The Pomp Podcast - #1315 Santiago Pilego | What Created The Vibe Shift In America

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

Santiago Pilego is the Director who leads the venture side of a company called New Founding. In this conversation, we talk about the vibe shift that is happening in America, culture wars, backing companies defined by American ideals and positive national vision, DEI and ESG, bitcoin, and creating solutions. ======================= Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people onchain. But what exactly is Base? It's an Ethereum L2 offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the onchain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the Base ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the onchain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So, if you're looking for a platform where the future of onchain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make onchain the next online. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠base.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and follow along on Twitter at @BuildOnBase to see cool things to do onchain, everyday. ======================= BetOnline.ag is a proud sponsor of the the Pomp Podcast. Use crypto to bet on sports, play poker and enjoy casino games at BetOnline. Visit https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp and use promo code POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline boasts no crypto transaction fees, and processing is anonymous, instantaneous and secure. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Santiago Pliego. He is the director who leads the venture side of a company called New Founding. In this conversation, we talk about the vibe shift that's underway in

America, how the culture worlds are playing out, why they are building and backing companies defined by American ideals and a positive national vision, why they explicitly oppose DEI and ESG, and how the bureaucratization of American business culture is ruining so much of what made us an economic powerhouse. In this conversation, Santiago explains how he and his partners have a very, very strong vision of where we are and where we need to go. And also, he lays out why they so courageously are willing to stand up for what they believe in, regardless of who agrees with them and who disagrees. I really enjoyed talking to Santiago, and I think that you will find this conversation fascinating and educational. Here is my conversation with

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

This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by BASE. BASE is making it their mission to bring a billion people on-chain. What exactly is BASE? It's a layer two offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, BASE is shaping the future of the on-chain world. BASE is a canvas for everyone with hundreds of apps in the ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first time. BASE is designed to bring your ideas to life.

So if you're looking for a platform where the future of on-chain is being built daily, BASE is your destination. Join in and make on-chain the next online. Learn more at BASE.org or follow along on Twitter at BuildOnBase. Again, that's at BuildOnBase to see cool things to do on-chain every single day. This episode is brought to you by BetOnline. Do you like making a profit from sports betting? Well, set yourself up to take home the most profit possible

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conversation is there is a vibe shift underway in America and globally. It seems like people are upset with the way that the world is going. It feels like people are being left behind, and they want to do something about it. And we see this kind of presenting itself in things like Bitcoin, things like even artificial intelligence, the tech industry. But also it feels like there are people

who are saying, wait a second, I didn't want to participate in politics. I didn't want to participate in the culture wars, but I feel compelled to, I have to, or else this is going to go in a direction I don't want it to go. You and your partners are all doing this in a very unique way.

And so like, what is the vibe shift that is happening in America that has caught so many people's attention and forced many smart, intelligent, hardworking people that otherwise wouldn't participate to jump into some of these issues? Yeah, that's a great question. I think the vibe shift is kind of a product of a couple of different things. If we just look at the last, I don't know, 10 years, because we're in the venture space and we talked to a lot of founders, people building interesting things is kind of where we sit i think a lot of these uh you know for the last let's say 10 years or so especially in the frothing markets of uh the 2010s you could build you could try to build something

cool a rocket ship an interesting company and just kind of generally keep your head down i remember interviewing and chatting with people at you know very large uh billion dollar corporations now and i'd ask them about some cultural issues this was five years five six years ago and they said you know i just keep my head down i just kind of like build and I think that strategy, I don't think it was ever going to work, but there was a time in which it seemed to work because you could, the political and sort of like cultural battles of today weren't as heightened or as explicit at the time as they're now. I think people are finding, especially competent, competent guys for the most part, but competent, extremely high quality guys are finding that keeping your head down is just not a strategy anymore. and like where you work what you're building who you know where you live uh like your community all that stuff really matters and it has a very um like it shapes the world in which you want to

live in it shapes the country in a particular direction like what you're spending your effort and your money and your capital your intelligence building uh and so uh what we're doing kind of what we're seeing with the vibe shift is uh competent people let's say up to again five years ago would just keep their head down and build in large part there was a you know frothy markets if you could just keep your head down and build maybe you could hit an ipo or whatever now things are so nuts that uh you just need to be explicit about what you believe and there's actually increasingly an ecosystem and this is where we sit that supports people to do that and that want to take advantage of of the cultural and political headwinds that are changing

now as these people are um trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing if you will um what are some of the big red flags or the alarms that are going off that have really caught your attention or newfounding's attention like what are the things that you guys like all right enough is enough like we have to do something yeah that's a great question so um we've we've identified sort of as far as the shining goes we've identified three macro threats that i think resonate with a lot of people um and these are things that are increasingly just noticeable like tangible in our in our in our culture today one of them is uh increase in globalization sort of global disruption or people you know you're trying to build something in america but like what

happens across the country across the world has direct effects to your life in ways that you may not want many ways you may not care about but the reality is like you know whatever's going on in Middle East or whatever's going on in China, whatever's good, it will just disrupt your life in significant ways. So that's one of the macro threats. The other is an increase in bureaucratization. And so red flag that guys are sort of opting out of is this increase in what the Anons would call the long house. But it's just this move towards bureaucratization that stifles any kind of innovation, that kind of vitality that young men in particular have where they want to just go build really cool, great things,

like take big swings. That's just not allowed in large corporations. And in general, it's seen as, like we've entered a sort of age, especially with AI, you can see this, an age of safetyism where the questions are, what can we build? Why should we disrupt current power structures

or technologies? It's more like, ah, that's too scary. Ah, that's taking us to places we don't want to go. so let's pump the brakes on innovation let's pump the brakes on on guys building cool things and uh not go the direction so globalization bureaucratization and the last one is increasing um in political and cultural alienation like these companies you know the recent ousting of press and gay from harvard like institutions that were thought to be sort of neutral on the one hand which again was not never going to be the case but neutral and or just undying like

eternal institutions like prestigious colleges or corporations or what have you are ideologically captured and they increasingly do not provide the value that they would have provided back in the day. I mean, the whole world is changing in this regard. Harvard, again, good example of this, where all credential mechanisms are just devalued. Like now a recommendation from a highly credible person, a trust-based recommendation on somebody can be worth much more than like a, you know, harvard degree if if someone says pomp you should hire this guy he didn't he doesn't have an elite background but he's the best operator you could ever possibly want for your business like that's more valuable if you trust the person making the recommendation than just having the right diploma

right and so uh these are again the increasing globalization bureaucratization and then the uh the ideological capture of institutions are red flags that are making guys just say i'm out like I'm opting out of the system and looking to break out of existing sort of hierarchical power structures and build something new. So that's also where we're betting in a sense. And so I can talk a little bit more about how we respond to those themes, but those are the red flags that sort of high-quality, competent, dynamic guys are observing and ready to opt out of.

How much of this is self-inflicted wounds by the United States and by politicians and some of these bureaucratic organizations versus maybe it is global competition or kind of external pressures, if you will? Like, is it just us getting too fat and happy and kind of the old, you know, hard times make strong men and now we're in easy times. So we have weak people with weak leadership and that's screwing us. Or is there actually some sort of geopolitical chess game that's getting played? And so we're having not unforced errors. We're kind of more responding to the world. I think it's a little bit of both. Right. So, like, examples abound of China taking advantage of these sort of cracks in our psyche and our national ethos to come in and, you know, everything from the border stuff that's happening right now all the way to, like, using TikTok to essentially psyop a young generation of Americans into radical ideological brainwashing, if you would.

There will be trends that are national and that are our own fault, but that are taken advantage by external bad actors. Internally, I think a lot of this you see, it is a self-inflicted gunshot wound. um i had a somewhat of a of a friendly but uh uh back and forth with paul graham recently on twitter where there was this um there you know there was a mild he didn't tweet the original thread but there was a wild thread about like zoomers getting more and more right wing and based and then zoomer zoomer boys and then zoomer girls increasingly more liberal and uh and paul tweeted something like oh this is just has a this has a simple boring explanation boys are just spending more time on playing video games and girls are they girls don't get to hang out with

the boys as much and i was like i just that's not the answer like that's a that's a symptom of of the uh of the problem but the shortest way i can put the problem is like a bunch of these guys are just fed up with and they see the lies they see the uh the the uh the falsehood of just liberal modernity in its way where again it zaps them out of vitality everything is your fault uh you know if you're a young guy who wants to build something interesting no you're actually an oppressor uh no you uh you if you want to be credentialed you have to subsume yourself to these existing power structures or credentialing uh uh institutions all of these things have contributed over generations to uh just sort of the cultural political stagnation that we're in

today uh and then bad actors foreign ones will take advantage of uh of the cracks and attackers make things worse as people are uh trying to solve these problems how much of it is uh so so a social problem a political problem versus a technology and like coordination problem you know and i really kind of think of that it's like do you have to be part of the system to create a solution or can you be outside of the system and create the solution? Yeah, good question. I mean, in some cases, I think there was a period of time where a lot of us were trying to, and it depends on the institution, but a lot of us were trying to reform existing institutions. There are good things to be salvaged. There are good things to be reformed. In some cases, though, I think

the framing of an institution itself and the way it was set up or what it produces, either it's no longer relevant in a good way or is just rotten to the core that it needs to be disrupted. So, and the solution, I mean, fundamentally, this is where maybe I differ with some of the techno-optimists like Mark or Mark Andreessen or the EAC folks,

where the solution is never going to be unfettered technological innovation on its own. There always needs to be, but human beings are, we're made in the image of God, so there's going to be a spiritual component to it, and there's going to be a cultural aspect to it, and there's going to be, you know, different pieces, different parts to make up the whole solution to the problem. I do think innovation, like building new things is a way to disrupt the existing status quo. So to give you an example, when you have a political stalemate, when you have a cultural gridlock the way we kind of have today, there's ways out of that gridlock that are scary and really violent. And I mean scary in the, like, not in the, like, I'm just, you know, I don't like interesting things. I mean, like, real bad. Things get really, really bad.

We had Eric Prince on our podcast, and he was talking about when if we go off the constitutional script, things get gnarly really fast. And so there's a way in which just any nation, if you look at history, any nation that has cultural, political gridlock can come out of that gridlock or that stalemate through just violence and just terrible ways to break that gridlock. Another way is you use a lever like technology. use a lever like innovation, which provides the same kind in some ways, same kind of disruption, or better in some ways, because you don't use violence, but it allows you to break that gridlock, break that stalemate. So examples, I mean, there's so many examples of this, but I think of situations like in the Reformation, where you have a continent-wide gridlock that's political, cultural, there's also a very strong religious or theological aspect to it. And then the invention

of the printing press in the late 1400s becomes this technological piece of innovation that sort of helps to break apart the old order and enables without violence. I mean, it's an amazing piece of innovation and technology allows the smaller but disenfranchised and highly motivated newcomers to disrupt the incumbents with technology.

Now, there's not to say there was not, you know violence surrounding the reformation in general but that's an example of of how you can use technology to disrupt a political or cultural stalemate as opposed to using something like like just full-out violence are there one or two things in terms of solutions to these problems that you all feel like are the big lever points or the big like inflection points where there's a hundred problems right these are the two if we nail these the other ones you know either are not as important or it's kind of like an 80 20 you know 20 of the actual problems gives 80 of the value and so we should focus on those yeah that great question so i mentioned earlier the three macro threats

that we sort of identify global you know increasing globalization and global chaos bureaucratization and then political and cultural uh you know capture or uh divide so our response to those those three threats um are our responses to those three threats are so to globalization it's a focus on the local the uh communal the national and the national like so as opposed to global and globalism. We focus on local, localism, and national self-determination. As opposed to bureaucratization, we look for opportunities or themes where there's skin in the game or a return to the entrepreneurial mindset. So where you really have skin in the game, you put yourself in a position where you own the results of the work you do, the companies

that you build. And then lastly, as opposed to the cultural and ideological divide that increasingly exists, is a return to American political Christian ideas. There's a lot of people in the movement, if we call it that, that you don't need to be a Christian to be a part of this, but there is a return to the founding ideas of the country, and the country was founded in deeply protestant uh christian principles that allowed us to to enjoy sort of the uh the the fruits that we have today um so what we see is as things we want to focus on are people building in those themes now there's the companies the founders the things that we start ourselves uh the founders that we back are in the center of that venn diagram of skin in the game uh focus

on the local, on the national self-determination, and then on the return to classical American Protestant ideas. We're right in that center. And we see that, why we focus on those is, and it's different, we play well with the American dynamism folks, and we play well with the Founders Fund guys, and all of those kind of like increasingly pro-American venture firms. But our edge is going to be a little bit different, partly because of our network. And I can talk about that in a second, but partly because we're focused on tools and solutions that will enable a large disenfranchised, but highly motivated, in many cases, highly religious group of consumers to become early adopters. An example of this in the historical

sense would be probably one of the greatest technological inventions of all time, if you use that term which is the united states it was a legal and national tech innovation like just completely disruptive in terms of how people and countries organize themselves and the first wave of early adopters was a highly disenfranchised highly motivated and religious uh group that wanted to take advantage of this new technology um that legal innovation you know national innovation uh social innovation and use it to lever uh against a uh incumbent empire uh and so we'll uh we will focus on companies that are building in those themes and places where we can help accelerate the adoption of these these tools and technologies through our connections with

uh customers who are ready to jump onto new solutions one of the lines on your guys website is we build and back companies defined by American ideals and a positive national vision. I almost cringe having to ask this, but are there people who have a negative national vision? And what does it mean to have a positive national vision? Is that just you want us to be in a better place in the future?

Or is there more concrete kind of components that go into that? Yeah, so this is part of the vibe shift. And let me answer that by giving you a little bit of context about something that's interesting about Newfoundland. So something that's interesting about Newfoundland why people are drawn to new founding is that we we've been pretty public about our our just sort

of political views uh earlier than it was uh than it was uh popular as it were um and what we've what we've managed to do is through just sort of the team and the connections the people that we interact with the the network that new founding operates in is we're at the center of another venn diagram of interesting circles we one of our of the circles that overlaps on new founding is venture tech uh we have deep background there we work with all these guys another circle would be like crypto everything from bitcoin all the way to just the the edge edge folks building you know trying to conceptualize the network state and trying to do something interesting with those concepts uh building decentralized technologies and whatnot another circle would be uh just sort

sort of the Christian right. Again, dissatisfied and disenfranchised religious groups who are, in many ways, have been calling out some of these themes that we're seeing now today, culturally and politically, but didn't have the credibility of the status hierarchy and the old status hierarchy to be able to disrupt, to do anything about it. They were low class, essentially. And then the last group that we overlap with are the just sort of cultural and political junkies, The people who, again, maybe not religious, but I've been calling the the the political playbook, you know, for a while and got it right. So we're at the center of all those groups. And so what's interesting, you ask the question about the people who have a negative vision of the country across those groups. also get to see the negative versions of those in tech and so in silicon valley increasingly we see

this with the the responses to anyone building in ai or building in crypto on the other side is just a there's a vision about the country that is deeply just anti-human that is anti-flourishing that uh would rather uh sort of sabotage the country uh and the the the spirit of innovation And pursuit of greatness that exists, that has essentially animated everything from the early adopters that came in the Mayflower all the way to westward expansion in the 1800s, that would rather sabotage that than give up old and decrepit power structures. And so AI, and again, think about those circles that we overlap in. On the tech side, there's a lot of new technologies that are emerging that are a threat to existing power structures. Mark's written about this. A bunch of people have essentially called this out, and they're right.

People in D.C. and other places, academics like Claudine Gay, they should be afraid, in a sense, of things like AI, because it will expose that you plagiarized, or that your credibility or that your power was actually not built on real things, but on taking advantage of old and in many ways synthetic power structures and credential mechanisms um and so there are people on the innovation side that have a deeply negative uh view of the country there are people obviously in the cultural side that have a deeply negative vision for the country a vision where you can't speak you can't say what you believe

you can't ask basic questions about how societies are structured uh where you know the nuclear family we're just normal people are uh are a threat uh that's part of the vibe shift that that i've been noticing and that we've all been noticing is that people who were uh not even people who are just normal people you know five years ago are now branded as being far right or outright or whatever just because they're holding on to normal just absolutely normal views about of reality, how men and women should work, how families should operate, the kinds of business that you should start,

that you should be able to say something, you've got a question, that's just now fringe. And so the negative vision that we're sort of fighting against is one that is deeply anti-human, is anti-innovation, would rather, again, sabotage the country in the spirit of what's made America great than give up old and failing power and credentialing structures.

That's the way I could put it. So there's another line on the website. We explicitly oppose DEI and ESG and the bureaucratization of American business culture. DEI and ESG, in some people's mind, that's the religion. You fall in line or you're on the outside. To others, it is complete nonsense and actually a negative thing. It sounds like you guys are in the latter camp. So talk a little bit about those two thought processes and they've really kind of seeped, you know, there's the old Goldman Sachs, like the tentacles, the octopus.

I think a lot about like DEI and ESG have seeped their way with their tentacles into all sorts of business culture and organizations. Yeah, absolutely. So you recently saw it with the Mark Cuban thing, which is just really funny to see that whole kerfuffle on Twitter. But yeah, it is religious in nature. I think anything that we see, this is how I think of it, anything that we see from like DEI, ESG, all over like the insane critical race theory and race Marxism that exists in our institutions today, it is religious in the sense that it has to take an insane leap of faith against how reality is structured. And so people would rather, again, this is what I meant earlier by sabotage the country as opposed to, instead of letting go of credentialing or power structures that are no longer applicable. So people would rather staff their teams, build companies, or just insist that hiring or building a team is better to do so on the basis of DEI or ESG principles rather than, you don't have to be Warren Buffett to just know those things do not need to factor into building an incredible company. uh in fact in many ways doing so is is an act of like self-sabotage as a way to sort of a peace

uh you know present a uh an offering a peace offering as it would in the altar of cultural um of the cultural gods of the jour so what we do is we oppose that bet uh and we oppose it by through our through our media through our podcast or you know twitter etc just creating a everything from a just a vibe all the way to content and writing that attracts the most competent the most dynamic the most motivated people to build we don't you know doesn't matter if you grew up in texas doesn't matter if you grew up in upstate new york doesn't matter if whatever like we just want you to are you are you the kind of person that sees what's going on uh and is ready to exert are you ready to exert your will your intellect uh your your uh skills into carving

a better future that's who we attract and this is part of the going back to the vibe shift i think this is part of the what we've been able to do and uh a service that we've been able to provide to people like this is before let's say Elon Musk bought Twitter saying a lot of the stuff that I just posted now every single day on Twitter would have destroyed your life and would have gotten you you know cancelled and kicked out of your company James Damore famously you know was was killed or not killed kicked from Google thankfully not killed for just asking some questions about like are men and women really different you know are men and women really interchangeable or are they distinct distinct sexes uh this was in like 2012 destroyed his

life canceled kicked out of google whatever uh so before musk buys twitter and it's still the case today in many it's still increasingly the case but but let's say before musk bash twitter a lot of these people work at places like goldman i'll work at places like google facebook like just these are smart engineers smart designers smart whatever not all of them but a lot of them are and they know that things are weird they know things are weird culturally politically but they know that they can't ask uh or say anything like ask questions say anything because they will be destroyed they also know that there are other people in those circles in tech in finance in business that probably think like them that know that things are weird but to find each other

it also means that you have to kind of expose yourself and be destroyed and so uh the problem in our hyper sort of politicized fractured and dangerous times was that these kinds of people other like had a very hard time meeting and organizing and structuring what we've done is we fly a really public flag of courage and a positive national vision that allows these people to use us as a clearinghouse of trust in a way they reach out via twitter they reach out via LinkedIn, they reach out because they see us investing in different companies, whatever. And then we can air traffic control them to connect with other folks, other investors, other potential co-founders, other talented people who think and feel the same things.

But we're that clearinghouse of trust. We're that brokerage, that values-based arbitrage connecting these people. When we see entrepreneurs today, it does feel like there's a resurgence of people who are agreeing with you um many of them seem to be younger they seem to be working on specific types of companies hard tech uh etc um is that a requirement you have to be younger you have to kind of not be beaten into the system um and so in some weird way the same way young people historically have disrupted old industries uh now we need to rely on young people which you know as a reminder people who literally wrote the constitution were quite young um and so it's the young people with the radical ideas like that is

a weapon not a you know negative component of this movement yeah i think that's that that's definitely part of it i mean increasingly again in that thread that i wrote uh kind of counter sitting on paul graham i talk about how young people especially they've grown up um surrounded by you know gen z let's say are surrounded by um generations who have been ignoring their eyes and ears about basic things about how the world works and uh that have led us in many ways to the insanity and the cultural and political stagnation that we're in today and younger people younger guys especially as as evidenced by those those charts are saying i'm done like i'm done pretending um yeah some of those do end up you know going to dark places taking the black pill whatever

but for the most part what i'm increasingly seeing with founders that i talk to every day is guys who just are rediscovering uh what makes what makes like american men great uh again if you would like they want to build they realize like oh i don't have to like to live the good life i don't have to just go to harvard and then try to go to mckinsey after that and just sort of like you know move to a coastal city and um just you know suddenly i'm 70 and i hopefully have a little bit of inheritance to pass my kids and i die like that that world is disappearing and uh younger guys are opting for real things this is why i think we see um and this is what makes me excited about this moment um you see young guys uh rediscovering uh you know uh religion like a

A lot of these guys, have you been to El Segundo? I have to talk to guys out there in El Segundo. I've never been, but I've made a couple of investments and I've gotten the full download. And it sounds fun. No, it's super fun. So there's guys like friends with Augusta Dorca, who's building a rainmaking startup,

or Isaiah Taylor, who's building Valor Atomics. And these are young guys who are explicitly Christian and they're building and taking some really hard bets in the world of atoms and not of bits. They're surrounded themselves with other guys who are similarly as dynamic and as motivated and as almost a little bit crazy as they are. And the world of SaaS,

the world of keep your head down and don't take big swings so that you can kind of try to IPO and walk away with a big bag is over. The world of, you know, don't say things, don't call things out as you see them, is just not appealing to young men. In general, it's just not appealing to men, period. But certainly not young men who've seen sort of the consequences of the result of playing that playbook for a while. And so going back to sort of the context of cultural and political stagnation, something that's exciting about this moment, and again, lots of historical examples and parallels with this, that in many cases, the times that are most fraught with political intrigue and fracture, et cetera, are also the times when you see technology and disruptive technology emerging and being used as a lever to break that, as I mentioned earlier, the stalemate or the gridlock caused by cultural political stagnation so these guys are the the the companies that they're building will by the very nature of what what they're sort of betting on if successful will

disrupt existing power hierarchies existing status hierarchies i mean uh again i say it's a bunch of these guys are building companies that where the technology was uh essentially developed not fully but developed in the 760s and 70s and then through bureaucratization through increasing globalization through increasing cultural and political fracture uh these technologies stopped being developed like nuclear power you know famously uh i think it was was it reagan wanted to build a thousand nuclear power plants just never happened like nuclear bad and like the technology was all there it was just through all these through all these macro themes that i've identified uh that was killed like no we can't innovate a nuclear well now these guys

if successful we're building a nuclear space we're building uh you know alternative uh space companies manufacturing whatever the case if successful like they will disrupt uh a a world that depends a structure and elite as it were that depends on them not succeeding and that's a good thing. That's a very good thing. Assets like Bitcoin, or the protocol of Bitcoin being open source. It's not a single person. It's not a corporation. It's not a centralized thing. It seems to fit into this worldview and the perspective that you have. But it also in some ways is violating this, you know, people need to stand up and go and do this and rally resources and take a political stand, etc. How do you put those two things or kind of balance them in your

head because bitcoin probably like the most apolitical thing it's the thing that cares the least about culture wars it's the thing that you know nobody even knows who created it but it seems to be serving the world view that you're presenting here yeah i think that's uh there's this there's some ways in which is synergistic and there's some ways where um bitcoin and just decentralized protocols uh like i would have a critique of them and it's in this way so first i would And Bitcoin on paper, if you just read the manifesto, it is the most sort of apolitical, neutral thing that you could conceive in terms of a protocol. However, if you think of Bitcoin's goal, maybe not the goal of the protocol, but the goal of the people that use Bitcoin in America, some of them would say it is that the objective of Bitcoin is to replace the US dollar. That's as hyper-political an objective or mission as you could possibly come up with.

uh that again going back to my my my long rants about uh disrupting existing power structures and hierarchies talk about disrupting the uh the global hegemony of a of a uh of the dollar through a decentralized protocol so it is very in a sense a lot of the aims and goals of bitcoin or those protocols are very political one critique i would have a bitcoin and just decentralized cryptic protocol protocols in general is that they are and this is both a good and a bad thing they are trustless right like the whole point is like a third party uh is a is a uh uh how does the saying go uh a trusted third party is always a security risk right in a lot of these protocols a to to build a to build sort of a better future to carve out uh what we see as as uh

what one needs to come after the malaise the cultural and political stagnation we are going to you are going to have to have trust-based communities and so again to answer your question i see a compatibility sort of a synergy between a decentralized trustless protocol like bitcoin and then trust-based communities adopting that kind of protocol to build or to transact the trust-based community piece is something that's central to the new founding thesis in fact we think of sort of the greatest store of value is a trust-based community. Think of a church. So I'll use this as an example. In a church, you'll have a large body of people who share generally the same values and live in proximity to one another

and have a framing of the world that's in many ways similar. And so if you're looking for a recommendation on anything from where to take your wife on a date to a babysitter to a new school for your kids if you ask somebody in your church you're gonna ask them because you uh you uh trust them and also because there's a sort of a body of work institutional memory in that group that you trust and that you want to extract a little bit of value from what's cool is that when a person in a community like that gives you a recommendation they're staking some of the and i'm using all these terms that we see in the crypto space, they're staking some of their credibility in that recommendation. And if that recommendation proves true or accurate, whatever, their credibility

vis-a-vis you goes up. If that recommendation turns out not to be great, the credibility drops down. And so largely communities that play in those dynamics, a church is an example, but it could be work, it could be a GC, it could be any of these trust-based communities. They will generally look out for the good of the of the of the network the good of the community because they're staking their personal credibility in the network of recommendations and so this is why i think you need trust-based communities to be able to harness trustless protocols like bitcoin um and that's in my mind sort of the best the best of both worlds how do you think about um balaji's you know kind of the world's going to move on chain everything

is going to be open source trust will be inherent but it'll be this like automated kind of auditable thing uh by anyone anywhere in the world at any time is he more right than wrong or is bitcoin unique and like actually this won't permeate into other parts of uh culture and society i think he's more right than wrong i do again and i've i've critiqued him in the past biology is a friend but a friend of newfoundland friend of the movement but i've critiqued this particular point kind of going back to what i was saying earlier where you can just have a network states and let's say a new country based on uh pure abstracts where people don't ever meet and there's no like grounding of that community in something that's in their world i think just

in general human communities tend to organize around real like real things uh and you can certainly have um things like a network state based on i don't know a mutual love for this by South Tribe, like a mutual love for a particular movie or, as he said, a mutual understanding about politics across the world. But I think ultimately, you need to have a grounding in the physical. You need to have a grounding where these communities do meet and interact in real life. Where I see is that very accurately and presciently sort of going is things like AI, deepfakes, for example, and AI in general, one of the things that's disrupting is an old status hierarchy based on image.

And so as the ability to generate AI images, AI voice, audio increases, the value of those signals in general will decrease. Like if, you know, let's say you could, you're going to have to prove that what you're saying or if there's any content out there that's you speaking or that you've written a piece or an image that you took, all that stuff is going to go to zero in a sense, in a good way, through the increase of decentralized AI technologies, for example. What will replace that is costly signals that will essentially tell you whether something is real or not. And these costly signals include something like courage. So moving away from a hierarchy of image, you're moving to a hierarchy of courage. Where are people explicitly sending costly signals like courage, like using tools or technologies or saying things that previously were not allowed, and using that as an effect to sort of, again, break open and carve out a way outside of existing power hierarchies. That's where I see some of his themes really being accurate, moving away from existing stagnation.

So let's just like jump forward 20 years in the future. What does this world look like? United States, we still got a two-party government. Is there still three branches of the government? Was there a civil war? You know, like, is it the tech utopia? Like, what does that world look like? And I think a lot of people say, okay, cool.

Everything you said so far, I'm on board with. It sounds like we're going to go build a better future, et cetera. When we get to the finish line, what does it look like? i think yeah that's a good question i hope it's not a i certainly hope it's not a civil war or anything of that sort i do see um the great sword i think is going to be more and more um um so galvanized or or uh just become explicit in a sense so you'll have people are as i mentioned earlier the themes that we're seeing generally is like young uh not necessarily young but young competent people who want to carve out a different future are starting to sort themselves out first

by moving let's say to a city that's aligned with them so leaving san francisco to go to miami or leaving san francisco to go to austin they're moving to states that align uh with with their values and the future they want to they want to build then they're moving companies right and that's sort of where we're at right now uh then they're moving uh this result you know covet and Post, then they're moving locations. And so they're moving from a state that they thought they would die in and their kids would die in to, let's say, from California to Idaho, or from Chicago to from Illinois to Tennessee or some kind of red state. And I think it's just going to increasingly happen. People are going to, and this again, going back to questions about

network state and decentralization, I think people in some ways are going to decentralize from the existing system. In some other ways, they're going to centralize with things that really matter, like living with, transacting with, having community with people who share their same values.

So what I see the country going is a clear, just clear lines being drawn. I think it was in the midterms that certain swing states were ended up like, I forget the names, I forget the numbers,

but it was like, 51-49 Democrats, Republicans, or the other way around. I think in 20 years, we see states that are 91 or 97, blue or red, and then the remaining percentage, the other, like either all in on red or all in on blue. I think that's sort of the future we see. I mean, Texas right now is sort prototyping some of that with the the stand-up against uh the the border invasion um and i see it i see the country moving that direction where you really have a choice we're living in idaho or living in texas really makes a world of difference than living in california not just at the like oh you know do i get harassed in the street by homeless people or are there you know can i

carry a gun or not but like that's where we're at today i see those differences uh becoming starker and starker and uh that sort of geographical divide that great sort uh increasingly uh increasingly taking place i mean this is why going back to new founding one of the bets that we recently took one of the business lines that we launched in the last at the end of last year is a real estate play and so we're buying and developing a bunch of land in a red state and area of Tennessee that will soon like announce the actual location, because we're seeing this trend of people wanting to move and live and transact and just build community with other people who share their values. Of course, we're attacked by, you know, the Guardian and others

as being alt-right or whatever. It has literally nothing to do with race or anything like that. All it is, is increasingly people don't want to live in a place like the Tenderloin in San Francisco, and they want to live in a place where their kids can, you know, ride a bike in the street, where they can have a little bit of land, where you can enjoy natural beauty. Like, that's just where people want to go. And so, again, back to your question, I see the country sort of separating in those ways, self-sorting in unique ways. If you love crime and you love, you know, the tenderloin, you can make your estate the

tenderloin uh and if you love uh things like idaho or texas has to offer you can make your state more like that what are the potential pitfalls for this happening i feel like there's a lot of momentum right now um i don't know joe biden gets elected uh re-elected does that like yeah you know kind of suck the air out of the room and put a stop to it or what are the things that you feel like um are things that could be friction points for this friction points yeah some of it is is certainly political uh i think biden uh and exist in the current uh with the cathedral the the regime however you want to call it the blob uh continuing to exercise power could certainly prove to increase the stakes for anybody again whether you political you think of yourself as

political or not building in ways that would eventually disrupt existing power hierarchy structures so that's one of the pitfalls although i think if something like that happens it's going to have to accelerate the involvement of people who previously saw themselves as non-political and turn them into very very very political actors elon musk is one of is the best example of this like he is i think he's starting to realize that if the blue states as it were blue america has its way he will not succeed in in building his dream of getting to mars and you know 10 years ago he just wanted to build and he just wanted to go and everybody's kind of let him go and that's cool and he's kind of an eccentric billionaire and it doesn't matter now he's at the point where

like oh a couple of cracked eggs you know outside the launch pad of starship means that we shut you down and you can't launch any ships you know just some insane bureaucratization again we're going back to my themes like bureaucratization that just will neuter attempt to neuter his enterprising spirit and everything he's kind of built and so if uh if the the regime only increases on power i see guys like elon really having to to become hyper political uh and having to take like direct explicit stance and say no you're not going to stop me i'm getting to mars or i'm going to go do this thing uh in ways they would not have foreseen 10 years ago another another potential pitfall and um obstacle i would say is like building in like seeing the political cultural

the clients around us, but not carving out a competent, positive vision and instead trying to build or grift out of a sort of a pure reaction to what's going on around us. The example of this would be, and this is what we've always, we've always stayed clear to this in our branding and our aesthetics and our messaging, the sort of like anti-woke or, you know, expert for conservatives type of branding or framing or investing, because those things are pure fads in a sense. Like there are a lot of companies that came out of the COVID stuff

that were like, we are so-and-so but anti-vax or we are so-and-so anti-woke. And like wokeness as a brand is going away. And so if you've branded yourself, if you position yourself as purely like this thing but not woke or this thing but not crazy, that's not enough to become a lasting business

or message or legacy. Instead, I think people ought to build uh good things like people go build real things take hold of the world as it is like take the dominion mandate seriously and frame yourself whether it is you're you're a founder building an interesting company in california or in texas or you're an investor or you're a you know content creator like position yourself as somebody just building um i mean this is what in a sense what right wing means at this point is just you look at the world and align with reality that's it build aligned with reality don't build react in terms of reactions don't say we're this but not

woke we're this but not you know for conservatives just build good things just build really good things and you'll avoid that pitfall of just becoming a fad to yourself what is the thing internally that you guys talk about the most that would surprise people externally i think going back to something i said earlier is building the coalition across these a cultural, commercial, political coalition across the circles that Newfoundland touches. Again, we enjoy an interesting position where we talk to Christians,

we talk to Bitcoiners, to crypto guys, we talk to venture capitalists, cultural and political junkies. And we're sort of at the center. I mean, our podcast is itself a way to publicly, tactfully, if you would, like display that we overlap with all these circles. And there's lots of interesting ideas that would typically not cross these circles because, you know, a pastor may not be following biology or biology may not be following a right wing and on who has some interesting thoughts about how rural Appalachia is reconstructing itself or whatever.

And we can broker these conversations. So one of the conversations that would surprise people and people always enjoy when they come to our office or they interact with us is how we're able to broker connections between these otherwise disparate groups that are increasingly finding themselves as allies in the culture wars. And that's also something that we talk about a lot, like how do you do that with wisdom? How do you do that in a way that creates good avenues for, again, commerce and cultural affinity? there are some ways in which these groups will not fully align with each other there's other ways in which they can be great allies and so we see our responsibility in some ways as being a good stewards of the fact that we're in the middle of all these all these communities and helping them interact with uh organize uh alongside and transact with each other in interesting ways

like i that's i think also one of the things that makes us very different from someone like other pro-American vitalism firms and companies out there where we explicitly call out the fact that we have connections and access to all these groups combined and are able to make introductions and broker relationships between them. And then when you think about the fund that you guys are currently managing, talk a little bit about how is the fund structured? Is it all early stage investing? Will you guys kind of go outside of the normal means? You're thinking differently about the way the world is in the future. Does traditional venture capital fit into how to fund that stuff or is there a different model that you need? Yeah, good question. So I'll take a step

back and just talk about Newfounding in general and then how the fund comes about because I think I'll answer your question a little bit. So as I mentioned, Newfounding was essentially at its purest form, we were launched as a rallying point, a gravity well to attract all these people that were dissatisfied with the status quo who wanted to build real competent things but needed help finding each other organizing so we built a couple companies ourselves uh exited two brands to the blaze last year we built as part of that network we built a talent network where we're connecting employers and companies and startups that want to hire these kinds of people uh these kinds of people and uh and these kinds of employers or

employees connect them with with the startups right um then um one thing i launched last year uh beginning of it was like march or april was something i called the deal room which again through our network through podcasting we were just getting hit left right and center with on the one hand founders who were seeing our our public messaging our our twitter our uh podcast whatever and we're like hey i love what you're building i'm building an interesting company uh if you know of any investors who want to invest in this space let me know on the flip side the deal room also built you know so the founders on one side on the other hand uh attracting investors wanted to invest in these kinds of founders and so very quickly found ourselves

building a a really good deal flow pipeline and a really good lp pipeline and of people that were values aligned and wanted to build in the same spaces etc two years ago we considered starting a fund, but the markets were so nuts that we wanted to just sort of see where they're going to go. At the end of last year, having built really good deal flow, a good pipeline, having a strong network, having a lot of the talent component figured out, we decided to launch the fund. It's still a hard fundraising environment, but to your question, this means that venture pricing is attractive for firms and LPs. And also on the deal side, like companies, the guys that are building companies that are founding companies have to build real things. You can't just build,

we're past the age of just building like the 20th note-taking app or the 10th Calendly clone or copycat SaaS or any of that stuff. In general, just founders are steering away from that for cultural and political reasons I've outlined, but also venture firms just want to move away from that stuff. It's sort of a tapped out market. Instead, we're seeing a shift towards deep tech, towards defense tech. And when it comes to software, it's like software enabled big swing, insert big problem that you want to tackle. And so our fund is structured in a way to take advantage of the themes that I outlined earlier and the response to those themes. So any company that is solving a critical problem that emerges out of an increase in globalization, that emerges out of an increase in bureaucratization, that emerges out of increase in political and cultural alienation, a company that solves those, we're after.

This means looking at deals that something like American Dynamism would also take a look. But it also means looking at other deals that will be better fit for us because of our connections across the Venn diagram of circles that we touch. So we invested in an ad tech platform that is outside of Facebook and Google don't allow any kind of firearms or firearms-adjacent advertising. And so these guys, Arminet, they built the fastest growing endemic app network for the firmware space in about seven months. And they came to us because they liked just our aesthetic, our vision, but also because they recognized that we could help them accelerate their market adoption. Like we essentially have become, because of our connections across those networks, we can be kingmakers in a way for companies that fit that profile. So our minute comes to us. They're working with some of the top gun manufacturers and publishers to create that network.

But, you know, we invest capital into our minute. We like them a lot. And within hours of getting to work with those guys, we're able to pick up the phone and have conservative publications write pieces on them. We're able to introduce them to customers who are looking for this kind of solution. Again, disenfranchised, very motivated customers who want to move to a disruptive alternative, that's where we have an edge. Any kind of deal that allows for that kind of transaction to happen. And talk about the team that you all are putting together as well across the organization. It feels like you have a unique combination of people who are very steadfast in their beliefs, people who have a very long track record of building successful organizations and products, and then a group of people who are young, hungry, entrepreneurial, kind of great operators.

And when I look at the group, it looks like on a whole, this is a very different, but also a potentially very valuable group of people that you all seem to be bringing together. Yeah. So I think our own team reflects the nature of the network that we've built and the kind of people that we attract. sort of the people who either built careers or wealth outside of traditional hierarchy structures. So Nate, our founder, he went to Harvard Law. He got a JD. But instead of practicing, he had a bunch of offers from top law firms. Instead of practicing and taking those offers, he partnered with a classmate to buy a bunch of distressed apartments in Texas and Florida. And like, you know, there's the high status life.

This is what I go back to, you know, if people listening to this sense of theme here, it is a theme. There's the high status, easy sort of life in terms of the old credentialing and power structures available to a bunch of these guys, a bunch of us on our team. And instead we decide to do something

that's non-consensus, that's a macro bet in a particular direction, seeing where the country, culture, politics, et cetera, tech is going to go. So Nate does that. And then he built a very, very successful real estate company through that. And then looking for the next macro bet, new founding was that thing. One of the other partners, Josh Abitoy, he also, he did practice.

He's a lawyer also by trade, M&A, very successful M&A guy, but decided like the rest of us that he was, he had kind of two options in 2020, 2021. He could keep his head down and continue that cushy sort of, you know, diminished life in terms of his his agency in an increasingly hostile and volatile cultural and political time or he could take he could exit he could take the the step uh the leap of faith and become public about his views become public about you use the same skills that he was using to increase the influence and power of ultimately the people that hated what we love and use those same skills and an effort to build a country he wants to live in. That's Josh Abbott. Again, all the guys on

the team, we have similar stories. We were in bureaucratized corporations. We were at companies that were good, but the cultural alignment with those was increasingly impossible to reconcile with what we believed. And we wanted to carve out a different future. We also saw this was sort of the right time to do it. The tools, especially something like Twitter being now our platform as opposed to the left platform, the tools and the appetite for something different are all available now. And the team we've assembled, we're ready to take advantage of the cultural moment. It is fraught with danger, but it's also fraught with opportunity. And again, we're representative of the kind of guy, the kind of person

that we attract to our network, somebody that wants to exit, somebody wants to say, I'm done pretending, I'm ready to build real things. What have I not asked you that I should ask you in terms of the vision of the world, what you guys are building, and where you think all this is going?

Ah, that's a great question, and to ask myself a question here. One question that we get a lot that you haven't asked here is just how can people, And some, you know, New Founding has very clear sort of mandates or objectives across our venture fund, across our talent network, across our real estate play. But a lot of people just reach out saying like, hey, I like New Founding. Like, what do I, how can I help the movement? You know, like they see something that's interesting.

We're always happy to chat with people like that. We may not have either an internal product or business line that we're developing that allows that person to plug into new founding itself. But because of our network and again, the coverage across all these interesting Venn diagrams, or the circles in the Venn diagram that I described, we're generally very able to air traffic control people and say, hey, you're a very competent founder or investor and you want to do some consulting on the side or advisory, we're able to introduce you to another company

or you want to do, you're building a company and you want us to help you with marketing or customer introductions or investment, whatever the case may be. Our network sort of overextends or rather is bigger than our current business lines in a way. And so we're always able to help or try to help enterprising dynamic guys

uh, find a way to plug into the movement as it were, uh, and connect them with other guys who are, or companies or investors or businesses or whatever, who are aiming in the same direction. Um, that's not something that we, I guess there's not like an entry door for that on our website or anything like that, but we, we do it all the time. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about new founding? Yeah. So newfounding.com is our website. Uh, People can follow me at Sants, S-A-N-T-S, Liego on Twitter or X. And if people resonate with this interview

and they want to find aligned work or hire people who would resonate with this interview, they can go to newfounding.com slash talent. If you want to check out our fund, go to newfounding.com slash venture fund. Throw us a little, you know, come check it out. Throw us a little in there. see how we can do for you like we're we see amazing uh deal flow work alongside some of the

best investors in the world uh and i have a strong conviction that we're betting in the direction the country's going in i love it i learned a lot today thank you very much for your time um it is uh rare in today's world for people to not only have a strong view of where they think the world is going but be willing to make a bet on it and so i commend you and everyone else over at new founding for kind of drawing a line in the sand and saying this is what we believe. It takes courage. And frankly, there's not a lot of people willing to do that in kind of the digital age. So it was pretty fascinating to watch. And as you guys continue to be

successful, we'll definitely do this again in the future. Yeah, let's do it. Great speaking and thanks for having me on.