On The Brink with Castle Island - Adam Draper (Boost VC) on Investing in Sci-Fi Technologies (EP.61)

Episode Date: April 1, 2020

Adam Draper, co-founder of BoostVC, an accelerator and venture fund focused on Sci-Fi technologies joins the show. In this episode we discuss: - Adam's advice for portfolio companies navigating the current COVID 19 crisis - His thesis on Virtual Reality and what categories he is most excited about - His journey in crypto, from being an early investor in Coinbase to present - Book recommendations Learn more about Boost at Boost.vc and follow Adam on Twitter @adamdraper

This week's episode is brought to you by Zen Ledger, one of our portfolio companies, actually. Zen Ledger is the best software to get your crypto taxes done fast and easy. They have friendly customer service by phone, email, or chat, and it's the easiest place to get your crypto taxes done. If you use a CPA, you can invite them and they can be part of your process. You can also do tax loss harvesting or get a full audit report. And as a special offer for our listeners, you can use the coupon code Castle 15 to get 15% off. That's Zenledger. I. Go check it out. Today on the podcast, we spoke with Adam Draper, the co-founder of BoostVC.

Adam's one of my favorite people to catch up with because his optimism is contagious and he's constantly telling me about exciting new technologies. I first got to know Adam when I was at Fidelity and he was one of the early investors in the crypto asset ecosystem. At Boost, he focuses on sci-fi technologies, as he calls them. These include virtual reality, cryptocurrencies, space technology, robotics, and ocean technology. In this episode, we discussed the advice that Adam is giving to his portfolio companies and how he encourages founders to, quote, behave like cockroaches. We talked a lot about the VR landscape in which categories are well positioned in a COVID-19 downturn. And we also talked about the state of the crypto asset market and where Adam is

spending his time. This episode was a lot of fun. So without further ado, here's our conversation with Adam Draper. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans, American international group AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of

constituted easy. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Adam, thanks so much for joining the podcast. Thanks for having me, Matt. I'm really excited to be here. In some ways, it's the best time to be on this podcast because I have to be in my house, in my garage. It's true. I mean, I would have loved to do this in person, but we're doing it. You've got the nice boost VC background behind you. I can't tell where you are. I think you're at your house, but it looks like you're ready to go. Yep. I am. I'm ready to go. Well, that's awesome. So a lot to talk about you were one of the first people that I started talking crypto with. So we have a lot to talk about crypto. I want to talk a lot about VR.

but maybe before we do, why don't we just talk about what's going on in the world with COVID-19 and how's this impacting you? What's been the impact on your portfolio? And how's it going? I think like everyone else, digesting it initially was tough. So it was sort of like one of those, it's a tough pill to swallow that the world change. And I truly believe that. I think the world changed. Even if tomorrow everything's fine, COVID-19 is gone, everyone will be thinking about the world differently. And that is a crucial. crazy, weird thing to think about, but then also a big opportunity. So, I mean, never in all of history has the entire world been focused on one problem. That, to me, is one of the most

unifying, exciting things about this experience. There's a lot of things that are not great about it. Don't get me wrong. It's a horrible virus. It's making the economy sort of in a tough spot. But what we get to do every day, I woke up one morning and I was like, what I do is not only fun right now, but it's actually a necessity. We're about to come up against a world where unemployment is actually going to be going up, where over the last 10 years it's been sort of flatlined at a low. And that means that supporting what we call sci-fi heroes is probably the most important thing that we could be doing is building new economies, creating new technologies, and building out new companies. On one side, yeah, scary, fear-based. And then once I got past that, it was very,

I am waking up every morning just jazzed to be doing what I'm doing because I get to support all these amazing founders. On a personal level, I would say, I mean, the amazing things are, I have been sort of, it's been a catalyst for me to reach out to friends and family right before this podcast. My grandfather actually called me and checked in on me, which probably has never happened, which is amazing. And, and, you know, it's just nice. We're like reconnecting. We're tighter than ever as humanity. When you look at the whole picture, it's actually great. On the founder front, the world changed. I'm talking a lot right now, but I want to sort of summarize how I'm thinking about the market and then we can sort of go into other stuff. That's awesome. I love speaking with you because you're always so

optimistic. And I think a bunch of the categories that you're investing in really are going to be shining during this period, however long it lasts, particularly around VR. But maybe before we hop into some of those, could you just set the stage and give your background, talk a little bit about boost and what you're doing with the firm? Oh, yeah. Should have done that before. It named Adam Draper. I'm founder and managing director of Boost VC, which is, as you can see behind me, if this is going to be on video, the accelerator for sci-fi tech. We take private. We take pride in being able to build ecosystems around the latest technologies before almost anyone else. We were the first fund to focus on Bitcoin as an ecosystem and backing founders in that space.

We have been back investing in virtual reality for about five years. And this is the first time that that's an exciting thing for other people. It was exciting for us back then. It's really exciting for other people right now. And then I'm obsessed with the ocean. And so that's sort of become a little bit more of a vertical, but really what we are is we want to invest in the precipice of human risk. We want to invest in human endeavor and because those people are the people who really change the world. So that's what the Boots v.C. Accelerator is all about. We've invested. It's been eight years now, 300 companies. We've invested some of it, in my opinion, greatest. And you and I have a couple of great portfolio of careings, you know, CASA, a couple others. Yeah. So,

that's what boost VC is. Another thing that I think it sort of ties me to sort of the overarching venture capital market is that I come from a family of venture capitalist. My great grandfather was a venture capitalist. My grandfather is a venture capitalist. My dad is venture capitalists. And they've all brought something unique to the ecosystems. So yeah, that's me. That's myself and Buccc. I was the first investor in Coinbase. So that's sort of a cool thing. It's worked out pretty well. Well, yeah. And I think it's more important than ever right now. For sure. I mean, just for crypto, I'm not even saying coinbit. I just think right now, if you are a natively digital thing, you are so important for the economy. For sure. I mean, I was just saying to my wife earlier that I can't tell you how many people have reached out just asking me about Bitcoin, like how to buy it, where can I learn more about it? This week of all weeks, it's just been crazy. And I think it has to do with what's going on, obviously, with the quantitative easing measures.

It's never been more important. Yeah. I mean, the stuff that people are trying to do at like the money printing machines out there, I'm, yeah, own some Bitcoin. I'm very bullish. Yeah, for sure. So maybe you're stepping back and talking about companies that are in your portfolio. You have invested in a lot of companies.

You've been around for eight years already. This is clearly a first panic crisis, whatever you want to call it, of this magnitude in either of our lifetimes, I would think. What type of advice are you giving to the founders when you're going to. to talk to them right now at these portfolio companies? The first, so we've taken the last two, three weeks, and we've basically been like, okay, let's diagnose what's going on with all the portfolio. And so what we've been doing is hosting Zoom meetings with actually the different ecosystem. So we did a crypto ecosystem.

We did a VR ecosystem. We did an ocean ecosystem. And I'd say the first thing is just sort of being there for the fears that people are having because there's so much uncertainty. So it's about voicing that uncertainty and just saying like, hey, everyone has it. There's no one who doesn't have this uncertainty. But then it's also about just saying like, what are the positives that are coming up this? Let's look at and figure out where to focus and where to spend time.

Now, the actual advice I am giving, rather than that's where I'm listening and hearing more, but the advice I'm giving is figure out how to get 18 to 24 months runway right now because the phrase I've been using is the world changed. Everything you thought you knew about either venture capital, business, startups, it changed. We don't know how exactly yet, but I know that investors are going to be easing up. There are certainties that will be coming with us. Yes, companies will still be funded. Yes, there are a lot of funds out there who are actively deploying capital and very excited to deploy capital.

However, in general, we were in a founder-friendly market where, everyone was employed, we're moving to a more investor-friendly market where the employment rate is going to be dropping quite a bit. So it's imperative that you are starting businesses, but you need to be building for a profit and stop thinking that venture capital is sort of something to lean on. That's great advice. Yeah. That's a really good advice. And you have that saying, be the cockroach. I think that's especially pertinent right now. I'm so glad that we came up with that so long ago, there's this, for anyone listening, the first company that Booth V.C. ever invest in was a company called Favor. And it was these two founders out of Cal Poly who were doing

on-demand food delivery. And they moved to Austin and they sort of took over Austin as their place where they did business and DoorDash Postmates couldn't really penetrate that market because favor was already there. And we always had this feeling about them where they were always out of money, but they never were going to die. That was sort of the thing. And we were. like, yeah, they're just cockroaches. And then we started saying, like, that's what we're looking for, because we were investing not huge amounts of money. We wanted people who were going to be there until the wave hit. And as we focused on cryptocurrency, that became incredibly important because the wave wasn't there yet. With virtual reality, the exact same thing. And these habits of just

making iterative improvements until a wave hits, this in some ways is a massive hit to the economy, but then a positive massive hit to anything digital. Anything digital is getting a fresh flow of new users right now. Everyone is trying to test things at home. Everyone's trying to try to do things. So one of the internal slogans at BoostVC is Be the Cockroach. We have taken that as a one of our companies actually just wrote an entire customer update where customers were reaching out saying like, are you okay, like your company okay?

and they wrote, yeah, this is like normal. Our number one value is be the cockroach. We'll be here. That's awesome. I love that. I love that. I want to talk a little bit about VR. So this is an area of the world that I know very little about, to be fully honest.

But it's a huge focus area for you. And you've been investing in the space longer than anyone I know. So talk a little bit about just what is your general thesis on VR right now? How do you think about this market? What's investable? What's not? What type of businesses are you backing? Just talk generally about.

about what you're seeing there. My thesis on most of everything is actually coming very true right now, which is, and I think people are realizing it more than ever, we are humans on a rock hurtling through space. So we should figure out how to live here. The two things that I believe are revolutions that are happening in the world. One is we are building a truly digital world, and the other is we're saving this physical world's resources. We're trying to figure out how to conserve all these. resources. The fully digital stack is crypto, the internet, VR, and AI. That's the stack. Those

things are almost guarantees if we are truly building a digital world, which I've sort of made that way of like 70 investments in virtual reality. The thing that got me into it was I tried on a Samsung gear, which is not a high quality headset. And all of a sudden I was sitting on the moon watching Transformers the movie. And I was like, yeah, this is going to be a thing. And I wasn't moving. There was nothing fancy about it. And it was super early. I mean, it was four and a half years ago, five years ago. So we decided to add a vertical, which was virtual reality. We saw that there was this really smart group of people who were focused on building towards human endeavor in virtual reality. And we were like, okay, we're good at building communities. Let's do that. And we quickly

realize that the killer applications of virtual reality are education, so training is sort of the popular one right now, but learning things. And VR is like the matrix. You actually get to do the things. You want to be a pilot. You want to be a surgeon. You want to practice without the cost of having a cadaver to be a surgeon. You want to practice without the cost of owning a plane to be a pilot. Social, just being together. The killer app of VR is being together. We are viewing this digital world through a window. I'm looking at this thing. And rather than like you and I being in the same room, which is actually possible today, you can actually do podcasts and stuff in virtual reality, but facial expression is still a big problem. We still don't have facial expression in VR.

And then fitness, the thing that was a surprise to us was fitness ended up being sort of this sleeper hit. And we have two investments in that space, which are FitXR and Y. You Are Fit, which is sort of like the digital Fitbit and then which tracks your digital health. And then the other one is fitness club in virtual reality. And I mean, it is interesting. Most things are blowing up in virtual reality right now. A lot of people are at home. If they bought a headset, they finally turned it on.

They're trying to connect with people. And I've done two of these now. There's actually a company called Adventure Lab. They do a escape the room in VR. I did it with my family once and I did it with my friends once. And it was so fun. These are the types of things where everyone's experimenting and trying stuff.

And I think what people are going to be surprised about with VR is how robust the ecosystem is and how good the content is now. People just haven't wanted to go in for like dizziness reasons. And I think the threat of the virus will cause them to be like, well, I can be dizzy for a second. Yeah, I've got enough problems. I can spend some time in VR. How do you see the incumbent tech monopolies?

for lack of a better word, competing in VR. Is this a space that everyone is looking at, or is it feature rich and conducive to upstarts as well? What's that dynamic look like in the market? So what's fascinating about virtual reality is that over the last 40 years, there have been so many false starts. So it was like 80s, 90s, early 2000s,

there were always a new headset, there was always a new thing, and everyone got excited about it. Even, I think he's eight years ago now, Oculus got bought by Facebook or six years ago, like it was a long time ago. And that was a false start to the ecosystem again. They bought it and everyone was like, oh, this is the time it's going to work. And it's right, but they needed to first scale.

And we didn't think about like the fact that we needed this big market. So now we have all this content that's being built out and it can be distributed to millions of headsets in a very quality way. And so I think a lot of the incumbents got disheartened by, those false starts. And so they use those as an excuse not to participate. But Facebook made a big bed early and it's starting to pay off. They even showed the metrics that last year, they made $100 million on the app store and $100 million in revenue. And 30% of it came from the latest headset, which had only been out for like three months. It's a really exciting people who buy it, buy content. That's what they've realized because it's a $400 device now. I'm talking about the

Oculus Quest. A lot of people right now are going out to buy the Oculus Go. Don't do that because it's not as good. And I can explain why, but that's basically it. You buy the Oculus Quest. They're both from the same company. One is three DAF, which means three degrees of tracking. And you don't want that one. Because that means you have to be seated at the experience and you can't move around. If you get the six DAF, which is six degrees of freedom, you can actually like physically move in the space. So you must get asked this question a lot, but curious what your view is on AR, so augmented reality versus VR. And where are we in terms of timing for AR versus VR? And I guess which category do you find most promising?

I'd imagine VR. So what's fascinating is I think I was contrarian for a really long time on this. So I think they're both huge, first off. That'll be my first thing. Like right now, I'm using augmented reality to have this background behind it. Zoom has an augmented reality button. It's called the background, virtual backgrounds. However, my bet is that, and it's a very simplistic view of the entire space, which is,

I believe that VR is truly an infinite world. Infinite means never ends. And so you can always create your imagination in that world, where AR is really overlaying this world with new information. And so that is a finite amount of space that you can use, where we can create infinite space virtual reality world. It's a very simple way of looking at it, but I believe that I'm right on the 30-year time frame. I think VR is exponentially bigger. I just know that they're going to merge at some point.

It's not going to matter that it's VR-A-R. It's going to matter that I'm talking to a raccoon in some sort of crazy Disney experience. I mean, AR is actually taking off pretty well right now. I mean, Snap is probably the best example where the face filters, that's augmented reality. It's just when you can stop saying virtual reality and augmented reality, that's when things are taking off. That's going to be the exciting moment where people are just saying, hey, get into my glasses, try this thing. That will be very cool. That makes sense.

So what are your favorite VR applications right now? What should people check out? I will say the thing that I use probably the most, I mean, I listed to Adventure Lab and FitXR, I actually use both of those. So Fox VR is FitXR's product where you box. And I genuinely get exhausted and winded and like I drenched in sweat. And that's, it's a good workout. It's just a good workout. And then I think content creation is going to be really interesting. We've backed a company called Masterpiece and Tabori. And so you're able to, people are able to just like create amazing thing oh here i'm going to give a quick like if you have

the quest here's the boost vc package it's tribe vr which is tribe xr it's learning to dj but there's a social element to it sculptor vr so create your own world and then hang out with friends you can do that it's fit xr it's poker VR i think that is the best thing that i can tell you it's just download those apps a couple of them are free couple of them costs 10 to 20 bucks each yeah those are the best those are in my opinion the best but I will say the thing I have spent still the most time on just because I'm an obsessive once I get into something I have to gain a mastery of it was a space pirate trainer which is you have two guns and you have to take out these AI robots but the best example in a game of VR is probably super hot right now which is you freeze time

and stuff it's pretty awesome so if you're listening for VR, Tribe VR, TribeXR, the FitXR, poker VR, download them. That's the BoostVC like startup kit. And then there are a couple other popular things and they're great. I'm going to check it out. I think in the next quarter we're going to start to see some statistics coming out of this in terms of how many headsets were sold and how many downloads there are. It's going to be crazy.

Even more than that, it's how much time people are spending. So how much time people are spending in VR is starting to look out landish. That's the trend that we're seeing as we're getting together with all of our companies and talking to them. They're like, yeah, it's more about how much time they're spending in headset now. And that's exciting. That's really interesting. So one transition into crypto. So you're super early into crypto.

You mentioned that you're the first investor into Coinbase. What initially got you excited? How did you even hear about it? What sent you down the rabbit hole? Okay. So I have a very unique weird, like it was a life is mostly life. lucky and random and amazing. I reached out to Brian Armstrong, Coinbase. While they were fundraising, I had this small time before I started Boost VC where I was just investing in a couple startups.

And I looked at the description of the company and it said digital currency marketplace. That's what the one liner was. And at that time, I was like, I don't know what a digital currency is. I don't know that there needs to be a marketplace of these things. I'm really excited about learning about this world that I know nothing about. And so I met Brian at a coffee shop. It's called Red Rock. I give Red Rock a lot of credit. Actually, someone finally came up to me and said, like, I need to go to this Red Rock place

you keep talking about. Because in a lot of podcasts, I talk about Red Rock. I've had great success at Red Rock. And the thing he said, first off, no one gives Brian Armstrong enough credit for, I mean, obviously he's running a multiple billion dollar company. So no one wants to like he's getting the credit. but he didn't successfully fundraise for his seat round, and he had to educate the entire venture capital community

on what Bitcoin was. I don't think it gets quite enough credit because he got rejected by everything. But he said one brilliant thing to me, which was he had to describe Bitcoin and his platform, and he said at some point, the world will be on one financial infrastructure. And that concept just resonated with me.

And so then it was more about, okay, I believe this entrepreneur is great, obsessed for this idea. Now I need to make sure this idea is big. And the entire market size of this thing was $100 million at the time where it's what, $250 billion now. Like it was $100 million. 10 bucks of Bitcoin. Like it was nothing. And I was like, okay, what can I do? So I asked for references and I talked to all these crypto people. And every single one, yes, they had this like anarchist idealistic vibe, but they were all obsessed. It was a piece of their identity, this thing. And was their identity.

And having a small group of incredibly passionate, you just knew that there was something special about this technology and about what was about to emerge. So I ended up investing, and I'm very fortunate to be a part of that history. It ended up also being the trigger of me completely focusing on Bitcoin as our accelerator.

In 2013, we ended up backing at like 100 plus startups in the crypto space, still doing it, still investing in crypto. Yeah. What you said about people being obsessive, I couldn't agree more. I mean, you run into entrepreneurs in this space and it's their life work and they would work on it for free. I mean, some of these protocol developers specifically, I mean, this is something that they're the definition of mission driven entrepreneurs. It's really something to see. So over the years since that, since you founded Coinbase, so much has happened. I mean, we went through a private blockchain phase hype cycle.

We went through a period of education with financial firms trying to figure this stuff out. You were a big part of that going and delivering a lot of education seminars to big firms. That's where we met. And then over the years, we also saw the launch of Ethereum and all sorts of other platforms. I still remember meeting you. We met at that restaurant. That was great. Oh, that's right.

Yeah, that's right. They kept talking about this great guy at Fidelity, this great guy. They got Matt, Matt. They were talking about my boss. They were like, Matt. You got to talk to Matt. And I was like, so there's a lot of hype going into the dinner about Matt. And I was like, got to talk to this Matt guy.

Hopefully it wasn't overhyped. Under, underhyped. There was a lot overhyped in some of those days. So so much has changed and you've had to keep up with so much in terms of, is this protocol worth paying attention to? Is this private blockchain thing actually a thing? what type of companies are you backing now and how do you think about just segmenting the world? You can't see everything in blockchain crypto space.

How do you think about what actually matters? This is what the entire investment space is about. The space, people during 2017 got a little misguided because anything could raise, right? Like anything was able to raise money if you had a generally okay idea. And then the private blockchain stuff, like we never got super hooked into because, why not just use a database? And I mean, there are some really great use cases, and I think some people still try to sell me on it.

I think there are some genuinely good use cases today. But what we've always sort of done is we always want to see a team. First off, I'm all people. The person matters more than anything else. You want the person and the idea to line up. You want it to be like, yeah, this sort of makes sense. That person will work on this idea for eight years. and they'll create more value than previous to their entire life.

This eight years is their eight years to make this value. Ideally, it's longer than eight years. I'm just saying like eight years you start to realize whether or not there was value there. Are they committed to doing it for free is always a good thing? How long have they been working on it? But in crypto specifically, we want to make sure that people are thinking differently, if that makes sense. I do think defy is a really great thing.

But mostly people are just imitating what already exists. So I want to see what couldn't exist before. And normally for education purposes, you need to go through this phase where I have a saying, you have to become the enemy you want to defeat. So you sort of need to become what people are used to first. And then you walk them to what the new way is. And I think we're in that phase. We're imitating a lot of the things that already exist.

And now we're going to have a lot more community-based financing tools. And that's what smart contracts and decentralized finance is all about. A lot of decentralized finance isn't really decentralized. That's kind of the secret, not so secret of the defy space in some ways. It's also what is crypto actually good for? And I would say the one use case that is clear is storing value. That is the clear use case right now. And that's mostly Bitcoin, but there are others.

And then it's an excuse for a lot of really smart people to be iterating on fintech. like that's the other piece. We're just trying to find the right people who are in insurance, who are like crypto is the right thing to be solving insurance because I think insurance is broken. And I think back to COVID-19, which is sort of this murky thing all around us, what we're really witnessing is a real flaw in the healthcare and economy. Those are scary things. And so I believe that decentralized insurance and decentralized finance will solve actually

both of these problems that are being highlighted right now through a centralized government. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One of the things that you and I have talked about at length over the years is just the kind of the lack of user empathy maybe that's been in this industry for a while. It's really technology-driven industry, and it's really difficult for the average person who doesn't necessarily have a technical competency to get involved and to use some of these products. And so user interfaces has been a big focus for you.

You know, where are we with that? Is it getting better? Is it getting better fast enough for some of these interfaces? Yeah, I think so. The two things I'm going to plug right now are I love Guesser. I think Guesser is a great example of an amazing user interface that's using heavy sort of decentralized technology underneath, but it's a centralized user interface on top of Auger, which lies on top of Ethereum. That's so exciting to me because it simplifies what these users want. They just want to bet. They just want to predict. They just want it like, that's exciting to me. And then the other thing is on this sort of wave of translating. what people already understand in the real world is we invest in a company called Unstoppable domains. Unstoppable sells websites, but they are decentralized domains, and that is new. But people understand domains aren't a digital asset. And so it's a much more simple way of sort of triggering that, oh, okay, I own this thing that people can use and build maybe Google, some company. and it's marketing.

Like, oh, these guys have a marketing real estate thing in the digital world. And I think having people understand little at a time or it's going to be very exciting, even though, I mean, what's exciting about unstoppable is like it's an asset that people understand to be an asset, but it's not like a Bitcoin, this thing that you need to learn about. Right. Yeah, I think that's a great example. And there will be assets at the intersection of virtual reality too. And so people understand domain as real estate.

But you might be in a situation not too far from now where you're actually buying real estate digital assets in VR. This is already happening, actually. Oh, you're not doing that? Yeah. You're probably already doing that. I need to get my headset. Well, I mean, Decentraland is sort of the closest in that world.

And that ecosystem's evolving pretty well. I know ECG has sort of taken a big swing to support that ecosystem, which is exciting. when we started supporting virtual reality and crypto, we did not know that there was ever going to be an overlap of the two ecosystems. But it turns out they're both incredibly interrelated because basically everything in a headset, every asset is going to be a website, basically. There's going to be a link to where that is on the blockchain, like what it's for who owns it. and everything that's around you in virtual reality.

If you've ever seen the movie Ready Player 1, yeah, of course, yeah. You couldn't do any of that stuff without the blockchain if you're having a truly ownership-driven economy. And that is so exciting. One of the things that I love to talk about is sometimes science fiction writers are better at predicting the future

than the actual industry experts. And so in the 1970s, I think it was 1974, 75. The founder, Ken Olson of Digital Equipment Corporation, which is the largest computer company at the time, was asked about PCs. And he basically said,

I'll get the quote wrong, but it was something to the extent of why would you ever need a computer in your house? Like, no one's going to want that. And then Arthur C. Clark, the science fiction writer, right around the same time within a couple of years, really painted a picture of not only PCs,

but of iPhones. And just talking about how Every business person will be conducting business via these things. And so it was the science fiction writer back then that had it right versus the industry expert. And I think Ready Player One might be a great example, right? We might live in that world not too far from now. My fear is that the current science fiction writers are not thinking far enough out now. My fear is that our imagination is being hindered by something because almost everything that's been written about is possible now.

Like Ready Player 1, everything completely exists. Like, it all exists. We're thinking Star Wars, Star Trek. Like, we imagine a world where there are spaceships above us. We've already imagined that and we have people building that. I want people to start thinking further. I want science fiction writers to be thinking further. That's sort of what I want.

I hope that our imaginations are staying sort of the same unlimited distance. But I feel I haven't read anything that's made me think we're imaginative. I love that. So maybe to close out on the crypto part of this, Bitcoin, the case for Bitcoin, it's been a crazy week and a half here, right? Yeah. I don't always give investment advice, but I will say buy some. So it's been a crazy week. So we had a massive sell-off last week. There's all sorts of margin calls. We had gold being sold off. We had just about everything, except for dollars. And now Bitcoin is really ripped coming out of that. And I think you're starting to see more people that previously might not have even understood Bitcoin talking about it in the

context of digital gold, and especially with all the unprecedented interventions that are happening right now. I know you're a bull, but I'd have to think that the case has really never been stronger from your perspective. I think I've always been a bull, but recently, I don't think I've ever had a time in my career where I've felt I need it. I've always felt like, oh, it's a nice to have. If you're in crypto, you sort of expect the apocalypse to happen at some point. And when it's happening, you're like, this isn't any longer a nice to have. This is a, I own my property.

Like, I own my coins. This is important to have my own bank account that I control. I think that simple piece of mind helps me a lot. I don't know, you know, I'm not everyone. My bias is, I've been in this industry for 10 years. and, you know, I do believe that it builds a better future. Like it makes us more in control and connected to our money. It builds economies that we can't even fathom right now.

All those things are exciting. But I think this is in some ways what this situation, this lockdown, this quarantine is forcing us to do. Imagine what the world is in five years. It's making us live five years in the future where we are digitally talking and communicating. We are working digitally on different projects. But those projects are the same as what we were doing before, but we have to figure out this communication thing. I think that this fast forward that's happening right now is making people consider Bitcoin faster. And they're considering cryptocurrency faster.

And that as a necessity rather than an option. And I think that's really exciting, especially when you watch the government decide, oh, yeah, no, we're willing to print as much money as possible. realizing that printing a bunch of money as possible is taxes and then pressing a money pritcher button. And that's a little scary. I'm not in control of that. I am in control of the Bitcoin I have. Yeah, that's a great point.

I think Neil Kashkari's appearance on 60 minutes last week when he talked about the infinite ability to print money at the federal level, that is really an advertisement for what we're talking about. I always said the most interesting thing about Bitcoin originally was that it caused everyone to make the question, what is money? When I was growing up, I never thought about it. It was just this, in order to get my pizza, there's this scarce thing that I have to use. But where does it all come from is never really part of the education? Economics. In economics, they're like supply and demand. I never really understood fundamentally how the system works. Bitcoin was my PhD in

economics. That's me diving in deep and understanding how these companies were going to build themselves and change the economy. That was my first class ticket to how the system is going to work and does work. And it's false. In general, up until now, I do believe that the centralized government system was the best system for managing billions of people's money until the internet. Until the internet, it was the best way. We have the internet now. There is. is a better way. Well said. Well said. So my closing question would be a lot of people are going to be listening to this from their quarantines that have been going on for at least a week or two at this point. Not sure how much longer it'll continue. But any good book or movie or show recommendations,

what should people be doing on their time hunkered down here? First off, I think the first thing I want everyone to do in this quarantine is take a second, you know, hug the things that are important to you, do the things that are important to you. And then think about what you want the next, how you want the next 10 years to look, where you want to be, what products need to exist to make that better. I would encourage people not to watch as much television right now

just because I feel like people are doing that for an escape and try to read, read more. I reread books a lot. Maybe that's my escape, but I always think I'm visiting the author's head. I just reread Aragon as a, book about a guy who rides dragons. It was amazing. Amazing again. Everyone always recommends, I haven't read Third Body Problem, and I'm sure that's like a cursed thing to say in our crypto ecosystem.

That is on my list. I have a list of 20 books I want to get through. The books I reread most are Harry Potter, The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, Ender's Game. I mean, I read a lot. Ender's game's awesome. What am I reading right now? I'm reading. Oh, I'm reading Snow Crash for the first time, which is like also cursed the taboo in the VR ecosystem. So now I'm finally getting around to these books that everyone's been talking about forever because I love reading. Also, I subscribe to the Scientific American.

That's a great magazine. Just build towards a better world because what we're realizing is the coronavirus is just highlighting problems that we already had. That's what it is. It's showing that there were problems in the economy, in the healthcare system, and it's fast-forwarding answers.

That's what we're doing right now. by quarantining everyone. We're trying to fast forward answers. And so if it's not the coronavirus, what is the thing in the next 10 years that's important for us to be building towards? I want people to think and read towards their missions. That's sort of my jam. So I believe my job is more important than ever. I get to sort of push people to think further, to build more, to go faster. Yeah, I get to help assist people in employing more people. Venture capitalists are important now. A lot of VCs are going to be running away from this. And I think that it's a time to build an economy. So that's what I want to say. Very well said. Some of the projects and

companies that emerge from the other side of this are going to be amazing, just all the time that people are cooped up right now, just obsessively building things. I can't wait to see what comes out of it. Biggest companies either started right before or during the biggest events, like financial events. So now's the time to build a big company. For sure. That's a great place to leave it. So Adam, where can people follow you and learn more about what you're building at Boost? I should always lead with that. Go to boost.Vc. And if you want to apply to our program, we run two programs a year. Our applications can be open in about a month for the next try. So go on the website to be reminded that that's about to happen. Follow me on Twitter. I'm pretty

active there at Adam Draper. Yeah, email me at Adam at boost.vc. I would love to hear any in all. So thank you so much for listening. Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks, Adam. It was great to be able to connect. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island.Vicc to castle island. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the Brink dash podcast.com or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.