The Pomp Podcast - #1359 Anthony Pompliano on Julian Dorey Podcast About Bitcoin & Deployment To Iraq

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

Anthony Pompliano went on Julian Dorey's Podcast to talk playing football in college, being deployed in the middle of the season to Iraq, America today, making Facebook millions of dollars, discovering bitcoin, bitcoin adoption, and a theory between the Mafia and the fall of America. Subscribe to Julian's Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDorey ======================= Join me at Consensus 2024 May 29-31 in Austin, Texas. This year marks the tenth annual Consensus, making it the largest and longest-running event dedicated to all sides of crypto, blockchain and Web3. Use code POMP to get 20% off your pass at ⁠⁠https://go.coindesk.com/3Q60F2Q⁠⁠ ======================= Buy and sell cryptocurrency in a tax-advantaged crypto IRA with iTrustCapital. Enjoy 24/7 access, lowest fees in the industry, and tax benefits for your retirement. Open an account today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.itrustcapital.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= 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. 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 ConsenSys 2024 by Coindesk. On May 29th through the 31st, I'll be heading to Austin, Texas to speak at ConsenSys, the world's most established global event for all things crypto, blockchain, and Web3. I'll be sharing my thoughts on what the next bull run will look like, how it will differ from previous run-ups, and the broad macro investment thesis for Bitcoin and crypto more broadly. That's not all. ConsenSys has tailored programming for

Bitcoin maxis and multi-chain mavericks alike, covering everything from post-having strategies to mining and more. Plus, get ready for the epic showdown, Bitcoin versus Ethereum at Karate Combat. That's just a taste of what's to come at crypto's only big tent event. Join me in Austin alongside 15,000 other investors, founders, brands, and more to take in all that blockchain has to offer. Get your path today by clicking the link in the description and using code POMP to save 20%. Again, click on the link in the description and use code POMP if you want to save 20% and I'll see all of you at Consensus 2024. Today's episode is brought to you by iTrust Capital. Are you buying crypto on an exchange because you're excited about the bull

run? Well, I hope you're reporting your crypto gains to the IRS because they want you to pay your taxes. That's right. When you buy and sell crypto on an exchange, you need to pay the government taxes when you make profits. That sounds pretty taxing. There's another way you can buy and sell crypto without worrying about taxes. At iTrust Capital, you can buy and sell crypto inside of a tax-advantaged crypto IRA. Crypto IRAs are retirement accounts that work similarly to an exchange, but with tax benefits. Let me give you an example. If you can buy and sell crypto on an exchange and you make a $20,000 profit, you have to pay the government taxes. However, if you do the same thing in your Roth IRA and you make a $20,000 profit, you don't need

to pay any taxes. That's right. You get to keep all the profits and not have to pay taxes because us in a tax-advantaged account. So opening a tax-advantaged IRA at iTrust Capital only takes a few minutes. You have 24-7 access to the markets with some of the lowest fees in the industry. The bull run has begun, and people are starting to see their accounts go up. So start taking advantage of tax benefits with an IRA at iTrust Capital. You can start maximizing your crypto investment today. Go to itrustcapital.com. That's itrustcapital.com. 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 uh 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 bomb uh he's part of the qrf force and what's up guys thank you so much for checking out the channel if you haven't already please make sure you smash that subscribe button and hit that like button on the video it is a huge huge help in the algorithm and it allows us to continue to get great guests like this so thank you and enjoy the show new york pumps 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 gonna wear the suit and tie on cnbc then i gotta come from coming on the most popular podcast in the world i gotta have a suit and tie here too right uh well you know what you look good you're one of the best top five all-time dressed on the podcast already so it's a good start does somebody wear a tuxedo uh have we had a tuxedo no we haven't had a tuxedo right johnny oh johnny russo came in here decked out what'd 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 that 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 turn around, you hit someone on the head. 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 and 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 started doing this podcast. Again, no kind of gain 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 all those times, and I hope people know 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 by most people's standards to say why is he spending time doing that? But I learned something from every single person I talk to. And if there's one thing in finance, investing, even in 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 even realize they were helping me right they thought that they were actually meeting because there was something in it for them or something right um and so there is this element of like you want to pay it forward now uh 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 uh there's some experience they have that you want to 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 want to 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 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 you know very expensive to spend but at the same time uh if you can learn one insight 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, uh, version of, uh, of the army. Um, so when I was in high school, uh, I think there was a combination between, I knew I was going to go play football somewhere, uh, in college. Uh, I was a pretty horrible student, but probably not because I

couldn't have done the work when there was a class that was, I was interested in. Uh, I did pretty well in it, but for the most part, like, I just was like, this is all stupid. Uh, literally 95% of this, I'm not going to need in life. Uh, they're basically just teaching us things to try to get us to pass some tests. 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 gonna go to on the weekend do all that kind of stuff but also figure out like how do you make money right and 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, you know, 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 have 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 was just like, you always have to work hard. And so 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, and he would just look around and

be like go rake the leaves i'll give you 20 bucks right 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's right um 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 uh essentially is like a company yeah right like some people 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 uh five pump 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 you know shovel your driveway and where we lived uh the driveways were um uh they weren't like super long like a mile long right but like they definitely weren't kind of these short little driveways um and it was like a very wooded area and so most people would be like oh i'll just shoveled 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 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 um but it's very helpful right and so uh because i knew i was gonna go play football in college um i got to my senior year and frankly 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 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 um and so what can i do and so going into my senior year i'd um my dad had really helped uh 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 bull around right um he doesn't want to be here he's gonna go 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 gonna go to college and so yeah so smart right and the reason why they would do this they wanted 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 or postgraduate year where i could go to one of these kind of like boarding schools essentially um and you go in between your senior year and your of high school and your freshman year of college and you 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? Show up. Yeah. And then basically then you, you try to go play. And so, um, I had decided, Hey, I'm going to graduate early. Um, 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, uh, 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 school work 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 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 wanted 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 f***ing 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 right um 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 to think about it and so um i really wanted to go there but i wasn't good enough to get a scholarship and so it was like they're like yeah 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 yeah so i gambled i said i'm not coming back i'm i'm committed to this and so uh 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 uh there's a couple other schools davidson brown uh etc that i was looking at they're all kind of like academically you know kind of high end um and i was definitely trying to use sports to get into these schools and i knew that uh i was not not going to go play in the nfl like that was never i was never confused by that but it was like the next julian edelman no um it was just like this was my ticket to the next step in the game right and so uh through a long conflated thing uh basically somebody's like well what

about bucknell university and i i don't even know anything about bucknell where is that right and uh like it's in pennsylvania awesome uh and we basically took a tape we sent it to them uh did a couple of 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? 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 if i got 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 brother are you by 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 um it was a job i think character building maybe 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 lunch i'm a genius right um i'm making more money than all my friends in high school look at these fools sitting in the classroom uh 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 uh who was working there he wasn't the manager he's like the assistant manager and he had a big uh like um a 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 uh my girlfriend stabbed me last night and i was like oh i watched 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 quiznos great place I actually learned quite a bit because you got to interface with customers, do all this stuff, right? But definitely not the place that I'm like, I'm not going to build a career here.

Yeah, it wasn't an end plan. So I was working five days a week. Again, a lot of free time. And at this time, we'd 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. Um, and so, uh, I applied for a second job, so I got a job at, uh, Chick-fil-A. So now 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 $7 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 would pay 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's 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. Um, and so while I was doing this, I was working two jobs at fast food. You know, all my friends are in school. They're like, well, what do you do? And you're, you're insane. Um, one day a guy walked in, in a military uniform in, uh, Quiznos. And,

uh, 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 it was like a, maybe air force guy or something. and uh no no disrespect to the air force uh 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 roles 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 military i never thought about that and i only really had two data points that uh 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 had moved to North Carolina. And so many of these kids had extended family members, people who lived 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 like and then i remember just like i'm 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. Turns out that it was actually kind of a friendly fire that had killed him. But I remember thinking, like, 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. What a guy. Right? I remember that, like, as a very little boy. It's crazy. 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

it like imagine being in an nfl locker room and somebody comes in is like yeah i know like we got the life like i'm gonna go do this yeah right and it is incredible and so it was very inspiring to me to see somebody who had done that um and i think that part of it was like why not me and so um i remember calling around and eventually i get to uh 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 this 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 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 i was like who the is this guy um 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 uh 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 signed an nfl contract i get a signing bonus i'm basically like a free agent right now how much you talking and so uh it was twenty thousand dollars oh all right that's listen you're making seven twenty five seven twenty five seven seventy five and

i'm concerned 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 twenty thousand dollars that's a big check yeah 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 uh he goes now there's a sliding scale for the signing bonus twenty thousand dollars 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, they didn't – you didn't tell them you were going to the office? Nothing? 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 you know it's definitely directed at the young man who's going to be signing up not the parents right um and so i go and i talk to my mom or i'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 i could 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 in the conversation no okay well what about and for like three days every five minutes what about what about and to 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 um and so she finally relents she agrees uh she signs the paper and you gotta pick a job and so you take this test um and the test that you take allows you certain opportunities to go through it's called asvap test and i scored pretty well on the asvap and so uh i also know i was going 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 is dangerous gets me twenty thousand dollars check and i can be done with training

and back by august and they're like in the inside of a six month time period everything and they're like uh 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 like great sign me up for that so literally my original contract that i signed was uh a truck driver i was gonna go in in uh i think it was 88 mike is what they called it uh which is the job description and i was gonna go be a truck driver i didn't know what i was signing to be honest get 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 uh military unit because i'm in college oh so they were going

to give you the flexibility on that they're not saying contract at the time uh with the uh 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 a 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. And 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're going to be fighting this war for a while.

um this is still a rack 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 they're like 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 we get called over And they'd be like, look at how good our guys are. And they'd just be having to bang out pushups 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 like breaks people. And it's like fucking dudes crying and shit. You're like, bitch. We're fucking doing pushups, right? What is going on here? It's like, you're probably not gonna make it, right?

But it's a very testosterone filled environment and all this stuff. But what you realize was like, 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 call it smoking you. So if you did something stupid, they basically take you outside. And I remember there's one kid, this kid is a fucking animal. They would literally bring them outside, and they'd have them do something 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 telephone pole out there and walk back, like iron mic it, like half a mile.

Whoa. Right? And the dude would be like falling over, but he never complained. Never complained. And I remember this kid's face like 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 them 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 there's no like uh just kidding i'm going to lewisburg yeah so um uh so i met somebody uh in fort leonard wood missouri where we were doing basic training and he was like oh i'm going home by august and i was like what's your job because 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 actually got out like the last week in july and i showed him to play football in august and so all of that training everything by the time i roll up to college they're all like yeah what did you

just do because i hadn't told the football coaches oh you didn't tell them you and you enlisted it's none of their business something i'm doing for myself and so i show up and uh when i was in high school i think i weighed like 195 pounds uh you know i was training every day lifting all this stuff slot wide receiver uh i was a safety mainly and i was going to caution play uh receiver okay and um 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 because i had been in basic training in the middle of the woods in the heat of the summer in missouri yeah 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 by my daily schedule. Like how do you do so much stuff? I mean, I've been doing this shit literally for two decades right so when i was in college um i would go to classes my freshman year um my parents hate when i explain this to people i got a 1.8 gpa oh that's good or uh yeah 1.8 gpa i was like drake rogers numbers right there 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 yeah and me being like oh there's grades like you guys are gonna get the grades like okay all right got it and so uh 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 back into the football

office like i was walking down the red carpet i was like hey motherfuckers i got a 2.1 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 six weeks whatever it was was to teach us how to speed read. 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 going to get better grades like that. 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 going to 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 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. 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 then go to the National Guard unit check-in. I would go back and sleep because we had to check in for football and be in our rooms by a certain time. Then I would wake up on Saturday morning. 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 would 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 uh i get a phone call we're two weeks into the uh football season and it is uh the lieutenant who is at the national guard unit and he says uh

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. I'm in college. I'm Gucci. 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 in 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 going to go. So on a Thursday 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're 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 uh 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 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 yeah so basically what you do so there's a federal protection if you're a veteran you get deployed the school can't not

let you come back right so but you have to withdraw you have to let them know hey i'm not gonna be in classes and stuff like i'm not gonna be attending got it um so i walked up dean's the management at bucknell was incredibly gracious they understood they said okay great so i gotta walk over to the football practice and people been practicing and you know it's like a small college of i don't know five six thousand people uh the football team everyone's like yeah where 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 motherfucker 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 uh you know i've withdrawn from school i'm gonna be deployed uh all stuff and i remember one kid he just stands up he goes yo like you going to war uh yeah i mean yeah that's blunt to put it bluntly yes like that that's what we're doing and so uh uh the next morning i remember i went to the locker room they were leaving for an away game and uh it's raining outside uh i'm like saying goodbye to them i literally don't know if i'm gonna see these people again right and uh it was like emotional it was weird right you're like a i think i'm at this point i'm probably 20 years old and you're like saying goodbye to other 20 year old dudes and like 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 you know i 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 i show up to like go on this deployment and the way that they do is that you basically go to training first uh the thing about the national guard is uh 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 right if you think about it um 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 right to be physically fit to stay kind of mentally sharp all the stuff and they may get called because there's a flood they may get called because there is some sort of uh you know 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 like right

they're like you're like they're shooting at you you're like well i know they're not shooting like 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 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 right in in those scenarios um but when we talk about later uh when we get to iraq that training saved our lives multiple times and so even though we were around and you kind of looked at it as uh you know hey this is stupid right like kind of like the cops and robbers in the woods you know type mentality um it worked

which was pretty incredible for you know again a kid who was playing football going to college uh 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 you know 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 Stryker. And so a Stryker is like – just think of it as like the coolest badass vehicle that the Army had at the time. right and so um as combat engineers again what does that mean they pitch it originally as like

we got explosives we're gonna like go blow shit up like awesome when you get to iraq uh you sit in kuwait for two weeks and basically they get you acclimated they kind of teach you all this stuff they show you you know videos of soldiers getting beat up and they're basically like keep your mouth shut if this happens to you um you know all these different components of like trying to prepare you you fly into baghdad into the green zone and uh they did not they do 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 landing 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 was 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 that 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 uh 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 34 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 they the uh uh you know the 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 uh 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 you know one extreme which is

pretty much anything goes it's like quote unquote real war uh and we are invading a country and so You can imagine all the brutality and just kind of nastiness that goes with that 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. Yeah. 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 a forgotten part of what Iraq was like once we got in there. That's very fascinating to me. Green Zone is basically like the safe area. Think of it as like our most fortified position in Iraq. It was in Baghdad. And it would be nearly impossible for someone 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 so 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 gonna drive down that road. They've got resupply, 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. We would go out in what they call skeleton crews. So in a normal vehicle, let's say like a striker vehicle, I think it can hold like 11 or 12 people. And so you've got a driver, 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 12 people in the back. We would go out with five people in that vehicle. We'd have the driver, we'd have one gunner on the actual kind of 50-caliber machine gun. We'd If somebody is 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 can 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 get the 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. You know, 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's 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 uh the pincher on the robot could like pick up an m&m and not crush it like we're not getting fucking

blown up in iraq we got good we got a robot right oh if you identify that ied like call in uh eod which is the explosive ordinance uh division i think there was a movie about this guy you know it puts on the whole suit walks down it's supposed to like actually hurt locker right yeah like call those guys they're going to come disarm the bomb it's going to be this great thing when you get there there's trash everywhere on the road you'll 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 gotta give them a ton of credit shout out north of grumman whoever the fuck you lockheed so i have to put that in 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 uh again there's like this uh psychotic element of like well if someone's gonna get blown up like i hope it's me today right uh um why do they get to have the cool story like i mean literally there's some of that stuff going on

um and so uh 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 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

Okay. 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 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 is in like 08, doing this? Yeah, this is 2008. God, what do we have now? And so you have all that stuff. Guess what? We never put the panels down. Never. It takes too long.

Oh 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 etc 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 gonna 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 done not what is in the manual what was the training etc 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 on the ground are making the decisions it's not somebody back in you know some uh 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 go do they get it done on time

and when that route goes is hot next uh 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 you know what you're trying 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 um So 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 had 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 in the

last four to 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 is like 90 old unit 10 new guys and then it eventually gets to 50 50 and then you kind of fully transition over and it's 100 new guys and so i think 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 um and all of a sudden uh we're going through kind of a very small town uh i just hear a just real close like right past our heads and uh 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 uh 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 uh i've been hunting a lot that was a fucking bullet get down and we just dive into the vehicle and so immediately everyone's calling out that there's a potential sniper um we can't see it's pitch black and not only is it pitch black but they can see us easily we're illuminated and so now we're sitting inside the

vehicle but basically you you gotta choose you're gonna sit inside the vehicle all night or you're gonna 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 him so okay keep moving um that should have been the red flag but we just thought hey you know what maybe we're wrong right we have headsets on and stuff so we can communicate with each other uh it's the middle of the night two three o'clock in the morning maybe we're tired do we imagine it right all these things are going through your head it was one why he shoot a second time all this stuff and so we keep driving we get out onto a main supply route and uh the unit we took over from they had nicknamed a stretch of this road as ied alley

yeah now ied alley has become a uh 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 ids right yeah i've had some guys mention this on the show and so for us there was this one stretch of the road um and it was perfect for the enemy because basically what 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 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 think it just the training kicked in and you're just like holy shit somebody

just blew up on the vehicles. And so very quickly, 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 vehicles 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. And so no one was shooting. So bomb goes off. It's the Husky. There's a gentleman that's in there. 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 now wait so you you got someone in there and was he knocked out i guess 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 uh 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 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 to 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 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 gonna butt heads now right because the middle management's 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 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 um eventually we get permission uh to fire and now the striker has a uh a 50 caliber gun on it and that gun has almost like a video game type uh 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 they are now you gotta shoot where they're gonna 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 quick reaction force and so uh in that quick reaction force um their job is to show up and basically bail you out of they know they're coming because they're 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 um so those guys are showing up right as all this is happening and so um a bunch of guys get out of the vehicles uh they walk down and they're trying to find it remember the vehicles have a hard time getting down there um they get online and as they get online they start to walk through uh 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 bomb uh he's part of the qrf force and uh he was shot right in the head and um probably there's two things that happened that day that i don't think people quite understand um and it's not kind of on the uh maybe like the opposite ends of the barbell in terms of what american soldiers have to do in war on 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. it's a one guy was ambushing from the trees because basically you couldn't tell right it's still kind of 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 they do they captured them and they called in a helicopter to airlift sergeant bomb 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 a risk right

like like oh we just move some troops over here like no this is fucking 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 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, I remember asking him, I said, what did 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 and you're like man that is not something that other countries normally have to uh 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 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 have fucking 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 And 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. You know, 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 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 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-zakawi has now been run a while he's dead at this point but like the remnants of him which would later form isis are all there and it's it's kind of a hell hole at this point was there ever a thought in your brain obviously you're doing your job you told i gotta go out and do this and you're trying to execute and save lives but was there ever thought in your brain of like well what the fuck are we still doing here yeah of course right 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 marx latrell has a great speech that he did marx latrell for those who don't know uh he's a navy seal uh if you ever watched the movie the lone survivor or read the book uh he is the survivor um 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 do your job you don't need me but if you can't do your job i'm gonna 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 right 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 put down their guns and they run right but we are not so great at at nation building. We are really bad at it. Right. And so we said this on this podcast. And so if you put those two things together, it's called war. Yes. But we're real good at starting them. But the nation building is hard. What is what is success look like? Right. Think about it from a business perspective or think about it from anything you've ever done in your life. OK, I'm going to go do something. Let's start with what is the desired outcome? What is

this 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. And so to the average soldier, they don't care about that stuff, right? One of the things that people in the military will tell you if you talk to them is they don't give two shit about that. Once they're there, they're not really fighting for the thing on their shoulder. They're fighting for the names of the guys on the chest next to them. That's right. And so there's this element of they're proud to

be an 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, what language you speak, what your 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 going to go conquer this, you know, area, they're really evil people, all this stuff, and they spend 90% of their time, they don't see those evil people. Like, well, what are we doing? I've been driving around this fucking 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 gotta 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 um it's very complex and i think the people who haven't lived through it they just look at and they're like oh i just don't kill good guys yeah because 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 you know 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 right 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 you 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 the show named Connie, 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's trying to have him see it his way, like, why are you doing this, whatever. and he says this all 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 capital club on what wherever k street, you know, are like, yeah, it seems like a good idea. That never escapes me. I tell friends all the time, you want to know what the average Iraqis 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 that there was a point in time right around 2007 to 2009 um there was uh 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 uh beginning and ends of their towns they uh 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 were 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 yes 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. Yes. 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 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, again, it's not like you see today an American kind of conversation. People are like, oh, learn to code. It's not that. But it is with the internet, you are able to democratize economic activity. 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 of two options.

either they find a way out or they're going to join a gang, right? It's very similar is if your entire family joins the gang, you're probably going to join the gang, right? And guess what they're saying? 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 like obviously you're dealing with that one percent where you do have some people who before you got there were hardened terrorists right but then you have a lot of people who may be

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? It's unclear because frankly, you don't get to talk to a lot of them. You don't know,

like one of the things that is missing in society generally is just like, we don't talk to each other, right? Twitter is a perfect example. I hate you, right? It's a real tweet. There was a guy,

maybe, I don't know, a year ago, saying all kinds of crazy stuff on the internet. I just DM'd him. I said, hey man, you want to get on a call for five minutes? I'd love to just hear your complaints, right? Just tell me, like 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 like take all the tweets and be like like mail them to him for christmas be like dude what the fuck are you talking about right oh 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 yes 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 hitting the links in my description below. Thank you. but but i i've told a story before where um i remember driving down um the road and we used to at times if we had extra stuff that people had sent us that we didn't need we would like throw it out to uh iraqi children etc and they were like false they knew that we had like candy or whatever right we'd throw it to them um and i don't 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 40 maybe 15 years old, right? 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? 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 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 maybe 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 uh or invade lands and they would rape and pillage and kill and do all this stuff and guess what there'd be a lot of bad stuff there too right and so i think that's just happening you know now yeah and i and that's kind of the endless cycle of it where no one how 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's getting killed like rah rah rah you're gonna have feelings about that afterwards you're just gonna like there's no way around that so sometimes cynically i'm like there's 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's certain emotions and attitudes that are formed socially towards perhaps

other people or areas of the world cynically you kind of have a 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, etc., 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. it when you see it 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 i'm gonna figure out a way to like you know 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 it's compounded by another and the next thing you know you're 10 years later like holy shit how do 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 like 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 where 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 um uh it always cracks me up because whenever i hear people talking about, you know, some of these topics. So it was 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. 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 uh 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't uh can't talk like that oh god you know what these guys that do they're they're human nature fuck you yeah we had dale comstock sitting right there saying that right literally that that is their reaction you how are you going to tell me how i can talk to these guys

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 and that those are like the realities on the ground versus kind of this top-down 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 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 to 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 the military is the point of the 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 um uh i wish more people would tell and and you know i know we're talking 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 was an ambush shot 27 times he was hit with a grenade got knocked out he neutralized i believe it was four 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 but when you see this 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 walks in the building they uh they killed i believe the guy in front of him he walked in second get 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. He then comes to the other two combatants in the room are still firing at his friends and he kills both of them. He gets up. 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 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 the stories. And 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 hear that whole story, right? The guy lived for almost a decade, I think, since it happened. Yeah, it was 2007. It was 2007. So the guy lived for, what, 15-plus years after that incident. Imagine what you went through.

And that was one incident. 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. that's right 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 yeah 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 talk about this a little bit in more detail because you're a financial genius as well but you know that that is a great point like we we really that train at some point will crash because we are on 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 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 you know 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 you know he's been put in a position where he feels like he can't take it and that that's so heartbreaking to me yeah and and look part of it is um 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 it's like yo 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 ship. 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, 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? 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 then you got a ton of C players. Well, you're only as good as your worst

people. 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 how is 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 gotta ask that question you're probably not 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 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 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 you mentioned you had the idea that you wish one hollywood movie house or something was was dedicated to telling these stories and 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 a 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 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 um democracy and capitalism are the two best systems ever created there's a lot of people who've 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 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'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. 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 of 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 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 you can leave and so when you see all of these components going into 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, et cetera.

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 local people realistically it'll 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 it's not like a conspiratorial stuff but do they really have that level of control over over things you think so i i think that uh leadership matters and i think that there are

certain people um who frankly i i don't know if i'd be like oh this would be the best president right i i don't think that we know enough about different people who want to be president etc but um 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 falls 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, here's part of what I think is really interesting, right? Is 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 um 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

gonna go down there right my wife and i we're gonna hang we're gonna come back and then more people started showing up new york kept getting crazier right and it was just like there's night and day difference here um 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 right california's got crime texas got crime 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 um 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 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 have to pay 10% more to live in New York City. That's an interesting way to look at it. Wow.

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 right 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 okay having more biotech experimentation here. A lot of people would move there who want to work on biotech stuff, right? 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, right? Like that was kind of the, you know, jokes on me, right? In hindsight is like, damn, they got me for 20 grand. They got six and a half years of my life. So same thing here. It's just, it's all incentive systems. And so I do think that a huge, you know, kind of issue of our time is none of our smartest friends are going into politics oh yeah it's all it's all the dumb how do we get them to do it now here's the other thing who wants that job though pump who wants to do that is people ask me all the time would i ever

do it and i say 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 like 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 right and so you look at this stuff and you're like okay like there's different ways to view taxes etc but i tweeted it recently and people got all worked up i said but you should stroke it uh 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 the united states now if i could reinvest my tax losses into a really good investment that

like 100 x'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 because none of your friends will come your family won't move they might they're not gonna 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 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 renouncing 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 um he spends a lot of time in the u.s right so when you think about that you're like wait a second um taxes are like this really stupid thing because guess what the government knows how much you owe they don't tell you you gotta 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. 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 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's some

in europe that have it but for some of the united can you explain this to people so in new york city um, there is Manhattan, the actual Island, uh, and there's five boroughs, but in Manhattan is where most of the businesses are. And so between, you know, call it 8 AM and maybe 6 PM, uh, there are quite a number of people who come to those businesses. And some of those people live in one of the other boroughs. Uh, some of them live kind of above 59th street. Uh, some of them live in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and they come into that area. Well, the city of New York city, um, 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 um 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 really so guess what happens they just read your plate they have a they already have installed the like camera things and they're going to 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 getting 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 gonna to do we're going to create a sandwich tax the fuck is a sandwich tax right you're like every time you saw a sandwich you have to pay us two cents like literally i mean this is the stuff that they're thinking of right yes 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 that creativity because we overestimate how conspiratorial the government is and we underestimate how creative they can

get in the evil genius stuff right wait can you can you clarify that so we give most government conspiracy theories way too much credit like you know oh i 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 know 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 brandon buckingham in here doing a podcast can 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 yeah dude right away my group text all of it now here's the thing maybe right i don't know i i don't know what

happened like we don't even have all the details right we don't understand but they jump to that right away now it's intellectually stimulating what if right humans been doing that forever but but also i think there's this element of um you know you you started getting some of the details of like are people really that smart are we really 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 uh it all comes back to elon and so you're looking at this you're like okay like 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, is 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, like, what are you selling?

Right. Like, yeah. It 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, yeah, there, there is a lot of this ingenuity. Um, and so I just think that trying to sift through all the noise is very difficult, obviously, but, um, that is the challenge for business owners and investors in today's world is we live in a dynamic world. You got to be able to critically think you 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 just sort of like, Oh my God, all this information, the world's ending. I'm just going to go crawl in a whole 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 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 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 something that shifted there 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. And it's not to say we don't still have a ton of them. I mean look around. 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 they're kids in school. Life is about tradeoffs, and the internet brought access to information to exposure of other societies, economies, lifestyles, etc. The tradeoff 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 uh they run a business do over 100 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 um we were talking about what are some of the things that they've seen that have been successful in the sense of um founders just go puff no no they they even bigger um 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 uh computer chips those computer

chips are used for artificial intelligence right in the most basic way um and it's gone up a lot the stock is really high right uh if you're like oh my god this is amazing 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 is 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 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 find it right or you buy it at a great price when everyone else doesn't want it and then in an invidious case also be like oh my god artificial tunnel is gonna be a big deal i want that stock when jensen's like yeah i knew this 30 years ago like we're doing pretty good and so i just think a lot about um when it comes to like economic security and financial freedom most people they get sucked into the world of like uh oh don't buy

my five dollar 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? Like I, I would imagine when you were fuck around in high school, thinking about more important things. You were, you know, you're 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 my junior year uh fall get deployed uh i don't come back until the spring of what should be my senior year so the last semester of my seniors all my friends

are leaving right and they're partying they're having a freaking blast and i'm like man i got four semesters i got two years i gotta uh finish school um 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 uh like the guy the old guy shows up with the skateboard and he's like yeah how do you do fellow kids yeah yeah that was me right uh literally some of them called me grandpa yeah right and i'm like i will whoop your ass right um and uh and on top of that though uh 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 like the mental component so if you think um football is a team-oriented sport all male uh you put on armor and it's combative without like true violence in the sense of like guns etc to war if i would have come back from the war experience right 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 an out 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'd been back and in school um i went over not to talk to him ask him a question or something about 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 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 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 decide 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 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 like but the finish line is here

like you're like four or five months away like you're getting kicked out of school but you know once you graduate right 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 could like start a business all that bingo like that sounds fucking awesome i'm doing right 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, um, kind of portals to check their homework. Those websites, uh, 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. Uh, and then we would, uh, sell people to get listed. We would split the revenue with school district. And, uh, 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. 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

probably like all these components that go into it at the time, my friends are balling who aren't starting companies. They got, you know, a hundred K jobs. We're going to have banks. They're doing the equivalent of posts on an 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 is 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 that big uh and like one a was like we don't know how to scale it that big right uh and then two was um i picked my best friends because they were my best friends right and they picked me because i was their best friend and i think at some point we all kind of realized like ah if we were like drafting the like 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 town 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 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 oh yeah 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 you know 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 you know uh occupations like you start to get all this information that you can then give to businesses um was this term geotagging geotagging is uh when you're 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 coordinates right like they had a tag on it so what we started to develop was something called identity stitching uh 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 four square of 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 like 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 to stitch 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 if you can basically take the social media data yes in you can use it for offensive or defensive purposes so like in the law enforcement use case let's say that a shooting happens if all of a sudden uh 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 you know 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 you imagine the intelligence use cases um and so again it like 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 like 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 like you know be a good little boy put on my suit and

die go to fucking business school pay a bunch of money like 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 um and so uh people always laugh so i had to get the job at facebook i literally uh a recruiter asked me uh what are you going to do now after we uh we're done the second business and um so i don't know he goes why don't you come out here do an interview i said cool what's the position he's a 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 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 like what is the thing to to find success and they probably were kinder to me than they should have been i think that there was an element of like i was saying all the right things um i think they knew that i really wanted to work there like i was excited about doing it um and then uh 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 him 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 eight or nine hundred thousand dollars here's how much money he's gonna 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 grand or something uh and you're getting some 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 it's very different because longevity you have in the business group 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 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 my job and like nah it's like just like go pick another team all right this place is awesome you guys just like go pick another okay and so i end up getting uh onto this team uh facebook pages growth so the pages product is not profiles business pages it's the top of the funnel for their advertising revenue i didn't know them again young and dumb is a very big advantage when you're at that point your career uh 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 um 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 financial 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 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 because one of their great advantages is they have tons of traffic so if you have a startup and you only get you know 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 uh remember like t9 texting so you would like press button you know t9 texting is okay uh wow i'm old shit what is

t9 texting is basically like on your phone you know how it's like one it's abc when you when texting first come out call 1-800-ATT-AT&T no no no so like when you first texted what you would have to do is there was no letters oh you gotta hit the number so you hit the like to get to 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 and you just go and you do t9 texting so in emerging countries all of the phones are still

like this for the most part and so um 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 Like, why? I was like, well, we're trying to drive more money to the business and 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 shit right to the front of the line. Exploded the number of people who clicked on it. It's like a cheat code. Yeah, it's just figuring out 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 just really trying to understand this stuff and to the businesses credit like they sent me to indonesia at one point um to go like learn more about this and stuff right so like really trying to understand and um i remember at one point uh i got an email from a well-known executive uh and they basically were like stop growing so fast and i remember being like that's weird like i'm on the growth team we grow we grow everything and so one of the leaders uh guy who was a mentor of mine uh you know he goes

hey don't worry about it like you know it's good they don't like us growing too fast because uh 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 right 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 i was like oh i'm like an imp like i'm like a real live employee like yeah the business made them no incentive yeah so i remember being like all right i'm not gonna be here forever like that's but like that is how business works right is that i just could 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 shell sandberg and oh shit 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 verse not zuck's face works right like like stupid stupid things you just learn you mean there's not an in 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 it could 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 advantage that's cool right so like you're talking about zuck and cheryl yeah and again like everyone's like oh are people good people bad people whatever like i can only tell you my experience right like that was a pretty good guy you know decision yeah up to not myspace tom everyone 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 that was like a 90-day project basically right because once you kind of learn hey put my face in the photo put my dog whatever like you kind of know those things take up jujitsu yeah yeah i mean incredible glow up right 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 i 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 that's pretty cool um and so before i left then uh there was a team called social good and goodwill and again

into facebook's credit to some degree 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 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 um and then another one was uh amber alerts and so everyone's familiar with amber alerts like on your phone you see them you know, missing highway or whatever. Uh, there's this woman, Emily Vacher, uh, uh, who was an FBI agent and, uh, 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 so, uh, we decided, Hey, let's get this, let's figure

this out and we launched it as you can imagine people are very excited in the press because it's like a feel-good story i don't think we really thought we were gonna find any kids like i mean we hope you're gonna find some we hope data says you're gonna 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 a thousand that's one more than was going to get found so six weeks after we launched the product uh i get into the office and she's on east coast west coast and she's like did you hear i'm like what she said we found a kid yesterday all right whoa what happened so what happened was i think was in the state of washington uh there

was a guy 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 but we got to run to the store watch it for 30 minutes or something and we'll be right back 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 um 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 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 and not like this is what I want to do. um i i'm 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 stroke me a million bucks what y'all doing yeah right i mean i was willing to like put my life on the line for 20k you know 17 a decade later we're at a million like shit what about 37 i would be getting 10 right like

move it up in the world and um yeah just like it's just one of my big lessons in life has been there's no such thing as a good or bad culture um i think a lot about uh 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 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've learned them right both positive and negative experiences um and so when i decided when i was deciding 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 I started investing. And frankly, you know, 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, etc. um and he was like the guy in the local area that everyone was like yeah 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 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 um we 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 checks on i thinking it'd be like 63 companies in the fund or something 60 something uh companies and we have nailed multiple multi-billion dollar companies in that fund where we are one of the first investors in those companies um and for example i don't want to name the company but people probably can figure it out uh 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 you know i'm sure people are going to argue about and 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 dollar valuation whoa all 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 paper. It looks amazing. Let's see where the cash comes. Uh, 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. Cause you got to know about the deals, not the stock market where anyone can go buy the stock. You just got to figure out if it's a good company or not. You gotta go find things that are kind of hidden. Uh, 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 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 yes um 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 the 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 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 we 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

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 yeah like what the what's the payments guy this is bitcoin 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 he wasn't even 20 know he might have been like 19 year old yeah i think he's a freshman 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 because 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 just buy a fucking computer makes money like yeah right and he showed it to me um 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 um i say man i'm game they kill me in 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 because i needed money to live and i took the other 50 and i bought

machines um i had this is 2017 ish 2016 okay um yeah i think it was 20 yeah like second half of 2016 second half of 2016 okay um get hosted in washington state um 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 five dollars goes up to like eight dollars and i'm getting it and i'm 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 gonna get our money back i just spent i don't know however tens of thousands of dollars my guy no i know but but i'm thinking but i'm thinking at

the time i'm like we just spent you know each machine was a couple thousand dollars whatever we ended up spending how am i ever gonna get my money back five each 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 to eat 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 okay goes to 150 i sell it all i'm a fucking genius i just 15x the money that i might get back all my money plus some profit i'm a gangster have you thought about at all like what it was or was it just like you oh i have a money i have a money printing machine yeah why 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 shit 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 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 at one time uh she came home uh we were dating i i had

basically just moved into her apartment um she didn't know yet uh and so i was there at a duffel bad 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 do you what could you possibly be studying on the internet it's like 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 probably I heard like plenty of people, this is the future, right? But along the way, I'd 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 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 yep 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 thing um he wanted me to go work for him uh and i said why don't we be partners that's it he said okay what do you think and so me and jason

mark and morgan creek became partners and we basically set up a joint venture separate yeah So we used the name Morgan Creek Digital Assets, both 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 were investing mostly in other things in 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 be pretty good but mark believed in mark with 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 don't we 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 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 20 000 in 2017 and it started to draw down meaning the price was going down so there's a bubblish 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 not 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 it's 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 i like a decided to publicly write it and i wrote it and i published it but you did it though too and when i published it people went nuts they were like you're an idiot posted on twitter i was like whatever why do you guys care if i'm wrong all right 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 at 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 flip there he goes okay what's the trade now is that uh looks like it's about 3200 3250 yeah i take every dollar i own right now and i put it all right into that it's the lowest it's ever gonna go now if you look at the bottom chart of bitcoin at that point you literally nailed it almost down to the exact day that 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's like this is the thing you do say things that you know you got to make a call on stuff and you're going to be wrong about stuff but i appreciate when people you know actually use their platform type something out that is a conviction but then literally go do it yeah that's what you did i i didn't know any better right like it was just hey this is what i believe so like i'm gonna say what i believe um i also went on television uh that's the first time i went on television i think was in 2018 and they were like the price is down lot like idiots and i was 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 it was 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 can 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 can take the money or it can go to charity not one person took it so like you know we'll see but like we put it out there i think there's cnbc article the whole thing like whatever bitcoin starts to rally we start buying in the funds as well as personally um and

sure shit that's what happened it went from 6 000 to 3 000 back to 10 um 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 a hundred thousand so 10x right um 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 that's right 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 a couple 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 100 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 got to write a tweet and be like okay what are these dumbasses on the internet going to say how are they going to 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 at a better 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 have they they specifically do a great job right and so same thing with trolls like they're intellectually

short sellers right they are like 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 um 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 but i stopped every single thing i was pretty much doing right uh to go and dedicate all my time to so i own full disclosure i own 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

dollars 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 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 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 going to want an explanation they're just going to 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 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 you know 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 cent but a lot of times it's other so using the dollar across the bitcoin rails right um but 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 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 has a store of value it's your savings you know it's the joke i got a savings account i got checking account right yeah um you guys know that stand-up bit all right um Um, I followed what you were saying, but I don't know the standup, but I'll tell you the story later. Um, so, uh, a checking account and 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 and a 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 that 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 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 you have electronic dollars like in an atm right now 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? book. Did 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 can 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 um 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 gives them a currency it fails government's like oh we have another one you're like i've 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? 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 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 uh 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 right sounds like gambling that's it'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, 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 uh inside of their apps they have literally the the lines and all this kind of like 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 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 uh it's going to pay out you know 500x well what do you make of the fact that the 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 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 let 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.

Yes. 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 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 an 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 us 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 with 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 right there's also people who uh they they say hey look i i have a certain religious view i have a certain societal view i i subscribe to this right now again it's like anything in the united states there's some people who agree with the rule all 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 rules so i do think that there's this element of like 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 but there's a clear set of rules yes right now do they subscribe to themselves same thing does the government follow all their rules

right um and so you can see there's a lot of parallels right i see where you're going with this now what ends up happening is they ruled by violence people were scared right and so that is is not 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 activity 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 were scared to get on the subway 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 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-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 whether you own bitcoin or i own bitcoin bitcoin doesn't care 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

new paradigm, but really what it is is 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, 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 it 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 some sort of 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 say, 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 but i'm

good um the second thing is uh there could be a bug that's introduced during the software process very unlikely uh there's a lot of checks and balances and very slow methodical intentional development etc but that could be catastrophic if if it was ever to happen and then the third is uh there could be some yet unknown computer advancement a lot of people like to point like quantum computing there's no quantum computer yet but um there could be some advancement that somebody could basically concern hack the bitcoin uh 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 has 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 then you have a quantum fucking 14 computer yeah if you're a non-economic actor sure that there are things that you could probably try to do um but also if you develop the quantum computer no one else has it no one is prepared to defend themselves are you gonna try to destroy bitcoin first or maybe you're gonna go take you know the united states of secrets right oh i'll do that first yeah right like absolutely you know there's all these kind of different components so um it's

hard to talk about like the unknown or the future uh but i do think that um 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 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 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 two million on there or something just uh less than that but yeah yeah you're up there you're up there in the twitter universe but pomp thanks so much for doing it brother thank you 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.