The Pomp Podcast - #485 Neil Sheppard on the Future of Derivatives

Episode Date: February 4, 2021

Neil Sheppard is the COO of Financial Services at Diginex, where he oversees capital markets, trading, exchange and trading products. Previously, he spent 13 years at Nomura in various roles across equity products in London, Tokyo and Hong Kong. In this conversation, we discuss Diginex, derivatives, risk management, capital efficiency, and the crypto exchange Equos.  ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.io/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today.  ======================= With over 5 Million users, Crypto.com is the easiest way to buy, and sell over 90 cryptocurrencies. Download the app at Crypto.com and get $25 with my code: POMP. When it’s time to spend your crypto, nothing beats the Crypto.com Visa Card, which pays you up to 8% back instantly, with no annual, or monthly fees to worry about! Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com App today using the code “POMP”  ======================= Download the top-rated DraftKings Sportsbook app NOW and use promo code POMP when you sign up to get one hundred to one odds on any football game THIS WEEKEND. That’s code POMP for new players to get a shot at one hundred dollars on any football action this weekend.… for a limited time, only at DraftKings Sportsbook! =======================

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. Neil Shepard is the COO of Financial Services at Diginex, where he oversees capital markets, trading, exchange, and trading products. Previously, he spent 13 years at Nomura in various roles across equity products in London, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. In this conversation, we discuss Diginex, derivatives, risk management, capital efficiency, and the crypto exchange Equos. I really enjoyed this conversation with Neil, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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1-800-9-WITH-IT or in Colorado 1-800-522-4700. Okay, go get the DraftKings app. Let's get into this with Neil. I hope you guys enjoy it. 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, guys. Bang, bang. Neil is here. How are you doing, sir? Thank you so much for doing

this. Thanks very much for having me on. Absolutely. You work at Diginex, which is the first company with a crypto exchange that is publicly traded in the United States, which is on the NASDAQ under the ECOS ticker there. Talk a little bit just about your background and how do you get to Diginex, how do you guys get listed, et cetera? Sure, happy to. My background is I'm an engineer by academic training, so I'm an aeronautical engineer. I blame Tom Cruise for that, anyone who's seen Top Gun.

That was really my introduction to aircraft and planes and everything about aircraft that really wanted me to be a pilot and an engineer and everything and how that works. But I was graduating university. So I grew up in the northern part of the UK, went to university in the UK and I was graduating university around the time of the dot-com bubble. And then a lot of investment banks at the time were spending a lot of time at university coming and trying to attract talent and bring people not just necessarily with a financial background, you know, into the industry. And I sat through a couple of these milk rounds, as they were called, and listened and got interested and thought maybe that was actually the career I wanted. And before I knew it, I'd done an internship in the city in London and then graduated,

took a job at a company called Tasno, which is now quite a cheap model, and spent a number of years working there. So I've been in sort of traditional finance, if you like, for about 20 years prior to crypto and prior to joining DigiNex. And that's taken me from London to Tokyo, to Hong Kong, to where I'm currently based. So, that sort of time within the industry, within the broader sort of financial services industry, I've had the pleasure of being involved in the sales and distribution process, running research teams, particularly around the direct risk products, and then most recently running

trading desks, trading risk, and managing capital with the perspective of trying to use these products to generate returns. But in reality, you know, two decades is quite a long time. And you start to see things change and you start to see, you know, what's having an impact in the world and how you can make an impact and particularly how you can make an impact within an institution and within an industry that really has so much inertia against change. Despite it having a lot of the brightest minds around, there really is a large initiative. And also sort of post, you know, the global financial crisis, a slight stigma attached to it, you know, with regards to how banks were operating during that time

and what was being done. And really that gave me an opportunity to sort of step back, think and address the issues that were not being able to change in the financial services industry and then see this sort of new growth of a product and a new asset class come out and say, okay, how can I take what I've learned in the last two decades and then apply it this new asset class that you could see was having some teething problems and still does. And how can we try and find that middle ground between what traditional finance is doing and then what's available in crypto? So the opportunity presented itself to move into the crypto space. And I know that you've met Richard and he's been on your show and he's done a great job

speaking with him. And he and I have worked together. So Richard and I and the former founder of diginex itself all worked together in tokyo we kind of grew up in finance a bit together there and um he'd often talk to me about coming to join him because he'd left and sort of been at the genesis of diginex ahead of me and talked to me about it and got me interested in it and then finally when i decided that the um the sort of the risk reward was strong enough and risk reward is something that we're thinking about all the time when that balance tipped it It became natural for me to go and work with people I knew, I trusted, and people who understood the deficiencies in crypto and the deficiencies in traditional finance and how we can work to offset both of those to bring, you know, some real rigidity and infrastructure to a business that kind of needed it. But at the same time, understand where the incumbency in traditional finance was really holding it back.

and so when you think through kind of uh diginex today um how did you kind of outline the business right you guys have done so much you have so many different products um just walk us through what the kind of structure of the product suite is sure i mean when you think about a product and you know we think about cryptocurrencies it's quite easy to sort of say okay we'll start with with one central piece an exchange there's a number of them around and you know i'm sure your listeners are aware of so many of them but to us it wasn't just having an exchange it's it's all the other pieces of the ecosystem you need to build into that exchange to allow people to say not only can i come here and trade and transact but how can i do that safely how can i do that

securely so i need a i need a custody solution so we naturally need to have a custody solution and digivolve is our custody solution that we're extremely proud of you know is um is being recognized and this week was recognized as you know one of the best uh custody offerings you know that's out there on the street um so we have to add that to it then we need to think about okay you know how do people actually want to transact yes we have a ui and api feeds for people to be able to trade on the platform but also they want to do a little bit more than that so we have you know access product which is effectively a an order and execution management system that not just interacts with our exchange, but a whole number of other exchanges.

And one of the points I'll make later is we're not so arrogant to assume that ours is the only exchange out there and ours is the only one we should look at. We're extremely proud of it and we believe what we're doing is the right thing. But we also recognize that people know what they like or people are used to things. So getting them to move is sometimes quite difficult. So rather than ignore all of those people, we want to enable them to trade better too. And that's what we've done with Diginex Access, which is our order management and trading system. And then also around that, we see cryptocurrencies as a subset of the larger digital assets piece.

And so looking ahead at where we could go with digital assets and effectively, you know, capital structures, looking at how they can use the blockchain technology to do something truly innovative in the future is what we're doing with our capital or Equus Capital business, which is effectively our equivalent to an investment banking or corporate advisory firm. And putting all of that together then sort of gives you an understanding that really what we're looking at is the whole ecosystem. And really what we're trying to solve for is that liquidity issue

and how can we bring people together to transact with each other in a safe, secure way, you know, in a liquid way and something that gives true transparency around price and execution. Got it. And so what I want to spend today talking about is the derivatives business that you guys are building. And you have a very unique view, I think, of derivatives. One, from just the importance that it will hold in the industry, but also kind of how to address it as an institutional product and infrastructure. So maybe let's just start with, for the people who don't know, let's just start one-on-one like what is a derivative and why is it important sure and

i think just the concept of derivatives scare people a lot um and we want to dispel that myth um you know regulators are often concerned about them and um that talk about the risks that they bring um but to us in many ways it's a lot about risk management and actually what derivatives allow is a is your ability to reduce risk so essentially a derivative is is getting economic exposure to an underlying asset class without actually having to earn that asset class. And the most common ones you'll come across will be futures and options. Now, every day in traditional finance, these trade in inordinate amounts of size and are being used by retail and institutions across the board.

I think where we've looked at it is you can't really build an institutional asset class business without understanding that you need the derivative space. And really, it's about educating not just our customers on the platform, but also working with the regulators to ensure that they're comfortable with the way we're doing it, to draw those parallels with the derivatives worlds that's used or the derivatives methods that are used in traditional finance, but also understanding where the benefits for specifically, in this case, cryptocurrency derivatives could really play out. So, really, that's the ethos, that's the thinking.

Kind of the key piece for us is really, okay, how do we give access to all of our customers for that product? Because there are a number of other derivatives exchanges out there, and we're doing it differently from them, and we're trying to find that bridge between the two. So we have currently FuturesLive on our platform. will have options trading in the coming months and quarters, but we're going to do them slightly differently to some of the other platforms you might know in the derivative space, but also slightly differently from how you might have seen options trade in traditional finance.

Talk through a little bit about that nuance in terms of how you guys view it differently than other people in the industry. Sure. I think the key element for us is is how we manage customers risk on the platform so as most people are aware you can come and trade the most simple derivative out there is a future and people will talk about leverage it's a fairly common phrase you can go on to a crypto exchange and trade 100 leverage uh future the reality is that future is not leveraged at all it's the platform that gives you leverage and understanding that subtle difference might not impact most people on a day-to-day basis because they see them as one and the same but there's a very specific difference between a leveraged product

and getting leverage on a product and what we want to do is make sure people understand that difference so you don't you're not buying a product that's inherently leveraged you're using your capital to allow you to buy more of a product with less money and your leverage is in is in the way you use your capital not in the way the product itself is structured and i think that's important that people understand that because you're not forced to take risks you don't want to take. You can go and buy a three or four or 10 times levered ETF, for example, on an index. Every unit of that you buy, you have 10 times as much exposure. Now, you can roughly do the same thing by buying 10 times as many futures with the same amount of capital. But at any point,

you could reduce that number. So I might not want to have 10 times as much exposure. I could you know buy five or two or whatever it might be and so understanding that you're really in control of of how you get exposure and how you take risk is a key thing and then understanding how we help you manage that in a fair and transparent way and i think that's one of the fundamental differences in terms of allowing our customers to get access to these products we're not trying equals we see ourselves as a platform it's a utility we're here to provide people a safe place to transact we're not here to make money from people who don't understand necessarily the risks that they're taking and so we want to make sure that the processes that we put in place that

that mitigate your risk on that platform are done fairly they're done transparently we're not actually trying to make money from other people's misfortune or misunderstanding of products we don't want that what we want to do is make sure what we want to do is is provide that marketplace and a utility. And really, it's about how we educate people to use these products properly, but then also how we ensure that when they are using them, they're doing it in a safe way. Talk through kind of why somebody would use this. I know that you guys think a lot about risk management. You think a lot about capital efficiency, but just explain those a little bit more and kind of just walk me through somebody coming to your platform that wants to use these

derivatives, kind of what they can expect in both the risk management bucket and the capital efficiency side? Sure. So if you imagine, there's probably a lot of people for whom owning and maintaining a balance of Bitcoin is a key part of their own personal balance sheet. That's becoming a more and more prevalent view. And we all understand a lot of the fundamental economic reasons as to why that view is becoming more and more mainstream.

Now, you can go on to a number of different exchanges and buy some Bitcoin. You could do it even off an exchange and you can hold it in a wallet. And we've already talked a little bit about the custody piece. So that piece is already in place. Now, I guess the difference that we want to talk about is when you combine both derivatives exchange and a spot exchange together and you understand that people are looking at that holistically. I might own some Bitcoin, but I might have the view that in the short term, as we're seeing right now, you might get a small correction in the price. I might say look I'm okay I'm happy with that I can I can live with that sort of P&L fluctuation in my life or I might say look you know I can feel the supply demand dynamic because you know

we might have gone a little bit ahead of ourselves too quickly or we've not pulled back enough yet for people to start again um and I'd like to protect myself for that so what I can do then is sit with my core Bitcoin holding and maybe I want to sell some futures against it so my exposure to Bitcoin reduces. But it doesn't cost me. I don't ever sell my actual Bitcoin. I just sell some of my exposure to my Bitcoin. But what happened is because we understand that you have some Bitcoin and you saw some exposure to Bitcoin, you don't have any risk to us. So we're not going to charge you to do that. So we won't charge you margin on your short position because we know you have a long position. Now, ironically, if you've done that on two different platforms, platform A

doesn't know what platform B is doing. So they will charge you because they don't understand your whole risk. So again, it's about building that ecosystem, understanding that we want to look at risk holistically, we want to look at your whole portfolio. And if you show us your whole portfolio, we'll allow you to manage your risk so much more effectively because we won't charge you anything to be able to do that

from a risk management perspective. So in its kind of simplest sense, that's where we're really trying to get to with that. We offer derivatives across a range of different functions. If we look just at that sort of perpetual futures piece, we will have dated futures as well. But if we use that perpetual futures piece, which is the common products across the crypto space, it's using that product against your core position that we really think will benefit.

But also, you understand that if you have that position, how are we going to manage that through time? If you use a lot of capital by trading futures, we're not going to try and benefit from you if you run up against a headwind that you really weren't predicting. And so the liquidation process that we run is extremely fair and extremely transparent. We're not taking positions off you that we would then try and benefit from like selling those out in the market at a different price, we actually make the whole liquidation process transparent and clear. We make it a competitive

process. Prices are deemed by supply and demand. You can't have a fair price for an asset unless there's supply and demand vying to create that equilibrium price. So at the same point, we don't want to take positions off customers if there isn't a competitive price to do it. So even through our liquidation process, we use a competitive price model to ensure that Any position that's taken off you because you can no longer afford to keep it is also done in a completely fair way. And we actually make no money from any of the liquidation process.

That's actually managed by effectively external people. And to that point, actually, as a platform itself, when I talked earlier about us being utility, we have a hard and fast rule and we've made it public in our statements to the SEC and it's part of our process for getting listed. We don't market make on our own exchange. So we are never counterparts to any of your trades on our public exchange. We can't see it.

Anyone who's on the platform has no informational advantage or disadvantage compared to ourselves. We're trying to create that fair marketplace and that runs right the way through from products we put on there to the way those products are traded. And if, unfortunately, at any point, a customer can no longer afford to keep a position open, then the process for which that position is closed is, again, a fair and transparent one that we try and ensure. And that's really the whole ethos behind the setup that we've got. So one of the things that's interesting to me is basically as you build out a product

suite, you get access to more information. As you get access to more information, you're able to de-risk in some of these situations. you're able to have better clarity about who the customer is, what their portfolio is, what their risk exposure is. And so not only can you make one sounder decisions, but also too, it changes the cost structure, right? In terms of you actually aren't kind of flying blind. And so I guess the question then becomes, as you build up that product suite, how important is it to really explain the ecosystem to a prospective customer or user, rather than just say, hey, come use our exchange or our custody,

kind of a one-off product, right? It really is there's this value add almost or kind of lock-in in the product suite that allows you to be better and better serve the customer if they use all of the products, right? Yeah, and I think that's a really important point. When you have your own custodian, our ability to consider our counterparty risk to a custodian

is completely different to if we're using a third-party custodian. We acutely understand the way in which we've built that product, how that product is insured, for example, how that process happens, what the costs are for actually running and managing that process, like the true costs, not what we charge people, but the genuine true costs, and being able to see that there's efficiencies that can be gained. but also thinking about the fact that you know if you've bought if someone comes to us with crypto they've bought it somewhere um so they've had an experience of buying um now that means that they will probably at some point want to buy some more or possibly sell it so they need you know a venue for doing that but also they need a venue for storing it whilst they're waiting to do that now one of the areas that we're extremely interested in um and we had an announcement earlier this beginning of this year is around what you can do within the lending borrowing space how

you can be more efficient not just how we can be efficient with your assets but how you can be efficient with your assets um the concept of of lending assets and borrowing assets and traditional finances is um is well known fairly well understood um even within a traditional retail bank that's effectively the model you know your net interest margin for a bank is effectively where they take money off people like you and i and see it in their accounts and where they lend it out to other people for whatever reasons, it might be finances or corporate debt. The interesting thing that's at the moment is a lot of people sit and hold crypto for the fundamental reasons that we mentioned earlier, but it's sort of sitting as a dead asset. And that's something that we also want

to change. So how can you earn by just holding crypto? And how can we do that again in a safe way that allows people to understand what we're doing with their products, but at the same time allows them to generate a return on a product that doesn't naturally or inherently have, unlike, say, a fiat currency, which is really just trying to run to stand still a lot of the time when it comes to inflation rates and interest. So for us, we're in the process of rolling out a product that allows people to earn whilst they do nothing, but at the same time have access to all of that ecosystem that we talked about, the custody piece, the trading piece, even some more complex trading strategies that we make available for people through

algorithms or automated trading processes, and bring all that together so that really you're comfortable that your assets are held in a safe and secure manner, you have access to liquidity as and when you want it, your assets are working for you even when you're not touching them um and you're doing that all in the system that all understands each other can all speak to each other um but as i mentioned before we're not ignorant to the fact that there are other venues out there and so you know we're comfortable as well that you say you know i've traded on another platform up for a long time i'm comfortable there um have a look at what you guys can do and we hope the experience you have with us and what you see the way we do things we do

things differently we'll certainly see you migrate your business over but we understand that there's currently exists. And we're not saying, okay, because you want to use another venue, we're now going to exclude you from everything we did. So it's take as much as you can and take as much as you want because you'll truly feel a benefit for it or from doing so. But we're not going to cast you aside because you say, actually, I still use a custodian here or I still use a trading system there. That would be a path to disaster for us. For sure. How do you think being based in Asia is an advantage, helps you think differently than maybe some of the other products that people are used to using? Is there anything

that kind of sticks out in your mind about the geographic location, either of you and other people in the team's experience over the years in finance, kind of working in various cities across Asia, or also just living there now and kind of spending day to day? I love living in Asia. I've lived there for the last 15 years and thoroughly enjoyed my entire time. I think there's definitely some experiences that we use and in particular around that derivatives piece. So as I mentioned earlier, you know, you need that derivatives piece to really offer the entire spectrum of risk control and risk management and exposure. If I build it, will they come? That concept doesn't work so well. You need to understand why people are coming. And in Asia, there's the traditional finance, there's an extremely

prevalent structured products market. And that's primarily driven by retail investors effectively using structured products to get exposure they want in traditional financial markets, be it through FX or equities or other products. And knowing to them that they're generating the return and they're giving themselves a certain pathway or structure through that product. But that really is being off the side of the volatility market, which is the measure of how options are priced. And an extremely interesting thing is that it's actually the almost the tail that wags the dog in Asia when it comes to the volatility markets, what price is options. It's the retail guys who are selling are actually determining the price for

which institutions trade volatility all the way up to index. And we've seen that and we've experienced that. We've sat there on derivatives trading desks in Asia and watched as this why would retail capital infrastructure products that has proven useful for trading activities? And so what we're doing with our investment products division, which is, again, a kind of key part of this building, is putting together those structured products that can be distributed by the wealth management platforms

and private banks to those same investors. And what that will do is bring back into the exchange all of the volatility that they're selling, the offer side of those options. And so we understand you need both sides, you can't just build an exchange and expect people to trade, you need someone to buy and someone to sell. And really that experience in Asia with the structured product market and having hired a great team to build that for us, that's where we think we're going to to differentiate ourselves in the options market because we know how to bring both sides of the trade there. There's plenty of people who want to trade volatility, trade options on

crypto, want to buy calls, want iPods, want to get that sort of exposure. Finding the other side of that is a little bit more difficult. Understanding that that comes from the retail piece, packaged and restructured through the structured product market is, I think, a key difference and one of the key things that we've all experienced from our time in Asia. yeah that's a really unique insight i think and one that obviously has played well for you guys before we go to wrap up i want to quickly just talk to people about where they can find you on the internet and where they can find diginex the products go learn more about them or sign up if they'd like actually yeah i mean one of the things that's interesting for us we're after

talent. We're after great people and we want people to come and join us. We want people to want to come and join us. And I know that it's something you just started looking at in terms of that talent acquisition. The financial services industry suffered a huge brain drain to tech, particularly post-GFC. What we want to do is start to let people see that tech and financial services aren't mutually exclusive. And if you want to do something right and you want to do it differently, You can still do that in a financial services company and you can still be the best at that and do it in a way that is pleasing to yourself

and the satisfaction of everything that that brings. And so really for us, talent acquisition right now is a key thing for us. You can come and see our products, eggwast.io, diginex.com. Everything's available there. We're on LinkedIn, we're on social media. There's opportunities to get to us.

We have a Telegram channel that everyone's welcome to look at and see some of the conversations that we're having there. But we really do want to talk and engage with people, and particularly those people who feel that they've got something to add in this space, and we are genuinely open to having a lot of conversations with people about how we can, you know, continue to build out the product suite, the offering,

you know, the platform, you know, to really establish ourselves as that core provider of a quality platform, a quality product within the industry. yeah i highly suggest people go check it out so i i love that perspective uh i always ask everyone the same three questions and you'll get to ask me one to finish up first is what is the most important book that you've ever read um it's a good question um i had a i personally i thoroughly enjoy reading um biographies autobiographies or memoirs and fiction um And I just recently finished one based on the diaries of Winston Churchill during the Blitz and looking at how people reacted to what he was saying and how he was working with the American government at the time to try and encourage them to help the British during the war.

how his speeches were being met both in parliament and by individuals within the um within the uk and how they're responding to that and also then how that had an effect on on the uk's ability to sort of manage its way through that he to me he's one of the most interesting artists out there um and extremely naturally gifted uh communicator and so to read how that process went through and And the way he thought about it and how much time and effort went into thinking about those things at a time when the whole world was under such duress is extremely interesting for me and has had a reasonably profound impact. I am the same way.

I love reading biographies of successful people. So I fully understand that. Second question is a little bit more personal. Sleep schedule. And this is brought to you by our friends at Eight Sleep. They've got this like thermoregulation bed that I sleep on every night, which basically just makes it really, really cold, which helps you sleep deeper. And also I start sleeping eight hours a night and feel amazing compared to when I sleep five or six. Are you a three or four hour sleeper or more like a nine or ten hour sleeper?

I'm one of those people who looks at my watch when I go to bed and panics if there's not eight hours before I need to get up. Amazing. I'm also one of those people who wants it to be extremely cold. So I am a huge fan of any thermoregulated bed. Sadly, my wife operates on a completely different scale than I do. And I think we're one of the people, you know, there's an electric blanket in our room and my side's never even had the plug attached to it and hers is on nine months of the year.

And we operate in a very different way in that sense. So I'm definitely eight hours. i think i can't um to my kids you know sleep is the most important thing um really because without enough sleep you really can't operate so yeah i'm i'm always amazed that those people can get by on three or four hours because that's not me unfortunately yeah i used to try but not anymore i'm a full-on convert to the sleep religion for sure uh last question is more fun aliens are you a believer or a non-believer um look based on the laws of probability i have to be a believer um you know for me everything's about you know the chance of things happening

in probability and everything i do in work every day is looking at the probability of an event happening and whether or not you know the expected result is positive or negative off the back of so just based on the sheer scale and scope of of what's beyond just this planet i i would have to say i believe um i don't know i don't have a strong view on the form or the process um but absolutely it'd be one of those things whereby you'd have to say i'm completely not surprised at one point when this happens because you know the the scale to which um to which the whole universe operates means that it has to be there i i'm uh uh your spirit animal on the other side of the world because i i completely agree it's just not from a probability standpoint i don't

know how anyone thinks uh they don't exist i don't know if they've shown up i don't know if they're little green men that get out of ufos but uh but definitely there's got to be life somewhere right absolutely you know we were having a conversation with my kids about how life started and indigenous people on different lands. And we were sort of trying to go through this process and, you know, and how it got there. And the fact that even just in the world, you know, on one side of the world versus the other,

how these events sparked and now, you know, expand that not just within the galaxy, but the universe and beyond that, you suddenly realize that, you know, it's just impossible for it not to be the case. For sure. What's the one question you got for me to finish up? um so i probably embarrassed myself slightly earlier with tom cruise and believe me it's

more maverick than tom cruise per se so um in a similar vein to your books but what's the movie that got you to where you are because for most people these days it is a film or a movie yeah i don't know if i've got uh like one movie where it was like hey here's the thing um and you know i'm gonna go pursue that um i think that i probably have uh a couple of different movies that people um might not have ever heard of or may not have put as much importance on them as i did um but the two that immediately popped to mind are uh there's this movie called four brothers uh it's got mark walberg tyrese a bunch of uh of kind of actors and the whole idea is basically they're four orphans, right. Or kind of adopted kids that ended up in the same house.

They go off in the kind of pretty hard life in Detroit. Uh, they all kind of disperse and they come back and, uh, and basically they're just kicking ass together. Right. And it's like, look, we're not brothers actually, but they call each other brothers. And I grew up in a family with five boys. So that movie always kind of was cool to watch with, uh, with my actual brothers. Uh, and then the other movie, um, and probably my favorite movie ever is this movie called In Time. It's got a Justin Timberlake in it, which immediately is like a polarizing 50-50, whether people like it or not, just because he's involved. But I think that the message behind the movie, it's basically everyone has a clock in their forearm. And when you go to work,

you don't get paid in money, you get paid in time. And so literally, as you leave the factory, they put more time on your clock. If your clock ever hits zero, you die. But if you are quote unquote rich, you have unlimited amount of time. And so it's got all these like metaphors for life. Like one of the things is there's zones or neighborhoods. And based on how much time you have, you can go in between the zones or you cannot. And so he has no time. He gets a bunch of time. He goes to the rich area. And the first thing he realizes is in the poor area where people don't have any time, they run everywhere. Nobody walks, everyone runs. But when he gets to rich area nobody runs everybody walks and so he's like huh and then he realized oh because i run

everywhere because i'm always trying to save time right i'm always trying to like get to to the job get more work and stuff so i think like a movie like that which you know frankly nobody even really knows about uh it's just really got a great message and kind of reminds you that like time is the most scarce asset and so um it kind of just centers you back on like what's important that's oddly enough i've seen both of those films amazing yeah amazing and i particularly the process of transferring time with that armed like sort of handshake that they have in movies is quite an interesting one um and how it all works too but i'm one of those people who as we talked about secretly efficiency and time efficiency is is so key to me um i like to be

on time i don't like to be early i don't like to be late i like to be just on time i like to try and do as many things as i can at the same time or reduce the amount of times i have to do something with the way in which i work which sometimes sort of frustrates my wife if i leave things in the pile because i'm going to move them all in one go rather than take them one at a time throughout the day um but yeah to me it's a really scarce commodity and don't put off to tomorrow what you can do today i could not agree more my friend um all right we will send people go check out DigiNEXT. Go look at the stock. What's the ticker on NASDAQ? EQOS on NASDAQ.

EQOS or EQOS.com as well. So thank you so much for doing this, Neil. I really appreciate it. We'll do it again in the future. Thanks very much.