YouSaid · the spoken record

Anthony Pompliano

lines on the record: 210
first: 2021-03-25
most recent: 2021-03-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Is at the same time that that asset is contracting, you're also seeing a massive influx from not only retail investors, not only kind of the wealthy and the elite, but also from financial institutions, corporations, pension funds, et cetera, into this kind of digital sound money.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jewelry peaked in 2013 and has continued to fall since. And so what you start to say to yourself is take just the asset of gold, which about $10 trillion market cap. And you say, okay, well, if jewelry demand continues to fall, even if it's at a slight rate, but it continues to contract, you have central banks that now at some times are net sellers and sometimes net buyers, right? So, okay, again, contraction there. And then from the investment standpoint, the actual price, the daily price of this continues to fall, which is a signal that there's a contracting demand from an investment perspective. That's 93% of all use of gold. Only 7% of it's used for actual technology and metal conduction and things like that. So you have a $10 trillion asset that appears, and again, maybe data changes and I'll change my mind and other people change their mind, but it appears is on the decline. And so if that happens, you're going to get the contraction of a $10 trillion asset. Well, where's all that value go? And what you're seeing.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, you know, look at something like gold. I think that people are drastically underestimating the shift that's underway right now. Gold is, one, down in value since August of 2020. And so in a time frame where central banks have had historic quantitative easing, literally $6 trillion in the United States, the one asset that historically has been the best store of value and has, you know, in 2008, financial crisis hit an all-time high based on the government response, has actually suffered for a main part of this financial crisis. You then look at central banks around the world who have been very large holders of gold for a long time and net buyers on a monthly basis for multiple months over the last six months, they've been net sellers of gold. And then you start to look at jewelry demand. So the actual non-monetary value of gold. And that demand for gold”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You, I, and everyone else in the world have lived in a narrative driven world for the last couple of decades, right? And what the internet and digital technologies have done is it opened up the possibility and the desire from people to have a world now where I can validate things. So when I see that headline, I want to see you say whatever happened to the news if you're the subject of the news rather than have somebody else tell me the story. If I see that you say something is scarce, prove to me that it is scarce. And so I think that's kind of a psychological shift the younger generation is starting to understand because ultimately you and I probably grew up in a world where our parents could tell us a story and we just believed it. You know, dad or mom says it. It must be true. If my brother heard a story, what does he do? He goes to Google and he looks it up. And he comes back and usually tells my parents, oh, you got the story wrong, right? And so I think that that provability or that validation ends up becoming really, really important.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't know how much is coming out of the ground every day. Again, great, fantastic estimate, but we can't prove it. And we don't know what the total supply.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're literally going to have your wealth devalued away over time. So you can't just save, you have to invest. That is a really tall task for people. They have a hard enough time just doing their job right, taking care of their family, right? Now they got to go be an investor. So I think saving technology from a Bitcoin standpoint is if you buy Satoshis or Bitcoin, over time it will increase from a purchasing power standpoint because there's a fixed supply and demand continues to rise. But then you start to look at, well, what other assets do people put in their portfolios, whether it's art, it's real estate, it's precious metals, or something else. Most of those assets are not because people actually think that they're going to go up in value over time. They're using a store of value, right? The reason why somebody buys gold is because it's a store of value, right, historically. That's a narrative-driven type asset, though, right? We tell people it's scarce. We tell people that it is a store of value. When you look at it, though, we don't know how much gold exists in the world. We have a good estimate, right? But we don't actually, we can't prove how much there is.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You denominate that same stock market in gold. The stock market is down since 1971. And so, is it so much that the stock market is accruing true value, or is it that the underlying currency in which it is denominated in is being devalued? And I was being devalued in a very disciplined way, right? In terms of it's not like I went 50% devaluation in a short period of time, but it's still being devalued. And so I think that people are waking up to this idea that a traditional 60-40 type global portfolio doesn't work anymore, right? 40% of it in bonds is just not going to get it done. And so when you start to look at this, people first look at Bitcoin via two main ways, in my opinion. They look at it, one is a store value. Should I actually go and put some of my wealth there, use it as a savings technology, right? We ask people in the traditional world, if you're a teacher, a fireman, an accounting, you know, mid-level manager, we say, hey, go do your job. Be best in class as a fireman or as a teacher. And then, oh, by the way, you have to be a professional investor as well because if you just put your dollars in your bank account.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never thought of it as a way to send money to each other. And so it is a psychological difference between even me who's only a decade older than him or so and his peer group. And so I think as we're watching kind of Bitcoin continue this ascent, ultimately what we're seeing is an entire generation of kids are saying, listen, if I look at financial assets across the board, I have stocks, I have bonds, I have currencies, and I have commodities. I know that bonds from a real rate return perspective is flat to negative, right? I'm going to make no money on this because I have a belief that my dollar is being devalued. And actually what we're starting to see is, again, the internet has broken down these walled gardens and kind of these centralized hubs of information in that if you were to look at, let's say, the stock market from 1971 to today in dollar terms.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bank and sending a wire or going to an ATM and getting physical cash is an antiquated idea in their mind, right? One time I asked my brother, he's 24 years old, and I said, hey, how do you send money to your friends? And he gave me one answer, which I expected, which was Venmo. And the second answer I didn't expect. He said, Uber. I said, how do you send money via Uber? He said, well, we get in a car together. And at the end, we split the ride. And so, again, you and I have probably both done that.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I always go first to we don't need to have competition in terms of like a direct competition between the dollar and Bitcoin, right? If you look at most technologies in the world, they're really valuable ones are actually market expanding technologies rather than simply just market share stealing technologies, right? So if you look at Uber, for example, Uber didn't just say, hey, I'm going to go take out all the taxis, right? It actually drastically expanded the market for people. Now there's literally millions of people in the United States who don't have cars because they use Uber, right? And so I think that Bitcoin is very similar in that, yes, there is a component of medium of exchange in terms of the dollar, but also there is this component of just store value assets in general. And so when you start to look at Bitcoin specifically, I think that what you're seeing is you're seeing a generational gap where young people say, I grew up with a phone in my hand. I'm digitally native. The whole idea of going to the”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In many cases, there's actually not that much kind of accountability because usually these are not elected officials who are making some of these decisions. These are appointed. And you can argue that, hey, we elected somebody who appointed them, but at the same time, that accountability isn't quite there. And so I think ultimately when you just back out and you say, you know, what is Bitcoin and why is it important to the world it is giving access to anyone in the world with an internet connection, to a store of value and a monetary network that allows them to peacefully protest and to opt out of a system that pretty much is not working for majority of people in the world.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why? Because if you let them out, it exasperates the problem. And so now what we're seeing is we basically are giving a tool to billions of people around the world that is a peaceful protest, right? You and I had no say at all when not only the Federal Reserve and elected officials here in the United States, but central banks around the world over the last 12 months decided to create trillions of dollars and inject it into the monetary system, right? They have arguments and some of the very good arguments as to why they should do that. They're trying to mitigate short-term pain, long term, they'll figure out the other issues, right? They have very kind of elaborate and well-articulated kind of viewpoint as to why they're doing it. But you and I had no say. And so when you start to look at, we have a very small group of people in this world, both in our country and in countries around the world that make these decisions, that have very, very far-reaching kind of impact. And on top of that,”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People in the world don't have that capability. And so, what you're essentially doing is you're democratizing access to a true store of value and a medium of exchange, right? And so what you see in many of these countries is that when their currency starts to fail, the first thing that a government or a group of people in power and influence do is they lock the citizens into the currency with capital controls.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where you are born, what language you speak, what religion you are, your wealth status, your education status, none of it matters. If you have an internet connection, you can plug into this monetary system and you can move value around the world to anyone else without asking for permission. And in the United States, we basically have that ability in the US dollar kind of traditional banking system. I can pretty much send money to almost anyone I want unless they're a really bad person that's on some list or something.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there's a very strong argument to be made that there are certain countries around the world that are being sanctioned, that the people of those countries did nothing wrong. Now, the governments are bad, right, in terms of the way that you and I would look at democratic rule or communism or whatever it is. But the people are being hurt as well. So there's a whole group of people who would have just argued, listen, we shouldn't hurt anyone at the expense of punishing one person or a group of people. There's other people who argue against that. But I do think that if you really kind of zoom out and you say, I'm going to take myself out of the Western worldview and I'm simply going to look at this as we're all part of the human race, it's censorship. And there might be an argument for censorship, but there also might be an argument against the censorship. And so what Bitcoin does as that specific kind of payment network is it says anyone in the world with an internet connection. I don't care.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at it a little bit differently, which is that the United States has kind of the American superior order because we have the bombs, the bullets, the soldiers, and that military might, we basically impose our will around the world.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can go to the ATM, I can get out physical cash. If I want to swipe a card, I could do that. My money in my bank doesn't lose 50% of its value in a When you go to other countries, that might not be the case. And so I do think that there's kind of a relative analysis that goes on here. If you compare Bitcoin to the dollar, there's all kinds of arguments to make that the dollar is better as a medium of exchange today. But if I go and I tell you, well, what about in these kind of extreme examples of Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Turkey, et cetera? And so I think that that's kind of one perspective to view this through is security versus all of the innovative components of a medium of exchange, et cetera. The second thing, though, that I think is really, really important is around censorship. And so when you look at, again, every currency in the world today, every single financial service, they're highly susceptible to censorship. And actually, I would argue the United States is in the business of censorship in terms of how many countries around the world do we sanction and cut them off in either a minimal or a very material.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, being different and wrong just means you're an idiot, right? Being different and right means that that's where kind of the outsized returns are. And so if you look around the world at currencies today, they're all the same. They're all inflationary, unlimited supply controlled by a government, decisions made in a very non-transparent process. And what we've watched is the manipulation of all of those currencies over the last 12 months. In direct contrast to that is this thing Bitcoin, which is outside of the system. has a finite supply, transparent and programmatic monetary policy. And so when you see those two systems kind of in comparison to each other, in the United States, there's a lot of people who say the dollar works great for me.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And especially in light of the kind of the macroeconomy, right? So what's so fascinating about the last 12 months is in investing in general, the best returns, right? And I kind of put that in air quotes a little bit, is something that is different than everything else and right.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Says, no, just like gold had paper claims and other things built on top in layer two, three, four, five, we're going to do that here. And so they've already started to build kind of this layer two where it's easier to transact. It's cheaper. It's faster, et cetera. And so I actually think that both of those worlds are going to coexist in the future. The big question is just which one has more importance, right? So, again, get out of binary. It's just probabilistically And so, my personal belief is that the security, the store of value component as the bedrock for a monetary system is essential, right? Like that is the most important thing because you can always improve the other components, but you can't go back and fix that kind of core piece.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They tried to be responsible and disciplined, but obviously hard to do. Sometimes we've been really good at it, sometimes we've been less good at it, and they go around the world and some countries have absolutely sucked at it and some have been good at it. And so when you look into the Bitcoin world, I think that when you look at the optimization for security, similar to gold, store value, people hold it purchasing power has gone up a lot year over year. It's like a 200% year over year compound annual growth for over a decade, right? And so you measure this in kind of the US dollar exchange price, et cetera. But there's still a lot of people who will yell and scream about it's slow, it's costly, right? All the things around those transactions that are obstacles or challenges. And so there's basically two schools of thought. And this is where we kind of get into the bifurcation. Some people just said, hey, this technology is antiquated. We can't use it. It doesn't make sense. And so what we're going to do is we're going to go build something new. And so you go get kind of all of the various versions there. The Bitcoin can be...”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so ultimately, what people said was, well, let's create a second layer on top of that gold in order to make it easier to transact. And so we created paper claims on the gold. So, hey, don't carry around the gold in your pocket anymore. Put it in a vault or a bank. They're going to issue a paper claim. Now you and I can trade these paper claims around. And at any point, if you want the gold, you just show up and you say, hey, give me three ounces of gold or two bars or whatever. And so that actually made the store of value. It allowed that to be the anchor and kind of the most important part, the security of your purchasing power. But now it became easier to transact. And then eventually we built layers even on top of that. So everything from electronic money, kind of electronic USIPs, all the way to credit and other systems on top of that gold. 1971 comes around and obviously we depeg from that gold right and it was a temporary measure at the time we ended up not going back to it and so what you moved or transitioned from was sound money which was outside the system no one could create more to now the government had full control they could create as much as they wanted to”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't always like that, right? It was historically a layer one technology was gold. And so gold was a fantastic store of value. You knew that if you held gold, it wasn't going to be inflated away. It was sound money. It was outside the system and no one could create more of it. The reason why that's important is because that optimization for store of value served as the bedrock of the entire stack of money for 5,000 years. And so The problem with that, though, again, trade-off between store of value is it was really hard to transact with, right? If I came in here and you said, hey, I want a couple of ounces of gold and I had a whole bar, I'd have to literally shave off the ounces of gold. It's heavy to carry around. If you said to me, hey, you're in one city, mail it to me really expensive. There's all these issues with it.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's talk about Bitcoin first, and then it'll help us use as a kind of a comparison to Ethereum or whatever else. So when you think about what is money, right, that's kind of the first question people really kind of go down the rabbit hole on. And ultimately today, it's a belief system. Right. And you may believe that one currency has more value over another because it's backed by a certain military or a certain government has a monetary policy that you believe in or don't believe in. But ultimately it's a belief system. There's nothing backing this other than a government asks you to pay your taxes in it, right? And they can have a monopoly on violence in terms of put you in jail if you don't pay your taxes. They can go to other countries and they can invade and do all this stuff.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so whether it's through ICOs or some other forms of capital raising, there's arguments for it saying, hey, look, this now gives kind of the little guy some sort of access and ability to do it. But there's also arguments against it. Some people say, hey, it's easier to dupe them and it's easier to run scams and kind of all this stuff. And so ultimately, I think that crypto is this like arena of ideas. It is literally the war of attrition. And what will end up happening is 10 years from now, you and I will talk. And we're going to say, well, the market said X was valuable and Y wasn't. And so all of the tribalism from between, you know, here and there, it's fun. It's engaging, whatever, but also it doesn't really matter.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's also a lot of really, really great ideas that people are trying to build around Bitcoin. Same thing in the Ethereum world. And so what you end up getting, I think, is the tribalism really comes out of the idea that there's a ticker price that is attached to all of this, right? If you go back in history of technology, venture capitalists didn't sit around the table and yell and scream at each other in this like religious zealot way, right? Because you bet on one type of cloud computing platform and I bet on another one, right? Just the market's going to desirable is going to work on it and try to make our successful. Here, I think that the sensitivity, and mainly it comes out of the Bitcoin community, is that a lot of this is being funded not only by venture capitalists and kind of professional money managers and asset allocators. There's also this element of including the retail investor and the public.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Largest community and blockchain by market cap. Was created because somebody wanted to, or a group of people wanted to do something on Bitcoin. They felt like they couldn't do it. And so they said, hey, we're going to go create something that has these smart contracts that we can then go do here. Again, this is technology, right? So the tribal is.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The technical security of a blockchain. So, when you look at, let's say, Bitcoin versus Ethereum, right, Bitcoin has decided in that community has decided, security is the number one thing that you have to optimize for. So decentralization over everything else in terms of transaction speeds, cost, anything that you could come up with that is something that would be important for a currency. The number one thing to optimize for is security. And as we have seen with a lot of technologies, Facebook's Libra are now what's known as Diem is a great example, not having decentralization is susceptible to the nation state. And so a lot of these other platforms and blockchains, they say security is important, but it's not the most important thing. We believe there's a trade-off between a little less security and transaction speed or composability or whatever it is. And so take Ethereum as kind of the second.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You then look at kind of everything else. And you have a lot of smart contract platforms and various things that they're all going after. Ethereum with kind of the world computer approach. And you can kind of go down a line with all their other arguments as to what they're trying to build. I think the big difference just comes down to innovation versus security. And when you simplistically look at it via that lens, you actually understand where both people are coming from.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when you unpack it and you start to spend more and more time on it, you realize they're actually trying to accomplish the same thing in two different ways. So Bitcoin is seen, I think, as a digital currency, right? Kind of the idea that this is going to ascend to become the next global reserve currency. It's a programmatic kind of transparent money. And it's essentially just 180 degrees difference than the inflationary non-transparent fiat currencies that exist in the world.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so what ultimately ends up happening, which is very weird in the investing world, right? It's unlikely that you and I are going to sit down. You're going to buy Apple stock is the best stock and there's no other stock that's worth anything. And then also it's very weird if you said to me, you know, this stock is worth zero and that's where everything that I own I've put on a short on one single company, right? There's diversification. There's much more kind of probabilistic thinking and finance in general. When it comes to this specific world of cryptocurrency and kind of digital assets, if you will, is there's two main groups of people who are trying to build two very, very different things at the onset”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so it's a very binary view of the world. I think that what's probably most misunderstood about, let's take Bitcoin as a specific example, is that most of the people who are labeled Bitcoin maximalist, they would be open-minded if they believe that something else came along that was a superior technology or had a better kind of probability of achieving, again, that ultimate vision. I think where there's this controversy and kind of clashing of ideas is that the Bitcoin community believes Bitcoin is the best way to do that and has very specific arguments as to why the other things are not.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would even take maximalism a step further, and it's not just the kind of singular viewpoint of this is the best. It's also an element of it's anti-everything else. Right. So, you know, take keto, for example. The keto diet is not only the best diet, all the other diets are bad.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost in a way put an inanimate object up for, you know, some sort of obsession. To me, it's much more about the ideals, the ethos, and the most rational and likely path to that kind of end result or that world that I think is at this point just a foregone conclusion.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the way I really look at it is I work backwards off of what is the maximalism that I believe in. And the world that I believe in is kind of an automated world that is run on these open, decentralized protocols. And what we ultimately do is we return sovereignty and individualism and kind of personal responsibility and liberty to people over institutions. And what we end up doing is we end up kind of taking what has historically been a very analog or physical world economy and geographic rule. And we then kind of put it in the cloud and this digital economy becomes the prevalent way that we all conduct commerce, communicate, et cetera. And so it's less about any one single technology to me, right? I think that it's pretty stupid for people to”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that intention gets at the question of are people inherently good or bad? Right, 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, if somebody walks down the street and murders 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?”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the extent of rule of law against you in order to protect society from you, right? And you become that monster, that beast. 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 two very, very different responses. They may be just as morbid. They may be just as violent in terms of the actual actions.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 at which they understood what they were doing, that they intended to be malicious, nefarious, and kind of do bad things versus...”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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, regardless of what side they're on. 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 motion and response that it invokes in people when they hear about it as well.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right? Okay. Like that doesn't sound nearly as bad as hey, we're going to go send 10,000 soldiers and some percentage of them are going to die on the battlefield and then we're going to basically pipe back videos and articles saying that American soldiers are dying.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, one changes the tools and tactics and techniques that we need to arm our country and other countries will arm 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 going to be no death.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so war, I think, has 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 geography, or something else. And so I think conflict will always exist. The question is, what form does war take moving forward?”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, get to see firsthand what happens. It's just something that we should avoid at all costs. But if we have to go or we have to actually send soldiers somewhere, understand what happens when that occurs. And, you know, the United States is the best in the world at doing it.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when you're actually on the ground, what you understand is the humanity of it all, right? 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 Latrell, who's a famous Navy SEAL. And there's a movie made about him and his story. He gave a speech one 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, right? 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...”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 and 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 if 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 U.S. 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 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.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, right? I would have hatred as well, right? Imagine if in the United States tomorrow you and I woke up and there was tanks rolling down the street from another country.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are at war, and if we make mistakes here, that is the cost of, you know, kind of those mistakes. And this was somebody who I didn't know. 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 one 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? And we better take this seriously. 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 going to learn a lot here. And I got to make sure I get home.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Heard this whiz go by, and the guy next to me was from rural Pennsylvania. And he just said, you know, look, I've never been shot at before either, but I've done a lot of hunting. Get the fuck down. Okay. And so we kept driving that night. 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 start 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 US soldier that ended up dying. He was shot in the head. And when we got back to the base, kind of after that entire event,”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then its majority of our team and a small number of their team. And so what a lot of people will explain is the two most dangerous times in war are actually the first two or three weeks and the last two or three weeks. When you first get there, you don't know who the people are. You don't know the terrain. You don't know kind of the local cultures and who to look out for, what signs, all that kind of stuff. And the last two or three weeks is you basically think you've survived the deployment. You're looking forward to going home. So you become complacent, things like that. And so we made it through that transition period with no issues. But literally, the very first mission that we went out as a team ourselves 100%, there was two separate incidents. One 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 another guy. And that was kind of just a wake-up call again of never been shot out before, right? And so I'll never forget you.”
2021-03-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source