Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - Mare Liberum: The Next Chapter in Protecting Our Sovereignty, Interview with Erik Bethel | Triggered Ep.271

00:06:21.000 Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Triggers.

00:06:25.000 Today we're welcoming a first-time guest, Eric Bethel.

00:06:29.000 He's gotten some attention for a couple of great interviews that he's done recently, so we decided to have it on and do a deep dive on all things China and military technology.

00:06:38.000 Eric actually represented the U.S. at the World Bank during my father's first term, and he's now on the front lines of investing in maritime security, securing the Western Hemisphere and standing up to the CCP.

00:06:50.000 His family story actually starts in Cuba.

00:06:53.000 And Eric grew up in Miami before attending the United States Naval Academy and then on to the Wharton School at Penn, my alma mater.

00:06:59.000 So there's going to be a lot to cover.

00:07:02.000 This interview is going to really open your eyes to the threats that we face, land, sea, and basically everywhere in between.

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00:08:50.000 Well guys, joining me now, former U.S. Director of the World Bank and partner at the Mara Libram Fund, Eric Bethel.

00:08:59.000 Eric, great to have you here.

00:09:00.000 How are you?

00:09:01.000 I'm doing great.

00:09:02.000 Good afternoon to you.

00:09:04.000 Well, welcome to the program.

00:09:05.000 It's always great to have a first-time guest and someone with your story.

00:09:10.000 Can you maybe start with just a brief introduction of yourself to the audience?

00:09:13.000 You have a really sort of interesting background in naval warfare.

00:09:17.000 You represented the United States at the World Bank in my father's first term.

00:09:21.000 You've also been a strong voice on taking on China.

00:09:25.000 Let's start with that 30,000 foot view of your story.

00:09:29.000 Sure.

00:09:30.000 Well, I'll begin chronologically.

00:09:34.000 So I'm currently a partner at Mari Libram.

00:09:36.000 We're a venture capital fund.

00:09:38.000 fund, and we invest at the intersection of where technology meets maritime strategy meets national security.

00:09:45.000 And a lot of our focus is on national defense technologies that directly strengthen our security in the Indo Pacific, certainly, but elsewhere.

00:09:56.000 So we've invested in companies like Saronic that makes unmanned surface vessels, Windward, which is a maritime AI company, Regent, which is a sea glider technology, Epirus, they make counter drones.

00:10:17.000 And so I kind of came back to my naval roots.

00:10:21.000 I'm a Naval Academy graduate and I serve on the board of the Naval War College Foundation.

00:10:29.000 Also, I have an MBA from Wharton, by the way.

00:10:30.000 Oh, very nice.

00:10:32.000 So you have that in common.

00:10:33.000 Yeah.

00:10:34.000 So, well, I just went undergrad, but it's close enough.

00:10:37.000 Same classes.

00:10:39.000 But before this, as you mentioned, I did serve as the US director at the World Bank, confirmed 102 to 0 by the Senate.

00:10:49.000 And so I kind of got a front row on how China is infiltrating my country. 0.96

00:10:54.000 Multilateral organizations, World Bank, UN, etc.

00:11:00.000 And we can we can double click on that if you like.

00:11:02.000 Yeah, we'll definitely we'll definitely circle back to that because that's that's kind of fascinating and a big part of what we gotta really be focused on.

00:11:07.000 I think we've been asleep at the wheel for far too long on the issue.

00:11:10.000 Far too long.

00:11:12.000 And then after the World Bank, I was nominated to serve as the US Ambassador to Panama.

00:11:18.000 I cleared committee, but the floor vote never happened due to the 2020 election.

00:11:23.000 And so Panama, of course, as we now know, is critical, not just for the canal, but for broader US influence in the region.

00:11:32.000 Before that, I was a naval officer and I grew up in Miami, the son of a career State Department foreign service officer.

00:11:44.000 And my mom is Cuban and, you know, her family fled Cuba due to, you know, under Castro due to repression.

00:11:54.000 My grandfather was under house arrest.

00:11:58.000 And I grew up in Miami and across Latin America speaking Spanish more than English, believe it or not.

00:12:06.000 Wow.

00:12:08.000 I imagine they would agree with that if it didn't work in Cuba, it won't work in the United States now?

00:12:16.000 Or Venezuela, or, you know, pick your socialist state.

00:12:20.000 Yeah, that's always the one that shocks me, is the people that are always advocating for the communism, socialist dictatorships, et cetera, around the world.

00:12:27.000 They never seem to be people who actually lived under those ideologies.

00:12:31.000 They only talk about it in glorified terms from an academic standpoint.

00:12:36.000 100%.

00:12:37.000 And you've you may have noticed that in the recent presidential election, the Latin community, especially in Miami, many of whom have fled repressive repression.

00:12:48.000 repressive regimes overwhelmingly voted Republican and for your dad.

00:12:55.000 So let's talk a little bit.

00:12:57.000 I know you went to the Naval Academy.

00:12:58.000 Actually, I went to the Hill School.

00:13:00.000 And so we were for boarding school.

00:13:01.000 And so we were a big feeder school to the Academy.

00:13:03.000 I think like 15, 20% of my graduating class went to Navy.

00:13:08.000 A bunch went to West Point as well.

00:13:10.000 But I know they just wrapped up Plebe Summer in August.

00:13:13.000 Can you talk a little bit about your experience at the Academy, why you chose to go there, and what stands out most looking back?

00:13:21.000 I'm going to think about that.

00:13:24.000 To give you a thoughtful answer, I think that the clearest reason for My desire to go was a sense of purpose.

00:13:34.000 It's not like you're just getting a college degree like you can get anywhere, but rather you're doing something noble, helping your country.

00:13:44.000 And it was especially important for me, the son of a Cuban immigrant, but for the United States, I could have been born in Havana or somewhere else.

00:13:54.000 And it was really out of just being grateful to my country that and the sense of mission that the Naval Academy had, which is what made it so poignant for me.

00:14:07.000 As far as the lessons learned and things I got out of it.

00:14:12.000 Well, apart from that overarching sense of purpose, discipline, hardship, dealing with adversity, I think were things that you may get at some colleges, but it's not universal.

00:14:29.000 And so, ultimately, you're taught to be a leader and your decisions may affect the lives or deaths of the sailors working for you.

00:14:37.000 So, you take it very seriously.

00:14:40.000 What do you think, your opinion today, the state of the academies, military leadership versus even a few years ago.

00:14:48.000 I know from my buddies that I literally lived with for five years in high school that that went there.

00:14:53.000 It feels like a lot has changed in the last few years when you see sort of the onset of woke policies and DEI there.

00:15:00.000 What do you think happened there?

00:15:02.000 And are we on the right path now to kind of get those things back to sort of the purpose that you're talking about?

00:15:08.000 I think we need to operate from a first-principle standpoint, which is what are our academies there to do?

00:15:15.000 And what is the military there to do?

00:15:17.000 Our military is explicitly, it exists to fight and win wars.

00:15:24.000 And so you need to train people at the academies to do just that.

00:15:30.000 And you need to have, of course, you need to have diversity, but diversity implies diversity of thought, diversity of political leanings, including in the faculty, to ultimately be able to think through asymmetrically how you combat an enemy.

00:15:45.000 So if we get back to first principles, I think we're doing just fine.

00:15:49.000 And I think we're on the right track to do that.

00:15:52.000 So, I guess, talking about sort of enemies, I guess you were the US director at the World Bank during my father's first administration.

00:16:00.000 You've said that China quite literally infiltrated it.

00:16:04.000 Can you break that down for us?

00:16:06.000 How did a global institution designed to help developing countries end up basically serving the Chinese Communist Party's interests?

00:16:14.000 And what did you see from the inside there?

00:16:17.000 Yeah.

00:16:17.000 So first of all, let's understand what the World Bank is.

00:16:20.000 It's an institution that the United States created to rebuild Europe after World War II.

00:16:28.000 Over time, its mission has amplified.

00:16:32.000 But I think, look, I think it's an institution with a noble goal, right?

00:16:36.000 Ostensibly, the stated mission of the World Bank is to end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity.

00:16:44.000 I mean, there are hundreds of millions of people that are living on, you know, $2.15 a day.

00:16:51.000 I think that's the international poverty line.

00:16:56.000 Now, when it comes to China, and so the mission is good and there are noble people working to advance that mission.

00:17:03.000 When it comes to China, though, in and around, I've got to refresh my memory, but in and around 2016, China's income level was high enough that it was formally considered.

00:17:20.000 So the way it works is if you're a very, very poor country, you get free money in the form of grants.

00:17:26.000 You cross a threshold and then you get into the loan program and they're super cheap loans.

00:17:31.000 These are like the cheapest loans you'll ever get.

00:17:34.000 And then you graduate, right?

00:17:37.000 And in 2016, China's GDP per capita was high enough where they could probably graduate.

00:17:42.000 But instead of being cut off, the World Bank put them on what's known as a transitional lending path, meaning its borrowing is going to get reduced over time.

00:17:52.000 But as of, I think, June of last year.

00:17:56.000 Last year, China's loans from the World Bank were averaging like 950 million dollars per year.

00:18:04.000 And what is that going towards or do we even know?

00:18:08.000 It's funny you should mention that.

00:18:10.000 One of the things that I worked on to at least uncover was a loan that was made in the sort of the 2016, 2017 time frame, which was a Xinjiang project.

00:18:25.000 Xinjiang is a province in western China where you have a lot of ethnic minorities.

00:18:30.000 They're not Han Chinese. 1.00

00:18:33.000 And the loan was to support five vocational colleges to update the vocational criteria and curriculum and improve opportunities for minority students.

00:18:48.000 But we found out, and there were some great investigative journalists, I think Foreign Policy and Axios uncovered, that a lot of the schools got money and that money was used for surveillance equipment, camouflage, barbed wire, stab resistant armor.

00:19:08.000 And so we had to ask ourselves.

00:19:10.000 All those things you need at a university in China.

00:19:14.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:19:16.000 So it was absolutely crazy and it was swept under the rug.

00:19:21.000 The World Bank made a few trips to China to investigate, but China stonewalled and many, many months later, everything was scrubbed, kind of like the Wuhan wet market, like nothing existed after a few months.

00:19:35.000 How dare you say it came from the lab that studies the exact virus in question at the exact place of ground zero?

00:19:40.000 How dare you?

00:19:42.000 You're not a virologist. 0.99

00:19:43.000 It's like, hey, you're just not retarded. 1.00

00:19:46.000 It's science, not that hard.

00:19:48.000 It's so obvious, yeah.

00:19:51.000 Yeah, I mean, it obviously came from Wuhan.

00:19:54.000 Whether or not it was leaked intentionally, I don't know.

00:19:57.000 But what China did do was they did allow outbound flights.

00:20:04.000 And what's super interesting is that there was a huge spike in deaths in Northern Italy of all places.

00:20:12.000 And wouldn't you know that there are like seven thousand or something, you can probably google it, thousands of textile companies owned in Northern Italy, like places like Prato, by Wuhan businessmen.

00:20:26.000 So China was deliberately allowing outbound flights.

00:20:29.000 They were like, hey, we're not going to be the only people suffering from this virus?

00:20:33.000 No, that part was, you know, I'm with you.

00:20:34.000 I mean, I don't know how to prove the leak.

00:20:36.000 It wouldn't surprise me.

00:20:37.000 It seemed like it'd be a good way.

00:20:38.000 If they did it, it'd seem like, hey, this is a way to destabilize the world, put Trump in an awkward spot prior to an election, these kinds of things.

00:20:44.000 So, you know, I'm not saying I can prove it.

00:20:47.000 It wouldn't surprise me.

00:20:48.000 And based on sort of their actions throughout the world, I guess, you know, it's probably more plausible than not.

00:20:53.000 But yeah, we definitely know that they did nothing to stop the spread when they knew they had this thing going on.

00:20:59.000 They didn't stop those outbound flights.

00:21:00.000 They wouldn't let stuff coming in.

00:21:02.000 But they were fine letting it out to the rest of the world because if China has to suffer, the rest of the world's going to have to suffer. 0.52

00:21:07.000 Well, what's worse also is that they had this information.

00:21:11.000 operation saying that it actually came from Fort Dietrich in the United States and that we were responsible for it.

00:21:17.000 There was like a thread on that.

00:21:19.000 Yeah.

00:21:20.000 And then they had this vaccine diplomacy project, which was, which was absolutely awful.

00:21:30.000 Yeah.

00:21:30.000 Where they were, you know, telling countries to use their vaccines and not ours, holding vaccines from countries like Honduras that still at the time recognized Taiwan and not China.

00:21:44.000 It was terrible.

00:21:45.000 Yeah.

00:21:47.000 What else did you see from the World Bank standpoint.

00:21:49.000 Obviously, you know, that's a pretty shady loan.

00:21:51.000 And I'm sure, you know, no way.

00:21:52.000 It's sort of, I mean, there's a component of it that reeks a little bit of like USAID, which is like, we're just giving out money.

00:21:58.000 We get our accolades.

00:21:59.000 They'll treat us great when we go over there.

00:22:01.000 But are they actually accomplishing the purpose?

00:22:04.000 I mean, it doesn't feel like, especially with China, you know, that they'd be deserving of things that certain other countries would as it relates to education.

00:22:10.000 I imagine their education systems probably far better certainly than our public education system and otherwise.

00:22:16.000 Well, consider this.

00:22:17.000 When you get a World Bank loan, you're classified as a developing country.

00:22:23.000 If you're a developing country, you get favorable treatment at all of these.

00:22:27.000 international organizations like the WTO And so forth.

00:22:32.000 So it's in their best interest to keep getting loans from the World Bank.

00:22:36.000 And if you think that money is fungible, and it is, you get super, super cheap loans from the World Bank, like 900 million dollars, a billion dollars a year.

00:22:45.000 And then you can then take those loans and lend them to, say, Kenya or Uganda at, you know, so far plus 700 basis points.

00:22:53.000 And if the Ugandans can't pay you back, well, you own them, right? 1.00

00:22:57.000 You take their telecom, you know, operations or whatnot.

00:23:02.000 But the other thing I noticed was procurement contracts.

00:23:06.000 So like when the World Bank.

00:23:10.000 works with a country to rebuild a road or a bridge or a hospital, right?

00:23:15.000 The procurement business, which is in the tens of billions of dollars a year, at the time, China was winning close to, you know, 40 percent of all contracts, and the US was winning like one percent.

00:23:30.000 Today, it's changed.

00:23:31.000 China's down to 30 percent, but 30 percent of the contracts, while getting money, while getting favorable trade treatment at the UN, I mean, it's ridiculous.

00:23:42.000 Yeah.

00:23:42.000 Yeah, how do we actually compete if they get that status and they get those loans for, you know, pennies on the dollar dollar and we're paying six percent, whatever it may be.

00:23:48.000 It's a.

00:23:50.000 Well, it doesn't seem like a level playing field.

00:23:52.000 And we're funding it.

00:23:53.000 Our taxpayers are funding it.

00:23:55.000 Yeah, I guess that's the worst part is that, I mean, World Bank, how much of that funding is coming from the US as a percentage, almost all of it?

00:24:03.000 Well, so we own a certain percentage and we're on the hook for a certain percentage of it.

00:24:07.000 And we're still the largest shareholder of the World Bank.

00:24:10.000 But the way the loan program works is the World Bank issues bonds globally.

00:24:17.000 And those bonds are like the cheapest bonds you'll ever buy.

00:24:21.000 So it's an AAA rated credit.

00:24:24.000 And you say to yourself, well, how can you be an AAA rated credit when your loan portfolio goes to, you know, Tajikistan and, you know, and because it's fully backstoped by the US government.

00:24:34.000 Well, at the end of the day, we're the backstop.

00:24:37.000 I suspect that if, you know, the poop ever hit the fan, I don't know that, you know, other countries would step in for their share.

00:24:44.000 Some would, but not all would.

00:24:47.000 So at the end of the day, it's really the faith and credit of the US Treasury that balances the check book.

00:24:53.000 And, you know, the irony of that is watching some of the moves that China's making to make the yuan sort of the world's, you know, currency.

00:24:59.000 You see the stuff going on as it relates to the attack on the petrodollar and all these things.

00:25:03.000 So again, it's just one of those it just seems like we keep being our own worst enemy and acting in the interest of others and just not actually ever calling out these practices when they're manipulated against us.

00:25:14.000 Well, I did.

00:25:16.000 And by the time I left, I think there was a growing awareness both inside of the US government and also with our partners and allies at the World Bank that this was a problem.

00:25:31.000 Perhaps that was reversed in the four years of the Biden administration.

00:25:35.000 I'm not sure.

00:25:36.000 But China remained a square, a square, a square you know part of what I was trying to do interesting so you know you then moved on you're now a partner at a fund as we mentioned in the intro you know focused on maritime technology and national security so I guess the phrase Mara Libra means the free sea it sounds like we're moving into an era where that idea is actually under threat and you certainly see that again in parts of Asia South China Sea you know what's the biggest naval or

00:26:04.000 maritime tech gap you know that we have right now you see that you know the Russians testing hypersonic missiles you know it seems like everyone's progressed uh pretty well in that and I don't know that we've necessarily caught up you know what what's that trajectory look like moving forward?

00:26:21.000 We're seeing the single largest military buildup since World War II.

00:26:26.000 And it's by and large, one sided.

00:26:29.000 But because of, you know, China, look, as of today, the PLA Navy has something like 400 capital ships and then another, say, 350 support vessels.

00:26:42.000 It's growing.

00:26:43.000 It's already the largest navy in terms of warships.

00:26:47.000 And because of that military buildup, the Japanese are ramping up their defense budget.

00:26:54.000 The Filipinos are, I mean, there's a summit in Korea today with the president.

00:27:00.000 And so everyone is kind of on pins and needles.

00:27:05.000 So this is a this is a really big issue for us.

00:27:10.000 And in terms of shipbuilding power, they just merged their two largest shipbuilders to become the monolithic global 800-pound guerrilla.

00:27:22.000 So these are big issues.

00:27:24.000 Hypersonics are an issue, but also consider asymmetric forms of adversarial action, whether it's hacking into the US electricity system, building islands in the South China Sea, influence operations through TikTok.

00:27:42.000 I mean, I could we could probably spend the rest of the afternoon talking about this.

00:27:47.000 Well, what are some of the biggest ones, you know, in that that you see specifically as it relates to sort of the maritime issues?

00:27:53.000 You know, I know we don't have the capabilities to build ships anymore.

00:27:57.000 That's sort of a shame.

00:27:57.000 I think we're trying to change some of that.

00:27:59.000 I mean, that's controlled largely by China.

00:28:01.000 Certainly South Korea has a pretty significant operation in that department, at least their allies.

00:28:07.000 But it's, again, one of those places where we don't seem to control any aspects of our supply chain, which creates pretty serious problems, as we saw during COVID and otherwise.

00:28:15.000 Well, I mean, you have like 900 pounds of rare earth elements in every F-35 fighter, to give you an illustration, and China has basically curtailed rare earth elements except through like a licensing agreement.

00:28:31.000 But I mean, where to begin?

00:28:34.000 And then I'll go through the gaps.

00:28:36.000 Like a ballpark, China's built artificial islands and militarized them throughout what's known as the South China Sea.

00:28:46.000 Vietnam calls it the East Sea, the Philippines calls it the West Philippine Sea, but it's in that area.

00:28:51.000 Yeah.

00:28:54.000 Through Belt and Road, China has secured long term leases in places like Sri Lanka, in Greece, through Piraeus, and even in Djibouti.

00:29:04.000 And if you look at the combined data of the ports owned and operated by Hong Kong and China, you know, Hutchinson itself owns 52 ports, China Merchants owns around 38, Costco owns around another 34, 38.

00:29:25.000 So all in, you're talking about close to 100 ports that are around the world that are controlled by China.

00:29:32.000 The Chinese also have a technology, a software called Login, sometimes called Login.

00:29:39.000 It's port software, and you've got scores of ports around the world using it.

00:29:45.000 Yeah.

00:29:46.000 ZPMC makes the cranes that go in ports, and they have an 80 percent global market share, and I think it's like 70 percent in the US.

00:29:56.000 And the concern is, do they have backdoors, right?

00:29:59.000 If they wanted to basically stop our ports infrastructure from functioning, what do you do?

00:30:05.000 Now, when it comes to the military itself.

00:30:10.000 Um, I don't think that we can compete, uh, in any effective time frame, uh, through the conventional shipbuilding method.

00:30:22.000 Yeah.

00:30:22.000 And even if we did, uh, Don, consider that an aircraft carrier's range is like, let's say it's 700 nautical miles, like the planes can fly in any direction, but they need to get refueled.

00:30:36.000 Yeah.

00:30:37.000 The range of one Chinese DF 26 or 21 missile is like 2000 miles.

00:30:42.000 Yeah.

00:30:42.000 So like you don't have to be Einstein boy to figure out that if conflict happens, aircraft carriers are steaming east out of the conflict.

00:30:51.000 So what do we do?

00:30:54.000 I think what we need to start thinking about is how can we bridge the gap asymmetrically?

00:31:02.000 I mean, can we put thousands upon thousands of autonomous drone boats in the water?

00:31:09.000 Like Saronic, for example.

00:31:12.000 It's a company we invested in.

00:31:14.000 So the drone boat could be kinetic, right?

00:31:18.000 You can put an explosive payload on it and send it on one-way missions.

00:31:22.000 Or it could be a decoy.

00:31:23.000 Hey, I'm a cruise ship.

00:31:25.000 Hey, I'm a freighter.

00:31:26.000 Or you can use it for information and collection, harvesting information.

00:31:32.000 Or Regent that makes a sea glider that flies below radar and above sonar, and it's essentially invisible.

00:31:43.000 So these new types of technologies are really what's going to drive, and these innovations are what's going to drive the future of warfighting.

00:31:51.000 It's very clear from Ukraine that the days of soldiers jumping out of helicopters with machine guns getting.

00:31:57.000 cut down by drones.

00:31:58.000 A hundred percent.

00:31:59.000 It seems like, you know, a $300 drone now can take out a $15 million tank in about three seconds.

00:32:05.000 And by the way, the same goes with planes.

00:32:07.000 You know, friends that are, you know, F-35 pilots that are like, hey, we'd last about 15 seconds in Ukrainian airspace if they turned on all the stuff.

00:32:15.000 And so, you know, it's just the changes there, but you've never really thought about it as much on the ocean, right?

00:32:20.000 And you're right.

00:32:20.000 I mean, a drone, a plane drone eventually will be able to handle far more Gs or whatever maneuver much better than a pilot human body could ever handle, even the best of the best.

00:32:31.000 And so, you know, why not change on the ocean side as well?

00:32:35.000 And it seems like you could do that in a much more cost-effective than you know i don't know how much a nuclear uh aircraft carrier costs but imagine it's rather significant probably not as much as a drone boat, just saying.

00:32:51.000 You can build tens of millions of drone boats for the cost of an aircraft carrier, yes.

00:32:57.000 So how is that being adapted by the U.S. government?

00:33:01.000 Because again, one of the things I saw, again, as part of even the transition period for my father's administration, you meet with someone from the Air Force and they were a fighter pilot.

00:33:11.000 And I get it.

00:33:12.000 And they love planes because of that.

00:33:14.000 It's sort of hard to sometimes step back and be a fighter pilot and say, no, we actually got to focus on stuff that's not planes because it's actually more cost effective.

00:33:22.000 It's better.

00:33:22.000 You sort of love what you know, right?

00:33:24.000 When you're a hammer, everything is a nail.

00:33:27.000 How do you get the government to adapt those kinds of ideas?

00:33:30.000 Because again, I think you could stretch that dollar a much longer way.

00:33:35.000 Yeah, look, the procurement cycle, I think, is broken.

00:33:38.000 And I think almost everyone in the Pentagon will agree with it.

00:33:42.000 The question is how do you fix it?

00:33:44.000 So the desired end state of any company is to get to what's known as a program of record.

00:33:49.000 That means that the military is buying your product and it will buy your product for a period of time, like an F-35 or a tank or whatnot.

00:33:56.000 Yeah.

00:33:57.000 The problem is to get to a program of record.

00:33:59.000 Sometimes it takes years and years and years.

00:34:02.000 And then it's testing and then it's retesting and does it fit the need and is there a champion in the department?

00:34:10.000 And so because it takes so long, a lot of these Silicon Valley startups, you know, can't rely on the vicissitudes of the government procurement cycle and they don't make it.

00:34:23.000 It's called the Valley of Death.

00:34:25.000 So I think DIU, the Defense Innovation Unit and others are doing a lot of work to keep these companies, give them a lifeline so that they can ultimately get to a program of record.

00:34:37.000 But something has to happen urgently.

00:34:41.000 in the defense department and they need to address this.

00:34:44.000 Yeah, I mean, that seems like, you know, across the board.

00:34:46.000 I mean, I'd say, you know, to your comments on the World Bank.

00:34:49.000 I mean, all of these things, we have to look at the world in a very different way.

00:34:53.000 Now, not the sound bites, not what's been put out there in the media, but actually with common sense.

00:34:57.000 And, you know, that often takes a lot of time to set in because I guess people get used to systems.

00:35:02.000 They sort of function well within those systems.

00:35:04.000 They're part of that bureaucracy.

00:35:05.000 And then any kind of change is a threat to their hegemony and power within those systems, which is a problem and why nothing gets done.

00:35:12.000 There's a lot of inertia, right?

00:35:15.000 If you work as a civilian in the Pentagon, you've been there for., you know, half a dozen years.

00:35:22.000 Switching to a new platform and taking a bet and using some creativity doesn't necessarily win you any brownie points.

00:35:30.000 But sticking to the same old, same old does.

00:35:32.000 So there's like a lot of momentum and inertia.

00:35:34.000 And they're like, well, we've always done things this way, we may as well continue.

00:35:38.000 So, you know, maybe to change topics a little bit, let's talk about Latin America.

00:35:42.000 Your family had mentioned is rooted in Cuba.

00:35:45.000 It seems like the Biden administration had basically abandoned the region, but there are signs that some of that's changing a lot in the second Trump administration.

00:35:54.000 How critical is our influence in Latin America, whether it be, you know, just respect for American sovereignty, narcoterrorism or just even economic investment?

00:36:04.000 Well, as we speak, we've got warships off the coast of Venezuela.

00:36:13.000 And I was reading Twitter today, which let me see if I can find it.

00:36:20.000 Maduro, while speaking at the first pedagogical conference of Bolivian teach, Bolivarian teachers, whatever that means, Maduro paused to present his new cell phone, which he said was a gift from China's leader Xi Jinping.

00:36:37.000 He said he communicated with Xi.

00:36:39.000 through that new phone by satellite.

00:36:42.000 So he was quick to say to the US, well, at least I have a friend in China.

00:36:47.000 Yeah.

00:36:47.000 Well, that historically hasn't worked out.

00:36:50.000 By the way, I think that's something I see when I travel all over the world, even just for my hobbies, whether it's hunting or fishing, you end up in sort of these, you know, middle of nowhere awesome countries, but like out of the cities.

00:37:00.000 And you actually see.

00:37:01.000 all the attempts that China made where it's like, we're going to bring jobs and they're going to do this and create infrastructure and the jobs they bring are for Chinese nationals that they then send to those countries. 0.55

00:37:10.000 So no jobs created for the locals.

00:37:11.000 The infrastructure they create crumbles after a few years.

00:37:14.000 So probably won't work out.

00:37:17.000 well for them in the long term, but I imagine they'll manipulate it really effectively in the short term.

00:37:21.000 In the short term, they are definitely doing that.

00:37:24.000 Venezuela owes between like three and ten billion dollars to China.

00:37:31.000 And they're in the hawk.

00:37:32.000 They can't get out of it.

00:37:34.000 I think what we're doing in Venezuela and putting a price on Maduro's head for being a narco trafficker is great. 0.99

00:37:42.000 And it signals to the other hard left-inclining countries in the region, Cuba, you know, to some degree Colombia and Bolivia and others, hey, the US means to business.

00:37:56.000 So I think that's great.

00:37:59.000 I think that there are growing numbers of allies in the region.

00:38:06.000 There are still places where we need a lot of work.

00:38:09.000 Places like Brazil, for example.

00:38:11.000 Yeah.

00:38:12.000 Pretty scary.

00:38:13.000 Where we need to exert a lot more leadership.

00:38:19.000 Because Lula is squarely in the arms of the BRIC community. 0.89

00:38:25.000 And he's no friend of the United States.

00:38:28.000 And we have to manage that, obviously, you know, delicately and thoughtfully, but we have to exert leadership in the region.

00:38:37.000 Yeah.

00:38:37.000 I mean, the big one obviously is just the narco-terrorism stuff.

00:38:40.000 I mean, we referenced it a little bit.

00:38:42.000 There's clearly an effort to dismantle the cartels and the narco traffickers, but how do you see that actually playing out?

00:38:49.000 What does that take to get to get done effectively?

00:38:54.000 Well, let's begin with, I mean, all roads to some degree lead to China.

00:39:00.000 Since 2012 or so, if I have my statistics right, you have more than 400,000 people that have died from fentanyl overdoses.

00:39:13.000 That's about as much, that's as much death as the US military suffered during World War two.

00:39:20.000 Yeah, I read the stat, it was 100,000 a year, which is basically two Vietnames.

00:39:24.000 It's crazy.

00:39:25.000 Two Vietnames a year, and it's like no one wants to do anything about it, it's just, oh, let's just accept this, like it's fine. 1.00

00:39:31.000 It's crazy to me, actually.

00:39:33.000 This is not acceptable.

00:39:35.000 And what's worse is it's being done deliberately.

00:39:39.000 The narco traffickers in Mexico are part of the issue.

00:39:44.000 Our porous border historically was part of the issue.

00:39:48.000 And then of course you've got the malignant actors like Venezuela, which is at the end of the day a quasi narco state led by Cuba and others at this point. 0.87

00:40:01.000 So let's fix it.

00:40:03.000 Yeah, I agree.

00:40:04.000 I guess one of the other things that you kind of talked about if we go back to banking and maybe a little bit of crypto, you've warned about China's central bank and their CBDC, their central bank digital currency.

00:40:17.000 You've called China sort of a geopolitical weapon.

00:40:21.000 How is that aspect being used to bypass our financial system?

00:40:24.000 So if we put sanctions on, they're not effective because they're.

00:40:27.000 basically enroading, you know, whichever systems we have in place, and where can America really lead the way in forming, you know, reforming our financial institutions for the better?

00:40:39.000 Yeah, I think I'll speak to the second part and then I'll address the first.

00:40:44.000 We don't win by trying to out China China.

00:40:47.000 In other words, China has a central bank digital currency, which basically monitors everything you do, all the purchases you make, and it's linked to your so-called social credit score.

00:40:59.000 So if you buy, you know, diapers, you're a good parent, your social credit score goes up, and so forth.

00:41:04.000 Yeah.

00:41:04.000 So a CBDC for the United States, I think, would be terrible.

00:41:08.000 Well, and we ruled that out.

00:41:09.000 I mean, my father said he was never going to do that.

00:41:11.000 It was, you know, as we were talking about crypto and have gotten into it heavily in the last few years, mostly because we were debanked and we saw all the things that could be done from TradFi as well as sort of, you know, again, if there was a CBDC they just shut you off because they don't like your political views if and when someone's in power.

00:41:29.000 So I could see China totally manipulating that. 1.00

00:41:32.000 And I imagine they have to get around whether it's SWIFT system or all of these other things.

00:41:37.000 That's right.

00:41:37.000 So they're trying to create a non-dollar system of clearance and settlement.

00:41:43.000 It's called CI both settlement and clearance.

00:41:51.000 And little by little they've gotten, you know, scores of countries to subscribe to it.

00:41:58.000 And what they're trying to do is very simple.

00:42:00.000 They're trying to sanctions prove themselves.

00:42:03.000 Now, one of the areas that's been refreshing and surprising, at least for the US, is stablecoins.

00:42:11.000 Yeah.

00:42:12.000 So, I mean, if you think about it, what stablecoins do is they export the dollar in places where banks are either weak or sanctions limit access.

00:42:24.000 So, like if you're in Nigeria or, you know, even Venezuela, people use stablecoins as a functional dollar substitute.

00:42:34.000 Especially in those inflationary countries where, you know, you get your paycheck and by the time you cash it, it's worth half.

00:42:40.000 Exactly.

00:42:41.000 And so, and this is great for the US because it reinforces global dollar demand in everyday transactions.

00:42:48.000 And the good news for the US Treasury market is that, you know, as we know, for every stablecoin, you have to have a liquid asset.

00:42:57.000 Correct.

00:42:58.000 So, issuers have to hold super high quality assets like US Treasury.

00:43:03.000 And so in the short term, it certainly benefits US Treasury purchases.

00:43:11.000 Yeah, well, especially as China's stepping away from that, trying not to have that, right? 0.97

00:43:15.000 They're walking away.

00:43:16.000 I mean, I could see a lot of the stablecoins I know we're working on when with USD one right now, and it backed 100% by US Treasuries, they're going to actually be the backstop to fill the gaps of these countries who are traditional buyers of US Treasuries that allowed us to borrow and do all these things, some good, some bad.

00:43:32.000 Oftentimes borrowed money that was then wasted.

00:43:35.000 But we did it anyway.

00:43:37.000 But these are the things that are actually going to preserve dollar hegemony.

00:43:40.000 Because I imagine any rational actor is going to look to a US Treasury backed stablecoin far more affectionately than they would something that China would likely manipulate for whatever ends and could disappear in seconds.

00:43:54.000 Absolutely.

00:43:57.000 The only pause I would have, I want stablecoins to proliferate.

00:44:01.000 So it should be more than just one or two.

00:44:05.000 I'm glad to see the work that you guys are doing.

00:44:09.000 It can't just be Tether and USDC.

00:44:11.000 Because if you have that concentration risk, we have just a few private issuers that are minting tokens and holding Treasury.

00:44:18.000 that could be dangerous.

00:44:19.000 But if there are many of them, I think that's great.

00:44:22.000 Yeah.

00:44:23.000 How do you think, you know, crypto factors into, you know, the rest of this outside of, outside of just the kind of the China cause?

00:44:31.000 Well, there's crypto is a lot to a lot of different people.

00:44:37.000 I mean, I guess that's strict.

00:44:39.000 That's a pretty broad one, I guess.

00:44:41.000 Yeah, it's pretty broad, right?

00:44:42.000 So let's take stablecoins off the table.

00:44:44.000 But if you look at Ethereum, I mean, it continues to dominate and DeFi and real world asset tokenization.

00:44:52.000 A lot of money has gone into Ethereum in the last, you know, six, seven months.

00:44:58.000 Bitcoin, as everyone knows, it's basically digital gold and it's, you know, capped at 21 million coins.

00:45:07.000 It continues to rise.

00:45:10.000 It's a, to your point earlier about it, you know, inflation hedges.

00:45:14.000 It's a great inflation hedge.

00:45:16.000 It's, you know, great for wealth preservation.

00:45:20.000 I think, you know, Bitcoin is funny though in the sense that it's not just a token that you own.

00:45:25.000 It's kind of an ethos, right?

00:45:27.000 It's more than just money.

00:45:30.000 You know, there's this hodal culture of people that see it as financial freedom away from all government, sort of libertarian leaning folks.

00:45:40.000 Yeah.

00:45:40.000 Yeah, no.

00:45:41.000 And I get that, by the way.

00:45:42.000 I mean, again, it wasn't like we were early adapters or believers.

00:45:46.000 We were, you know, hard asset real estate guys.

00:45:48.000 It's just really, it's an old business.

00:45:50.000 It's bricks and mortar.

00:45:52.000 It's what we did.

00:45:53.000 And, you know, we never really had a problem.

00:45:56.000 And then all of a sudden, things got political and we got, you know, letters from, you know, 150 banks and we'd lost, you know, thousands of accounts overnight and all this stuff.

00:46:04.000 It was like, how do you make payroll?

00:46:06.000 You know, purely from, you know, a political standpoint, not that, you know, our balance sheet affected, you know, changed anything.

00:46:11.000 There was nothing different than just all of a sudden they didn't like us.

00:46:14.000 And so when you could turn.

00:46:17.000 off that traditional conventional banking system so quickly, that was pretty scary.

00:46:21.000 And what we came to realize, and perhaps we should have known it, but I guess when you're sort of the beneficiary of the upper tier of the Ponzi scheme that is traditional finance these days, It's just easy.

00:46:33.000 You pick up the call, the phone, you call the banker, you get a loan.

00:46:36.000 It's pretty quick.

00:46:38.000 It's not always the most efficient.

00:46:40.000 I think a lot of that will be handled by blockchain technology when you get rid of title insurance and these kinds of things because it's all on the chain.

00:46:47.000 That'll make it easier.

00:46:48.000 But it was like overnight, we realized the banking system was actually broken.

00:46:53.000 There was no democracy to it.

00:46:54.000 If you're some woke activist and you can check the whatever 30 boxes off, you get a loan, even if you can't really pay it back.

00:47:01.000 If you were a guy that bought magashwag in the last couple months, yep, you're on a watch list.

00:47:06.000 You're potentially a terrorist, according to the FBI.

00:47:09.000 And things change.

00:47:10.000 And we just never realized that.

00:47:11.000 Once we realized that, wow, if they can do it to us, they can do it to anyone.

00:47:17.000 And more importantly, if they will do it to us, they will do it to anyone.

00:47:20.000 And so we just said, how do we shake this up a little bit?

00:47:22.000 And obviously, crypto was an answer to that.

00:47:25.000 So we've spent the last really two years developing basically an alternative to the conventional financing systems to make it fair for everyone.

00:47:34.000 Well, you may recall two or three years ago, PayPal issued a statement saying that for those that they deem to be spreading misinformation.

00:47:45.000 Spreading misinformation.

00:47:46.000 Yeah, they would they would get debanked.

00:47:48.000 But think about it like this, right?

00:47:50.000 What if in a future dystopian society, for the benefit of the climate, you can only pump gas using your digital dollar token twice a month or in the interest of equity, you're eating too much steak.

00:48:06.000 Poor people are eating hamburgers.

00:48:08.000 So you can't buy.

00:48:09.000 You can see how this can become 100%.

00:48:13.000 And I imagine, you know, they did that.

00:48:15.000 I mean, I was talking to Palmer Lucky, who, you know, founded Oculus and at 18 sold it to like, you know, Meta, then Facebook for like, you know, billions of dollars.

00:48:25.000 And he's doing, you know, a bunch of stuff in the drone space with Andrew and everything like that.

00:48:31.000 Just, you know, a genius guy.

00:48:32.000 And this is like 2015, 2016 when I got to know him.

00:48:35.000 And he was talking about sort of the dangers of AI.

00:48:39.000 and how that would be adapted to your point to sort of a social credit scoring system.

00:48:43.000 Whereas any other time in history, if you were dissatisfied with your leadership, you know, people got together in a room and they started talking and you could create sort of a revolution but with ai uh cameras on every corner you know the second there's even a spark of unrest we're just gonna take that guy we're gonna pull him off the chessboard it's no longer an issue you can never actually achieve the critical mass now uh to to achieve that revolution uh which is really kind of scary and i imagine that's probably what's going on in china with with

00:49:13.000 their systems and you know the advents of ai and uh you know the weaponization against it against their people yeah i'm very concerned aboutned that they've open sourced DeepSeq.

00:49:32.000 And just like they've done, there's a proxy for what they've done in every single industry and what they've done in AI.

00:49:39.000 So in almost every industry, let's take, think of any metal in the world.

00:49:45.000 What they do is they subsidize or electric vehicles, they subsidize and lower the price to such a degree that normal companies can't compete.

00:49:54.000 And so they go broke.

00:49:55.000 And then like China owns the monopoly of rare earths or whatnot.

00:49:59.000 If you look at all of our AI models, I think Llama 4 was the last version that was open source.

00:50:06.000 Everything else is closed.

00:50:08.000 And of course, I understand you want to pay your 20 bucks a month or whatnot for chat GPT.

00:50:12.000 You got to make money, right?

00:50:13.000 Yeah.

00:50:13.000 But what if China decides, hey, we're going to give DeepSeek away for free to governments around the world?

00:50:19.000 Oh, and by the way, you're going to need a data center with that.

00:50:23.000 So we'll build the data center and subsidize it.

00:50:25.000 Oh, and by the way, your smart city needs to have DeepSeek AI.

00:50:30.000 And after a while, right, once you're hooked, how do you get out of it?

00:50:34.000 Yeah.

00:50:35.000 And more importantly, once you're in that much, I mean, you hear about these people, they're marrying their AI chat bot.

00:50:42.000 And you're like, wait, what?

00:50:43.000 It's like, well, it relates to me better than any man I've ever met.

00:50:46.000 I'm like, you know, but I mean, think of the information, you know, that's been collected, right?

00:50:52.000 I mean, that was the big scare even a couple years ago as it related to TikTok.

00:50:56.000 Like, are they spying on your kids? 0.98

00:50:57.000 And then they take something, you know, a stupid 15-year-old said or did online and weaponize it against them, say when they run for Congress in 25 years. 0.99

00:51:06.000 I mean, this threat makes, you know, the notion of that seem like nothing. 0.99

00:51:13.000 I mean, you know, having access to literally everything in your life, every thought you've ever had.

00:51:17.000 I mean, what better way to manipulate someone to your liking?

00:51:22.000 And I guess that's the big threat of AI is like we may not not even realize we're getting manipulated.

00:51:26.000 When you turn on CNN and then you go to the supermarket, you say, oh, inflation's great under Joe Biden.

00:51:31.000 You see the prices, you're like, okay, that's nonsense.

00:51:34.000 You know, a technical model that knows how you think and is able to manipulate that, I mean, they could manipulate you, you'd never even know it.

00:51:40.000 You know, it's funny, but the AI requires training on vast amounts of data.

00:51:50.000 Almost all the language models have trained up to this point on something known as common crawl.

00:51:56.000 Common crawl is a foundation.

00:51:58.000 And what it does is it scrapes the internet of everything, right?

00:52:02.000 And it just it sits in petabytes and petabytes of data unstructured is sitting in these servers.

00:52:10.000 Now, a broad concern from an intelligence and from a national security perspective is that China, for example, floods the zone with new websites that populate common crawl.

00:52:23.000 And then if maybe in the future, if you type will, will, will China take over Taiwan, it'll spit something out like, Oh, China is a peaceful nation.

00:52:31.000 It's it's only seeks to take back what it, you know, and whatever.

00:52:35.000 Well, you see that.

00:52:36.000 I mean, I saw, I read an article, I guess it was last week talking about that where even some of the more.

00:52:41.000 popular sort of AI engines, you know, they're almost like 40, 50% weighted on like what Wikipedia says.

00:52:51.000 I'm like, I don't know. 0.97

00:52:52.000 I can read my Wikipedia page and tell you it's total bullshit. 0.98

00:52:54.000 You know what I mean? 0.95

00:52:55.000 But it doesn't matter because that's one of the, you know, maybe that in Google is the two biggest manipulators of, of.

00:53:02.000 I guess they get to be the arbiters of truth.

00:53:04.000 And maybe, you know, I'm sure you can find the real truth on Google, but you're not going to scroll down to page 4,763 to be able to see that article.

00:53:13.000 And so that whole notion in and of itself is scary.

00:53:15.000 Where are they getting the information from?

00:53:17.000 How is it weighted to your point about flooding the zone.

00:53:20.000 And we face a truth deficit.

00:53:23.000 And I think I have to ask myself, what is truth today?

00:53:28.000 And as we've seen from what Tulsi Gabbard is uncovering, I think five, six years ago, people believed that there was actual Russian collusion in the administration.

00:53:45.000 I had to do fifty hours of congressional testimony on that one.

00:53:48.000 So yes, I took that one rather personally.

00:53:52.000 And now people are saying, hey, wait a second, maybe this isn't true.

00:53:57.000 I'm not talking about well-informed people who read the news.

00:54:01.000 But even they were manipulated because they read the Wall Street Journal and they read the New York Times and they were like, oh, there's got to be.

00:54:07.000 By the way, I was guilty of it myself and I was a target.

00:54:10.000 You read, It was like, well, the FBI says it.

00:54:14.000 So there must have been something.

00:54:15.000 Someone showed up to one of my speeches or a clickline or whatever.

00:54:19.000 Maybe they were a Russian asset.

00:54:21.000 I literally wanted to give the people that were trying to take down myself, my father, my family.

00:54:28.000 democracy, I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt.

00:54:30.000 And now I realize like that was actually totally ill-founded.

00:54:33.000 Like they didn't deserve even that notion.

00:54:35.000 But it's hard to unprogram yourself from thinking like, hey hey, these institutions are functioning for Americans and they're doing the right thing when, you know, reality is they've been very corrupted for a very long time.

00:54:46.000 Yeah, I think many Americans had no idea.

00:54:50.000 And, you know, where we are today is that we face a trust deficit and, you know, one of the things that I, that I can say that's magnificent about the current and past Trump administrations is transparency in the sense that he's giving a press release like every thirty minutes or a press statement or a press release or, you know, giving speeches.

00:55:15.000 Yeah.

00:55:15.000 Biden maybe gave what three press conferences?

00:55:19.000 Yeah, nobody knew.

00:55:21.000 Teleprompted with scripts, with the answer, with the questions and who to call on.

00:55:26.000 So yeah, it's a little different.

00:55:28.000 My father will never get credit for that one, but you're 100% right.

00:55:31.000 At least he's willing to have those conversations and people can make up their own minds.

00:55:35.000 Yeah, including with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the first administration and opening the kimono up to the American people.

00:55:44.000 So, Eric, you mentioned earlier about sort of the Chinese, I don't want to say spy cranes, but the potential for them to shut down our ports and infrastructure, gather our data, whatever it be through even our port system. 0.98

00:55:57.000 What are the other examples of potential Chinese sort of espionage inside our own borders?

00:56:03.000 For example, my father said that he's cracking down on shell companies and LLCs tied to China, buying up real estate and farmland, especially around military bases.

00:56:12.000 How much of our economic agenda is also really a national security agenda at this point?

00:56:20.000 Well, I mean, you touched on one of the points, which is buying farmland next to US military bases.

00:56:27.000 Yeah.

00:56:28.000 Why?

00:56:29.000 Yeah, well, especially when you watch, you know, a Ukrainian truck inside of Russia with, you know, hundreds of drones in it pop up near a Russian base and take out, you know, a third of their air force in about an hour.

00:56:41.000 I mean, it's it's genius actually.

00:56:44.000 I mean, I you know, I get it, but do we do we believe China's not doing the exact same thing right now?

00:56:49.000 Of course they are.

00:56:51.000 Look, if Chinese individuals were buying luxury apartments in Manhattan, I would be less concerned. 0.99

00:56:58.000 But when you're buying tens of thousands of farmland conveniently located next to US military bases, well, there's probably a reason for that.

00:57:06.000 I would add to that list running influence operations on US campus and recruiting scientists.

00:57:17.000 We have 300,000 Chinese students studying in the United States every year.

00:57:22.000 And according to the Chinese own national security law, they are obliged to share any information that the Chinese government wants them to with the CCP.

00:57:34.000 This isn't hyperbola.

00:57:36.000 And perhaps most of these students are, you know, they're just here to get to go to college, right?

00:57:43.000 They don't necessarily care.

00:57:45.000 But if they're in a sensitive area, if they're studying some unique aspect of hypersonic missiles at MIT, well, maybe they get a call from a United Front, a Chinese spy network saying, hey, we need this.

00:58:00.000 Otherwise, there will be consequences for your family or you.

00:58:05.000 And so they're put, even if they don't want to be, they're put in a very compromising position.

00:58:12.000 So there's that.

00:58:14.000 I would say, TikTok, using TikTok and social media to harvest data and amplify division in our country, that's a huge issue.

00:58:26.000 And don't think that TikTok's algorithms aren't Sophisticated enough to even look at your pupil dilation or facial movements to send videos that elicit the same response when you swipe.

00:58:40.000 And so after months of using it, they have like an imprint of who you are as a person.

00:58:46.000 And they're harvesting all that in Beijing.

00:58:49.000 If it were, can you solve some of that with what they're talking about now, you know, having, you know, a US company control the servers and, you know, at least theoretically control the backdoors to make sure that doesn't happen?

00:59:01.000 Because that that does seem like a solution, right?

00:59:03.000 Because it's a hard one, right?

00:59:05.000 You want to protect Americans.

00:59:06.000 You also want to be pro-free speech.

00:59:08.000 and you don't want to be the guy trying to ban things and whatever it may be.

00:59:11.000 It's kind of conflicting values.

00:59:14.000 Well, take the name China out of it.

00:59:16.000 What if it were called North Korea Talk instead of TikTok?

00:59:21.000 Would we say the same thing?

00:59:22.000 Would we say, wait, why would Cuba or North Korea or Iran have a social media app in the United States?

00:59:31.000 You'd scratch your head and go, this is terrible.

00:59:33.000 We can't allow that.

00:59:34.000 But somehow we think it's okay because China's more like, benign.

00:59:38.000 But I would argue that they're more dangerous than North Korea is. 0.99

00:59:42.000 But to answer your question, I don't know enough.

00:59:46.000 enough on the technical side to be able to answer if that's enough.

00:59:51.000 But I think what we would like to see is whoever owns TikTok in the US should also have access to the algorithm that understands how they're doing the harvesting.

01:00:04.000 And we also need to get And I think that's something, you know, again, just from my time in the transition, you know, when they were talking about the ban and stuff like that, I think that's some of the stuff that they were working on doing just to protect that because you do have to protect your kids from themselves.

01:00:16.000 I mean, I I I don't know how old you are, but at my age, I sort of thank God every morning that we didn't have cell phones in our pockets when we were, when I was, in my late teenage and early twenty because that would have really worked poorly for me.

01:00:29.000 Well, I deal with it every day.

01:00:31.000 I've got, you know, three teenagers and my wife and I instituted a policy where you can only use your cell phone from, you know, an hour a day and it's within sight of the family.

01:00:46.000 So it's a, it's a I think every parent in America that has kids is dealing with this.

01:00:53.000 Yeah.

01:00:53.000 Oh, I trust me.

01:00:54.000 I have, I have five young kids and not only are they more adept on these systems than me, you know, they definitely spent a lot more time than I would have ever imagined on there, as much as I want to try to limit that.

01:01:07.000 Eric, you know, as we wrap up, just maybe reflect on sort of this intersection that you've had between military diplomacy and finance, because I mean, it seems like so many of the people in this world that are making the decisions on these don't have that same sort of, And so the military guy makes a decision purely based on military, but may not know anything about finance or diplomacy, and vice versa.

01:01:34.000 What's your level of optimism for the future on whether it's my father's mission for an American revival or in general?

01:01:44.000 I am very long on the American ideal and the American dream.

01:01:52.000 We are a country that attracts the best people in the world.

01:01:56.000 They want to come here.

01:01:58.000 They want to build things.

01:02:00.000 And we've given them the freedom, the capital through the VC community and the opportunities to be able to do it.

01:02:09.000 I think a lot of the mistakes we've made in the past are self inflicted.

01:02:14.000 If you look, look, he's not my brand of politics, but Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, said that when China goes to a country, they get a road, and when America shows up, they get a lecture.

01:02:27.000 Moral war. 0.71

01:02:28.000 Yeah.

01:02:29.000 Moral war. 0.71

01:02:30.000 Just saying.

01:02:32.000 I think we need to be very practical in our engagements overseas.

01:02:38.000 People overseas, they want jobs.

01:02:40.000 They want American businesses to show up.

01:02:43.000 They want that notion of shared prosperity.

01:02:47.000 And if we just showed up, we would win, because people like dealing with the United States.

01:02:55.000 Yeah.

01:02:56.000 Eric, where can our viewers find you?

01:02:59.000 Are you on, you know, X or any of the platforms so they can follow along?

01:03:03.000 No, no, I'm on, let's see, I'm on LinkedIn.

01:03:08.000 It's just me as a guy, right?

01:03:12.000 I don't have a, I don't have an X handle, although I've been told I should get one.

01:03:17.000 Hey, you know, by the way, if you haven't started now, maybe you're actually probably much better off because the amount of time I spend on this stuff, you know, just basically talking shit the whole time is, uh, you know, I don't know.

01:03:28.000 It's, it's not for everyone.

01:03:30.000 So if you've managed to avoid it, maybe that's, maybe that's probably a positive.

01:03:33.000 Probably better, better for my sanity, I suspect.

01:03:37.000 But yeah, you can also, you know, our Mari Libram website, you can find me.

01:03:42.000 But very, very glad to join your podcast and thanks.

01:03:48.000 Thank you very much, Eric.

01:03:49.000 I really appreciate it.

01:03:50.000 That was awesome.

01:03:51.000 Guys, thank you so much for tuning in.

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Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - August 28, 2025

Mare Liberum: The Next Chapter in Protecting Our Sovereignty, Interview with Erik Bethel | Triggered Ep.271

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