The Pomp Podcast - 322: Amir Haleem on Building the World's First Peer-to-Peer Wireless Network

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

Amir Haleem is the co-founder and CEO of Helium, a technology company that built the Helium Hotspot. The Helium Hotspot has created an innovative way to decentralize and democratize ownership of wireless networks. In this conversation, we talked about Amir's time as one of the top gamers in the world, why he thinks we have to decentralize wireless networks, how the Helium Hotspot works, and what it means to build the people's network. =============================== Blockset by BRD is your hosted blockchain infrastructure. Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high-quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. Using the services provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions, accurate and near real-time portfolio management solutions, auditing platforms, commercial block explorers, and much more: https://www.blockset.com ===============================  Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. ===============================  Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Amir Halim is the co-founder and CEO of Helium, a technology company that built the Helium Hotspot. The Helium Hotspot has created an innovative way to decentralize and democratize ownership of wireless networks. In this conversation, we talked about Amir's time as one of the top gamers in the world, why he thinks we have to decentralize wireless networks, how the Helium Hotspot works, and what it means to build the people's network. I really enjoyed this conversation with Amir, and I hope you guys do as well.

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I break down complex topics into easy to understand language and I share my opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at POMPletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Amir. I hope you guys really enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular

strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, everyone. I am here with Amir. Super excited to be doing this. How are you, sir? I'm good. How are you? I got no complaints, man. Yeah, likewise. I literally can't complain at all. We'll give it a few seconds to get some people in here. but I'm excited to do this and I think people generally have heard of helium the hot spots and they want to know more so I figured this would be a good way to do it yeah it's awesome to be on thanks for thanks for having us and yeah can't wait to talk about some hot spots and helium in general for sure so maybe let's just get started with with your background

for those that don't know who you are what do you what did you do kind of before helium so a long time ago i was a uh in college i think i was one of the first western pro esports players that existed so i i did nothing in college other than play quake which was the first like real internet you know tcpip game got really good at it i was you know like the best player in the world for for a while uh same with quake 3 so i did that for a long time and i met a lot of people through that community that led me to my eventual career, which was building video games. So I worked at a company called Dice.

We built Battlefield 1942, became like a huge deal and a much bigger franchise than I think we ever expected. I spent most of my career in the video game industry. And then, you know, six or seven years ago, I had met Sean Fanning, who's a Napser co-founder, during my video game travels. uh and we started talking about let's build a we should there should be a wireless network for sensors right like there's not there's not a wireless network designed for low power things

whether it's like tracking devices or air quality monitors or you know all sorts of applications like there isn't a network for that and so we just started scheming on that probably 2012 at this point and um i moved up to san francisco from la where i was living and uh we started helium in 2013 but before that I was fully like deeply in the video game universe. That's awesome and I guess as you were transitioning out of that industry more into this stuff like what were the main takeaways now that you've seen esports and kind of gaming blow up like was it obvious back then that we'd get to this point or are you kind of surprised by the rise of esports? Both really I mean in some ways it was obvious because we had like some we could look into the future a little

bit by looking at korea you know so in south korea like you have pro esports athletes mostly starcraft at the time that were on like cereal boxes you know these guys were full celebrities and the starcraft results were on the evening news right alongside like soccer and baseball and so you could kind of see that there was a way that that would happen right and and korea was like south korea was like the blueprint for that i'm still surprised though i mean to see like a packed like staples center or like you know it that blows my mind continues to blow my mind like a lot of the people i played video games with in those days are now like the organizers and owners of those you know events and and teams and stuff and it's just you know i'm i'm amazed at

what they've done and the sort of universe that they've built in some ways it's like we sort of expected it to happen it should have happened and in other ways i'm still like shocked i mean when we played quake like if there was 50 people watching you know finals or something like that we felt pretty we felt like celebrities or something but now now it's you know a full a full stadium full of people and the prize money's in the millions and so i think it's awesome it's it's it's cool to see it i think um you know back then it was really only college kids and like professionals that had access to the internet that way you know you needed a t1 or some sort of dsl connection if you were going to be serious and so that you know shrunk the sort of playing

field and you know there's only so many people who are who fit in that that camp but yeah i'm like i said i'm amazed i can't believe it every time i see i'm like way too old and slow and bad now to like even thinking about playing but it would be fun for sure and so let's talk a little bit about after you transitioned from gaming to kind of this wireless network and hotspot world, there's already existing infrastructure. There's tons of incumbents around the telcos, and they've pretty much dominated this space for a very, very long time. So I want to start there, just maybe give us like a map of the industry. So kind of what does the legacy infrastructure look like? And then what does that ownership structure look like in terms of the telcos

and any market share or anything like that? Yeah, so there's, you know, I think most people are probably pretty familiar with all the bits just because they touch consumer applications a lot, right? So you've got, on the one hand, you've got cellular networks, right? So big outdoor networks that are run by AT&T

and Verizon and Vodafone and Orange and, you know, pick your carrier depending on what country you're in. And that stuff was really designed for, you know, let's call it voice and above, right? Like it started out as a voice network and it's now sort of morphed into a data network and you've got lte and you've got 5g and you've got you know high bandwidth like high power protocols that are really good for streaming

video voice over ip facebook whatever um on the other end like in the home you've obviously got wi-fi and bluetooth which i expect everyone is super familiar with um but there isn't sort of a like a way of thinking about it is like there isn't a sort of bluetooth like thing that lives outdoors you know so there are low power cellular protocols that that the carriers have tried to introduce you know so they're called nbiot and category m1 this they have terrible names which is perhaps why they like haven't seen in any way but but those are an attempt to build like a low power wireless protocol on top of the existing lte networks right and so it's like if we wanted and the best example i could give was like imagine something like tile right so i think everyone

unfamiliar with like the Tile Bluetooth tracker, like imagine that that just worked anywhere you went and it didn't have to be tethered to a phone and it didn't have to be like near anything. So the same way an iPhone works. That's sort of what NB-IoT and M1 were trying to do, right? They're trying to build like a low power version of a cellular network. And for a whole bunch of reasons, like a lot of them technical, some of them economic, it is very difficult to make that work, right? It's difficult to spend the money on the CapEx and the OpEx to like build these big, expensive networks and then put a sensor on it that wants to pay you like a dollar a year or you know a few cents a month or something like that like there's no roi there it doesn't make

any sense um and then there's you know technical challenges because they're running an lte spectrum like they have to be very smart about avoiding all this voice and data and that makes the protocol more expensive more complicated which makes the silicon more expensive like there's just so there's like a like a layer cake of problems uh and so that's sort of the incumbent universe and like as you all know it's like cellular is owned very much by the big telcos the spectrum is licensed like there's absolutely no chance for a small company like helium or any startup to participate in that universe like the spectrum gets auctioned for like billions of dollars um and so it's a very much like a boys club like an old an old school club of people that you just

can't get into um and so helium is sort of an alternative to that it's like what is a way of building a low power network that sort of tries to service that same use case like that sort of wandering tile or like a radiation monitoring sensor or precision ag sensor or you know whatever it may be uh but operates in unlicensed spectrum that everyone can use and it's built in a completely different way it's built by people and not you know a central entity and so that that's that's sort of the playing field and and that's roughly how we think about the solution yeah it's interesting because I think it was Chris Saka. I can't remember where I heard this, but when he was working at Google early on, they made a bid for Spectrum and they were actually going to lock

up data centers, kind of all the infrastructure type stuff. And if I remember the story correctly, there was a point where they decided to go against, maybe it was AT&T or T-Mobile or Verizon, whoever it was. And they literally were like sitting there and the bids that they were talking about were you know a billion two billion dollars whatever and it was just an all-out like almost like liar's poker type situation right of like who who basically is willing to bet the most uh in order to win without walking away at the end saying like wow i paid way too much so it's pretty crazy how that kind of auction type system works it's crazy i mean it sort of reminds me of like the u.s security laws a little bit right where where normal people just like cannot participate in like

tech companies pre IPO in like any reasonable way, right? It's like, it's a very locked down universe. There is a 0% chance of Helium or any startup, including Google at the time, like being able to just participate in that world. It's just too expensive. You know, it's an absurdly expensive universe. And the way it works is, I mean, just in case everyone isn't familiar with like licensed and unlicensed spectrum, it's, you know, the FCC, that's sort of the governing body of wireless stuff in in america auctions off these blocks you know so like these areas of of frequency so like 650 megahertz for example um you know they auction it and people like verizon and google and whoever else bid on it and once they win they like own that spectrum and they can operate you know in

that spectrum and no one else can it the alternative there is something called unlicensed spectrum and so most countries have like a block of frequencies that are unlicensed like everyone can use it everyone can share them uh and that's great it's awesome like there's a great that's great that we have a thing to use that the downside is the rules around how you operate in those spectrums are kind of strict right because you're sharing it with like potentially anyone in the country right and so you can't do a lot of things in those spectrums that the cell operators can do in their own license spectrum um and that you know makes life harder and means that you have to sort of innovate in slightly different ways because you can't you know just send that maximum power and you can't

do all this stuff that the the guys that own the spectrum can but that's sort of roughly how it's broken down is that the FCC just sort of decides which spectrum they're going to sell and then people bid on it and then they own it and then they operate their cell service or whatever inside that spectrum so uh I can't imagine that everyone plays by the rules 100% of the time especially in that bidding process given how much value creation can happen uh help us understand just like what's the i don't want to say like the dirty side but maybe just like the darker side of that industry is it literally just all of the big players who have big pocketbooks they basically kind of box everybody else out because they have money or is there some like lobbying that goes on like what

happens there i don't know like we're not in we can't get in you know like we're like locked out of that world um i don't know i mean it seems highly suspicious and strange the way that that world works uh i gotta imagine there's some like early access to all of this spectrum lobbying and auctioning that that no one else knows about and it's always the same players right and that that must strike you as a little bit odd at some point um but like i said to me it feels like it is the same as the u.s securities laws like i'm constantly frustrated by the fact that like everyday people can't invest in pre-ipo companies because we're just like too dumb to do that you know like it It just, I find that insulting and annoying.

And this reminds me of that, where it's like this club that no one can get into. And so like, you know, when we thought about starting Helium, it was like, well, shit, how do we have any chance of like competing in that universe? And it turns out like the, I think the answer is like improvements in technologies, improvements in thinking about how to deploy infrastructure.

And you sort of have to approach it from that point of view because you're never gonna win in the other game, right? Like you can't win that game. Yeah. And this really brings us to kind of Helium. So I first heard of you guys, I think, when Multicoin, Kyle Samani and those guys were getting pretty excited about it. Obviously, you guys have become advertisers on the podcast. And I now have my Helium hotspot right here. I was joking with you before. When I do this, I feel like I'm Vanna White from Wheel of Fortune or something. But tell me more about kind of like what was the impetus for starting the company kind of when you guys first set out to do this? Yeah, it was that. I mean, we wanted to build a – like we imagined some naively at the start because we really didn't know what the hell we were doing at the start, if I'm honest. Like we didn't know anything about hardware or wireless or all the stuff I'm telling you is learned over the last several years.

Like I didn't know any of this. and you know we wanted there to be something that looked like a public infrastructure for for wireless things you know predominantly low power things right stuff that we don't really have today stuff that runs on batteries that pays just a few cents a month or something to send and receive data that can go anywhere that works and we thought that just that should just exist somehow and we i don't think we knew exactly what the right way to do that was either from a technology point of view like what's the right way to sort of build that wireless protocol or what's the right technology like we had no idea um and then also what's the right incentive model or like what's

the right structure to like help build that because i think if you build it yourself you end up just sort of like a low-grade version of at&t right like you you're like at you're trying to do the same thing they are you just have way less money and way less resources to do it and so we we sort of recognize that there had to be an alternate approach for like how you how you built the network several years ago we you know i think the combination of wireless technologies and sort of pervasive knowledge of bitcoin and blockchain networks or crypto networks in general led us to think that maybe there was a way of incentivizing people to like build a network like this with us you know if they shared in a piece of the economics right like if there was

sort of a crypto incentive model there maybe that would work but we weren't certain like you know We had no idea. We weren't certain. It seemed like a ridiculous idea at the time. And there was many like whiskey fuel discussions about whether this was a good or bad idea. And, you know, eventually we decided that this was an interesting approach and that the public sort of perception of cryptocurrencies was at that time such that it might like it had a chance of working. I don't think if you tried to do this in 2013 or 2014, you could have pulled it off because I don't think anyone knew what Bitcoin was beyond sort of a very hardcore group. i don't think anyone knew what ethereum was you know the whole concept of a crypto network or a cryptocurrency was like very much in its infancy and those guys were you know anyone doing it at that time is like an incredible pioneer for like seeing that that was possible um and so that's

you know a few years ago probably three years ago now we decided that trying to build this network in this sort of decentralized way you know we call it the people's network and that's because it really is built by the people like people buy the hotspot that you were just holding up And by doing that, they are participating in creating this network and they participate in mining cryptocurrency and participate in like being an earning when people use the network. And so, you know, we took a vastly different approach to like how we would build this. And so far, it seems to be working. I think we sold over 10,000 of these hotspots now. There are probably over a million square miles of network coverage being created. Something like 12 million packets a month gets moved over the network already.

So, you know, it seems to be working, like it's sort of resonating and as a concept, both on the supply side, so the, you know, the building of the network, but also on the device side. And that's everything from, you know, individual tinkerers all the way up to like large corporations that are starting to use the network. Got it. And so would it be fair to call the architecture structure something similar to like a mesh network, that that's essentially what you're trying to do with each one of these devices being a node in that network? Or is that something that's a little bit different? I think mesh is a very overloaded term in low-power wireless. I think people come to call low-power wireless networks mesh networks by default because they don't really have a better name which is fine i mean it is you know it's not it's not wildly incorrect in our network like the

mesh is really like a peer-to-peer network that is not wireless right the the mesh or the peer-to-peer part is really the blockchain network that we built um and unfortunately we like we built that all from scratch like we didn't use an existing code base like bitcoin or it's not in the rc20 or it's it's not any of those things and so every one of these hot spots is actually operating like a full node on this blockchain network uh and so that's the peer-to-peer like mesh part you know like the the communication between the hotspots the maintenance of blocks you know all of that is sort of the peer-to-peer part the wireless part is very very much like a wi-fi network it's like a hub and spoke kind of network like the hub is you know the central point and all of the

devices talking like talk to that hub like there's no meshing and in a mesh network the difference is that the devices talk through each other to get back to a hub you know so you can have like a device which sort of serves as a hop for another device and our network doesn't work that way you know mostly for battery life reasons like if everyone has to sort of like hop through everyone else then battery life can I think become a little bit of an issue but fundamentally like it's a pretty simple you know hub and spoke network but the complexity is really on the blockchain side and the sort of peer-to-peer network that lives underneath got it and so let's start with this thing, which is the Helium Hotspot. It looks very similar to other sort of networking devices that

I've used or even have here at the house. And so help me understand, like, what is this and how does this work specifically? Yeah, so you can think of the Hotspot as like a, almost like a bridge, right? So you connect it to your existing internet, right? So that's how it connects back to the internet and it connects to the blockchain network. And then on the other side, it is also creating a very long range network using a wireless protocol called long fi and that is when i say long range i'm talking on the order of like miles or potentially even tens of miles away from your hotspot right so if you were to take that and stick it in your window um the range that a sensor could could communicate with that hotspot could be up to like 30 40 50 miles away

right in the worst case you know somewhere like manhattan where there's a lot of tall buildings and you know it's like you know radio waves don't travel very well through buildings maybe you get a mile maybe you get a square mile or something like that away from your hotspot in the best case when you're like up high and there's like not a lot of obstructions like we've seen tens of miles away and so and the kinds of devices we're talking about like i have like i position this thing like we have this thing which is like a device that we call tabs it's a wireless like tracking device and so this is the kind of sensor that we're talking about that would communicate with the hotspot and it sends infrequent you know location information so like once every 30 seconds once

every minute that kind of thing and that's what talks to your hotspot your hotspot delivers that to the internet and that's sort of roughly the way the system works is that your hotspot is effectively like a bridge between the long file network and the internet and the long file network is like a very very long range very low power thing where you can have sensors that live for you know, 10 years on a AA battery, for example, rather than, you know, what we have today on a cellular network where you might have to charge the thing, you know, every two or three days or something like that. Got it. So before I forget, if people watching want to go buy this thing, you can go to helium.com slash store. And the folks at Helium have been super kind. And if

you use code POMP, you get 50 bucks off. So I have no clue. How much are you guys selling these things for uh i actually don't know right now i think it was it was 4.95 i'm not sure where it's at now it's it's but it's around that okay um so yeah 50 off if you use code pop so i don't forget that all right so this device uh i had it hooked up earlier uh i took it out of the box you'll love this story so i literally uh got the box i uh hadn't opened the box yet and i carved out an hour on my calendar uh and i said to myself wow i'm gonna have to go do like bob the builder type stuff, right? It's like putting together like a table when it shows up. And then I opened the box and I realized all I had to do is basically just screw in this antenna and plug it in the wall

and then connect it to wifi. It took me like five minutes. And so my wife was laughing at me. She's like, wow, you really, you're real handy. But what I found interesting is like, so the hardware is one piece, right? It's super easy to put together. But then you guys have the mobile app. And as I was going through that, what struck me was, um, there was kind of two components. One is dead set. Like literally if I could figure out how to put, set it up in five minutes, like literally anyone can do this. Um, but two was you, you kept explaining kind of the different components of what it's doing and why it works, which, uh, just made it super slick. And so help me understand, like, when you look at what you guys have built with both the hotspot, uh, and

then the tab like what are the use cases that you're hoping people use this for or you're seeing people already start to use this stuff for yeah so to me first on your first point like on the ux kind of ui stuff like i just think that that's a super important like missing piece of the crypto space right now like it's you know a lot of the stuff is i noticed you had coined mine on a while ago and i think there's like some similarity in terms of like what we're trying to accomplish which is like how do you make it easy for like everyday people to do this right it can't just be like defy where it's like a never-ending stack of like acronyms and you know you just have no idea what the hell you're doing and clis are involved and you know it's just it's too complicated

for the average user right like the skill i think is in like obscuring that stuff and making it easy to use and so we spent a lot of time on that like the whole reason we built the hotspot in the first place was exactly that reason like how do we make it straightforward how do we make it easy um so i'm glad that i guess a long way i'm glad that worked um on the the use case side yeah it's like it's all over the place i mean some of them are what i would call like from a consumer point of view sort of boringish use cases so we're talking about leak detection right like this is a massive like a huge insurance problem right like knowing when things leak whether it's in industrial buildings or whether it's in homes so we're seeing a lot of insurance companies for

example deploying sensors on the network that are trying to effectively like change the way that they underwrite insurance policies by knowing more about what is going on in the thing that they're insuring right so if pipes crack or if boilers break or if toilets leak they want to know about that rather than it leaks and it takes out the house and then they have to write a 250 000 check or something right and so that's kind of like one end of the spectrum we've seen a lot of stuff like cold chain and logistics you know so wanting to know whether food has been cold for its entire journey like all the way from you know the dock or the fish the fisherman's wharf or wherever it's coming from all the way to wherever it's going you know like was it kept at the right

temperature you know like again relatively like simple applications that you think would have been well solved by existing technology that just aren't stuff like logistics or package tracking Like, you know, it would be pretty cool if you knew a much more granular view of like where packages were being delivered, both as a consumer and an industrial level. And then consumer applications, you know, so stuff like tabs, which we built as a sort of an example of a consumer tracking application. But you could imagine, you know, something like a future iteration of tile or you could, you know, you could imagine consumer applications that took advantage of a low power network where you didn't have to be close to a phone. We've worked with companies like Lime for tracking lost scooters. You know, it's just all over the place. It's like literally anything where the cost needs to be low and the battery life needs to be long. And there isn't a way to do that today. Those become sort of potentially viable applications.

And it's really like all across the board. And so a lot of those users that you just described sound like a mix between what I'll call individual or kind of retail users or customers and also more corporate type customers like insurance companies or the lines of the world, etc. How does it work when you're working with the corporate customers? Are they kind of putting the hotspot throughout an entire city? Is there just good enough coverage with a couple of them? How does that work in terms of if you are one of those corporate clients? So it's a little bit of a mixture. So to start with, we're in over 1,000 cities now.

So that's amazing. So there's some amount of helium coverage in over 1,000 cities. And because the range of the hotspots is pretty large, sometimes you don't need that many in certain cities, like smaller cities, rural cities, you know, like maybe you need a handful, maybe you need dozens, you know, something like that. And so in a lot of cases, companies that are looking to deploy sensors just deploy the sensor. They don't have to think about the hotspot and the network infrastructure feels like cellular network infrastructure or something, right? Like you just turn it on and it works in the same way that you turn on your iPhone and that works. And so that's the sort of dream, right? in the end like no one deploying a sensor would even have to think about the network infrastructure

we've seen some really cool like hybrid situations where um we have a program called the patron program which sort of is for hotspot customers that have bought 15 or more hotspots and recently we had a company called conserve that's building um they do wireless monitoring of fine art and collectibles for museums and like wealthy individuals and and it's a combination of location and environmental and you know some other stuff and what happened was a bunch of patrons got together and effectively built wireless network coverage for conserve who had the actual like application use case right and so that combination of like people building uh wireless network coverage for like customers and applications i think is super powerful um and so we expect to

see more of that over time and then in the short term you might end up in some situation where companies still need to deploy hotspots on their own for now right like of course the helium coverage isn't everywhere yet and so for now you know it's relatively inexpensive for customers to deploy hotspots to create their own network coverage and then you know there's also other compatible hardware on the market you know that we use a wireless protocol under the hood called laura wan there are a lot of laura wan gateways on the market and it's feasible for a company to like use their existing gateways or buy gateways from someone else that we don't want to be the central dependency for hardware. We only made the hotspot so that we'd make it easy for consumers.

Um, but if you're an enterprise, there might be more cost-effective ways to do that. And we're starting to see that happen to where, you know, customers already had deployments and they're starting to like switch over to, to our network. Yeah. It's super interesting. Um, and then help me understand, uh, there's the ability basically, if you're running the network, uh, in a number of different ways uh to actually earn um funds right or crypto to uh in exchange for running that network and so there's everything from kind of proof of coverage actually running things through the uh the network maybe walk me through those different use cases as um kind of the the mobile app as i was onboarding uh kind of explained a couple of them but what do they fall into from

a bucket standpoint so the hotspot hosts earn earn helium tokens so we have a currency called helium it's hnt there there's the hotspot again um you know so you earn hnt in two ways so one is through mining um so our mining is not the same as bitcoin's mining right so bitcoin's mining as you know is like very power intensive like hashing shaw 256 computation you know i would say that we were a little bit inspired by filecoin here who was trying to to build a a proof that was related to the thing that they were doing right so so in their case they're all about storing files um and so their proof is about were you actually storing the file right and our proof is are you actually creating network coverage or not right and that's the thing that we try and prove and

the reason that that's difficult is that you know when you cross this divide between like the blockchain and software and the hardware in the real world it's difficult right like it's complicated to like you know prove things are actually happening in the real world so we created proof of coverage as a way for hotspots to among themselves try and prove to each other that they are really that they're really hotspots like you're not a virtual machine like you're actually a hotspot creating network coverage that devices that you know talk the long five protocol can communicate with and so that's you know that was the mission is like can we make a useful proof So it's not proof of work. It's not proof of stake. It's not some existing thing, but it's proof of coverage that is specific to our network that is really trying to prove the fact that you're creating coverage. And so you don't have to do a whole lot. You connect the device, you power it on, you put it in a good place, you put it in a window, and then the rest of the process is effectively automated through the software.

But the more you participate in those proofs, so the more you can actually prove that you're creating network coverage, the more HNT you earn. So that's the mining side. And then the other side is device traffic, right? So if you are in an area where there's a lot of LIME scooters or there's a lot of tabs or there's a lot of, you know, XYZ applications, those sensors are going to be sending and receiving data through your hotspot. And they're going to be paying you for that, right? Like they have to pay you in order to like use your hotspot to get to the internet. And so that's, you know, the other side of the network is that as utility grows and as, you know,

consumption grows, you, I mean, you can think of yourself like as a cell tower operator effectively, right? Like you were a miniature cell tower operator and people have taken it to that level where they have like large outdoor antennas and they have, you know, they've gotten serious about it, but that's how I would think about it is that you operate sort of a mini slice of a wireless network and anything that comes in your sort of territory is effectively paying you in order to get access to the internet. Yeah. And so what are the like privacy and

security concerns or things that people should be aware of, right? Because when you start talking about the fact that, you know, here in New York City, I've got a wireless device. I pretty much am the only person who knows the password to it. I'm the only person who uses it other than my wife. And other than that, nobody can touch it. But with this device, there's kind of people that are sending traffic through it that I don't know, in many cases. I don't know what the use case for it is in terms of I'm kind of not discriminating from what I understand based on what they're trying to do. And so how do I think about privacy and security for this device compared to the device that I would have for the kind of more traditional wireless internet?

yeah it's you know we this was a thing that we we took very seriously and put a lot of thought into um and so one of the like one of the requirements of like customers using the network right so if you sort of align right like they they can't have a situation where you as a hotspot operator really have any idea about what it is that you're sending right like you can't know that it's a location reading or a temperature really you can't know anything about it you shouldn't even know who owns it. The only thing you should know about the data is where you're supposed to deliver it, right? And so what we implemented is sort of throughout the system, everything is encrypted. And so the way that the sort of device to internet communication works is there's, you know,

AES-128 encryption on the devices. The device sends data. Your hotspot, by looking in the blockchain, can figure out who owns that data. I shouldn't say who owns it. You can figure out where to deliver it right like you don't actually know whose it is and so you'll receive a packet and you'll be like okay i'm supposed to deliver this packet to like this ip address or this peer to peer address and you do that and that peer to peer peer to peer address says yeah that looks like one of my packets i'm going to pay you for that and so there's a little bit of like a handshake that goes on there and then you get paid effectively for delivering that packet but you have no idea about what it is you don't know anything about the contents of it you can't

decrypt it all you can do is deliver it to its intended destination and the only way you know its intended destination is through the sort of shared knowledge of the blockchain and so we use the blockchain both in a sort of traditional cryptocurrency sense but also as a routing it's almost like dns almost right right for for sensors like that's how we also use the blockchain is you know i get a packet from a sensor and i need to figure out what to do with it and that's you know part of what the blockchain does on the blockchain side you know we use a lot of strong cryptography and there's a lot of novel and interesting techniques in there and we use like distributed key generation and like a lot of what i would say are cutting edge tactics in the

blockchain world to try and both keep the thing secure but also keep it anonymous and private and sort of obscure as much information as we can so if i as the owner of the device don't know the information that's going through or the owner of that information uh is it fair to also say then And if somebody was to, quote, unquote, get control of my device, right, if other people can connect to it, you know, coming from a very non-technical person, if they were able to get actual access to the device, they also wouldn't be able to tell what information is going through it, who the owner is, kind of, you know, they have just as many limitations as me as the owner of the device. Yeah, there's actually not a whole lot you can do if you compromise someone's device. Like, someone came and stole it from you. You know, there's actually not really anything they can do with it, right? Because the ownership of the hotspot to you is actually an on-chain thing, right?

So on the blockchain, it is recorded that you, Pomp, with this wallet, own this hotspot. And no one can change that, right, without you signing that change. So if someone steals it, the worst thing they could probably do is just turn it off, right? So that you wouldn't be earning HNT and you wouldn't be mining anymore. But they have no ability to, like, take the earnings from it. They have no ability to, like, inspect the data coming through it. like nothing is compromised from that sense like the worst like the literally the worst outcome that we can think of right now on the hardware is that you

are no longer earning HNT because someone stole it and turned it off like that's that's sort of the worst at the worst case so I think it's well designed from that point of view and and this was you know thinking that we put a lot of thought into that we knew both hotspot hosts would be concerned about but also users of the networks are large corporations like Nestle and lime and like guys like that would be highly concerned about, right? And so I think a lot of thought went into this. I think we ended up with a pretty good design

that makes it still relatively easy to use, but also safe. Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And then help me understand kind of where you're going, right? So we've got the one hotspot, you've got tabs, like what do you think kind of comes next? Or how does this evolve to go from a thousand cities to, you know, 3000 cities and kind of many more users and much more data going through the system.

Yeah, we're on the mission, right? So that we recently, last week, we announced the sale of hotspots into Europe and Asia. So we think that's important. Previously, they'd only been available in North America. We're working as quickly as we can to allow non-helium devices to become miners and hosts on the network, right?

So you'll be able to buy any LoRa gateway, whether it was manufactured by us or any of the other manufacturers in the space. There's at least dozens of other companies building these. So we're working as quickly as we can to make that possible so that we're not the single source and that we're not a bottleneck of any kind. And then from there, really the focus is on applications.

How do we enable more and more use cases and applications to join the network and take advantage of it? I think there's a little bit of lag because there hasn't been a network that looks like this up until now. You know, there aren't products natively that sort of take advantage of this kind of network, right? So if you thought of, like, again, back to sort of the Tile example, you know, if you're a startup, you're not going to build Tile if there's no network to use it on, right? And so there's a little bit of a, there's a little bit of lag there where, like, now people understand that the network exists, that they're starting to build things that take advantage of it. There's a sort of growing ecosystem of third-party tools for the network that's building.

And so everyone's pretty happy with how that's going. we have aspirations and dreams for building other types of wireless network this way so it is entirely feasible that you could build an LTE network this way or a 5G network this way there are all sorts of licensing implications like similar to what we talked about at the start so you've got to sort of figure out how you how you navigate those but I think what we if anything happens like in the long run like what I hope we will have accomplished is that this becomes the blueprint for how wireless infrastructure gets built right it's no longer a central entity you know with massive capital outlay that owns all the stuff that is actually sort of a decentralized

people's approach to like building infrastructure uh and that the sort of helium way of doing it becomes like just the standard way of doing things in the same way that sort of uber has sort of taken over what ride sharing looks like and airbnb has taken over what hotels look like it just seems obvious to me that if you have real estate and power and internet backhaul, you are sort of not taking full advantage of it if you're not also able to monetize that as a wireless base station effectively. Yeah. And so I guess as you look at other types of networks as well, really this all falls under kind of this idea of the people's network, right? And I love that just because one of the reoccurring themes for me is just democratizing access to things that like the

old boys club has had control over right so we've seen this and everything in kind of very watered down examples of like the robin hoods and etoros of the world absolutely busted up the kind of the trading world right and they went zero fees and fractional shares and all that kind of stuff then you know you see that kind of across finance happening really what you guys are trying to do is democratize the ownership of these wireless networks if successful in a material way what's the ramifications like what do the incumbents do can they do anything to to react or stop you um what do you think are those ripple effects in the uh industry i mean i would like to say that it has to happen eventually um you know there's like so many privacy invasions and you know like

the whole way the consumer internet is funded is effectively through like an invasion of privacy right it's like i know everything that you do and therefore i'm going to sell you some stuff as a result of the fact that i know everything about you and that's the way the consumer internet works um i'm not sure it's great in the in the long run you know like we see sort of overreach in every every aspect of the internet today it would be nice if there was a way for the internet to exist in in a way that sort of didn't depend on that infrastructure and so there are other projects out there like orchid that have taken the sort of decentralized vpn approach to the problem um you know it's it's hard like i'm not gonna lie like it's complicated and hard i mean

the the spectrum ownership problem is real you know the fact that even if we could build an lte or a 5g version like the only way to practically deploy would be to partner with a telco right because you you want people that have iphones and android devices and you know you want to sort of reach those existing customers and not not require them to like move to some new service which would be almost you know would just be sort of too hard of a switch uh and so you're still a little bit stuck right like we don't have a perfect answer to like all the pieces uh but it's sort of it you know there are there are glimmers of hope right there's a thing called the citizens band radio turns out the iphone supports that turns out all the android devices support that it's another

public frequency that that can be used in the same way as the frequency that we're using today um so there are ways that it can happen but there are certainly uh motivated incumbents that will prevent it from happening as much as possible uh so we have you know we have hope for for the fact that you can sort of improve some of that but today the most obvious place to like insert a solution is in the low power wireless area uh it's the least well-served area of telecoms because it makes the least economic sense for an incumbent you know there are unlicensed spectrums that we can use and so we're very much focused there for the time being but we do see this as like this is a blueprint for like how you should build networks in general uh and in hindsight we would hope that

sort of the existing model just seems silly eventually because it's you know there's another way to do this got it and then help me understand like is there a world where the telecoms uh would be open to working with you or like do you think that that's something that is more uh hey helium would like to work with them but they kind of thumb their nose as most old boy clubs do yeah it just sort of depends right it's you know if you thought so 5g is a good example right like so if everyone isn't aware like the real 5g is sort of this promise of like these ultra high bandwidth like ultra low latency like links right where you could stream 4k video and you could play video games with like low latency and like you do all this stuff right and the only way to really

accomplish what people are talking about there uh is to use like a technology that i called millimeter wave right it's it's these very high frequency um like this is very high frequency like spectrum that is both licensed and unlicensed the downside of it is that the range is extremely short right so things like like glass buildings humidity like everything like affects this you know transmissions in that frequency and so if you thought of it from that point of view like you're going to need like hundreds of thousands or like millions of like 5g base stations to like cover a city as an example right and so if you thought of it from that point of view like the only way to like practically build a 5g network like a real 5g network is going to be something

like this right where you get a lot of help in deploying the infrastructure in the form of people uh in the form of like businesses like you know you have to sort of democratize the deployments because it's going to be too expensive for anyone to do it on their own like no one is going to be able to like absorb the cost of bill of deploying a million 5g base stations in a city like new york it's just not going to be possible right and so you know 5g is sort of an interesting case where the only real way to deploy it depends on a model like this and so you've already seen like at&t and some of these other guys like playing games with with the thing like on my at&t iphone it already says like 5ge in the in the corner like it's not 5g it's like lte with like a you know

a different a different icon and so that's what's going to happen is sort of similar to what happened with lte and 4g back in those days and because it's just going to be too expensive to deploy a real 5g network like i think companies are going to start playing games with what it means um so that's an interesting opportunity like i think as we work and as we talk to telcos it's almost like well why not try that you know like why why is that not an interesting approach because it's not a whole lot of downside for them experimenting with that approach. For sure. And then what aspects of this are open source versus closed source? Can I go in and modify either the hotspot or do other things with the network? Or is everything pretty much closed off and not as

kind of open and malleable as an open source thing would be? Yeah, I mean, we've opened everything. I don't think there's a component of our stack that is not open source that I'm aware of uh and i think that's important you know that's important for any kind of adoption at any scale um is that all of these components are open that anyone can use them anyone can host them uh i don't think there's any dependency on helium inc to operate the network today that i'm aware of um of course there are future looking things that we'd love to build but we don't need them right like the network as it as it's designed exists and works today uh anyone can operate their own servers and everyone can operate every piece of this on their own and for some companies

that's desirable right like they don't want data to be flowing through some third-party entity or startup or whatever they want to operate their own servers um and so we think that that's an important like consideration and like this something like this growing is that it's very open and different got it that uh that makes a lot of sense um and then in terms of uh the actual product itself are you guys building this are you partnering with people like and then how will that evolve over time in terms of the the physical hardware and supply chain and all that yeah i mean today we're building it ourselves uh as i said like there's nothing about it that really requires us to build it ourselves other than the fact that we wanted a

good user experience um and so there are lots of other like laura gateway manufacturers in the world and it is our desire over time that you know the majority of the devices on the network are not ours you know we made the hotspot because we wanted to make it easy to use so that everyone could you know everyone could grab it and you didn't have to be an iot enthusiast you didn't have to be a crypto sort of specialist you know literally anyone could could get this and use it and that is our motivation for creating the hotspot rather than trying to create a sort of unique piece of IP. And so over time, and we're sort of working as quickly as we can towards this, you know, we would like it to be that we weren't any kind of bottleneck or any kind of dependency

for the network to exist. And we think that over the next, you know, weeks and months that we will, you know, accomplish that goal and that we'll start to see more and more hardware and applications come on the network that are sort of unrelated to us. Got it. And one of my last questions for you is like is there a world where uh you guys work to get this into retail so rather than people going online they can literally go to like the local best buy uh or some sort of electronic store or is that something that that doesn't seem to make sense and is outside the strategy yeah it's tough i mean like building hardware and dealing with logistics and manufacturing is like it's a tough business it's you know when you do things in volumes like this it is very very

difficult to to make it to make it make any sense um it only starts to make sense when you get into the millions and tens of millions and then you can actually sort of start to get some scale there or some sort of economies of scale um so i don't know i don't want to say no because you know who knows but today like our our approach is to just sort of sell direct sell online uh and then a sort of long-term a long-term mission would be our long-term hope would be that more and more other entities that create compatible hardware could sort of step in and fill that gap right like i think the challenge today has been that um iot products have been targeted at a very i don't know what to describe it as other than you know iot it sort of you know

nerdish kind of group right where you have to have like a pretty high level of proficiency in operating linux and computers and you know you have to like know what you're doing in order to deploy any of these things and then on the crypto side it's sort of in similar a similar universe right like i think companies like coinbase uh to some extent what coin mine is doing and like all of these guys have really tried to like make it easier for like everyday people to participate in crypto and i do the hot spot in sort of the same place right it's like it's trying to make it easier for people to join the helium network and participate in helium but it's not um it's not a must and so we hope that the hot spot is just sort of an example to people of like hey you

could if you built a device that's reached a larger audience than just this sort of highly technical audience then you know there's a different way to do this and you know you might be able to build sort of something like a big decentralized network that way and so now that we've shown that to be true uh we're starting to work with more and more of these partners i think when we approached them like three four years ago they just thought we were idiots uh and now that we have i think already operating the largest low power wireless network in the country uh they are starting to sort of reevaluate whether whether we actually are idiots or whether we should actually whether we should whether they should partner with us and like try and do something so

we'd love to sort of democratize that and and grow that universe such that we're not the only provider of easy to use you know iot hardware yeah the one thing i'll say before we uh we go to the uh the lightning round to a wrap up is uh people know that i don't really bullshit that much But literally, it took me about four minutes to take it out of the box, put the antenna in, plug it in the wall, go through the mobile app. It was super, super slick. And I think that generally people who are interested in this stuff and want to participate are going to find it pretty compelling, both from user experience standpoint. And then also, I think for me on the hardware side, you could have made it way more complex. right it's one of those things where like uh when it's super easy people don't uh remember how hard

some other things are um so uh so you guys built a pretty cool thing here uh before i wrap up uh i always ask two questions uh the first is what is the most important book that you have ever read oh god um i was not expecting that question um i tend to find myself reading uh the hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz a lot more than I would have expected uh like if I'm on a flight not that that happens in COVID times but pre pre-COVID uh if I was on a flight there there's nearly always some paragraph or chapter of that book that that resonated very deeply with me and so I think even if you're not a founder or looking to start a business like there's just a lot of wisdom there and uh I always thought that the you know when you read it you could you felt the sort

pain and the struggle in his, in his, in his writing. And I don't know if you've read that book, but it was, it was, uh, I've always found that to be the most useful book that I read. And, and every time I read it, I usually find something else that was applicable to like, whatever I'm dealing with right now. That book is a fantastic, uh, I don't think I've ever said this publicly, but, um, in the book, uh, if you remember the part where, uh, they essentially bought a company and the CFO gets, I think it was cancer, right. And, uh, and they essentially make the right decisions in terms of taking care of the family, et cetera. As I was reading the book for the first time, I saw the name and I was like, what the hell? And then I realized I actually went

to high school with that family's kids, the CFO's son. And obviously when we were, you know, in school together, we knew that their father had passed away and, you know, got sick and all stuff. Nobody had any clue, you know, kind of all of the other components of it. And so reading it in the book it was just you know nuts to kind of just see one two worlds collide kind of you know your childhood and all that but but also with uh with ben and uh um all the stuff there but also too just seeing like you you never really know what the true story of things are right so it's kind of just really really cool to see uh in a scenario where uh where ben and his executive team didn't need to uh or weren't kind of legally required to do something i feel like it was the

thing to do which was which is pretty cool yeah it's a great book i mean there's all sorts of wisdom in there and i think the the sort of honesty that he has about the fact that a lot of it was luck and if it wasn't for like certain people's advice and cert you know certain interventions at sort of certain moments that it would all have sort of come crashing down catastrophically i think is just sort of important for everyone to hear and and know that it's not always perfectly designed you know google tries to sell to yahoo for four million dollars you know know like it's just you know it's just it's not it's not a grand plan and probably no one is smarter than you are um and so it's it it's i always find that book very very uh very eye

opening and i i feel like i reread it more often than i probably should i love it i love it uh for those that are just listening to uh the podcast and not able to watch it on youtube amir has a an absolute epic background on zoom which is a bunch of helium balloons uh rising up above manhattan and new york uh but speaking of uh things floating around in the space uh second question which is a little bit more fun is aliens believer or non-believer i mean they have to exist why right i mean it so i i don't know if this is correct but i feel like it's correct that there's something like 300 billion known stars right and so and each star has its own you know system right with its own planets and everything else inside i mean it just feels like the law of

like large numbers has to be true there like if there's that many potential planets there has to be some like i refuse to believe that like we're the only intelligent life form in that size of a universe i just can't i can't accept that that's true it's even it's more it's more likely that elon musk is right that we're in a simulation if that's true you know it just can't be right you know it just doesn't make any sense but i don't do you believe in aliens i don't know if that's for sure i'm with you it's just a mathematical probability so and people have heard me now talk about this way too many times uh for this in every episode um but basically my big question is on the time uh element so aliens existing somewhere is pretty much a

foregone conclusion in my mind it's just like do the human race match up in the billions of years of the you know galaxy at the same time uh that's one question and then i don't know if you saw i saw it last night um there's a video i have no clue if this is real uh but there's a guy who said his friend sent him a video from miami uh last night that's going viral on twitter today and it's basically these like five lights in the sky and they uh kind of expand they contract and then they all split off in different directions and it's one of these things where like look in today's day and age like literally could be a deep fake or could be aliens in 2020 i have no clue but when you just see stuff like that you're like look i think that over time more and more people

will become convinced whether rightfully so or they're just being you know kind of mentally manipulated that there's something else out there um and when you see us you know launching humans into space from american soil after you know a decade of of not doing that and things like that i think people just they want to believe to some degree right like they want the greater thing out there i think the time point is a good one though it's like you know maybe we don't maybe we don't overlap by you know hundreds of billions of years it's totally like dinosaurs or something right i know some people still believe humans and dinosaurs live together which is uh i don't understand that but but but you can sort of imagine that sort of you know overlapping timelines but

yeah it has to happen like it it was cool to see the the spacex stuff i think is meaningful it's like cool to see people pay that close attention to that i often think that like if we look back in time the lack of funding for like space travel will probably seem like our biggest error you know over over like humanity's time but i don't know maybe we're getting like miles of miles off track here but um that was cool i was i was i was watching the spacex launch with my kids and i i thought that was awesome so supposedly blue origin i think is the one it's either blue origin or virgin galactic i can't remember but i thought it was blue origin i may have that wrong or no no actually i think it is virgin galactic uh somebody will correct me for sure on twitter uh but

basically what they want to do is they want to set up a space hotel um similar you know kind of around the iss on the iss something like that i was reading and uh you get to that and you're like look the whole like let's go to mars there's a finality it feels like right for a while where people that go won't be able to come back uh and so that seems more like uh hey you're gonna be a scientist you're going to be a explorer you know an innovator something like that the idea of like hey you can go for two weeks and then come back uh is it probably a little bit more appealing to a wider audience um and so it just it's this balance between like how much of space should be focused on like the hardcore science and innovation versus uh you can almost like drive

more funding by simply just like letting people go to space right just let the average person get there and then all of a sudden everyone wants to fund it so that it's cooler and cooler um yeah it's probably a balance somewhere in there yeah i'm sure once the first hotel opens it'll be like hours until there's a trump version of it with like a big you know like the big logo like they have on the front of all of these things don't don't give him any ideas man don't he's already got space force don't give him a trump space hotel i'm sure the space force is already way ahead of me on this one. I love it. To wrap up, you get to ask me one question. What one question do you have for me? God, that's a tough one.

Do you think Bitcoin has a chance of replacing fiat currency in our lifetime? I think it for sure is a foregone conclusion that Bitcoin will be the global reserve currency at some point in the future. Your question specifically on timeline, I think is the big question. So for me, I think I'm probably a little bit younger than you. I'm 32. So let's call it that I've got 45 to 50 years left based on kind of life expectancy. So 50 year timeframe, I would put the probability today that in the next 50 years, Bitcoin becomes a global reserve currency, 20, 25%, which to me is higher than it was three to five years ago. And 10 years from now, maybe it's trending more towards like the 40 to 50% range, right? Like it's still more likely

than not that this is like an incredible technical feat that kind of gets adopted. And two, you also survive all of the, I'll just kind of wrap it up as like bullshit, right? In terms of state action attacks and you know legislation and all that stuff yeah but 2025 chance like that's reasonable i'll take that right because if it happens to if you think about the value creation right and then all of the impact of like the things that bitcoin uh potentially could solve in terms of just like improving money 2025 is like a pretty good you know number for me actually kind of makes me excited right but but it's still more likely than not it doesn't happen just because of how hard and how incredible of a feat that would be.

Yeah, I just, I mean, I'm sure you saw, but like there was some leaked, not leaked, but some information came out in this John Bolton situation with Trump that he had diverted a significant amount of attention to like killing Bitcoin. And I think that's probably like the bigger concern is like regulation. And certainly at least for us at Helium, like the complexity of operating in the cryptocurrency space in the united states is like no joke you know like it's it is hundreds of thousands or more on legal bills and you know you know it's just really it's a really complicated place to be um but yeah i mean by the time you know in our lifetime the money money supply the usd money

supply probably quadruple five six more times probably in that in that span of time so there's there's a chance i think 25 is probably good the the way that i think about this question too is uh what you're essentially asking uh kind of in a roundabout way also is like what's the probability that the dollar fails in our lifetime right and and so to me like that's a much higher probability right you know you can probably put that at like a 50 plus percent then at least the question of like is bitcoin's replacement or is it something else and i think that when you also get to um you know if the u.s was to do something on the regulatory front uh that would be like highly detrimental to probably not bitcoin itself but it would be like the ownership of bitcoin by

american citizens or you know something in that realm uh i think that there's just a lot of countries that are uh considered economic you know foes in many ways uh that want to see the dollar system go away right they realize that that they're kind of on the on the short end of that stick. And so I do think that the game theory is probably much more real, given that these other countries are large, they would love for the dollar to go away. And while they wish that their national currency would be the global reserve, the next best thing is to not have the US have it. So basically using something that's not manipulated. It's just fun to think about. And I think that's part of why a lot of people pay attention to it. It's just that there's so

much that goes into it from geopolitics to computer science to economics etc that's a fascinating it's like i'll admit i didn't know a whole lot about bitcoin you know up until probably four years ago um and it's just fast it's like been fascinating to watch and and you know watching some of the sec statements and some of the sort of regulation around this space and you know like basically people you know elected officials have just sort of come and flat out said that it would be highly risky for for for us to not be able to use usd as a weapon right like that's effectively what they've said i think it's all fascinating and i i i don't know what will happen but i think bitcoin is probably the best shot at it from a from a monetary point of view it's an incredible

invention um and then and you know i hope that the kind of thing that we're doing whether it is helium or some future iteration of helium or you know something else becomes just the way that people think about building other parts other types of things in a similar way right like it's not it doesn't have to just be owned by at&t or vodafone or orange or whatever it can be actually distributed and decentralized among people um and i think as you know as people believe that and as like people like as companies like us and projects like ours take this sort of become more real i think that will become more tangible and people will start to sort of evaluate whether there are other ways to do things um and so orchid has always been promising to me you know

the idea of this sort of like incentivized vpn model um i just you know i i just i wish for more privacy and more you know security on the internet in general and and i hope i hope all this stuff works for sure absolutely um so listen people if you want to participate in the decentralization democratization of uh the wireless networks and the telcos go grab you a helium hotspot helium.com store i believe it is and amir and the team have been kind enough if you use code pump to get 50 bucks off so amir listen i appreciate you uh taking the time to do this i think we guys are building is super super cool so uh so keep going and then we'll have to do this again in the future yeah thank you thanks for having us i appreciate it