is the most amazing company I've ever worked at. I never want to leave this place. And he could look at it and be like, I fucking hate this place. I hate this culture. It's the same culture. Culture is more about fit it goes back to this idea of like a players want excellence that's right but b or c players don't want excellence they actually hate that environment like yo why these people up my ass all the time right and so a lot of things that i i am thoughtful about now

or intentional about come from experience i I've learned them, right? Both positive and negative experiences. And so when I decided what I was going to do next, I didn't have an idea for a company. I wanted to start a company, but I didn't have an idea. So I started investing. And frankly, a lot of the credit goes to a guy named Jason Williams. Jason had built a very successful kind of urgent care facility called FastMed, had a massive exit. And I think that he wanted to start investing as well. And we were a good team because I had a pretty decent deal flow from having worked in Silicon Valley, known some of these people, et cetera. And he was like the guy in the local area that everyone was like, yo, that guy always wins. Like he was like the Elon of the local area. His head now will explode because I said that.

But he was. He was. And so he was able to raise money, and I was able to help deploy the money, and so we were a good team. That fund, we didn't know what we were doing, but we nailed it. And the only two pieces of advice that I ever got in investing before I started a fund was follow the talent and then bet on the people yeah that's it good advice the two best pieces of advice anyone could have been given right in hindsight and so that's what we did we went we found people who were starting companies as early as possible and we bet 50 to 100 000 on, I think it'd be like 63 companies in the fund or something, 60 something companies. And we have nailed multiple multi-billion dollar companies

in that fund where we are one of the first investors in those companies. And for example, I don't want to name the company, but people probably can figure it out. One of our companies recently sent us an email and said they just won a billion dollar lawsuit unless he's googling so again the company's already worth a couple billion dollars if this holds which yeah i'm sure people are going to argue about in the courts whatever but if this judgment holds like they will get a billion dollars and so we invest in that company at 15 million valuation whoa right and so you look at this like you can create a lot of value and this is like 2016 2015 2016 2017 yeah so like you can create a lot of value in doing early stage investing

now the downsides are it's been almost nine years we have had very few of them actually get to liquidity events so it's very illiquid on On paper, it looks amazing. Let's see where the cash comes. Two is I had a lot of access. I knew people. I worked my ass off to meet a lot of people and get access. And it's very much access-driven game because you've got to know about the deals. It's not the stock market where anyone can go buy the stock. You've just got to figure out if it's a good company or not.

You've got to go find things that are kind of hidden. Third is very underrated trait in all of business and finance is you gotta be likable. So there's a lot of people who are just assholes or they're very abrasive or, um, they don't go out of their way to help people. Likeability gets you into deals. Likeability gets you phone calls. And so if you're in the business of deal flow, if you're in the business of knowing people, if you're in the business of people telling you information so that you can help them, you got to be likable. Yeah. And then I think also there was an element of probability.

You invest in 60 companies. A lot of them went out of business. A lot of them didn't. You're playing a probability game right and so there is a degree of speculation that goes into venture capital that a lot of people don't like to admit because it makes them seem like oh maybe you're not as good as you say you are it's just a probability but it's true like if you invest in 60 companies you don't think all 60 of them are going to end up being grand slams it's a reality you're playing a probability game of i need you know two to four of these to be huge out of 60 so if i'm right less than 10 of the time and they become multi-billion

dollar companies which they have it works it works and it was during this time i believe when you were doing these investments that you really got exposed to blockchain yes and if i remember correctly i think you told me this back in 2018 that you thought you had missed it you thought like it was over you thought like oh my god i should have gotten to this like six years ago or something yeah the first time i think i heard about bitcoin was uh working at facebook um and i actually found uh there's a guy that i was dming with about it maybe even as early as 2012 but i don't even think i actually knew like what i think it was an offhand comment but like the first time I really was like, Oh, somebody's talking about Bitcoin 2014, uh, maybe early 2015. And, um, we had hired David

Marcus, Facebook had hired David Marcus from PayPal. And, uh, he'd come over, he was running the messenger team, like the messaging app. And, um, he was talking about Bitcoin. And I remember turning to an engineer on our team and being like, yo, like what the fuck was the payments guy? This is Bitcoin shit real. Right. And he was like, he just said, he's like what's the payments guy? This is Bitcoin shit real. Right. And he was like, he just said, he's like, it's stupid. Okay. Didn't Google it.

Didn't do it. Like so dumb of me. Right. But Hey, you gotta learn. Um, didn't think about it. And then in probably 2016, a 21 year old kid, um, maybe it wasn't even 20. It might've been like 19 years. Yeah.

I think it was a freshman or sophomore at NC state kid named JP Barrett came to me and he said, uh, he goes, um, I know that you know about data centers cause, uh, my dad had been in the data center business for a long time.

And so, um, he goes, uh, do you know about this thing called mining? I was like, no. He said,

what you do is you buy these computers, you plug them in, uh, it runs a computer program and then it makes money. I've been trying my whole life to make money. What do you mean you just buy a fucking computer and make some money? Like, yeah, right. And he showed it to me, and I started Googling around, and I was like, there's a 50-50 chance this is real and a 50% chance this kid steals my money.

Like, that's literally what was in my head. I said, hey, man, I'm game. They didn't kill me in Iraq, so Iraq so like let's fucking roll the dice right like I got good odds on my side so far um and so uh I sold all of my Facebook stock I put 50% of it in the bank

cause I needed money to live and I took the other 50% and I bought machines um I had this is 2017-ish? 2016 um yeah I think it was second half of 2016 Machines. This is 2017-ish? 2016. Okay. Yeah, I think it was 2016. Second half of 2016.

Second half of 2016. Get hosted in Washington State. Get a dashboard. You'd be shocked. We really got money coming in every day. And we're mining Ethereum using these GPUs. I don't even know what Ethereum is. Fucking could have been, you know, dummy coin, whatever.

All I see is what it's worth. Ethereum at times like $5 goes up to like $8. And I'm getting it. I think I'm mining at the time like five ETH, right? Oh, my God. No, not oh, my God. I'm like, bro, we're never going to get our money back. I just spent, I don't know, tens of thousands of dollars.

I'm thinking in today's terms, my guy. No, I know. But I'm thinking at the time, I'm like, we just spent, each machine was a couple thousand dollars, whatever we ended up spending. How am I ever going to get my money back? Five ETH a day, it's like 40 bucks let's call it yeah and so at the start of 2017 starts out at like eight bucks ten bucks by may it's a hundred and i haven't sold any

eath i've been sitting i don't know what to do with it so now all of a sudden i'm like oh each one of those 40 days are now 400 days to $150. I sell it all. I'm a fucking genius. I just 15x'd the money that I might. Get back all my money plus some profit. I'm a gangster. Had you thought about it all? Like what it was? No.

Or was it just like, oh, we can mine that shit. I have a money printing machine. I am going to be rich is what I'm thinking um that's how it starts ethereum keeps going up it goes to 300 i'm like oh it goes to 1400 i remember this i sold it at one tenth of the price it actually went to um again each one of those 40 days would have been four thousand dollar days so um like shit but now i have too much pride to buy back actually a bad investing decision but uh thankfully i get saved because these cycles which i didn't understand at the

time so start really now i gotta figure it out so now i'm talking about a lot online i'm trying to But thankfully, I get saved because these cycles, which I didn't understand at the time. So start really – now I got to figure it out. So now I'm talking about a lot online. I'm trying to understand who the players in this – what do you guys know? Who the hell created this shit? Who's Vitalik? Satoshi? Is that a real person? Like I'm in the weeds, right?

My wife always jokes that one time she came home. We were dating. I had basically just moved into her apartment. She didn't know yet. And so i was there i had a duffel bag of clothes um i'm like i'm grinding right yeah and uh i have books but not like regular i have like textbooks and she's like what are you doing i'm studying and she's like oh what what could you possibly be studying on the internet second i say the word

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

And so I'd met a guy named Mark Yusko mark ran a company called morgan creek capital management uh big hedge fund um and going back to many points in my career i said okay i want to work with this guy but i ain't gonna be an employee i did the employee i'm not on the employee um he wanted me to go work for him uh and i said why don't we be partners that's it he said, what do you think? And so me and Jason, Mark and Morgan Creek became partners. And we basically set up a joint venture. Yeah.

So we used the name Morgan Creek Digital Assets, but separate but related. You got your nice office in New York that you put fucking nothing in. We can talk about that. Except a bag. And so they owned half. We owned half. And the whole idea, again, how Jason and I became partners was they could help us raise money, and we knew how to deploy the money. And for whatever reason, we just figured it out.

We tried, figured all this stuff out. We were able to raise money from the first two public pension funds in america to put money into a fund to want to buy bitcoin so we're investing mostly in other things and companies and things like that but a little bit in bitcoin um and i think a lot about that experience because it took people with courage to say hey you know what this is new but i think it's valuable and i'm going to do something that may not be popular today but if it becomes popular in the future, it'd be pretty good. But Mark believed in the concept when he first partnered with you, right? Like when he was talking about it.

I think all of us probably were like, this is going to be big, but we lied to ourselves and thought we understood it better than we did, as with everything, right? You always think you understand something better, and then five years later, like, oh, wow, I understood it way better than we did as with everything right you always think you understand something better and then five years later like oh wow i understood it way better than i used to um and so that fund there are a couple of investment decisions in my life that i've made where i'm like that was a big decision i got it right and and uh paid off um bitcoin had hit twenty thousand

dollars in 2017 and it started to draw down meaning the price was going down so there's a bubble-ish type activity and now it's crashing and bitcoin um by june is when we started raising the money uh was now at like 10k yeah right or something and it dropped to about six thousand dollars and kind of went sideways so it's down 75 percent from the high it's down 75 percent most people what like now we're in september october 2018 yes this is august i think yeah yeah and most people they'd be like hey that's pretty good discount i'm gonna buy it but my entire career i take the perspective i have a small brain but a lot of smart friends i was calling every single person i knew and i said hey what do you think is going to happen

what do you think is going to happen what do you think can happen are you buying are you selling are you holding what are you doing as much information into my algorithm as i can and then i'll figure out what i think based on what all these other smart people have told me and i came to the conclusion that bitcoin was going to drop from 6 000 to 3 000 before it went back to 10 and i not only thought it but then then I, like a moron, decided to publicly write it. And I wrote it, and I published it. You did it though too. And when I published it, people went nuts.

They were like, you're an idiot. Posted it on Twitter. I was like, whatever. Why do you guys care if I'm wrong? You're dumb okay that happened and when it happened uh that's when I made the first big purchase of Bitcoin at $3200 I was there that day that was Monday December I want to say 17th 2018 that was the day you met me in New York that I mentioned at the outset and I'll never forget that because

when we were sitting in there for an hour just going back and forth on shit, one time in the whole meeting, you pulled your phone out. And it was like smack dab in the middle where I'm like, you know, what do you think of this? Like, what about the motion on Bitcoin? And you literally flipped out your phone like this.

Flipped it over. He goes, okay, what's the trade now? It looks like it's about $3,200, $3,250. Yeah, I take every dollar I own right now and I put it all right into that. It's the lowest it's ever going to go. Now, if you look at the bottom chart of Bitcoin at that point, you literally nailed it almost down to the exact day, like the exact hour. And when I went to leave that day, I went to take a piss before I left. And when I got to the elevator, you were getting in the elevator to go down to go home to make the biggest Bitcoin trade of your life. So when people – like this is the thing. You do say things that you got to make a call on stuff and you're going to be wrong about stuff. But I appreciate when people actually use their platform, type something out that is a conviction. But then literally go do it. Yeah.

And that's what you did. I didn't know any better, right? Like it was just, hey, this is what I believe. So like I'm going to say what I believe. I also went on television. That was the first time I went on television. I think it was in 2018. And they were like, the price is down a lot, Mike.

Idiots. And I was like like we're buying and um by the end of maybe end of 2018 or beginning of 2019 we also got the genius idea we're like let's you know rally people up on wall street you guys think we're dumb fine we issued a million dollar bet we said anyone on wall street you pick any asset you want for 10 years we'll take crypto you take anything else crypto in general i think i think it was crypto because we had to pick like what was the asset and um we had like an index fund like basically s p of crypto right and we said we'll take this you take anything else and we'll put up a million dollars you put up a million dollars whoever's right in 10 years uh you could

take the money or you can go to charity not one one person took it. So like we'll see. But like we put it out there. I think there's a CNBC article, the whole thing, like whatever. Bitcoin starts to rally. We start buying in the funds as well as personally. And sure as shit, that's what happened. It went from 6,000 to 3,000 back to 10. Now, that's a good story.

On the other side, when it hit 10, I said, I think that by December of 2021, it's going to go to 100,000. So 10x, right? It went to 70, right? And so you will always get criticized because it didn't go to 100. I was wrong, right? 100% was wrong. It did not go to 100 but i called for 10x and went up 7x ballpark right well just if you had bought then like you're not

complaining type thing right um and so uh over time what you learn is you get some intellectual humility you gotta be wrong right when you start your career off hot and you're right all the time people take notice but also you need to be humbled a little bit so you gotta be wrong, right? When you start your career off hot and you're right all the time, people take notice, but also you need to be humbled a little bit. So you gotta be wrong a couple of times. And then you're like, all right, you know what? I'm right more often than I'm wrong, but also I know what it's like to be wrong. Maybe I should actually not have the bombastic a hundred percent confidence certainty. This is going to happen instead. It's, it's likely this is going to happen, but here's the reasons why it wouldn't happen. It makes you a better thinker, right?

And so one of the benefits of the internet and having a big audience is you have to write tweets with the trolls in mind, right? When you write a tweet, you can't just say what you think anymore. You've got to write a tweet and be like, okay, what are these dumbasses on the internet going to say? How are they going gonna critique this what and so it becomes the like let me put the caveats into the tweet or let me write it in a way that is addressing what are going to be the concerns well that's just called critical thinking yes so the trolls are actually some of my favorite people because they have taught me how to critically think they keep you on a level yeah they keep you honest for sure it's you know short sellers are idiots and a lot of the time but they do provide a great healthy activity in financial markets.

The yin and the yang, man. Yeah. And so like being a short seller, you basically got blown out for the last decade, but there are times where they're right. And especially the ones who are activist short sellers who go and identify frauds and then call them out. They specifically do a great job, right? And so same thing with trolls. Especially the ones who are activist short sellers who go and identify frauds and then call them out. They specifically do a great job. And so same thing with trolls. They're intellectually short sellers.

They are intellectual short sellers in that they look at ideas and they short them. Okay. You make me better. Thank you. Yeah. And so if you think about kind of Bitcoin as an asset, it's super volatile. Sometimes you get it right. Sometimes you don't. But what we've seen so far is people just buy, hold it.

They do okay. But you said that by the end of 2017 is when you were really sold like this is the next thing, which doesn't mean it's going to be tomorrow. I stopped every single thing I was pretty much doing to go and dedicate all my time to it. So I own – full disclosure. I own Bitcoin bitcoin i've never sold a dime of it right i own ethereum i've never sold a dime of it those are the only two i've ever bought i think chris ibrahim bought me 50 worth of a few other things i don't even know what they are but i do question like the idea is great the idea that satoshi nakamoto invented on october 1st 2008 of taking power away from these governments that have fucked everyone over, printed away their money for years, and now we're crashing the world at that time with the great financial crisis and putting it in the hands of the individual is a beautiful idea. The complexity of it still hasn't been solved for me, right?

Meaning I can go try to explain how to do bitcoin to my 85 year old grandma she ain't gonna get it and there's aspects of it that even i'm like i gotta have chris come explain it to me and so from an adoption standpoint two questions here number one how does how can crypto or if we want to go more specific something like bitcoin that is truly decentralized. How can that come into mass adoption, number one? And number two, at what point are we going to stop talking about it then in concepts of U.S. dollars, which is what we're trying to in a way hedge against with it? How does the dollar work? Could you explain it to me? It's backed by the power of the U.S. military.

Maybe. Right. But like when you think about trying to explain the dollar is super complex people don't you don't describe it you're just like oh the dollar can buy goods and services money green yeah right same thing with bitcoin eventually right it's just like an entire generation of people grow up it's just a thing so if you think about gold it's been around for 5 000 years the dollar's been around for about 50 right 1971 in its current form um bitcoin's been around for 15 compared to 5 000 years 50 and 15 is

basically the same thing right and so there's not a person under the age of 16 in america or in the world who's grown up without bitcoin being a thing they're not gonna want an explanation they're just gonna know it's money but are there kids right now who are who are really using bitcoin in their day-to-day yeah every person who holds Bitcoin is using it. Like there's some people who think Bitcoin- Yeah, but are they going to Starbucks and buying it? I don't think that's the purpose of Bitcoin, right? And I've changed my mind on this.

I used to think Bitcoin could become this great payments thing also, maybe. That's what Jack Mallers is trying to do, right? Yeah, he's using the network really to send other currencies. Bitcoin can be sent, but a lot of times it's other, so you can send the dollar across the Bitcoin rails, right? But yeah yeah it's like if there's an asset that's going to keep appreciating in value remember the dollar loses value so you're incentivized to spend it that's right right if an asset is going to appreciate you're disincentivized from spending it you shouldn't

spend it like we don't accept bitcoin for almost anything any of our businesses people are like what do you mean you're supposed to like be like you know enjoy bitcoin also like no i'm not i don't want your bitcoin right there's nothing that we're going to ever build uh create anything that is worth you spending your bitcoin i don't spend my bitcoin so you're viewing it as gold yeah it's a store of value now if you think about that uh bitcoin and the dollar are probably going to win together. Right? Bitcoin is a store of value. It's your savings.

You know, it's the joke. I got a savings account. I got a checking account. Right? Yeah. You guys know that stand-up bit? All right. I followed what you were saying, but I don't know the stand-up bit.

I'll tell you the story later. So a checking account and a savings account. Savings account, you're not supposed to spend the checking account you spend. Right? Yeah. Same thing here is just think of the dollar and Bitcoin as a checking and a checking account in a savings account savings account you're not supposed to spend checking account you spend right yeah same thing here is just think of the dollar and bitcoin as a checking in the savings account bitcoin is your savings account the dollar is your checking account right so you're going to spend your dollars because you're going to lose value over time you're incentivized to spend them but your savings you don't want to spend that so bitcoin is your savings and now yeah sure at some point the dollar gets so bad and bitcoin becomes stable

right there isn't volatility to it. Sure, maybe people eventually use it. If that happens in my lifetime, amazing. Probably not going to happen. Do you think there's another infrastructure crypto-related that would come in and take over the dollar that's not a centralized currency that the government creates? Well, there's dollar stable coins, and those are used more often than Bitcoin for transactions. So again, it's the same dollar. It's just in a new technology form factor.

Like you have physical dollars and you have electronic dollars like in an ATM, right? Now there's just digital ones that are on a blockchain, but they're all dollars. So those are very popular. But again, it's dollars and Bitcoin. They're just in digital form. I don't think the other blockchains are competing with Bitcoin in terms of technology or trying to be money. Ethereum, Solana, all the way down to the meme coins, like they're all trying to be something else. They're more like technology companies.

So it's the similarity of like Amazon, Google, Facebook, et cetera. You would never be like, well, which one are you going to buy? Are you going to buy dollars or Facebook? Do you buy Amazon or oil? It's like, no, all the companies might compete with each other for revenue or attention or whatever, but currencies are in a different bucket and commodities are in a different bucket. And so these other things are very competitive with each other, and they're trying to optimize different kind of technical features. But Bitcoin is trying to be a great store of value, trying to be digital gold, and there's no one even close there's no one who could unseat it it's either Bitcoin works or it doesn't I actually have a theory that if Bitcoin did not work which I think it

will but if it didn't work an entire generation of people would never trust a digital currency as a store of value again because it's similar to somebody in Venezuela where their government is a currency it fails governments like oh we have another one you're like I seen this play but i'm good right and you don't think that affects happen though with all the other forms of crypto that people you know got rugged on and stuff like that no because i think people understand you buy bitcoin you hold it it's store value the other things are speculative right same thing as early stage venture capital same thing as tech stocks right um you know we live in a society of gamblers. And

that's something that's new to American society, we have destroyed the currency. And so when you destroy the currency, people fall behind the wealth inequality gap gets worse, people feel like they can't catch up. And the most important thing is they lose hope. When you don't have hope, you then take risk, right, you have to hit a home run, rather than a single or a double. So the second that you have lost hope in the traditional financial system based on the

current dollar system that is deleting your wealth slowly, you then say, well, where can I speculate? Where can I gamble? Where can I risk take? And so you see this across markets. You see this in zero-day options. Literally, people wake up every day and they're buying an option based on what they think the price is going to be by the end of the day. Sounds like gambling. That's gambling. Then there's meme coins. You're buying a coin because you think it's funny. No, it's not tethered at all to reality. By the way, some of them are hilarious, right? Some of them are not so funny. Some of them are going to go up. Some of them aren't. All of them have no

actual value in the sense of being tied to reality. It's all about a meme and a consensus view. People make a lot of money finding those opportunities. Oh, sure. But it's still gambling, right? And then if you look at things like sports betting, you can't watch a major sporting event now without having gambling ads. And inside of their apps, they have literally the lines and all this kind of stuff. Like we've become a society of gamblers.

And a lot of it is not the gambling companies or platforms or odds makers, etc. They're just seizing an opportunity that was presented by the devaluation of the currency. And so if you really – I've never heard someone put it that way. Yeah, if you really think about this, like we have a society of gamblers now because we literally had a central bank that devalued our currency, which drove people away from opportunity because they lost hope. And if you don't have hope, then you got to take risk. You got to hit a home run. And so literally today, people's retirement plan is can I nail the zero day option? Can I buy the meme coin that 100x is? Can I find that sports bet and hit the triple parlay that it's going to pay out 500x? Well, what do you make of the fact that the government – well, let me correct that.

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

companies like this buying up so much are they just saying like okay if this satoshi was really we don't know who he was but if it was a guy or a group of people and they truly were individuals unassociated with anything and had created this thing that is now getting this adoption are they are are you know the corporate elites coming in and saying, well, at least we'll take as much as we can out of that population so that we have control over it? I'll give you another version of this that probably no one has ever told you. I think that a huge driver of the fall of America is the shutting down of the mafia. So if you think about how societies and civilizations work is whoever has the monopoly on violence sets the rules. If you, let's go to the extreme example of Afghanistan, the Taliban set the rule. There

was a rule of law. We as Americans in a democratic nation, in a capitalistic society with human rights, et cetera, we don't like it. We, in a capitalistic society with human rights, et cetera, we don't like it. We disagree with it vehemently. We think it is pure evil and we want to stomp it out. Now, it is hard to argue, understanding all of that and me as an American who agrees with everything I just said, also that there was stability in a society because there was a agreed-upon set of rules instability entered the country when there was warring factions of two different sets of rules the Taliban and the Americans that's right and so does not mean I agree with the Taliban does not mean I agree with what they're doing but it is very clear from a sober viewpoint that instability

is introduced when you now have two different sets of rules it's unclear who they should follow and at times they may be following two different sets of rules based on who's in the room yeah right the u.s withdraws all of a sudden afghanistan actually gets stability back into some of society now again brutality comes with that stability okay but when the taliban took back their effort you don't have two warring factions now you have one clear set of rules again americans we don't agree but it's a shitty set of rules by our standards yes and by the standards of a lot of people there who have to live under it now some but there's also there's also a lot of people like it right There's also people who they say, hey, look, I have a certain religious view. I have a certain societal view. I subscribe to this,

right? Now, again, it's like anything. In the United States, there's some people who agree with the rule law we have. There's some that don't. The war on drugs. I don't know. 80% of Americans now say, eh, that kind of sounds like it's stupid. 20% love it, right? Well, it's the rules, whether we like it or not, and it's the rules. So I do think that there's this element of instability and stability that comes with one set of rules. And whoever has the monopoly on violence and has a clear set of rules creates stability in a country, whether we like it or not. If you come to the United States, when the mafia ran, especially the Northeast, but a lot of the country, there's a very clear set of rules. You don't mess with women and children. You don't do certain things, right?

You don't participate in certain industries, right? All of these different components that they had laid out. Well, allegedly on some of those to be fair. just the italian mob the same was true of many other ethnicities right when they came here and also in their home countries jewish irish eventually russian yeah so this is not a u.s thing this is not an afghanistan thing this is not a single ethnicity it's just like this is how civilizations really govern themselves and so with the fall of the u.s mafia what ended up happening is those clear set of rules and also the aspirational elements of like what it takes to be a good citizen inside of that society fell and people defaulted back to the government the government does not have a clear set of aspirational rules or guidelines

what does it mean to be a good american today nobody tells us what activities should we participate in or not participate in nobody tells us in fact they may be doing the opposite they may be working even further against us and trying to make us not patriotic and have us not want to have very specific viewpoint in the world and so in a world where it used to be you don't touch women and children now there's people in new york city who are scared to get on the subway yeah because that actually may be the target is the women and children right it's very very different and so when you look at this i use the mafia as a way to kind of encapsulate this idea but yeah it's interesting there is this

element of um regardless of who is in power and has that monopoly on violence as to why they have the power having a clear set of guidelines and rules having a rule of law whether actually government you know mandated or mafia enforced the rule of law actually drives behavior in the society all right so bring this back to blackrock buying up bitcoin bitcoin is the ultimate set of rules it is written in software and can't be changed it is the governance system in a digital world in a world where everything changes everything is dynamic there is one certainty which is bitcoin's rules will not change but if but if that's why bitcoin ends up winning. But if organizations were able to get control of it just on the basis of them controlling the supply of it, could they not – they can't change the rules, but could they use the rules to their advantage?

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

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

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

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

They want to be governed by those rules. How do you think it could fail if it did? Play devil's advocate for a minute. How do you think 10 years from now Bitcoin, if it failed, would have failed? I think there's three things that people could do to – they couldn't guarantee the failure, but they could increase the odds. One is they could deter adoption by basically taxing the hell out of it, either through transactions or like some sort of like egregious wealth tax. I don't think it would ever pass, but if they said, Hey, we're going to take 50% of everyone's Bitcoin every single year. There's a lot of people who just, I don't even want to play this game. Even if I could hold it and you don't know about it, like the odds of

that or go to jail, I'm good. The second thing is there could be a bug that's introduced during the software process. Very unlikely. There's a lot of checks and balances and very slow methodical intentional development, et cetera, but that could be catastrophic if it was ever to happen. And then the third is there could be some yet unknown computer advancement. A lot of people like to point to like quantum computing. There is no quantum computer yet, but there could be some advancement that somebody could basically hack the Bitcoin network. Now, what I always explain is,

it's kind of like grabbing water, right? If you try to grab water, you close your hand, but the water squirts out. Bitcoin, if you were able to hack the Bitcoin network and take all the Bitcoin, they would have no value. The whole point of Bitcoin is it's never been hacked before. That's where the value is derived from. So if you steal all the Bitcoin, you don't make any money. Yeah. But if you're not trying to make money, you're just trying to destroy it because

you're a government like you're China and you have a quantum fucking 14 computer. Yeah. If you're a non-economic actor, sure. There are things that you could probably try to do. But also if you develop the quantum computer and no one else has it, no one is prepared to defend themselves. Are you going to try to destroy Bitcoin first or maybe maybe you're going to go take, you know, the United States of secrets, right? Oh, I'll do that first. Yeah. Right. Like, you know, there's all these kinds of different components. So it's hard to talk about like the unknown or the future. But I do think that it's important to know what some of the risks are and then just kind of think through, Hey, how could you mitigate those risks as we move forward?

All right. Well, there is a lot of geopolitical finance stuff that we didn't get to talk about today, but I know you have a meeting coming up. I'm looking at the clock and we're right up against your time. So we got to cut it there. But this was really good, man, because I really haven't heard you. I know you talk about it like in pieces over time. You've been doing content for years and everything like some of your story, but putting it all together like that, I haven't heard that yet. I really appreciate you sharing that. It's a pretty wild ride you've been doing content for years and everything like some of your story but putting it all together like that i haven't heard that yet i really appreciate you sharing that it's it's it's

a pretty wild ride you've been on and i think the common theme is that you are constantly finding a way to scratch your own itch and solve your own problems and that's what's made you such a great entrepreneur and a good example for people but for those out there listening we will have the link to your youtube down below you are appearing on cn CNBC and other networks all the time as well. You write a sub stack every day, which we'll put that link down below. What else? Where else can people find you? Twitter is probably the best thing.

Of course, the Twitter. What do you got? Like 2 million on there or something? Less than that, but yeah. You're up there. You're up there in the Twitter universe. But, Pomp, thanks so much for doing it, brother. Thank you for having me.

I appreciate you. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank're up there in the Twitter universe. But, Pomp, thanks so much for doing it, brother. Thank you for having me. I appreciate you. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help.

And also, if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory Podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.