TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #378: Building a Billion Dollar Payments Company with Ryan Breslow

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Ryan Breslow to discuss Bolt, Love, and the AI Singularity. Follow Ryan on Twitter 6:48 - Stanford Bitcoin Group 11:21 - Building Bolt 15:08 - Pain points in Bolt 17:25 - Making API for merchants 21:15 - Engaging with VCs as a founder 26:46 - What value to look for in an investor 28:36 - Bitcoin companies are long term game 31:38 - Bolt started as a Bitcoin wallet 35:27 - Optimism 43:03 - AI art and the singularity 47:13 - Getting addicted to tech 53:17 - Ryan's new venture, Love 1:02:25 - Final words of wisdom Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Upstream Data TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc rip 378 i sat down ryan breslow founder of bolt founder of the stanford bitcoin group back in 2013 founder of love a company focused on health care in the modern age and alternative ways to do it we had a far wide-ranging conversation about startup culture building a payments company a billion dollar payments company uh his thoughts on bitcoin our addiction to social media apps i'm addicted i'll be the first to admit hi my name is marty bent and i'm addicted to twitter i need to work on it we talk about a lot of this this report was brought to you by our good friends at unchained capital unchained capital is here to help you

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so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be what is up freaks welcome back to tftc it's your boy marty here on a brisk wednesday afternoon in austin texas joined by ryan breslow a man of many talents ryan welcome to the show it's great to be here marty well again thank you for joining us i think i'm really interested to get your perspective on many things i think one thing many of the listeners of this show may not know about you is that you actually started the bitcoin club

at stanford in 2013 correct yeah co-created with uh there was about eight of us um including a couple professors balaji sort of assan and vijay pandey who all kind of co-created the club and uh yeah it was it was awesome what uh what drove you guys what interested you in bitcoin and and sort of drove that group of people to start this club particularly yeah well it was really um balaji uh who was the driving force because he had a course at stanford called startup engineering so he'd teach us like the ins and outs of javascript and engineering that was actually applicable to building web apps and then he started talking about crypto and um he started hosting hackathons for the class like to get good grades you have to

companies hackathons and everyone had a project most were crazy ideas handed us to us by Balaji and there was about several of us that were the ones who consistently stayed till like 5 a.m the next morning hacking and talking about crazy things with Balaji and so I think one day we just all had the idea like we should just turn this into a group and the stanford bitcoin group was born oh yeah and so that was in 2013 that was almost 10 years ago what uh how would you describe your perspective of bitcoin then and how it's evolved over the last decade yeah i mean not much has changed in terms of my fundamental understanding or belief as to why it matters so much for the world um you know in the beginning i saw it as a um necessary vital store of value for the planet

that um was digital and controlled for the people by the people and um i thought that layer of it was really important and then other blockchain applications started to come out they're still built on top of bitcoin um and so you know ethereum came shortly thereafter there were colored coins at the time and uh then this uh this concept of decentralized computing was also a powerful theme so i always thought crypto delivers the world a store of value that is necessary centralized computing is necessary um privacy and there's some other legs private communications and other legs that could be necessary and so i think a lot of those fundamentals haven't changed and a lot of the tools now to make those things become real are further along than we ever

could have imagined yeah yeah i just went and grabbed actually one of belagi's products from 21 co his uh his bitcoin his mini bitcoin miner the idea behind this was like the machine payable web and that really hooked my attention back then and one thing i'm interested to dive in to with you is particularly bitcoin being used for payments back then like this was the idea that you could you could build apps and have machines talk to each other and send and receive bitcoin for for certain services for certain executions of code and stuff like that um but many would argue that bitcoin at that particular time probably wasn't well suited for payments due to the nature the slow nature of the the protocol layer since then obviously the bit or exceeding

the lighting network has been developed launched and is beginning to gain adoption um but between those two periods you went and started a massive payment payments company bolt um and i'm interested to get your perspective on like the payments use case of bitcoin developing over the last five years particularly and how it compares to your experience building bolt yeah um I think there are a lot of advantages to leveraging crypto for payments. The fact that it's instantaneous, chargeback proof, irreversible, relatively seamless, and that it's international obviously makes it really viable for payments and in many cases a 10x improvement on how payments occur today.

The problem that we face is that if everyone's in the crypto universe, payments are beautiful, they're magical. But the existing world of payments still exists, meaning merchants still primarily show credit cards and also consumers don't really, a lot of consumers for a long time haven't had disposable crypto and knowledge of how to use wallets and then the on-ramp into crypto is more painful than the payments ecosystem today so yeah if you already have crypto payments are seamless but if you don't have crypto then it's really really complex to get the crypto and then go to spend it and so you might as well just use a credit card and so as crypto holdings become more ubiquitous

then i think we'll see more use of it in mainstream payments and we're already seeing that when i first started bolt there was coinbase and bitpay were signing up all these flashy brands like overstock and expedia and dell.com and uh others and i'm sorry if i misquoted one but um or if those weren't all accurate i think they were i think they were Yeah. And, you know, they got like no usage. Now, we're seeing that when a merchant adopts crypto, they're getting five to 10% boosts in their sales. And, you know, they're getting crypto volume more than ever. And that's because we believe people just crypto is more ubiquitous. yeah and i guess that yeah that's a big question do you so as it pertains to bolts and just payments infrastructure in general do you see or what would you imagine a tipping point is adoption of the individual adoption by the merchants combination of both better deals

yeah it's a multi-sided marketplace or network where everything needs to advance in order for these tipping points to be reached so there needs to be enough merchant adoption which um you know folks like us can play a big role and then there's the consumer adoption then there is the general infrastructure layer and the token layer that needs to get better for consumers, more sustainable, more secure, faster transactions. And so the way I look at it is it's just a matter of time. There's enough people who are influential in each of these legs to move the ball far enough down the court to where i think one day the the scales will tip and we will see crypto be just as dominant as the dominant payment players today and having built like a massive

payments company what are some of the the areas in that space that the layman probably doesn't understand in terms of pain points and hurdles that you had to overcome to actually build a product like bolt which allows you to do one click checkout yeah that's the uh difficult thing to understand with with bolt bolt this caused a lot of confusion in the marketplace in the past and it's because it's a very complex system to do a very simple thing so when you here that we do one-click checkout, you're like, okay, well, that's simple, right? Why has no one else done that before? And we would get that pushback from investors being like, this can't be an opportunity. And what we ended up doing was building a new platforming around checkout that

no one had done before. So we call it our checkout OS, which is our checkout operating system. and so and this differs from a checkout button like a paypal or apple pay or google pay we call that the nascar effect of buttons at your checkout because that's a lightweight layer of software that redirects the user redirects them back we run the checkout os meaning we integrate all the payment methods all the apms all the tax systems shipping systems shopping car systems order management systems, ERP systems, inventory management system, make sure an item's in stock at the beginning of checkout, at the end of checkout. Sometimes you need to buy a line pickup in store. Sometimes you need to add multiple discount codes. Sometimes

you need to also have a gift card as partial payment to a credit card. So the number of edge cases that we have to handle in our software is extraordinary. And then every merchant has a completely different set of integrations for each of these. So we have to support thousands tens of thousands of permutations of checkout integration. So we're a middleware integrations company on the back end. And then we offer this super seamless front end magic one-click experience over the email field. And what was the hardest part there?

Just getting the merchants linked into that and getting all those systems lined up? Yes, because the tech was really hard to build and the sales were really hard to build because i'd go to someone and we weren't known at the time and i'd be like i want to take over your money page and they're like heck no you're not touching my money page and uh so it was very hard to convince merchant sellers but it was brute force i mean we we clawed and kicked and got merchants to trust us enough to hopefully see the value to give us a try and then once we

got in, they would improve our value over and over again. It wasn't always successful. It was really messy in the beginning. We had a million and one bugs. Integrations or engineers would pull their hair out. They're super messy. They weren't clean APIs. Some e-commerce sites are built on software bundles, meaning to hook into their software, you're integrating with like an old version of ibm software packaging it doesn't even rest apis and so it's super hairy but we just through pure grit and determination signed up more merchants every year than the last and built more integrations than the last oh yeah and has the environment of those rest apis gotten significantly better since you since i started the company yes in fact most e-commerce

platforms now have checkout apis to actually help third parties process orders like big commerce didn't have a checkout api so we had to do a whole bunch of hacks to actually push an order through to their back end whereas now they have shop finance order apis and a lot of demand or sales force so a lot of apis that we needed didn't even exist so we're doing all types of hacks to to make them exist so kind of like plaid where they started with bank statements scraping and then eventually the banks built the apis the same thing has happened to the checkout layer and in many cases the shopping carts erps etc they built it as through their partnerships with us as the guinea pick yeah now it's crazy how just the whole landscape of e-commerce has changed it feels

leaps and bounds better than it was just two or three years ago it's made extraordinary progress and i think you know when i started bolt everyone sees bolt as this hot company for the first four years out of the eight-year journey it's been fintech no investor was investing in fintech and definitely no investor was investing in e-commerce tools right and if we pitch ourselves as a payments company no one thought anyone would compete with the stripe so you know it was a dead category um by years four to six fintech became hot and then years six to eight in our journey uh e-commerce also became hot and so we kind of became a hot company we fit within those uh, categories, but for, you know, they say they're overnight successes usually have a history.

Well, it was the last 18 months have been extraordinary, but first six and a half years were honestly really painful. Yeah. And overnight success takes almost a decade. It's, uh, and you've mentioned investors a couple of times. That's another reason why I'm very excited to have you on the show because that's one of the things that drew me to you last year, I believe around last summer, you were writing threads

on the nature of venture capital from the perspective of a founder and aligning yourself with investors that get your vision and aren't going to try to screw you over. And as a disclosure, I'm a partner at a VC firm too. And I'm really interested to dig into

how you view engaging with venture capital as a founder you've written a book about it in the last year and a lot of the people who are listening to this podcast and uh are building companies in the bitcoin space and really thinking through how they're going to scale their businesses and fund their businesses so i i'm really excited to hear your perspective on vc uh as a founder and what you view as the best approach as a young startup going out and raising funds? Yeah, I mean, fundraising is one of the most miserable parts of building a company.

I think any entrepreneur will agree. Even though I found that through fundraising, it really helps you crystallize your narrative that you can bring back to your team. And there are all these other benefits, but generally, if you're a builder, you want to be building, you don't want to be fundraising. And a lot of founders have a lot of fear and anxiety around it. So that's why I wrote that book called fundraising. No one had written a playbook and I'd given the same advice over and over again. I'm like, if you follow this guide, you should generally be good and safe, right? Safety is key to fundraising because you don't

want to jump the gun too early, get a bunch of no's, and then everyone sees that you failed. It's going to be really embarrassing and devastating. So another way to frame this is building relationships early, which is what I did. I built relationships well in advance of my fundraising. If I completed a fundraise, I started relationship building with investors for the next one many months in advance. So the, you know, the heartwarming way to frame this is relationship building, right? The more hardcore tactical way to frame this is making sure that you don't lose and protecting yourself because if you were just building relationships, you'll start getting a sense of how ready you are. And some people may preempt you, right? You ideally want

to get preempted on your raises. And I'm talking about growth rounds, seed rounds, a similar philosophy, but it's all outlined in the book. Yeah. So when you say protect yourself, what are, what are some of the common mistakes that people are making when they're going to raise? Yeah. I mean, I write in the book, the most common mistake is that you say you're fundraising too early and well before you're ready. And so when you say you're fundraising, you're forcing people to make a decision and getting passes on your company, the word will get out. Investors talk and, you know, instead you meet with investors and, you know, you can say that you might be fundraising or likely

too soon, but I mean, while building relationships, this also prevents issues down the line because if you take on an investor too transactionally, you're going to not have the depth of the relationship to carry you through tough times later. And I'd say I'm very lucky at Bolta. We got rejected by a lot of like the tier one VC firms who kind of moved from zero to 60 really quickly. And founders are like so excited they have this tier one VC in their company. And And a lot of the time, they should be excited because they're great VCs and great partners. But other times, there's a reckoning because they took money from someone they don't align with and their issues and they didn't build the relationship. And then things – I've seen things become absolute disasters.

It happens more than you think. So the reason I wrote these things is to build awareness for the next generation of founders to just proceed with caution and build good relationships and value authenticity and not just chase brands and all of those best practices. yeah that's it's a 1031 the firm that i work for that's what we try to communicate is we focus on bitcoin only companies building on infrastructure for bitcoin lightning and other areas of the industry that's what we really try to lean into is like hey we understand bitcoin we're not going to try and force you to do anything outside of bitcoin um because because you don't want to uh but that not i mean what are some examples of or what in your perspective is a good relationship with a capital provider what what kind of value

or would you be looking for um somebody writing a check to bring to any of the companies that you're building yeah it obviously depends on stage and their level of investment um i think you want help healthy tension not unhealthy tension right you want mutual respect respect to exist in the room uh and this is not just on the investor this is on the founder too right the founder has to keep it professional uh be very transparent be honest about challenges while they're being optimistic about the future and so this is a two-sided obligation it's just like uh you know i could talk for hours about this it's kind of like relationship counseling right it's like most people in the world struggle it's very tough um so i think that's what second

and third time founders have a huge advantage in is they have they've made the relationship mistakes and they're just better at managing relationships and first-time founders And so what I'd also ask investors who are backing first-time founders is to give the founder a little leeway. Their ego might get big. They might be overly aggressive. and I say coach them in a respectful way, bring them back down to reality or help them see things that they haven't seen in that type of way versus an antagonistic type of way. Yeah, that's a very interesting dynamic.

I'm relatively new to this whole world. Yeah, it's particularly interesting in Bitcoin because there's a lot of people outside of the space that really don't understand and are trying to force people to do things that probably aren't worthwhile or advantageous in the long run. And building in the Bitcoin space, I mean, accumulating Bitcoin is a low-time preference act, and then allocating in the space, I think that's one thing

VCs that are allocating into Bitcoin companies are coming to learn that, hey, this is going to be a longer slog. You have to expand your time horizon. for what you expect in terms of a return. Yeah, I think the recent series of events have tested that. It's forced the investors to say, how committed are you for the long term, right? Are you chasing something shiny?

Because if you are, it's... It's easy to get wrecked. It's easy to get wrecked. Very easy. and i think this will be one of the healthiest things for crypto's long term for crypto long term because these lessons are so painful um that you know i think the recklessness will subside um but we also can't let it shorten our enthusiasm for the space same time No, it's been a wild couple months. It's insane to see not only how big of an epic fraud the FTX situation is turning out to be, but how many respected investors got duped by it.

Yep. Totally. Yeah, it's a big lesson. It's also a lesson to, and that's the other thing with Bitcoin And particularly as you have this new asset, this bear instrument that really drives on the point like, hey, you have to you have to take extreme responsibility over this. If you trust it with a third party, they could they could gamble away without you understanding the tradeoffs of allowing them to to custody this asset for you. And so that's another part of the space that really fascinates me is we're going to have to change consumer behavior or consumer behavior is going to have to change if we're going to live in a world in which Bitcoin proliferates and takes over as the predominant monetary good and payments network of the world. It's teaching individuals how to interact with this relatively foreign asset. Even though we're 14 years in, people still don't understand how to properly maintain private-public key pairs and who they should be interacting with in terms of businesses that are providing services to them. Yep, absolutely.

Usability is still a big problem. Bolt actually started off as a Bitcoin wallet. Yeah. And then I was like, you know, um, well, it's funny. We actually, I was like flying around the country talking with banks and regulators, um, as a 20 year old trying to get banks and treasury services to build this Bitcoin wallet. Um, we were the first, uh, Bitcoin company to get banked by a couple of the more prominent banks that now bank hundreds of crypto companies. and we're in the rooms with their ceos and chief compliance officers and built these

enormous compliance programs and so that's the backstory of bolt that most people don't realize and it was so burdensome and other companies like coinbase and circle with a lot of money were entering the space and i was just like had an idea why isn't anyone focused on usability paired with security and convenience for mainstream internet payments. And I'm like, why has no one built a checkout company? And so about a year in, I pivoted to the modern day vision for Bolt. But in the beginning, I was working on that usability challenge. And I was like, there are so many people with so much capital who are focused on this. I'm sure someone's going to solve the problem and that's what you know skeptical investors say like no way you're going

to win this and now fast forward eight nine years later that problem still hasn't been solved no can bolt solve it do you think i think uh i think we have a chance to you know we'll see yeah that's why again i'm really bullish on the lighting network and so like people are going to be listening to this podcast and they're going to be streaming us bits of bitcoin some sats uh directly to to my node over the lightning network um if we were able to get a lightning network address of yours we could plug it in you could get some of the sats that are flowing here uh it's and again i think this all the development of this market all comes back to timing like when you were the original vision of bolt as um bitcoin payments would you agree it was

probably just too early for that the market wasn't ready for it infrastructure wasn't ready yeah totally and i think the kind of payment giants i wouldn't call us a giant but potential to be a big player you know we'll be well positioned to help with crypto adoption at at the right time so um but uh but yeah i mean a separate point the fact that bitcoin is still what is that 16 000 we're up to 17 now we're pumping today 17 after everything that's happened you would think it'd be um you know a tenth of the price i mean it's it's pretty uh i think it's pretty promising that the core believers kind of haven't really flinched a lot of pain has been endured um the speculators have been hurt um but the majority of us who really care

aren't really going anywhere yeah and luckily for all of us ftx didn't actually have any bitcoin to sell so uh yeah they uh they squandered it all away uh unfortunately for their their users but um it has not affected price that much and yeah it's yeah i think it's an imperative moving forward when you see all the censorship that's going on um when you see the the sanctions that are being levied on on billions of people globally it feels like the moment is right for humanity to wake up to the inherent utility and fundamental value that that bitcoin provides the world in terms of money in payments what are uh what are you're a very positive guy that's what that's what i like about you too uh is you're putting a lot of optimism out there when if you go on twitter it seems hard

to find a lot of optimistic takes out there considering the state of the world what's your what's your view on where we are now as humanity and why are you why do you seem so optimistic are you optimistic? Am I just making assumptions based on, on tweets? Well, I think, uh, in life you have two choices to be pessimistic or optimistic and you'll, you're in order for good things to happen to you. I think you have to be optimistic. So I think I've just chosen to be optimistic by those simple terms. I also do think that there are real fundamental reasons to be optimistic. There's a lot of people getting wiped out, but there's also a lot of lessons being learned that will last decades and decades to come. I don't see anything fundamentally that

has broken, right? I see lessons learned and I see setbacks, but the fundamentals are just as strong as they've ever been. And, you know, I generally see every challenge through the lens of learning. So I think a lot of people are learning and getting a lot smarter than they were before. Yeah. Yeah. Despite all the madness blocks are being produced, transactions are being processed everything's everything's okay the protocol has no idea what's going on outside of it just knows that all the transactions are being passed along yeah usually things are that seem like disasters in the long term aren't um or with hindsight right as kind of a student of history um but at the same time you know there are real disasters out there um and uh you know i

there there could be worse things to come but i i just i genuinely generally believe in humanity's resiliency i do as well um i forget who it was but somebody put it out there this year it was really stuck out to me and stuck with me is that nothing's ever as good as it seems or as bad as it seems like it may seem terrible but you're probably somewhere in the middle between good and bad at all times it's a great phrase yeah something great happens to you and then you're like okay well my life hasn't changed that much and something really disastrous happens in the world and you're like my life hasn't really changed that much um you know everyone is uh really you know politics is a great example right you spend all this effort on who becomes elected

your life really doesn't change that much that's meet the new boss same as the old boss right exactly yeah that's but i guess somebody building companies and building this podcast media company i'm sure you know this as well it's just being able to throw that noise aside and just show up every day like how much does consistency play into building a billion dollar business because you're gonna have these ups and downs on the way up yeah it's it's enormous i mean you think that you're on the brink of failure every day for you know potentially decades right and you have to show up every day and give it your absolute best despite extraordinary challenges of all sorts people issues people leaving

um you know fundraising successes fundraising failures goal attainment it's just a non-stop series of challenges and uh you have to be optimistic you also have to be realistic at the same time i think that was a big learning for me that i've learned is i used to just present the optimistic the reasons to be optimistic to my team and my team started to discredit me and at first i was like i'm gonna ignore them um and just continue to be optimistic because you know, I generally, genuinely am. But I eventually realized that that didn't inspire trust because they thought I couldn't see the issues. So then whenever I do a town hall or give a talk to my team, I present all the issues and challenges first with kind of a cold, harsh

dose of reality. And then I would talk about the reasons to be optimistic. And then people would be optimistic because they trusted that i understood the challenges what was it to that drove you to change that approach somebody call you out or did you just have this realization by yourself it was a consistent uh challenge that i saw over many years at bolt i'm just in terms of feedback that i'd get we had a big feedback culture so we do two-way written feedback every two weeks with all my direct reports so once i get the same feedback multiple times you know you can only ignore something so much and instead of pointing at others at some point you have to start pointing at yourself and say okay what am i doing here and uh at some point

i've had that moment of clarity yeah yeah you accountability is is a big thing i mean i it's i've i've experienced that here too as well where it's like hey everything is your fault right you're in control of your own destiny everything i i take everything is my responsibility someone doesn't like me what did i do if i missed a goal, what did I do? If a team is not performing, what did I do? And I think younger version of me would have pointed and said, what is wrong with them? But by pointing at yourself, you learn a lot. And that doesn't mean those people are great, but maybe it's, well, I let an ineffective leader stay for too long, right? It's still not that leader's fault. That's my fault.

um so always comes back to to to me to to us yeah yeah that's uh it's a big lesson i'm learning on the go as well it's easy to point the finger it's not not always easy to to look internally yeah look in the mirror very do that uh have you been following this ai trend at all a little bit it's not my uh it's not my wheelhouse yeah not mine either it's interesting to see if you have been following because it seems like i mean i'm just seeing on twitter i have been experimenting with some of the dotly stuff as well but apparently we've hit an inflection point in which these ai applications are going to change the way we work moving forward yeah i think they they are um so you know i haven't spent a lot of time thinking about the how

but it'd be very interesting to watch yeah i'm thinking for me like i would love like we're building um a self-sovereign content stack with bitcoin monetization using ghost and btc pay server and my biggest uh my biggest one of my biggest pain points is like deciding on what thumbnail to put in the newsletter every day and it just wastes so much time like googling stuff like let me find a picture let me find a license i would love to have just a little spot and ghost where i could write a prompt like hey produce a picture of this for me it would save me an insane amount of time yeah the creative process um we you know the core content is what we're needed for but the all the bells and whistles and animations and all of that i mean that should be pretty much

automatic yeah yeah maybe the ai should just like read your read your newsletter as you're reading it and produce hey maybe this would be a good thumbnail for you yeah the thumbnail that would get the most streets yeah yeah i think uh i think 2023 is going to be the year i start to take ai seriously i'm like all right is this going to disrupt my business yep yep so seeing times we live in yeah fascinating times it's i mean we were born at this inflection point in human history we're transitioning into the digital age and it feels like again going back to like the chaos that it seems like exists in the world and people literally cannot compute the the pace of change that's happening in the environment around us

like our brains just have not been able to calculate how fast things are changing right i mean technological progress is still following moore's law right and so i think they say by 2045. I mean, that's what some people are predicting in terms of singularity, which I don't completely believe in singularity, but I do believe by 2045, the earth will be unrecognizable and technology will have 2x, what is it, every 18 months, roughly. So So it is pretty wild when you think about technological progress and how there's more made every couple of years than the entirety of humanity's existence.

Yeah. No, I'm happy you said that. Singularity has always turned me off. It seems very unnatural. Maybe I'm a Luddite. maybe um just uh i like my human ways but it's always seemed the whole transhumanist singularity movement has always been like i don't know i don't know i like the uh the human process of the circle of life having children and um i think we should be leveraging these technologies to just

make our meat space lives better i don't know if we necessarily need to become cyborgs i mean By definition, more people need to realize that before it's too late, right? Like technology should be serving us. We should not be serving it. It should make our lives healthier, happier, more grounded and fruitful and connected to our family and our friends than disconnected. Right now, a lot of technology does the disconnection really well and we serve it. And so I do believe that it is a possible outcome that we enslave ourselves so much to technology that we lose our humanity in mass.

Maybe there are pockets of humans who end up refounding civilization after 99% of us have destroyed each other. um but uh i think we need to come to that realization sooner that we're losing our connection with nature with our bodies with our minds with our friends and family and we're destroying the planet and um i think those are all while i am an optimist we uh have some serious problems and there should be some red alerts going off. Yeah. Needs some societal introspection. This thing's pretty addicting.

Yeah. And I'm guilty. I'm guilty. I'm addicted to Twitter. Yep. I know what you mean. It's one of my toughest personal challenges is managing my time

on Twitter. And I'd still say I'm addicted to it. I've gotten better at it, but through excruciating work. What did you do? How did you change your Twitter habits? Well, I really try now. I would check it a lot just randomly.

And I try not to do that. And I'm not always successful. But the hard thing about it is that there's no silver bullet approach. It's literally day-to-day self-discipline. That's why these things are so addicting because they're always available. It's just one button away, and you're already on your phone for other things. And so one lapse in strength, and you click the thing, and now you have dopamine. Now you have to check the notifications and check all the messages because you're already in it.

And so I've really tried to not click the thing unless I'm going to post, right? like posting and then i could check maybe once to see how it posted and that's it that's my rule and i've been mostly sticking by that but it hasn't uh come easy no yeah i need to start changing my twitter habits i'm on that the bird app way too much it's addictive it is um and you know there's all this this content is like crack i mean it's like elon musk and kanye how could you not be interested in what's happening when there's these like these people who are living these kind of life so out on the edge on the fringe and like being addicted to their every move um when you know most of us live relatively boring

lives um it's uh it is like crack maybe our lives could be more exciting if we weren't following yes other people's perceived exciting lives maybe more boring things to experience in life there's so much art and music and nature and there's so much depth to all of those tracks and uh but this thing's easy it's one button right you see if something quite engaging one button away these other things you have to get up out of your seat and put an effort to get to and uh most of us just don't want to exert any effort we're we're stuck in this position scrolling scrolling yeah yeah i mean you say how do we do this it's literally get away from your phone but how do you get people to get away from their phone it's we've got to talk about it

more you know use the word addiction like you know even for a second before i said that i hesitate I'm like should I use the word addiction you know and you they use the word so I'm like yeah I'm gonna use the word you know and um I don't know if we we should talk about it with our friends with in podcasts um I think uh I think it's we need to inform each other and that's why I stay optimistic is because you know I'm like if I'm not optimistic and helping spread these messages important messages who's going to be right if not me then who if not me and who I don't have the biggest audience but like I couldn't live with myself if I wasn't using my platform to spread some good right because what a hypocrite if I'm criticizing other leaders for

not doing good but I'm not using my own platform no matter how big you know I was a much smaller entrepreneur if you've only had five friends that I could convince to have healthier habits I mean And that's how I think we changed the world is at the micro scale, not the macro scale. Yeah. And you've started a new company, Love, correct? Is that focused a lot on this area? Yeah. So the vision behind Love stems from health experiences that I've had.

At the age of 22, early into Bolt's journey, I developed chronic back pain for about two years and um couldn't work out couldn't go out with friends couldn't sleep and it was really debilitating and i went to more mainstream doctors and even mainstream physical therapists who you know gave me different meds and have different trainings and how many like physical there's having working out in different ways and some were suggesting injection surgeries everything was making it worse it's not getting any better and I then had a family friend who was more of an alternative spiritual healer and I went to them and told them about my issue and they said your back pain is 100% due to your stress at work and when they said that I really

heard them and believed it and because I believed it I really worked on calming down through different practices so i worked on my mental calm i also went to chiropractor who was amazing so i had some physical help i had some mental help and within three months my back pain was completely gone and it has a return now for four to five years and i've continued yoga i've gotten deeper into my body can move in a million different ways and actually some other important context is i did competitive gymnastics and wrestling when I was younger so I thought it was from that so I had all these reasons to think it wasn't from stress and I worked on my stress in my mind and that's what fixed it and so I also I've had a few other kind of health issues that I'm able to heal

through alternative and natural ways so I'm like how many people you know I had a friend who had back issues and a doctor recommended surgery. He's now 12 surgeries in and his back's not any better. His back's not any better. And I bet there's a good chance it has to do with, you know, he suffers from some anxiety and stress and depression. I have good chances probably from that. And so I'm wondering how much of our illness is being treated in just the worst possible ways when you think about opioids and SSRIs and pain pills and all these things that help some people, right, but leave a lot in a worse place than they found them. And so I delved into the alternative medicine world and found just gold mines of healing

modalities that have been around for centuries or millennia that we don't pay any attention to because big pharma hasn't funded a trial because you can't patent a plant right you can patent a chemical you extract that of a plant and do all these fancy things too and you know that you can patent and rename it which is how a lot of our blockbuster drugs are formed but you can't patent a plant which has been healing plants have been healing people since the beginning of time You can't patent psychedelic therapeutic methods. You can't patent acupuncture. You can't patent a chiropractor.

So these things are discredited, and I believe they have a lot of value. And so we're building a marketplace for alternative healing where we vet, we do the research, we do the homework, and we list products therapies and services for consumers that have passed our sniff tests and might help them on their journey yeah i mean me personally i've i've benefited from psilocybin in the past it's got me through some not physical pain but mental pain and yep um um you got like doing shrooms every weekend but um when when i have hit a rough patch in the past i've found that um there is um some healing powers to to that fungus specifically absolutely and you know there are many different strains and there are hundreds of other plant medicines

that can heal that are all available i mean so many deeper you go there's there's people indigenous peoples have been using these things for centuries and millennia and not just psychedelics but for all types of healing properties and we've just thrown all that away sent a millennia of wisdom thrown away and completely discredited and saying it doesn't work when people real people have been really healed by it for, for such a long time. So I think there's both use cases for, um, Western medicine and Eastern, right? Western and, you know, big pharma has a very important role. Um, and it saved a lot of lives and there's a reason it exists, right? If you're in a car accident, a plant's not going to help you. You need to go to a trauma center, a tumor in your

brain you need to go to a specialist your plant's not going to help you really if it's late stage and so all i'm saying is there's this other world it's been neglected that i'm hoping to shine some light on and offer to consumers in a curated uh way on a simple web marketplace yeah well thank you for doing it because it is glaringly apparent at least to me that we are over indexing the the big pharma solutions which i would argue in in recent decades have probably caused more harm than good particularly with opioids ssris and amphetamines like adderall totally right those there's some very dark spots and there's some very light spots too saved countless lives is harmed countless lives so it's all about not saying no to big pharma but

it's saying hey use it for these things right and here are some other options for these other things that may be a little more natural and um a little uh you know you're not always bringing a gun to a knife fight yeah yeah the patenting of these medicines is really i don't know why they're called evil but it certainly created this perverse incentive system where the medical or the pharmaceutical industry isn't incentivized to choose the low cost potentially better option at the end of the day yes the incentives are problematic because i mean the reality is it does take a lot of research to clinically validate that a medicine works. So sure, they should have good moats and be able to profit from that. But when that process is the end-all

be-all for healing, that's the problem. Because we're completely reliant on that process for healing and we don't have enough people around us saying hey have you tried to work on your sleep on your anxiety levels have you gone to to get some therapy have you tried eating better um you know have you tried these certain plants that may help with these different things and so it's the reliance on it that's that's the issue yeah i mean for me personally a diet and sleep has has done wonders for me like i grew up with eczema for the first 24 years of my life i was all over my arms back of my legs and it wasn't until i was like 23 or 24 where i got some advice i forget from who i was like it's probably your diet i changed my diet and i

haven't had eczema in almost a decade and then sleep too people really don't value sleep you need to get your sleep hours it's so important you do it every night that's where your body literally restores um and uh yeah sleep's a big challenge for people because all those addictions that you have to our phones and to other things they really impact sleep negatively alcohol caffeine um so yeah as i sip a a two a 3 p.m coffee now um but with that being said it is 3 p.m um i know you've you've got to go you're a busy man ryan um is there any words of wisdom you'd like to leave the freaks out there before we wrap up and words of wisdom keep building keep uh let's crypto isn't dead it's far from it and um yeah i'm i'm excited for what the future holds i think

this is the one of the coolest times to be alive so i'm just grateful that we're experiencing all all the things that we are yeah hell yeah stay optimistic freaks ryan i appreciate your time thank you for coming on it's a fascinating conversation likewise such a pleasure alright enjoy the rest of your afternoon that's all we got today freaks

peace and love take care