TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #57: Alex Adelman

Episode Date: February 13, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Alex Adelman, Co-Founder and CEO of Lolli, to discuss developers building for developers, the retail landscape, building a consumer facing product with a BTC component, and much more. Follow Alex on Twitter: www.twitter.com/alexadelman Follow Marty on Twitter: www.twitter.com/martybent Thanks to our sponsor BlockFi! Head over to www.blockfi.com/talesfromthecrypt to see how you can use your bitcoin as collateral to get USD loans in minutes!

Well, hey there, freaks. I hope you're all doing well on this beautiful, beautiful Wednesday morning. I have an incredible long conversation for you with the CEO of Lawley, Alex Adelman. But before we get to that, I'd love to introduce you guys to this week's sponsor. You've heard about them before. BlockFi. Tax season is coming up fast, which means it's time to think about crypto taxes. I know we don't want to think about them, but we have to. Don't fall into the trap of selling your crypto to pay your taxes. BlockFi helps crypto investors by providing U.S. dollar funding using your crypto as collateral, preferably your Bitcoin.

You get your crypto back at the end of the loan. It's that simple. BlockFi customers use these loans for anything from buying a home to funding a business. So visit blockfi.com slash talesfromthecrypt to learn more about using your crypto without having to sell. That's blockfi.com slash talesfromthecrypt. You freaks got a special offer there.

Go check it out. Very excited for this interview with Alex. We had a great conversation, got a little drunk, got a little cosmic. I think you freaks are going to enjoy it. As a little disclaimer, I think I must say this. Lolly is a sponsor of both Marty's Bent and Tales from the Crypt. Though I did not bring Alex on because he's a sponsor. Genuinely curious about Lolly and what they're doing,

creating a consumer-facing business that works with Bitcoin and helps the world adopt and get Bitcoin into the hands of your everyday common man. So I think we had a great conversation. So I hope you freaks enjoy it. Tales from the Crypt. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy, Marty Bent, here in a relegation studio on a shitty Tuesday night.

It's terrible weather here in Brooklyn, New York, sleeting. It's probably the worst weather you could probably get, like, in mid-February. But to warm up this cold February night, we've got a special guest here. Very excited to be speaking with this person. I want to introduce you freaks to Alex Alderman, CEO and founder of Lolli. Thank you for having me. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for coming, dude. Isn't now the time to say it? I guess. What's up, freaks? It was good. How'd it feel? Pretty good. Pretty good.

I can check it off my bucket list now. So thank you. Well, thank you for saying what's up to the freaks and thank you for coming on. For you freaks that don't know, Alex is a CEO and founder, co-founder of Lolly, which is an online platform, a web extension that helps you shop at retailers and save money, basically get rewards back in bitcoin um so before we dive into lolly and everything that you're building right now let's jump back this is tales from the crypt looks like you have a very interesting story for how you ended up here we did a little pre-interview prep

um so how the hell did you find bitcoin how did you get to building lolly yeah so um i've sort have been on this, I guess, adult life mission to democratize commerce. I started, I think, really getting into this idea of the democratization of commerce when I was in university. And I was studying economics, and I was looking at, like, microfinance, namely the Grameen Bank. And the Grameen Banks, one of their first studies and initiatives was to give poorest woman in every city in Bangladesh a cell phone and seeing what that did for how it this trickle up economics that occurred from empowering people and giving everybody the ability to have be on the same platform and have access to opportunity really inspired me and

started the gears turning about what I wanted to build and what I was most excited about about backing up a little bit, just been building software since I was about 12, as soon as my family got the family computer, yeah, started building video games for friends, for myself, like comic book related, bunch of different styles, basically like, do you remember Game Maker at all? I do not. So it was like early glitch. It was like the first like drag and drop kind of game maker out there.

And it sort of like tricked you into coding. So got to do that first. Loved like making something that somebody used. And kind of almost like an extension of like going from art, Legos, Kinects, right into the computer and like building something was really fun. What were these games like? Are they like RPG? Yeah, a lot of RPG. There wasn't a ton of flexibility. It was a lot of single-character sprites, 2D. You could code them to shoot things and capture things, eat things.

It was pretty simple, but really, really fun. And actually, my co-founder of Cosmic, Pearson, we would spend all weekend building these games. We would go sell them at school, sort of early entrepreneurial venture, if you will. What was that hustle like? It was good. I think we sold them for like a dollar or something like that. I don't think we made much money, but it was fun to have people.

How do you hand off those games? Like a file on a USB or a floppy disk at that time? I want to say we burned it onto a DVD or something. Yeah, one of those DVD burners. I think I got an external. Yeah, it was good. that's uh it seems like a bit more uh laborious than like a mixtape or something like that i should have just gone full soundcloud back in the day yeah soundcloud rapper yeah that was my

mistake that's awesome dude yeah it was fun so did you go to unc like you studied economics but was sort of develop development and engineering always like with you while you're studying or Yeah, I always kind of looked at, I never really looked at it as, like, the, I never really got excited about the academics of computer science, and I also, truthfully, was an awful engineer. I was, like, terrible. Like, I think I, I mean, played around with JavaScript, but I actually found that I really enjoyed, like, building bigger and bigger platforms that served more people. and I sort of I think I can't remember the client actually I do remember the client it's somewhat relevant I can say this I was doing I was building a backend education platform for Remington gun company interesting yeah and they

were a client in North Carolina and I remember like building this platform and they wanted it in dotnet and I was like I am NOT gonna learn dotnet and so I So I remember assembling a team of three or four engineers all across the country, maybe even might have been one in Ukraine, and building this backend platform to teach internally people about all the different guns that they had and the safety capabilities, how to talk about them publicly. It was a pretty cool platform. But that was sort of, I think, my first project where I was like, okay, I cannot build this

and I need a team to build it, and the end product came out better. And so I just sort of got, I think the bigger the projects, the bigger the impact, I wanted to keep going bigger. And I realized I think I was better on the client side and actually the design, the product side, than I was ever being an engineer. Yeah, product management is a fascinating thing. And the whole concept of user experience design. So I caught the UX bug in 2014 and it still fascinates me to this day because there's a lot of psychology behind it. and basically the study of human decisions and why they make those decisions

and designing flows and spatial sort of settings and visual cues to sort of design a complete experience is something that I don't think a lot of people appreciate at the end of the day. Yeah, so sort of flip the script, what's your favorite app right now? Twitter, yeah. Twitter's been number one for a while.

That's how we met. Yeah, that's how we met. It's our origin app. Yeah, I'm pretty boomer when it comes to apps. Like, I only have a few that I use. I don't like to go beyond it. I probably use less than 10 apps a day, I would say. What does it take for someone to get you to download an app?

That's a good question. I mean, it just has to have utility. Yeah. I'm pretty basic. I like hanging out with my friends and family, So I like experiencing the real world beyond it, even though my wife would argue that I am addicted to Twitter, looking at it too often. But, yeah, I really like to, I don't know, I'm very manual with things. I don't like to set processes via apps and stuff like that.

So after Twitter, my favorite app is probably Spotify. I just listen to music all day. Good tunes right now. Yeah. Got it on shuffle right now. Hopefully the mics aren't picking it up. I don't think they are. Okay.

Yeah. I'm a simpleton when it comes to apps like that. But I do think I, I don't want to say a rare case, but I think that's good. I think it's like good to have, um, a filter. I mean, seeing like everything can be somewhat exhausting and I think you lose touch to the real world. Um, I always like get back to the basics and like I get through like, you know, if I'm building something new, I'm like, I need to get inspired and I need to download a bunch

of apps and see something I haven't seen before. But I think a lot of times it's just like, you know, back to basics. Like what are, what are humans doing in real life? And then how do you build technology around that? Yeah, right. That's a very prescient theme for for the quote unquote industry that we're in. Right. Because that's I mean, that's been my biggest gripe for for a lot of the sort of ambitious projects in the space is a lot of utopian developers building tools for each other. And that's why I want to bring you in because I think what you're building at Lolly is very practical and a great way to onboard users to Bitcoin. but again before we get to Lolly I know you have a story about how you ended up there and am I

okay to assume that that description of developers designing things for other developers is apt? Yeah I think that it had to come first. You need the developers to build for developers

and that's I think extremely important for the space the infrastructure needs to be there so that I think people like me and my team can come and build on top of that. And I think, like, I'm so grateful for the road work that has been laid out for us to just run and play freely on top of their rails. And so, yeah, I'm really, like, thankful for that. But at the same time, I think we're hitting this point where we've all, you know,

the entire space has done a ton of work. and now it's like how do we bring this to the masses how do we get the world using bitcoin and get people excited about it the same way they get excited about twitter same way they get excited about other other fun apps that you know make up your top 10 yeah you have to get people as excited as we are about it which is like proving not impossible but it is hard it's hard to get people to it is because i believe to get excited about this you have to question things that you assume are sort of never going to change or objective truth.

And there's a lot of hard questioning and mental rewiring, if you will, to sort of get excited about this stuff. But let's talk about Cosmic and what you were building there because it seems that once you figured out what Bitcoin was, you got excited about it and sort of started building a business around it.

Yeah, so I was studying economics in school, and like I said, got really excited about microfinance, enabling people, and kept thinking about this idea of how do you give everybody in the world the ability to buy and sell anywhere, and put everybody on this equal playing field, or at least give everyone the same opportunities to be on the same playing field. and so my team and I started building what we thought was a universal shopping cart and this cart was gonna live everywhere you were it was gonna be browser extension it was gonna be you know embedded as a JavaScript widget into sites and anywhere you went on the web or mobile you were gonna be able to add something into your cart and buy it so it was a two-sided marketplace we had retailers on one side, and then we had consumers on the other that were buying, and then publishers as well. So it was a complicated business model to start with, and I think that a lot of it came

out of naivety. We didn't really know what we were doing, but I think with any project I've ever taken on, we just sort of, like me and my team, just sort of run at it and figure it out along the way and so age like 22 knew very little about like building a business um i would say we knew a good amount about like how to build it and i think we built something really powerful um but in you know kind of going back to what we were saying earlier like understanding the consumer was one of my biggest learnings and we were about like six to nine months in and realized that the world didn't need a universal shopping cart um we were talking to users we were interviewing like you know grandma's in omaha and like they they were like i want my cole's cash how do i get my cole's

cash my favorite ux persona is the grandma's in omaha they're the best and i was it's a fun story and i'll get there but i was literally in omaha talking to grandmas it was amazing so um yeah so we just like set out building this thing um called cosmic cart at the time and um huge fan of the name we love to get cosmic here at tales of the crypt so huge fan of the name awesome thank you space space is my jam uh space and now lollipops candy so i'm sure there's some intersection there at some point in the future oh definitely there's definitely some anime intersection there somewhere yeah out there in the world yeah something like that so um yeah so on on this universe um we were trying to build the universal shopping cart um talked to hundreds of retailers by this point

and realized like they didn't want a branded cart that like lived everywhere that was amazon and everybody was like how do we fight amazon so what we built is we white labeled it for all these retailers and we gave them a channel to sell into other channels um still keeping with the mission of democratizing commerce and creating this abstraction layer on top of all these different platforms so we integrated magento shopify ibm atg uh hybris you name it um still giving everybody the ability to sell anywhere into any channel and we were this abstraction layer that let you pay with any payment provider any credit card any debit card anything and wherever you were whether in a magazine app ad video you could buy natively okay so it was a really cool

technology um and we had some really fun stories along the way i'll be sort of brief with them but um we were building in north carolina um we went out to las vegas to like go to this thing called magic marketplace and we had gone through it sounds bad but we had gone through five ctos but this time and each one of them like couldn't build what we wanted to build and and so i had just found matt which i'll help you know he's a co-founder of cosmic co-founder of lolly like i would say um my like partner in crime with like probably everything i have built and will build it's always good to have a pisc exactly and he does all the hard work he's like he's he's incredible uh brilliant um she doesn't meet at unc no we met on google plus boss wow one of the few

maybe the only the only good thing to happen on google plus a few connections on google plus i love it yeah we were in each other's circles i think we were on the technology circle the north carolina circle uh java circle like you name it um we just had a lot of overlaps i love that it's a first that's a first it's a tales from the crypt first and probably the last first and last cheers to that so yeah i met matt and and matt came in as like our third engineer at the time and and he he was building like a which is relevant now um this like privacy application called frame that did bank level encrypted photo sharing and video sharing i believe too interesting yeah so it was like snapchat on steroids um and it's kind of cool

to think about like i when i met him i was like you know we're going into payments we're going into commerce we need privacy we need security um you know i i care deeply about that and it was good to, you know, align under sort of morals and the ethics of privacy and security. So that was like a good alignment. He came in and in two weeks built a prototype for Cosmic. I was out in Las Vegas going booth to booth to booth selling this dream. We ended up signing up 72 merchants that were interested in using this technology. So fast forward a little bit, built out the technology, ended up landing um or getting some investment um in Omaha Nebraska of all places it was not it was the oracle of Omaha it was the it was sort of like so there's a lot of people that like are

Berkshire babies there they like their parents bought them like Berkshire Hathaway stock and like they've done really well and there's whole books about this like these families it's a berkshire trust fund mafia going around it was a berkshire mafia was like we like this idea we want to invest in it um so i met this investor and i was like crashing in my friend's mom's second cousin's house always where you want to be baked me cookies for my future investors i brought them to the office and we hit it off and they invested in our company and we had the only only issue and no offense to Omaha, was we had to build in Omaha for three months.

And so I think that I love Omaha, but that was good for me. A long three months? It was a long three months. Got to see everything in Omaha. It was really interesting. Stories for another day, probably. Yeah.

So three months after building, and it was good to be heads down. They were incredible investors, mentors. They had built a company called Hay Needle. And we learned a ton while being there. and great people, nice people, loved it there. Did a ton of like Midwest interviews and coming from North Carolina,

it was good to sort of compare and contrast. Like what are real people doing? And I think I learned this from my family. My mom was a child developmental specialist. My dad was a psychotherapist. I was brainwashed as a kid and so I think like around like the dinner table it was just like, how are you, what's going on in your life?

like how was your day just like every we talked about everything and i think that encouraged me to like and this is actually this interviews are weird now because it's normally like i feel like i'm the one asking questions yeah so no that's i'm happy you brought that up because as somebody who was born in northeast philadelphia very ragtag neighborhood grew up with a potty mouth and fought a lot and then we moved to charleston south carolina when i was like 10 or 11 and uh lived there for four years how are those johns there's johns the johns are always good okay whenever you're john i'm with a john it's good um but yeah we got so like we moved from philly down to south carolina and that was a bit of a culture shock like i realized like holy shit

people do things differently down here it was a lot different you had to say yes ma'am yes sir you'd shake hands and look people firmly in the eye you weren't allowed to have potty mouth hey y'all love it here yeah and then uh then when we lived there for four years and then moved back to the philly area and that was like another culture shock i was just like just getting used to south carolina i was like oh my god back in philly and then stayed in philly for like five years then went off to college in chicago but through those journeys like you realize that people around the country like even in just one country in the united states think completely differently like in different areas of the country and it's mind-blowing especially if you don't get

out your geographical bubble uh and experience it especially like living in these places for for an extended period of time you don't really realize that it is a melting pot there's like crazy differences all throughout the country yeah you nailed it i think that's like the source of all my inspiration for anything i've built is like building it for real people that are like real people are everywhere but it's like what are the common factors that make up those people and they're like the insights that they have and the things that what do they feel and like really honing in on that and what matters it's like I mean we could get into the election we get into a lot of ideas about like where the world is right now but understanding people I think is so

important and is probably the biggest lacking thing in the world it's right it's really sad and it's uh I I think that's one of um something I think about like just about every day is like am I building this for people that need it yeah no it's in something I think about every day I I mean, I'm not building a product like you, but like writing to an audience, it's like I definitely write to like a northeast bro, you know, or that type of northeast freak. Yeah. Yeah. Northeast freak. But it's something I'm always hypercognizant of, like, and maybe I'm restrict or constricting my message a little bit by having a certain voice. but no these are interesting problems and this is why i like building products and i think what you guys did at lolly's made it so simple so straightforward that anybody regardless of what your preference is around the country gets it so innately like it's a great ux process

thank you um so let's jump in the lolly i think it's a great time to jump in the lolly and so So, you guys were building Cosmic, and you basically found Bitcoin, you said, three years? Yeah, so I was randomly, I was crashing on couches in New York, actually. Yeah. I think while I was living in Minneapolis. And I, backing up real quick, I moved from Omaha to Minneapolis because we landed Target. we were a week in I'll be quick with the story and then get get back into it no hey we got plenty of time here okay cool so I was I moved to Minneapolis because Target said they were

interested in Cosmic and moved up there I was staying in like a hostel not like a hostel was a hostel and ended up negotiating a deal with Target a week into landing Target team of three uh pull up reddit 8 a.m and we had signed our lives away to like you know for their full api access and biggest credit card breach of all time 40 million credit cards breached uh i turned to matt and i was like did we do that he was like no i hope not i don't think so and we got interviewed by secret service it was really fucking crazy holy shit probably the crazy one of the craziest days i hope to never live that day again it's like wolf of wall street when his second day of work is like black bunda yeah exactly uh it was wild so uh turns out we

had nothing to do with it um and it ended up being like sort of this blessing in in disguise um we ended up um getting to like like i think for about nine to twelve months we were the only company in the space that was like building it the right way and and building it the secure way we were a team of three that survived the target breach as sort of our claim to fame in the commerce world and so we got to go to all these retailers and say hey we built this the safest we you know we were going to continue to build it with these sort of standards and and so yeah we had like a really fun year this brings me into like I was crashing on couches in New York I was trying to like you know keep this business going keep this the dream alive and I remember like I

was on a trip here and randomly was at a bar and through a friend of a friend met uh ryan shay and ryan shay i i'm pretty sure had just learned about bitcoin at this point or was very new to it yeah because he was like oh he had he had just gotten the bug and you know like i think any of us here like heard it from somebody you get that bug and you're just you see it it's like in their eyes and he was like we talked about for like two hours and it was was this pre-name coin yeah yeah so it must have been six seven years ago um so yeah pre-name coin and and yeah he i mean he it was a great conversation and i was like everything that i was building at the time and building towards i was like this sounds so similar it sounds like the democratization of

commerce native to a currency and i was like that's really fucking cool and and so brought it back to my team and i was like can we do this can we build this into cosmic and it just never made sense and like retailers had no idea what i was talking about there's it goes back to kind of listen to your customer it was way too early um and there was no real like financial reason to build it in and it just really wouldn't have worked um so i actually didn't even invest in it and i clearly wish i did um but i just kept like looking at it researching it um you know keeping tabs on it and i think probably like a year or two later um is when i first like i bought a bitcoin and i think it was when coinbase came out to be perfectly honest so coinbase came out and i was

like i'm gonna buy this i'm gonna like you know have some skin in the game and and so i bought it I think some of my teammates bought it and we just all like I think we're personally like very interested in Bitcoin it was like so fucking cool and like can I cuss on here is this yes? You can get as much as you want cool. I just sure So so yeah, just like got really interested in it kept in you know Following it over the years sort of it like was ran in parallel with like sort of our mission with cosmic After cosmic was was Cosmic started to do pretty well.

We raised another round of financing. We ended up landing some more retailers, landed a big customer called PopSugar, came in. Oh, I know PopSugar. Yeah, they're an amazing company. One of the only profitable media companies right now that's figured out the model,

and they're doing pretty well. Yeah, I think the company I used to work for way back in the, or not way back in the day, but ages ago we did a CMS building. I think we helped them contract CMS work for their Drupal site. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Brian and the executive team over there. And really the whole team is just like amazing.

I'm like, they built a real business. They speak to a real person. And yeah, it's just like, it's just like authentic. Like it's literally, it's Brian and Lisa Sugar. Like they started it from this place of truth. They just like, we're building it for themselves. and for like Lisa and yeah they've just built an incredible business I learned so much from both of them and I'm like so thankful uh they so I should back up they ended up acquiring Cosmic

to come and power uh ShopStyle which was doing over a billion in retail revenue at the time so Cosmic was going to power this future of native commerce for them um so we ended up going with the acquisition um building it for a year growing about 10x post-acquisition um and yeah building out the dream and then a bigger company came along called uh ebates rackerton and they ended up buying us i had shop style extension at one point yeah cash back yeah yeah uh big fat check did you ever get the big fat check i don't think so the midwest loves the big fat check yeah yeah um and hopefully at some point they'll love the big fat bitcoin so that's that's the dream at least so yeah so I ended up like working at Ebates for about a year the CEO that

bought us ended up leaving change of direction I ended up pitching them Bitcoin back and they didn't know what I was talking about and weren't really into it so yeah I ended up parting ways with them and started to like it took some time off and like started to think about like what I wanted to build and started like you know went back to Omaha went back to Minneapolis went back to chicago like all uh north carolina um and really started to think about like what i wanted to build and like explored a lot of ideas but i kept coming back to this idea of um i guess at the time crypto i was like this is so exciting this enables people it's like gives everybody the ability to be

on a similar playing field it is the democratization of commerce and so many things had come out since since learning about bitcoin and i remember like meeting up with arjun balaji and we were walking around union square no uh washington square park okay and i was like i was on and on about like all the things you could do with smart contracts and ethereum and i was on this big ethereum kick matt was like my co-founder of cosmic was like building in solidity and we were playing with like a bunch of different ideas in that space and arjun was like when was last time that you read the satoshi white paper and i was like i don't think i've read it for probably two years and if i'm being honest and uh and so like he was like read it and like think about getting back

to basics and what is like think about like what are you doing that the world needs right now and it was a really good like gut check and realignment i went back home like read the white paper again and was just like this is this thing bitcoin is has not seen it's not seen its full potential it's it's out there it exists it is this truth that i like first fell in love with and yet the biggest problem that i think it faces is the distribution problem what do you mean by the distribution problem people don't know about it people don't have it it's like how do you get it into people's hands how do you educate people on self-sovereign money free money like the freedom of owning money like it's people don't know about it and so I like my mom had been asking about me

about it my my sister was asking about it I'm on these text threads from friends from back home in North Carolina and Omaha people were like hey how do I get this this bitcoin thing how do I get crypto like what do i do and i've never been one to give financial advice to anybody and i didn't feel comfortable giving it because it's such a volatile asset like would i give somebody financial advice for a stock that i wasn't confident about they had no control of probably not definitely not yeah so what i sort of i took a step back and after talking with a lot of people i was like what am i good at what is my team uniquely great at and what do i care about and i just kept coming back this idea of like we can build ebates we can recreate ebates and do it for bitcoin and ebates

is arguably the best way of distributing cash the best cash back company in the country and maybe the world and how do we do that but instead of getting cash back give people bitcoin when they shop online so i started talking to retailers and i went out and just like a madman like kind of got these like flashbacks from early days of cosmic of like this tenacity that i had when i first started building and just like started reaching out to all my old friends all my old contacts at all these different retailers and i was like what do you know about bitcoin and what like why would it matter to you how uh how did these old contacts react when you first reached out a lot of them were like what's bitcoin that and and that sort of was a great like had never heard of it or like

all right i'm ready to learn can you explain it to me had either never heard of it or like had mixed opinions of what they had heard about it from like the mainstream media and and so a lot of it was like education and realigning what bitcoin was to them and i remember i was on this call with uh like how you said that realigning how it was because a lot of people get tripped up with the mainstream narratives and it is a realignment right it totally is it's it's how do you take something that somebody understands and help them understand what you're trying to give them yeah it's like help me help you it's like peeling back the onion you have to peel back the onion and then put it back together with like a better onion you know exactly yeah we're the

onion of bitcoin yeah so it's uh basically like started to hear really listen to them and what they kept saying is like how do you bring me customers how do you bring me new shoppers i he's like you know i remember i was on this this great call with um hotels.com and this entry level employee there he he kind of like he just sort of blurted out in the meeting and he was like so it's like points but instead of points there's no barriers and you're turning bitcoin into points and i was like whoa that is good it sounds great to me yeah yeah i was like that's that's it i was like thank you i am going to use that and that started like that gave me this ammunition to go to all these other retailers and align like what like points are great for retailers i personally

think that they're bad for consumers because it's there's like all these arbs that they run and there's sort of this like um the retailers are like you know gaming the system so that you don't spend them and all that stuff yeah and and for him to say basically points without borders or rules it's like it realigned what it's like you are giving people like points they're earning this bitcoin they're excited to earn this bitcoin and they can take that bitcoin and use it anywhere in the world and then i'm a bit ignorant of this part of the industry in particular is it also good for the retailers or like we don't have to deal with the point system at all and exactly okay they are not locked in to the other point systems that have been created by the retailers by the

um by the airlines by all these other rewards networks because they're locked into those ecosystems uh this is sort of an abstraction layer of a loyalty system it's it's like be loyal to bitcoin like the loyalty layer is on bitcoin and it's not on like anything else it's beautiful it's like how do you get people loyal to bitcoin and lolly is the rails to get people loyal to bitcoin i love that and uh yeah so the probability that your your miles or points would become worthless over time is probably a lot higher than i mean bitcoin's still a long shot but hypothetically if bitcoin were to become uh a widely used digital currency uh it probably would sustain value more than those points am i correct in assuming that points go down as soon as you get

it's deflationary it's like centralized points are controlled by they can do they can make those points whatever they're worth whatever they think they're worth and it's just an arb like it's a lot of people don't understand i mean it's why like things like um the points guy exists he's like trying to help you with the art utilize them right away yeah yeah and there's all these games online it's like i mean points are a game it's this funny thing that people try to like game but at the end the day you're getting gamed oh it goes beyond that line online where people are getting people to set up bank accounts in foreign countries and are being uh internationally and stuff like that there's a there's a whole racket to the to the point system totally and i really shouldn't hit

on points too much because like we built our model to actually work on top of points so like you can get your points and you can get your bitcoin is sort of something i should make very clear um i think that the points exist and i think points are good for certain merchants um but for the end consumer like i i think bitcoin is better than points it's gonna it is it has value yeah i mean if given the choice i would hope people would choose the uh the sounder store value over time but we'll see we'll see having the option that's what i wrote about in the uh i didn't write about this specifically but i mentioned it today in the newsletters that bitcoin presents an optionality at least 10 that had not existed 10 or excuse me one decade before today um so that optionality

is there now you can extrapolate that to points and and retail shopping too it's like hey do i want the points or i want bitcoin now i have the option um which i think is a great segue into like how does this all work like what are the mechanics behind it like how are you guys providing the service how how are you basically valuing how much bitcoin people get per transaction or per purchase excuse me um very fascinated to hear more about that yes so um we go to the retailer and we say we are going to bring you a unique customer we're going to bring you someone that might not have shopped at your site and they're they and when we bring them that that shopper um we want to reward that shopper for being loyal to Bitcoin, for being loyal to Lolly.

The retailer likes that because they're getting a new shopper that might not have shopped at their site. And we like that because we're getting to reward our users time and time again every time that they shop across all these different verticals. And then clearly the shopper likes that because they're getting something, they're being rewarded with something, and they have this positive connotation with both the reward, Bitcoin, and the retailer. So it's sort of like, I mean, I am not trying to like sugarcoat it, but like literally everybody wins in our model, which is part of the beauty of like the cashback model that I give to credit to Ebates.

They've been building a company for 20 years and they nailed it. Like it's good. And that's like another theme of this podcast, like Bitcoin's incentives sort of like compound like in every layer and like just like the incentives of the setup like work for everybody. It seems that's what I'm trying to figure out. like how how would it not like what's the biggest knock on lolly i guess like yeah so i first of all i love that you brought up like incentives at every layer yeah um unless like i would love to talk about that for a second because jump into it like when i first learned about bitcoin like i think that the it was before coinbase so it was like the only way that i knew to get into it was

mine it and i was like i and i don't know about buying a miner like it's a lot of work like i'm running a company like i i got i got a lot going on i'm like not i just wasn't i didn't have the bandwidth and i would say like i was the target market to mine like i i love building computers i love building software like um and i wasn't going to do it and and so mining is like at its core is like there's a set amount of the population that is going to do it and like when we when we go back to like what we were saying earlier like thank you to all the miners out there for building the infrastructure for like letting us build on top of what you're building and and like it has to exist but i'm not going to do it my mom's not going to do it my you know my friend's grandma

in omaha is not going to do it like yeah i thought i i wanted to interrupt because i thought of a great uh analogy for this over the weekend as you may know if you read the band i'm a huge college lacrosse fan and uh basically uh lacrosse goalies are the minors of the lacrosse world you have to be a little crazy you have to be a little out there you have to be a little risky risk taking to be a lacrosse goalie and as a lacrosse player anybody who's ever played lacrosse knows that you thank your goalies because they're taking a huge risk getting a rubber ball pelted at them at like 115 miles an hour goalies are the miners of the lacrosse world and the miners yeah that's what they're just like they're just like eating it on the chin but they're like crazy nuts they're like

I want to do this. I need that clean Bitcoin. So I have, I have a similar analogy and I like that we're going with analogies. So I played rugby in college and there's a position called the hooker and it's a, it's a real position. It's not a made up, made up name. And literally their job is they're, they're in the middle of the scrum and they've got like 800 to a thousand pounds of pressure going from each side. And they're like in the dead center. And typically it's like a smaller guy and their job is to hook like they hook the ball when the ball is fed in they're just like like these dudes break their necks they like get you know they they it's just a very injury prone position but their job is to actually mine the ball so that your team wins

possession and and so i would i would say like similar analogy the hooker is the miner feeds it out and then the the like i was a back i was just i was like i actually i have a fond memory of like being a freshman like coming from wrestling to rugby and here and like being like there was an open position at a hooker because no one wanted to be the hooker and it's actually oddly similar when i actually think about this first time thinking about it um i like raised my hand because i like i'm you know opportunist i like am very excited if like i could be a starter for position i remember raising my hand because there was an open position and one of the seniors grabbed me it was like you don't want to be a hooker so probably similarly to like people being like yeah

you don't want to mind like it's you're like just bye yeah you're better off just by yeah back here on another level so i like took the fullback position i got to like get all the glamour be the winger get the get the score tries and like you know waved my girlfriend in the on the sideline so yeah it's kind of similar but um yeah i like i like analogies yeah yeah no but let's get back to the specifics of like the incentives on these layers like it seems like for everybody involved at least in the lolly uh closed circuit i guess if you will whatever you want to refer to it as uh seems incentivized to participate in in this system um and and i guess let's just like keep building on like the incentives that compound on these other layers like

how did you notice this and i think you you came to the conclusion uh pretty quickly that that this existed and and how hard is it to to make these retailers see see see this incentive and understand it yeah so uh it's a great question um so i think there's like the layers on the consumer side are mining very few people are going to do investing you know buying bitcoin um very few people are going to do as well like if you look at how many users that are on even robin hood or or uh e-trade or any anything you know buying

selling stocks it's a very small population and i just looked at that and i was like is that really like that's not going to solve the problems of bitcoin like that'll get it to you know a few million people like that's cool like needs to exist it's the next phase of the retail cycle but it's not the end game you're not gonna have seven and a half billion people investing just like not the real world yeah so i thought a lot like deeply about just even like regardless of my experience i was like sort of coming off an exit i had two exits i was like excited about building something new and I was like what am I going to build like and and I just kept coming back this idea I was like shopping like everybody fucking shops everybody has to buy things like

you and it's not even about things it's about experiences it's about like buying things for your office like buying office supplies buying bourbon buying things that you want and like you know call it capitalism consumerism whatever but it's utilities like you need to fly to go visit your family you need to go fly for work like you need to stay in a hotel like you should be able to buy something and get a reward for it like that's the state of the world right now like how do you get rewarded like as a as a consumer we can shop anywhere we have the freedom of choice and so how do you give somebody the ability to like get into bitcoin and get a reward for shopping at this retailer and started to go to like i said to these retailers and and figure out like what they really

cared about is shoppers driving shoppers and similar to the cosmic problem um how do they compete with amazon so everybody was like how do i draw more customers away from amazon and and so that's what we we're doing like we're letting you have choice and we're saying you can shop at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of retailers for a ton of different just about every category and buy something and earn bitcoin when you shop and you don't need to invest you don't need to mine you don't need to do that to play a part in this in this world that like we're in and that's really exciting so that's what we're building that sounds dope and thank you so how do like the mechanics of getting the bitcoin to the user work do you guys have like a pool of funds that

you're siphoning off are the retailers giving you a deal and you're using kind of that deal to buy market buy and then get the reward um i kind of like the mechanics of the distributing of the bitcoin work yeah so um if you're allowed to disclose of course yeah yeah um transparency so um consumer buys something from the retailer uh retailer says lolly bought you know lolly drove the sale um they pay us in fiat uh we buy bitcoin and we send it to their lolly wallet they get bitcoin um gets locked in um they own the bitcoin you know i am a big believer like not your key is not your coin uh so when you hit a certain threshold fifteen dollars right now um you get to exchange that send that to your own addresses if you want to um or you can cash it out

for usd uh if you want to do that as well boss so easy on ramp and in my opinion super easy off ramp um yes you guys allow people to withdraw correct correct if you go to lolly.com backslash forward slash account um you can withdraw and you can move it to any address uh move it to your u.s dollar bank account through ach um we do fees at cost for u.s dollars and then um yeah i mean the cost of doing any sort of transaction on bitcoin we don't we don't take any off that yeah i guess i'm super curious right now to like how do you guys limit your cost in your end like to buying stuff like you have like crazy or like an otc relationship set up where it's like hey we're gonna drive this much volume obviously um and you just get a deal

on that end and then make it as simple as possible because what i'm actually getting to here is like all i can think of is like implementing lightning and making this like cheap as fuck for you yeah i mean that's the dream like yeah so right now yeah we're using an amazing otc that we get really great rates um we're not doing any dark pooling we don't have any plans of doing dark pooling uh like robin hood and some others uh we give what we get to the consumer um we take a percent from the retailer um and i think that's an important distinction we're we're out here negotiating all these rates with the retailer we're trying um i mean part of it is like our deep relationships that we have with these retailers the last seven years from our last

company um we have a competitive advantage there like i invite competitors like you know whatever I'm a competitive person and I like I want to win as a business and so I think I'm able to get competitive rates but part of that is like I'm actually competing more so with the Ebates of the world to get those competitive rates than anyone out there so I'm going out there and pulling up my Rolodex like trying to get these retailers on board trying to get the best rates for our consumers our shoppers and getting them these rates transferring it to Bitcoin and passing as much on to people as possible. Clearly, we need to make this business work

so that we stay alive, so we take a small percent from the retailer side because we're driving these consumers to their site. Obviously, and that's what fascinates me. It seems like a sick setup, and it can only be refined and streamlined going forward, especially if things like Lightning blow up. I met up with Elizabeth a couple days ago, actually,

And we've been, I think, long-term, like, internet friends for a while. But it was great to meet in person and hear her vision, very similar mission for the future. And, like, I, you know, I think I told you earlier, like, I got on this big Ethereum kick because I just sort of thought that Bitcoin wasn't going to be able to scale. And projects like Lightning make me really, really excited for the future of commerce, the future of Bitcoin. and i think one of the most exciting things like i sort of envision this sort of like product ui that i'll open source on your pod on your podcast um which i think is like really cool it's like transfer it faster you know you have the lightning literally i'm picturing like the lightning uh icon transfer it fast bitcoin and then transfer it slow you've got like the you know the tortoise

and you've got, like, U.S. dollars that, you know, seven days later you can get your cash, way to go, cool. Right? I mean, seeing what Juul and Kasa have done with their extensions, it seems like it should be pretty simple to implement what they have. I mean, maybe you can be compatible with the Kasa node or something like that and just hook up immediately, like, directly there in your extension. I think that's what Kasa's actually working on.

I don't know. So we're running our own nodes. I think Kasa's awesome. I think like second time first time around like starting Cosmic I kind of looked at the world with this yeah and I'm not even talking about Kasa in particular I'm just thinking because I'm thinking of my node because I have a Kasa

node but make this extension compatible like Pierre's node launcher or something like that or anything like any node just make it compatible and just hook up totally obviously you guys are thinking about this I'm just thinking aloud here yeah so I love those projects I think like I used to look at the world

as like a zero sum game and I think I was like a flawed logic and we're all in this together and I think that it's like how do we compound upon each other's infrastructure and how do we build you know something for everybody and the pie is pretty fucking big it's like you know we can all enjoy you know the the end game I think what we're in such early days that I'm really excited to like collaborate with a lot of these projects jewel casa um elizabeth you know lightning um and the way that i see this actually playing out is um you know we have these partnerships with right now over 500 of the top merchants in the in the country arguably in the world and what i want what i think our

contribution is like how do you get them to accept bitcoin like we've already won i think in getting them to reward with Bitcoin and earning, you have to give people Bitcoin to get someone excited about it. We have thousands of users right now that are excited about Bitcoin. They're earning it.

They're choosing it over cash. There's plenty of cash back programs, but they're choosing Bitcoin back over cash back. So we have these users. We have, I think, all the users that want to earn Bitcoin instead of like buy it.

The next phase is like, okay, now that they have it, How do you get them to spend it? How do you get them to use it across all these retailers? So my next challenge over the next five years is going to all these retailers and saying, let me help you spin up a lightning node. Let me give you this ability to do no-cost transactions

next to no-cost transactions. Lightning fast transactions. And distribute this to thousands of retailers that want no fees, that want trust, across the network like how do i give this and that's the next phase of lolly that's incredible and this is actually very much in line with a conversation i was having earlier this week with another bitcoin and it is like we need to create the closed loop system that's always been envisioned like when the consumer has the optionality to just keep their bitcoin in the lolly extension

and spend it at a retailer that's going to be incredible but again specifically with lightning obviously it's not a foregone conclusion still reckless to experiment with it but i i do believe that the vision is there and there are some predictable paths through which this technology can go and after a conversation i had earlier this week with a bitcoiner here in new york like he's going to get to the point where you go to the retailers you're gonna be like it's irresponsible for you not to use this like the fees are so burdensome for you in the the incumbent financial system that literally as a ceo as an owner of this business it is irresponsible for you not to use this technology because it is so cost savings if you can figure out a way to uh basically

hedge the volatility you nailed it it's like goes back to what do people want what do companies want like how do you make bitcoin attractive to retailers like we i think we figured out like how do you make it attractive to consumers you literally make it free like great we've done it um it's out there anyone can earn bitcoin for free using lolly like done the next phase is going to retailers and saying what are your biggest problems like i know your biggest problems but what are your biggest problems it's like charge backs the like you pay like i international commerce i so i come from the payments world and i am always surprised with how few bitcoin bitcoiners um come from the payments world because like the payments world is riddled with problems

It is, like, I mean, just as a 22-year-old, like, coming into the payment space, I'm like, this is a fucking mess. Like, what? You want to pay what fees on for what service to every single fucking time? Like, it made no sense to me. And it was just a tax of doing business. Every time you pay, you pay 1.5% to the banks, the acquiring merchant, the credit card companies, over and over and over again. it's just this assumed tax and i'm like i'm a big believer like if something's broken there should be a fix but at the same time like there are institutions in place that do not want that

like they they like their tax they're sitting back there they're having fun they're not building anything they're just collecting their tax what value are they adding and bitcoin comes along and and you know goes back to democratization of commerce but it goes back to giving everybody the ability to buy and sell anywhere freely and to own that transaction to own that money and own the transfer of that money and when when i learned about bitcoin i'm like heads deep or like in into this into this like space and i'm like why are we paying all these taxes for like you know um on for these payment companies that aren't doing really anything that bitcoin does like where everybody is verifying right um and so i got really excited about that that idea sort of tucked it in the

back of my head and came back to it when i was building lolly and i think one of like where i sort of view the future of payments and the future of credit and the future of cross-border and the future of like connection like bitcoin is this connective tissue between 7.5 billion people everybody can own it everybody can transfer it to each other like you can't do that for other currencies it's literally impossible literally impossible how do you do that so at first like the first phase is like let's get it into the hands of everybody let's get like distribute it let's let everybody earn it the next phase is like let's get everybody excited about spending it but why would they spend it and my what i think is the future of spending is actually shared

incentives the retailer has the incentive to accept it because they don't have to pay the the tax they don't have to pay the 1.5 percent but it's not even the 1.5 percent because that's actually kind of small in relative to chargebacks chargebacks with international commerce are fucking massive a company i work for uh in our like we i work for an online uh ad platform that is experimenting with bitcoin and for our crypto publishers we only accept bitcoin like because of chargebacks in particular and like it's immutable it's beautiful like the scammer problem the ico problem went beyond like just launching icos these people were buying ads with credit cards and uh charging it back like basically running like after they would they

would charge the credit card say it was fraudulent get the money back and we're like all right we're just gonna accept bitcoin for this look at the best payment companies in the world right now they're they're tacking on fraud detection they're it's bolt it's stripe it's adyen all these companies have built probably collectively 40 50 maybe more billion dollars of market value in the world by building fraud detection services like bitcoin is fraud detection native in a currency it's immutable why would you pay with bitcoin if you like not going to get it back yeah so if you can decrease if you have this margin of 10 15 cross-border commerce like that that world gets really exciting and it adds an incentive for the retailer to accept bitcoin

because that's like a 10 margin that a lot of people don't think about that the that the retailer is passing off to the consumer and and a big thing to me is like retailers are not largely not transparent you don't know what's baked into the marketing expense you don't know what's baked into the payment expense you don't know any of this thus the consumer just pays they're happy to pay with their credit card like yay visa like paid with my credit card why are you getting those points like why are you getting these like nice rewards it's because like you're paying with something and it's like you're responsible for something you're on the hook for something but the beautiful part of bitcoin that i think aligns with every party and everybody wins

is giving everybody the ability to win and the retailer wins because they decrease the charge backs the consumer is has to be trusted otherwise like they lose their bitcoin way to go like and the retailers are happy to accept it and so you're decreasing the chargebacks to near 0% because you can't get it back. So everybody wins. And I look at Lolly owning those rails and Bitcoin

being the rails that we transfer payments in the future. Thank you for building it. I mean, maybe that's what people need to realize that this is important. It's just to see it exist in front of them. Like, oh my god, this

exists and i can avoid chargebacks by just literally only accepting bitcoin like and it's going to take time it has taken time so that's like one thing i wrote down here in the notes is like you said like six seven years ago it was too early uh is it still too early do you think that's a great question i think that's you know i i think it's the right time um i think with cosmic we learned a lot um we were too early and we hit it at the right time to get acquired and to build something of value for the world um but you know i i want to build something massive like i want to build something that literally affects 7.5 billion people and hopefully by the time it exists like i'm you know i'm playing the long game i hopefully it's like 8 billion hopefully

it's nine billion i i want to build something that like changes the world and i i think cosmic taught me in building cosmic and my team and and everyone taught me that to to see the long game to see the big picture and with lolly it's like it's not just rewards it's it's bigger than that it's It's a rails to get Bitcoin to millions, ideally billions of people, and it's starting with rewards. So that's the goal, and I think that we're playing a long game. We have amazing investors, amazing users that are investing their time in us to share this and to believe in this, and the team believes in it. It's the same team that was building Cosmic.

It's the seven people we have on board right now. it's six of them we were you know we've been in the trenches building cosmic we went through some really shitty times and we you know went through some great times and we're doing it again and like we're doing it same dream same team like it's it's we're out here doing it again it's been fun no i love it and it's actually reminds me a lot of like what i was wrote about today which is coin center's paper on cash and privacy and they touch on like user data a lot and it seems like you guys have like the opportunity to flip the relationship of retailer and user and especially around like the collection of data and the distribution

of data. And it seems like you're very privacy and security first principle with a, you have a very private privacy and security first principles mindset. How, how much does this play into the product? Yeah. So it starts with Matt. I mean,

Matt is my inspiration for privacy. He's our North star. um i think he's taught me a lot over the years about the value of privacy um he um i'll say this nicely is like a privacy nut like he mad he called you a nut yeah uh privacy freak there we go freak freaks more after on on brand so shout out matt uh yeah i mean he's the best like he he's always looking out for our users i

I, he, he wouldn't, I mean, I, I, geez, if I, he won't even let me code anymore. He won't let me submit any, any code. So I have no say of, of it other than like, you know, he, he's our North star. Um, he cares about our users. He, um, it, with every, everything that we launch, we have privacy in mind. Um, we have to, given the sake of rewards, we have to track the purchase on every retailer's site. We do not want to track anything ideally.

And I think that you'll see the product evolve over time where we want to give people the ability to be anonymous. We want to give people full privacy. That's the end game. At this point, in order to give rewards, I have to know that user X shopped at retailer Y and bought something. That's all we collect.

That's all we want to collect. And when we collect that, we pass that off to the retailer. The retailer pays us. We give the reward to the consumer. You can transfer it to whatever address you want. You can do whatever you want with it. It's your Bitcoin.

That's our privacy stance. Yeah. No, and it seems like a huge uphill battle. and i i i mean i can't imagine a way in which ecom is like i can't imagine a way in which to avoid giving up at least some information in the way that e-commerce is structured in its current form and i would argue it needs like bitcoin like capabilities to get it to a point where it's less intrusive and so i guess this is what i'm trying to get like is the draw of user data too big to get away from do you think what does the model look like after

the collection of user data if it does exist have you thought about this and yeah um yeah so one thing that like i didn't think i did with cosmic that i think i've done with lolly is cosmic like i sort of saw the big picture and i saw the like what we had to build in between was just this like abyss I was like I want to build a shopping cart that everybody can buy and sell from and give everyone the ability to buy and sell anywhere and then I was like okay it looks like a cart looks like a white labeled solution like it looks like whatever it was with one thing I like I learned going back to something I mentioned earlier just like seeing the

big picture with lolly like you have to understand what you're building today and who you're serving today and how like once you control that experience how do you build it for a better future so and then like what does it become and so like I I think that you have to play ball with the people who run the court like you have to know what these retailers want and you have to give them that and once you control the narrative and you can let people like own their data own their privacy you just like i've seen all these projects a lot of them are built on ethereum they're doing it from day one and they're missing the point like you can't do that from day one and

have any transformative impact like people want to fucking shop at walmart people want to shop at jet like people want to shop at overstock they want to travel with priceline like they want to shop at the places they want to shop and you're not going to convince these retailers you're going to bring them consumers if you're trying to change their business model yeah it's not even changing their business model it's just changing again like going back to ux and psychology like arguably the way it's set up now is the easiest way right like hey give you my address you know where i am like you're gonna feed me good ads in the future i'm drunk rambling a little bit now this whiskey has gotten to me by the way we're drinking

iron smoke straight bourbon whiskey thank you for bringing it of course of course um no but what i'm trying to get is like how do you yeah how do you confront these problems because i think the problem is uh what's the word i'm looking for convenience like convenience is the problem in today's sort of model of ecom and stuff like that and how do we make it more convenient and then this harpens back to the optionality that bitcoin presents where i would argue it makes it more convenient if you can just point uh a scanner at a qr code from a node and nobody knows who you are it's completely sovereign it's completely your node and you nobody knows how you got that bitcoin pointed at a qr code expand it for money maybe send it to a pl box or something

I don't know if that's the next iteration of how you disguise, like, where you live when you're buying stuff or something like that. But basically, overcoming the convenience of today's e-com experience. Is that possible, Bitcoin, do you think? I think it is. I think people are loyal to other people that serve them. And you could make a strong argument that, like, retailers are becoming people. They have to. you see it in the twitter personalities right exactly oh my god the brands are becoming like

right oh my god sad sunny d and like yeah you know comforting uh what is it moon pie even though this is an official this isn't an official arby's account but nihilist arby's has done more great marketing for arby's yeah uh just for like i don't know it's my favorite account but like i would actually eat arby's after reading nihilist arby's tweets like even though it's not an official account but like the personalization of brands the personification if you will yeah it is happening and becoming more real i come from philadelphia i would argue the sixers had the best sports twitter brand in any any franchise in any sport trust the process trust the process they've been on it for years i was in literally i was this morning i was in a yoga class and the

teacher goes trust the process and i was like is she a sixers fan or is like this just the universal truth they made it into real reality it's like it all comes back it's like yeah this world's pretty interesting right now like if okay it kind of comes back to original marketplaces like people selling to people in the same space it's like they want this good it's it's it's something they need and at the end of the day like the more personal brands are the more those brands people serve us like that's where we want to shop and so if the brands are saying like look at everlane everlane is a great example love everlane great product huge fan of everlane hey shout out robin betchel she's an everlane investor investor reads the bent listens to the podcast shout out

to you robin didn't even know we had some everlane my last uh my last three duffel bags for weekend trips when i bring a carry-on or everland bags i'm wearing an everlane shirt right now boss oh no just kidding i'm not i thought we're gonna pretend you were i was oh yeah cut it out love everlane the transparency that they're bringing to being like a brand i think is amazing um i think brands need to go that route and they are going that route and as soon as they start going that route with payments and they so they show you like the tax that they're paying to the credit card companies to the banks like right now they're just showing you the tax that they're paying on the marketing expenses and they're saying we're not willing to pay the

facebook tax we're not willing to pay these like you know the ad expenses of like reaching you we're just going to be make the best fucking product and we're going to be a great brand transparent brand like that's the shift that's happening right now in commerce and the next phase of that i think will come into the into the payments world and they'll say what like how are we accepting payments why is it important and i i think that we're at the leading you know we work with everlane we work with the most transparent brands in the world and the consumer has to trust these brands in the future like they're tired of like you know having their data like leak they're tired of this they need this transparency but the brands need to also protect their consumers

and and so i think that there will be sort of like a if not already a day of reckoning when like these these people um when these brands realize they need to protect the consumer and i think that comes in the form of bitcoin it comes in the form of letting people check out privately it it comes in the form of like letting people like own their data and i mean i don't want to um you know be cocky but i think it you know what we're i think we're taking the apple approach we're not probably going to be first but we're going to be the best and we're going to be the safest and we're going to be the most private and if we always sort of hold that as like a north star and we always work with the best brands and we care about people's privacy like i'm okay with

like not hacking on lightning right now i'm not hacking on lightning professionally right now like because i want to make sure that it is the best and i have high confidence that it is the best i need to see it in the in like action and and then i'll take it to our brands i when i take it to our brands i want to know it's the fastest safest way and we have a high you know like we're the ones that we're talking to like literally brands that are doing 72 billion in revenue like sorry bigger than that hundreds of billions of revenue boss like if if i go to if i go to walmart if and i say like i need you to accept bitcoin like that's a that's that's a big ask right like imagine if walmart accepted bitcoin like what would that do what would that

do blow people's minds pomp would tweet about it it would this virus would definitely be spreading we just landed uh 1-800 flowers and i i have this tweet in drafts it's like the iris is spreading and it's uh i love that it's uh yeah shout out shout out to pomp over there yeah no um no but i i love i love that you're a little cocky we're big fans of finding bravery uh in your bravado here at tales from the crypt and i think it's important and like you said it's going to get to a point i i like that you are not apprehensive but uh just cautiously optimistic uh about lightning in particular but i do like again like i said earlier like the vision is there like you can see it like obviously we are probably more

uh technically savvy enough to interact with this technology at this point the stage of its development but even though it's a little clunky here and there it's definitely not the most seamless ux right now the vision is there it's like once you like use a jewel extension to play somebody in chess around the world and wager 500 satoshis which is less than a fucking penny like that's when it's like holy shit like this stuff works i just won 500 satoshis I want a half a penny it's not like I'm not psyched that I want to have a penny I'm psyched that I could win half a penny like it is there and again slowly but surely over time I think it will be bought out and I love that you guys have this long-term vision of just waiting for

it and it seems like you have a pretty baller retail network that maybe you can flip a switch at a certain point in time it's my contribution yeah I feel like everyone's done so much work and and to bring something to space it's like it's it's my team and i like we this is what we're good at and this is what we want to bring to the space and yeah it's like it's a team effort it's like everybody on the lolly team believes in this thing and like let's let's bring it to the world fucking love it man we're not done yet let's get cosmic and that no pun intended to your previous company but getting cosmic in the tales from the crypt sense like how do you see bitcoin affecting the world like your econ major did you

understand bitcoin more innately because you understood economics do you think or was it um payments in particular and how do you see let's get fully fucking cosmic how do you see changing the world um universe yeah yeah um so yeah going back to um economics i kind of truthfully I never I didn't get into business school I like applied undergrad Chapel Hill had a great business school um I just gave a talk there and and they were like why did you study econ not and not like business and I was like I didn't get into your school and I'm like that's cool whatever like um you know a little chip on my shoulder but I I took some finance classes I took some like uh econ classes and even though that like the the business school was like the

sort of um pinnacle pinnacle thank you um i i don't know i just like loved econ i was like it it went back to psychology to me like econ explained why people make the decisions that they do i would argue economics is strictly psychology at the end of the day it's it's the best people's decisions when faced with scarce assets is if you're going to describe economics at its purest form that's how i would describe it it's more psychology than anything that's why i love that modern day economics models and stuff like that it's you can't predict economics yes um i so i will say behavioral economics i i'm mostly partial to and like i think Chapel Hill was great for a lot of reasons but I had very conservative traditional professors

that were teaching Austrian really lucky you yeah Austrian economics schooled in Keynesian economics and saw like some really old school things that I actually thought were pretty archaic at the time um and frustrated me i was like i'm learning things that explain 50 of the problem 50 of the solution what do you mean by this what's that what do you mean by this i i mean like you're learning these models right like it's a bunch of models that are like this is how we're going to predict the future but only 50 of the future 60 accuracy 50 accuracy confidence levels confidence levels are a huge thing all right confidence level sure yeah it's like give or take 50 sure yeah but mostly give like how do you take um how do you increase that like degree of

accuracy and i'm like coming from like a family that is like a big believer in mental health and psychology and like understanding people and why we make the decisions that we do as human beings merging these two ideas between like psychology and economics I mean I like I went to the internet and I was like who is talking about psychology and economics because I am so frustrated in these in these classes and the questions that I was asking weren't getting answered I could go even deeper and say like I grew up going to Catholic school and the questions that I was asking in catholic school were not getting answered and questions are like i'm a catholic school boy myself really um what was your catholic school well i have so uh kindergarten through second grade i

went to catholic school northeast philly then we went to a quaker school for a year nice then we moved to south carolina i went to public school to high school and then i went to an all uh all boys uh jesuit high school for high school you saw it all that's awesome yeah what was that like i liked it i loved it uh kind of a little vulgar here freaks but go like i really appreciate it going to an all-guy school because when i started hitting puberty like seventh and eighth grade so goddamn horny in class it was just so much better being at an all-guy school you don't have to worry about any of that shit and jesuits get a lot of flack but i do think they're great educators they uh the whole mission of the high school i went to is creating men for and with

others and they really push us to be intellectually curious and to question authority um and i think that's why i'm here where where i am today uh shout out to teachers prep in philly best high school there ever was that's a good shout out um do you think you have some listeners from from high school out there somewhere maybe i don't know i hope so if you're listening out there go prep prep lax prep lax yeah no but

that was yeah my Catholics like I have a love hate relationship obviously as Catholics the diddling boys scandal is high on everybody's mind and I'm somebody who does not agree with the church

per se but I do agree with the message of Catholicism at the end of the day i think jesus was pretty chill i think jesus is pretty chill i agree i think jesus was pretty pretty chill yeah i mean good guy yeah all around good message yeah he meant well jesus meant well um i yeah i i'm yeah like born and raised catholic um dad's jewish like grew up multicultural family mom's hispanic dad's um eastern european jew from long island Do you speak Spanish?

A little bit. A little bit, very little. A little bit, yes. Yes, yes. Very little. Very little too. See, I even fucked that up. Yes.

My bad, my bad. We'll do the Spanish segment next time for the international audience. Yes. Yes, I grew up in a multicultural family. Like, mom was devout Catholic and taught, was, like, very much adamant, go to Catholic school. And I think, like, it led just, I think the nature of, like, growing up in a family of people with this, like, psychology mindset led me into this sort of mindset to question everything. Coupled with Catholic school, I felt like I was questioning everything throughout Catholic school,

led me to feel like a lack of answers, but this fascination and love for religion as well. I love all religions. I think religions are fascinating, and they've driven the world. They've brought us together, and they've brought us apart, but they've created tribes, and religions are beautiful at their core. I'm going to get heavy with you right now. Hit me. this is uh santiago syria and i talk about this a lot religions are the quasi blockchains of the

ancient world they help bootstrap sort of society and what it is to be a good person so you can go back and prove the stories throughout history of what it was like to be a good person they try to teach you how to like become a good person in real time um yeah thinking about like religions as bootstrapping mechanisms throughout history or something like that yeah that's beautiful um i subscribe to that i think religions are are are that and their forks like you know they evolve um as beliefs evolve and humans evolve with those beliefs they subscribe to new religions that serve them and yeah religion i mean it's it's there's a lot of parallels for like what we're doing right now and religion oh yeah it's like what what is humanity why are we why are we all like in this

together like what are we doing um how are we connected and if you look back at like history every war every like conflict was started and ended by in my in my eyes by commerce it's like by communication and in commerce why do all these countries love each other or not fight it's like because there's economic incentive for them not to fight how do you bridge them with a common currency the common ideology you give them this common like language like it's it's give them a common language in the form of a currency that is bitcoin well i actually had this argument with matt odell in person over the weekend at a college buddy in town we met up with matt we shot the shit about bitcoin and like a lot like so that's like another big debate like side debate of bitcoin is

like does it produce a dystopian future or uh a utopian future and some people argue dystopian i would argue i don't want to say utopian but like i think it would make or sorry that's a terrible framing not dystopian or utopian uh violent or peaceful i think that's a better framing um some people said more violent uh because of the potential for the wealth gap to increase uh in a bitcoin world which is definitely a possibility uh but i think what you're building would would fight against that um or a peaceful revolution and i think what you just brought up explains how it could be peaceful like the economic argument for why wars happen is because trade is sort of uh trade is encumbered by some sort of system whether it be currency exchange or

rough borders or sanctions whatever it would be and hypothetically in a future where bitcoin is the world reserve currency and there are no economic borders through which you can exchange value maybe people will cooperate more and will lead to a more peaceful future i don't know if i'm being too lovey-dovey hippie right now no that's my language i love that yeah that's what i'm building towards and if not if i'm wrong i i i'm sorry all right like but that's like something here are we naive that's another big question on this podcast are we naive and if not the one argument that i that i've heard um that i like i think a lot about pendulum swings as the world changes at the scale at which changing right now not the scale the pace

both both yeah the pace and the scale we've never had you you launch like a feature in an app that like is anti-privacy and it affects a billion people like the scale of that is fucking unbelievable very true very true and the pace of it is like every two weeks facebook is launching code so it's compounding it's compounding so somebody makes like a like apple i you know i think one of the most brilliant things for privacy i was like tim cook going into like the i mean what was he going in front of congress and they were like give us this data and he was like i wish i could help you guys i don't have it what a fucking answer oh my god right like just what a precedent for apple to be like if we had it great we'd give it to you

we don't have it that's the precedent that's the world that is like where we have to live in in the scale in which the companies that will exist in the future have to protect the people that they're affecting so that brings up another interesting point like so this what you just said reminds me of like the the meme that goes around in fin twit and crypto twitter a lot where it's like he's a guy he said bye he said what he said bye bye bye bye bye bye bye bye now we're gonna make a sale and it's like so so so so so it's like um i completely forgot where i was going with that what were you just describing uh tim cook privacy yes precedents i'm sorry i'm sorry the uh the whiskey's getting to me the precedent so the point i was trying to make there is it

feels as if all it takes is a little bit of courage from one stalwart in an industry to stand up and say hey this is wrong we're not going to accept this it seems as though there's almost a complacency over the market it's like oh this is just the way things are like we're going to comply with this like it seems as though to change things there needs to be a bit of courage in the market particularly from industry leaders or big businesses or fast uh quickly growing businesses to say hey this is the new way we're going to do it this way like we're going to stand against the grain and sort of change the perspective and the interaction with this product and basically somebody to have the balls to stand up and say hey this is what i think we need to change the world

That's why I was so pumped about Jack last week taking a principled stance on Bitcoin in particular because it was like so goddamn refreshing. It's like the last couple decades since Steve Jobs, obviously he didn't die 20 years ago, but since Steve Jobs died, it's been hard to find very many CEOs with as much principle as he had. And Jack, for all the flack he gets with Twitter and the banning and the censorship and whatever, I thought his stance on Bitcoin and being principled about it in particular was very refreshing. Just like you don't see that that often. I agree. It takes this focus and this long-term thinking that I would say like the first time around, I didn't have. I don't think I saw this like long game of what the world could be and how I could impact that. And when I look, I mean, I think Jack is like one of the best CEOs with like the longest vision of anyone.

And arguably, like my prediction is I think he'll be the most powerful person in the world in the next 10 years. Did you see Arjun's tweet? I talked to Arjun about this. I didn't see the tweet. Oh, Arjun tweeted out. We got to pull it up. Okay. um our origin and i like probably agree with a lot of a lot of things i think we actually talked

about this um you keep ripping i'll pull this yeah so like i didn't think our genre actually talking about the the like what does cash app to square combo look like to twitter combo um i mean it's that world is fucking massive like that future is incredible yeah so here's here's arjun's tweet the year is 2024 via musk-like maneuver cash app and twitter have morphed creating a bitcoin native millennial bank on top of the most important communication platform on the planet to offer uncensorable speech and payments jack wins the nobel peace prize it's so good it's so good it's so good it's actually like i can see this happening yeah like that twitter i mean you you and i are both

active on twitter um i think one of the reasons we love twitter is the trans i'll speak for myself um and then let me know what you think um i had a hard time getting into twitter when i first got into it i think it's like it was interesting but i was like what do i tweet about why the acquired taste it's an acquired taste uh somewhere to this bourbon we're drinking um it's good um but yeah how do you like how do you get into twitter and my one of my friends uh ryan dowijan he wrote this blog post of like how to be good at twitter and filter filter filter yeah filter it takes a it's a process it take it takes trust the process trust the process like it it takes interaction like you have to interact with it like and so obviously with anything in

life yeah it is it's kind of like life in a digital form it's our thoughts being broadcasted out in the world and this sort of like we you know the I think the best things I've ever done in life have been like when I've shared a thought when I've shared an idea and it's been like beaten down and changed and then being like okay well maybe that wasn't a good idea if I can do that in a public sphere and somebody can like say you're right, you're wrong, you're right, you're wrong and you can like build on that. Like most of my most formative thoughts

I think over the last 10 years, I think I just said nine years, I joined Twitter nine years ago, have come from like putting my thoughts out on Twitter and seeing what the world thinks and my thoughts have compounded on that and it's sort of this beautiful hive mind. Oh, it's it's like definition of a high mind. It's definition of high mind.

So going back to sports analogies, lacrosse sports analogies in particular, like a lot of the one thing that was mentally beaten to us in my high school lacrosse team was like, you're only as strong as your weakest link. And basically what that means is like you need everybody on your team to be prepared from the first starter to the last player on the bench. uh and i think twitter as an information sharing platform gives the ability for the weakest links to access the best information and yes sort of bootstrap like you create everybody's on a level playing field of the conversation where you can peek in and sort of you can strengthen the weakest links by having open conversations and i don't know if i'm being too pretentious right now or whatever but like this is honestly what i believe like i believe the more access to information more importantly quality information which is dictated by likes and retweets and

the sort of cream rising to the top like meritocracy is imperative and is changing society that was my drunk rant i know i think that's great uh tell it to jack when he comes on like hopefully he listens yeah and it's it's spot on it's it's the it's the democratization of ideas in a digital format but even though i'm about to interview jack i will say i do think i do think twitter needs to step out of the equation a little bit the company just like needs to like i said twitter's all about filtering and picking like it is like the user experience like you need to design your own experience on twitter you need to decide what information feeds you want to have access to

you need to be able to block and mute the trolls it is a process those people exist they exist throughout the whole world the trolls the haters people are going to hop in your menchies and shit on you no matter what your political views are no matter what you believe in there's going to be somebody there fighting you just filter them out like if all your like twitter is the best communication tool that's ever been created that's why this podcast is here right now that's why i'm here right now like this podcast would not be a thing if i did not dm somebody on twitter and be like hey we should meet up and talk about bitcoin like i literally would not be here and the thought of that beauty being able to be bastardized because a bunch of people are like screaming

these people have bad ideas and you should ban them, it makes me sad. I think maybe fucking up my future interview but I think there is a way to utilize Twitter and that Twitter can step out of the equation and makes everybody happy.

And it's rigorous filtering. How do you empower the individual to control their experience of how they interact with the world? That should be the goal of Twitter and it's it's so tough like i don't envy jack's problems and neither do i that's like i'm so like it's so tough it's like how do you create a constitution and let me make that clear like

i don't hold him responsible for that at all no like i can't imagine having that power or like not even that power that responsibility excuse me the best platform in the world is on his shoulders and like no pressure like yeah exactly it's how do you write the the modern ever-changing constitution for what can be shared protecting your users letting them protect themselves it's like i i mean i don't know an algorithm in the world that has been invented to do that and it's like on the cutting edge like it's like why do you do it i don't i don't i have never seen a like of all the people who are fighting for free speech and all the people who are fighting for for fighting for um you know anti-hate speech and controlling their experience it's like where's

the solution right the algorithm i don't i have i i couldn't come up with it i don't know it doesn't it doesn't exist what is right what is wrong it's this i mean when you put everybody's brain and friction exists it's a law of nature like yeah there's going to be friction like literally my hand rubbing against this table and then ideas rubbing against each other like there's going to be friction no matter where it goes back to the pendulum with here the pendulum theory i i strongly believe in is the world will correct itself humans will correct themselves and you put enough out there into ether and like i'm okay with people who do not like agree with me online i'm okay with it i don't like it it's not it's not enjoyable to my twitter twitter.com

experience but like it's okay it exists and those are real people out there that have brains well okay let's just say that there's no bots let's remove the bot equation block the bots the first that's first off i haven't i haven't experienced so much botics uh activity recently yeah eth bots are gone at least xrp bots gone i think those are paid chills i don't know if they're bots but okay yeah so let's just say like if all humans had a an account or multiple accounts maybe someone anon accounts that were like out there that's fine for me i love that i think everybody should be able to voice their opinion i was actually i was in japan about a year and a half ago i met with twitter twitter japan and i was fascinated to learn that people have an average

of about four to five accounts and that's for the what yeah really yeah real life and full Transparency. I have two. Tales from the Crypt. Ask Jack about different cultural versions of how people have used... It actually goes to your point. How do you make Twitter for everybody? That's part of how Japan,

just the mentality of Japan, they live in this world that is their own. It's so different than the Western Twitter. So they've made it their own by spinning up all these different accounts. And so they have all these Anon accounts

from their personas and i don't think they're like bad people i don't think they're like hiding their identity i think they're just finding their lane and they're finding their what they're interested in and they're like i'm super into anime i'm super into baseball i'm super into this and that and they talk and they engage in what they're interested about and they do it freely because twitter and like that's the beautiful part of twitter so how do you how do you make that for everybody and not just make it a hack on top of twitter right i'm happy i don't have to solve that question i'm very happy i don't solve the question um maybe i'll ask jack in a couple weeks i mean again it's something i don't want to focus on this interview but like especially

while we're in this interview but um it's something that fascinates me it's it is i i mean again it's why we're here tonight it's a powerful tool and harnessing it in the most advantageous way possible for every human is something that fascinates me like i think about it every day is it good for the world do you think yes i do too i think so yeah um it feels in the present that there is debate of if it can be if it is good for the world but i think that short-term thinking i think that's saying oh you know uh donald trump tweeted this it's like you know we might have a world war because of twitter but i think the world will figure itself out and we will this pendulum will swing back and like i mean i i see you know that's the point i would

like to make is that i think the empathy creation from twitter is way bigger than the hate creation exposure being able to see through somebody's eyes like especially like in war-torn areas like Syria in 2012 2013 being able to follow people documenting the war on the ground and see through their eyes like the empathy that created I was like holy shit I'm a white boy in fucking Chicago I can't imagine being in this situation right now I was like god bless you like holy shit like that would I had a lot of holy shit moments via Twitter being like I can't believe people live life this way exposure yeah access to ideas that is the core of like what balances the world like i i mean i'm going back to catholic school i felt i was in a white homogenous catholic school

in charlotte north carolina and i felt i don't know how to describe it this is i don't talk about this a lot but like i felt this imbalance i was like what am i like i you know grew up with a hispanic mother like very like much part of like my individual identity and culture and and jewish father like i felt this sort of like imbalance i was like i i felt like something wasn't right and you know through like i mean this kind of this is actually a deeper conversation but my dad got laid off by the bank um inspiration we can talk about later if you'd like but oh i i uh can resonate with that inspiration very well love it um ended up going to public school and just being i mean it was like twitter it was like every like i i think the the the stat that

they that they had was like it was the most diverse public school in north carolina um it was the second largest public school in north carolina um i was just like forced to meet so many people and be exposed to so many different i think it was we represented 65 different countries and it was it was amazing like i fucking loved high school there was so many amazing people there was so many people that inspired me from different walks of life and i just like i went all in i was like this is amazing this is what i was lacking in life and this is like where my brain went i was like i have to learn everything and know everything that i had not known before and having that exposed me to all these different ideas all these different thoughts and and just

like just inspired me i i've just never felt so empowered up until that point in my life of coming off of like this like confused catholic school middle school kid being like whoa this is the real world like these are real people this is like what life's about like different ideas different opinions than mine and not necessarily agreeing with them and being you know this like chameleon but like being challenged yeah that's like i fucking love that story again like we moved back to uh the philly area from south carolina for because of a very similar situation and yeah i uh came back to philly was in public school for a few years and then went to private school but yeah the culture shock like and again like real life culture shock of moving from place

the place has made me who i am today like i like to say this a lot it's just cheesy but like i am the culmination of my experiences and my experiences are vast not vast but i've only ever traveled to like two three or four countries outside the u.s but um i feel like different meeting different types of personalities in different parts of the country has made me who i am today and again like Twitter just makes that possible for everybody. You don't have to move a geographic location to access somebody's mindset in a different place. And that empathy creation is something

that we don't realize the power of it. I don't think most people do. I do, I believe. It is crazy. Again, I think it's the most powerful tool that's ever been created. And it's figuring out how to harness that empathy and realize that, yes, there's a lot of hate.

But I believe the empathy creation on that platform in particular way outweighs the hate i i totally agree i think i think that um it there's i'll like actually this is not a completely original thought this is a an idea that was um given to me by a friend uh david bernstein started this thing called run for america um to get progressive candidates uh bipartisan non-partisan um candidates into government how do you get new ideas into government is his whole life mission i met him we were both like 24 25 we're at a dinner table and he told me he was on this like 20 year mission how do you get more progressive candidates into government and how do you get new ideas into government thus ideas into into people like

spread to people and his his thing was like i mean his whole like thesis for for the next 20 years was just like fascinating to me he was like able to see the trump election before the trump election he was able to see like the the pendulum swinging and when trump announced that he was being you know he was running for president and i don't know if you remember that like it was insane i was where were you what was your mentality when he so he was elected in 2016 so 2014 he announced i was here in new york and i had just read the sovereign individual actually nice and i told my wife but that girlfriend now my wife i was like he's gonna win like i knew wow i knew like after reading that

book and uh i'm not saying this book is the reason why trump won or anything but like they did predict the conditions that would lead to trump which were a mass amount of citizens displaced uh of jobs because of automation uh because of that you have nationalistic tendencies in turn people are trying to blame immigrants for their job loss and stuff like that and then they turn to somebody who's going to solve all those problems and change uh the narrative and flip this sort of paradigm on its head and trump was that obvious candidate who doesn't care and for all the hate trump gets i do think it was refreshing i do have the sort of let's burn it down not let's burn it down mentality but like hey we need to throw a

fucking wrench in this thing and people need to wake the fuck up so some parts of me are happy that it was elected or people are now like how did it get this bad it's not even that people know why it's this bad people are beginning to question how did he get to this point where the celebrity apprentice is our president like and then like again like i you were elected yeah he was elected but like i trump to me is like whatever like i don't see him as an enemy i don't see him as an ally i'm just like he is a symptom of the system yes we have created over time that that's all he is to me and And the fact that he was elected, if it opens people up to questioning the system they grew up in,

which I would argue nobody is, or not nobody, but a vast majority of people have not questioned their whole lives, I'm all for that. I'm not for Trump. I'm for the questioning of the systems you grew up in. And, hey, freaks, I would argue they're pretty fucked up and we should change them. I have to agree with that. I think it's like, it's, I never would say that I, if I could, if I had control, that if I wish I would, I would do it any differently, to be honest.

I think that Trump is this sort of necessary evil that has to exist to bring in the good, bring in the swing. Bring in the fire under people's asses. Like, hey, we need to fix this. Like, Donald Trump's our fucking president right now. Yeah. like are you fucking kidding me but with that being said it's not like we should revert to like this like the system that we came from like donald trump is president because the system that

we came from is and it's broken it's broken like yeah you cannot have politicians with no term limits fucking like again like i go back i don't know if i've described this on this podcast before like but the whole like mechanism of democracy in its current form is still an anarchism of like 1776 like we vote for people to go to a centralized place to speak on our behalf when we have technologies like twitter where we can speak for ourselves like it just like fundamentally does not make sense to me i'm not saying we should go to direct democracy or anything like that but i'm saying like we should probably adapt and like we don't need to give up our voice to these assholes who are psychopaths and are dead set on getting position rather than actually changing the world

um the republic the republic is failing us yeah the and and you know it's a question of will like i mean democracy fail us as well like probably so but at least it's like bringing truth to the situation well okay maybe argue that truth was like truth with truth with a completely representative democracy hillary would have gotten elected and would the pendulum have swing so far that like we would have corrected or would we have keep would we would we keep igniting the fire that's a good question and while like you know i think hillary would have been a better president i do not necessarily agree with like if i zoom out for this like 50 year time frame that i hope to be alive that i hope to like play a part in the world and like to

help the world and humanity advance like i don't i think trump might be better long term to exist as this fucking awful individual that is a representation of a failed republic like that might be a better world yeah which is really tough i would argue i would argue Hillary could have played that character as well I'm not the biggest Hillary fan like again like you talk about career politicians people that don't deserve to get to where they are she wouldn't have ignited a large enough like anti Hillary like I think that Hillary has her pros and cons Hillary is very much like she would have been like what what we have had I just think again like I go back to

like we shouldn't even be thinking about these people like these are like if you think about america's government and like when you talk about like the three branches like the judicial the legislative and uh the executive branch i almost forgot it there it's probably less than 5 000 people that run the decisions for 320 million people and like to me that just like logically does not make any sense like i think the whole structure of it i can't i don't i i'm not going to create a new structure and like how we should organize but like just like off the bat like street smarts looking at it like yeah this doesn't fucking make sense anymore like that's my mentality uh yeah i think i think one of my i mean one of the things i care most deeply about

aside from lolly and bitcoin is like mobile voting i think giving people the ability to we have the technology we have the security we have the ability like i am excited by those projects that are bringing mobile voting if you have a mobile voting solution out there like bring it to me. I'll give it to the right people. I so believe that that will represent our true democracy and enable politicians to make the decisions and be absolutely held accountable for their decisions on a micro level. Like, when your politician goes to, like, the House, like goes to the floor if they are not voting with you you should get a notification on your 10 apps that you have that say hey this politician that you voted for did not serve you

they didn't vote with you you're not who they're looking out for and then next election you should strongly consider did like do they deserve your vote yeah where's the transparency where's the democracy where's like where's the truth in it all right and so santiago siri mentioned earlier and that's like so what he's building at democracy earth they're working on that but love santi and the democracy earth team but i think it should be even more localized like yes like it's where it has to start so the the the phrase um communism at a family level socialism at a community level democracy at a state level and anarchy at uh international like geopolitical level makes a lot of sense to me like i think a lot of these decisions that we uh allocate to

politicians via votes we can sort of take ownership of now with the technology that exists today and the decisions just need to be more local as opposed to like a lot of the things that we vote on affect every american where i would argue they should just affect your your local community and and what affects you more innately more directly it should be more grassroots like i think again that's that's why i'm into bitcoin because it's grassroots it's bottom up it's organic it is not decreed upon people you opt into it and I believe you can create a similar structure with government where it's opt-in grassroots you have your local community and then you guys vote to interact with the state community and then if your state community likes it you can interact with the

federal community and then from there with the international community but it should always be from a very localized community perspective first then moving out from there nothing decreed from uh dc onto every locality in the in the u.s i just i'm drunk alex i'm sorry it's a good conversation i i'm enjoying i'm enjoying this i think i am too yeah i want to live in this future we're talking about right well is it even possible like am i just drunk it is possible does it make sense freaks you can yell at me no i i'm an internal optimist because well the reason i like when i have this like and i love hashing pun upon pun intended hashing this out with you it's because a lot of the uh a lot of debate gets bifurcated

and it's like you're either you believe this or believe that and a lot of people don't explore the gray areas of like hey let's recognize that we're humans we're fucking stupid to a certain extent and we sort of need to figure this out together and i think there should be more like Like, again, going back to Twitter and why it's open and why it should be open, like, this is why it's important. Yeah, get those ideas out there. And, like, I mean, I am a big believer that I am a proponent to never be dogmatic about anything. And it's just this, like, principle that I have. And it's tough in the world that we live in because I, like, I think I'm right about a lot of things.

I, like, I want to build the world that I want to live in. And I want to be working towards, like, something better. And it's a struggle that I have because it's like, is that North Star right? Am I right? Like, so many things come up in our lives that, like, question that North Star. Like, are you building to something better? Like, I just got, like, I mean, I've been a big, like, I love cooking. I love.

I thought you said cocaine for a second. Yeah. He loves cooking. Cooking. Cooking. Eating, cooking. I legit thought you said I love cocaine. I was like, whoa.

Whoa. Big admission on the podcast. We're going really, we're going into it. Alex loves cooking. I love cooking too. Cooking. There we go. What do you like to cook?

I do love to cook. What do you like to cook? Very good at making a beef bovignon. If you want a beef bovignon in a nice cold winter night, like tonight, I can make that for you. Amazing. burning the cognac is the most important part speaking of bananas foster one of my favorites a absolute like family recipe um burn the cognac yeah yeah it's good cognac has that nice

that nicely it's so good yeah yeah they so i've experimented actually with burning um high alcohol bourbon and it's also very good really yeah um with various things as long as as long as it lights i think over 81 yeah something like over 81 proof or something like that and you actually get to test the brand a little bit because you you there's like i never knew this before but you test the validity of the alcohol content by when you burn it if it burns will it burn interesting youtube channel put it out there interesting will it burn um but there's there's people that say it's like 85 and then you burn it and it's like no it's 80 science yeah that's interesting lucky uh henny henny's a good uh henny's a good um cognac there it is okay it

burns yeah let's burn uh so get so cooking where was i going with cooking i don't know cooking what were we talking about we're talking about we got political we got religious already we're we're hitting all the boxes um i don't know cooking cooking for me it's just therapeutic uh it's a process helps me get away from twitter for like three hours a day or something like that same i i think i that's not where i was going but i oh i i remember where i was going all right veganism oh are you controversial are you vegan no i eat everything okay um i you know born and raised north carolina uh every meal growing up was meat i had meat in it um never really thought twice about it um

transparently started dating a vegan and got exposed to like a different world view and have been thinking a lot about that worldview of like what is life where like where do we break down what is like a what is what is life like how do we understand what is the value of life like if aliens came down would they eat us would be we would we be cool with aliens eating us to get cosmic again like they're they're a more advanced species i do not want to be a galactic cattle right me neither me neither and the the sense of empathy overwhelmed me and being like well shit like i grew up in a in a state that had more pigs than people like do i want to be a pig and it fucked me up so do like i don't know i'm i'm like going through this this like i love

cooking. I love making every ingredient. I love traveling. I love the culture of cooking. Like I feel like cooking and eating is this universal language that brings us all together. And so I was like talking about this idea of being like this carnivorous being versus a vegan being and this disparity between the two. Like what is life and where does it break down and how do you decide like is a shrimp deserving of life or is a cow deserving of life or is a human deserving of life what about a carrot is a carrot deserving of life like i've read about mushrooms communicating with trees like what the fuck are like where is life breakdown and like what can we eat and are we at a time when we can value life as such and i'm i like it goes back to dogmatism i'm not

dogmatic about anything i'm i'm open to being proven wrong i'm open to like finding something new but i always am looking for truth you know looking at like like hume hume talked about it and way ahead of his time and fucking like just brilliant and hated and like didn't need any external validation like someone who just believed that this is what humans were looking for they were looking to not need resources to like be just this like self-sustaining being and looking for truth is what it all came down to and that's what i'm looking for and yeah i i like to think i get like fucked up every day with truth and i like love it so well that's why we're into bitcoin because as safe adina moose would argue bitcoin is the only objective excuse me the only objective

suite of facts that exists in the world. It feels like truth. It is truth to me. I mean, it technically is truth if you're defining truth as something SHA-256 hash algorithm

per 10 minutes. I can see it. It is truth of what happened in the Bitcoin blockchain at a certain point in time, whether or not the intentions of the users of the Bitcoin blockchain are commensurate

it with the outcome of where their UTXOs end up is another question. But regardless, the Bitcoin blockchain documents what happened within any given block. And so that's been a big theme of the Ben and this podcast recently is like, I think, modern society, we're becoming detached from reality. And, and what I like to harp on is in finance and central banking in particular, is the tweaking of sort of metrics and projections that are used to define the monetary policy, which end up being completely bullshit in time. And I think that is actually a grave disservice to humanity

because nothing is rooted in truth. It's rooted in, hey, I think this will be this way. And if it doesn't turn out to be this way, I'm going to recalibrate and project it another way. And hey, if it doesn't hit that projection in the future, I'm just going to keep recalibrating. And we've gotten to a point where we've recalibrated so much that we're so detached from reality.

And again, in the financial world in particular, that we are literally detached from financial reality. Like the financial world is a bit asinine when you actually understand it. Yes. Going back, So I met Elizabeth Stark at a, we met up, and we're discussing, like, you know, how do we work together, what's the future of Lightning, and seeing all these, like, commonalities of how we, like, saw the world, and sort of this, like, idealism of what the world becomes, like, with Bitcoin is so exciting. and we went to this party um after after hanging out and the there's this guy there that like

really like he he was like a total he just didn't like he didn't understand bitcoin and i've met a lot of people like this over the years and i'm like i never want to like sell someone anything i just like i don't believe in it i'm like you should come to it on your own research like i'm not gonna i don't want to be the person that like sells you something sells you this ideology i was sold many ideologies throughout my entire life and i don't like being sold what i told him was like how do you what do you know about money and what it came to is like he did not fundamentally understand money i would argue that 99 of people do not and it's like how do you encourage somebody like like i almost think that the biggest education bitcoin is not that hard

when you relate it to money money is so fucking hard to understand and hard to explain and it's like i had to give him a brief lesson of history of money and and then it started to encourage and i'm just waiting for that text of being like i earned my first bitcoin i shopped at jet like i bought a toaster and i got my bitcoin and i get it thank you and i don't need that validation but at the same time it's like i want to i just want to educate people on what fucking what money is like why it matters what is like how do you own money and how do you own an asset like going back to what like the the central belief of bitcoin how do you give everybody how scary is it that we live in a world of 7.5 billion people and i would argue conservatively or excuse me like

liberally liberally 7.5 billion people 7.2 don't liberally 200 million people actually understand bitcoin or not bitcoin money money the concept of money like what money is people do not understand what money is and like i did not understand what money was until i was fucking 22 years old and then when i understood it was like holy fuck like there is no good money on this planet like and but i mean we're already two hours and six minutes in right now we could dive down a whole another rabbit hole i guess this is where we should end it but like how imperative is it that people understand this concept of money and how bitcoin plays into the utility of money in particular um it is the education piece yeah it's you can't tell someone the value of bitcoin until

they understand the value of what they value and what they value is u.s dollars is what they value is kohl's cash like you gotta tell them what kohl's cash is like sorry but like kohl's cash is not real no it's it's it's controlled by coals and like the u.s dollar is similarly controlled by the u.s which is not it's it's it's an organization that says this is what the the the currency of the world is based on countries all over the world literally have u.s dollars that are backing their own currency and we look at venezuela we see where that breaks down and like I am fucking terrified for the next financial crisis because it doesn't look like the last one it is worse it is scary and like what when people realize what money actually is and what it's

backed by it is a scary world and that is what I'm in like reluctantly waiting for for people to finally start valuing our future currency i believe our future currency is bitcoin plenty of other people would argue with that i think it's the closest thing that looks like a store of value that can replace gold and that is what i'm building god we could keep going for hours i love it thank you for coming through thank you for having me thank you i'm glad we met this is great i'm glad we met too yeah you know you just get a couple whiskey drinks in you and life starts flowing but again like i don't want to sound like a pompous prick but like i do worry like people don't understand what money is and like and again i go back to this example a lot like i've asked

a lot of people in person like when they like come up to me like oh bitcoin's just a ponzi like it's fucking it's a fucking scam like all right like i'll just fuck with them be like all right like what like i'll pull out a five dollar bill but like what does this represent i'll be like yeah five dollar bill nobody i'm like all right like but what is a five dollar bill like it's it's currency backed by our government i'm like yeah not particularly but like what backs their currency and i shit you not nine times out of ten people will say gold and i'm literally like what the fuck like yeah 40 years ago 90 like this is anecdotal this is me in my experience maybe i'm hanging out with too many dumb people but nine times out of ten people legitimately think our

currency is backed by gold and i had to be like no it's not like please look into what money is and and i i i actually i go back to like my ingon classes and i was like what did i learn like i i reading reading the bitcoin standard which i literally send to every client like retailers everywhere i i might be i hope to be the biggest buyer of that book ever because i think it's the best book out there that exists to educate people not just on bitcoin on money history of money and and it's like if you argue with me on what money is read it like read other like it's biased you know it clearly is like leading up to like oh well money is shitty like let's believe that something else should exist i get that but bitcoin is the first thing that

convinced me that like gold currency everything is flawed and that the closest thing that looks like to the future is bitcoin and i send it to everybody i believe in it i think everybody should understand the value of what money is it literally connects us all like better than whatsapp better than anything it is like the thing that keeps us together it is the biggest social contract that exists yes literally money is one half of every transaction and like oh that's all right this is the last all right this is the last topic but like how fucked up is it like money but money is so pervasive in pop culture more money more problems like money money money get money get money but nobody understands what the fuck it is like that is the most ironic thing in

the world to me like that is literally what drives pop culture is money money money money money and nobody knows what it is we have drank three quarters of the bottle of iron smoke straight bourbon whiskey alex it's been an incredible conversation it's been good do you have any parting words for the freaks out there oh man um thank you uh for being a part of this movement i think like people who are following i think you are the at the forefront of like educating people on this space of like making it accessible we need people talking about this so thank you we need more literate people talking about it we need people who can explain it better than i can so if you're out there raise your hand yeah this has been awesome thank you for having me alex

thanks for coming on man pump what you guys are doing with lolly um if you guys haven't checked it out lolly.co.com.com.com lolly.com.com lolly.com slash ref slash tftc yeah that is our ref link um thank you for building what you're building thank you for joining the front lines of bitcoin again do you have a parting note for anybody other than um i i encourage you to share it your friends i think that probably most of the listeners are clearly believe what we believe um future i think looks like bitcoin um i think that the biggest thing is like we want we reward people for sharing it's like we want people to share this with their friends like i needed something to share with my sister my mom my dad my friends from back home and i built lolly for that

and like i encourage you like even if you're not a big online shopper use lolly download it share your link earn bitcoin real bitcoin like this it's it's not just sharing your ideology with people it's sharing lolly sharing this idea with people and as soon as people have skin in the game as soon as people own actual bitcoin i think they'll be like me and i think they'll start to to believe i like that mindset i love that mindset uh alex you've got me the drunkest i've been in a while on this podcast i appreciate that um takes two where can we find you on twitter at alex at alex edelman and then at try lolly and try lolly yes i'm sorry for mispronouncing all good alex it's been a pleasure um thank you marty check out lolly full disclosure a lot i

I mean, I'll disclose this in the pre-roll ads, but sponsor the pod now. Thank you for coming on. Big supporter. I believe in what you're doing. I believe in what you're doing, and that's literally the only type of advertiser I'll partner with is somebody who- Game recognizes game. Game recognizes game is the perfect way to describe it.

Freaks, if you're liking this, subscribe, rate, review. Go check out Lolly. Download it. Seriously, try it. If you're using Amazon every day, why not try out Lolly? Make some Bitcoin. I mean, Prime's cool, but it's sort of fetcher. And you can get everything that you would get at Amazon on Walmart, on Jet, on Overstock.

And eventually, Amazon will join us if we drive enough sales to these other partners. And, yeah, we're talking with Amazon. Yeah, I'm going to pull Matt O'Dell right now, too. We're at the bottom of a bear market. Like, this is the time to accumulate Bitcoin, right? Every bit counts. Every Satoshi counts. Start stacking sats, freaks.

um alex it's been a pleasure yeah uh thank you freaks for listening peace and love peace and love