Anthony Pompliano is an entrepreneur, investor, writer, and podcaster on topics of decentralized finance. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:31 - Army
10:12 - Iraq
17:51 - Will there always be war?
25:04 - Bitcoin maximalism
33:33 - Money is a belief system
36:04 - Bitcoin
39:40 - Censorship
44:13 - Bitcoin as main currency
53:04 - Scarcity creates value
54:45 - Money is time
1:03:11 - Eric Weinstein vs Bitcoin Community
1:17:01 - Ray Dalio
1:34:08 - Bitclout
1:37:20 - How to get Bitcoin
1:48:05 - Investing
1:58:42 - Volatility
2:11:45 - Philosophy of the meme
2:21:40 - Dogecoin
2:31:10 - NFTs
2:36:58 - Virtual reality
2:41:54 - AI
2:47:55 - Bitcoin resources
2:52:21 - Book recommendations
2:54:59 - Can money buy happiness?
2:56:53 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Anthony Pompliano, entrepreneur, technology investor, prolific writer, podcaster, and Twitter user on topics of finance, cryptocurrency, technology, and economics.

I highly recommend his popular podcast and daily letter called The Pomp Podcast and The Pomp Letter.

Quick thank you to our sponsors, Theragun Muscle Recovery Device, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, ExpressVPN, and Indeed hiring website.

Click their links to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that I'll be having many conversations in the coming months about cryptocurrency with people of all kinds of backgrounds and world views.

Those who are proponents of Bitcoin, like Anthony, Nick Carter, Robert Breedlove, Alex Glaston, and many others.

And those who are proponents of other cryptocurrency technologies, like Vitalik Buterin, Charles Hoskinson, Richard Hart, Sergey Nazarov, Silvia McAuley, and many others as well.

I'm simply looking to explore exciting ideas in the space of technologies that could very well change human civilization and AGI civilization as well.

I appreciate that some communities are a bit more intense in their style of communication than others, but I personally am only interested in open-minded, respectful collaboration and exploring ideas.

I personally try to like to approach conversations by considering that I may be wrong about everything and I'm looking to learn.

I won't engage in group think, social signaling, outrage mobs, mocking and derision.

I send you my love either way and hope to meet you in person over some drinks, some good laughs and a good conversation 1 day.

No matter the difference in style or substance, we're all just human after all.

This is an amazing ride we're all on together.

Buy the ticket, take the ride, as Hunter S.

Whether you pay for that ticket with Bitcoin, Ethereum, the dollar, gold, seashells, a beer, or just a good old smile.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Anthony Pompliano.

You served in the US Army for 6 years and spent 13 months in Iraq in 2008 and 9.

Can you tell the story of why you joined the Army and what were some of the moving difficult and maybe lasting experiences from the time you served?

I needed my parents to basically sign in order to join.

And I graduated a semester early from high school and I thought I was going to go play football in college and kind of enroll in the spring semester.

And when that didn't happen, basically was working at Chick-fil-A in Quiznos and had in my mind, look, this is probably not the path in life that I want.

And so I knew I was gonna go to college, I knew I was gonna go play football in the fall, but I had this window of time.

And so I walked into a recruiting office and just basically was like, I'm assuming you guys need some help.

And they gave me the whole pitch and give you a signing bonus, you can go jump out of planes and go do all this crazy stuff.

So what impact, I mean, do you remember 9-11?

What impact did that have on your thinking about this?

So I was in eighth grade, if I remember correctly, And I remember being in school when it happened, and I walked into a classroom, and the entire class, somebody else's class, they were all talking to the teacher about something.

The second that me and a couple other kids walked in, everyone got real quiet, And the teacher was like, hey, go back to your like homeroom.

And so it's just kind of a weird like what's going on.

And the next thing I know, they called all the students into the cafeteria.

And this is back before, you know, every classroom really had a television in it and, you know, cable and all that kind of stuff.

And So when we were there, they basically just said, listen, there's been this event that's occurred.

All of your parents are going to come pick you guys up, and they'll explain it to you.

And so to a kid in eighth grade, you're basically like, what happened?

And so I got home, and I remember talking to my dad about it.

And my dad basically gave me, you know, the core American kind of talking points, right?

Look, somebody from another country came here and tried to kill Americans and was successful in doing that.

And to some extent, he just said, and I'm willing to bet, we're gonna go back after him.

little bit to the idea that there's evil out there, that even just the idea of terrorism, for many people that was, when it hits you on your own land, it really shakes up your mind.

In some sense, World War II, that's why World War II was fundamentally different for Americans than it is for the people like in Russia, in England, in France, in Europe in general is there's something about when there's families, women, children dying on your own land, that's different.

And that was 1 of the first times in America where like on your, of course it's Pearl Harbor, but like this is like in recent history, it's like they hit us here.

I think America was very, very good at exporting the violence elsewhere for a long time.

And there was this element of complacency, but also this element of, you know, really just American superiority.

And I think that that woke people up not only to kind of the idea that other places around the world may not like the American ideals, may not like democracy and capitalism and that, but also maybe we aren't as big, tough, and secure as we thought we were, right?

And so obviously I think you see the kind of the over-rotation with a lot of the kind of security theater that came after that of almost psychologically, let's make our citizens feel like they're safe, even if the things that we're doing don't necessarily, you know, kind of change that apparatus.

But on top of that, I think that it really woke people up to extremism around the world.

And I don't know if necessarily there was a change in the extremism as much as it just was an awareness thing.

How many people drew a line from, was it 92 or 93 with the World Trade Center bombing, to deep levels of extremism and hatred of the American industrial complex?

And so I think that was, you know, again, as a young kid, you don't understand a lot of this stuff.

You basically just, hey, somebody came here and tried to kill Americans.

And so, you know, we should go fight back, right, was kind of the response I think that I had.

What role did that have psychologically for you when you then in

I mean, this is a very different joining the army than in the time when like it's more peaceful.

Here you're essentially facing, I mean, I don't know if you see it that way, but you know, there is a war on terror.

And I know that people kind of criticize that whole formulation framework of thinking, but nevertheless, you are going to Iraq, you are going to Afghanistan, you're going to these places and are fighting these complicated, like, I mean, it's not even clear what you're fighting.

Well, I think that there's a couple of key pieces, right?

So 1, like, 1 of the actual most impactful data points, if you were, or kind of stories for me was the Pat Tillman story.

So I played football in high school and I was gonna go play in college and seeing this NFL player who basically just 1 day said, hey, I'm gonna go and do this instead and walk away.

I don't know necessarily if it was a I want to pursue the same story right now.

So he ended up dying and so not exactly the the end result that you want, but I think it was almost like he made it okay if you were on a certain trajectory in life to go take this detour and to go do it.

You're pretty naive when you're 17, right?

And so I almost kind of backed into the deployment because I signed up as a reserve member.

And so basically the plan was to sign up for the reserves, I was going to go to basic training, get all the, you know, kind of education and qualification.

I was going to go to college and then after college, you know, maybe there's a chance that you will go and serve or do whatever.

For me, I ended up getting deployed when I was a junior in college, when we got pulled out of school.

And so at 20 years old, it's not exactly what you thought you were signing up for, right?

Especially to kind of leave school to go do it.

And then on top of that, I probably had an advantage over most people, both on the entry to combat and the exit to a kind of a combat situation, which was football.

So I always explain that in hindsight, you're in a male-dominated, testosterone-driven kind of combative sport where it's us first them and there's training and injuries and just kind of all of the things that go into playing a combat sport like football to now they give you guns but you still have a uniform on still male dominated.

It's just a little bit more serious in terms of the injuries and potential death and things like that.

But also on the exit from that deployment, most guys I was there with, they're going back to being, you know, prison guards, police officers, working at the lumber yard, you know, just kind of everyday Americans.

And so I had the fortunate ability to go back into kind of that combative environment, go back to play football.

And so it was almost this like de-escalation on the way out where they take your guns away, we still got a uniform, still male dominated, still combative, and then eventually you're just a normal citizen.

And so I think that in some weird way, I was very fortunate to kind of on the entry and exit have that experience where other guys didn't.

So what, you were deployed to Iraq, were there any memories, experiences that changed you?

Or in general, like you're probably a different man on the other side of it, how did that time change you?

I think there was 2 main takeaways that I took, right?

So 1 was Not a specific moment, but on multiple occasions I remember we were driving down the road and I would look and there would be a 10 12 14 year old kid And if you've never seen somebody who literally has hate and disdain in their eyes,

Just not necessarily to you personally, just to the uniform, to what you stand for, to all this stuff.

And I always think of, if you've ever watched the movie, 12 Strong, and in it, they've got this Afghan, Afghanistan warlord, and he's talking to a bunch of soldiers.

And he says, you know, you don't have killer eyes.

And he's just like, he can just tell, right?

And so I think that that was a, a memory on a number of occasions where I just saw young kids and I just said, they hate us.

And, And it's not you personally, it's what you stand for.

But the really big event was when you first get to these combat zones, a lot of times what will happen is you basically, your unit teams up with a unit that's leaving and there's a handoff And it happens over a couple of weeks.

And so you can imagine almost 1% of our team goes out with 99% of their team, then

And then eventually it rotates, and then it's majority of our team and a small number of their team.

And so what a lot of people will explain is the 2 most dangerous times in war are actually the first 2 or 3 weeks and the last 2 or 3 weeks.

When you first get there, you don't know who the people are, you don't know the terrain, you don't know, you know, kind of the local cultures and who to look out for, what signs, all that kind of stuff.

And the last 2 or 3 weeks is you basically think you've survived the deployment.

So you become complacent, things like that.

And so we made it through that transition period with no issues.

But the literally the very first mission that we went out as a team ourselves,

1 was we were driving in the middle of the night and, what we think was a sniper shot at a truck that I was in, I was standing up outside of it, along with a, another guy, and that was kind of just a wake up call again of never been shot at before.

You kind of heard this whiz go by and the guy next to me was from a rural Pennsylvania and he just said, you know, look, I never been shot at before either, but I've done a lot of hunting, get the fuck down.

And, later on in the night, an IED went off, a guy ran over an IED, who was at the front of the convoy.

And when that IED went off, again, I had never been in a convoy that had been blown up before, but the training kicks in.

And so immediately every single person starts screaming out, IED, IED, and they started looking and trying to figure it out.

And you realize the United States military did a fantastic job training us before we went, because in that moment, nobody thought about anything.

You just did what you had been programmed to do.

And so ultimately kind of through the end of that event, there was a US soldier that ended up dying.

And when we got back to the base kind of after that entire event, I think it just hit us.

We are at war, and if we make mistakes here, that is the cost of, you know, kind of those mistakes.

It was somebody who literally showed up kind of as secondary support for our unit and basically was there to help us, right?

And so it was 1 of those weird situations where you have this emotional connection because it's somebody who shared an event with you, but you didn't know them, right?

And you learn their name later and you understand that they have a family and they have young kids and all this stuff.

And so again, as a 20 year old kid, you're kind of processing all this and you just realize like, the gun I have in my hands, it's real for a reason, right?

This is not, you know, us joking around in kind of the barracks and, you know, all the things that you would expect, you know, guys are doing the army.

So I think that was like the moment where I said, Hey, I'm gonna learn a lot here.

But nevertheless, I mean, you're somebody who thinks philosophically about this world now, right?

You're very intelligent and thinks deeply about the world.

So looking back, you mentioned hatred in the 14 year old kid's eyes, there's death.

So the way you kind of describe this whole story is like training kicks in, this shit is serious.

Like this is, you know, there's a reason there's a gun in your hand.

There's like, you have to get the job done.

But at the same time, if you zoom out, there's a kid who has hate for you.

Some of those kids would probably, if they could, would kill you for the thing you stand for in the uniform.

And then there's bullets flying at you, and then there's people that, some of them you might already care for deeply are dying, what the hell do you make of that?

How do you think about the world having witnessed that?

Yeah, a lot of times when we would talk about it, we were there.

If I was that kid, I would want to kill that person too.

Imagine if in the United States tomorrow you and I woke up and there was tanks rolling down the street from another country and they were basically imposing their rules on us whether they thought it was the right thing to do or not the soldiers were there they were doing this we would probably feel not so great about it right At kind of a minimum and at a maximum, we'd be really, really pissed off, we would fight back.

And so what you don't understand when you're in the heat of the moment is, why does this person feel this way?

And so what's very weird is, well, what happens if a year ago, US soldiers came through, they got shot at, they returned fire, and they killed that kid's uncle, you'd be pissed off, right?

And so you just start to understand, like, we look at war very black and white.

We look at it very much from a clinical perspective.

We're going to go, we're going to go kind of invade somewhere.

We are the most dominant military in the world.

But when you're actually on the ground, what you understand is the humanity of it all.

And so what becomes very interesting is pretty much every veteran I know that comes back, they're some of the largest pacifists in the world.

And I always revert back to Marcus Luttrell, who's a famous Navy SEAL.

And there's a movie made about him and his story.

He gave a speech 1 time that I saw and he basically said, listen, if you're a politician, your job is to be the diplomat, do everything you possibly can not to send me and my friends anywhere.

Because when you send us, we're going to bring hell with us.

And understand that is the business that we are in, but every single other person up until we get sent has a job to do to prevent having to send us.

And I think that ultimately that's where you see a lot of kind of this generation that has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan that says, listen, maybe we shouldn't be running around the world being the police.

Maybe we shouldn't be going and invading all these different countries.

Because when you actually get to see firsthand what happens, it's just something that we should avoid at all cost.

But if we have to go, or we have to actually send soldiers somewhere, Understand what happens when that occurs.

And the United States is the best in the world at doing it.

Do you think, I'm thinking about that kid with the hatred, do you think there will always be hatred in the world?

Do you think from another perspective, do you think there'll be war always?

Is that a fundamental aspect of human nature or is that something we can escape?

Yeah, so war I think has like very negative connotations in terms of bullets and bombs and death and kind of just very morbid type understanding.

Conflict on the other hand, I think people look at and say, of course, there will always be conflict, right?

You just can't have billions of people all on the same planet without some level of disagreement, whether that's a disagreement of ideas, disagreement over physical, you know, geography or something else.

And so I think conflict will always exist.

The question is what form does war take moving forward?

And so in my mind, it's starting to look a lot more clinical, right?

A lot more drones, a lot less soldiers on the ground, a lot more use of special forces and kind of these small, highly specialized teams rather than kind of big mechanical armies.

And then you get into like the information warfare and kind of cyber warfare.

And you start to understand that We're at war with a lot of people right now, right?

Doesn't mean we're necessarily dropping bombs on their countries.

Doesn't necessarily mean we're sending soldiers there.

But on a daily basis, we are engaged in these kind of cyber battlefields.

And so if that's where war starts to play out, 1 changes the tools and tactics and techniques that we need to arm our country and other countries were armed themselves with.

But it also changes the way that we think about war, right?

It sounds a lot less worrisome if I say, hey, we're going to go to war with a country, by the way, there's gonna be no death.

Right, okay, like that doesn't sound nearly as bad as, hey, we're gonna go send 10,000 soldiers and some percentage of them are gonna die on the battlefield and then we're gonna basically pipe back videos and articles saying that American soldiers are dying.

Yeah, it does seem to be a fundamental difference between the Genghis Khan style.

Like if I would feel differently if somebody like hand to hand with a knife murdered my family versus cybersecurity where I stole all their data, stole all their money, stole everything they own, falsified their identity, all that kind of stuff.

That, those are both traumatic events, but they do seem to be fundamentally different, but maybe that's actually very narrow style thinking.

Because ultimately you have to think about what is life and what's happiness.

I'm not sure what's more painful, if I take it to myself.

Like, I'm not sure what I would rather live through, being stabbed, like to death, or having my identity stolen, all my money stolen, or maybe reputation destroyed like with lies or something like that.

That's very interesting to think about if you think about quality of life and all those kinds of things.

the other is kind of a long, prolonged, almost torture.

So it's physical pain versus psychological pain.

And I think another key piece to this, which I don't have answers to, but there is an element of emotion and rage in the physical violence versus again more of that clinical, you know information warfare and so it's really easy to show a battlefield where there's death on both sides and bombs being dropped and buildings destroyed.

It fits very well into propaganda for everyone involved, right?

When you start talking about cyber warfare, how many times have we seen a big company get data hacked or information hacked and we all read the headlines, maybe throw a tweet out and then move on with our day and don't remember it anymore.

And so it's just very, very different, I think, in the emotion and response that it invokes in people when they hear about it as well.

Given the conflict, do you think people are fundamentally good?

Are we all sort of like blank slates that could be evil given the environment or good given the environment?

Or can we kind of, is there some base that we can rely on that people, if left to their own devices, will be good and trustworthy and honest.

I think you have to separate out intention from action.

So if you talk to some of the most heinous criminals in the world, They've rationalized their actions.

And so you've got to ask yourself, what is the level of which they understood what they were doing, that they intended to be malicious, nefarious, and kind of do bad things, versus the actual actions themselves.

And so even as a society, if let's say, for example, you were to walk down the street and you were to murder somebody on the sidewalk completely unprovoked, we would look at you and say, you are a sociopath.

You have everything wrong with you, and that is somebody that we do not want in our society and therefore we will levy, you know, the extent of rule of law against you in order to protect society from you, right?

If in the same situation, somebody walks in your house with a knife and you murder them or you kill them, now we put you up on a pedestal as a hero.

And those are 2 very, very different responses.

They may be just as violent in terms of the actual actions.

The intentions, the way it's perceived is very, very different.

And so I think that as a world, we like a very black and white, clean cut, you know, good bad.

I think the world's a lot more messy than that.

And I think that a lot of times when you look at intention, it's hard for us to tell what somebody's intention is.

But I've looked at a lot of people who are both considered very good and also a lot of people are considered very bad.

And they sound very similar in terms of the motivations for their actions.

And so I think that it's just a really hard problem that probably doesn't have a perfect solution or an answer.

Or do you think it's better to look at the results of the behavior as opposed to the underlying ideology, the underlying intention of the behavior?

I think that intention gets at the question of like, are people inherently good or bad?

Is I think that they're generally inherently good and The intention is driving towards the thing that they believe is the best outcome or the best thing for them to pursue.

The action I think is where we spend most of our time focused on.

And frankly, we actually may be a better society or kind of kinder as a humanity to each other, if we spent more time looking at intention rather than action.

But again, you know, if somebody walks down the street and murder somebody, it's really hard to have a conversation and it may be inappropriate for us to have a conversation about intention versus any level of action, right?

So you're 1 of the prominent, I would say even the faces of the world of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, that whole entire world.

Let's dive straight in and ask, do you consider yourself a Bitcoin maximalist?

I think that the way I really look at it is I work backwards off of what is the maximalism that I believe in.

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Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin | Lex Fridman Podcast #171