The Pomp Podcast - Adam Draper, Co-Founder of Boost VC: Why Investing in Weird Things Leads to Great Returns

Episode Date: April 17, 2019

Adam Draper is a Co-Founder of Boost VC. In this conversation, Adam and Anthony Pompliano discuss Bitcoin, Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, space, aliens, oceans, and why investing in weird things delivers great returns. ----- Ethereal Summit returns to New York City this May 10th to 11th to kick off Blockchain Week and offer you a chance to go deep into the heart of crypto, blockchain, and Ethereum. Get up close with outspoken crypto leaders like Mike Novogratz, Joe Lubin, Tushar Jain, Danny Ryan, and yours truly Anthony Pompiliano. Ethereal Summit is where you can get in the mix with the builders of blockchain.  Check out Etherealsummit.com with discount code POMP to get 20% off tickets to come hang with the brightest minds in blockchain at Ethereal Summit New York, May 10th to 11th at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Adam Draper is a co-founder of BoostVC. In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, space, aliens, oceans, and why investing in weird things delivers great returns. I really enjoyed this conversation and Adam was as entertaining as always. I really hope you enjoy this as well. This May 10th and 11th, Ethereal Summit is coming to New York City to kick off Blockchain Week. It offers you a chance to go deep into the heart of crypto, blockchain, and Ethereum. Come hang out with Mike Novogratz, Joe Lubin, Tushar Jain,

Danny Ryan, and yours truly. You get into the mix with the builders of blockchain and Ethereum. It's less shiller, all killer. Go to etherealsummit.com and use my discount code POMP to get 20% off tickets. I'll see you there on May 10th and 11th at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. 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. Bang, bang. I'm here with Adam Draper. Thank you so much for coming. Bang, bang. Bang, bang. You have to start out everyone bang, bang. I'm going to do sci-fi. I'm here with Pomp. Yeah, perfect. I'd rather be called adam draper it's cooler name than pop arkansas what up on the live stream all right so here we go ready that's a good use okay continue what's your background okay my background everyone knows you as the man who wears their orange pants but you're actually way more substance underneath those pants that sounds weird oh god this is so refreshing i gotta say thank you for having me on

this i've been you know up and down talking to endowments and all these places that you Serious people. We're suiting ties. Yeah, and the energy. You guys have good energy here. Yeah, it's fine. Okay, my background is, okay, so in between high school and college, I'm going way back. I played tennis in Australia for 10 months. Were you good? I was good. I mean, I was trying to go pro, and then I-

Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not playing you then. I was going to play you if you were bad, so I got ego boosted. And then I ended up at UCLA, and I was an English major, and I didn't know what I wanted to do. And then I – basically, I was forced into the English major. I had enough credits and units towards that. Education.

We can talk about education if you want to. I'm waiting for someone to have a Twitter major rather than an English major. Twitter major would be so valuable. That's what people should write on their resumes. Yeah. That would be brilliant. And then – so my background was I started a company. It was called Expert Financial with a guy named Thomas Foley.

And we were a secondary market for private securities. Actually, at the same time, Barry Silbert, who's at DCG. I don't know if he's been on this. He should. He's not. We're going to get him on. OK. I just saw him yesterday.

And he's great. And he was working at SecondMarket. He started SecondMarket. And we were sort of competitive in this secondary market for private security space. um and uh i went on and after about four and a half years of running expert financial we it did end up selling uh to a company called venovate okay uh venovate was bought by a company called uh king uh oh my god what was it called keystone keystone keystone was bought by coinbase recently for experts ats that we had so technically came full circle uh but because i invested in

Coinbase. So, you know, the value chain works. After Expert Financial, I realized that I had a lot of fun mentoring startups and not doing what I did in making mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes when starting a company. What was the biggest mistake you made when you started the company? I think in a regulated space. So we were a broker dealer. We had to be a broker dealer to be able to transact securities. The biggest mistake that we made was using the SEC as a product manager. So like having their input on like how it should be working so that it is like regulated and secure rather than just if I were to go back and do it, I would not be paid and I would try to facilitate a lot of transactions of secondary. So I would go

through the process. Paul Graham says do things that don't that don't scale. Same system. I would go through that system once and then i do it again and then you use technology to enhance the process you don't start with the technology yep and so i would say you should talk to a lot of crypto people they're uh got a little backwards there yeah well i mean like yes yeah that is a key thing you you need to understand who your customer is so like one of the lead things when people reach out cold to me uh in an email uh they say like what they do Or they lead with, the worst was in 2017, 2018, when they were leading with how much money they had raised. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was like, ICO, only one million left, raised 18 or whatever. And it's like, I don't even know what you do, and you've been writing for three sentences. Oh, I'll take it one step further. It was like people would show up, and they'd send you a thing about, hey, we have 27,000 people on our Telegram channel. Yeah. Like, that's a metric. I go, okay, congratulations. Like, that's a metric of success.

By the way, what do you do? And so what I ask them now is I say, who's your customer? Because at the end of the day, I actually find that most startups, most crypto or otherwise, don't actually know who the end customer is. And most of the time, it's not who you think it is. And so that ends up being a very intuitive question to see how far along they are in the process. If they can succinctly tell me, this is who my customer is, this is the demographic, and this is how much money we make off of them. you're further along than almost anyone absolutely what did uh after the company what did you do next uh so i founded uh what was the first ever crowdfunding website for equity really it was

called boost funder okay okay and then what i realized was uh like i'm going deeper than i probably need to how long is this supposed to be i could be i could be talking for ages yeah we might go four hours okay perfect uh unless i gotta go to the bathroom then i'm leaving But I'll still be here. So I founded BoostFunder and it was basically my way of going, OK, the SEC regulators, they only care if you're actually making money. So like if you're taking a fee, they think that the greed is involved. So I was like, I'm not going to take a fee. I'm going to match investors and entrepreneurs online. And so I launched it, but I realized that there was a discrepancy between what an investor needs to invest and what an entrepreneur, the level of the entrepreneur thinks they are at to get investment. And so I was like, you know what? The best way to solve this is actually offline.

And so that led to Boost, which founded as an accelerator, but now is a pre-seed fund focused on investing in sci-fi technologies. Okay. Before we get to Boost, let's talk about Coinbase. Okay. Because you invested, I think you were the first investor? Yes, I was the first investor. They did go through YC though. Okay. So technically YC. Describe what your experience with Bitcoin, crypto, etc. was pre-Coinbase.

And then let's talk about the Coinbase investment. Okay. That part is a good question because it's very short. Okay. I had no previous experience in digital Bitcoin currencies. So they I got a list of companies that sent to me and I read through all the descriptions and one of them said marketplace for digital currencies. And I said, I do not know what that is. What is a digital currency? What is I don't know what that is.

And so I cold emailed Brian Armstrong at Coinbase. Founder CEO. Yeah. Founder CEO. and I said and I wrote this email sort of making myself sound better than I was and I'd invested in a couple companies

before Coinbase and I said those in the email and then I said do you want to meet for coffee I met at, we did we met at a place called Red Rock which is in Mountain View I highly recommend it, it's a good coffee place it's got good coffee and then I

he said that like he's sponsored by Red Rock I actually I like to thank them because I've written, uh, I've invested in three companies who I met at Red Rock, uh, who total market cap today are worth like $10 billion or something. So like, so only go to Red Rock, uh, the collective valuation. Um, and Brian said one thing and he said a lot of things about his background. I've, I've sort of a, an emerging theory about, uh, entrepreneurs and it's like rational people doing irrational things um or irrational people doing rational things also works uh but the

but brian armstrong he was coming he left airbnb okay uh and it was at that point it was a billion dollar company he had been he was one of the first hundred employees um and he had started two companies previously so like this founder looks on paper very like rational yep and when i was talking to him he was very rational but what he said to me was at some point the world is going to be on one financial infrastructure. And the concept of that means all of the countries have to have a connected financial infrastructure, which is an insane concept. And he's saying Bitcoin at that time, Bitcoin is going to be that financial infrastructure. And he was referring to himself and saying, what Coinbase is, is the gateway. It would be the Netscape to the browser

to the internet. And I just started to obsess over this concept of a connected financial infrastructure. And so what I did was I did diligence and I started talking to other people in the Bitcoin world. He referred me to a couple of people and I talked to a couple more people. Who were the people you talked to? So I talked to someone who was a founder. His name was Laurent, who was at, it was an app search engine at the time called Quixie. He was the CTO. And then I talked to Bill Bardite, who runs Abra now uh i talked to i talked to a it was a bunch of people who are now like you know thought leaders in the space actually and the and the overarching consensus that i felt was this is the most dynamic

community of people like whether or not the technology is there like these are these are like some of the most dynamic people smartest dynamic by dynamic i mean like smartest but also uh like passionate about changing the world and um a little crazy like all of them were a little crazy um but they all seem they all have these backgrounds like my first experiences with bitcoin were not drug deals or anything like that it was it was literally like people with 15 years of experience in finance trying to buy coffee with bitcoin yeah trying to buy a copy of the and i uh red rock i need to go there again i need to start having my meetings there i'll but we'll buy the building at some point and just be like i have all my meetings it'll be

a co-working space um we'll do it together pump um that's fine the uh and so that was my story with corvus i ended up investing because of the dynamic uh community as well as this just you know a rational person but doing unrational things um irrational things yeah so kanye who uh is a legend on twitter at this point uh says tell me a genius you know that isn't crazy and there's an element of what you're describing that fits that in terms it's like they fit the yeah it's like they're they are crazy don't even run all of them are crazy yep but they come off as semi-rational yeah yeah elon is like probably the perfect example like he actually if you sit down and you listen to him talk you're like you know what i could see how he could get through an

entire conversation and say everything he just said with a straight face and no one thinks he's crazy but you understand the guy just said that we're gonna go to mars that's see that's what i'm talking about like the the like you know the person exactly elon's perfect example elon's a perfect example where it's like on on paper he sold paypal he like you know has this background of building and delivering and then he says oh we're going to mars yeah yeah duh you know it's a perfect example all right so uh as you're building boost uh let's go through how you actually well what does boost mean by the way first of all uh so boost means like b-o-o-s-t but not boost mobile like the phone carrier that's so funny we used to get a lot of overlap

of people being like oh you work at boost mobile uh early early on in the like people would like tap me on the shoulder and be like oh you work at boost mobile my phone doesn't work dude yeah boost wireless so uh boost is a community of people uh we have housing and office space okay in uh downtown san mateo and so in the bay area in silicon valley and we bring people from all over the world working in uh highly technical industries like crypto and virtual reality and oceans and space uh and we bring them and it's almost like a home base for companies uh and startups to be able to connect to silicon valley okay so it's almost like uh so they can live there work there uh our accelerator program we run once a year and the companies uh come in for three

months and they live in the housing work in the office space we're running a program right now with 20 startups um nine crypto fantastic stuff and the uh yeah and so that like boost what we what I feel is that being for venture capital, being the connection to the entrepreneur at the earliest stage, closest to the idea is the most powerful position to be. And so what we do is try to provide sort of a safe spot, a home base for those people to be able to really innovate in the Bay Area while also being able to connect to a network in Silicon Valley. Got it. Why set up in San Mateo rather than San Francisco? For those that don't know, san mateo is outside of the city think of it that way and san francisco is a city so uh one reason

would be that we have the housing and office space there um the other reason that's a good reason yeah yeah that's where the building is that's where the building is and since we've moved in like i've seen a whole cultural shift from uh san mateo being a very sleepy town to listening in at coffee shops and deals are being done and that's like it was a seismic shift over the last seven years of watching these different people um come in uh and just change the world and it's been fantastic to watch youtube found in san mateo ad mob san mateo so google only buys things that are started in san mateo that's like two things now right that's two things go to red rock and then if you start red rock san mateo you should it's got deep roots rooted dna but it also

has Boost. And now we back 300 startups. All right. So you guys are accelerating companies and you were also investing in companies that don't go through the accelerator as well. Correct. So we started as an accelerator. And I found that to be the best way to sort of solve this problem of getting to know the entrepreneur earliest. And then we verticalized into Bitcoin and virtual reality. And then as we, you know, developed a very brand and we started to understand that there were companies outside the accelerator who wouldn't join, who are third time founders who, you know, are in the crypto space or the virtual reality space, we wanted to be able to invest in great people. And so being able to write a 250 to $500,000 check allows us to

do that also uh and you're trying to invest as early as possible always we try to be first check more than anything we want to make the decision for ourselves we always like to just say like we're the first decision one of we say first check but it like there could be someone else in and like we just want to actively make the decision for ourselves whether or not we are investing got it um let's go to all the non-crypto stuff first sure vr i have strong opinions on crypto also i know you do that's why i'm gonna save it till the end when you're tired okay vr ar ocean space like you guys are going after all these different verticals let's start with vr and ar first okay why are you excited i think it's super important that we start with vr ar first

okay okay uh here let me stop you for a second we're gonna start with vr ar the uh so adam has taking over the podcast so uh last week was this week is actually gdc which is the gaming developers conference and tons of its vr now like almost like a huge segment of this conference that's one of the biggest gaming conferences in the world has taken over and is virtual reality describe the difference between virtual reality and augmented reality for people that don't know okay so virtual reality is i am enclosing myself in a new world of digital proportions goggles on You put full goggles on and you don't see beyond your goggles. It could be – you could be in space.

You could be in Athens, Greece. It's like 100% artificial or synthetic world. Yeah. I like that. Synthetic world. I deal with synthetic worlds. I just made it up. Yeah.

So augmented reality is overlaying data on a real world. I would say like if you played the Pokemon game Niantic, they overlay little Pokemons on your phone, which is overlaid on the world. I would actually argue that the first major augmented reality platform is actually audio. So it's Alexa or AirPods or because it's overlaying data on our world. It's just not visual. Virtual reality is very, very visual. It's very difficult to do like a radio version of virtual reality because it's fully immersive. It is you are being teleported to this other place.

Dude, when Apple figures out the battery life on the AirPods, I'm never taking them out of my ear. Right? It's incredible. They're training us. A little at a time. Oh, yeah. It's incredible. Yeah.

Before we die. Before we die, are they going to have implants? You're already hooked into the AR. You're on an AR platform. That's augmented reality. So listening to podcasts, that's overlaying your world with audio. Because AR has multiple components, which can be visual and audio. Completely.

uh actually and also like once they start tuning into like google yep uh and like saying where you are that's a true ar application in siri like if it starts to say like hey you're supposed to take a left turn to get into this building go up you know 74 floors or whatever wherever we are adam had some issues getting in so we're gonna give him a hard time i had to go get him in the lobby and everyone looked at me weird um but so so let me tell you this though i went in la and i wish that i remember the organization because i'd love to give him credit for this but uh it's a vr application and this young kid uh was an advertising agency that i think his father ran and he said to me hey come look at this i want to show you this new demo and so i went this probably two two and

a half years ago or maybe even three years ago now and uh so he says uh put these goggles on put them on and all of a sudden i'm standing on top of uh the freedom tower yeah right and in it all of a sudden as soon as i put the goggles on uh i started looking around and i have headphones on and i could hear wind yeah and then he goes move your right foot six inches to like step off the ledge no no even better and when i move my foot there's a rope that they have laid on the ground while i put the goggles on so now all of a sudden there's a my foot feels a rope i see a rope as if i'm walking in between the two towers and i hear wind and when i go to move my feet they turn on a light fan and now my the rest of my body feels wind blowing so think about the sensory overload

of like visual audio rope touching your foot and you feel the wind i wouldn't walk no i was like no no no so it turns out it's like nine out of ten people don't walk hey i was like i'm good it's it's incredible actually there's a uh new experience that's in so there we we backed one called spaces that's a terminator experience and there's another one called sandbox and what they are are uh group experiences where you're all tethered up and you can see each other in virtual reality and then you kill terminators or zombies or whatever the escape the room of that uh experiences, it's really fascinating because it gives you a good experience of like anxiety and like things coming at you. There is, what is crazy is, so I think there, so 7 million high-end

headsets were sold. Okay. Okay. So market size isn't that big, right? But I would argue that only half of them are actually set up. So three, smaller. So they sold 7 million and three and a have got set up yeah i think so i think 50 of them are set up so 3.5 million are set up i would argue that only 20 of them though are active so that's like a market size of like 700 000 um but uh there's a company that made 15 million dollars last year in virtual reality a third party built an application that is on all the devices that made 15 million dollars on maybe 700 000 on 700 000 users like once we scale the actual numbers like it is captivating like this stuff is great And someone was asking me earlier today, when's the technology going to be good enough?

Like, it's good enough. It's just harder to use. And the new device that's coming out next month, I'm like an advertisement for Facebook. Facebook is releasing something called the Oculus Quest. And it's an all-in-one headset. You don't need a computer. You literally just unbox it, put it on your head, and you can do all the applications that basically everything that's been built for the high-end computer stuff. so it's fascinating the airpod example because uh audio is obviously exploding and do you think

that that is because audio was exploding and then the device of an airpod empowered more people to listen or do you think the airpod creation empowers the explosion of audio like is it the the medium or is it the device that leads the charge so i think it's about persistence okay So I think, okay, the difference between a laptop and a mobile phone are not that much different in computer power. It's basically like you have a computer in your pocket or a computer on device. But the main difference is context. So I work on my desktop when I need to sit down, and it's the old world. Some people probably only run on their mobile phone.

But the reason that the mobile phone took off so fast was that there were these intermittent spots where you could do work or play games. so the bathroom uh the train i'm willing to bet that what do you think 10 maybe 20 of phone usage is in the bathroom oh i bet for early adoption i bet it was for of the smartphone i bet it was like 50 whoa for early adoption yeah now now it would be less it's like we're using it all the time yeah but yes i i bet it was a huge part of it yeah i was i always thought just like focusing on toilet games would be a great market that's fair i uh and and so by what i mean by it's about persistence though is like the mobile phone became more persistent than the desktop just on usability yep and now we're moving to something that is currently could always be in

your ears that is still accessing computer and so you can suddenly start to see a world where we're talking to our phone constantly and it's almost uh me it you could tether audio applications from your phone to your ears you know what i want so badly like just give me the answers and tell me who the person is like i want to leave the airpods in and when the airpod knows who you're meeting with well just not even who i'm meeting with but just like you run into somebody whether it's a conference on the street in a coffee shop red rock right wherever we're definitely tell me who the hell this person is i mean the glasses are definitely going to do that you you would have to have a way of identifying which bluetooth i mean like if people are enabled like there's a way

there's a technical way every system if every system was connected you could do it for sure but just like that's a use case right direction definitely a use case uh and the part that i always go to is like everyone's like i would never get an implant in my brain i'm like bullshit you're telling me that if all of a sudden you could think a question and get the thought and get the answer immediately you wouldn't be interested in that i think well yes like you just have google in your brain yeah what are you talking about also people have surgery that are just purely cosmetic people will probably have surgery for uh non-cosmetic like actually really irrational yeah humans are actually really irrational and it would be a very human thing

to be like oh like yeah sure we'll like fix our noses and whatever but not not fix our brains yeah let's not let's not let's not put anything in my brain that's too dangerous yeah have you looked at Neuralink or like, was it Kernel? So Kernel, Neuralink, there's another one called Pandromix. Okay, I don't know about that. So I looked into that space. It's been a while since I've looked, like maybe two years almost. Yeah, so I looked into the space. I mean, it's early. Yeah, of course. And mostly- We just named the whole market. That's the whole market. It's like three companies. And it is the whole market. Two of the best founders of our

lifetime are working on them, but still. And that's very, very true. And it's going to cost a lot of money and it also you have to go through medical compliance stuff Brian Johnson for those that don't know Brian Johnson sold a brain tree and he started Kernel and it's basically an implantable device I actually think

they call it a mental prosthetic like he's very careful about the way that he describes it which is smart I like mental prosthetic but he committed I think a hundred million dollars of his own personal capital to fund this thing so like expensive might be an understatement that literally he couldn't raise the money he had to personally put the money up oh completely and

i i think it's going to be passionate people who are going to rational people doing irrational things uh who are going to change that industry and the elon again like he's putting i think he's putting up most of the capital i don't think he raised money for neural link it's probably like the early days of the uh what's the whole one the um the hole in the ground the um boring company Yeah. I have a wild theory. I don't think that he's boring holes in the ground for traffic. I think he's practicing for Mars. Oh, it's brilliant. He's like, we need to learn about this. Well, so I think this is true. And of course, Twitter will correct us if I'm wrong on this at some point. But I'm pretty sure. Well, you're always right. And Twitter cannot be right.

No, no, no. As Twitter has reminded me many times, I'm usually not right. But I think that on Mars, it's going to be really difficult for us to live above ground based on some of the atmospheric conditions. And so there's a theory that the best way if we get to Mars is to actually – Have you read Red Rising? No, I haven't. What's that? Oh, fantastic series.

Okay. And it's about basically what you're talking about where we're going to be living beneath the surface of Mars. Maybe this is where this theory came from then or something. No, I don't think – well, maybe. it could have been it was just it's a sci-fi book basically everything in sci-fi books comes from uh from from the world builds those things who says that they're like you know if you want to see the future like we you know look at sci-fi or something yeah i mean isaac as asimov basically predicted artificial intelligence uh and he did in irobot and in psycho in uh the

foundation and then the um i mean i'm trying to build magic with vr and that's basically harry potter did you see a ready player one oh yeah amazing fantastic like probably one of the better movies i've seen in a while and the way that it was done was just crazy enough that it was like whoa this is possible and just rational enough where you could see like we're gonna get there it's after that movie came out i was so happy because it it's gonna uh translate what virtual reality is to a millions of people who have never thought what a what it would be like yeah and that's exactly what it is and it worked really really well they did the headset stuff really well they showed how the world's going to change bad and good it really i don't want to uh out this

person but there's a an older gentleman that uh i'm uh just fascinated with and one day i said something about virtual reality because what do you what do these young people talk about virtual reality but you got that virtual reality on your computer and what he said what he meant was like you're going into a virtual reality and you're like, it's not stuck to your face, but you are going into a virtual reality. And I was like, you're actually really right. So the difference between a, the, the desktop and VR is immersion. So we, we currently interact with all this data with a, through a window. So we're looking at a window to that data where now we can actually fully immerse ourselves in that data and feel and experience it. I think that we, the killer,

there are three things that vr is epic for like amazing for uh the surprising one to me is fitness so yeah what tonal and a bunch of these are all getting close we have uh fit xr box vr uh the why you are like there are a couple it was just surprising like when you go to which ones did you invest in so when you go to vr i did i sorry box vr and fit x fit xr runs box vr and then uh why you are is the, is the other one. And, uh, I don't want founders to get mad at you that you're not mentioning your, uh, your portfolios. Oh, well, I hope they're not mad either. That's fine. You only invested in 300 companies. We'll be here.

We can just sit here listing things off. All right. Go back to VR fitness. But, but when you go on, on VR Twitter, uh, it's, it's all about, uh, how many pounds are being lost, uh, using the, the device and, um, and, and it's hitting a different demographic of person who might not want to go to equinox like they're they want to play games but they don't want to uh you know go go somewhere else have you seen actively to a different location the black mirror episode where they're on and they're pedaling and they got to stay pedaling no i haven't oh man it's basically

they're pedaling a real bicycle that's stationary and they're all in a room and they're you know essentially enslaved there to some degree and they're looking on a screen and they have to keep pedaling like keep the lights on type stuff yeah i mean we're pretty close to that net i'll listen i'll give i'll give my girlfriend a hard time like she's got an apple watch and she will literally like it says stand up she'll stand up like like hey you gotta get steps in like you gotta like compete with don't tell me what to do you have to like compete with your friend like that's virtual reality to some degree it is right no it's this machine is telling you what to do there's a digital world that is that we live in already and we're just getting

closer and closer to being able to see it with our eyes like it's already all around us all the time like all this data all this stuff well elon will tell us that we're in a simulation anyway so it doesn't matter yeah now we're building a simulation in a simulation so uh like yeah it's the movie inception that's what we're gonna be in all right so ar vr big deal okay yes i'm a believer um do you think ar or vr hits mass like mainstream adoption first i think vr hits first and that's contrarian to the market yeah why well okay visual ar uh will not hit until after virtual reality if visual so i'm okay because i think airpods are here and i think they're here and i said ipod like can you imagine if we still had ipods that'd be crazy i mean we do it's just digital

now it's all application it's like one app now we just put like and we have multiple phone app we put a phone app in there multiple of those though and that like i have lots of ipods um the i think vr hits first uh because ar is a very very difficult technology challenge it has to recognize the external world and then overlay data on top of that world where vr literally just needs to replace your world with a digital screen and it's they're both difficult but like i think ar's technology is just it's a couple it's three years behind like it's literally the timeline is three years um behind i like this i'm gonna disagree with you okay perfect go yeah well no i'm not gonna tell you why by the way a lot of people disagree with me lots of people disagree so i

agree with what you're not alone yeah i agree with what you just said but i think the piece that i would take past that would be even though the technology is quote-unquote worse or not as developed as vr the method in which it is uh utilized is more important than the quality of technology and people are it's less scary to engage with ar than it is vr like i like i fundamentally think that a lot of mass consumers are like no way i'm putting those goggles on sitting on my couch and like looking like a loser well it means that we have to deliver a good enough service true yeah so we have to create the habit the ar and that's why i led with fitness so fitness being the first of the thing i haven't even said the other two the other is okay the

other is training so training which basically means education so we're getting closer and closer to the matrix you know like i know kung fu yeah that we're there basically do you think kung fu is the first training that works uh no it's enterprise so uh training for uh we have a company called apex officer that trains uh law enforcement uh vantage point for hr uh like different types of training uh in different its context is what is different about the training um and then oh man i forget i forget the name of the company and uh and the founder is going to kill me for this but uh in 2015 i met him and he said i'm gonna use uh basically synthetic environments right artificial environments to do interviews and so it was like if you were a

customer support person they would literally the interview would be we're just gonna put you in this environment and like bam somebody just called bam now you just got an email now your boss has just sent you a need like and you have to like so just do the job for a day walmart is already training their employees hired is the name i forget all right keep going uh walmart's already training their employees uh with virtual reality for black fridays really yeah so like they're training kung fu for black friday basically it's kung fu for black friday they come out and they go i know kung fu um they do because it's a high stress situation yep and we will we as humans if we experience something multiple times we come more desensitized to it so you can be ready for it

and you can do what you feel you should be doing rather than like the sometimes the response is fight or flight and like you know that's i guess what they experience on the rig on black fridays in uh in the army we did these like vr simulations and uh you put the goggles on or whatever and you get in like they're almost like a skeleton vehicle so they kind of feel like a vehicle you're standing like in the gun turret whatever uh and they put you through the simulations and like i was kind of janky uh like cartoonish you know type of content but like hey man that dude over there on the right side of the screen shooting at you like probably shoot back right or like hey man like somebody over the radio just said x like what are you gonna do so i uh i did

something really cool in vr uh recently which was um i've been using it so i've actually found deals in vr so i actually you put on goggles and then yeah i like set up meeting times with with startups and i've invested in three companies that i met originally in virtual reality in a meeting and i'd say three meetings a week you realize that that sounds insane exactly all right no we live in the future all right you're in the future we're just pulling you back to reality for a second yeah just for this podcast i came back and i i'm from the future i'm trying to articulate what it looks like the and the uh that is a big part of my job by the way i have to like retell the stories of like how this technology impacts people um but for me personally i i'm running a i took eight of our

vr portfolio companies i actually haven't even talked about this anywhere so this is the you you all get to hear what we do off the chain we get exclusive yeah you get to hear about the the That makes me sound like a reporter and that I couldn't do that. We're not reporting. But I have taken eight of our companies who are in our portfolio, already went through an accelerator or we invested in, and every two weeks we meet up in VR. What do you guys do? Well, I hold them accountable on numbers and metrics, and then we do what an accelerator does. It's a VR accelerator, and we hold them accountable on metrics.

and then what ends up happening is we talk around one topic uh for instance like someone brought up i'm nervous about launching like launching my application so someone else said i've already launched this is how facebook works uh for launching and this is how to become a launch partner that's information i couldn't have given them but the group can collaborate and solve the questions basically what you're talking about is rather than use like google hangouts and have six seven people you're just doing it in vr yes yes but the is it better than exponentially better than google hangouts um so one to one i would say they're equivalent like if i'm only working if doing this this is okay google hangouts or in vr like it works both ways but in collaborative

environments where you need to work on a whiteboard or you have to solve a difficult problem getting into a room together this is it's the difference between this and google hangouts Got it. Like it's difficult to quantify, but I would argue that it's about five to 10 X better for collaborative environments. So for my situation where I have a group of people who are all talking, it's fantastic. Like the group. But I also ran an investor day in VR. So the investors had to get in VR. They had to jump into VR and meet these companies. Man, that really kind of probably filtered out a bunch of the idiots. We'll figure it out. Well, no. So I, in order to mitigate that risk i i brought them all into our office oh you did like real reality so we we had

like this merger of reality vr where the investors were on one side and the companies were on the other side of the virtual reality did uh did you see the photo of zuck walking into uh f8 and everyone's got on the uh thing like was it kind of like that uh it was well so i i didn't have that many people, but, and they, what I, how I set it up was more like investors hang out and have appetizers and then they can opportunistically jump into headset and they meet two at a time in each headset. Um, it worked really, really well. I'm very happy about it. It was a small scale representation of what I hope to scale out to a bigger audience. Um, it's gonna be fun. It's really fun. So that's VR, VR, AR. What about the oceans? Okay. Oceans. Uh, I'm obsessed with the

oceans why um okay do you want the long story yeah or the short story we can do whatever we want long story okay uh the long story starts at a bachelor party okay perfect okay was it yours uh no it's my brother's okay and uh will he kill you for telling these stories no okay we'll tell them tell the more extreme story than so kill you billy billy sorry um the uh no so i was at a bachelor party and uh we were at it we were at a bar and we were playing hot takes you said that like you're not supposed to be at the bar the uh but we were playing hot takes uh hot take is like something you believe that the rest of the world would hate you for okay basically so like for example just to give other people an

example like an example would be like uh jaw rule is the greatest rapper of all time like right now that would be the hottest take of all time you think so yeah it would be a very hot take because fire festival like all that stuff no but i would argue that's why fire festival was fire festival because ja rule because ja rule so it makes him so i would have taken the opposite side of that okay so that that's what i'm saying is that basically ja ja rule like nothing like just barking at people on a cd to get you famous yes and so i uh so my hot take was that climate change is not a thing okay all right and so so but so this is this is why i'm giving you the the like full story uh so wait is this something that you have to believe if you say it so you believe it

so but but also everyone's just like making fun of each other it's not a like coordinated game i just want to make sure that when the press read this like when they listen to this they say adam draper doesn't believe but but i said but i said that and then what i said was uh then my friend almost punched me in the face okay okay because he was so viscerally he had this visceral reaction he didn't know anything about climate change but like everyone got super angry about my reaction to it and i didn't know anything about climate change so so like i'm not gonna like it was it was like strictly off of the media telling me it's a thing i said it's not a thing um we're crypto people like i'm a i'm a check check the facts so that next year the next 12 months i read books

I learned about climate change. I learned about global warming. And what do you think now? Okay. So I think it's a ridiculous debate because it's not even about whether or not the climate, the earth is warming. Which, by the way, the way that we use to measure the data, I don't completely trust. But I do believe that climate change is happening. Okay.

But the argument isn't about whether or not it's happening. But isn't global warming and climate change, they could be the same thing or they could be different? Well, they are the same thing. They used a different word to describe the concept. And again, I'll caveat all this. Basically, climate change, global warming was the first word everyone used for climate change. Yeah, but let's just say that the climate was changing the other way. It was getting colder, which I'm not claiming that it is.

But that would be climate change. That is still about. Well, they rebranded global warming because people were arguing about it. That was their argument against it. I'm just like three years late. Got it. Yeah, you're three years late. But no one actually checked.

No one read books. No one checks everything. Everyone just had an opinion. And I like to figure out like where these friction points are, figure out where the truth is. Right. Like that's where the discoverers of truth. And so what I did, I'm not going to say that I know for a fact what the truth is, but I know that I believe that the climate is warming or or getting more extreme. Let's say getting more extreme, which is what climate change is. They're talking about extremities. But the argument is about really it's are humans causing it or is it a natural system? So my thought is like because I believe that climate change is happening, whether or not it's human caused or not, like we should probably – the ocean is the regulator of the earth's temperature.

Many people don't know that. yeah it's the the reason that we exist is because there's enough like uh dissolving of h2o that we don't get hit by the whole heat wave um and and co2 actually doesn't have anything to do with climate like it very little to do with climate it's all it's mostly h2o and so the ocean has a you know a trash heap the size of texas in the middle of it so we might as well clean it up to like check it off the box of like human caused climate change okay um and so but okay this is the long way of saying and i don't know if you know i care okay you care thank you i found the person um my name is adam draper and i'm part of oceans anonymous yeah it's a it's a room of one

i go into vr and i go to my oceans anonymous anonymous meetings every week all right um but basically oceans have a huge problem and the problem is uh i've lost some people uh the people dropped off but then other people are saying very interesting so there's a couple other oceans okay well well i care too good uh the oceans um have it's a business model problem basically everyone thinks of it as a non-profit okay because and naturally the united states and every country's uh issue is that no one owns the ocean so our incentive is actually throw trash in the middle of the water yep everyone's incentive is to throw it in the middle of the water so that it's not our problem so naturally it's a tragedy of the commons problem so like naturally it became a trash heap

so the key is to change the business model of the ocean from a tragedy the commons thing to a ownership model of the ocean so what i'm trying to say on this podcast is i own the ocean okay it's mine and and what are you going to do with it can i have some well it's my problem now do you want some i i don't know what are the problems well can i make money but there's huge markets in it so aquaculture is a 250 billion dollar a year market what does that word mean so uh fish farming fish farming okay got it fish farming 250 billion dollars people like me fish farming yeah and there's no technology infrastructure it's literally just like and we're literally like just like you would um create animals to then eat

them yeah we're just creating fish to eat them to eat them okay yeah completely and there are seaweed farms and other farms just like vegetables okay hold on pause seaweed farms really weird that i know this uh i went super deep and i want to start a seaweed farm at one point i sort of still do okay we can partner up let's do it find some young kid who wants to go play in the ocean and do the seaweed farming uh yeah hey there's somebody who's listening is anyone gonna uh if you if you want to uh if you want to start a seaweed farm reach out to adam but continue seaweed farm so there's a kid uh the reason why i figured this out was there's a kid i think in seattle maybe or somewhere in the pacific northwest what he did was he was uh young like

16 to 18 years old start a seaweed farm and what he was doing was uh his whole play uh in the local paper said something like he realized that there was a special type of seaweed that if you grew it you could then put it into cow feed and that cow feed could drastically reduce the gas output of the cows aka cow farts so making vegan cows uh well they're already vegan well kind of but in the sense of this was just an additive to the food they were already eating and it drastically reduced the co2 emission of the cow which is the cow fart and they're at one point i don't know if this is still people believe this or not but the cow farts were a major contributor to global warming to global warming so this whole thing was one of the best ways to attack global warming is

to get cows to stop farting so much and the best way to do that is you put glow uh seaweed from the ocean into the cow feed sounds crazy i looked at i looked at it wild business because here's why your point about nobody owns the ocean it's like if you want to start a farm you gotta go buy farmland yeah you're buying it from somebody and you don't have the ocean you don't have to buy the ocean now sometimes what what you can do is you can actually get somebody to pay you to do it because there's all sorts of things around this acu uh aquaculture right all this stuff and uh and so i talked to a couple of people and there's a bunch of very wealthy people around the world especially in asia who are like oh i own an island like i'll just go hire you know 200 people

from my home country and i'll just get them to farm seaweed completely the problem is that the seaweed has to stay fresh to till you get it somewhere and so uh the whole seaweed farm culture is like very underrated i think it's all like one company like right now this was like a I'm a 16-year-old in a dinghy, so I'm sure that there might be a couple of companies. Like the seaweed that is crispy around sushi rolls and stuff, I think it's like a huge – I think it's like one company makes all the seaweed sushi wraps basically. Probably. Like huge businesses are in the water. Logistics, shipping, carrier freights, all those things, water.

There are a lot of problems with the water and that's why I'm investing in startups that can solve those problems. So you're talking about surface water, like what's going on in surface, but what's underneath the ocean? We don't know anything down there. Yeah. No, there's – we have 100% high-resolution capture of Mars. And we have only – I think it's 5% of the Earth's seabed at high resolution for pictures. So we actually have higher resolution of Mars photos than of the Earth's water surface. So we can take better pictures of space than we can of our of our own planet.

Yeah. Yeah. And so why is that? Well, basically, that's a great question. My answer is great question. So my answer to that is just rolling out the great question. My answer to that is, I believe in the 50s, JFK and Russia said we're going to space. and over the next 10 years I like how just JFK not the US it wasn't the US it was just JFK he has the speech that's like we're going to go to space

because we want to it's a great speech you should listen to it just for inspiration sometimes but he said in over 10 years we got to space and we got to the moon Russia by the way they announced their intention to go to space through Twitter bots

alright go ahead hold the radio waves I could resist. And so what happened was NASA got an insane amount of funding. Around the same time, though, in the early 60s, they started another program called NOAA. And it has been 1,000x less funded than NASA. And what is NOAA? So NOAA is the Monitoring and Observation and Research of the Seas, basically.

And so what the I figure what it actually stands for National Oceanic Association and another A or an H. No, it's an A. It's an NOAA Association Association Organization and the and so the so basically my answer is underfunded. That's why. So the reason it captured space captured competition and the imagination. i agree with that and so we went and we won we won the moon uh and do you think we went to the moon i do yeah i think we went to the moon why well uh they have that experiment where they bounce a um off of there's a mirror up on the moon or a reflection thing and they bounce lasers off of it to prove that there's something that is not from i mean it means that we could have crash landed there but like we'd something so there is a mirror that they there's like a yeah

there's some there's a big bang theory about it i i asked the guy one time i like to joke around and be like oh we didn't really go like you know we can't stream sunday night's uh football like how did we go to the moon yeah like how are we streaming in the 60s live from the moon right there are like these polarizing situations like that where it's like there's no way because like i can't even screw in a light bulb like look like i'm obviously joking around but i did say to one guy i said hey do you believe in uh i won't say who it is but he's hit me with uh dude there's no way we went to the moon nobody can show us the flag up there yeah that's actually i was like wow they're like oh it's on the dark side like it's over there i was like man we gotta we gotta uphill

battle to get people to wrap their head but i do think that we have like a land rover on mars or whatever rover on mars when people don't know about the moon landing was it wasn't just once it was like what six times in four years or something right um but but it does the reason why i bring it up is but we haven't gone back like we haven't really gone back much yeah i've like six times yeah and it's been 80 years 70 years whatever well here's the crazy part so imagine all the conspiracy theories around just the moon from 60 70 years ago to if we land on mars oh my god people are going to be going crazy about every conspiracy theory in the book oh yeah completely oh my god that's just vr yeah like it's not real yeah we're in a we're in a

simulation simulation all right what is the biggest opportunity in the ocean like if you could say if you said if one company solves x so the biggest enabler of opportunity which i would argue is the biggest thing is persistent internet on the water so on the water or under the water both but to to enable under and over to be able to communicate right now there's a problem where submarines can't really talk to airplanes like it's a weird problem um there aren't very many people who run into this problem i will say but also just the submarines that can't talk to the airplanes but but uh i think of it like if there's a network uh on the ocean then suddenly it's going to enable more like enable more fishermen to be out there enable more data to be harnessed uh

But just like, you know, without GPS, Uber wouldn't have been enabled. Like without like there are these little technology hurdles. And right now we have Internet covered on land pretty well. Not everywhere, but pretty well. There's nothing on the ocean. And so in order to get data like photo, video, whatever data from a buoy offshore to land, it's very expensive. So cheapening that will allow for new companies, new stuff. So I would say communications on the.

like there's probably some kind of uh some kind of metric of like just getting water yeah that's fine we got that out of the ocean um there's probably something around like the number of connected devices per square mile on land versus the number of connected devices per square mile in the ocean it's probably like egregiously uh oh yeah swayed in one direction oh yeah and i would also say like success based on what i think that there are a lot of things that could uh be really really big businesses. Like I think the answers to most of humanity's future 50 year problems, like how do we feed 9 billion people? How do we give fresh water to 9 billion people? How do we are answered by the ocean? And like, I think people are blind to it because we're very

crypto people will appreciate it. We're very Terra maximalist. Like because we're here, we like have farmed animals. 2014 was the first year that we farmed more fish than we caught, which i would argue on land is like 99.9 percent of all food is caught i mean it is uh farmed yep um and so we still have like 49 we just had the flippening yeah we had a flippening of the oceans i'm that's here i'm gonna write that down that's my next blog post the flippening of the oceans jesus christ okay uh all right so the other thing about the ocean that's super interesting is like We haven't even gotten to crypto. Yeah, I don't care about crypto.

Okay, good. No, but the thing about the ocean that is kind of fascinating to me is just not only do we not know anything, but then it seems like every time somebody goes and does something crazy in the ocean, we figure stuff out. We're like, whoa, what the hell is that? Yeah. Who's the billionaire guy who – I think he's a billionaire, maybe he's a multimillionaire, who he keeps going to the depths of the ocean, like the deepest points of the different seas. Well, James Cameron is one.

Yeah, so he's the movie guy, right? Yeah, he's the movie guy. dead aquaman uh there's another guy who uh runs a company in seattle who's built a he's he's trying to make it a tourist uh no no there's a guy i think he's uh not from the u.s and he keeps going down in these one-man submarines yeah and he's just like yeah awesome i went to the deepest part of the indian ocean if you're like what and he's like yeah you guys trying to go to space i went to the ocean yeah no floor like i touched the floor of the indian ocean i think there is a segment of people who are sort of like why are we going to space like i think i'm doing both like

i've backed space companies too but like i i also do have a hey why go against gravity we could use gravity as the energy source to get us things down there um and by creating an ownership model in the ocean like showing that you can make money in the ocean i actually think the trash heap naturally will clean itself up so long story short i am the solution to climate change not what i thought you were gonna say uh you want to know one of the things that fascinates me that people don't know what is the underwater cables yes like people have no clue they just think like it's magic like yeah i just used this internet thing and it just like flew around the world real quick

there's a great book called the victorian internet the victorian internet yeah what's that about uh Basically, it's about the first people laying cables to create the telegraph lines between Europe and the US and how they failed four times. And this guy was the, it's not Morse, the Morse guy who created Morse code. It's not him, but there was a predecessor who laid the cables to make this happen and how it was his just like quest to make sure that we connected Europe and the US. I mean, there's these big, big cables, like they're huge. like dude you ever been in the ocean yeah it's a pretty big place yeah like like they're huge and and it's a well they're also like thick they're like huge freaking yeah um and just think about like when one of those cables goes out it's like how much progress is lost oh yeah

devastating yeah and how really if you figure out where it is like that's a huge insurance problem like that's trillions of dollars that are just like down like in every country not only the u.s it's just like it's national security stuff too right like oh yeah you could imagine that if all of a sudden we or somebody else knew where ours were we knew where theirs were and all of a sudden they decided hey i'm just gonna go cut this well also the victorian the victorian internet also talks about how the telegraph led to the first level of hackers where people were uh like creating coded messages and decoding them because of uh and i mean it's just fascinating it's fascinating stuff well i have to read it what uh what's the one thing that you're excited about in

space in space yeah i'm really excited about software why in space why because it's not there explain the uh okay so basically uh well i'm gonna reference one of our companies but there's a company called cubo you can show whatever you want yeah well i'm chilling um but there's a company called cubo s and what they do is uh basically they saw that he was working at a company called spire that was a satellite mini micro mini satellite micro satellites mini satellites small the small satellite uh manufacturer um and it's big company and he He realized that all these hardware engineers were building the software for this device. And he was like, this doesn't make any sense.

So he created an open source community that was for space software, which is wild. There is an open source space software community. And then he realized that it's difficult to test software in space. So every satellite has basically the same sensors. So they have it's like what's the red sensor and the lasers and heat and like they have basically seven sensors. And then what but they all coordinate differently, just like a computer computer is basically all the same pieces. But there's an operating system that ties them all together. They were trying they're trying to be the Android of this space, but they also can be sort of the AWS.

And so they are actually live on two satellites right now where people can test their software. That's pretty cool. In space. Dude, there was about 24 months ago, there was a bunch of these space companies that all started to build stuff. Like they were doing scientific testing on the ISS. They were doing all this stuff. And that was big when it was mining asteroids. Yeah.

Like everyone was talking about that. And then also if you looked into space manufacturing. Oh, super cool. Like people are going to send out stuff, they're going to manufacture in space and then send it back down to Earth. And what you can do is you can build enormous things that are – because it's just flown out there. So like 3D printing in space is going to – like the killer app of 3D printing is really space manufacturing. It is not on land. Well, it's iterative processing, I guess.

Or houses. I'm really excited about 3D printed houses. Same. Yeah, because you could give a house. Like, you know, the Tom Shoes? Yep. You could give a house by buying a house. But the other piece of it that's interesting is not only how fast it can be built, how efficiently, right, in terms of cost, they can be built.

But also, I think that it changes the way – if you know that you're going to move into a 3D house, you immediately are okay with lower expectations in terms of the square footage you need. Oh, yeah. Right? Like, it completely changes the way that people think about their home. And we go from, oh, I need a basketball court in my house, and that would be really sweet, to, hey, you know what? like i'm pretty okay living in this 3d printed house because it's it's cool i can talk about it but whatever it's like a new age type of quote-unquote wealth but without the price tag completely no i think three i mean i think they're gonna be reasonably priced and i think

you really don't need that much space that's what like yeah i mean at boost we do provide housing and the accommodations are not huge they are it's like a dorm room bigger or smaller okay dorm it's like a dorm room and it has bunk beds and so these teams are literally stacked on top of each other uh do you have a lottery for who gets top who gets bottom that's a brilliant idea we should actually do that just do it in vr though maddie maddie i don't know who you are but i just gave you an idea i'm on royalties maddie we should do that um all right so crypto this thing that uh you're supposed to come here and talk about yeah i'm here so first of all uh Well, I already talked about Brian Armstrong, so I already talked a little bit about him.

Yeah, we just sucker people in with the Brian Armstrong story to then let them listen to space and notions. Yeah, you're like, oh, well, he invested in Coinbase. All right, so I have a couple of questions. One, your father, Tim Draper, always tells a story about how he initially got excited about digital currencies with a son asking to buy a sword. Was that you? uh so no he's actually telling a tangential story of a uh he was in i believe it was in korea and there's this game that 25 of the country was playing called like legends okay and they and he was being told by someone that their son got his gift for christmas was a like thousand dollar

sword or like 1500 sword or something expensive but this was this was pre-crypto pre-digital cryptocurrencies pre and it was just if i'm clear it's like early 2000s um yeah early 2000s and it my my dad started realizing that not only software was going to be expensive in the digital world it's also going to be like items like you can develop value of things in a digital world depending on how much time you're spending in those places and so he i think that was his deep seeded like thought yep that kept through when cryptocurrencies started to pop up uh he invest he did uh so we always debate about which of us invested in a crypto company first so this is what i was going to get to because i if i remember correctly he passed on coinbase or he didn't

invest and you did so yes okay uh he he invested in a company called coin lab before me coin lab okay all right which is no longer around and uh that was an l for him yeah and it was and i did coinbase and then i brought it to him and i said you should you should do this deal uh and he they were they he and someone else were uh like no we already have one like we got one they're not going to be it's a winner take all whatever um and i'm making my my dad was actually very enthusiastic i'm making it sound like he was the one saying that my dad's never the one saying that Yeah. He's like a crazy positive person. But he did think like, OK, we have one like, you know, if it's not a winner take all, someone will do well. But he also at the same time, it was a mining company and we both put in a purchase order for future mining, mined Bitcoin of a significant amount of Bitcoin at the time because the price of Bitcoin was like, you know, five to thirty dollars.

like that was basically the range and they never delivered on that that account which led my dad to actually buy the u.s marshall coin got it because it was that many bitcoin that he was supposed to have and so he bought it at a much more expensive price later the the marshall story is crazy but but the fact that you invested in coinbase first and he didn't is uh yeah you get the last laugh Well, you know, Marshall coin, not a bad investment. He called me that morning and he said, he called me. I was on my way to work. I was going to turn on the El Camino. You guys need to know these details. These are important details about where I was, what mindset I was in. They don't have virtual reality. This is the next best thing. I was listening to Taylor Swift in my Jeep and the, uh, we'll shake it off, uh, just to get in the, in the right mindset. And then, uh, followed by Tim McGraw. And then my dad called me and

literally he didn't even say like, Hey, it's dad. He said, uh, he said, should I do it? And I didn't know what that meant. I was like, I have no context. I'm just driving to work. And he said, should i do it i said i don't do what um and he said should i put in my bid uh for the marshall coin the u.s marshall coin um he made the assumption that everyone was going to bid under the market price and so he bid over and i uh and and i was like you know if i could i would because i'm like such a true believer and like we're in a weird spot in the market it feels like a good time um and so he hung up on me i didn't know he was going to buy the whole thing i i thought it was gonna be like i'm putting in a bid for some you know like you could put it in a bid and bought

like a certain amount and like he bought he bought like he bought the whole cart um and the next like five and i didn't find that that out until like the next um two days later when it was released everywhere in media like it was just all over and i was like you put the whole thing you got the whole thing would have been nice to get the heads up uh but and also pray that we're right If you're right, you're a legend. If not, oh, man. Well, and then I gave him the advice. I was like the final say.

Like if I said no, like he probably would have second guessed. He might have still gotten it, but he might have second guessed his thought. Yeah. So that's the Marshall point. So what's your thoughts on crypto today? Crypto is awesome. Why? Today.

I think I don't think I've been this excited about crypto. Are you? Ever. Wait, hold on. Let's get your affinities on the table first. Okay. Bitcoin, believer, non-believer? Believer.

Big believer? Yeah. Like global reserve currency 100 years from now believer or? Like I'm not against, like, okay, first, I believe that if the impossible can happen, so like could Bitcoin be disrupted? Yes. I agree with that. To date, I believe Bitcoin will be a global reserve currency.

Okay. I agree with that too. uh timeline uh and obviously the timeline isn't don't hold them to it please do hold me to it now what do you think it is 20 years 50 years so what i what i do say there are two predictions so one is i say in the next 15 years 10 years actually i say 10 years uh there will be more digital currency than fiat okay okay um value of digital currency isn't there any more x no i'm and i'm what kidding i'm kidding okay then you're gonna be delirious state uh okay but the uh so i believe i believe that to be true in the next 10 years global reserve currency i think

things happen fast when they happen but i still think it's 25 years like i think reasonably trust is being built right now it's going to work for certain like cultures certain nations certain places um i still like i think bitcoin works the way the internet works where it's like i don't talk about the internet like i just talk about using products on the internet and so like i think bitcoin works when i can just buy things using maybe it's us dollars maybe the denomination is something else i always joke and say like like the u.s dollar is digital currency yeah right it's what eight seven percent is in physical coins or notes like the rest of it's digital and everybody they type in more numbers on a like a all right what about i would love to know how

that actually works um ethereum i believe that they're going to be different protocols for different things like i think um you know you might i do think lightning's going to work i think we will be able to use i think scale is not going to be a problem we gotta go slow because i'm not smart uh so bitcoin believer lightning why do you think it's gonna work so why i think lightning's gonna work he's talking about lightning so the same reason that i thought bitcoin was gonna work like there are really really smart people building really really great things it's probably the best execution we're seeing in crypto behind maybe binance i yeah i mean i think it's just good like i think lightning's just like at the how do people make

money if lightning works like what are the ways that you think about if lightning works as a layer to scaling technology the places to invest will be blank what's blank well then it becomes sort of like how to be a gateway for either real world things or natively digital things so i would probably if if i if that just all of a sudden happens um i would probably invest in vr meets crypto like assets in that world uh i believe non-fungible tokens are undervalued like crazy why um the reason is i believe that most opportunity lies in regulatory uncertainty so crypto was a good example oceans that's a good example um there are no laws on the ocean and i think that non-fungible tokens are going to uh walk this line where they aren't an asset

it would be the equivalent of regulating like beanie babies which is a ridiculous concept And I think that NFTs are going to be able to get through all the regulatory fear and allow the end consumer to use crypto without using crypto. And so, like, I think that suddenly we're all going to be using these assets, these digital assets that represent like a kitty or whatever, when really it's shown it's it's paving the education gap to denominating this entire building in a cryptocurrency, like being able to auction off pieces of this building. And it's it's really about education at that point. Do you think that the NFTs, like what's the timeline for it to get through the regulatory uncertainty? Are we talking like 12 months or 10 years? I think it's more about like we just need a good use case for the – like we need a good game. We haven't seen good yet.

I haven't seen good yet. Like I think – See, NFTs to me are the perfect example of great idea, wrong time. I'm not farting. I just moved. The chairs are really noisy. It's squeaky. It's a squeaky chair.

It's a good audio room though. This is a good audio room. Yeah, it's fine. we have experts in the room not me um but yeah no i think nfts are just undervalued because no i i think you could build a good game like you you need to people need to stop thinking that they're starting at the end like i just want someone who really truly wants to build out a great uh uh what's the um magic the gathering game on the blockchain and then fiddle with the blockchain as a tool that creates new gamified experiences um like i think a lot of people think

like they launch and then everyone uses it and like i i mean that's obviously not true like i think the most used product is crypto kitties in the crypto space bitcoin but crypto kitties in the actual non-financial space what do you think governments are going to do how do they play forget regular not regulators like security not a security but like what do central banks do etc okay so i'm going to give you two worlds all right the first world is my fair to the banking system world um i believe all i really truly want are better services like at the end of the day that's all i want i want all the user cares about is can you help me do what i want to do yeah i just like when my when i want my money i want my money uh when i want to pay for something

i want to pay for something i don't care if it's the bank or bitcoin it's just the bank has developed such poor service that they forgot who their customer was um and then on the other side bitcoin is developing more trust even though it started as like a drug dealing tool it's developing more and more trust where people just rely on it 24 7 uptime for 10 years is something that no one has been able to so my whole theory here is that people trust machines and algorithms more than they trust humans and inherently banks are run by humans the financial system is run by humans But Bitcoin is run by an algorithm that just can't fail. And back to this.

Can't is just like there could be security concerns with 51% tax, all that. But like the way that it is programmed is it never goes down. And back to the persistence, like things don't really get flipped on until persistence happens. Like Bitcoin is a persistent currency. Like there are no bank hours. Like it's not I'm relying on my bank to be open. That's not a persistent money. Like that's a choppy money.

I can only access my money for these hours. That's a ridiculous concept. Well, the stock market's closed more hours a week than it is open, all that kind of stuff, right? But the best example of Bitcoin is, so Venezuela, the power grid went down. The grid went down. And everyone on the internet's been all up in arms about this idea that, like, people are saying, oh, Venezuela's power grid going down shows the power of Bitcoin. They're like, how the hell can you use Bitcoin without the power, right? But what a number of Venezuelans have posted different stories on Reddit, et cetera, is, look, the power grid was down.

The banking system was down. I have a generator. I turned my generator on. I could not use the legacy system. I could not go on my website for the bank. I could not go to the ATM. I couldn't do anything, even though I have power, but the power grid is down. And because they could do that.

But with Bitcoin, all I have to do is I just have to hit the network. and as long as i have power doesn't matter if anybody else in my country has power i can still access my money because i can hit the bitcoin network i think persistence is more value like i think people don't uh because it by it being there you can develop trust in it and i think that's why you know uber is this persistent it it delivers certainty like i know when the car is coming around the corner i know that's something like this next generation doesn't know that we had to blindly wait for cars or taxis like we had to like we had to hope that someone was going to show up and then eventually you get a call that's like oh we're like 30

minutes out and you're like well i'll go back inside like i i think that's like crazy there's so much transparency so much certainty yeah i think persistence i think that's the power of bitcoin persistent money accessibility if there's energy that's fair um what do you think are the one or two companies that somebody should build in crypto that you haven't seen yet okay the things i'm excited about right now that's sort of like asking me what i'm excited about yeah you just took the question ask your own question go ahead yeah it's your podcast i mean what should they build okay build the craziest possible thing like like what's the craziest possible thing you could imagine somebody building right now first you have to start with the word global

uh i'm gonna send you a pitch deck with just the word global ready ready this is it go ahead an ocean city an ocean city built with the economies denominated in bitcoin okay that would be the craziest thing i could think of right now ocean city uh i've actually seen people pitch this before which is basically something that floats in the ocean and acts almost like an island but it's a standalone city and all of the commerce that's done is done with a single global currency called Bitcoin. Which connects them to the rest of the world. Okay. So that would be one of the craziest things. But if we're talking about like applications, I think that somebody's going to tweet at us and be like, I'm building a city in the ocean.

Will you come visit? I hope so. Yeah. Crypto portfolios are already underwater. That was good. Somebody on the live stream just said crypto portfolios are already underwater. We're already building the digital land of the ocean. I would say, so what I'm really excited about right now are user interfaces. So like I think that there's, I was drawing this to a other thing. Oh man, you look like, you look at my notebook. You just draw a bunch of stuff.

And it looks like you can't read any of the words and then you just look at people like, did you get it? But I think that it's like the power of decentralized services is the difference. First, the difference is basically like centralized services. Let's take iTunes app store, the app store, the Apple app store, for instance. We interact with the user interface. That interface is governed by a process at Apple. And then that is built on top of the Internet. That is a open rails.

um the difference between that is completely controlled by apple that entire process now in the decentralized world the governance system and the user interface are separated so suddenly auger could build their own interface but i think what we're learning is that they should just work on like different daps that's the dap layer the governance layer the peer-to-peer network should be building their peer-to-peer network which is smart contracts and uh so you're basically making the argument that there shouldn't be vertical integration but augur should work on the protocol and then things like veil should come along and build the interface or guesser but yes okay um did you invest i did okay uh and is it better they're different they're different

like you're you're an animal you're a politician i'm like i but i genuinely do think they're different okay well but that's like i'm not an investor in veil but i'm also saying like they're just different they're going they're going to end up going after different markets but it's two separate interfaces using the same protocol the same protocol that's built on top of the no using the same dap that's built on the same protocol so like the stack today is ethereum on the protocol the dap layer is auger and then the interface is veil or uh or guesser this is gonna you're gonna see this stack replicated over a bunch of different uh do you think so let's call that fragmentation right of the stack do you think that the fragmentation has to happen first before then

we can get vertical integration um or is it likely to happen forget if it has to but is it likely i mean i think we're what we're going to learn is like smart contracts might have their own protocol and the way that people use those smart con i'm sorry not their own protocol like ethereum might have a bunch of different smart contracts layers um auger is specifically for prediction markets so gambling and is a great use case global gambling is like why crypto i want to be able to bet a million dollars against someone who's in africa like you couldn't do that today like you could not figure out how to i love how uh like the elite call professional gambling investing So it's still gambling, right?

Like if you really think about it, like if you buy that building, you are taking a probability bet that you're going to make money off of it. More time and value will be going into that after you buy. That's still gambling, right? It's still gambling. It's just less risky, we claim. Yeah, it is. Unless you're buying a 2007. You can have a hand in the outcome.

But in gambling, you probably have a hand in the outcome. So most of the time, unless it's literally just craps or, you know, well, you can still you can learn the game. You can learn the odds. So I think gambling is going to be good first use case because it was a good first use case with Bitcoin. Like it was a fantastic use case. Like there were there are still Bitcoin related casinos built on the Internet that are not supposed to be accessed by the U.S., but people VPN in and then they gamble. Yeah. Somebody on the live stream is from VPNing from Iceland.

I can neither confirm nor deny whether or not I have done it, okay? But in general, I think that also, by the way, my interface concept completely relates to Coinbase. Coinbase is an interface that interacted originally just with Bitcoin, which is built on the blockchain. Like, I think there is a separation, but they are interwoven so tightly. and does the most value accrue to the protocol to the dap or to the interface so i think personally so i do think the protocol generates value like it's going to generate a lot of money it's going to be a big deal um you will make money if you hold that protocol however i believe that the closest to the consumer makes the most money okay so the farther you get away from the farther

you get away the less money you make the farther you get away from the consumer the less money you make yes or another way to think about it is if there are multiple layers stacked on top of the protocol the farther you get away from the protocol the more money you'll make yes so the farther away from the protocol so my it's actually a little contrarian in the market is like i i think that the the ui ends up being the winner but it might get super fragmented so you might be able there are going to be a thousand uis that are auger on top of ethereum like there could be a thousand so so uh that are used for different things like will verticalize in different ways i definitely agree with you and i think that owning equity in those companies is going to

be way more valuable than owning tokens over a long period of time uh especially because there is a there's a higher probability than not that the most important protocols are already built now which ones are they is a whole other situation so i i'm certain i always think disruption can happen but i am certain that the ones that builders are building on it's the stuff that's there like people just want to build and so like ethereum is being used and built on you know bitcoin is being used and built on like people are trying the things that are tried and true because the market's there like they don't want to build an app on something that doesn't have any velocity yep like if there's no velocity like why i agree with that what's the one thing

that you would change in crypto if you could i would say other than own more bitcoin yeah i would stack that up um the one thing i would change is uh not the speculation i actually think the speculation did a service to the market um agreed i would change i i want people to see the actual value though like i think it would just be like better education that's what i would say is like i think people went in because they saw money and they know they're supposed to make money like that's a thing in humans like we're supposed to make money so let's there's money there let's go to it i would much rather people be building towards like their own personal mission and if crypto overlaps with it uh they build with that so i it's an education thing rather than i think

there's so little good education and it does take time and buying crypto helps where you have skin in the game like to educate yourself on it um but i would love just better financial education as well as in crypto um it helps you understand how incentives work and then it helps you understand And, like, at the end of the day, it makes better services. And so, like, it almost says nothing. If I could change one thing, I want the words blockchain, crypto, and Bitcoin to go away. And I want people to be using them. Yeah, I completely agree.

Look, we talk about a lot. We're moving to a digital world, and you need digitally native assets, you need digitally native accounting, you need digitally native contracts. And the winners are the gateways right now. And by the way, we didn't just use blockchain or crypto in any of that. Yeah. And in a digital world, you need to be immersed yourself in it, which is virtual reality. That's fair. In the ocean. Yeah. And then you need an ocean that has a Bitcoin native population. All right. Rapid fire to end this thing.

Fantastic. Because I have to go pretend to be an adult and do other things. I probably do too. What time is it? Well, you probably have like a meeting or something. I don't know. We've been talking for like six hours. What's the most important company in crypto? We've been talking for so long. Okay. Say it again.

What's the most important company in crypto? Most important company. No wonder we covered so much legroom. The most important company in crypto is Coinbase. That's usually the second most important company, I say, after Facebook. But why do you say Coinbase? Just because of the interface and you've brought so many people on? yeah i i just think they legitimize the space like i think people don't give brian specifically enough credit for what he had to do and uh how much value he's delivered to the market by educating institutions by educating investors and building a product that was the easiest way to get in um i would also say i would also say on the other side on the jurisdictional arbitrage side i would say binance is really important so i would actually third is facebook third my whole

thing is just they've got the users whatever they give to people people are gonna have good bad indifference i think it's gonna be i think we're gonna plus people i think we're gonna be pleasantly surprised yeah completely completely agree uh by the facebook token do you think it's gonna be decentralized i mean ish like i think that they will have steps towards decentralization that's That's what my guess would be. I would guess that it's built in a way. So I would say that it's going to be more decentralized than people are anticipating. Yeah, I believe that this is their true – this is David Marcus' mission.

He wants this to exist, and he's true about it. I do think that Facebook wouldn't build something if they're not going to control a piece of it. See, that's where I actually disagree. I think that they can control a lot of the infrastructure and interfaces and stuff. So they're thinking – With the actual currency itself. It could be the glue that sort of interacts with everything. They would single-handedly be the biggest nation on the planet that has their own native currency.

Look, I work for the company. I'm biased. I'll throw it all out there, right? But the one thing that I know about that group of people, they're not playing for second place. Yeah. Right? Like they're going to go try to change the world and do some like just epic stuff. Well, you're saying we're building a digital world like we could argue that Facebook already did build it and that there is no native currency there yet.

And now there is one. Absolutely. I mean, I also, you know, I also think Twitter's going to play a big role. Like, I mean, it does. Jack's killing it. As far as communicating with Twitter people, like crypto people. And he's made, he's openly made just incredible moves towards making more leaders of the world excited about Bitcoin. Like when I.

Jack made Bitcoin cool. Yeah. Yeah. When I go to these meetings with, well, you do this too, but in endowments, foundations, institutions, like it's no longer like, should we or like, I'm not investing in crypto. It was default no for a really long time. Now it's, I'm going to, how am I going to? And their questions are much more around like, how should we allocate? Not so, it's smart. It's good questions.

It's not about how it works anymore. Yep. And they have a infection in every group. like there's one the virus the virus has spread the virus spread the virus infected like somebody and they're just obsessive about it in every single group the the um we should go and pitch institutions together and like just go dress like this and i'm like he's so smart he's so smart so i've learned uh this can be one of my last lines if you want it to be but i've learned that there are two types of people in this world okay the people who accept the person who wears orange

pants and the people who do not and that's their problem and that's on them and so it's like you know i'm just being as me as possible in the meetings yeah and i'm not i'm just people do ever people like is there like a visceral reaction to the orange pants no it's just always like is this person taking it seriously enough and so like there's a little bit of an uphill battle explaining myself sometimes but like in general it's more uh you know you well the first question they always ask is how many pairs do you have yeah and how many well two two how many days have you been wearing this pair four in a row four in a row that's not that bad because my trip to new york yeah like sometimes i wear the same socks like seven days in a row whatever

yeah well socks man i'm kidding i thought you were just gonna roll with that i was gonna be really worried i thought you were like actually i wore mine one time eight days like i actually i don't know why i'm that way about socks but like i really don't want to wear you can't wear socks two days in a row now that that across they get a little uh pants are fine whatever even t-shirts would be a little i'll admit i go into my when my dirty laundry is uh like overwhelming i'll go into the dirty socks and like pick them out if i'm out of socks just you have cleaner dirty socks on right now uh these are clean yeah i only pack clean socks so we're good on we're good on socks all right what's the most important book you've ever read um so depends on stage of

my life i would say uh overall i reread harry potter and i think it just captures the imagination in a way one of my biggest fears is that uh people's imaginations are dying and i one of the vehicles i use to try to change that is through investing uh in companies that are going crazy and doing things and then on the um uh so harry potter and then on the other side I think essentialism came at a perfect time for me personally where I was becoming very overwhelmed with a lot of different things, family and work, and it helped me just focus on the right things at the right time. So I would say those are the two that are on the top of my head that like – as far as impact on my life, those two. Are aliens real? I have so many thoughts.

You're asking me like the deep questions now. Yeah, come on. We got five minutes. first off it's real and you could ask me a question then we're done first off if we go to a planet we are aliens okay that's fair so aliens are real yeah only if we go to a planet yeah but do you count the moon as a planet no it's a what are they called i wish i had the word on the top of my head uh the the uh so my my answer is i'd like to believe did you see this story that like there was a they feel that there was a spaceship oh yeah yeah by the way it's a harvard professor

a harvard professor there was a real spaceship i need to get i need a alien expert to come on and debunk my beliefs or prove them correct because i'm at the point now where you're full alien i mean look again you can go to the math argument and just be like come on but i mean you talk to crypto people how can you not believe in aliens one of the craziest thing that i've read about space because now everyone sends me the space stuff right like oh this guy's weird like here they read this thing they always dm it to me from an anonymous account by the way this is the best brand you can have the best brand you can have is like you oh you like crazy stuff yeah oh yeah i'm all in on crazy um just ask my girlfriend uh but the uh the part that uh is

is uh just just blew my mind was there's two galaxies right now that are colliding and they can see this or something and i actually don't remember what happens when two galaxies collide and they go and by the way our galaxy is going to collide with those two other galaxies well those two other galaxies in four billion years and i'm like wait a minute hold on like the idea of two planets colliding would be pretty scary like if we're just like yo mars what's up bam just like bumper cars yeah what happens when galaxies collide uh good title to an album when galaxies collide shotgun for that band name um i well i think uh things would be different yeah would be my answer so like that's the stuff for when space is just like come on if there's

other galaxies colliding out there and all this stuff there's got to be aliens like we like we so no i believe that there are aliens okay all right i actually go back and forth on parallel universes too but like i i uh i don't know where are you i don't need to confess like how incredibly weird i am on this podcast i don't think i'm just gonna change the name of the podcast to weirdos i appreciate enthusiasts yeah okay okay yeah the rest of the world weirdos. What, uh, what one question do you have for me? Um, okay. What is the biggest adventure you have ever been on? The biggest adventure? Um, uh, in 2015 on 12 hours notice, I booked a flight to, uh, Medellin, Columbia by myself. I went, uh, landed, didn't know where I

was staying got an airbnb who said to the host like hey man what's there to do around here i read that this is one of the like top 25 up and coming destinations uh and it's like there was an arbitrage between everyone thought it was super unsafe because of all like the stuff all stuff but it actually was like one of the safest places now because they've really cleaned it up and he was like oh there's a bunch of things to do blah blah whatever and one of those things was uh to go see um what is his name uh not el chapo um the uh uh the narcos guy narcos guy yeah yeah um what is what is the dude's name i'm blanking on his name it's called hacienda napoles is uh is the uh name of the place and pablo pablo escobar yeah yeah thank you and the internet i i was i knew that

we were gonna get it pablo escobar so you can go to pablo escobar's compound it's like an hour and a half two hours out you take this bus and you kind of walk up there and uh it was wild because like you're literally in the backwoods of columbia walking around pablo escobar's uh thing and there is a federal prison that they have built and literally the people are in cage like fenced cages and you can see them and i just remember being like standing there in a moment just being like whoa where what did i do like how did i get here those are the best wandering the wandering Yeah, and I just remember, like, it was just every day for, like, a week, I just woke up, like, what do I want to do today? Bam, just went and did it.

And it was a lot of fun. And so since then, that led to, I've done a bunch of these now. Like, I went to Israel. So it sparked you to do this more. My brother and I went to India for two weeks and just do things like, hey, man, like, let's stop taking Ubers. Like, you want to just ride on motorcycles? He's like, I never driven one before. and so we rented motorcycles in this busy indian uh village or city and he's driving around traffic

is just unbelievable first time you ever drove a motorcycle so stuff like that is just like look it's just like you're in charge of your own life like you're gonna get the shit done or you're not and like you're gonna have some fun along the way so uh whatever are you ready i'm gonna leave you with a quote okay pat mcnamara went on joe rogan's podcast recently yeah and i heard this quote it's just seared in my brain okay he hit him with every night is saturday night every morning is monday morning i was like man what a legendary life motto to live by well is it anthony bourdain my my body is a carnival or something like that like that like just live life to the fullest yeah just do whatever you want all right man this is a this is a absolute pleasure i had a fun had a fun time

I can't even talk anymore. We've talked so much. We talked a lot. I did not realize. We went over an hour and 37 minutes. Were we supposed to go less? No, we're supposed to just go until you get tired of talking. Ethereal Summit returns to New York City this May 10th and 11th to kick off Blockchain Week

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