#144 Erik Bethel - World Bank Director

Summary

Shawn Ryan Show Episode #144 Summary: Erik Bethel - World Bank Director

Host: Shawn Ryan
Guest: Erik Bethel, World Bank Director
Duration: Approximately 1 hour and 50 minutes
Date: [Assumed based on transcript timing]

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Introduction and Background

Erik Bethel, a seasoned global finance professional, joins Shawn Ryan to discuss his extensive career spanning both private and public sectors. With a background that includes roles at JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Franklin Templeton Investments, Erik provides a comprehensive overview of his journey to becoming the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Panama and his subsequent appointment to the World Bank.

Notable Quote:
Shawn Ryan [02:20]: "Erik Bethel, you're a global finance professional with experience in the private and public sectors... representing the United States at the World Bank."

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Data Privacy Concerns in the Digital Age

One of the early topics delves into the growing concerns over data privacy. Erik expresses his apprehensions about major tech companies like Google, Facebook, and particularly TikTok, emphasizing the potential misuse of personal data for manipulative purposes.

Notable Quote:
Erik Bethel [03:24]: "Alexa is doing the same thing... We have a concern... Digital currencies... influence people's thoughts and autonomy."

Erik shares his personal measures to safeguard privacy, such as using Signal for messaging and the Brave browser, which allows users to opt-in for ads, enhancing privacy control.

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The World Bank: Mission and Challenges

Erik provides an insightful overview of the World Bank's mission to eliminate poverty and promote shared prosperity. He highlights the institution's history, its multilateral nature, and the challenges it faces due to misaligned incentives among member countries.

Notable Quote:
Erik Bethel [17:49]: "We've created a system where everybody wants to stay in their box and they don't necessarily want to leave. Then many... aren't incented to change things."

Erik criticizes the current incentive structures within the World Bank, suggesting that countries may prefer remaining in aid programs rather than striving for economic independence.

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China's Influence and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on China's expanding influence through the World Bank and its creation of the AIIB as a competitor. Erik questions China's role as a developing country despite being the second-largest economy and outlines how preferential treatment at international bodies like the WTO benefits China’s export capabilities.

Notable Quote:
Erik Bethel [13:32]: "China was one of the largest recipients of World Bank loans... It's a different affiliate than the UN."

Erik articulates concerns over China's strategic maneuvering to gain economic dominance and its implications for global trade dynamics.

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Geopolitics and National Security

Erik transitions to broader geopolitical issues, discussing China's multifaceted strategies to undermine U.S. economic and national security. He touches upon intellectual property theft, influence operations, and the establishment of a new global axis with China at its core.

Notable Quote:
Erik Bethel [131:49]: "China is not like anything we faced before. It is an adversary, it's not a competitor. Great power, competition. We are in an invisible war..."

He emphasizes the pervasive and often invisible nature of China's influence, extending from economic sectors to organized crime and technology.

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Revitalizing U.S. Manufacturing and Energy

Addressing domestic challenges, Erik discusses strategies to bring manufacturing back to the United States. He advocates for favorable incentives, tax breaks, and investment in energy infrastructure to make U.S. manufacturing competitive on a global scale.

Notable Quote:
Erik Bethel [85:12]: "We have to make it attractive, particularly in the so-called flyover states... through favorable incentives like taxes, like land..."

On energy, Erik highlights the critical need to enhance the U.S. power grid and invest in energy generation to support burgeoning technologies like AI, stressing that current infrastructure and policies are inadequate.

Notable Quote:
Erik Bethel [89:12]: "We have to do something because sitting around navel gazing and bureaucratic inertia is going to get us nowhere."

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Web3 and Blockchain Innovations at the World Bank

Erik explores the potential of blockchain and decentralized finance (Web3) to enhance transparency and efficiency within the World Bank. He recounts his efforts to implement blockchain solutions, including collaborations with notable figures like Vitalik Buterin, to ensure funds are transparently tracked and reduce corruption.

Notable Quote:
Erik Bethel [120:11]: "Decentralization means that the data lives in lots of different places and it can't be corrupted... If I can help at the World Bank to do that, and if it's on a public blockchain, everybody can see where the money goes."

Despite initial skepticism within the institution, Erik remains optimistic about the transformative impact of these technologies on global financial systems.

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BRICS and the Future of the U.S. Dollar

The conversation shifts to the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and their initiatives to diminish the dominance of the U.S. dollar in global trade. Erik discusses the implications of BRICS developing financial infrastructures that bypass the dollar, potentially destabilizing the U.S. economy.

Notable Quote:
Erik Bethel [151:12]: "If the dollar isn't the reserve currency, we're screwed... We have to do something to really rein in our spending."

He underscores the urgency for the U.S. to address fiscal deficits and debt sustainability to maintain the dollar's global supremacy.

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Conclusion and Future Outlook

Erik concludes with a message of hope, emphasizing the resilience of the American spirit and the importance of technological innovation in reclaiming economic and national security. He advocates for a return to foundational values and strategic investments in critical sectors to navigate the complex geopolitical landscape.

Notable Quote:
Erik Bethel [167:12]: "I believe that freedom... is what freedom means is anybody in the United States can make it... through hard work, the application of effort, through taking risks and from just busting your ass. You can do anything here."

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Key Takeaways

• Data Privacy: Growing concerns over major tech companies' data usage; personal measures to enhance privacy are essential.

• World Bank's Role: While aiming to eliminate poverty, the World Bank faces challenges due to misaligned incentives and China's strategic influence.

• China's Global Ambitions: China's creation of the AIIB and its aggressive economic strategies pose significant challenges to U.S. interests.

• Revitalizing U.S. Industries: To compete globally, the U.S. must incentivize manufacturing and invest heavily in energy infrastructure.

• Blockchain Potential: Decentralized finance technologies like blockchain can revolutionize transparency and reduce corruption within international financial institutions.

• Economic Strategies: Addressing the U.S. fiscal deficit is crucial to maintain the dollar's dominance and prevent economic destabilization.

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This episode provides a comprehensive exploration of global finance, geopolitical tensions, and innovative financial technologies, offering listeners valuable insights into the complex interplay between international institutions and national interests.

Transcript

[Sean Ryan]

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[Eric Bethel]

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Up Skinny Pop original popcorn today. Eric Bethel, welcome to the show.

[Eric Bethel]

Glad to be here.

[Sean Ryan]

I have been looking forward to this since General Spalding introduced us by, I believe, what, a couple months back.

[Eric Bethel]

Yep. Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

So great guy. Thank you for coming.

[Eric Bethel]

I'm glad to be here.

[Sean Ryan]

But so we have a lot to talk about. I want to cover a little bit of your life story and then move into World bank, which we'll get into, and some geopolitics stuff.

[Eric Bethel]

All right.

[Sean Ryan]

But everybody starts off with an introduction, so here we go. Eric Bethel, you're a global finance professional with experience in the private and public sectors. In 2020, you were nominated to serve as the U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Panama. You were nominated by the President and confirmed unanimously by the Senate to represent the United States at the World Bank. At the World bank, you participated in the analysis and deployment of over $100 billion of capital through grants, loans, equity investments and products. You were previously the managing director at Franklin Templeton Investments. You also held a variety of emerging markets focused private equity and investment banking positions at JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley in both New York and Mexico City. You are currently a partner at Mare Mare Liberum.

[Sponsor]

Mare Liberum.

[Sean Ryan]

Excuse me?

[Eric Bethel]

It's Latin for freedom of the sea.

[Sean Ryan]

Freedom of the sea.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Love it. A venture capital fund focused on maritime sustainability. You're a husband, a father of three, and a devout Christian, as I found out last night. And am I missing anything?

[Eric Bethel]

I think you got it, man. You put me in the higher tax bracket, unfortunately.

[Sean Ryan]

Oh, man. Well, that's quite the introduction. Very impressive. And I'm just ecstatic to have you here.

[Eric Bethel]

Glad to be here.

[Sean Ryan]

Thank you. And, you know, we had. We were kind of talking about General Spalding and his venture with Siempre.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah. The hardened telco equipment company. Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Very fascinating stuff. Are you worried about. Do you worry about data collection and all that kind of stuff?

[Eric Bethel]

I mean, who doesn't?

[Sean Ryan]

What do they do with the data.

[Eric Bethel]

Who's they?

[Sean Ryan]

That's the question. Yeah, who is they? Where's our data going? What is it? And why is it, why is it so intrusive?

[Eric Bethel]

Look, I think people over the last, I would say 10 years, perhaps longer, believe that if you give yourself. Let me back up for a second. There's a guy who wrote this book called Life After Google. Very, very interesting book. But basically what he posits is this. When you go on Google, which has the entire body of human knowledge and you start accessing it, Google is monetizing you, your search history, your Gmails, your everything. And what do they do with it? Well, in the case of Google, they sell it for ad revenue, which is benign. But Alexa is doing the same thing. We had an Alexa in our home. And then I realized, wait, what are we doing? Why am I voluntarily giving all of my information over to someone? And those are US Companies that have legitimate businesses that are selling ads. Where I get a little bit more concerned is when you have folks like TikTok that are collecting information on your kids. And so the TikTok algorithm, which they didn't want to sell. So if TikTok goes and gets sold to, I don't know, Microsoft or Oracle or whatnot, the Chinese government has said the algorithm doesn't go with it. And so my concern and history will perhaps prove me right, is that when you are looking at a TikTok video, it's monitoring your facial expressions, the camera's looking at you, it's looking at your pupil dilation, and it's sending you videos that elicit the same response. And so after a long enough period of time, they know who you are as an individual. Are you a divorced dad, you know, with three kids? Are you a 17 year old? That's, you know, that's troubled? And all of that information is going to affirm in China called ByteDance. And who knows what ByteDance is doing with it, and who knows if they can inject things in the video feeds that make you think a different way, maybe make you think a different way about your country, about your value system, about China. Maybe it encourages people to accept the fact that China is going to win in everything and we may just as well become accustomed to that. That, to me is frightening.

[Sean Ryan]

Interesting.

[Eric Bethel]

I'm less concerned about Google and Facebook and so forth, although I don't want to voluntarily give my information away. And so what I've done over the last number of years is I don't use text messages. I use signal, even when I call My wife, I speak to her on Signal. I use the Brave browser, which is phenomenal.

[Sean Ryan]

Is that the best one?

[Eric Bethel]

In my opinion? I think it is. So what they've done is they've stripped out all the ads, and then you get to opt in. In other words, if you want to see ads, you opt in. And when you do that, you can get Bat tokens so you can get paid for looking at ads. But if you don't want to look at ads, you don't look at ads. And it's the closest thing we have to a private browser that's out there.

[Sean Ryan]

Interesting.

[Eric Bethel]

I don't use Google. I use DuckDuckGo, although that has its own share of problems, but it's not perfect, but it's one of the better ones out there. So that's what I do because I care about my privacy. And having lived in China for eight years, I'm very concerned about malign influences looking at who I am. It's not like I have anything to hide or anything, but I just don't like it.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. Well, I got you a little present.

[Eric Bethel]

You did?

[Sean Ryan]

I did. I did. Because.

[Eric Bethel]

Is it Black Buffalo Dip?

[Sean Ryan]

It is not, but it is a unplugged up phone.

[Eric Bethel]

Cool. What is this?

[Sean Ryan]

That is. Are you familiar with Eric Prince?

[Eric Bethel]

I am.

[Sean Ryan]

Erik Prince developed a phone with a couple of partners. One of the guys on the project was on the development of. What is that? What is that? Virus Pegasus.

[Eric Bethel]

Okay.

[Sean Ryan]

Was on this project as well. But basically that keeps your data. It sounds like. So.

[Eric Bethel]

So the data is stored in the phone.

[Sean Ryan]

I don't know exactly how.

[Eric Bethel]

See where it's made. Made in China. No, just kidding.

[Sean Ryan]

But I believe it's. I believe it's. I think it's.

[Eric Bethel]

So it's like a privacy phone.

[Sean Ryan]

It is. So there's a kill switch on there. So even when you, you know, when you turn your phone off, people think it's actually off, but it's actually slamming.

[Eric Bethel]

What do I do? Do I just put in my SIM.

[Sean Ryan]

Card and it has a kill switch. And so you flip the switch and it automatically puts a blocker between the. Where the battery connects so nobody can listen in.

[Eric Bethel]

Wow.

[Sean Ryan]

Instead of having to put it in a Faraday box, there's a quick suite that'll. It's like a little menu that pops up. And basically what it does is you can control your VPN and all these different things from one menu, and it won't. Even if you do Download Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, it will not allow those apps to track Your phone, when you're not using the app, you can actually. That's on that menu. You can block it. So anyways, I just thought.

[Eric Bethel]

Cool.

[Sean Ryan]

Thought you might appreciate that.

[Eric Bethel]

So a couple of months ago, I met Erik Prince randomly. I didn't know him before. And I was walking through the lobby of a hotel and I see this dude working on the computer and I say to myself, that guy looks like Erik Prince. I didn't think about it. I had my cup of coffee, I had a business meeting, and when I went back, he was still there. And I stopped him and I said, hey, are you Erik Prince? He's like, yeah. It's like, hey, nice to meet you, man. What are you doing here? Like, you're just like randomly sitting in the lobby. It's like, well, I'm countering illegal fishing and I'm working with a South American country and we're going to board Chinese fishing boats in like, I don't know, some country in South America. And I thought, okay, cool.

[Sean Ryan]

That guy's always up to something. But, yeah, that's the unplugged phone. So.

[Eric Bethel]

All right, thank you.

[Sean Ryan]

You're welcome. But next question. I got a couple of just random questions here before we kick it off with your life story. But what is the World Bank?

[Eric Bethel]

Oh, boy. How much time do we have? Is this like a five hour one of these five hour interviews? I can tell I can go on forever and ever, but I'll distill it to the more salient points. I'll give you the Cliff Notes version. It starts with history. After World War II, Europe was decimated. And so the United States decided to create a vehicle, an institution to originally, that's the origin of it, to rebuild Europe. And I think the first loan was to France, if memory serves, and it was like $100 million. Over the years, after Europe was rebuilt, the World bank moved into another category, which is we want to eliminate poverty and to promote shared wealth creation, shared prosperity. So that was the World bank and is the World bank as I joined it. So what the World bank does is.

[Sean Ryan]

Is it a private institution?

[Eric Bethel]

No, no. It's a multilateral institution that's owned by a bunch of different countries. Almost every country in the world, with the exception of, say, like Cuba, North Korea, folks like that, who would be the.

[Sean Ryan]

Who would be the.

[Eric Bethel]

We are the country sharers. We are by far. And so it's different than the United nations at the un. It's one country, one vote. Right? So a small country in, you know, some, you know, Southeast Asia. Might have the same vote as the United States at the World Bank. We started out with a very large shareholding, and that has whittled down. I think we're at about 16% or so.

[Sean Ryan]

How does it whittle down?

[Eric Bethel]

So there's a formula. It's called the dynamic formula. It basically works like this. Your shareholding is a function of two factors. One is your growth of your economy, your GDP growth, and the other is how much you contribute to the bank. It's 20% based on contributions and 80% ballpark. My numbers may be off a little bit, but it's 80% based on how your economy grows. So what's concerning is that for years and years and years, China's economy has been on a plane like that, and the United States has sort of stayed like this. And so China has not contributed very much until recently, but yet their shareholding grew exponentially. I'm not sure why that is, because we contribute far more than any other country, but it is what it is.

[Sean Ryan]

So are they the second largest shareholder?

[Eric Bethel]

They would have been, but they're not. They're probably, and I say would have been because there were some changes four or five years ago that prevented them from being the second largest shareholder. And it was most likely for that reason that they created their own version of the World bank called the aiib, the Asia Infrastructure Development Bank. So they have a competitor to the World bank, and that's why they did it, most likely. But the bigger shareholders are after the U.S. japan, a number of European countries, and it sort of goes down from there.

[Sean Ryan]

And so the. The mission of the World bank is.

[Eric Bethel]

To promote shared prosperity and to eliminate poverty.

[Sean Ryan]

How do they do that? Invest in countries.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah. So if you think about the capstack. Well, I'm using technical terms, but if you think about ways in which you can contribute money, you can do it through loans. So the World bank can loan money to governments. Okay, track one. Track two is you can provide money in the form of grants. Grants are free money. You can provide loans to companies in certain countries. You can invest in equity. You can provide a loan guarantee. A loan guarantee is if the loan doesn't get repaid, the World bank will guarantee it insurance products. So think about everything that you can think of in finance or markets. And the World bank does it.

[Sean Ryan]

And this is to help countries.

[Eric Bethel]

This is to help countries get out of poverty.

[Sean Ryan]

What does the World bank get out of it?

[Eric Bethel]

Cynically? I mean, look, the World bank is a phenomenal institution and there are a lot of, well, intentioned people. But there are a lot of, you know, I'm going to go with a number here. There are probably 13 to 15,000 people full time at the bank. What they get out of it is a great job. And there are probably another 15,000 consultants. And so that's what the World bank gets out of it. Plus there are a lot of very well intentioned, very good people working at the bank who really care about solving poverty. They could have gone to the private sector, they could have gone to JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs, but they said, no, this is what I want to do because it's meaningful to them. But sometimes Charlie Munger, who was Warren Buffett's business partner for years, has this famous quote that said something like, show me your incentives and I'll show you the outcome. And so we put hundreds and hundreds of billions into emerging markets and developing markets. In some cases we've seen change, but in many cases we haven't because there's a misalignment of interests. Let me explain what that means. If you're a desperately poor country, right, you get grants. Grants are free money, as I mentioned earlier. But as you move up the poverty scale and you get yourself out of poverty as measured by GDP per capita and a few other factors, then you graduate, you don't get the free money anymore. You get into the loan program. And so desperately poor countries are like, hmm, do I want the more. Do I, do I want free money more or do I want to get a loan? So they, like, don't necessarily want to graduate. I'm certain people are going to say, oh, Eric, you're being silly. I mean, of course everybody wants to get out of poverty, but the incentive structure isn't aligned for that. And then once you're in the loan program, you're getting very inexpensive loans, the Libor, whatever the prevailing rate of interest, plus, you know, a few basis points, right? 10 or, you know, 15 basis points, 50 basis points, even 80 is pretty good. That's 0.8% on top of the prevailing rate. That's pretty darn good. But once you graduate out of the loan program, then you have to go to the markets, and the markets price you at 800 basis points over the prevailing rate. The folks that are in the World bank loan program don't want to graduate. We've created a system where everybody wants to stay in their box and they don't necessarily want to leave. Then many, not all, but many of the World bank employees are like, hey, this is great. I got a great job and I'M not really incented to change things. And so it becomes a challenge.

[Sean Ryan]

Interesting.

[Eric Bethel]

And I say this a little bit with a heavy heart because what do we all want to do? We all want to get people out of poverty. I mean, there are people that are living on less than a dollar a day, right? So what if we were to create an incentive system, not like the current one, but where we actually reward the individuals at the bank and we reward the countries for getting out of poverty, fix the incentives?

[Sean Ryan]

How would you do that?

[Eric Bethel]

There are a lot of ways, but it would require a big restructuring of the World Bank. I mean, you would have to incentivize the individuals working there to show results. You show me a result, a tangible result after a given period of time and you get a reward.

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[Sean Ryan]

Interesting. So what generally happens, does a country just, I mean I think we see this in our own country, right? Nobody wants to. Those that don't want to work are not going to work. They're going to take from the system. And so is that kind of what's happening here?

[Eric Bethel]

Look, I think it depends. It's a country by country basis situation. You have some countries and by the way, not every country is either monolithic nor are they. They've got election cycles as well. So you can have good leaders, you can have bad leaders and it's every five or six years things may change in a given country. And sometimes you have leaders that are really trying to make a change and they're trying to do good for their country. And the World bank can be extremely effective in doing that. In other cases there's a lot of inertia and a lot of the World bank loans have been pre programmed in years earlier. So you never know what you're going to get. The bureaucratic inertia and the momentum is like, oh, we just check boxes and country X gets a loan. My beef at the World bank was really focused on China. We can get into that a little bit later. But while I was there, things have changed somewhat. While I was there, China was one of the largest recipient of World bank loans.

[Sean Ryan]

Really?

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Interesting.

[Eric Bethel]

And so I sort of scratched my head thinking, well wait, isn't China the second largest economy in the world? Aren't they building quantum communications in space? Don't they have the largest venture capital pool? What's going on here? And what I came to realize was it was Part of an elaborate ruse such that if China gets World bank loans, they're considered a developing country. If you're a developing country, then what? Then you get favorable treatment at the World Trade Organization and the entire Alphabet soup of UN agencies, including things like the Universal Postage Union, which nobody's ever heard of and nobody seems to care about, but it's actually important. So the Universal Postage Union is one of the offspring of the UN system that regulates freight rates around the world. So if you're a developed country, you pay in. If you're a developing country, you get paid. You follow? And so if China's a developing country, then their freight rates are subsidized and they can export more.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Eric Bethel]

So that's one of a zillion examples. And it's wrong. And so does that mean they're getting.

[Sean Ryan]

Paid to ship all the fentanyl supplies here?

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah, don't get me started.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, we'll get you fired up later on that. All right, but is there. Can you name a. Is there any particular country that was a wild success story from the World bank? Maybe?

[Eric Bethel]

I think you can look at, most of. You can look at most of Central Eastern Europe who, you know, 30 years ago were in pretty dire straits. And through the help of the World bank, they are where they are. Okay, so those are, you know, that's exhibit A for countries that have taken World bank money, dumped something successful with it, and then moved on. And many of them are out of the World Bank. They've graduated.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Eric Bethel]

And there's, by the way, there's dignity in graduating.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Eric Bethel]

Staying in an impoverished country for the rest of your existence is not necessarily, you know, what I would want to do.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, me neither. Well, thank you for sharing that. One last thing before we move on. I have a subscription account on Patreon. They're our top supporters. They've been here since the beginning. And without them, I wouldn't be sitting here and neither would you. So one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask the guest a question. They had a ton of questions for you.

[Eric Bethel]

Oh, boy.

[Sean Ryan]

I narrowed it down to two. All right. But this is from Craig Bowden. Do you see the World bank, the world going back to a gold backed currency standard?

[Eric Bethel]

No, no.

[Sean Ryan]

This is from Joseph Barnes. Is there a more sinister plan for digital currencies to gain more economic controls of Americans as a whole? Is this part of the Obama administration's plan for a global government economy?

[Eric Bethel]

Central bank digital currencies are evil and bad in their current incarnation as Exemplified by the ecny, the Chinese digital currency. We could theoretically, in the United States adopt a different type of currency that provides privacy and security if it's done the right way. If it were me, I would just stick with cash and regular bills, dollars and coins. But if we were to do a central bank digital currency, the way I would do it is to create what's known as a bearer instrument, which in finance terms means if you bear it on your body, it's yours. Right. Which means nobody can take it away. And if you could create a decentralized. This is going to sound crazy. A decentralized central bank digital currency that provides people with freedom and privacy. I think you've got something. What we want to avoid is a digital currency in the US or in the Western world that basically creates a pseudo benevolent relationship between the government and the people. And what I mean by pseudo benevolent is what if we had a currency that said, that monitored your fuel purchases as we discussed? I think last night you drive a truck, you know, or an SUV. Well, in the interest of CO2 emissions, you can only fill it up a couple times a month. Or if you haven't gotten your 12th Covid booster, well, maybe your money isn't good at Walgreens. We want to avoid all of that. You want to have people to have agency and autonomy over themselves, over their currency, over their shopping habits. You don't want somebody to know that you're, you know, what if you're buying something at the, at the pharmacy that's private, maybe, you know, for your. One of your kids, you don't want anyone to know that. So as long as it's done that way, where you have privacy and agency in mind, great. If, on the other hand, it's designed the way China's digital currency is designed, which is attached to a social credit score, which I can talk about later, then it's totally frightening. It's George Orwell.

[Sean Ryan]

I can't wait to get into that. But we'll start off with where did you grow up?

[Eric Bethel]

Where did I grow up? So I grew up in Miami. My mom fled Cuba when she was very young. She was maybe 20 years old with two young sisters. She had to flee with basically the clothes on her back because they would open up your baggage at the airport and take anything of value. So she was wearing, I don't know, five dresses, one on top of each other. She had a photo album and a Bible, and that's it. And she left with her two young kids, went to Miami with her two young sisters. Moved to Miami and waited for my grandparents who were under house arrest. My grandfather was the. I guess you would call him White House correspondent in this country. He covered Palacio Preciencial, which is. He was the guy that was in the Presidential palace covering a lot of the news that came out of there. And so he was under house arrest for a couple of years. My dad was a U.S. diplomat stationed in Havana at the time of the revolution. And my parents had met in Cuba at the embassy. And when they both ended up in Miami in sort of the early 60s, they reconnected, ultimately got married and started me. Started a family, and here I am.

[Sean Ryan]

That is quite the story. What kind of diplomat was your father?

[Eric Bethel]

Great question. He was the press attache at the US Embassy, but he also relayed a lot of intel because being the press attache means that you cover all the newspapermen, you know exactly what's going on in the country, and you can ingest all that information and then send it to the powers that be in Washington. So he did some intel work. And also the face was he was the press attache. When he left the diplomatic service, he did a number of things. He and my mom started a business. But it was unusual growing up in my household because my dad believed that I needed to speak Spanish. Spanish is my mom's native language. So I didn't really speak English until I was, you know, I don't know, in elementary school.

[Sean Ryan]

No kidding.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah, I was in a. Like, English for, you know, esl, Like, English is a second language kid. They'd look at me and say, eric, what is four plus three? And I would say, que no intiendo? So you look like me and you only speak Spanish. It's kind of weird. But that's Miami. At least. At least it's Miami today. Now it's normal in Miami.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, yeah.

[Eric Bethel]

And so it was unusual growing up in the sense that my dad would go off on trips and he would come back. He took a trip to Bolivia and he came back with this kind of weird looking soccer ball. And it was handmade. And I asked my mom what was he doing in Bolivia? And she said, oh, he was looking for Che Guevara. I was like, wait, what? Like now I say, wait, what? Back then I was like, oh, whatever. Hey, thanks for the soccer ball. So, yeah, that was growing up.

[Sean Ryan]

Who is that?

[Eric Bethel]

Che Guevara? Yes, Che Guevara was. Well, today you see him on three quarters of college kids T shirts. But he was basically an Argentine Marxist who accompanied Fidel Castro everywhere. And he was A really bad guy. He was a butcher who shot people at, you know, Cuban dissidents. And he was a. He was a pretty bad guy.

[Sean Ryan]

And your dad was hunting him down.

[Eric Bethel]

Hunting him down? Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

What was he gonna. Did he find him?

[Eric Bethel]

No, he was found somewhere else by other folks, but yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

How old was your mom when she came to the US?

[Eric Bethel]

21.

[Sean Ryan]

Did she pursue a career?

[Eric Bethel]

Interesting. So my mom came from a very conservative household, and my grandfather wanted her, like most girls of that era and that time, to settle down and get married. And she said, well, what I'd really like to do is I'd like to study. And he said, study? But why? Why aren't you, like all of your other friends getting married? And so somehow she prevailed and she got to go to the University of Miami. After two years of that, my grandfather said, okay, that's enough. These Americans are going to warp your brain. It's too liberal. Come back. So she came back grudgingly. This is in the 50s.

[Sean Ryan]

Wonder what he's saying now.

[Eric Bethel]

And so she came back and she said, I want a job. At which point my grandfather said, what are you doing? You know, what do you mean you want a job? And the only place he thought that would be suitable for her was to work at the US Embassy. So she worked at the embassy until the end of the revolution. And then, as I mentioned earlier, fled to Miami. Yep.

[Sean Ryan]

Interesting.

[Eric Bethel]

So the sad chapter is that when I was very young, eight or nine, my dad passed away and my mom and I, I'm an only child, you know, were struggling financially big time. And, you know, we lived in, let's call it the barrio in Miami. We spent a lot of time with my grandmother in Hialeah, which is a suburb of Miami that's, you know, very blue collar. Spent a lot of time with plumbers and electricians and by and large, the Cuban diaspora. And so I grew up sort of feral in this world of Spanish speaking folks that had to flee Cuba because of communism. And it really made a lasting impression on me what communism can do to a country and destroy a tremendous amount of wealth, not just physical wealth, but also human capital. And people really suffered. And so anyway, little by little, we sort of moved, you know, sort of like the Jefferson show back in the 70s. Moving on up, we ended up in another town called Coconut Grove, and then ultimately to Coral Gables, which is a reasonably nice suburban. And my mom decided to start a magazine company focusing on, you know, the airline seat pocket magazines. Working for a. Well, initially she was working for a US Company that did, I think the magazine for Delta or United and the Venezuelan airline at the time called them up and these were a bunch of gringos and they couldn't speak Spanish. So they put her on the phone and said, hey, would you like to do our magazine? And the gringos said, well, what do we know about Venezuela? This is really out of our comfort zone. So she asked and they allowed her to pursue this. And she started aboard magazines Viasa. And then subsequently she got the contract for the Chilean airline. At the time it was called Land Chile, fast forward, you know, 20 something years later, she had almost every airline in Latin America.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Eric Bethel]

800 million passengers at that time. And it turned out to be very successful. And she did it as a single woman immigrant. So she did. Wow. And so I couldn't be more proud of the fact that a. We live in America. Anybody can make it number two. You know, you can just start a business and flourish and be successful as a woman. As a Latin with no, you know, she didn't graduate from college as a single mom, like, right on.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Eric Bethel]

Go, America.

[Sean Ryan]

That's impressive. Very impressive.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah, so. But, yeah, I didn't speak English for a long time.

[Sean Ryan]

How did your dad pass?

[Eric Bethel]

He died of cancer.

[Sean Ryan]

Oh, man, I'm sorry to hear that.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah. And he was young too, so. Yeah, it was tough.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, I'll bet. I'll bet. So what were you into as a kid?

[Eric Bethel]

I think, like most kids, I just hung out with my neighborhood friends. We rode dirt bikes and made ramps and crashed and skinned our knees and broke things. Hot Wheels, cars, Sports. Sports. Yeah. I was on the swim team. I was also once on the soccer team. Unfortunately, I was terrible. I was. I remember this as if I remembered it as if I were, you know, as if it were yesterday. I think I was 10 years old and I scored a team. I scored a goal for the other team. And my mother, who was in the audience was like, cheering. She didn't know. She's from Cuba. They don't play soccer in Cuba. And so it was very embarrassing. But, yeah, a lot of sports, a lot of just doing what kids did back in the, you know, 70s and 80s. You're outside most of the time. You're building tree forts and you're playing with your friends and riding bikes.

[Sean Ryan]

How was academics?

[Eric Bethel]

Pretty good. I was a little hyperactive as a kid, so sitting down and listening to boring and repetitive things was very hard. I always got good grades at the time. In my elementary school. They gave you three scores. There was the score that you got for your actual grades, there was a number that they gave you for effort, and then there was a score that they gave you for conduct. And so I was always like, an A1C, a1D. Like, my conduct was always pretty bad, but it was just because I was fidgety and hyperactive, and so, yeah, that was hard.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, where did you go from here?

[Eric Bethel]

Where did I go from where?

[Sean Ryan]

From school. From childhood.

[Eric Bethel]

Well, I was fortunate enough to get into the Naval Academy. I went to. Well, let's back up. I went to a high school in Miami called Belen. Belen was the high school in Cuba. It was the high school. Actually. Fidel Castro went there, and probably five minutes after taking power, he kicked the Jesuit priests out and they went to Miami and they started Belen in Miami, which is interesting, because even though it's a Catholic school based in the United States, it reports to the Archdiocese of the Dominican Republic. It's not really in American school.

[Sean Ryan]

No kidding.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah. And most of the kids like me were Cuban or Venezuelan. Today it's a lot of Venezuelans, but mainly Cuban. And as I mentioned, my conduct was not always superlative, and I was a little bit of a troublemaker. And my mom at one point said, you know what? If you don't behave, I'm going to send you to military school. And sure enough, she did. So I went to military school, and it was awful. And from there, I went to the Naval Academy.

[Sean Ryan]

Why was it awful?

[Eric Bethel]

It's like you're in jail, man. For a kid who's hyperactive. It was a school in the middle of nowhere, and there was really nothing to do. There was no social activities. I did well in school. Don't get me wrong. I think I was like number three or four or whatever in the class. But it was. Academically, I've always done well. Right. But it was. Honestly, it was a very, very difficult experience, as one would expect military school to be. You don't threaten to send your kids to military school unless it sucks. But in my. You know, it was a school that was. The guidance counseling department wasn't very elevated. They didn't. You know, I think I was going to end up at a community college or something. I didn't know where I was going to go. I had heard of these schools like Princeton and Georgetown. And so when the applications came in, I wrote it in. I didn't even type it. I would like to go to Georgetown because it's a good school. Right. Stuff like that. No one gave me any guidance. And, of course, I didn't get in anywhere. And I was on the swim team at the school and we swam against the Naval Academy junior varsity team. And I went to the Naval Academy and I said, wow, I could go here. And what I saw at the Naval Academy was people who were proud to serve their country, leaders who would one day be responsible for important things like the life and death of, you know, the people that work for you. And I saw a sense of nobility in not just, you know, it's a great school and it's got a number of academic accolades, but there was a certain sense of you're doing something with a higher purpose. And that really appealed to me. So I transitioned from all these other schools where I wasn't going to get in anyway, or community college where I probably would have gotten in and gone nowhere. And I applied earnestly to the Naval Academy. I didn't get in the first time around. So they sent me to the prep school which is in Newport, Rhode island. And through a lot of hard work and, you know, a lot of struggle, I made it through and I got to the Naval Academy.

[Sean Ryan]

Were you more dedicated to getting into the Naval Academy or serving the country?

[Eric Bethel]

Just curious. That's a good question. As a 17 year old, I didn't know I was interested in doing something good for the cause of humanity. Okay. I was also toying with the idea, which freaked my mom out of taking a freighter and going to Afghanistan and fighting with the Northern alliance and the Mujahideen because they were fighting communism. Like what did I know as a 17 year old? And my mom was understandably not very happy with that. So it all gets jumbled together. Patriotism, fighting on the side of the good guys, getting an education. And that led me to the Naval Academy where I flourished. I did very well.

[Sean Ryan]

And after the Naval Academy, after the.

[Eric Bethel]

Naval Academy I served as an officer for a number of years, which was great. And when my time came to leave, I thought to myself, well, I can stay in and it's going to be a 20 year career. It was during the Clinton sort of reel backs of funding. We had won the Cold War and I had a friend that worked on Wall street and he called me up one day and said, hey, if you're thinking of getting out, you should consider this. You know, you did really well in school. You're good with numbers, you're good at math. Try it out. And so I took leave for three and a half weeks. I went to New York, I bought a pair of shoes at Pay Less. I bought a Suit. I didn't. Had never owned a suit before I bought a tie. Thankfully, the Naval Academy teaches you how to tie ties. And there was a book, the book was called the Naval Academy Business Resource Directory. This is long before the Internet. And it highlighted people on Wall Street. You know, it was one of these bookstores by city, by industry or whatnot. And so I was in New York. I stayed at the bachelor officers quarters on Governor's island, which doesn't exist anymore. And I just started cold calling. Probably three quarters of your listeners don't know what a pay phone is, but there I was with a roll of quarters calling people. Hi, Mr. Smith, I would like to work for Bear Stearns. It seems like a great company. Can I come and meet with you? Right. It's like time after time after time. And I started getting hits. And so I'd never been to New York before. It was overwhelming. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know anything about finance. Like, I wanted to be an admiral, right? And so my first meeting was with this guy. I won't say the name of the firm. He was a bond trader and he was chewing gum. He was like a Naval Academy class of. I forget. And he goes. So as he's chewing gum and he has like a. I could tell, like a five minute attention span. What do you know about bonds? And I gave him this word salad of nothingness. Well, a bond, sir, is like a. It's a bond like, instrument with characteristics that reflect the bond intensity. Like something. It's like nothing. And he looked at me and he stopped for like 10 seconds. He stopped chewing gum. And I was like, mortified. And he goes. And he used the F bomb in every conceivable way. Like, I didn't know you could use it as a preposition, as an adverb, you know, as a verb. And he just like unloaded all of this on me and said, you effing better effing get to know you F. Like you don't know effing anything about anything. And so I walked out of there with my tail between my legs. It was my first interview. I was like, oh, man, this sucks. And of course, there was no Internet, so how do I learn? So I went to the library, the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. And I just started reading books, understanding Wall street and taking notes. And so every day I was there for like 12 hours, just grinding, like, learning everything I could. Oh, that's what a bond is. Okay. And by the time I got to my later interviews, they sat down with me and they said, wow, you actually know what you're doing. And I had studied it. I didn't even know that Morgan Stanley was a financial firm. I thought it was a vacuum cleaner company because I'd heard of Stanley Steamer, you know, like, you can clean your rugs. Yeah, I didn't know. I didn't know anything.

[Sean Ryan]

So what. Hold on, hold on. Let's rewind for just a minute. What got you, what caught your attention in the finance world? Was it the lifestyle? It couldn't have been the job, correct.

[Eric Bethel]

Because it was really serendipitous. I had a buddy of mine and he's like, you should try this out. And I said, okay, why not? It was really that simple. And so, so I interviewed at Morgan Stanley. They saw that my grades were good. They saw that I had, you know, done some leadership stuff in the past as a naval officer. And then the interesting thing that happened was, you know, you look like a Morgan Stanley banker, but you speak Spanish. And so they tested me out, like with their Latin America team and stuff. And like, my Spanish is fluent. It's like as fluent as my English. And they said, dude, you're in the Latin America group. And I got a job, it was an entry level job on Wall street as an analyst. And I basically was there for three years grinding it out. And it's a bear. Like, I've been through plebe summer, I've been through the Naval Academy. I've been through, you know, at that point, my, my dad passing away, I've been through hardship. That was a bear. And it was super hard. So crunching financial models day in and day out, inflationary accounting, doing models to account for inflation in places like Brazil. Like, the first time I went to Brazil, this was in 94. The taxi meter didn't tell you how many. At the time. It was called a cruzeiro, how much money you needed to give them. It had a chart and it would say like, C5. And then he'd read his chart for the day. C5, okay, you owe me this amount of money because inflation was changing every day. And so I had to do models to account for inflationary accounting. And I had no training in finance. At the Naval Academy, I took economics. I was an econ major. But that doesn't prepare you for a lot of this stuff. And by the time I got out of that, it was like, I mean, I'm not going to. It's like the mental equivalent of going to Bud's for three years, sleeping under your desk for. You know. Yeah, it was. It was hard.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow. Did you enjoy it?

[Eric Bethel]

I did. I did. I really did. I learned a lot. And I have a philosophy which I carry to this day, which is I live my life with one foot in chaos and one foot in order. And that's how you grow. If you're always in the chaos, then it's just. Your life is crazy. Right. And if you're always in order, well, then everything is just humdrum and very boring. So if you're able to straddle both, it's where you grow. At that point in my life, I was more in the. A little bit more in the chaos, and I was growing exponentially. And so by the time I got out of Morgan Stanley, I actually knew a lot. And so I had traveled throughout Latin America. I had worked on billions and billions worth of deals, again, in a very low capacity. In some cases, I was carrying bags for the managing director. In other cases, I was doing PowerPoints. In other cases, I was running the whole model, the Excel spreadsheet. So it was a phenomenal experience, and that got me into business school.

[Sean Ryan]

Where'd you go to business school?

[Eric Bethel]

I went to Wharton.

[Sean Ryan]

Nice. Yeah, nice. What did you. What about business? Did you study at Wharton?

[Eric Bethel]

I was a finance major, like most people.

[Sean Ryan]

And what did you want to go do? Did you know?

[Eric Bethel]

I didn't really know, but there's a. There's a path. There's a glide path from a Morgan Stanley, which is where I worked, through to business school, and then on to private equity and venture capital. So I knew I wanted to be at the intersection of finance and developing markets because that's where I felt comfortable, and that's what I did.

[Sean Ryan]

How did you like Wharton?

[Eric Bethel]

It was great. Wharton was phenomenal. I had classmates from all over the world. I spent most of my time with my Latin American classmates because I felt a lot of affinity to them. I had lived in Mexico for. I was at the Morgan Stanley Mexico office for a year. My Mexican classmates were fantastic, as were the Argentines and the Chileans and so forth at the time. Interestingly, I had a few classmates from Venezuela, and Hugo Chavez had taken over the reigns in Venezuela. And I would hear this guy talk. Hugo Chavez was a very bad guy, as is his successor. And I said to my Venezuelan classmates, this guy sounds a lot like Fidel Castro. And they would say, oh, please, we have a constitution that'll never happen in Venezuela. The Cuba thing. Oh, please. Cuba's an island. We're a real country. We have all this oil, I said, all right, well, what you've seen since then is Venezuela is now at the bottom of the barrel and they were producing three to four times the amount of oil 20 years ago than they are today. They adopted a socialist model. They nationalized pretty much everything. And it's a basket case. The fact that it even works today, Venezuela, there was a time where they had like a million percent inflation, something like that. The fact that it works is testament to how much oil they have in the ground, which is more than Saudi Arabia. They should not be a poor country. It's just that they're managed by.

[Sean Ryan]

They have that much. Oh yeah, I had no idea.

[Eric Bethel]

Oh yeah, they're just managed by numbskulls.

[Sean Ryan]

How quick did that happen?

[Eric Bethel]

You know, it's been a gradual decline, but certainly over the last 20 years.

[Sean Ryan]

In 20 years they went from 3.

[Eric Bethel]

Million barrels a day to. I'm gonna go with like 700,000. And what they do is they do stupid things like they give 100,000 barrels a day to Cuba, basically for free. And Cuba goes, thanks guys. And then they sell it in the open market. And that's how Cuba generates revenue.

[Sean Ryan]

Are you serious?

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Why do they do that?

[Eric Bethel]

Because Cuba's an ally. Plus Maduro's team doesn't sound like an ally. Well, the Cuban special forces are all over Venezuela.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Eric Bethel]

You know Maduro, who's the new guy, his security detail is. A lot of them are Cuban. And he himself was sent by his communist dad to Cuba when he was a teenager to study. So the Cubans are actively involved in almost every facet of the Venezuelan political apparatus.

[Sean Ryan]

Interesting. I had no idea. Wow. Wow. So Wharton, back to.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah, so Wharton was great. And met a lot of dear friends. Since I had already done a lot of accounting and finance, that part was less relevant. But I learned other things, marketing and sales and things like that. Things that you need in business. From there I went to JP Morgan and never looked back. For the last 20 years I've stayed in the world of finance and where finance intersects with. With emerging markets. And ultimately that brought me to China.

[Sean Ryan]

What is an emerging market?

[Eric Bethel]

An emerging market, I think that's the non PC term now it's called developing markets. It's basically so you have Western Europe, Australia, Japan, the us, Canada, countries like that. Those are the so called developed world markets. And then there's everything else. And there are gradations. Right. So you have Mexico or Brazil, that might be closer to us. Chile, certainly closer to a developed country. I think Chile is Considered a developed country now and then countries that are further away. So yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay. And so then you went to China?

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah, so I, you know, through a friend, I was introduced to a guy, an American guy that ran. Created the first private equity fund in China in 1982 or something. And so we met and we developed a friendship, me and this guy. He's probably in his 70s. And I thought, what an interesting dude. And his background was even more interesting. He was a CIA asset back in the 70s who was. Who would dress up as a hippie and go to North Vietnam and to pose and take selfies or whatever the equivalent of that time was with the North Vietnamese artillery and geolocate them and then sort of go back and then somehow those installations would disappear. He moved to Hong Kong and started a business with, I want to say, the first bank of Dallas making dipping their toes into China. And then he started a private equity fund. And I thought, wow, what a super interesting guy. And so we developed a very cordial friendship and relationship. And one day he said, hey, listen, would you be interested in coming to work for me? And I thought about it, I thought, wow, what a great adventure to go to the biggest developing country. Back then it was a developing country. Today it's not. What an opportunity. And so, mentally I jumped on it. But of course, I had to consult my wife, who was six months pregnant with our first kid. We were living in Carmel, California, where I was working for a family office. A family office is basically a high net worth individual or individuals. And I was entrusted with making investments for them, living a very comfortable life in Carmel. I was on the city council and the thought of moving to China was pretty radical. But again, back to order and disorder. My life was very orderly and I was kind of bored, to be honest with you.

[Sean Ryan]

I was just gonna ask you, you don't seem like the kind of guy that's gonna settle for that.

[Eric Bethel]

No, I pretty much redline everything I do, which is. It could be bad, but whatever. I was just wired. I was like, wired crazy.

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[Sean Ryan]

Shopify.com SRS how long did that gig last?

[Eric Bethel]

Which one? The city council gig or the China gig?

[Sean Ryan]

Not I'm backing up from China. The managing people's money gig.

[Eric Bethel]

A couple years.

[Sean Ryan]

Couple years. Is that when you met your wife?

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

How did you meet your wife?

[Eric Bethel]

So I met her at a car show in pebble beach. And because I was on the city council in Carmel, which maybe I should back up for a second, prior to working for a family office, I got a call from a friend of mine. I was at J.P. morgan at the time, and my friend had left his Wall street position to take a job in a. In a startup in Silicon Valley. He calls me up and he says, dude, you gotta join me. This company is like a rocket ship and we're gonna. We're gonna make zillions of dollars. And if you go back in time to, you know, 98, 99, it was a bonanza of activity in Silicon Valley, and I didn't wanna miss out. I didn't wanna sort of have this lingering thought that, man, I could have done something, but I didn't. So I moved out to California, and within probably six months of me being at this company, we sold for half a billion dollars to. Yeah, to a Microsoft backed company. And I was like, score. And so of course I had options. And I said, well, I'm going to go and move to Carmel. Unfortunately, those options, they were restricted shares. What that means is I couldn't sell them. And so From March of 2000, when we sold the company till the time I could sell them, they basically were rendered completely worthless. Which is humbling, but whatever, you got to pick yourself up and do something else. But anyway, there I was in Carmel and I didn't know a soul. And I said, well, maybe I should run for office. Why not? So I registered, put on a blazer, went knocking door to door, and hi, I'm Eric Bethell, I'd love to be your representative at the city council. And some people were very pleasant, some people were not. Who are you? Like, I don't know you. Or one day Betty White opened the door, you know, like from the Golden Girls. It was like, whoa. And yeah, and I thought, so the big advocate you want on your side, at least in Carmel, is Clint Eastwood. And I unfortunately had had a very bad run in with him. And so I was concerned that he wouldn't support me, but he did, he did, he did support me.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, good for him. Good for you.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah. So, yeah, my run in was I had at the time a crazy dog who was probably crazier than I was at the time, who was a Labrador. And I was at the Mission Ranch, which is a Clint Eastwood resort. Think of a beautiful farmhouse looking at a bucolic meadow scene with sheep, you know, eating grass and people sipping their chardonnays. And I opened the door of my truck and the dog ran out and he stopped and he looked at the sheep and his laser beam eyes just went straight for them. Next thing you know, the sheep were like in a state of disarray, running everywhere. The guests at Mission Ranch were probably spilling their chardonnay on each other. You know, the sheep disappeared. My dog is like attacking them. And so Clint Eastwood came out and said, hey, buddy, see your dog here again, I'm going to shoot him. So I was like, I got to go back to this guy and tell him I'm running for city council. Anyway, so sorry to go on these crazy sidebars. I went to, I was invited to this thing called the Concourse d'elegance, which is a car show in pebble beach where they have these antique cars, one of a kind Bugatti from 1932, and the guys polishing the fender and stuff. Really, really nice. And my wife was there with some friends. We met. I went, hello. She went, hi. And we ended up meeting through our collective group of friends. Later, a group of us went out and had dinner that night. A few weeks later, you know, we got into in communication. And I said, well, hey, are you dating anybody? And she's like, no, not right now. And I said, what are you doing tomorrow night? And so I took her out on a date. And I don't know, 18 months later we were married. Two years later, we moved to China.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow. Wow.

[Eric Bethel]

Little did she know.

[Sean Ryan]

Did she want to go to China.

[Eric Bethel]

Little did she know what she was getting into. Well, I mean, she was, you know, six months pregnant. We're living in Carmel, which is like a place that doesn't suck. It's legitimately, objectively, by any account, it's really nice. And I had to, you know, somehow I prevailed. So we took a fact finding trip to China a few months before and we stayed at a nice hotel. We got to see, you know, the hospital. She's going to have a baby in China. This is what it'd be like. It's the expat hospital. It was very nice, very nice, like. And so she felt a lot more comfortable. Let's look at housing. What does the housing look like? Because, you know, one has an image of what housing is, daily life is like in China. But at the time, China had like millions of expats and I mean, millions.

[Sean Ryan]

Really?

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah. And so what year is this? I'm sorry, like 0405. Time frame. And so, yeah, we went to visit some friends that I had down there. They lived very nicely. A lot of them were on expat packages with multinational firms. And it was good, it was very good living. And it was at the time where everybody, myself included, thought that China was going to develop just like a big version of South Korea or a big version of Japan, just 10 times bigger. And it looked like it was heading in that trajectory. And I'll say it now, I was wrong. At some point they did a 180 and they said, all right, now it's our turn. And the United States is a speed bump on our mission to global dominance. And that's sort of, that's when I had my sort of Escape the Matrix moment. I popped out of my pod and said, whoa, wait, wait, what's going on here?

[Sean Ryan]

And how many, how long did it take for that to happen?

[Eric Bethel]

I think it was a gradual evolution. When I first got there, everybody in China was super polite, very nice, and by the way, I have no animus at all. The Chinese people are lovely people. But I started noticing kind of a phase shift in the way people began treating Americans and foreigners generally. Initially it was, hey, we're here to learn. We're very humble. Teach us about your manufacturing. Oh, wait, what does that computer do? And I had friends that were noticing things that were a little off kilter. So I had a friend that worked at a joint venture, a General Motors jv, where their Chinese JV partner was basically stealing everything. And so they were playing guerrilla warfare at the factory. Like, oh, don't look at those servers. Don't look at this manufacturing capability. Well, next thing you know, China creates a competitor to General Motors. The company was called Cherry, and they took the Chevy Spark blueprints, like, down to the rivet and created the Cherry automobile. Notice that there's one letter difference between Chevy and Cherry, like, even the name.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Eric Bethel]

And so that was starting to happen and it just got worse.

[Sean Ryan]

What are some of the other ones that you saw?

[Eric Bethel]

Well, I mean, look, we had a guy, I was on the finance committee at the American Chamber of Commerce, and I'm not going to say where this guy's company was from, because that wouldn't be proper. But a guy came in and he was the chief technology officer for, let's just say, a big manufacturing company in the US and he sat down with us in the committee and said, you know, the strangest thing happened. I plugged into the Ethernet at my hotel and my computer just died. And then when I resuscitated it, my hard drive was empty. And I was like, dude, really? You brought your hard drive with all your intellectual property to China? And at the time, nobody really thought about it, but I saw this happening every day. Every single day. I saw the craziest things in China.

[Sean Ryan]

What else did you see?

[Eric Bethel]

Well, so let me.

[Sean Ryan]

Did you know, did you have. I mean, obviously you did, the way that you just described that incident and your reaction to it. But how did you know that they were sucking all the information out of the devices and kind of the.

[Eric Bethel]

Because I had started developing relationships with a lot of folks in China and talk to them. And the operating philosophy is, well, if it's not bolted down, I'm just going to take it. They're just letting us have all this stuff for free. Thanks. But there's something more fundamental, and that is what happened in China after Chairman Mao took over is they had this thing called the Great Leap Forward, and then they had the Cultural Revolution, and they eradicated any semblance of morality from society. And so they Replaced Mao's Little Red Book, which was their religion at the time, with success, power, success. And the new little G gods became Ferragamo and Gucci and LVMH and success and Harvard. And when you're untethered from any sort of moral core, you'll do anything to become successful, powerful. And you have a billion, four or whatever, 1.4 billion people who are just out for bear looking to make it. And I don't begrudge them because they're hardworking, very hardworking and intelligent people. But the beef I have is when you don't have a moral core, you'll do anything. So here we are. We've got a kid in China, and we've got to buy infant formula. And my wife says, we're not buying Chinese milk formula. It's like, you got to be kidding me. There are like 200 million Chinese kids here or whatever the number is. Nope. So every time I'd come go to the States, I'd come back with two suitcases of Nestle goodstart, and she would buy Evian water. And I'm just watching dollar bills evaporate, thinking it's the stupidest thing. And it turned out, I want to say in 2007, 2008, that Chinese infant formula companies were putting a plastic called melamine in the infant formula that was poisoning countless children in China. Because apparently that melamine artificially beefed up the protein so they could. So they could. They basically were cutting corners and putting chemicals that were hurting people.

[Sean Ryan]

So this sounds like the fda.

[Eric Bethel]

I don't know. So. So, yeah, I've seen it all. I've been screwed over more times. If I'm not getting screwed over in China, something's wrong. So if I'm at the signing ceremony of a deal, and it's happened to me on more than one occasion, you go to, let's say you're doing a deal in some random province in China. True story. I stayed. I went to. I think this was in. Was it in Dalian? I don't remember where it was, but it was in a. Not Shanghai, not Beijing. And I stayed at this hotel called the Galactic Peace Hotel, which I thought was funny because a lot of the names in China are very aspirational, even though they sound sort of silly to us. So I stay at the Galactic Peace Hotel, and it says, welcome famous American investor Eric Bethel. There's like this placard, you know, in lights, right? Anyway, I go to sleep. The next day, we're at our signing ceremony, and you Walk into a hallway and you have guys with TV cameras looking at you. You've got two chairs. It's very imposing. One with an American flag, one with a Chinese flag. The municipality leadership team is there, you know, from this municipality. And we're going to sign the deal. And I look at the numbers and I look at the guy that I'm supposed to be doing the deal with, and it was like the number that we were supposed to be paying X, and he had, like, made it X + 40%. And I said, bro, what's up with this? And he's like, well, we had to change things at the last minute. You're okay with it, right? I said, no, but everyone's here. What are we going to do? You have to sign. I was like, uh. And I walked out. And so I'm walking out, everyone's looking at me. It's very awkward. I'm hoping this isn't going to cause an incident. And so I'm about to get in my car and the guy's like, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. We'll go back to your original number.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Eric Bethel]

Welcome to China.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow. That's an everyday occurrence now.

[Eric Bethel]

Everyday occurrence. So you see all this and you say, okay, I get it. Everything is transactional. Everything is a negotiation. And unfortunately, many Americans, many people in the west, believe that when you negotiate with somebody in good faith, the other party also has good faith. But what if they don't? And so you can extrapolate that to everything geopolitics, you can expand it to doing business. And for American investors that are still, for whatever reason, doubling down on China, I ask why? It just doesn't make any sense. I can understand if 20 years ago you needed to start a business. Although I am at this point very opposed to the wholesale outsourcing of our industrial base to what is now an adversarial nation. We've outsourced it all, and that's a problem.

[Sean Ryan]

Is there any getting that back, do you think?

[Eric Bethel]

I hope so. The good news is some of it's going to come to Mexico, some of it's going to come to the us But I will bet you that at every single Fortune 500 company, quietly, their boardrooms are saying, how do we quietly extract ourselves from the political risk that we have, the geopolitical risk, and is having 70% of my pharmaceutical production in China a good or bad thing? I don't know. Like, what if they decide to cut us off? We saw it with PPE equipment and with masks. Even American companies that were making Masks in China were forbidden from exporting them.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow. What was the draw to? I mean, what is it price? Is it cheap?

[Eric Bethel]

In other words, why do people go to China?

[Sean Ryan]

Why do they go to China?

[Eric Bethel]

Well, I mean, the Chinese made it very attractive. So if you're an American manufacturing company and you're paying unionized workers whatever, an hour, let's just throw out a number, 60, 80 bucks an hour on an assembly line, and they can only work X number of shifts. And you've got occupational health and safety concerns, you've got regulatory burdens, you've got all of this stuff. And that was on U.S. red tape. And China says, I'll give you free land. My people will work for $1.50 an hour, and they'll work tirelessly. And I have human capital. We're unconstrained. And people living in the peasants in the countryside would come to the cities, and they'd be thrilled to get a buck 50 or 2 bucks a day. They worked really, really hard, and they had favorable tax considerations. They had free land. And it was very enticing. But over time, as China learned how to do the factory stuff that we were teaching them to do, they would create a splinter factory called, like, Almost with the same name and take all the employees, and then the American company would be left. So here's a Chinese company that's producing the same product almost with the same name. And then the Chinese company was competing with you that you would help start. So you started seeing a lot of that going on.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow. Would they sell it back to the US as well, or was that just for the Chinese market?

[Eric Bethel]

Sometimes. Sometimes for the Chinese market, sometimes for, you know, Kazakhstan or South Africa or whatever. But, yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow. How long were you in China?

[Eric Bethel]

About eight years.

[Sean Ryan]

What was the end for you?

[Eric Bethel]

Well, the end for me was we had created a fund. I left the firm I was working for. And it's a pretty interesting story. There were very few Latin American or Spanish speakers in China at the time. And I had hired a Mexican intern to work at the firm I initially went to go work for. He was studying at the China Europe International Business School. He was getting basically a master's degree. And we hit it off. Great guy. And one day, out of the blue, he said, hey, why don't we create a chamber of commerce between Mexico and Latin America and China, which didn't exist before? And so I said, sure, why not? And so in our free time, he worked very hard to get this thing up and running. And little did we expect, we started getting Calls from people like heads of state from Latin America who wanted to come to China and learn more and be involved in the business community. How can Latin American multinationals expand, like making tortillas or whatever for KFC in China, that kind of thing. And I thought to myself, there's gotta be a business in here to link China and Latin America. But gosh, what could it be? What could it be? And it dawned on us one day when a large Chinese mining company came to us and said, hey, we want to invest in a mine in Chile, but we don't know what we're doing. Can you help us? At which point, like many light bulbs went off and we said, wait, China is going to invest overseas because they need natural resources. And we looked at each other and we're like, wow, let's start a business around this. And so I approached my boss at the time and I said, hey, why don't we start a fund to invest in overseas, Africa, Latin America, whatever, natural resource companies, because China needs them because China didn't win the geological lottery. So my boss said, yeah, I've been in China a long time, sonny boy, and I don't see them really going overseas. That's not their thing. They're the Middle Kingdom. And so we said, all right, we took a flyer and we started a company to do this and we raised some capital, got together a team, and ultimately were able to invest in a few things. And the Inter American Development bank and the China Export Import bank gave us a mandate to go and like, they gave us a mandate and money to go out and raise a big fund. And the money was like a lot in the, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. And so with that, we actually became a real thing. And we ultimately forged a relationship with Franklin Templeton that absorbed this business. And Franklin Templeton said, hey, dude, why are you, like investing in Latin America and places like that, but you're living in Shanghai? And so come to Miami where we run our Latin American business and run it from there. I went home and I told my wife and she was like, oh, thank God. She thought it was going to be a two year gig. And it turned out to be like eight years. So she was ready, ready to come back. And so the incredible serendipity and providence was that I came full circle. I left Miami years and years and years back, and I come back to Miami and I bought a house like six blocks from the one that my mom lives in. And so she, of course, is thrilled. She gets to see the grandkids she doesn't have to fly, you know, 25 hours to see them and it's been great.

[Sean Ryan]

Good for you. I am curious, how would you bring back manufacturing in the us? I mean, I have a friend, a good friend, his name's Rob Luna, he's an investments guy and he always says money goes where it's appreciated. And with all the red tape here and all the taxes, how would we bring manufacturing back to the us?

[Eric Bethel]

Well, I think you answered part of it. We have to make it attractive, particularly in the so called flyover states. The US can't just be New York and Boston and the Bay Area or LA as the driving factors of our economy. Everything in the middle has to be rebuilt. And you do that through favorable incentives like taxes, like land, just similar to what other countries are doing. Energy is very important.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean, how would you give land. Everything's owned already?

[Eric Bethel]

Not necessarily. I'm sure you have municipalities throughout the country that are sitting on parcels of land that are vacant or derelict factories that are vacant, that can be repurposed. The other important thing is energy. Right now we have a. And it's going to grow an energy deficit. So if you think about things like AI, AI uses, as we all know, a lot of compute power. And that compute requires hyperscalers and data centers. And those data centers require a ton of power. And right now, unless we build it, those AI data centers are going to go elsewhere. So we need a lot of electricity, we need a lot of land, we need work programs because we've forgotten how to bend metal. And there has to be an understanding that there's dignity. Like I grew up around like blue collar workers. There's dignity in that. And so teaching our kids that you don't have to be a YouTube influencer, but you can actually do something where you're working with your hands. We need to fix our education system such that we train people to go in different professions. European countries are very good at this. They have apprenticeship programs in places like Germany where if you're a carpenter, you're like a good carpenter and you spend years and years perfecting your craft. We don't have that in the United States in the same way. So there has to be a well thought out plan, but it has to be holistic. Right. It can't just be, uh, I'm gonna give you tax breaks. It's not gonna do it.

[Sean Ryan]

Do you have, can we dive into some of these?

[Eric Bethel]

Sure.

[Sean Ryan]

The land, for example, if it's. Who owns that factory and how would it be?

[Eric Bethel]

How would it be, look, this is all hypothetical, okay? But let's assume, you know, you've got a place like, you know, Akron.

[Sean Ryan]

Let's go to St. Louis, Missouri.

[Eric Bethel]

St. Louis, Missouri. I'm certain that when industry left, you have vacant parcels of land that somehow were absorbed or gifted or whatever to the municipality. Okay, I'm guessing, look again, this is all theoretical. If the city of St. Louis or Detroit or Akron or whatever could take that land and say, I'm going to bring in industry and let's figure out some revenue share, we're going to make it enticing for you to come here. We want to create jobs, we want to rebuild our ecosystem of manufacturing. We're going to give you tax breaks, but you've got to give us something as well. In addition to, hopefully, the workers that will be there generating tax revenue, maybe the company can also share in its wealth creation with the city. And then the city would then hopefully, in an ideal world, be able to take that money and say, I'm going to create new programs, training programs. I'm going to fix our high schools to, you know, there's a whole lot of virtuous circling that can take place.

[Sean Ryan]

Let's talk about energy. I mean, are you aware of how weak our power grid system is?

[Eric Bethel]

It's pretty bad.

[Sean Ryan]

How would we, how would we develop more energy? I mean, from everything I've been told and read into and discussed on this show through numerous interviews, we are on the verge, it sounds like, of the grid going down. How would we fix that and develop more energy?

[Eric Bethel]

There's a lot to unpack there. There's an element that we can discuss that relates to national security. There's an element that relates to power generation. There's another element that relates to transmission and distribution. I'll begin with the national security stuff. We have a vast preponderance of our electricity transformers, especially the large ones that are Chinese. Okay. It wouldn't surprise me if those Chinese transformers had a back door and they could be turned off.

[Sean Ryan]

We don't even check them.

[Eric Bethel]

That is super dangerous. And I tend to stay out of political discussions, but I sort of scratch my head when one of the first executive orders in the Biden administration was to allow for Chinese electricity transformers. And the prevailing thought was, oh, these are commoditized products, who cares? And certainly the electricity companies wanted them because they were cheap. Right? And they're looking for their bottom line. And the bottom line reflects in their share price and their share price reflects in the CEO's compensation. I get it. But I think we need to do a very deep dive on where we're vulnerable. And it's not just in our electricity transformers. Our port cranes are also vulnerable, those that are made in China. And there are a lot of other vulnerabilities that we haven't even thought about. The water supply, water supply, sanitation. And so, yeah, like the colonial pipeline, that was just. That was the appetizer for other things that could happen. And so there's a national security threat. We need to fix that. But we'll table that for a second. On the power generation side, we are endowed with some of the best energy resources in the world. We have oil, we have natural gas, and a lot of it. We have all the minerals that we need to make electricity lines, but we just don't have the will to. I mean, we were a net energy exporter, you know, several years ago, and now we're. I don't know where we are, but the trend line isn't what it used to be. And I don't really have a lot of heartache about transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable sources at all. In fact, my wife has a Tesla. We have solar panels on my roof, and that's great. The problem is we have to be intellectually honest about how these things work. So when you have a giant solar farm or a giant wind turbine farm, what happens when the sun isn't shining? What happens when the wind isn't turning the turbine? So that's a problem. And then you have to think about baseline power. If I'm a manufacturing company, I can't just rely on power like, oh, it's sunny today. I can start my manufacturing process. You need baseline power. And so to get baseline power, one of the solutions is to create battery storage. You need to have battery storage such that when the wind doesn't blow, you still have power. Now, to me, there's a stupefying level of intellectual dishonesty when it comes to the green energy world. While I agree that we should transition, I'm not going to dispute that what we're doing is if we were to flip the green switch tomorrow, we become a. We give China the ability to become the OPEC cartel of one. In other words, China produces the vast preponderance of our solar panels. 90% of the photovoltaic material that goes into a solar panel is made by ethnic minorities in China in slave factories. These minorities are called the Uyghurs. They're not ethnically Chinese, and the Chinese are putting them in labor camps for making solar Panels. So do we believe in human rights or do we believe in climate change? Hopefully it's both. And then there's the issue of battery storage. Who makes the batteries? 70% of the refined lithium for lithium ion batteries comes from China. 90% of the, well, 100% of the cobalt pretty much comes from Africa where like seven year olds are in mines digging stuff up, which is awful. It all gets refined in China. The rare earth magnets for wind turbines are all made in China. And the list goes on. And by the way, to make a solar panel, what are you doing? China is burning coal from coal fired power plants and they're building like, you know, two new coal fired plants a month.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Eric Bethel]

To run electricity, to make a solar panel where they use, you know, silicon tetrafluoride and hydrofluoric acid to make a solar panel that gets exported to the developed world. And we're like, oh, we're so good. Well, wait a second, what are we doing? And so I think we need to reshore a lot of that manufacturing activity to the United States such that as we make this transition from fossil fuels into something else, which by the way should include nuclear. We do it intelligently and we're not beholden to one supplier of everything. That's super dangerous.

[Sean Ryan]

Where do they get the lithium from?

[Eric Bethel]

So lithium is produced in one of two ways. There are hard rock deposits. The deposit is called spodumene and they sort of mash it up and turn it into a powder and then run a chemistry experiment and separate all the things out of it. Typically that's done in places like Australia. In South America they have what are known as salar deposits. So think of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Now imagine that going on. That's 100 times bigger in places like Bolivia. Bolivia has a salt flat called Uyuni that sits. You can see it from space. It's like this white dot in the middle of the country. And it's reputed to have 50% of the world's lithium. And so the way.

[Sean Ryan]

50%.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah. And so the way you process that is underneath the crust you have salmoira. I don't know how you say that in English. Like a salty mushy water. And you basically drill, stick a straw in there, pull out the liquid, and then you bake it in the sun until it turns into a powder. And then it becomes a chemistry experiment. You separate the magnesium from the lithium and stuff. The Chinese are basically taking all of that and refining it in China.

[Sean Ryan]

How many lithium deposits do they have control of throughout the world. Do you have any idea.

[Eric Bethel]

It's not a question of controlling the lithium deposit. If they are the buyer of all the lithium, they don't need to control the deposit. Although they do have some, don't get me wrong, they have lithium deposits around the world. But let's assume if you're a random mining company and your only buyer is China and China sets the price, you're a price taker. So they can control you without having to actually control the mine.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay, I hope you, I hope I'm wrong here, but it is my understanding that China's investing in all these countries, Afghanistan's one with, from what I understand, very rich lithium supply and copper. And they're putting in the infrastructure so that the Afghans can mine that lithium and give it to give it or sell it to China. So wouldn't 100%, would that be control of that mine because they put the infrastructure in.

[Eric Bethel]

Look, there are a lot of ways to control things without actually having to control them. So if you control the egress from the mine and you own the road, great. If you've bought out the government of a given country, that's, you know, check. And if you are the buyer of everything that that country produces, do you not control the country? You don't have to put a single People's Liberation army soldier on the ground. When you can just control the country through economics.

[Sean Ryan]

That's better put, but that's what I was getting at. So they control who they sell to as well, Correct?

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

So if the US Wanted to go and buy lithium from Bolivia or Afghanistan or Mexico, and China says, no, we.

[Eric Bethel]

Can'T, because let's use rare earths as an example. Rare earths are not necessarily rare. Let me explain what these are. If you look at the periodic table, if you remember from chemistry, there are these two lines on the bottom that are kind of separated from everything. Those are the rare earths. There are light and there are heavy rare earths. Typically they're found in deposits that contain a lot of things, right? So you pull them out of the ground and then you have to separate the lanthanum from the dysprosium. And unfortunately we don't have, with the exception of one company called Mountain Pass or MP Materials, we only have one company that can process rare earth elements in the United States. And they do, let's call it primary processing. But then you have to sell to the magnet companies and whatever, and they're all in China. So here we have a rare earth processor. The Only one in America. And they have no customers other than China. I mean, maybe they have a few, but China is the vast bulk of their customers. So in other words, if you wanted to have a robust ecosystem for whether it's lithium, rare earths or whatnot, you need to have the battery company, the cathode company, the anode company, the people that create the shell that the battery lives in. The technology ecosystem that's doing research and development to make these batteries better. You need to control the processing. You need to have primary, secondary, tertiary processing so that you can make battery grade lithium, which we really don't have in the United States. Then all the way over here you've got the mine, right? We can buy the mine, but if we don't have anything else, we're still dependent on China. You follow?

[Sean Ryan]

Mm, mm. I do the power grid stuff in the man, it all scares the hell out of me.

[Eric Bethel]

The power grid stuff. You know, AI is a big thing, and AI is going to be a big thing for as long as we're alive. It's only going to get better. And like I said before, AI requires huge amounts of power. I think McKinsey Consulting wrote a report recently that we're going to need something like 30 to 50 gigawatts of power, you know, over the next, say, 10 years for AI alone. To put it in context, a big nuclear plant, big like a big Westinghouse plant like we have in Miami, that runs, you know, a lot of our grid is about one to one and a half gigawatts. We're going to need 50 gigawatts for AI data centers. And if we're not building them, guess what? They're going to Abu Dhabi, God forbid, China, they're going to go elsewhere. So we really need to up our game when it comes to building new facilities.

[Sean Ryan]

And that's not happening at all, is it?

[Eric Bethel]

It's happening. But in the case of, say, nuclear power, we have what's known as the nrc, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That's very onerous. And it takes. It's going to take 10 years to build any nuclear reactor. And so how can we compete? China's building 20 as we speak. So we've got to really get our game on when it comes to building power generation for AI and also for industry. I meant, you know, you mentioned earlier, how do we get industry back here? Yeah, sure, tax and land and job training. But if you have to pay 13 to 17 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity, and In China, it's 3 cents a kilowatt hour. Where are you going to go? How do we compete in a globally competitive world where our energy costs are three to four times as much as they are in China?

[Sean Ryan]

I don't know. It seems impossible to me.

[Eric Bethel]

No, it doesn't. It just requires will. It's easy. All we have to say is we need more power and we work with the agencies. Of course we need to do make. We need to make these in the right way. Right. We can't just build nuclear plants anywhere. But the new nuclear plants are very safe. They now have pebble bed reactors that will not create a Chernobyl. So there are new technologies out there that make nuclear very safe. You have small modular reactors that are very safe. And you know, we need to do something because sitting around navel gazing and you know bureaucratic inertia is going to get us nowhere.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, yeah. Work. Let's take a quick break and.

[Eric Bethel]

You got it.

[Sean Ryan]

Come back. We'll pick right back up. Want to shop Walmart? Black Friday deals first. Walmart plus members get early access to our hottest deals. Join now and get 50% off a one year annual membership. Shop Black Friday deals first with Walmart.

[Eric Bethel]

Plus see [e-mail] I'd like to invite.

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[Sean Ryan]

Thank you for listening to the Shawn Ryan show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to itunes and leave the Shawn Ryan show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. All right, Eric, we're back from the break. I would like to part two.

[Eric Bethel]

Part two.

[Sean Ryan]

Part two now. Part two. So I would like to dig into how you got started at World Bank.

[Eric Bethel]

How did I get there? Yeah. Gosh, I don't even know where to begin. So I was at Franklin Templeton for a couple of years.

[Sean Ryan]

And what is Franklin Templeton?

[Eric Bethel]

It's a giant mutual fund company. Well, it's a giant financial firm that has a big mutual fund presence. And then they've since bought a bunch of companies that do all sorts of alternative strategies like hedge funds and different types of funds. Our fund was in a family of what's known as private equity, where you invest in privately held companies. Yeah, that's Franklin Templeton, big publicly traded company. It's a great firm. You know, I have nothing, nothing but good things to say about Franklin Templeton.

[Sean Ryan]

I have a feeling I should be talking to you about the. About blackrock.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah, we can talk about that. We'll talk about that later. We can talk about that. But, yeah, Franklin Templeton is a version of BlackRock or any large institution, financial institution, Vanguard, Wellington Fidelity, there's a bunch of companies like that. But anyway, so I was thinking of leaving Franklin Templeton. I'm not really made for a bureaucratic existence. It just so happened that Trump won the election. And I said to myself, what can I do to support this new administration? I've got some financial flexibility. I've got hopefully good experiences that I can lend to the service of my country. And I just started reaching out to friends. I had a friend that worked on the transition team, good dude, West Point guy, and a few others. And I began inserting myself in circles. And so these are many of these opportunities, especially if you come in from the outside and you don't have any experience. In my case, zero experience in. Other than my city council member thing in Carmel. I had no experience in politics. None whatsoever. I didn't know anybody. And so little by little, I began getting myself introduced to people who introduced me to others, who introduced me to others. And I would sit down at my desk, I'd go back to Miami and like, write these little bubbles and say, okay, you know, this guy knows that guy and that guy knows this person. And so I had a very good friend who said, hey, you've got to take a look at the plum book. It lists 4,855 appointed jobs in any administration. It's like the plum.

[Sean Ryan]

The plum book.

[Eric Bethel]

Plum. Why is it plum? Well, back in the day, little historical narrative for you. Back in the day, it was actually a book. Today it's a spreadsheet or whatever, a PDF. But back in the day, it was actually a book. And the book was plum colored. And you can look through it and say, okay, and it's alphabetical. Agriculture assistant under deputy secretary of agriculture. I didn't know anything about that. And so I spent weeks and weeks and weeks looking through this plumb book to find something that I was qualified for. I naively thought that you needed to be qualified for a job in Washington. And I've learned since that maybe you don't. I say it somewhat, you know, sarcastically. But anyway, I look down, I was like, world Bank, I can do that. It's the world. It's finance. So I began circulating myself as a potential aspirant to do the World bank job. And so I had to go through. There's a group in Washington. It's the HR division of the White House. It's called ppo. It's the Presidential Personnel office. And sat down with them, and they said, hey, so you want this World bank gig? Okay, Tell us who you are. You a Trump supporter? Obviously. Why else would I be here? And they looked at me and they kind of rolled their eyes and they said, well, there are a lot of people that don't like Trump, but they still want a job. It's like, well, I don't need a job. I want to support America. Trump is our president, and what can I do to be helpful? That's what I'm here to do. And they said, all right, cool. Do you have an illegal nanny? No. I had to think about that. Have you said anything bad? Have you tweeted anything bad about the President? I said, no, I don't have a Twitter account. You don't have a Twitter account? Cool. Right on. Have you said anything that's going to embarrass yourself or the president? And I said, no, I'm a business guy and I'm here to serve. They said, all right. So I made it through that hurdle. Then I had to go through a series of FBI interviews. They came to my house, they interviewed my neighbors. My neighbors were calling my wife, saying, hey, is Eric, like, on the wanted list or something? No, no, no. He's trying to get a job in Washington. Oh, okay, cool. They interviewed my nanny, who I'm fortunate to have the only, not the only, but one of the few American citizen nanny. She's from Honduras, but has a US Passport. We pay her Social Security, we pay her taxes, we do everything straight and buy the book. And the FBI left and said, great. You know, but they did a very thorough investigation of who am I, who are my friends, who are my neighbors? And I checked off everything. Green light, green go. Next.

[Sean Ryan]

What is an illegal nanny?

[Eric Bethel]

What is it?

[Sean Ryan]

It's an undocumented.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah, it's like. Like three quarters of the nannies in Miami.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. Probably in the country.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah. And that trips up a lot of Senate confirmations and So, I mean, it's important. Look, as a rule in life, I try and do everything by the book so that I live above reproach. And it's. You know, and it's consistent with my. My faith, my value system, and I'm unapologetic about it. I think CS Lewis once said that I believe in Christianity the way I believe that the sun rises not only because I see it, but because by through it, I see everything else. In other words, the lens through which I view the world is based on my value system, and I want to do things right. So, anyway, that's me.

[Sean Ryan]

Good for you.

[Eric Bethel]

A guy with no political experience. And I went through a Senate confirmation process that was. It's tough for anyone. So you have to fill out forms that ask you questions, like, have you ever traveled overseas? Yeah. Where did you go? So I had to dig through my passport and look at, like, all the trips I had taken over the last 15 years. Imagine, like. And some of the passport stamps, you know, you couldn't even see them. I was like, okay, I went to Hong Kong on the. You know, whatever. Next question. Who did you meet while overseas?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, I love that.

[Eric Bethel]

Are you kidding me? And so these were probably forms that were filled out when people didn't travel as much, you know, back in the 50s. But they just sort of held onto them. So my.

[Sean Ryan]

This is a clearance process.

[Eric Bethel]

It's a clearance process, and, you know, it was, you know, hundreds of pages of who I met, who I knew, and they had to go through all of that. The next stage, which was done in parallel, was you have to go and explain your financial situation. Oh, you have a trust. Okay, how does the trust work? You have shares in X, y, and Z Company. Oh, you. Mr. Bethel, you have $9,412 worth of coca Cola shares. And we think you're going to have to sell that because you might influence the stock. Wait, what? Really? Okay, fine, I'll sell it. Whatever. And so it was, like, a very laborious process, the culmination of which was sitting in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with my family behind me, my wife, my three kids, my mom, who's in her 80s. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm praying to God, oh, please help me not say anything stupid. So they asked me three or four questions. I knew what I was talking about. I think they recognized that I'm a professional. And they said, all right, you're good. And once you make it through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then you have to go to the Full Senate for a vote. And in my case, I was a unanimous consent, 100 to 0, which is great in a toxic political environment. And I did the best I could to appeal to both sides. Everyone wants to be heard, right? And so if the Democratic senators wanted to meet with me and they had things that they felt were important, it's my job to listen and to be respectful to everybody. Of course, I'm a Republican and. But I think I'm an American before I'm anything else. So that process was fine. And then I showed up at the World bank and there I was. And it's a monstrous organization that's very complex.

[Sean Ryan]

Where is the World bank headquartered?

[Eric Bethel]

Washington.

[Sean Ryan]

Washington, yeah.

[Eric Bethel]

So I bought an apartment close to the World Bank. I flew on my own dime. I kept my wife and family and everybody in Miami. And every week I'm going two, three times a week, back and forth, paid for by me. I took a stupefying pay cut to work for the bank. But I did it as a labor of love because I'm here to serve, and it was a great experience. And the World bank is. It's a wonderful organization with its flaws that I mentioned earlier, it could be repurposed and recalibrated in a way that. Where it can do its job a lot more effectively. But do you believe that will happen? It can happen. But back. Let's rewind to 15 minutes ago to our energy conversation. We can build. We can build power generation capacity in this country. It just requires will. We can recalibrate the World bank and make it a lot more effective. It just requires leadership and will. And it needs to be done in a way that's respectful, because the United States is one shareholder, a big shareholder, to be sure. But we have to do it in a way that's respectful to the other countries and to make sure that it's a multilateral organization with a lot of moving parts. And you make no friends by being a jackass or by being a dictator or anything. You make friends by being a good guy. And so that was what I tried to do throughout my time at the World Bank. And so we can pivot this to some of the initiatives that I started. So you can imagine that a lot of money. The World bank has a term for it. It's called leakage. A lot of money gets leaked. So when you have a $100 million loan that goes to country X, not 100% of it goes there. Some of it goes to elsewhere, to Swiss bank accounts and consultants that maybe the President's Brother is a consultant and you know, not our president, but the president of that country. And so I said to myself, what's the best thing that I can do to make the World bank more transparent and give money to the people that need it? The people that need it are the poor, the fatherless, like me, like fatherless kid who was poor. Like, what can I do to help people around the world that have no drinking water, no electricity, living on a dollar a day, that's my job, right? And how can America be a force for good? Calling out corruption and being obnoxious about it is not the way to do it. So I thought to myself, technology can play a very important role here. What if, for example, we could, instead of wiring money to a finance ministry of a given country, what if we could put that money in a tokenized form and we can see the nodes that it goes through to get to its ultimate destination? What if we blockchain, enable that and put it on a public blockchain and you create transparency. So that was a project I worked on and I brought everybody under the sun because my business card gave me access to a lot of people. And so, I mean, I even reached out to Vitalik Buterin, the guy that founded Ethereum. And he came, he showed up at the World bank and, you know, super smart guy, I'm going to guess, more than a little autistic, but very smart. And he. And I gave an interview, I interviewed him just like we're doing, and we talked about how blockchain could be beneficial for the world. I brought in the teams from Microsoft and from Goldman Sachs, and I spent a lot of time working with the World Bank Innovation Lab to see what we can do to leverage technologies to make the World bank more effective.

[Sean Ryan]

How would blockchain improve the world?

[Eric Bethel]

Well, there's a philosophy that I alluded to earlier, this life after Google Book. This guy posits that there's the world of centralized everything and the world of decentralized everything. In the world of centralized everything, you have a single point of failure and a single point of corruption. In other words, let's assume you're doing national IDs for a given country in a centralized place. If the servers go down or an asteroid hits the server farm, whatever, you know, everything disappears. That's a central point of failure. Central point of corruption could be, well, maybe they want to disappear somebody and erase them from the role, the records of humanity. You can do that. And so decentralization means that the data lives in lots of different places and it can't be corrupted because if one server goes down, the other server still holds that info. And if that server goes down, you have hundreds and, and thousands of servers in a decentralized way. And you can then protect people from autocratic governments, autocratic companies. And I think that decentralization is the future for agency freedom, liberty and individual autonomy. That's my perspective. And so if I can help at the World bank to do that, and if it's on a public blockchain, everybody can see where the money goes. It's phenomenal.

[Sean Ryan]

I would think you would get a lot of pushback for that. Am I correct?

[Eric Bethel]

Actually, no. A lot of the countries that were getting World bank loans, especially those that were led by folks that had an enlightened vision of what they wanted to do. Many leaders in emerging markets or developing countries, they don't want to be corrupt. The system around them is corrupt. And there's a lot that they can't do about it because it's ingrained in the system. So they welcome things like this because nobody campaigns in a given country saying, I'm going to steal less than the last guy, but I'm still going to steal. Nobody's going to campaign on that. They're campaigning on honesty and integrity and good values. And so there was a lot of receptivity from a number of countries. The problem I faced was the inertia at the bank. Right? There's a lot of, There are a lot of people. And so you're trying to steer the Queen Mary. And it just takes a lot of time for people to understand what this is. And the headline, at least at the time from our then president of the bank was, yeah, I don't know about this blockchain stuff. Like, isn't bitcoin used by criminals? I was like, look, I'll bet you $100 cash bills are used by criminals more often than bitcoin. But let's take bitcoin off the equation here. I'm talking about decentralization of finance. I'm talking about Web3. I'm talking about blockchain. I'm talking about different concepts. These are concepts. You can take bitcoin and put it over there. And little by little, I started gaining traction. But this is an institution where from the time a loan is originated to the time it reaches its end destination, you have like 150 nodes that have to approve or disapprove. So it's a very big bureaucracy. And moving the bureaucracy is hard. That was the challenge. I could imagine the other Challenge was I thought to myself, why are we doing a loan or a grant or whatever in a given sector? Why is this sector better than that sector? Why is sanitation better or worse than education? And the feedback I got was, it's all important. And I said, well, if we were to rack and stack and we were going to prioritize what's most important, what would it be? And everyone's like, well, whatever the country manager thinks it is. And so it was very subjective. Then I went back and I said, wait, the World bank sits on, I don't know, petabytes of data going back 40 years. What if we could apply machine learning to all of the loans that we've given out over the last 40 years and then overlay that with, was it effective? Did school scores go up? Did infant mortality get reduced? Did literacy get improved? Whatever, right? And then you can, based on the data, based on objective hard science, you can determine, well, where should we deploy our money? And so that was another project that was before AI became a thing. And this is in, whatever, 2017, 2018. I'm trying to move the bank into the modern era. And again, I got a lot of support, but just turning the machine is hard. Turning the Queen Mary is very hard.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, I could imagine. So I could imagine what? I don't know what to ask right now.

[Eric Bethel]

We can talk about China at the World bank, my topic du jour. So I get there and I realize, wait, as I mentioned earlier, wait, why is China getting all these loans from the World bank, one of which was to an education project in Xinjiang? Remember, I mentioned earlier that there were ethnic minorities that were not Han Chinese living in the far western hinterlands of China. So we did a project, World bank did a project there, and it turned out that the Chinese were using it for repression. And of course they covered it up. And when the press got wind of it, everybody went into damage control mode, because loans sometimes fall into the wrong hands and they're used for bad things. But I couldn't quite understand why China was getting all this money. Furthermore, I couldn't understand why China was winning all of these procurement contracts. So if the World bank loans money to a country, a poor country, and they want to build a road, they do a tender. And in almost every case, China wins the tender because they're the cheapest bidder. And so I thought, man, what are we winning? We being the U.S. i represent the U.S. and we're winning less than 1% of these billions and billions of dollars of contracts. And China's winning 40%. So I thought, wait, China is getting money from the World bank, yet they're winning all these billions of dollars of contracts. Something's wrong here. And then at the same time, the Chinese government is competing with the World bank and loaning money everywhere around the world. Right. We call it predatory lending. And what happens is the loans seemingly don't come with strings to an African country or whatever, a South Asian country, but they do. When the country can't pay back the Chinese loan, China's like, I think, I'll take that port, I'll take that facility, I want that mine. And so these countries were coming to the World bank going, help us, help us. And so wait, my taxpayer money is going to the World bank so that the World bank can help this country repay the Chinese loans. Wow, what?

[Sean Ryan]

And the World Bank's paying China, and.

[Eric Bethel]

The World Bank's paying China and the Chinese are winning all these procurement contracts. I thought there's something wrong here. And so I did the very best I could to highlight a lot of these problems. But nobody in Washington really seemed to care because the World bank is, first of all, nobody knows what it is or what it does, but it's got real money, like $100 billion a year, 80 to 100 billion, that's real money. And it could be used very effectively for its real mission. And its real mission is to help poor people not be poor.

[Sean Ryan]

And so how can nobody in Washington.

[Eric Bethel]

Care at the time?

[Sean Ryan]

How is that even possible? Does anybody do their job there?

[Eric Bethel]

Look, I'm not going to throw anybody under the bus. I think there were nr, a lot of well intentioned people working in the US Government who didn't see this for the totality, the totality of what was going on.

[Sean Ryan]

They just broke it down in two minutes.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah, but some people would say, well, the World bank has policies and the country of X, you know, if China wins a procurement contract, well, they won because they won fair and square. Well, wait, did they win fair and square? If you were to unpack how China won, how did they win? Did they win through coercive measures? Did they win because they were the lowest bidder? In some cases they did. How did they win? And so you've got a lot of folks in Washington that are well intentioned and very smart, but they don't see at the time especially they didn't really see what the big deal was.

[Sean Ryan]

They can't think outside of a box.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah. And also China wasn't a thing back then. Nobody thought that China was going to be the malevolent adversary that it's become. I think now a lot of people's eyes have been opened, but back then, everyone just thought, well, China's just a big developing country. We got to help them with stuff like, you know, climate change, and we have to help China.

[Sean Ryan]

How long ago was this?

[Eric Bethel]

2017-2018-2019-2020. I think one of the things that Trump did very effectively was open people's eyes to the unfairness. He looked at it in the trade with a trade lens, and he's absolutely right. How come, simplistically, how come if we sell a car to China, they charge a 20% tariff, but if they not car, whatever, we sell a good to China, it's 20% and when they sell something to us, it's 2%? Shouldn't there be reciprocity? Like, shouldn't the tariffs be the same? We're getting screwed. And President Trump is a dealmaker and he saw us getting ripped off. And I think his perspective was, we're getting ripped off because we're allowing ourselves to get ripped off, which is stupid. And so he decided to make trade changes, put companies on trade entity lists and really start pushing back. And when he did, all of a sudden people said, wait, he's kind of right. And in retrospect, he was 100% right on this. But it goes far, far beyond trade.

[Sean Ryan]

Where else does it go?

[Eric Bethel]

Everywhere. So let's understand what we're dealing with. And I think this is a very important thing for you and your listeners to understand. China is not like anything we faced before. It is an adversary, it's not a competitor. Right. Great power, competition. We are in an invisible war, and it's been going on for a long time. You say, what does that mean, an invisible war? Well, it takes many forms and the vectors of attack are seemingly nowhere, but everywhere at the same time. Intellectual property theft, okay, we lose more every year in intellectual property theft than in almost anything. Hundreds and hundreds of billion of dollars have been stolen by China to advance their manufacturing, to advance their dual use technologies, to advance their military and so forth. This is happening at universities, this is happening at companies. I mean, it was like two months ago that a Chinese citizen working at Google left the company with a thumb drive and he was on his way to Beijing. This is happening every day. You have Chinese scientists at Livermore Labs or wherever stealing stuff. So there's that element which I think a lot of people understand. What people may not understand is China's ties to organized crime and to money laundering operations The Chinese at this point have as much, if not more power than the cartels because they are the money bags behind everything. We lose, what, 100,000 people to fentanyl every year. In World War II, we lost what, 400,000 people. We're losing a quarter of the people we lost in World War II every year. And by the way, all the APIs, all the precursors to fentanyl come from one place. They come from China. And it's hard for me to understand if the Chinese Communist Party is in control of pretty much everything, and they are, it's hard for me to fathom that they wouldn't be willingly trying to poison the United States. It's deliberate. So there's that. We have, across the world, the United States being thwarted by the likes of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, certainly Russia in this hemisphere, Venezuela, and a lot of it goes back to China. There is a new axis that's developing, and China is the economic might behind all of this. And so we're seeing it play out in lots of different places, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's coordinated.

[Sean Ryan]

It seems to me like they have us at pretty much every angle, which scares the hell out of me.

[Eric Bethel]

I mean, remember Daryl Morley?

[Sean Ryan]

I don't.

[Eric Bethel]

He was the. He was the GM for a big basketball team. I want to say the Mavs. It'll come back to me. I'm getting a brain fog moment. But he tweeted something in support of the Hong Kong pro democracy protesters, and he got pilloried by everybody in the NBA. And so why? Because the NBA makes a ton of money broadcasting in China. And the Chinese picked up the phone and said, this guy's gotta go. There are only something like 40American movies that are screened in China every year. And so Hollywood falls over itself to appease China to make sure that the movie can hit the Chinese censorship apparatus. So everything is compromised. Universities make money when people pay full tuition. And you've got 300,000 Chinese kids in America largely paying full tuition. So the universities are like, I'm not going to talk about China think tanks. A think tank will be encouraged by China to write a puff piece or a neutral piece on a given topic, like what China's doing in Africa, okay? And China will say, hey, here's a bunch. Here's a few million bucks. There's more to come. We want to see what the outcome is. The think tank will write a piece, you know, like a big Washington think tank, which will get picked up by the New York Times, which will get picked up by the Washington Post. And. And the next thing you know, China is a benevolent actor in Africa. Wait, how did that happen? If you were to dissect it, how did it happen? And so again, the vectors, it's invisible, but it's happening everywhere. And it's very scary. And they have a goal. And the goal is to kind of push us out of the picture and install their system. And their system is a state driven economic model and centralized control and authoritarianism. Our model is freedom of the individual, autonomy and free market capitalism. These two systems are irreconcilable. Okay, so this is what we're fighting. So it's more than just a country. What we're fighting is an ideology. We're not fighting the Chinese people, we're fighting the Chinese Communist Party. And they mean to take us out. And they have said, we will take Taiwan. We will be the powerhouse in robotics and AI and synthetic biology and semiconductors. This is what we're going to do. And we'll leave a few crumbs to everybody else as long as they toe the line. And America is just kind of in our way at this point. And I don't understand how our policymakers don't see this with clarity because it's so obvious.

[Sean Ryan]

I don't either. How much influence do they have over our policymakers?

[Eric Bethel]

I don't know. We had a member of Congress that was sleeping with a Chinese spy.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean, it seems to me that they are also very, how do I say, very? I mean, they'll build our policymakers businesses over there. Correct. And then they get hooked on the money and then they can yank that business at any moment because it's a communist country. For example, it's my understanding that Mitch McConnell has a shipping business, a Chinese shipping business.

[Eric Bethel]

Well, his wife, Elaine Chao, and the Chao family has longstanding ties to the CCP back to the Jiang Zemin days. And so, yeah, of course, Dianne Feinstein, RIP had a driver for 20 years who was a Chinese spy. But that's the overt stuff. The more nefarious stuff is it's very plausible and very likely that Chinese companies are hiring lobbyists in the United States to lobby on behalf of whatever TikTok or whatnot Chinese companies may invest in. American businesses that in turn have money to donate to politicians. And then of course, you have an entire, like, let's take the automotive sector. If Ford or Volkswagen or major automobile companies were to leave China, it would result in a massive problem to their bottom line and to their share price and the Last thing they want to do is upset their shareholders, and so they don't want anything to change. And then, of course, you've got Wall street, who is singularly focused on one thing, and that is maximizing profit. And they're doubling down on China, and they have been for years. That's starting to reel itself back because they're recognizing that they're not making money anymore. That's really the reason why they're dialing it back. And they see geopolitical conflict. But if China were doing well economically, they'd feet at the trough of Chinese stocks day in and day out. And these are American fund managers. They're like, I don't care. I'm here to make money. And don't get me wrong, I get it. If you're a fund manager, you have a fiduciary responsibility. You have a moral responsibility to make sure that your pensioner's grandma gets her pension check, and you will invest wherever there's money to be made. Okay, I get it. You have to balance that, however, with patriotism. And sometimes you may be investing in a company in China that's building parts for the next weapon that's going to kill our soldiers. And so you have to balance patriotism with making money.

[Sean Ryan]

You had mentioned. Speaking of weapons, you had mentioned quantum communications in space.

[Eric Bethel]

Yep.

[Sean Ryan]

What is that?

[Eric Bethel]

Something that I'm clearly not capable of fully explaining because I'm not a quantum physicist. I don't understand in the quantum world how you can be a 0 and a 1 at the same time, but we'll table that for a second. It's a means of communication that relies on new technologies that can't be hacked, can't be traced. And I think people are trying to still figure out how it all works.

[Sean Ryan]

Is this quantum entanglement?

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah, it's quantum entanglement. You can basically have a base station on Earth and a satellite, and through quantum entanglement and quantum communications, you can make the satellite do stuff. How it works? I'm not qualified to answer, but, yeah, this is very serious stuff. And they're making advancements in technologies that we need to be mindful of.

[Sean Ryan]

Are they more advanced than we are?

[Eric Bethel]

In many ways, yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

How else? So.

[Eric Bethel]

Well, I mean, consider if you think I may be wrong on AI, but if you think of AI as several things. It's an algorithm, right, that's doing pattern recognition, that's also ingesting the entire body of everything that's ever written. And there's energy that feeds the GPUs. China has data sets that are much bigger than ours and they don't have privacy laws, so you're able to ingest a lot more data. So I'll speak out of both sides of my mouth here because the Chinese AI industry is faltering in many respects because they're trying to censor what goes into the machines. Like what if something is anti CCP or anti Xi Jinping. So they've created filters and blockers to make sure that the AI is like, you know, fosters Xi Jinping thought, which is a strategic blunder. But they have huge data sets. They have, they own the entire ecosystem of drones. DJI is a drone company. It's Chinese. And nobody, nobody can compete with them at this point. And so they just manufacture drones better and cheaper and at scale that we just can't compete with shipbuilding. We can't build ships anymore in the United States, especially naval ships. And you can't throw, you can keep throwing money at Huntington Ingalls Industries or big ship builder or electric boat, the submarine builder, but they still can't build them fast enough. China's crunching out new ships every four years. They create the equivalent of the British Navy. We can't compete with that because we don't have shipbuilding capacity. Hypersonic missiles, something that we discarded years ago, they took our technology and they've created hypersonic missiles that are really good and really scary. Satellites. They're launching constellations of satellites. What are we doing? They're sending. They're going to. At least they've purported to want to build a moon base. They're going to build it. And so I think if there's a thread in this conversation, it's that we need to get our game on because these are very, very serious times and it requires serious thinking to figure out what we do.

[Sean Ryan]

Are they creating a lot of the division that we're seeing?

[Eric Bethel]

No, I think a lot of that is self hatred. We've been rich for a long time as a country, and I think as enough time passes and generations become wealthier and wealthier, they look for nonsense to think about. When you're not thinking about your daily needs, you start thinking about other things that are, in my opinion, stupid. So you create problems out of nothing. So a lot of it is our doing. However, do I believe that there are influence operations? Do I believe that our adversaries, whether it's Russia or China or Iran or Hamas, do they affect our ability to. Sorry, are they influencing social media? Yeah, yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

What about. I mean, I don't. I, e There's gotta be at least a glimmer of hope. I hope. But I also want to talk to you about bricks.

[Eric Bethel]

Sure.

[Sean Ryan]

It's my understanding that BRICS is. The entire mission is to devalue the US dollar and completely wipe it off the.

[Eric Bethel]

All right, let's begin with glimmer of hope, and then we'll go into bricks. Okay. At the end of the day, I am a firm believer in the American spirit. And I believe that freedom. People often think of freedom and they think it's, you know, a meme of some kind, you know, of Mel Gibson and, you know, Scotland with a blue face and freedom, you know, but it's what freedom means is anybody in the United States can make it from a single mom that came from Cuba with no college education to a half Kenyan president of the United States. Anybody can make it here. And you have the freedom through hard work, the application of effort, through taking risks and from just busting your ass. You can do anything here. And so I think if we. If we harness that energy that we still have in the United States, we will prevail. So There is hope 100%, but we need the will and we need the leadership to harness that. We can't tell generations and generations of American kids that our country sucks, that we're not worth fighting for, that we're irredeemably evil or racist or something, because that's not who we are. Have we had a troubled history? Sure, but every country has the Roman Empire. I mean, everybody, every country, every place of note, every important society has had their share of flaws, but I think we are a force for good. So there is hope. We'll pivot here to BRICS. So BRICS, I'll tell you the story back, I don't know, 25 years ago, there was a guy, Goldman Sachs, whose name was O'Neill, if my Alzheimer's is working correctly. And he coined a phrase called brics. Brazil, Russia, India and China. That's what it stands for. And he said, these are the countries that are going to be important in the future. Look at their population. It's huge. Look at the number of young people they have. Look at their. Look at how their economies are growing. We should pay attention to these four countries. That's how it started from a guy at Goldman Sachs. Since then, a lot of fund managers have put a lot of money into the BRICS countries thinking that their stock markets would perform well. Foreign direct investment plowed into these countries, particularly China. And for a while, the BRICS was like a thing China developed the notion of creating a BRICS bank where you take these four countries and now you can glom on other. South Africa wanted to join and then Mexico and Saudi Arabia. Now it's become bigger than it originally was, but it's still called brics. And so China in Shanghai developed a the BRICS bank. Now it's called the New Development bank. And its objective is today its current incarnation is how can we conduct trade in the Global South? I'm throwing these names at you. The Global south is like the developing world so that we can trade with each other more freely. Up until, for the last many, many decades, trade has been conducted using the dollar as the unit of intermediation. Right. Whether commodities, what you know, the currency that underpinned commodities has always been dollars. So when you buy oil, oil is traded in dollars. Whether it's in Saudi Arabia or whether it's in the UAE or whether it's in Indonesia, it's a dollar. And so the BRICs are saying, why should we have to transit the US dollar to trade soybeans from Brazil to China? Isn't there a way that we can do this internally? They're not going to create a currency, a BRICS currency, but they're trying to figure out how they square away the plumbing, the financial plumbing, so that they don't have to go through the dollar as the intermediary. So that's what's going on.

[Sean Ryan]

How does that affect us?

[Eric Bethel]

Well, if the dollar isn't the reserve currency, we're screwed. Like we become, I don't know, Argentina. It can be very bad. So let's back up. I'll begin with our fiscal deficits. And I'll take this back to why the dollar is important. Important. So right now we spend $7 trillion. That's the latest budget proposal. And we generate in tax revenue like 4.9 trillion. Right? So there's a deficit of, you know, roughly $2 trillion a year. Now, people don't understand unless you can make it real for them. So let's take out a bunch of zeros. Let's assume you as an individual are making 49,000 bucks a year and you're spending 70,000 bucks a year. Well, okay, that's bad. That's fiscally irresponsible. But that's what we're doing as a country. If it's you as an individual in that scenario where you're like $20,000 short every year, what do you do? Well, you max out your credit card one year, okay? That covers you the first year the second year, you take out a loan from the bank to pay maybe your credit card or whatnot. But over time, that's not sustainable. So what happens is when we have a shortfall, the way we generate revenue in shortfalls other than tax revenue. Tax revenues are 4.9 trillion. How do you get to 7? Well, we issue bonds, right? So we sell bonds around the world. And when people don't buy, for whatever reason, the Fed buys the bonds. The Fed is the buyer of last resort. So you've seen the Fed balance sheet basically go from like 4 trillion to like 8 trillion because they're the ones buying everything. Well, how are they buying it? Well, they buy it by printing money. And so the printing presses have been off the charts certainly since COVID and throughout this administration. And that, of course, has caused inflation and a lot of other problems which we can go into now. The artificial demand for dollars around the world is largely due to the fact that 60% of central banks have the dollar sitting in reserves. And also because the dollar is used as the unit of trade for commodities, for foreign exchange. Like if you want to go from Colombian pesos to, I don't know, Indonesian rupiah, you have to go through the dollar. If the dollar isn't there because nobody wants to use the dollar, we're screwed. All that artificial demand for dollars disappears and we crater. We're not going to forget financing the next aircraft carrier. We're not going to be able to pay Medicare. And that's when things get really, really bad. And it just takes leadership in our government, in our Congress and in our executive branch to say, enough. We can't fund everything. And there are things that, you know, look, we have 88 million people on Medicare, 65 million people on Medicaid, 8 million on disability, 44 million on food stamps. That's like, I don't know, I'm not good at doing math in my head, but that's like a little over 200 million people in America that depend on the government. That's not sustainable.

[Sean Ryan]

There's only, what, 300, 350 million, 340.

[Eric Bethel]

Million, something like that? 336. So if, you know. So we have to do something to really rein in our spending. And we're adding a trillion dollars of debt every hundred days.

[Sean Ryan]

And so who do we owe the debt to?

[Eric Bethel]

Mainly ourselves. We do have a bunch of foreign debt buyers. China had at some point close to maybe a trillion and a half or 2 trillion. And they've been paring that down. They've been Selling why? Because they don't want to get sanctioned. They learned from Russia. Once Russia invaded Ukraine, we basically sanctioned everything. We took all their money and we're like, okay, it's ours. So when you have a central bank that has dollars in reserves, it's not like there are bales and bales of money sitting in the Russian central bank in a, in a dungeon. It's sitting at the Fed. And so we can turn the money off whenever we want. And so China was like, hmm, I don't know that I like this. So I think I'm going to start selling treasuries. So it's a problem. And the debt is a problem for many reasons. We're always issuing new debt and there's debt that gets paid back. And as we start paying back some of these shorter duration loans and bonds and government obligations, we have to borrow at a new rate. And that new rate is really high. And so I mean the three month, I think is like 5% and change. It used to be zero. And so now we're borrowing money at higher interest rates, which means we have to pay, you know, our government is paying more in interest on our debt, like over a trillion dollars in interest alone. And we're paying 850 million, 850 billion for our defense Department. We're paying more in interest, just in interest to service the debt than we are paying for the Defense Department. You tell me, is that sustainable? We're screwed unless somebody changes things in a very radical way. And in D.C. nobody seems to care.

[Sean Ryan]

So the people that own the debt.

[Eric Bethel]

Are the Fed bonds people buy bonds? Yes, the notes and the bonds. There's an entire marketplace. Some are owned by big financial firms. Your 401k probably has a bunch of government bonds in it. So it's owned by ourselves individually through our 401ks. It's owned by large corporations like BlackRock and Vanguard and so forth. Goldman Sachs, it's owned by the Fed. It's owned by institutional buyers, foreign buyers like the Saudis and the Japanese. It's owned by a lot of people.

[Sean Ryan]

And can they call and collect?

[Eric Bethel]

So the way a bond works is I owe you 100 bucks, I'll pay you back in five years with interest. I'll pay you 5% interest a year and then in five years I pay you the principal. So they do come to collect once the bond is due.

[Sean Ryan]

And that's what the foreign countries are doing as well.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah, I mean, well, you buying.

[Sean Ryan]

So it's all bonds.

[Eric Bethel]

So you have many types of government Obligations. You've got a three month, you've got a six month, you've got a ten year, a five year. So there are lots of bond durations. And there's a giant marketplace for this. People are buying and selling these bonds all the time. It's not like that IOU that you just purchased from me, like, I owe you 100 bucks. I'll pay back in five years. You can take that IOU and sell it to your sister, and your sister can sell it. And then there becomes a secondary market for these, and there's like a giant marketplace of people buying and selling bonds.

[Sean Ryan]

So what does it look like when we default?

[Eric Bethel]

I don't want to be around when that happens. I'll be in a Mennonite colony in Paraguay living off the land or something. No, but joking aside, it can get very bad very quickly.

[Sean Ryan]

Can you paint a scenario?

[Eric Bethel]

Sure. A scenario where it can happen very quickly and it can happen over a long period of time. Over a long period of time. People start losing faith in the dollar. Our obligations become less and less valuable to them. Faith and credit in the US dollar becomes impaired. The dollar loses a tremendous amount of value. It depreciates significantly compared to a lot of other places. We see huge amounts of inflation, perhaps hyperinflation, or it can happen very suddenly where we just can't meet the obligations of the federal government. So we have $7 trillion that we need to pay out every year in whatever. And maybe we have to fire people. We have to fire the 24 million government workers. By the way, there are more twice as twice the number of government employees than there are manufacturing employees. Man. That's 12 million versus 24 million.

[Sean Ryan]

So when you told me that last night, that blew my mind.

[Eric Bethel]

Maybe we have to fire people. Maybe people have to take a haircut on their what they think that they're due. Maybe we can't afford a lot of the social programs, some of which are very important to people in poor communities. And these people in poor communities are saying, well, that was my lifeblood. Now I can't buy food. And people get really pissed off.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean, maybe if we just quit funding Ukraine.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah, I don't follow the Ukraine, Russia as much as I do China. But I don't understand how cooler heads can't prevail and get us to some peaceful outcome. At this point, it's probably too late. But I have hope that future leaders in the United States will take an important role in getting these two sides to the table and saying, let's figure out a way to end this. It's in everybody's best interest to end this thing. And I think Putin is obviously indefensible, but I just don't know what the strategy is. If you were to sit down and talk to anybody in Washington and say, what's our desired end state? Do we want regime change in Russia? Is that the desired end state? No, no, no, no. We can't do that. Well, is it to preserve the territorial integrity of Ukraine? Okay, yeah, I can buy that. But how do we do this? So I'm a first principles thinker. What is your desired end state? And let's go back and get there. But I'm not quite sure what we're trying to do, maybe because I'm not in the know. And again, I don't. You know, I'll caveat this with. I'm not following the Russia, Ukraine issue as much as I'm following the China issue.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, I mean, I'm asking you because of where you, what you're a part of now with the venture capital firm and defense stuff. And so could it be that it is the military industrial complex companies, Lockheed Martin.

[Eric Bethel]

So is Lockheed. And you know, are they pulling the strings behind Ukraine? I. Look, I don't know.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, I'm. What I'm asking is, are they lobbying Washington to vote this in so that they can send their weapons over to Ukraine?

[Eric Bethel]

I'm not really in the know on those discussions. I really couldn't tell you.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Eric Bethel]

What I'm more concerned about is that we're pretty much out of javelins. We're pretty much out of 155 rounds. We're out of a lot of stuff. Our arsenals are getting depleted. And if there's ever a real shooting war over in Asia, what are we going to do? That's my bigger concern. And so I think that we need to start rearming ourselves very quickly because something is going to go down in Asia when we least expect it, and we're not going to be prepared. And it's in things that are seemingly nonsensical that are super important. I'll give you an illustration. A few days ago, China restricted sales of a metal known as antimony to the West. China. Both China and Russia together, they comprise probably like 85% of the world antimony market. Why is antimony important? Because we need it to make bullets. Without antimony, we don't have bullets. We don't have ammo. Right. Because they mix it with lead and whatever. So a bullet is made of a bunch of different metals that are forged together. It's an alloy, and antimony forms an integral part of that. China's like, oh, guess what? No more antimony for you guys. So I ask you, how are we gonna make bullets? What's the plan? And it's something as esoteric and, like, stupid as a minor metal. But that minor metal is super important to everything else. China restricted gallium and germanium six months ago, and those are crucial ingredients to make semiconductors. And China says, well, sorry, guys, they're not leaving. So gallium and germanium prices exploded. And so these are things that, you know, are seemingly irrelevant, but in their totality, they're super important. Does that make sense?

[Sean Ryan]

It makes perfect sense. Makes perfect sense. It's looking pretty grim.

[Eric Bethel]

There's hope, man. We're America.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Eric Bethel]

And I think with, like I said before, with good leadership, with humility, and, I think, a return to our roots. Look, I'm a man of faith. I don't wear it on my sleeve or anything, but I think it would be good for the United States, many of us at a ground level, not the government, to return to our Judeo Christian roots, especially when, you know, things are on fire. You know, it's like the story of the pilot who was flying into the landing strip, a commercial pilot, and his rudder stopped working. And so he called the flight deck and the tower and said, oh, my God, my rudder is flailing. And he was told by the tower, okay, listen, here's how you fix it. You've got to do this, that, and the other, and press these buttons and just repeat after me. Flaps, check. Engines, check. Rudder check. Okay, good. And he kept going down the approach, and all of a sudden, his engine, his left engine caught on fire. And he calls the tower again and says, oh, my gosh, what do I do? The engine's on fire. And they went through the same rigmarole and the buttons and turn off the fuel and repeat after me. Flaps check. Left right engine, check. Rudder, check. Okay, good. A few seconds later, the other engine's on fire, and the tower says, okay, repeat after me. Our Father, who art in heaven. So it's a joke, but, I mean, I think that when we're in a difficult situation, I think the best thing we can do is to pray, get back to our value system and just brush the dust off and get back on our feet. We will prevail.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, I hope. I hope we do that. I'd like to circle back on some of the. We're gonna totally switch it up here. Sorry about that I'd like to circle back on some of the Web3 stuff.

[Eric Bethel]

Sure.

[Sean Ryan]

What is Web3?

[Eric Bethel]

Well, I alluded. What I alluded to earlier, Web3 is decentralized finance. So in simplistic terms, centralized finance is. Everything is at a central server, central location. Visa, for example, has something called VisaNet. It is gigantic. So it's in the D.C. area. Think of a like football fields of servers that are processing my credit card transaction at Walgreens or cv, whatever. And so it's saying, eric is Eric, Walgreens is Walgreens. And they're matching these transactions they're doing using know your client. They're making sure that I have enough credit in my account to pay that Walgreens is, you know, so there's a lot of stuff happening in all of these servers in a centralized location. Right. Check. Centralized, decentralized. Imagine that. Server farm. What's the right word? Atomized, dispersed along a lot of different servers everywhere. And so my transaction is not going to a central place. It's bouncing. That same transaction is bouncing upon a lot of different servers.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay, so this is only finance.

[Eric Bethel]

Well, I mean, you can do decentralized identity, right? Let's assume at some point, you know, you're going to have a passport, an electronic version of a passport. You can do decentralized identity, where your. All of your information resides in lots of different computers everywhere. You can decentralize lots of things.

[Sean Ryan]

So is it a new Internet?

[Eric Bethel]

It's a new way of. It's a new way of transacting between people or between entities or between institutions. Yeah, okay. Where the transaction eliminates the middleman. That's super simplistic. We can really go into the weeds and lots of different things, but getting too technical sometimes just people zone out. But yeah, and you can do it in a trustless environment. So right now, the Visa net exists because I'm a trusted agent in the system, and Walgreens is a trusted agent in the system. But in a world that, you know, in a trustless society, you can decentralize a lot of stuff. Okay, so hence the origin of Bitcoin. I would encourage anybody who's listening to read the original Bitcoin white paper. It's like eight or nine pages long, but it lays it all out.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Eric Bethel]

It's really good. That's what started it all.

[Sean Ryan]

I wanted to. We had a good discussion about Bitcoin last night.

[Eric Bethel]

Sure.

[Sean Ryan]

And I was. How do I say I was surprised to hear you seemingly pro Bitcoin. I haven't talked to a Lot of people in finance who like bitcoin.

[Eric Bethel]

Why wouldn't it be? It's an asset class like any other. You can go jogging on the treadmill and watch CNBC and watch the stock tickers, and you see the prices of gold and soybeans and, oh, guess what Bitcoin is there. It's a real asset class. It's a legitimate asset class. People are able to buy Bitcoin ETFs, and so it's really. It's a version of digital gold. So it's an asset class that rises and falls like any other commodity, but it's a perfectly legitimate asset class.

[Sean Ryan]

Does it concern you at all that nobody really knows who created it?

[Eric Bethel]

Does it concern me? No. Because to date, bitcoin, it's been, what, a decade? And it's still working just fine.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Eric Bethel]

And while there have been hiccups along the way, the hiccups haven't been related to the Bitcoin architecture itself. The hacks that you hear about, like Mount Gox, which was a famous exchange in Japan back in the day, it's the exchange that got hacked. It's kind of like saying, you know, the New York Stock Exchange got hacked, therefore, stocks. I'm not going to buy stocks.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Eric Bethel]

But no, you know, bitcoin itself has maintained its integrity for a decade because the architecture was genius.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, Eric, we're kind of.

[Eric Bethel]

Man.

[Sean Ryan]

We've covered a lot so far.

[Eric Bethel]

A lot.

[Sean Ryan]

And. But I want to get into what you're doing now.

[Eric Bethel]

Okay, well, when the. When the Trump administration left and Biden transitioned in, I thought to myself, what am I going to do? I'm 50 years old, and I want to do something intentional and purposeful. And so as I started thinking about what to do, I had really two tracks. One track was as. I think we covered a lot of it earlier. How can the United States remain the preeminent global currency? And how do we need to think about the Chinese central bank digital currency with its authoritarian hand and how it could potentially be hurtful for the rest of the world? I didn't cover this, but China has what's known as a social credit score. Are you familiar with this?

[Sean Ryan]

Somewhat.

[Eric Bethel]

Yeah. So at a baseline, think of your credit score. When you go to a bank, they're going to want to know, do you have bills outstanding? How much debt do you have? Do you pay your bills on time? And you're given a score right now. Take that and give it steroids. Did you buy diapers? Are you a good father? Great. Your score goes Up. Do you engage in pro Xi Jinping rallies? Have you read Xi Jinping's thought leadership Guide? You know, all these things make you go up or down in the social score ratings to the point where there are apps on the phone in China today where if there's an individual with a low social credit score near you, you can avoid them.

[Sean Ryan]

Are you kidding me?

[Eric Bethel]

No, it's really not.

[Sean Ryan]

I did not know that.

[Eric Bethel]

It's not a, you know, Black Mirror episode. This is reality. As you're crossing the street, if you're jaywalking, the cameras are monitoring you through facial recognition. The phone is geolocating you, and as you're jaywalking, the system is taking money out of your bank account for jaywalking. And so everything you do is monitored, and that includes, of course, your purchases. And the Chinese digital currency is a part of a broader plan to impose government will on its citizenry. Right. That's frightening. And so I was, you know, how do we help the US Dollar and how do we preserve freedom? And that got me down the rabbit hole of bitcoin and decentralized finance and so forth. So that was one track. The second track that I've spent the last several years on is I went back to my roots as a naval officer, and I came to a few conclusions. The oceans are important, and they're important for a lot of reasons. For the last several decades, 25% of the fish have been depleted from the ocean. I live on the water in Miami. Like, the ocean is important to me. So China's building four times the number of ships that we are, ten times the number. They have a 300 to 1 shipbuilding advantage in tonnage to the United States.

[Sean Ryan]

300 to 1.

[Eric Bethel]

300 to 1. Commercial shipping lines are getting attacked by Houthis in the Red Sea with Zodiacs and Stinger missiles, right? So it's seemingly out of the blue. The maritime domain has become important. So together with a team of folks, we created a fund focused on the intersection of technology and the maritime domain. So tech companies and maritime. With basically three pillars that hold up our strategy. The first is commercial shipping. How do we make it more efficient? Can we put Internet of things inside of shipping vessels that you can track everything from how the engine room is doing? Just like you have sensors on your car, right? Can you put cameras on the ship that can allow you to see navigational obstacles way in advance so that you don't have to do crazy turns and you can save gas? So port software. China controls, like, 80% of the world's software that operates ports. It's crazy. That's a national security issue. Anyway. So commercial is one leg. The second leg is sustainability, whether it's countering illegal fishing, mapping the ocean floor, or decarbonizing ships. Because the International Maritime Organization has mandated that ships lower their carbon footprint. So that could mean technologies around new paint coatings, new propulsion systems, things like that. And the third leg. So track one is commercial, track two is sustainability, and track three is national security. And that probably needs no explanation. So that's what we do. We invest in tech companies, and we're looking to not just invest in them, but make them better, help our portfolio companies along and hopefully make a meaningful change to the world's oceans.

[Sean Ryan]

What else are you guys mapping under there?

[Eric Bethel]

Well, I mean, we invested in a company that. So we're a fund. And so what we do is we invest in companies. One of those companies makes a drone that maps the ocean floor. And so think about when you mow your lawn and you're kind of going backwards and forwards, and you can map a kilometer of ocean floor and find there's a little hill there, there's a mountain there. Oh, look, there's a ravine. And why are you doing this? So that you can put the next fiber optic cable. You're going to need to know where to put it. You're going to need to potentially track marine mammal migrations where you're going to put the next offshore wind turbine. From the national security standpoint, a concern is that perhaps China or adversaries have put ordinance on the ocean floor. So there are a lot of things, and there are a lot of reasons. Just like you have Google Earth, right? Two thirds of our planet is ocean, but we haven't mapped the ocean floor. So I think we need to. And the United nations has mandated that we map 27 times the size of the United States over the next few decades.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Eric Bethel]

So, yeah, there's going to be a lot to do in that space. But that's just one of our various companies that we're investing in.

[Sean Ryan]

Which ones are you. Is there one in particular that you're most excited about?

[Eric Bethel]

I'm excited about all of them.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Eric Bethel]

And what I'm really excited about is the mentality and the entrepreneurial spirit that we have in the United States, where you have founders that are making the most amazing things and inventing the most amazing things. And like I said before, the American spirit is alive and well, and we will prevail. And we will prevail because we have founders and we have entrepreneurs that have the stamina, the creativity and the desire to just build and do awesome things. And I stand like, I'm in awe of the folks that we're investing in, many of them.

[Sean Ryan]

So that's what gives me hope, is that there's still an incentive to create in this country. And that's important.

[Eric Bethel]

And we will prevail. So thank you. Thank you for chatting with me. I hope I wasn't too loopy or said anything nutty, but just gave you a little bit of my background and very happy to be here.

[Sean Ryan]

It was an amazing interview. Fascinating. I learned a ton. I know the audience did. And I gotta say this, I would love to be connected with somebody at the executive level at that underwater drone program to interview him.

[Eric Bethel]

Sure.

[Sean Ryan]

And I would like to ask you, if you had, if you had three recommendations for me to interview, who would they be?

[Eric Bethel]

Elon Musk comes to mind. Just iconic people that have done amazing things. Elon Musk, for example, I'm not sure if he's human. How do you create an electric car company, a space company, a satellite company, Neuralink, Twitter. I don't know how he does it, but he is seemingly successful in many, many disciplines. And it's just awe inspiring that America was able to attract, because he's from South Africa, attract somebody to come to the United States and do these amazing things and has given him the opportunity to succeed the way he has. But I'm sure I'll come up with other names. Those are just the iconic top of mind, folks.

[Sean Ryan]

Those are some big ones. I appreciate it. All right, well, Eric, I also really appreciate you coming, coming to Franklin and doing this interview, and it's been a real honor and I learned a ton. So God bless and best of luck to you.

[Eric Bethel]

Thanks.

[Sean Ryan]

Hey, it's Rich Eisen here. Join me and my compadre Chris Brockman every Monday on the Overreaction Monday podcast.

[Eric Bethel]

Rich Jamis has taken the Browns to the playoffs.

[Sponsor]

Dude, why can't they win seven, eight.

[Eric Bethel]

Games to finish the year? Why not? I'm not saying that it's no why not, but this is a definitive statement that's clearly an overreaction, and it's perfect fodder for a show like this one. I appreciate you coming out of the.

[Sean Ryan]

Gate hot come react or overreact with us.

[Eric Bethel]

Overreaction Monday.

[Sean Ryan]

Wherever you listen, it's game over over, man.