Eric Bethel exposes China's strategic threats, alleging CCP infiltration of the World Bank via predatory loans and detailing a naval buildup of 400 capital ships targeting U.S. carriers with DF-26 missiles. He warns of espionage through 300,000 annual Chinese students bound by national security laws to share data on hypersonic research, while TikTok's biometric harvesting poses further risks. Bethel contrasts the Trump administration's transparency with Biden's opacity, advocating for asymmetric drone defenses and practical engagement over lectures to secure American sovereignty against Beijing's economic and technological encroachment. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Digital Freedom for Anyone00:02:51
Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.
Today, we're welcoming a first time guest, Eric Bethel.
He's gotten some attention for a couple of great interviews that he's done recently, so we decided to have him on and do a deep dive on all things China and military technology.
Eric actually represented the US 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.
His family's story actually starts in Cuba.
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.
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Well, guys, joining me now, former U.S. Director of the World Bank and partner at the Mara Librum Fund, Eric Bethel.
Eric, great to have you here.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Good afternoon to you.
Well, welcome to the program.
It's always great to have a first time guest and someone with your story.
Uh, can you maybe start with just a brief introduction of yourself to the audience?
Naval Warfare and Academies00:06:38
You have a really sort of interesting background in naval warfare.
You represented the United States at the World Bank, uh, in my father's first term.
You've also been a strong voice on taking on China.
Uh, you know, let's start with that 30,000 foot view of your story.
Sure.
Well, I'll begin chronologically.
So, I'm currently a partner at Mari Libram.
We're a venture capital fund, and we invest at the intersection of where technology meets maritime strategy and national security.
And a lot of our focus is on national defense technologies that directly strengthen our security in the Indo Pacific, certainly, but elsewhere.
So, we've invested in companies like Ceronic that makes unmanned surface vessels.
Windward, which is a maritime AI company, Regent, which is a sea glider technology, Epirus, they make counter drones.
And so I sort of came back to my naval roots.
I'm a Naval Academy graduate and I serve on the board of the Naval War College Foundation.
Also, I have an MBA from Wharton, by the way.
Oh, very nice.
So we share that in common.
Well, I just went undergrad, but it's close enough.
Same classes.
But prior to this, as you mentioned, I did serve as the U.S. director at the World Bank, confirmed 100 to 0 by the Senate.
And so I sort of got a front row on how China's infiltrating multilateral organizations, World Bank, U.N., et cetera.
And we can do a double click on that if you like.
Yeah, we'll definitely circle back to that because that's sort of fascinating and a big part of what we got to really be focused on.
I think we've been asleep at the wheel for far too long on the issue.
Far too long.
And then after the World Bank, I was nominated to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Panama.
I cleared committee, but the floor vote never happened due to the 2020 election.
And so, Panama, of course, as we now know, is critical, not just for the canal, but for broader U.S. influence in the region.
Before that, I was a naval officer, and I grew up in Miami, the son of a career State Department.
A foreign service officer.
And my mom is Cuban.
And, you know, her family fled Cuba due to, you know, under Castro due to repression.
My grandfather was under house arrest.
And I grew up in Miami and across Latin America, speaking Spanish more than English, believe it or not.
Wow.
I imagine they would agree with me that if it didn't work in Cuba, it's not going to work in the United States now.
Or Venezuela, or pick your socialist state.
Yeah, that's always the one that shocks me the people that are always advocating for communism, socialist dictatorships, et cetera, around the world.
They never seem to be people who actually lived under those ideologies.
They only talk about it in glorified terms from an academic standpoint.
100%.
And you may have noticed that in the recent presidential election, the Latin community, especially in Miami, many of whom have fled.
Repressive regimes overwhelmingly voted Republican and for your dad.
So, you know, let's talk a little bit.
You know, I know you went to the Naval Academy.
Actually, I went to the Hill School.
And so we were, you know, for boarding school.
And so we were a big feeder school to the Academy.
I think like 15, 20% of my graduating class went to Navy.
A bunch went to West Point as well.
But I know they just wrapped up Plebe summer in August.
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?
I think about that.
To give you a thoughtful answer, I think that the clearest reason for my desire to go was a sense of purpose.
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.
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.
And it was really out of just being grateful to my country and the sense of mission that the Naval Academy had, which is what made it so poignant for me.
As far as the lessons learned and things I got out of it, well, aside from that overarching sense of purpose, discipline, hardship, dealing with adversity, I think were things that you may get at some colleges, but not.
It's not universal.
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.
So you take it very seriously.
What do you think, your opinion today, the state of the academy's military leadership versus even a few years ago?
I know from my buddies that I literally lived with for five years in high school that went there.
It feels like a lot's changed in the last few years when you see sort of the onset of woke policies and DEI there.
What do you think happened there?
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?
I think we need to operate from a first principle standpoint, which is what are our academies there to do?
And what is the military there to do?
Our military is explicitly, it exists to fight and win wars.
And so you need to train people at the academies to do just that.
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.
So, if we get back to first principles, I think we're doing just fine.
And I think we're on the right track to doing that.
World Bank Surveillance Scandal00:02:57
So, you know, I guess, you know, talking about sort of enemies, I guess you were the U.S. director at the World Bank during my father's first administration.
Quite literally infiltrated it.
Can you break that down for us?
You know, how did a global institution designed to help, you know, developing countries end up basically serving the, you know, the Chinese Communist Party's interests?
And what did you see from the inside there?
Yeah, so first of all, let's understand what the World Bank is.
It's an institution that the United States created to rebuild Europe after World War II.
Over time, its mission has amplified.
But I think, look, I think it's an institution with a noble goal, right?
Ostensibly, the stated mission of the World Bank is to end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity.
I mean, there are hundreds of millions of people that are living on $2.15 a day.
I think that's the.
The international poverty line.
Now, when it comes to China, and so the mission is good, and there are noble people working to advance that mission.
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 formerly considered for graduation.
So the way it works is if you're a very, very poor country, you get free money in the form of grants.
You cross a threshold and then you get into the loan program, and they're super cheap loans.
These are like the cheapest loans you'll ever get.
And then you graduate, right?
And in 2016, China's GDP per capita was high enough where they could probably graduate.
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.
But as of, I think, June of last year, China's Loans from the World Bank were averaging like $950 million per year.
And what is that going towards, or do we even know?
It's funny you should mention that.
One of the things that I worked on to at least uncover was a loan that was made in sort of the 2016, 2017 timeframe, which was a Xinjiang project.
Xinjiang is a province in Western China where you have a lot of ethnic minorities.
They're not Han Chinese.
And the loan was to support five vocational colleges to update the vocational criteria and curriculum and improve opportunities for minority students.
China Controls Global Ports00:11:16
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.
And so we had to ask ourselves all those things you need at a university in China.
Yeah, exactly.
So it was absolutely crazy, and it was swept under the rug.
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.
How dare you say it came from the lab that studies the exact virus in question at the exact place of ground zero?
How dare you?
You're not a virologist.
It's like, well, you're just not retarded.
It's not that hard.
It's so obvious.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it obviously came from Wuhan.
Whether or not it was leaked intentionally, I don't know.
But what China did do was they did allow outbound flights.
And what's super interesting is that there was a huge spike in deaths in northern Italy, of all places.
And wouldn't you know that there are like 7,000 or something, you can probably Google it, thousands of textile companies owned in northern Italy, like places like Prato, by Wuhan businessmen.
So, China was deliberately allowing outbound flights.
They were like, hey, we're not going to be the only people suffering from this virus.
No, that part was, you know, I'm with you.
I mean, I don't know how to prove the leak.
It wouldn't surprise me.
It seemed like it'd be a good way.
If they did it, it seemed like, hey, this is a way to destabilize the world, put Trump in an awkward spot prior to an election, these kinds of things.
So, you know, I'm not saying I can prove it.
It wouldn't surprise me.
And based on sort of their actions throughout the world, I guess, you know, it's probably more plausible than not.
But yeah, we definitely know. that they did nothing to stop the spread when they knew they had this thing going on.
They didn't stop those outbound flights.
They wouldn't let stuff coming in, uh, 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 gonna have to suffer.
Well, what's worse also is that they had this information operation saying that it actually came from Fort Detrick in the United States and that we were responsible for it.
There was like a thread on that.
And then they had this vaccine diplomacy project, which was absolutely awful, where they were telling countries to use their vaccine, not ours, withholding vaccines from countries like.
Honduras, that still at the time recognized Taiwan and not China.
It was terrible.
Yeah.
You know, what else did you see from the World Bank standpoint?
Obviously, you know, that's a pretty shady loan.
And I'm sure, you know, 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.
We get our accolades.
They'll treat us great when we go over there.
But are they actually accomplishing the purpose?
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.
I imagine their education system is probably far better, certainly, than our public education system.
And otherwise?
Well, consider this.
When you get a World Bank loan, you're classified as a developing country.
If you're a developing country, you get favorable treatment at all of these international organizations like the WTO and so forth.
So it's in their best interest to keep getting loans from the World Bank.
And if you think that money is fungible, and it is, you get super, super cheap loans from the World Bank, like $900 million, a billion a year.
And then you can then take those loans and loan them to, say, Kenya or Uganda at so far plus 700 basis points.
And if the Ugandans can't pay you back, well, you own them, right?
You take their telecom operations or whatnot.
But the other thing I noticed was procurement contracts.
So, like when the World Bank works with a country to rebuild a road or a bridge or a hospital, right?
The procurement business, which is in the tens of billions of dollars a year, at the time I was there, China was winning close to 40% of all the contracts, and the US was winning like 1%.
Today it's changed.
China's down to 30%, but 30% of the contracts while getting money.
While getting favorable trade treatment at the UN, I mean, it's ridiculous.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How do we actually compete if they get that status and they get those loans for pennies on the dollar and we're paying 6%, whatever it may be?
It doesn't seem like a level playing field.
And we're funding it.
Our taxpayers are funding it.
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?
Well, so we own a certain percent and we're on the hook for a certain percent of it.
And we're still the largest shareholder of the World Bank.
Mm hmm.
But the way the loan program works is the World Bank issues bonds globally.
And those bonds are like the cheapest bonds you'll ever buy.
So it's a AAA rated credit.
And you say to yourself, well, how can you be a AAA rated credit when your loan portfolio goes to Tajikistan and.
Because it's fully backstopped by the U.S. government.
Well, at the end of the day, we're the backstop.
I suspect that if the poop ever hit the fan, I don't know that other countries would step in for their share.
Some would.
But not all would.
So at the end of the day, it's really the faith and credit of the U.S. Treasury that balances the checkbook.
And the irony of that is watching some of the moves that China's making to make the Yuan sort of the world's currency.
You see the stuff going on as it relates to the attack on the petrodollar and all of these things.
So again, it's just one of those things, 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.
Well, I did.
And You know, by the time I left, I think there was a growing awareness, both inside of the U.S. government and also with our partners and allies at the World Bank, that this was an issue.
Perhaps that was reversed in the four years of the Biden administration.
I'm not sure.
But, you know, China remained a square 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.
Focused on maritime technology and national security.
So, I guess the phrase Mara Libram 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.
What's the biggest naval or maritime tech gap that we have right now?
You see that the Russians are testing hypersonic missiles.
It seems like everyone's progressed pretty well in that.
And I don't know that we've necessarily caught up.
What's that trajectory look like moving forward?
We're seeing the single largest military buildup since World War II.
And it's by and large one sided.
But because of China, look, as of today, the PLA Navy has something like 400 capital ships and then another, say, 350 support vessels.
It's growing, it's already the largest Navy in terms of warships.
And because of that military buildup, the Japanese are.
Ramping up their defense budget.
The Filipinos are.
I mean, there's a summit in Korea today with the president.
And so everybody is sort of on pins and needles.
So this is a really big issue for us.
And in terms of shipbuilding power, they just merged their two largest shipbuilders to become the monolithic global 800 pound gorilla.
So, these are big issues.
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.
I mean, we could probably spend the rest of the afternoon talking about this.
Well, what are some of the biggest ones that you see, specifically as it relates to sort of the maritime issues?
I know we don't have the capabilities to build ships anymore.
That's sort of a shame.
I think we're trying to change some of that.
I mean, that's controlled largely by China.
Certainly, South Korea has a pretty significant operation in that department, at least their allies.
But it's, again, one of these 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.
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.
But I mean, where to begin?
And then I'll go through the gaps.
Like a ballpark China's built artificial islands and militarized them throughout what's known as the South China Sea.
Vietnam calls it the East Sea, the Philippines calls it the West Philippine Sea, but it's in that area.
Through Belt and Road, China has secured long term leases in places like Sri Lanka.
In Greece, through Piraeus, and even in Djibouti.
And if you look at the combined data of the ports owned and operated by Hong Kong and China, Hutchinson itself owns 50, 52 ports.
China Merchants owns around 38.
Costco owns around another 34, 38.
So, all in, you're talking about close to 100 ports that are around the world that are controlled by China.
The Chinese also have a technology, a software called Loge Inc., sometimes called Log Inc.
It's port software, and you've got scores of ports around the world using it.
Yeah.
ZPMC makes the cranes that go in ports, and they have an 80% global market share, and I think it's like 70% in the US.
And the concern is do they have back doors, right?
If they wanted to basically stop our ports' infrastructure from functioning, what do you do?
Urgent Defense Department Action00:05:08
Now, when it comes to the military itself, I don't think that we can compete in any effective timeframe through the conventional shipbuilding method.
And even if we did, 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.
The range of one Chinese DF 26 or 21 missile is like 2,000 miles.
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.
So, what do we do?
I think what we need to start thinking about is how can we bridge the gap asymmetrically?
Meaning, can we put thousands upon thousands of autonomous drone boats in the water?
Like Ceronic, for example.
It's a company we invested in.
So the drone boat could be kinetic, right?
You can put an explosive payload on it and send it on one way missions.
Or it could be a decoy.
Hey, I'm a cruise ship.
Hey, I'm a freighter.
Or you can use it for information and collection, harvesting information.
Or Regent, that makes a sea glider that flies below radar and above sonar.
And it's essentially Invisible.
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.
It's very clear from Ukraine that the days of soldiers jumping out of helicopters with machine guns getting cut down by drones and like.
100%.
It seems like a $300 drone now can take out a $15 million tank in about three seconds.
And by the way, the same goes with planes.
Friends that are F 35 pilots are like, hey, we'd last about 15 seconds in Ukrainian airspace if they turned on.
All the stuff.
And so it's just the changes there, but you've never really thought about it as much on the ocean, right?
And you're right.
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.
And so, you know, why not change on the ocean side as well?
And it seems like you could do that in a much more cost effective manner than, you know, I don't know how much a nuclear aircraft carrier costs, but I imagine it's rather significant.
Yes.
Probably not as much as a drone boat.
Just saying.
You can build tens of millions of drone boats for the cost of an aircraft carrier.
Yes.
Yeah.
So, how is that being adapted by the US government?
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, and I get it, and they love planes because of that.
But it's sort of hard to sometimes step back.
And be a fighter pilot and say, no, no, we actually got to focus on stuff that's not planes because it's actually more cost effective.
It's better.
You know, you sort of love what you know, right?
When you're a hammer, everything is a nail.
How do you get the government to adapt those kind of ideas?
Because again, I think you could stretch that dollar along a much longer way.
Yeah, look, the procurement cycle, I think, is broken.
And I think almost everybody in the Pentagon will agree to it.
The question is, how do you fix it?
So, the desired end state of any company is to get to what's known as a program of record.
That means that the military is buying your product and it'll buy your product for a period of time, like an F 35 or a tank or whatnot.
The problem is to get to a program of record, sometimes it takes years and years and years.
There's the testing and then it's retesting.
And does it fit the need?
And is there a champion in the department?
And so, because it takes so long, a lot of these Silicon Valley startups can't rely on the vicissitudes of the government procurement cycle, and they don't make it.
It's called the valley of death.
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.
But something has to happen urgently.
In the Defense Department, and they need to address this.
Yeah, I mean, that seems like, you know, across the board.
I mean, I'd say, you know, to your comments on the World Bank, I mean, all of these things, we have to look at the world in a very different way now, not the sound bites, not what's been put out there in the media, but actually with common sense.
And, you know, that often takes a lot of time to set in because I guess people get used to systems.
They sort of function well within those systems.
They're part of that bureaucracy.
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.
There's a lot of inertia.
Creating a Non-Dollar System00:15:05
Right.
If you work as a civilian in the Pentagon and you've been there for a half dozen years, switching to a new platform and taking a bet and using some creativity doesn't necessarily win you any brownie points.
But sticking to the same old, same old does.
So there's like a lot of momentum and inertia.
And they're like, well, we've always done things this way.
We may as well continue.
So maybe to switch topics a little bit, let's talk about Latin America.
Your family had mentioned it's rooted in Cuba.
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.
How critical is our influence in Latin America, whether it be, you know, just respect to American sovereignty, narco-terrorism, or just even economic investment?
Well, as we speak, we've got warships off the coast of Venezuela.
And I was reading Twitter today, which let's see if I can find it.
Maduro, while speaking at the first pedagogical conference of 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.
He said he communicated with Xi through that new phone by satellite.
So he was quick to say to the US, well, at least I have a friend in China.
Yeah.
Well, that historically hasn't worked out.
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 middle of nowhere, awesome countries, but out of the cities, and you actually see all the attempts that China made where it's like, they're going to bring jobs and they're going to do this and create infrastructure.
The jobs they bring are for Chinese nationals that they then send to those countries.
So, no jobs created for the locals.
The infrastructure they create crumbles after a few years.
So, probably won't work out well for them in the long term, but I imagine they'll manipulate it really effectively in the short term.
In the short term, they are definitely doing that.
Venezuela owes between like three and $10 zillion to China, and they're in the hawk.
They can't get out of it.
I think what we're doing in Venezuela and putting a price on Maduro's head for being a narco trafficker.
Is great and it signals to the other, uh, hard left leaning countries in the region, Cuba, uh, you know, to some degree, Colombia and Bolivia and others.
Hey, uh, the U.S. means business, so I think that's great.
Um, I think that we're there are growing numbers of allies, uh, in the region.
There's still places where, uh, there's we need a lot of work, places like Brazil, for example.
Yeah, it's pretty scary where we need a We need to exert a lot more leadership because Lula is squarely in the arms of the BRIC community and he's no friend of the United States.
And we have to manage that, obviously, delicately and thoughtfully, but we have to exert leadership in the region.
Yeah.
I mean, the big one, obviously, is just the narco terrorism stuff.
I mean, we referenced it a little bit.
There's clearly an effort to dismantle the cartels and the narco traffickers, but.
How do you see that actually playing out?
What does that take to get done effectively?
Well, let's begin with.
I mean, all roads to some degree lead to China.
Since 2012 or so, if I have my stats right, you have more than 400,000 people that have died from fentanyl overdoses.
That's about as much death as the US military suffered during World War II.
Yeah, I read the stat.
It was 100,000 a year, which is basically two Vietnams.
It's crazy.
Two Vietnamese 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.
It's crazy to me, actually.
This is not acceptable.
And what's worse is it's being done deliberately.
The narco traffickers in Mexico are a part of the issue.
Our porous border historically was a part of the issue.
And then, of course, you've got the malign actors like Venezuela, which is, at the end of the day, a quasi narco state.
Led by Cuba and others at this point.
So let's fix it.
Yeah, I agree.
I guess one of the other things that you sort of talk about, if we go sort of 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.
You've called China sort of a geopolitical weapon.
How is that aspect being used to bypass our financial system?
So if we put sanctions on, they're not effective because they're basically enroting.
Whichever systems we have in place.
And where can America really lead the way in reforming our financial institutions for the better?
Yeah, I think I'll speak to the second part and then I'll address the first.
We don't win by trying to out China China.
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.
So if you buy diapers, you're a good parent, your social credit score goes up and so forth.
So a CBDC for the United States, I think, would be terrible.
Well, and we ruled that out.
I mean, my father said he was never going to do that.
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, you know, someone's in power.
So I could see China totally manipulating that.
And I imagine they have to get around whether it's, you know, the SWIFT system or all of these other things.
That's right.
So they're trying to create a non dollar system of clearance and settlement.
It's called CIPS, C I P S. Uh, and it completely is both settlement and clearance.
Uh, and little by little, they've gotten you know scores of countries to subscribe to it.
Uh, and what they're trying to do is very simple they're trying to sanction proof themselves.
Um, now, one of the areas that's been refreshing and surprising, at least for the US, is stable coins.
Yep.
Um, so I mean, if you think about it, what stable coins do is they export the dollar in places where.
Banks are either weak or sanctions limit access.
So, like if you're in Nigeria or even Venezuela, people use stablecoins as a functional dollar substitute.
Especially in those inflationary countries where you get your paycheck and by the time you cash it, it's worth half.
Exactly.
And this is great for the US because it reinforces global dollar demand in everyday transactions.
And the good news for the US Treasury market.
Is that, you know, as we know, you know, for every stablecoin, you have to have a liquid asset.
Correct.
So the issuers have to hold super high quality assets like US Treasuries.
And so in the short term, it certainly benefits US Treasury purchases.
Yeah, well, especially as China's stepping away from that, trying not to have that, right?
They're walking away.
I mean, I could see a lot of the stablecoins we're working on with USD1 right now, and it's 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, oftentimes borrowed money that was then wasted.
But we did it nonetheless.
But these are the things that are actually going to preserve dollar hegemony 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.
Absolutely.
The only pause I would have, I want stablecoins to proliferate.
So it should be more than just one or two.
I'm glad to see the work that you guys are doing.
It can't just be Tether and USDC, because if you have that concentration risk, we have just a few private issuers that are minting tokens and holding treasuries, that could be dangerous.
But if there are many of them, I think that's great.
Yeah.
How do you think crypto factors into the rest of this outside of just sort of the China cause?
Well, there's crypto is a lot to a lot of different people.
I mean, I guess that's true.
That's a pretty broad one, I guess.
Yeah, it's pretty broad, right?
So let's take stable coins off the table.
But if you look at Ethereum, I mean, it continues to dominate in DeFi and real world asset tokenization.
A lot of money has gone into Ethereum in the last six, seven months.
Bitcoin, as everyone knows, it's basically digital gold.
And it's, you know, At 21 million coins.
It continues to rise.
It's to your point earlier about inflation hedges.
It's a great inflation hedge.
It's great for wealth preservation.
I think Bitcoin is funny, though, in the sense that it's not just a token that you own, it's kind of an ethos, right?
It's more than just money.
There's this hodel culture of people that see it as.
Financial freedom away from all governments, sort of libertarian leaning folks.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, and I get that, by the way.
I mean, again, it wasn't like we were early adapters or believers.
We were hard asset real estate guys.
It's just really, it's an old business, it's bricks and mortar, it's what we did.
And we never really had a problem.
And then all of a sudden, things got political, and we got letters from 150 banks, and we'd lost thousands of accounts overnight, and all this stuff.
And it's like, how do you make payroll?
Purely from A political standpoint, not that our balance sheet affected anything, changed anything.
There was nothing different than just all of a sudden they didn't like us.
And so when you could turn off that traditional conventional banking system so quickly, that was pretty scary.
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.
You pick up the phone, you call the banker, you get a loan.
It's pretty quick.
It's not always the most efficient.
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.
That'll make it easier.
But it was like overnight we realized the banking system was actually broken.
There was no democracy to it.
If you're some woke activist and you can check whatever 30 boxes off, you get a loan even if you can't really pay it back.
If you were a guy that bought MAGA swag in the last couple of months, yep, you're on a watch list.
You're potentially a terrorist, according to the FBI.
And things changed.
And we just never realized that.
Once we realized that, wow.
If they can do it to us, they can do it to anyone.
And more importantly, if they will do it to us, they will do it to anyone.
And so we just said, how do we shake this up a little bit?
And obviously, crypto was an answer to that.
So we've spent the last really two years developing basically an alternative to the conventional financing system to make it fair for everyone.
Well, you may recall two or three years ago, PayPal issued a statement saying that for those that they deemed to be spreading misinformation.
Spreading misinformation, yeah, they would get debanked.
But think about it like this, right?
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.
Poor people are eating hamburgers, so you can't buy it.
You can see how this can become a hundred percent.
Well, and I imagine you know they did that.
I mean, I was talking to uh Palmer Lucky, who you know founded Oculus and 18 sold it to like you know Meta, then Facebook for like you know billions of dollars.
And he's doing a bunch of stuff uh in the drone space with Andrew and everything like that.
Just you know, a genius guy.
And this is like 2015, 2016 when I got to know him, and he was talking about sort of the dangers of AI.
And how that would be adapted to your point to a sort of a social credit scoring system.
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, cameras on every corner, you know, the second there's even a spark of unrest, we're just going to take that guy, we're going to pull him off the chessboard.
It's no longer an issue.
You can never actually achieve the critical mass now to achieve that revolution, which is really kind of scary.
And I imagine that's probably what's going on in China.
With their systems and the advents of AI and the weaponization against it, against their people.
Yeah, I'm very concerned about AI in China for that reason.
But also, I'm even more concerned that they've open sourced DeepSeq.
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.
So, in almost every industry, let's take, think of any metal in the world.
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.
And so they go broke.
And then, like, China owns the monopoly of rare earths or whatnot.
If you look at all of our AI models, I think Llama 4 was the last version that was open sourced.
Everything else is closed.
And of course, I understand you want to pay your 20 bucks a month or whatnot for ChatGPT, you got to make money, right?
Yeah.
But what if China decides, hey, we're going to give DeepSeq away for free to governments around the world?
TikTok Data Harvesting Risks00:12:36
Oh, and by the way, You're going to need a data center with that, so we'll build the data center and subsidize it.
Oh, and by the way, your smart city needs to have deep seek AI.
And after a while, right, once you're hooked, how do you get out of it?
Yeah, and more importantly, once you're in that much, I mean, you hear about these people, they're marrying their AI chatbot, and you're like, wait, what?
It's like, well, it relates to me better than any man I've ever met.
I'm like, I, you know, but I mean, think of the information that's.
Been collected, right?
I mean, that was the big scare even a couple years ago as a related to TikTok.
Like, are they spying on your kids?
And then they take something a stupid 15 year old said or did online and weaponize it against them, say, when they run for Congress in 25 years.
I mean, this threat makes the notion of that seem like nothing.
I mean, having access to literally everything in your life, every thought you've ever had, I mean, what better way to manipulate someone to your liking?
And I guess.
That's the big threat of AI is like we may not even realize we're getting manipulated.
When you turn on CNN and then you go to the grocery store, you say, oh, inflation's great under Joe Biden.
You see the prices, you're like, okay, that's nonsense.
You know, a technical model that knows how you think and is able to manipulate that, I mean, they can manipulate you, you'd never even know it.
You know, it's funny, but the AI requires training on vast amounts of data.
Almost all the language models have trained up until this point on something known as Common Crawl.
Common Crawl is a foundation.
And what it does is it scrapes the internet of everything, right?
And it just sits in petabytes and petabytes of data, unstructured, is sitting in these servers.
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.
And then, if maybe in the future, if you type, will China take over Taiwan?
It'll spit something out like, oh, China is a peaceful nation.
It only seeks to take back what, you know, and whatever.
Well, yeah, you see that.
I mean, I saw, I read an article, I guess it was last week, talking about that, where even some of the more popular sort of AI engines.
You know, they're almost like 50, 40, 50% weighted on like what Wikipedia says.
I'm like, I don't know.
I can read my Wikipedia page and tell you it's total bullshit.
You know what I mean?
But it doesn't matter because that's one of the, you know, maybe that and Google as the two biggest manipulators of truth.
You know, I guess they get to be the arbiters of truth.
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.
And so that whole notion in and of itself is scary.
Where are they getting the information from?
How is it weighted to your Point about flooding the zone.
And we face a truth deficit.
And I think I have to ask myself, what is truth today?
And, you know, 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.
I had to do 50 hours of congressional testimony on that one.
So, yes, I took that one rather personally.
And now people are saying, hey, wait a second.
Maybe this isn't true.
I'm not talking about well informed people who read the news.
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.
By the way, I was guilty of it myself and I was a target.
You know, you read it, it was like, well, you know, well, the FBI says it.
So there must have been something.
You know, someone showed up to one of my speeches or, you know, a click line or whatever.
Maybe they were a Russian asset.
Like, I literally wanted to give.
The people that were trying to take down myself, my father, my family, you know, democracy, I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt.
And now I realize, like, that was actually totally ill founded.
Like, they didn't deserve even that notion.
But it's hard to unprogram yourself from thinking, like, hey, these institutions are functioning for Americans and they're doing the right thing when, you know, the reality is they've been very corrupted for a very long time.
Yeah, I think many Americans had no idea.
And, you know, where we are today is that we face a trust deficit.
And, you know, one of the things that I, Uh, that I can say that's magnificent about the current and past uh Trump administrations is transparency in the sense that he's giving a press release like every 30 minutes or a press statement or a press release or uh you know giving speeches.
Yeah, Biden maybe gave what three press conferences.
Uh, nobody knew like teleprompted, teleprompted with scripts with the answer with the questions, uh, and who to call on.
So, yeah, it's a little different.
My father will never get credit for that one, but, but you're 100% right.
At least he's willing to have those conversations and people can make up their own minds.
Yeah, including with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the first administration and opening the kimono up to the American people.
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.
What are the other examples of potential Chinese sort of espionage inside our own borders?
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.
How much of our economic agenda is also really a national security agenda at this point?
Well, I mean, you touched on one of the points, which is buying farmland next to U.S. military bases.
Yeah.
Why?
Yeah, well, especially when you watch a Ukrainian truck inside of Russia with hundreds of drones in it pop up near a Russian base and take out.
A third of their Air Force in about an hour.
I mean, it's genius, actually.
I mean, I get it, but do we believe China's not doing the exact same thing right now?
Of course they are.
Look, if Chinese individuals were buying luxury apartments in Manhattan, I would be less concerned.
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.
I would add to that list, Running influence operations on U.S. campuses and recruiting scientists.
We have 300,000 Chinese students studying in the United States every year.
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.
This isn't hyperbola.
And perhaps, you know, most of these students.
Are you know they're just here to get to go to college, right?
They don't necessarily care, but if they're in a sensitive uh area, if they're studying you know some unique aspect of hypersonic missiles at MIT, well, maybe they get a call from a united front, um, Chinese spy network saying, Hey, we need this, uh, otherwise, there are going to be consequences for your family, uh, or you, and so they're put, even if they don't want to be, they're put in a very compromising position.
So there's that.
I would say, you know, TikTok, using TikTok and social media to harvest data and amplify division in our country, that's a huge issue.
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.
And so after months of using it, They have like an imprint of who you are as a person, and they're harvesting all of that in Beijing.
If it weren't.
Can you solve some of that with what they're talking about, though, now, having a US company control the servers and at least theoretically control the back doors to make sure that doesn't happen?
Because that does seem like a solution, right?
Because it's a hard one, right?
You want to protect Americans, you also want to be pro free speech, and you don't want to be the guy trying to ban things and whatever it may be.
It's sort of conflicting values.
Well, take the name China out of it.
What if it were called North Korea Talk instead of TikTok?
Would we say the same thing?
Would we say, wait, why would Cuba or North Korea or Iran have a social media app in the United States?
You'd scratch your head and go, this is terrible.
We can't allow that.
But somehow we think it's okay because China is more like benign.
But I would argue that they're more dangerous than North Korea is.
But to answer your question, I don't know enough.
On the technical side to be able to answer if that's enough.
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.
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 band 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.
I mean, 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, you know, in my late teens and early 20s, because that would have really worked out poorly for me.
Well, I deal with it every day.
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.
So it's a, it's a, I think every parent in America that has kids is dealing with this.
Yeah.
Oh, trust me.
I have five young kids, and not only are they more adept on these systems than me, 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.
Eric, 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 Concentric circles of understanding.
And so the military guy makes a decision purely based on military, but may not know anything about finance or diplomacy, and vice versa.
What's your level of optimism for the future on whether it's my father's mission for an American revival or in general?
I am very long on the American ideal and the American dream.
We are a country that attracts the best people in the world.
They want to come here.
They want to build things.
And we've given them the freedom, the capital through the VC community and the opportunities to be able to do it.
I think a lot of the mistakes we've made in the past are self-inflicted.
If you look, look, he's not my brand of politics, but 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 or a war.
Yeah.
Just saying.
I think we need to be very practical in our engagements overseas.
People overseas want jobs, they want American businesses to show up, they want that notion of shared prosperity.
And if we just showed up, We would win because people like dealing with the United States.
Yeah.
Where to Find Eric Bethel00:01:23
Eric, where can our viewers find you?
Are you on X or any of the platforms so they can follow along?
No, no.
I'm on, let's see, I'm on LinkedIn, but just me as a guy, right?
I don't have an X handle, although I've been told I should get one.
Hey, by the way, if you haven't started now, maybe you're actually probably far better off because the amount of time I spend on this stuff, you know.
Basically, talking shit the whole time is, I don't know.
It's not for everyone.
So, if you've managed to avoid it, maybe that's probably a positive.
It's probably better for my sanity, I suspect.
But yeah, you can also, our Mari Libram website, you can find me.
But very, very glad to join your podcast.
And thanks.
Thank you very much, Eric.
I really appreciate it.
That was awesome.
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