The Pomp Podcast - Jason Williams, Co-Founder & Partner at Morgan Creek Digital: From a 9 Figure Startup Exit To Mining Bitcoin With Car Tires

Episode Date: August 28, 2019

Jason Willams is the Co-Founder & Partner at Morgan Creek Digital. For the 151st episode of Off the Chain, Jason and Anthony Pompliano discuss building a 500 million dollar healthcare company, thermal demanufacturing, Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks, universal healthcare, plants as quantum computers, and what it was like experiencing a plane crash. CRYPTO.COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine.  Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world.

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. The following is a conversation with Jason Williams, co-founder and partner at Morgan Creek Digital. In this conversation, we discuss building a half a billion dollar healthcare company, thermal demanufacturing, Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks, universal healthcare, plants as quantum computers, and what it was like being in a plane crash. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do as well. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right, crypto.com they're a crypto platform with one goal mother and mass adoption that's why we're

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of his opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only all right guys bang bang 151st episode we're doing an anniversary week of one year for the podcast um we've had uh one of my partners, Mark Yusko, come on. And now we've got the other Jason Williams. This conversation is a long one, but I think that we've got some pretty interesting topics covered. So I appreciate you guys listening to this and thank you so much for coming and doing this, Jason. Yeah, it's my pleasure. It's good to be here. Jason and I dressed up when Mark was here. I had on a button down and looked the part. And now when Jason's here, I've got a t-shirt on and so does Jason. So perfect.

Yeah, but you called me beforehand and told me to wear a t-shirt. Yeah, because I'm also in charge of the wardrobe on the podcast. All right. So Jason and I have known each other for a really long time at this point. Let's go through your background first so people who don't know you can get a sense of it. Yeah, so I'm from New York originally, Queens, and moved to Florida. So you were born in Florida, right? In Miami, in Hollywood.

Miami, Hollywood, Florida. So I was on the East Coast in Stewart, went to high school there, then ended up coming back to North Carolina to go to school, trained as a physician assistant. They started that program while I was at Methodist. I played soccer and football there. Then got accepted to Yale to do a surgical residency as a physician assistant. While I was at Yale, came up with the idea for FastMed. All right, before we get into FastMed, explain the difference between a physician assistant and a doctor. Yeah, yeah. So think of a physician assistant as someone who goes to school, gets his bachelor's degree, pre-med, then does another two years. So it was born out of naval corpsmen who were in Vietnam, actually.

These guys came back from the war and couldn't transition into civilian work. So at Duke University, they created this program to bring these naval corpsmen into civilian practice as physician assistants. And so these guys have tremendous capacity to diagnose and treat, do all kinds of procedures, really manual dexterity, a lot of manual dexterity. and they created Physician Assistant School. So that's my training. I wasn't in the military as you were, but I actually trained at Womack Army Medical Center because Methodist didn't have a hospital at that time.

So all of my training was at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Very, very cool. So you're there and you come up with this wild ass idea while you're at Yale doing the surgical residency. Maybe explain a little bit about what the initial idea was that eventually became FastMed. Yeah. So while I was doing that surgical residency, the surgical team at Yale is responsible to take

care of trauma. So anytime there's any type of surgical trauma that comes into the emergency room, the surgical team is called to the emergency room to assess the patient. What I was realizing through that experience was a number of things. The physicians and nurses at what I thought was one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country, possibly the world, were pissed off, angry. Uh, and I didn't understand that my whole life I had, um, you know, focused and, uh, prepared for this really important transition into practice of medicine. And, um, you know, it almost felt like, uh, like volunteer or, you know, like you're contributing something really big to society. And I was really confused by the way, um, patients were interfacing with the physicians and nursing

staff and the way the nurses and physicians were interfacing with the patients, it just seemed like everyone was just really angry and confused. And it left a big impression on me. I thought it could be done better. I thought that customer service was totally non-existent in healthcare. The whole institution was built to be lined up for the physicians. So it was on their schedule, on their time, on their availability, and the patients were just subjected to cruelty. All right? So came up with the idea to develop a retail-oriented medical practice that would do 80% of what

you'd find in an emergency room. So it would take care of all the non-life-threatening but urgent scenarios that you would potentially have. And what type of situations are those? Right. So it could be broken bones, lacerations, colds, coughs, pneumonia, asthma attacks, allergic reactions. So it's a lot of complicated stuff that these naval corpsmen were trained to do, like right in the sweet spot of a physician assistant. So I knew I could do that stuff using allied healthcare professionals, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants and do it at one-tenth the cost if I brought it into a retail center, 3,000 to 5,000 square foot footprint with 80% of the capabilities of a big box emergency department. So basically, the initial idea is you can provide better customer service, more efficient and kind of convenient location. And then from a cost structure standpoint, because you don't have the physician who has the big salary and kind of all the costs associated with it, and you're using physician assistant and the nurse practitioner, you bring down that cost structure pretty dramatically. And I'm guessing that you pass some of that on to the patient as well. Yeah, I mean, it was one tenth the cost. So everybody's saving, you know, if you don't have insurance, you're getting access to care. And if you have insurance, those benefits are passed on to the insurer, right? They're getting the big savings because they're not getting a 10x cost. So it was very good.

uh this is uh um you know i socialized it to my professors while i was at yale they're like you know good ideas are hard to come by you should probably do that so literally called my mother told her i was dropping out moved back to north carolina bought a post office so i want to talk about the post office um you know you're a young guy who's got this idea uh you kind of had already jumped, right. And, and, and quit school. Um, you know, you want to go do this, but, uh, getting a business started, uh, in this field and healthcare, uh, it's not like building a software company, right? So, um, in the software world, if you've got an internet connection, you got a computer and you got some skills, you can literally spin up a server. You can build a website and you can

kind of go to town right from your couch. Uh, you can't do that when you want to build a retail healthcare clinic, you have to go get a physical location, there's licensing, there's kind of regulation, there's staff and marketing, etc. Maybe just describe, you know, one, how'd you pick where you were going to get the first location? And then I know the story, but let's go through the how you acquired the post office. Yeah, so I think what you're describing are like asset light businesses, you know, this is an asset heavy business, highly regulated business. And even though we use technology. So there's lots of tech in healthcare. This is pre-electronic medical record. So when I started, we were using paper medical records, paper systems,

paper claims. I go out to First Citizens Bank, I'm 23 years old, and convince them to lend me just enough money to go to an auction to buy a post office in this town called Hope Mills, North Carolina. I picked the post office because it was like the city center, right? It was away from the hospital, the institutional kind of aggregated area where you'd have found typically medical offices. This was near your Starbucks, your coffee shop, where you went to the grocery store, post office, et cetera. That was the general thesis at first. So I won the post office at auction, bootstrapped it with some friends, hired a medical director, because at that time, physician assistants still needed oversight, right? It's a dependent practice. It's not an

independent practice. So you have to work as part of a healthcare team. Again, that's what made it so attractive to me. You know, you're building a healthcare team that coordinated care and communication. We could leverage and be far better than your primary care doctor in the same location who's not being challenged by some smart kids who are practicing alongside of them. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Yeah. So first practice, I start early 2001.

Then we deal with 9-11. We go through that. I learned a lot during that time. The business and the practice is super successful. You see, if you look back over the decade that I ran that, that health care is economically insulated from a lot of the things that you historically have to deal with with other businesses when you deal with economic collapse. I mean, if you think about from 2000 to 2015, while I was part of FASMED, we went through a lot as a country and our trajectory as a business was up and to the right. Well, it also, you know, the acquisition of that first property. Right. I think one of the things we've talked about a lot is this idea of like the banks are likely to lend money to people who don't need it. And when people need money, they're unlikely to lend them money. And so being a young kid with out of track record, right, and kind of just an idea, the options of financing a business, I think when you have that asset heavy type business, there's not a lot of venture capital, right, that's available.

And even back in 2000, 2001, that wasn't a very popular way to finance businesses outside of maybe the Silicon Valley area. And so you have to look at these other financing mechanisms, right? You have to go to banks. You have to go to private investors that are kind of less sophisticated in venture capital and more in a private equity model. And so it's kudos to you that you even got it done, right, let alone was able to kind of scale that over time. Yeah, Pomp, my accountant would tell you that I wasn't in the urgent care business. I was a real estate developer because that's really the way that we got the banks to lend the money. They weren't banking my early stage venture into owning urgent care.

They were lending me money to buy a post office. Right. So we were leveraging that property at first using, you know, financing to buy an asset, build it into a revenue generating model. And I quickly learned that you can use this levered real estate thesis over and over again. I never made one mortgage payment personally. The businesses float these these mortgages. And, you know, at the end of this story at one hundred and twenty three locations across the country. So what I want to talk about is how do we go from the first post office to 123, right? What was the kind of in-between story of, I think a lot of people when they get, when

they build a successful business, people want to know what's the origin story and they want to know what was the outcome. But that middle part, I think for most businesses is where a lot of the meat happens, right? And execution. And then obviously with your story, there's multiple transactions and kind of a bunch of stuff that happened in there. But maybe just walk us from, okay, you start the first one. it's successful, you see that the model works, kind of where do you go from there?

Yeah. So, uh, we opened the first urgent care in Hope Mills, North Carolina. I'm working nights in the emergency room still, you know, cause you're paying yourself last. Um, you know, and I'd like to talk at some point about, you know, how I, uh, how I feel about entrepreneurship, self-employment, being a business owner, how you deal with investments. I think that's interesting. It's something that, you know, I was able to confirm through just reading as I've gotten older. Like, you pick up books, Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Cash Flow Quadrants. One of my favorite books. No, but I'll tell you, you know, that's the greatest thing that can happen to you is you can try something.

You can test a thesis. It seems to be working for you. And then smart people confirm that, you know. So that confirmation just hardens your conviction, and then you just keep going. And that's really what happened with FastMed, right? We opened up the first urgent care. I'm recruiting my friends, my other PA buddies from around the country, hiring physicians, working nights in the emergency department, open up my second office, open up my third

office, and actually take quite a bit of time. I'm only opening up one office a year at first. Oh, really? Yeah, it was like from 2001 to 2009, I probably had 10 locations, 10 locations, 74 employees. Most of them are ancillary staff, physicians, physician assistants, but we have a nice business all located in North Carolina. And in 2010, October, 2010, we complete our first transaction for outside capital with a, um, a small, uh, venture, uh, group called Convess Capital out of Palm Beach, Florida.

And so when you do that, what was the thought process in terms of taking outside capital to kind of, uh, scale faster? Yeah, it was, that's, that's it. It was, there was a lot of interesting things happening in the U.S. healthcare system at that time. You had the election of President Obama. I was looking at universal healthcare, uh, as being, um, something that was, uh, highly likely to be passed. And what would that mean to U.S. healthcare? Would access go down? Would access go up? Who would be the gatekeepers of healthcare? Would it be the insurance companies or the primary care physicians? And then how did FastMed play into the overall landscape? Because it was unbelievable to me at 23 and the group that I had working with me that we could go into

any town in north carolina to start and open up infrastructure healthcare infrastructure you would think you couldn't do that it would be like the privatizing of of fire departments you know you just don't see that happening i but we were able to pull that off quite dramatically and we tested that uh in north carolina uh and um and then into multiple states got it and so you take uh do the transaction with ComVest and then eventually you end up doing something with a blue cross blue shield. Maybe talk a little bit about the second transaction and kind of what happened there. And it was somewhat groundbreaking in the healthcare industry.

Yeah. So we, we completed the transaction with ComVest in 2010, October used that capital to like blitz scale. So really fast growth nine, 10 offices, October, 2010, 74 employees. 2015, 1,400 employees, 123 locations across the country. So I was hiring over 300 people a year and just managing crazy growth. In 2012, this was an important moment for us. It was the first time in U.S. healthcare that a major payer had invested in the provider

side of healthcare. And if you step back for a second and you let that kind of wash over you, think of the competitive nature and the ethical questions you'd have that your payer, the insurance company, owns the provider of the healthcare. Where are the incentives? Is there alignment? Are they cost-conscious and making decisions based off of their fiduciary responsibility to drive profit, or are they truly spending money to provide you with the highest and best healthcare, sparing and not contemplating profit. What was the answer?

It was doing the right thing. And I can tell you while I was there at FastMed, the insurance company did a great job of blinding us to who were those who had Blue Cross, Blue Shield, but allowed us to develop patient steerage campaigns to help guide decision-making because that's part of what was wrong with healthcare and what I recognized in 2001 when I dropped out of Yale.

The reason everyone was so pissed off is because people were in the wrong place, right? You're at Yale at 8 p.m. with a toothache in the emergency room. Of course, the emergency room physician's gonna be like, why are you here? But the patient's like, my doctor's not open. Where am I supposed to go?

And this thing hurts. I need antibiotics and pain medicines. It makes sense? So all I wanted to do is create an option for them between the hospital emergency room and their primary care physician who was closed. He was not optimized for urgent needs, right? It was all scheduled appointments. Well, and the kind of family physician or, you know, whatever that role is,

is really more of a lifestyle type thing because they're dependent on the doctor, right? If the doctor's not there, the physician's not there, there's not a lot of work getting done, right? And so, you know, we've talked at length between you and I about. There's no work getting done, really. There's refills and reschedule, but there's no decision maker there. There's no decision making there. So there are choke point on the business. Right.

And so it's super unscalable because if you don't see the physician, you don't go there. Right. The only reason to go is to actually see the physician and have them look at you and have them make the decision. And they obviously can only see so many patients per day. And then at some point they want to go home to their families, et cetera. And so that kind of leaves open the opportunity for something like FastMed. And it's a little worse than that, too, for the primary care physician because they have admission responsibilities.

So they're also rounding in the hospital. And then to create new revenue opportunities, some of them will take on nursing home responsibilities. So all of that provides less access for the patient. So those were the things that we knew we could disrupt in 2001. Now you have the advent of hospitalists, so the primary care physician doesn't necessarily have to round on you when you go into the hospital. I don't know if that's necessarily the greatest thing, though, right? You want your primary care physician to see you and take care of you and be the coordinator of care. But now you have these patient care teams that you hope are communicating in the most efficient, transparent of ways.

so as you're building the business obviously uh you get to 1400 employees there's a lot of employees um and then you've got 123 locations you've got this huge business multi-states and again that this uh multi-state is important because it's a highly regulated business right so not only are you dealing with kind of federal health care uh rules and regulations but also at the state level uh then you've got the insurance and all these different things going on Um, and at the same time, you mentioned earlier, not only are you building the business, you're actually executing a real estate, um, acquisition, uh, effort as well, right? Because the, the model here is not to, um, Hey, I'm going to go set up my, uh, practice in a, we work right where I just walk in, you know, sign a piece of paper and I've got a, a one month lease. you actually have to go and acquire physical infrastructure so you got to get land in a

building and then you've got to build that out to ensure that it can facilitate the work that you want to do inside of that building for health care so not only just you know hey are there checkout rooms are there beds or all that kind of stuff but also it has to meet certain specific requirements from the regulators and you run the business right so you kind of have these dual businesses or business lines that are being built one is a real estate acquisition one is actually building the business maybe talk a little bit about balancing those two responsibilities and kind of how you thought about where to put your time versus maybe hiring others to handle some of it yeah i think the the real estate acquisition component is super critical

so i spent a lot of time on that um and we built a pretty sophisticated cloud uh mapping uh technology we used i don't even know if you guys still use google earth at all yeah it's around right but it was actually a pretty cool tool when it first came out because you could load satellite Right. But you could load all of these different demographic things and indicators in and create a model that could give you an idea of a zip code's potential to place one of our centers. So we had about 40 unique demographic indicators that we used, and they were peculiar. They had to do with access, line of sight, traffic patterns, traffic count, population, sophistication of the population, the socioeconomic situations in the population, and on and on and on. I can go on there. We felt really smart.

All it showed me was blockbuster video stores. and at the same time i was scaling the business blockbuster was going out of business so all we did was go out and pre-lease blockbuster video stores so uh jason started out buying a post office and then he basically i think he became one of if not the largest acquirer of blockbuster video uh infrastructure yeah we we literally started a program inside fastmed that was called warehousing so before the blockbuster video store would go out of business, I would go to the owner of these blocks of blockbusters and say, I'm going to pre-lease your store. I'm going to pay you right now $9 a square foot, something

like that. And I want the first option on the store once it closes down. So we had all kinds of real estate tied up, a huge growth plan set up, and a huge market. I mean, I was doing 1.5 million patients a year so just to give you a sense of what that means a large uh a large emergency department will do 45 000 80 000 patient visits a year one hospital emergency room we were doing 1.5 million patient visits a year that's a lot so the in terms of allocation of my time huge uh portion of it was citing new uh sites for growth the other one was culture you know And that's something that you and I don't really spend a lot of time on. I don't think we've ever really talked about the importance of culture.

But for me, holding together the growth and maintaining the integrity of the practice, right? We're in the practice of health care. I don't think that practicing health care and being profitable have to be mutually exclusive. I ripped off a quote from, oh, gosh, what the, I'm blanking on it, but I'll give you the quote. Essentially, he says, profit should be your first social responsibility, right? If profit's your first social responsibility, then you can do all the other things that you want to do. Peter Drucker. It's Peter Drucker, essentially.

um yeah so you have to have money and then you can give all your money away if you want but you can't be the reverse that can't be the reverse well it's also um this idea uh yeah if you go back to your example at yale where everyone's pissed off right and the quality of the care suffers the experience suffers it's kind of the people you interact with where we've all gone to some kind of service provider whether it's health care or something else and the person doesn't want to be there right and you're just like man this sucks right like i know this person doesn't want to be here. I feel like a burden on them. That's fine if, I don't know, it's a lawyer or something like that. It's completely different when you're coming in. You're the one with the

toothache, right? Or the gunshot wound or, you know, whatever it is. And so I think that your idea around culture is really important. It probably trickled down into the customer experience. Yeah, Pop, I literally fought every day to maintain the empathy and that connectedness between our staff and the patients. I mean, your point is exactly that. It's what was lacking in my experience in 2001 where hospitals treated people as patients and we were treating patients as customers.

So it's really a simple nuance, a simple transition, but just if you want to create a premium customer experience, well, what do you do in healthcare to do that? your healthcare establishment doesn't feel, it's sterile, but it doesn't feel sterile. It may feel more like your community coffee shop. You know, you have technology there and you use it, but maybe it's not the showcase. Maybe there's different seating, different aesthetics, you know, those are the things that, uh, that we really worked hard on. For sure. Um, all right. So you built this thing into an absolute beast. It's what, like the second largest retail chain of

urgent care facilities. And then Avery comes along, maybe talk a little bit about who Avery is and kind of how that happened. Yeah. So Avery is a Boston based private equity firm. We ran a process just like we did in 2010 and 2012. They gave me an opportunity to have a complete exit, which was interesting and scary. You know, this was my whole life's work as an adult. I mean, I started the company at 25 years old, so to exit was pretty dramatic, but it was a great event for myself and for investors. It was nearly half a billion dollar exit, and now it's Avery's. You know, it's really wild.

Don't screw it up, guys. Yeah, yeah. I mean, good luck. Yeah, but so I'm blocked out of healthcare for 10 years, so can't do anything non-appointment based. And, um, I had been doing some angel investing before my exit and thinking about things I wanted to do next. Um, really, uh, interested in biochemistry physics. I've written some patents in robotics, uh, like jumping robots. Uh, I was inspired watching a guy on the side of the road work with a reciprocating tamper. Do you know what that is? That's the, uh, the

actual, like, it looks almost like a jackhammer. Yeah. That you hold and it, it smashes the ground right i's it out right i built those that are automated so you don't have to hold them which is pretty i mean pretty interesting right so to do that you have to have um accelerometers that uh have you ever seen them kick that darpa like robotic cow yeah and it won't fall over that's the that's the stuff that i i've worked on so written patents in that issued and also in like thermal de-manufacturing. After you sell the business and you sign the papers, kind of money all gets wired, everything,

the next day, what are you thinking? Well, I think- Like you'd gone to work every day for 15 years and worked your ass off. Like, do you just say like, this is cool? Or are you sad? Or like, what's the feeling? Well, it actually happened on a Thursday.

Okay. So I was negotiating what I may do going forward with the acquirer, Abri, and with FastMed, and we couldn't really come to terms. It wasn't going to be big enough for me. So on a Thursday, they told me I could have a complete exit, and I moved out of my office on Saturday, and I started my next startup on Monday. All right. And so as you do that, let's talk a little bit about PRTI and kind of what that is and how you got involved and kind of where you guys are today.

Yeah, so I had a number of early stage venture businesses that I had been investing in starting in 2014, let's call it, writing checks like $100,000, $250,000 checks and trying to help from the periphery. One of those investments I made in 2014 was PRTI. It's a really interesting company. It was founded by this Italian inventor named Franco Fini. And Franco Fini had exposure to the waste industry. As every Italian does. Yeah, why not? Right?

So this Italian family has a waste business started in 1974 called Idria Dill. They invested in Franco Feeney's technology. They spent about 12 million euro to take it through three iterations of like form factor and then idled that technology. So it came to this group that I invested in's attention and they wanted to domesticate it, move it to the United States and potentially roll it out across the country. You know, the group were real estate developers and a guy who had renovated Bennigan's. I don't even know if Bennigan's still exists.

It's around. It's like Applebee's. Okay, so this group wanted to build an international waste management business that used a proprietary piece of technology to process synthetic polymers. I love them all. I mean, they're savages. I mean, absolute savages, right? Well, we're laughing because we know them, and the courage and also the delusion it takes to say, I can do that, is frankly the people that you want to be around, but also having people that are pragmatic and realistic enough to understand, we can do this, but we can go faster and be more effective if maybe we bring more and more people in that have the scientific backgrounds, the technology backgrounds, et cetera, to accomplish it. Yeah. I mean, and especially a business, we, we, we talked about asset light businesses. This is a

super asset heavy business. Jason's two for two on the asset heavy businesses. Yeah. I mean, it was, um, it was something else. So I made an investment, I joined their board and then I told them, look, I'm going to leave FastMed June of 2015. I'll come on as the CEO, run the business, raise the capital and we'll go. I mean, and they're like, well, what do you, what do you want to do? I said, I'm going to package the plant that's in Arma in Italy. I'm going to put it in containers i'm going to ship it to some land that we'll buy in 15 miles from my house in raleigh and we'll build this waste to energy oil refinery there and and just go from the ground up all right so hold on before we get into shipping this let's talk about uh how the business works right so when

you say uh waste to energy there's uh kind of three separate components to the business right There's a front end kind of a scientific process. And then there's the outputs. Walk us through kind of those three different sections of the business or kind of bodies of work. Yeah. So here in North America, there are 300 million used car tires a year that need to be disposed of.

And traditionally, you either shred, bury, or burn those tires because tires are built to last. They're built to not fall apart. So there's no real smart way to dispose of them. You've even heard people, I think it was in Florida, where they started to construct reefs underwater with these tires. They chained them together and put them at the bottom of the ocean. What they found were giant dead reefs. So they've now had to pull those tires up.

PRTI and Franco Feeney developed a way to heat a tire. A tire is a semi-solid. It has some natural rubber components, some steel, some fabric associated with it, and a lot of oil. You'd be surprised at the amount of oil that's in a tire. But he developed a way to thoughtfully break that apart and capture those constituent parts that the tire was made of. So you have a huge total available market of 300 million tires a year that need to be disposed of, a legacy business that is bullshit. like a the total dinosaur shredding burying burning um you have a technology solution that's thoughtful environmentally friendly um scalable uh super interesting to me super

interesting to me they'll pay me to take the tires so it's kind of an infrastructure play on the front end where you're just a waste management business so just to summarize this the tires are getting disposed of already right they're used they're coming out of wherever and they're going to get thrown away or destroyed the destruction you just described is actually really bad for the environment or energy intensive yeah yeah and so um you know as we've talked about this the things that have caught my attention is they throw them in the ocean they bury them in landfills they chop them up and they put them on the playground for children little chips of rubber right soccer fields yeah i mean all this crazy stuff that's going on and you had a technology

that could essentially break the tire down using this thermal demanufacturing process that we'll get into but the first problem you had to solve was basically where do we get the tires from right i think that's what you're talking about now where not only can you get the tires but they'll actually pay you to take the tires so kind of describe why they're paying you to take them versus you know you have to pay for basically the supplies of your business. Yeah, so most, if not all, municipal governments and counties will allow you to bring a used tire to a landfill, and they'll take it for free as a service, as a tax-paying service.

But then that landfill or municipality has to pay to have it disposed of. So there's a third party that's coming to transport, pick up, and dispose of those tires. So that's typically a landfill, a monofill, or a shredding company that's making pelletized rubber or um or shredding and burying does that make sense yep and that's really it it's it's nothing more than that got it so so they will actually pay you to take the tires bring them to uh the plant and um for those that are listening uh the plant is uh an industrial plant right i mean it's what six seven acres of land 10 acres of land um there are huge concrete

bays with you know piled high with tires um and uh there are big metal reactors right they kind of look like cylindrical um kind of tubes if you will um and then there's warehouse space right that has kind of offices and all kinds of stuff in there so this is a very kind of not only asset heavy but very industrial type business um very very different than sitting on your couch writing software um but as you figure out okay we can get paid to take these tires what happens to the tire once you bring it on site well one of the things that we found as we started to scale was that there was a number of tires that were coming out of the manufacturing site that were blemished that weren't road worthy and needed to be thoughtfully disposed of and actually you know you had to

provide a certificate of destruction to make absolutely sure they didn't get back on the road and you why right i mean there was something wrong with the tire i mean it just came off of the manufacturing line and it was messed up. And you'd be surprised at the tolerance of a loss yield here. It's about eight to 10%. So a typical Bridgestone plant makes 30,000 tires a day, 30,000 tires a day with a 10% loss yield. So what we calculated was 32 million additional tires a year are these blemished tires that need to be disposed of. I went directly to the tire manufacturer and contracted with them so i don't even at this point deal with the municipal waste the 300 million tires all i'm disposing of are brand new tires that are coming out of the tire

manufacturers so um these blemished tires have been going on for a while right there's been this this kind of lost yield um that business is very sketchy in the disposal of these tires right so um the tires come off the manufacturing line uh they in many cases look like good tires right there's some you can't tell you can't tell what's wrong with them there's some small blemish um and they're handed over to somebody to destroy them and so you said before that before they're loaded on a truck a guy takes a knife and slashes the sidewall historically before i got there they would not always slash all the sidewalls so there was uh another business going on where you could resell those tires it's a huge business so part of that waste disposal in the tire business

is a reselling business where they find identify pearls like if you were a golfer uh you know you're playing golf but you're always kind of looking around for you know lost balls that's what these guys were doing they were finding like pearls like and reselling these tires and uh you know we we know that it could be a pretty big component of these tire disposal companies revenue we don't do any reselling and and what we've been able to do by being present in the market is absolutely certify that uh these tires are being destroyed they're not on the road there's a dangerous yeah well and it's because what they're essentially doing is they're trying to find tires that oh maybe they don't meet the exact specification but they're good enough

they turn around they basically pop they don't know what's wrong with the tire i'm just telling you some random guy whose responsibility is to load the tire on the truck is deciding to not slash the sidewall because he's getting a brown bag he's getting paid to do that and then the guys who are unloading the tires are looking for the pearls right they're saying sidewall slash sidewall slash sidewall slash good tire they put it to the side put it to the side that tire ends up at the used dealership down the side to the side to the side right because think about how many when i say 300 million tires a year you have to put things in perspective i can only process and my plant runs 25 days a month you know uh all year 24 hours a day we process 1.5 million pounds

of tires a month 1.5 million pounds each tire is 28 pounds so i may be around a million tires you know it's not a lot yeah it's not a lot well and i bring this up because uh one uh These are the little nooks and crannies of businesses where I think people don't really understand some of the stuff that goes on. But two is one of the things that you and I have really spent a lot of time talking about as we've invested is finding businesses where people kind of just do the right thing. And when they do the right thing, what you actually end up doing is, one, you set yourself up to be a sustainable business. You kind of don't have cobwebs in the corner that maybe one day can get exposed. uh but two is uh you actually can create market dynamics uh and market forces that put a lot of pressure on your competitors right and so when the manufacturers understand hey these guys are

not going to play this game of reselling and not slashing the sidewalls and doing all of this there's a little bit more trust and confidence that hey we should make sure that they get every tire they can possibly take versus you know we know some shady stuff's going on over here we can't necessarily stop it, but we're not happy about it. And it's dangerous, right? People's lives are at risk if they're driving down the street with a tire that doesn't meet the specifications necessary. Yeah, it's so true. And most, if not all of the CEOs of these tire manufacturers have self-mandated zero landfill policies. So they do not want those tires coming out of their plant ending up in a landfill. So it's super important to align with a company like

PRTI that has this thermal demanufacturing technology, and we're able to recover the tire, it's a green story. And if you start to contemplate the carbon footprint, the effect of eliminating the waste stream and re-establishing the constituent components of a tire back into the market, you really are doing something positive. For sure. Let's dig into the technology, how thermal demanufacturing, big words, essentially means that you're going to use a high degree of heat to burn the tire and break it down he doesn't like that he doesn't so uh it the the technology of pyrolysis so pyrolysis is a reaction in the absence of oxygen and that's what everyone's tried to do with tires for the last 40 years so it's not a new technology

you're you're essentially taking some type of horizontally oriented um vessel you're filling it with tires chipped tires so you've shredded them and you've taken the steel out of them And then you're externally heating that vessel and you're rotating it. So think of a rotisserie, like a chicken rotisserie. You're eliminating the oxygen inside of it, right? So you're not lighting anything on fire inside. You're just heating it, but you're heating it externally. Got it.

All right. So zero oxygen environment, heating it externally, and you're rolling it. You're using an auger inside of that horizontally oriented cylinder, and you're driving the volatiles uh and the materials that you're demanufacturing or essentially breaking breaking down and you're pushing them out of the vessel so it's a long process that requires a lot of external energy and usually breaks um that's why it hasn't worked historically they've tried it when oil is a hundred dollars a barrel it didn't work they've tried it when oil's twenty seven dollars a barrel didn't work you know it's highly dependent on the tipping fee so if you're if you're

coming into this market you think well how do i disrupt it if i can build a business that can work on zero front end so even though they're going to pay me to take the tire if i'm not really dependent on that front end i can disrupt them because they don't have a lot of alternatives right and what you mean there is basically although they're willing to pay me to take the tires if i can build a business that is so profitable and sustainable that i can tell them i'll take the tires for free then you get all the tires and pump when i had that epiphany like this is 2014 and that's why i was ready to leave fast med i was like holy crap man these guys are going to pay me to take tires and i'm literally sitting on an energy company i never looked at

prti as a waste disposal company i was watching like tesla tesla to me is not a car company it's a battery technology company why did elon musk buy solar city because he needed a place to actually make power right why is he developing battery tech and that the home devices because he needs storage right so here you go you've got solar energy you can make power you've got battery tech i can store it i can transact it into the grid that's right he's got a comprehensive energy thesis um prt and it's a privatized somewhat decentralized energy infrastructure that he's building right it's it's huge think about that historically you have to interface with whatever power company you're dealing with they're going to tell you the rates you're a price taker you

don't have a choice if you want to buy alternative energy you're not really buying it um he he was building something quite interesting. And I looked at PRTI the same way. I've got tires. To me, it's a battery. It's a stored power source. They're going to pay me to take it. So I don't really have an input cost there. I have a technology that's quite different than what I just described to you with pyrolysis. And I'll explain to you how the tech works. And I can make power. I can sell it to the grid or do something even more interesting. So before we get into the tech, the input is tires into the technology. The output is carbon, steel, syngas, and oil, right?

Yep. And you're able to look at those commodities, sell some of them as commodities. Some of them you can do certain things to manipulate them into energy is where you're saying basically you get energy out of the back end. And how do you go from a tire to those four outputs on the back end of that technology? Right. So when I explained pyrolysis to you, I talked about the fact that it was a very labor intensive and very cost inefficient process where you have to use a lot of external energy to heat this. What we're doing with our technology is we have a vertically oriented chamber, not a horizontally oriented chamber. So the vertical orientation allows for gravity to affect the simple machine. What I do is I load whole car tires into this vertically oriented cylinder.

So they're not chipped. There's no pre-processing or pre-handling. As you know, because you've been out at the site, we grab the tires. We're going to go through the process in a second. We take whole car tires and we fill the processing tower with them. It's about 6,000 pounds of whole tires. So I close the lid mechanically, and then I pull a vacuum on it. So we have vacuum pumps that are evacuating the atmosphere out of the chamber.

Then I insert a torch into the bottom of the processing tower, and there's thermal concrete. I don't know if any of you barbecue, like use a green egg barbecue, but the reason it gets so hot is because the thermal concrete won't let the heat escape. It's actually all driven up through the food. We do the exact same thing. So I use a super hot torch for 20 minutes in the bottom of the processing tower, and I heat the tires that are down there violently for 20 minutes, and I turn them into coal. So superheated coal and steel at the bottom. After 20 minutes, I extract that torch, and then this is where the interesting tech happens. We use what I'll call a catalyst, which is just atmosphere.

The atmosphere has 19% oxygen in it. I'm pulling oxygen over hot coals and then radiating that heat up a stack of whole tires. And I'm controlling the temperature zones up that 40-foot stack. So it's just a time and temperature process. A tire is a semi-solid. It turns into a vapor very quickly. So you just change the phase. and our process takes about 10 hours to change 6 000 pounds of tires uh from semi-solid into

liquids and gases got it and um with only 20 minutes of energy input 10 hours of energy output each processing tower creates 0.23 megawatts of power it's crazy it's wild so then when you daisy chain these reactors together you know our model is uh is to have 16 you're talking about making like six seven megawatts of base power that they paid me to take the input and uh well and to me the part here that is so uh interesting is we talked a lot about these asset heavy businesses right this industrial type um um business there's a lot of technology that goes on in this right so for those that have never been to an industrial site or seen one of these businesses um when you walk in, there are screens everywhere. There's a control room, right? That the, um, that the

towers themselves, the torch, all of this is automated in various ways, um, to really allow for, uh, a relatively small team, um, in terms of headcount to manage, uh, what ends up being tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds every single day being taken from that semi-solid into the, uh, the gas and the vapors. Yeah. I mean, we 90, 98% of the process is automated. So the entrance, uh, exit of those torches, the controls, uh, we have programmable logic controllers, you know, that's where my coding experience came in. So, you know, we, uh, uh, we wrote all of that code to, uh, to automate the process. Um, and, uh, the only thing that's manual at this point is the unloading of the tires the discharge of the material and then

we've got a pretty crude oil refinery on site too when you were talking about the assets it really is a waste receiving component on the front the technology that processes the tires in the middle steel sorting carbon sorting and oil refining all right so i want to pause on prti for a second and we'll come back to this for the fun part. I want to jump to how you and I met and kind of the early days of Full Tilt, and then it will become obvious why I want to pause on the PRTI conversation.

We'll come back to that. But just your memory of how we met, kind of some of the early conversations, and then why we decided to start Full Tilt, which was the first thing that we did together. Yeah, so I've made a few investments in companies that overlapped with Mark Cuban and a few people that we know.

One of them was Undercover Colors. It was a date rape technology that came out of NC State. It was initially supposed to be a nail polish that detected six different typical types of date rape drugs. I also invested in a company called Penda Health. It was in Africa, in Kenya, that Mark Cuban was attempting to invest in.

And we had a mutual friend that was working in his firm. that introduced us. I think you had just left Facebook and left Snap. So you left Facebook, then you were at Snap, and you were moving back to Raleigh. I live in Raleigh, North Carolina. And they said, look, really interesting guy. You should meet. I think you and I met at Morning Times, downtown Raleigh, for 30 minutes. We had planned just to meet up. We ended up spending three hours or so together. It was really- Jason's wife was calling, saying, where are you? let's go please polina couple goals so uh yeah so we we uh we literally just hit it off you wanted to start like uh i don't know 100 million dollar fund i uh i said hey why don't we why don't we

try to raise like you know 10 million and uh we decided to to create full tilt it really came out of like almost our first meeting wild so uh i'm going to tell two stories one was in the first meeting uh when we were talking um distract there was two strategies that we discussed right one was go raise a larger venture capital fund uh mainly from family offices and institutions uh or raise a smaller more micro vc fund um and jason said to me uh i'm the king of the hundred thousand dollar check and i'll never forget this guy said to him what the hell does that mean and he explained to me that, uh, the, you know, kind of the challenges when you're whale hunting and the time it takes versus, um, being much more optimized on, look, just get started, build the momentum

and really get, um, kind of things going. And it's starting to establish that track record, uh, which is obviously what, um, we, we ended up doing. And so, uh, the second story is the first meeting was at, uh, this bar and, uh, went very well. we kind of hit it off and then jason says to me uh well let's meet up again i said all right we want to meet and he says to me well why don't you come out to the prti plant and uh when we i said okay and he said uh but i'm gonna need you to help me with some stuff and i don't remember the exact

conversation but it was basically like you're not coming here to sit in a conference room so just be prepared okay that's fine and when i showed up uh at prti the car tires actually show open 18 wheelers and so they pack i don't know how many tires a thousand yeah a thousand okay so a thousand tires into an 18 wheeler and they're woven very tightly it's not just thrown in there they're systematically woven into a 53 foot super efficient and the only way to get them out as of right now is for somebody to jump in the back the only way to get them out there's no way you can grab them with some mechanical device you'd blow the sides out of the trailer of the trailer so So you got to put a human in and literally grab each tire one by one and throw it out

of the 18 wheeler, uh, which when you're near the, uh, when it's full and you're near the edge, doesn't sound like that big of a deal because you kind of just grab it and toss it though. They're 28 pounds each and there's a thousand of them. But as you get deeper and deeper into the 18 wheeler, 18 wheelers are pretty far, 53 feet. And so you've got to literally grab the tire off the stack and then walk it to the end And then you basically throw it over a wall into the bay where they sit.

And so the second meeting Jason and I ever had was in the middle of the summer. I think it was July in North Carolina heat in the back of an 18-wheeler tossing 1,000 tires out of this thing into the bay while we discussed should we build an investment firm or not. And at the end, I remember us being like, well, if we're both willing to do this, we probably got a good shot of getting along, and this might be something that we should go pursue together. Yeah, man, I'll tell you. It meant a lot to me that you came out to do that because that's the kind of CEO I am and that's the kind of person I am. Like, I don't want anything for free

and I typically have to put my hands on things to truly understand them. And you probably have seen that in the way I invest. When we do something together, like I try to buy the product, I try to use it. Like, you know, I think somebody asked in your Twitter feed, has he run in a full node? Of course I'm running a full node.

It's a dumb question. run a full node and i think that part of it was uh stupid when we were there it's not just hey you know we're doing physical work to do this and by the way right jason and i both have done plenty of physical work in our life it sucks right is the best way to put it just you know just absolutely sucks um but it was the fact that you were running the company you had plenty of employees there that could have been doing that work but you said you know look there's better use of these employees time when it comes to some of the more technical stuff or the mechanical stuff this is just a pure grunt work type exercise i'll go do it right because i can free up my

employees to go do more important things also pomp when i told you about culture typically the hard parts in a business uh executives avoid they they don't like the conflict they don't like the the points that hurt i i tend to go there to humanize them and to establish that's my base you know so the front end of the business the manual part the unloading of the trucks in july of north carolina and the heat uh i go out there and i do that um because it is hard it sets the tone. That's it. It sets the tone. Everyone else is like, well, I can't complain. That dude's over there. And, uh, if he's willing to do that, not only do I need to do that, I got to do everything else. And I require a lot of time to think anyway. So spending an hour on loading a

truck like that, um, helps the business. It helps me. It's, uh, gets me out of the office, you know, um, anyway, it's just important for you mathematicians at home, a thousand tires in an hour. Nobody is exactly doing it at a slow pace. So we decide we're going to go build full tilt. And the whole idea is basically to create a early stage investment firm. And in hindsight, I don't think any of this was intentional, but correct me if you had some master plan. But in hindsight, looking back, there's a lot of things that we did that I think were counterintuitive to people. The first being we didn't have a website for, I think, a year, pretty much almost the entire time. Do we now?

Well, the very first investment firm we ran, I think we finally got a website. I mean, you'd call it a website? It was a WordPress landing page. Yeah, I don't think that's a website. Because people were getting mad that there was no URL or anything. And then the second thing was we didn't have an office. We used to work out of a Starbucks, right? And I bring those up because it's always been what's the actual most important thing, right?

Not what's the things that make us feel important or what are the things that everyone else is doing so we feel like we need to do it. But from very early on, it's always been what is actually the most important thing to get done today to help build this business. And I don't think there's a lot of people who do that, but across multiple businesses that you've built, right, and the ones we've built together, I think that's always been one of these themes that's really important. Pomp, we've seen those businesses that we've invested in that have thought that those were mandatory requirements, like having palatial office space and comforts that you would typically see in the world that these entrepreneurs are working in. It is totally not. It's not my world.

If you very kindly called me the king of the $100,000 check, I would take the title of uh king of the nine dollar a square foot office space i love it i love it um all right so we go uh and we start investing in all these companies uh maybe talk a little bit about uh some of the areas this is all kind of pre-blockchain that that we're doing this uh talk a little bit about some of the areas that you're interested outside of uh energy obviously with prti and blockchain with what we're doing now and just some of the businesses that you kind of have on top of your mind. Yeah.

So things that are interesting to me are technology, robotics, you said energy, the healthcare space, so healthcare innovation, service innovation. I'm fascinated with CBD, distillation, extraction, farming, if you could imagine. I think it's important. um and then just hard sciences so i tend to spend um my free time and the time i'm i'm educating myself on investment in that space um i've talked a little bit about quantum biology i think it's an interesting science that's involving um it's an important one um and uh so those are the things i'm kind of focused on now but again all of that stuff though it's probably lays into infrastructure

So I'm trying to find the gaps in where something's going, whether it's an idea, a concept, a service, and how do we get the tolling? How do we get involved in the tolling of those concepts? For sure. And so as we're making these investments, we invested 62 companies in a year and a half. It was a pretty rapid pace. Obviously, it's gone very well. So we were doing it at a Starbucks, but I got to bring it up. You don't like Starbucks.

You're a Dunkin' Donuts guy. Yeah, you know, we ended up at Starbucks because it just had better Wi-Fi. And I think you like the iced coffee there better. Listen, I— But we're Dunks guys. I mean, value play, $2 coffee. I mean, I'll stay there all day. I hate hot coffee.

I hate it. Really? I always get iced coffee. Jason always gets a hot coffee, and there's been a couple of times where when we get to Starbucks, he panics and he orders these things off the menu, and it's hilarious to hear him order, you know, the Frappuccino. No, no, no, no, white chocolate mocha, soy or something. Yeah, but I'm not great at that. i want to go back to prti for a second um because uh for a year and a half we pretty much spent every single day together right and uh we invest in all these companies and one day we are uh

driving to charlotte and i remember yeah we were going to buy a laundromat yeah a mcdonald's mcdonald's yeah that's right actually shout out to uh the two you laundry guys uh dan and alex uh these two young founders um that they're uh they're just straight savages right amazing literally started a laundry business uh grew very quickly in charlotte north carolina and uh they called us and said hey we want to build our own facility right very similar to the kind of the uh fast med playbook of um kind of vertically integrate the actual physical infrastructure with the business on top of it um and so you and i were driving down there and we ended up buying a McDonald's to build this. But on the way, I remember it was the first time that

I ever mentioned to you Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, Ethereum, et cetera. And so just what do you remember about that conversation? Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right. Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal, motherfucking mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and card payment. Everything you could want at crypto.com. Go help your boy out. Tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit crypto.com. Pomp's got you always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry. Your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and Wi-Fi. All you got to do is go to coinmine.com. You buy

a coin mine. It's like an Xbox or a PlayStation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. That's right. You purchase it. It shows up at your doorstep. You pull it out of the box. You plug it in, connect to your Wi-Fi. Five minutes or less, you're mining Bitcoin. All you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide, and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis. Kind of like how Tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software just your update in your coin mine consumer mining made easy that's right go to coinmine.com tell them pomp set you and thank me later i remember it was the first time that i ever mentioned to you uh bitcoin cryptocurrency ethereum etc uh and so

just what do you remember about that conversation yeah it was the second time someone had pitched bitcoin to me so the first time was in 2012 uh it was one of our sales guys at fastmed came to me but i didn't i didn't do anything with it you think it was crazy well i mean i was i was this this particular employee i was working on focusing him so for him to come with this magic internet money thing it was like it was the last thing i needed to hear at that point i was in the car with you for six hours though as we were going from raleigh to charlotte and um you know it was just at first i was very contrarian very down on it again i i was you know i understood game transactions so in-game transactions because i played video games my whole life still do so i

understood how to buy things and how digital money worked but i i just wasn't uh i didn't have the level of conviction that you did but by the time we had gotten back to raleigh you know I pulled my typical move, right? Where I said, like, I have to get my hands on it. So the three hours on the way there, there was a lot of healthy banter about this can't be real. Yes, it is real. Here's how it works. What about this?

And just kind of back and forth. And I remember you were asking questions that were very obvious. You understood enough to ask the right questions, right? Kind of the pointed, well, what if this happens or how does this work, right? And it was putting stress on my understanding, right? All the questions that we were first going through were around, how do you hack it? Like, how does this thing fail? Like, we were really spending a lot of time on that 51% attack stuff.

Yep. And so we had started to get into the mining. And I remember I revealed to you that I had bought some mining rigs. Yeah, I was super pissed. And I hadn't told Jason that I did it. And usually we do everything together. but uh i was scared he was gonna think i was way too crazy you hear that polina you hear that polina i'm sorry i'm sorry it's a birthday happy birthday polina polina is uh is my girlfriend and

her and jason uh compete over who uh who actually is my partner in life it's polina and uh and so i remember i told you this and you're like what's mining and i started explaining it and uh we got there and we did the whole real estate thing and and uh we're spending time with the guys and on the way back it was almost like you had been like thinking about the back of your head and i'll never forget you's like dude i have a power source and i remember like wait what and you walked me through the idea that prti takes tires puts it through the scientific process and on the output one of the outputs uh is commodities and the other is a power source and the business was supposed to sell it into the grid uh and receive revenue for that and

you had this like crazy look in your eye like what if we just use that power to mine cryptocurrency rather than sell it into the grid i mean that that was it i mean that was the establishment of our investment into building the data center or the cryptocurrency mining component of prti which um you know we believe was the first waste to energy cryptocurrency minus of that type scale in the world. And so I'm very proud of that moment for us. And I mean, that was late 2015, early 16. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, we were very early, very fortunate. But if you can imagine, you know, I had spent about $19 million to build prti so uh the to build the mine and stuff i you know i go all in so you know we built a very

a very big um we were actually mining uh with gpus at first a large gpu miner uh mine and went through the full spectrum of education at that point mining uh ethereum how to custody it where do you exchange it why do you exchange it do you get into alt coins um what are the tax ramifications of all that uh how do you source asic miners you know learning uh you know just about power um and and then trying to model out what does this look like as you continue to invest does this act like a real estate investment does this act like forex and uh currency exchange you know uh it was it was complicated and fun well the part that uh i specifically remember is when we were doing it um we understood how mining worked we uh had a um uh somebody was helping us jp

barrack who was able to uh the mining store.com was able to help us uh um kind of quickly get up to uh speed on i mean we literally sourced the hardware i mean but we bought the the rigs that he had under his dorm room yep we were just out of any hardware that we could find right and we were buying all this stuff and we put it together ourselves and well in the part that i remember was i i was driving there every day and we're doing all this and i remember saying to myself like how lucky we are that not only are we frankly crazy and convicted enough to do this but we're doing it at a industrial site where there's engineers yeah resources right i mean there was there was guys level engineers that worked at prti who they loved it right and they

were saying, okay, hold on a second. This is part of the business. This is part of my job now. How do I get airflow into the room? How do I get it out? Should we chill it with air conditioner? Should we build some sort of sucking mechanism where we basically suck air through the room to create chilled air? Should we just use fans? And you start getting into not just, hey, can I plug a miner into the wall? You really get into how do you build the infrastructure? How do you become energy efficient? How do you actually take an ASIC miner and drop it from 1400 watts down to something sub that, you know, since all of this game is about low power cost, low power utilization and hash. And so today, you know, when I think of PRTI, I think of not a waste management business,

which I think from day one, you knew that's not the business. And I don't even think of it as an energy business anymore. I think of it as a fully integrated computing platform where you can basically now power computing power with energy that is completely off the grid that you self generate and you control. And I think that it is probably one of the most powerful things that somebody can create is that vertically integrated computing power that is self-sufficient. I mean, without a doubt, even if you develop decentralized power generation, you still need access to the grid, right? What I'm contemplating and what we've been able to do is create decentralized power generation with a parasitic partner in data center mining that we can co-gen

for. So we don't even have to have an interconnect agreement. That's a fail safe in the event that I wanted to put power into the grid, but we don't need to. We can use that full load of seven to 10 megawatts of base power continuous power and put it into compute and here in the united states the total available markets around 170 prti plants wow so that's what we're chasing right now got it um all right and so uh as we're doing all this we get pretty convicted on crypto and blockchain bitcoin um before we get into all of that i want to talk about uh some nutrition stuff because uh For those of you on Twitter who don't know, Jason eats at Waffle House every single day. And I'll call him and I'll literally hear him ordering at Waffle House while we're on the phone.

Explain the Waffle House situation and what you get and why. Yeah, so I do this ketogenic diet. So I fast till like 1 o'clock every day. I don't eat after 8 p.m. i drink black coffee usually uh in the morning and then i go to the waffle house i order six eggs two slices of cheese two sausage patties and three slices of bacon and sometimes a five ounce sirloin steak every day this is what that's what i eat at one o'clock yeah every day so i went to my doctor um to get a an annual physical and and she almost collapsed when she saw my cholesterol

because it went from like 116 to like 240. She was super concerned. She's like, whatever you're doing, stop immediately. But then, you know, again, I practiced medicine for a long time. I said, well, you need to go through the total cholesterol panel and let's look at the indices. HDL, through the roof. Triglycerides, low.

Total cholesterol, okay. So this made me think of a few things and I need to spend more time on it. and I challenge your listeners to look at this, but I don't think we know shit about cholesterol. I don't think we know shit about anything with the body. Fair point, but cholesterol in particular, I think we know if you have all of these things out of whack,

like your triglycerides are high, your HDL is low, your LDL is high, your total cholesterol is high, you're probably predispositioned for heart disease, diabetes, a lot of bad stuff, stroke, et cetera. But the nuances of cholesterol, I don't think we understand. um i think ketogenic diet's real i've noticed not only um you know my ability to keep doing things that i want to do uh you know this bit of longevity is there um but in terms of my cognitive abilities i've noticed some uh kind of clear a clearness of my thoughts uh i also have lost kind

of the i don't know if any of you experience like midday fatigue or anything but i was getting that like around two o'clock i was like ready to pass out all that's gone so i quit sugar long time ago don't drink soda uh ketogenic diet wim hof breathing and uh waffle house baby so uh the nutrition is one piece of it right and um we've had people come on before that talked about the ketogenic diet and i think that's generally understood uh but it's not like you're in your 40s and it's not like you're sitting at home you know saying hey i got some kids and you know where's the local barbecue this weekend you're still playing competitive soccer right you're doing uh you work out every day um you've got a lot of physical activity going on so kind of

describe like what's the impact of all that physical activity plus building companies investing um and is that a thing where you're doing the working out because it helps in that other stuff or is it a thing where it's just more enjoyable personally yeah i think for me um i think balance is really important um and i think working hard is important like uh i i challenge people uh they they talk about work-life balance i think working hard is good i don't think there's anything wrong with that i don't want to shame anyone for doing that um i think taking vacations are good um but i think to really pull this off in a big way you got to eat right you got to get sleep you've got to drink water you know i actually follow i don't know if you any of you follow like

it's just a reminder to drink water every day it's my favorite account on twitter yes it's the greatest thing ever it's like drink water idiot did you have water today and they just insult you into drinking water um uh breathing i i i mentioned wim hof i think it's it's really interesting tapping into like your reptile brain um that autonomic automatic nervous system to be able to control that or call upon it in some instances is dope so the combination of all that super important to me you know i'm 45 just turned 45 um tore my acl the last time i tore my acl i was 40 playing rugby semi-pro rugby um you know i still play competitive soccer lift you know i'm just trying to keep going after it you know um i'm not a big bible guy but there's

a verse that I'm affected by. It says, you know, I want to master my body and make it my slave. I think it's really important because I've been in situations where my mind has betrayed me, where my body has betrayed me. And it's scary when that happens. Well, and it's also a thing where you probably have more control of your body than you do your mind right and you can use your mind to control your body so there's a um but when those things fail i don't know if you've ever you're a football player i don't know if you've ever been in the air before and then been knocked out of position so when you get in the air and you're turned something weird happens one you get the slowness of your autonomic nervous system you're

you're very hyper aware of that rotation but then it's scary you don't know how to come out of it So when you're flipping or turning, those are the type of situations I've unfortunately experienced five times. And the reason I'm saying five times is because I track them. Five times, I have nine lives, I've used five. And one recently again. No, the fifth one was recent. So let's talk about the – Jason was recently – I'm going to call it a plane crash because it's pretty damn close. You just tell a story about what happened when you're on this plane.

Yeah, so it was coming back from Turks and Caicos with my wife. I have three daughters, 16, 14, and 11-year-old, and someone who works in our home travels with us. We were all on this flight. I wasn't able to get seats together, so my wife and I were sitting together. One of my daughters was with our assistant, and the other two daughters were sitting together. We were 30 minutes into the flight, reached cruising altitude of 30,000 feet. they just turned the seatbelt uh lights off and said we could move around the cabin um and you sound like a flight attendant yeah i mean this was this was this was serious stuff man i've flown all

my life um and there was an explosion and then this noise it went and the plane turned to the right and started to drop and i mean panic uh on the on the flight like panic people are it's not like hey this is uh this is some uh turbulence and all of a sudden i'm talking about an explosion on the right side of the plane and then we're listing and dropping um my wife's freaking like jumping out of her seat trying to get someplace on the plane i'm like trying to figure out instinctively like so stupid but i was like i would be okay if i was by myself but i had this dreadful feeling like i'm not going to be okay because i can't save all these people um and then the next 20 minutes was just bananas well and and just to

remind everyone you have three kids between the ages of 11 and 16 yeah they were freaking out scared out of their minds everybody was freaking out the stewardesses were freaking out we were rotating down slowly and you know you i on the back of the seat there was the flight tracker So I immediately put that on. I wanted to see how high we were and the speed we were going. So we were descending quickly. The plane was slowing down, and we were way off course. So we were between Turks and Caicos and Florida, and it looked like the pilot was trying to go to Miami.

But then we were going the wrong direction. We were going back toward Nassau. um the pilot eventually gets on the the um the uh the mic and says uh look what you heard was the right engine it's no longer functioning the plane is still flying with one engine there's a long runway in nassau uh we're headed there but they're mobilizing the crash fire everyone and that's why we're turning above i can only turn to the right uh and we're just like getting prepared to crash crash land crazy wild but we safely landed i mean we safely landed with one engine we're um the fire crews everything checked out um and we waited in nassau got

another plane and that was it like it was literally we fell off the horse no one wanted to get on another plane but we couldn't they we weren't uh immigrated or we hadn't immigrated into the the country even though i think nassau is still part yeah um but we weren't even allowed to leave the room we had to yeah we had to get on another plane uh flew to atlanta and um and then from there from there it's just uh regular flights and everything but yeah it was wild it was wild what um when they're like hey we're getting the crash landing people as precautionary whatever like what are you thinking i just put my thumb up to the kids I said, it's going to be okay.

I said, if we go into the ocean, I'll just get on the wing. I'll paddle us back. I can imagine your wife and kids be like, ah, let's, why don't we land on the runway? You know, you know what? They're looking for any type of like, they smiled at me because they were like, that's dad. Yeah, of course. That's awesome.

um all right so uh let's talk about uh bitcoin blockchain crypto and uh and we're great so we're doing all this mining stuff and uh we eventually realized like hey this stuff is uh is real um and something we're going to go focus on kind of walk it walk us through the uh the process from there to uh to morgan creek well um we construct the mine at prti uh i jump on a plane with my coo go to china hong kong uh malaysia i meet with israeli hackers uh i'm sourcing asic miners and parts i want to understand um you know what they're seeing uh return to the states um you and i continue to uh deploy and close uh full tilt capital um i think in total we put about 16 million to work 3 million in early stage and the rest was in pre-ipo and late stage stuff

um um you uh you get a call from mark yusko uh have a few meetings with him bring me into a few meetings with him uh we got hold on we gotta talk about the first meeting i'm not letting you off the hook so i'd met with mark a couple of times for coffee and and uh if you listen to the episode with him he's kind of told that story but uh i i finally say uh all right this is worth me and Jason both going and talking with Mark and trying to, uh, to, to see if there's something to do here. And, uh, Jason and I went to the meeting separately. Uh, Jason drove straight from the, uh, PRTI plant and, uh, for you, you guys can't see him most likely, but, uh, he's got a very big beard and, uh, he's got a baseball cap on at, at the time. And, uh, he had a construction

vest because you have to, uh, safety first on the plant and obviously you got to have your reflective vest and the way mark tells the story is uh he's sitting in the room waiting for us to show up and jason walks in with a beard a baseball cap and a construction vest and mark literally says to himself i really hope that this guy didn't bring some psycho in here yeah i mean literally i mean mark has a traditional palatial office it's it's beautifully done i think he built you know a um a an office environment that represented um you know the things that were important to him and it's a professional to a t you know and uh and that's mark anyway and i show up in construction boots reflective vest baseball hat beard you know tatted up like what what's up

ready to make money let's go let's go let's go um all right so we ended up deciding that we're going to do this with Mark and Morgan Creek? What was kind of the reasoning why you were bullish or a proponent of it? You know, I think you and I, as CEOs, as people running a small venture fund, realized both the advantages and disadvantages of that world. Well, I don't think we could raise institutional money. I thought we had a very pure and convincing thesis. We understood the infrastructure around crypto. We navigated the world of ICOs well. um and i i think mark brought gray hair and um an institutional uh experience that we just didn't have plus 40 ftes plus 15 years of investment experience so he normalized us in a number of

ways that we would never been able to do i mean nuriel rubini you know his favorite go-to slam when he was trolling us is, oh, these two are working out of a Starbucks bathroom. Yeah, shout out, Norio, what's up? Yeah, where are you? I'm still here. $3,000 Bitcoin looks pretty good now. How many years to get a four-year degree at NYU?

So, all right, so we do this, and I think people who have watched this are listed as- 5.5. Jason and Norio have a great relationship because, uh, Noriel really went hard at, uh, at the Starbucks, uh, start of, uh, of Jason and I's investing career. And what Noriel doesn't understand is that, uh, we wear that as a badge of honor. And if we could, we would still be in Starbucks. Whereas I think Noriel thinks it's a

negative. So, uh, you're actually just making our day when you say that. Um, all right. I want to switch to, uh, as we're, we start investing. Um, you are one of the only people, uh, that I know, uh, that has dealt with the dark side of crypto, um, and Bitcoin. And, uh, I will let you tell the story, but essentially, uh, you went through a number of, uh, security and, and hacking incidents, uh, that were pretty scary. Right. So maybe kind of just tell, uh, tell some of that story and then kind of how it all played out. Yeah. So those events were all precluded by another major event, which was i think uh september 2017 i'm at prti my wife answers the door there are two fbi agents that have come to my house and they want to meet with me um my wife texts me and says hey this is

what's going on um i asked them i get on the phone with them i say hey what's up they won't tell me but they want to meet with me so i i tell them we'll meet in wakefield at the dunkin donuts so on the way there i'm trying to call my attorney because i'm like dude you're not supposed to meet with the fbi like i i know that this is not going to be good like what but my attorney's at lunch so that's why you invited him to your turf at dunks yeah i knew i could uh escape if i needed to no uh but but the only thing that gave me kind of comfort as i walked into the dunks was look if you always tell the truth you don't have to remember what you said so i try to do that So I sit down, I've got a camo hat on,

Ray-Bans, beard, reflective vest, you know, my normal look. And I'm sitting in the back of Dunks. Dude, it's like right out of a movie. Guys drive up, black truck, two guys in suits. Beeline, right to me. Like, I don't even know who I am. They've got a manila folder with them and they sit down.

The beard, the Ray-Bans and the hat didn't, And it didn't work to keep them from knowing who you were. So anyway, they sit down. They're like, hey, I'm whatever. And this is whoever. We want to talk to you about certain things. But they first want to go through my background. Like who, what, where, when, why, and how.

They know about my cars. They know about my patents. They know about my education. um they apparently had uh my bank account records which was concerning like the you know so i don't think you can just get that information um so they were looking for something um they asked me about foreign travel all this stuff well it came down to mining apparently the fbi had been looking at mining since the beginning and this was a special dark web task force that was um based in charlotte north carolina that was looking for bad actors in the space but also looking for information

in the space and um you know i i told them what i was doing i told them why i was doing it they came out to prti and took a look at it and ultimately that's what the thing was they were essentially if i remember correctly they were basically saying look you've bought a lot of these yeah they knew i spent millions of dollars millions of dollars that i sent to china yep i said i imported these computers they were just like why are you buying all this compute what are you doing yep you know so it was i think it was difficult for them to understand that i was also running my own power company so they weren't necessarily seeing the power on the grid you know like if you were running a math lab the reason they find you is because of the power consumption

yep they weren't seeing it it was like all this computes disappearing same thing in venezuela right how do the police figure out who's mining cryptocurrency even though it's outlawed they look and see there's a spike in the energy consumption in a single home right that's way too big of a spike there's got to be something going on same things happening in malaysia right now too they're busting uh these clandestine mines that are running so anyway and just so people remember the reason why they couldn't see the uh there was no spike in energy consumption was because it's all off the grid it's self-generated power yeah so imagine if someone's importing because i mean this is me getting wrecked but i bought asic miners for 2800 a rig so a small

asic mine for me is 500 rigs so you're talking 1.4 million dollars worth of computers that i'm bringing in you've got aluminum extrusion issues at the border so they're getting stuck there pallets of asic miners like i'm not off the grid like everybody's looking saying what are you doing but anyway so that's it i i have access to the fbi by text message because they've made themselves available to me now they're like yo you're you're legit if you find anyone doing some crazy stuff uh tell us and will you come and speak to our officers about monero crypto you know privacy tokens they come and they do their work and and i think that uh one they're like oh okay like we understand now it all makes sense why there's no uh easily visible traceable

yeah traceable energy consumption we understand the computers we've seen the site you know all the stuff like this is actually pretty cool right we would love to stay close as you kind of continue learning and building stuff uh but also um you know please let us know if we could ever do anything to help or if there's things that you know we may ask you uh to come educate etc right so it went from a uh hey what the hell is this guy doing to uh oh this is actually pretty cool and let's keep a relationship. Yeah. You know, again, my attorney says you never know who the target of an FBI investigation is. So, you know, whatever that means, that made me feel better. So, but then all hell breaks loose in November. So, you know, I can't recall exactly where I was, but I'll tell

you retrospectively, this was always happening on a Saturday night or Sunday. My, I think I was in jamaica maybe maybe as i i forget but i was definitely overseas um it's about 12 o'clock at night 12 12 a.m um and my sim card goes off and uh i immediately because i've been you know reading about this stuff i'm you know i understand enough i'm like oh crap i'm being sim swapped so phone goes off i grab my computer by the time i get to log in they've already changed my passwords so i've not in my email so now they're going through the process of changing my my passwords banking etc uh and uh and unfortunately this goes on for a long time i've uh i've had a lot of money stolen from me um death threats well so all right so the first time it happens

it is uh they essentially get in they sim swap you right they're able to change passwords and And kind of do what I would consider is everyone's greatest fear, right? Which is they get control, right? And once they get control, they can do all kinds of crazy stuff. You being in the position of I've now lost control of my phone number, right? And some of my accounts. There's not a lot you can do other than you start calling people and trying to get back control and doing all this stuff. Yeah, but you can't call anyone.

See, this is the thing. Most people carry one cell phone. Now, if I take your cell phone out, you lose cell service. You have Wi-Fi, so you can still receive text. But for the most part, you're out. And this is happening Saturday night and Sundays. So the fraud prevention departments of AT&T are closed on Sundays. So the hackers know that if they're going to SIM swap you, it's going to be on probably a Sunday.

Once that goes down, they can communicate to you by text, and they have a mirror image of your phone. So any apps you have, they now know where to go. Coinbase, Gemini, Slush Pool. So they know, oh, you're a miner, and they immediately can do things. So I've had to learn super hard lessons, Pomp, in regards to all of these things, whether it's hot wallets, cold wallets, exchanges, mining. um you know for example one of the the hard lessons was if you're mining on slush pool you can permanently uh place an address for your deposits of your mine and lock it forever and once you do that it cannot be changed i didn't know that the hackers did so once they

hacked into my slush pool account they were able to change that destination and steal a mind mm-hmm well and if you're overseas or someplace i mean you're just screwed well and to me the part that was crazy was uh when it happened it was like whoa we just got a crash course right because not just you it's everyone around you i was like whoa what just happened how did that work right and and it forced everyone kind of in our circle to um really look at security next level and all of stuff uh the second incident right which was um where i think kind of the fbi and more comes in is uh i remember all of a sudden you started frantically texting me saying like like they're trying to hack me again right right because i could recognize when it was happening i would

start getting pinged like my passwords were being changed um and i could defend it so now i have three cell phones and two computers uh multiple services that i'm using um and i can defend myself a little bit here so i could rapidly change passwords i've locked some things down i've got uh dummy apps on my phone to put people off so i may not have a binance account but they may think i do you know so they're wasting time going after that there's nothing there well and So what they did is you'd basically put defense in place, and then what they started to do was rather than spend the time to hack into all this, just directly threaten you and get you to engage in giving them Bitcoin, right? Yeah, so they would directly, they would attack everything. So your Dropbox accounts, you know, everything, your social media accounts, they would solicit investment deals through my contacts, ask for money.

I think they did that with you as well, right? Hey, can you send me a few Bitcoin? There were other things that we were really concerned about, SWAT attacks. So a SWAT attack is where they'll say, Jason has shot his wife. Here's the address. There's an active shooter at his home address. The SWAT team shows up, imagine in the middle of the night, and then you're responding to that. So you have this fog of war thing going on and people get hurt.

They do that to your work as well. So imagine my industrial plant, a SWAT attack. So we're worried about that. They've threatened to kidnap my middle daughter. And the unfortunate thing about that, when people make threats, it's like whatever. But they had specific information that was really concerning. So when I contacted the local police department, they thought I was crazy. They're not prepared to deal with this.

They showed up to my house, but they wouldn't even come in. But I said, look, this is what's going on. Here's the FBI's phone number. because the fbi was on this um they contacted the fbi agents and came in my house at that point they're like this i'm way outclassed this is above my pay grade you can hire me and my buddies to help give you some protection we'll increase um coverage in the area put more patrols here do you have a gun can you protect yourself i mean it was literally like i had to turn into uh some type of person i'm not like look i you know i told you i like to eat right and breathe but i'm not like

the terminator you know so um but that's what they were expecting they're like we're not the the police are not there they can't protect you but they show up once the bad stuff happens yeah or while either while it's going on or after it's over believe me i love the police thank you for all you do um but you know you're not standing next to me when someone tries to abduct my daughter you know and that's really what they asked me to do is like hunker down and um and uh and it's scary yeah it's scary because again it's like my kids on that plane like what do i do pomp do i sit down with the family and say this is probably not real but someone's trying to kidnap you molly i mean i don't think that you do that but i don't know what to do yeah i mean i don't think you do

that but i don't know what to do you know i just don't have as a parent i don't have the rule book i don't have the guide for that so you know i did the best i could uh it's frightening i know that they've they've uh doxed and uh stolen all our demographic information the whole families um they have all my personal information so you know at this point uh my mother's maiden name you know all the things that you think are like you seek like you're you're going through a process to uh validate who you are i just think it's a joke i mean i literally was supposed to be on like a celebrity level uh protection inside my phone carrier and they failed i mean they failed uh it's a bad situation uh it's scary how fast someone can steal all of your information from

a phone carrier how easy it is to do well and i think a lot of people at this point you just have to operate as if you're guaranteed that your information's out there because if someone's got some money got access to the dark web they're likely to be able to go buy um personal information on almost anybody right there's been so many hacks at this point of major you know internet services or uh you know insurance equifax whatever like yeah that it's just it's out there right and so um you know it's a really unfortunate scenario um one thankfully that there was you know uh a little bit more bark than bite when it came to a lot of the threats and things like that but you know the reason why i just tell the story i think they arrested the kid i got information from the

fbi that they made an arrest they uh so we'll see what what comes out of that but uh they found the person it was a group but they got one of them so far so i mean and the reason why i want to tell stories which is really interesting right hackers make note yeah you got caught yeah they can exactly yeah i can't wait to meet you um all right so i want to go from hackers to uh twitter uh jason i uh i endearingly call the gif god which that's gif for those of you at home who don't know what a gif is uh they are the uh little animated uh videos that people post um what's the twitter strategy what's going on there yeah like um you know pomp is a he's a great speaker as mark is and they're both great writers it's uh i'm very envious of that i've i've worked

hard to try to speak clearly in my life and and convey messages as clearly as possible writing them down is a little more difficult twitter makes it really hard right to convey a message concisely uh without losing the essence of what you're trying to say on twitter it's an art it really is but even better than writing is a gif it's like the best thing ever i literally just have millions of options to convey my exact feelings in a gift you have a skill the my favorite thing that you do is uh when the haters come out and they and they they always self-select they make it very obvious that they are uh are upset uh you use the clams where did this come from so you send gifts clams i don't know i just love to like clams

salty clams that they're clammy just chattering clams man that's just uh i love it and unlike mark how did you even notice that when you when you hit somebody with six clam gifts in a row i'm like what is he doing and then i'm like oh he's calling you clam he's calling you salty i got it that's it uh but you don't block anybody you don't mute anybody mark and i are both now in the camp of uh block early and often and just stop the madness but you engage with them all Yeah, you know, those that are persistent and stable, they get the clam. But I really tapped into something, a nuance that I missed when I was younger, when I was your age. When I dropped out of Yale and started FastMed, you know, I was working for an orthopedic surgical practice because that was really my training. I was doing that nights and weekends to raise money to make all this work. and i had a really dear friend there his name was eric carlson he was a 39 year old orthopedic surgeon and uh recently married had a like a two-year-old daughter um and we played golf

together he was like just a great guy and he put a shotgun in his mouth and blew himself away on his 40th birthday and the suicide letter said he didn't have any friends essentially and I was like what like like I was hurt by that but I also really started to think man I'm a selfish bastard like I didn't recognize that this guy needed me in some way I wasn't paying attention I'm always focused on me me me me me and I know that a lot of times that impulsive move the suicide move can be circumvented by a moment of question or some person reaching out or doing something. Um, that's kind of resonated with me at this point in my life. So being a human, when someone's coming at me, I'm really just trying to find, are you just a jerk off

or is there something wrong? Cause a lot of these people are kids that they're listening to a lot of information their whole lives are focused on themselves you know so it's very easy to get sucked into depression all this stuff on social media big time people are living their best life but 99 of it is nonsense so for me um before you get the clam you're gonna get a moment of humanity and all i'm doing is uh it's so easy i'm not gonna block you but i am gonna treat you like a human the uh until you get the sauce the uh contrast between the humanity and the clam is uh amazing special if you get clammed up people are gonna go find the clam gift now they're like ah that's what he's been there's a bunch of them man i know there are a lot of times somebody will

troll me i'll block them and next thing i know i'm getting notifications that you're sending clam gifts which i appreciate i try to defend you guys you and mark deserve it um all right one of the ideas that uh that you have uh i think it's pretty cool is this idea around quantum computing um and i think that quantum computing a lot of times gets uh associated with uh bitcoin and blockchains and you know you'll see the people on twitter who literally say uh when quantum computing comes this is all over, right? You have a very interesting view of, we already have quantum computing. Maybe describe a little about what you mean by that. Yeah. So a long time ago, I was very, very interested in quantum physics. So if you've studied quantum physics, it lays into

Buddhism and the philosophies around there. So any of these unmeasurable or very difficult things to measure were really interesting to me. Quantum computing, some would say exists today, and it exists in the form of quantum biology. So biologic processes that are at such a small level, it's like if you typed a zero on a page, so you have the type set and size of a typical zero if you fit the whole united states in that zero that's the level that i'm talking about uh of size um these things happen like i i believe and through kind of my own studies that um that quantum biology um and the the processes that are going on at that level um are realer than people think. So quantum computing is probably not fiction, but, uh, something that

is there. Um, and that computer will look like some type of chemical soup versus its form factor that you see today. There are amazing scientific discoveries that are happening now in the last two decades that are absolutely incredible um there are some cool books um life on the edge uh you got to check out that book what's that one about uh it's it's a book on quantum biology so essentially the the um uh the beginning of the book talks about the migratory patterns of a European robin, which lots of animals migrate. But what is so interesting about the migratory pattern of the European robin is that it's not driven by sight or smell or a repetitive migration. These birds can sense the magnetic fields of the earth.

now for something to chemically engage or biologically engage with a magnetic field isn't necessarily uncommon that's just an mri right what i do with an mri is i hit you with a magnet i grab onto molecules i orient them in a way and then i drop that magnetic field and it takes an amazing picture so we know how this stuff kind of works right again that an mri is quantum mechanics or quantum machine it's it's an example of it well these birds can actually see the magnetic field um which is crazy right now i'm talking about being able to see magnetic fields they think it's coming through like blue light spectrum uh photons uh in their eyes rods and uh and cones can uh can actually see that and um i can't remember the scientists who identified

it but this is all recent stuff um i think it's absolutely amazing you know and it's a part of the uh the thing that's always been inspiring uh to me and why i'm into robotics it's um uh we have those same kind of mechanisms and machines that are going on in our body right now again just the the fact of us seeing pump is is miraculous right when you step back and you think lights going into my eye it's there's an explosion of chemicals that are engaging my optic nerve that optic nerve is transmitting an electric signal into my brain and then it's mashing up into chemicals again right the most powerful computer ever human brain completely agree and it's one of these things where um i actually believe a lot of technologists could benefit greatly from better

understanding uh the science of a lot of this stuff right if um you really look at even just something simple like uh the social platforms that we have the way that information is consumed uh the way that information is passed through societies etc and if you overlap that with the scientific understanding of a brain how a brain consumes information how it processes it uh what side of the brain how does it engage images versus not images right when you really start to look at The, the science behind this stuff, um, it's powerful information. Uh, it can be used for good or bad, right? So if I really understand how to, uh, make an image or a statement resonate inside of

your brain, cause I understand the science of what goes on, uh, and somebody else doesn't, I actually have an advantage to, uh, bend the way that you think, right. And influence the way that you think. And so I think that, um, a lot of folks are naive and that we don't understand that stuff, but they don't take the time to really learn because the people who do have that significant advantage. Yeah, I mean, we've had to face this as investors and as humans on this planet. You and I in particular, you know, we invested in a company that was one of the world's first to make a complete glass representation down to the neuron of a brain, mammalian brain. Their pursuit is, one, for better imaging techniques.

But really, what they want to do is preserve grandma after she passes away and connect her brain to a computer and store her memories and harness the computing capacity of a brain. Now, you pitch that to someone in a Starbucks, 90% of people are going to have an ethical issue with that. The other 9% are going to say, is this going to be used for evil, I would think. uh and then some will be compelled to continue to develop the science you know would you go and get neural link pump would you have that implanted uh uh capability so i i am convinced that uh humanity will all have implants at some point um i think that it's less of a question of like hey if it was fully functioning you know a medical device that was tested and approved and safe and all that i think people are all you know either lying or tricking themselves as they say

they wouldn't go get it right because isn't it just the next level biometric device right you are you wearing an apple watch yeah yeah so you're monitoring some what's the difference between it being on my wrist and under my skin well i would say it'd be more advantageous for to be implanted and if i didn't have to charge it you don't have to do anything through all this stuff right well how about if you could recall the internet all that's on the internet just by thinking about it not wearing some device but actually engaging it so we don't have to remember or what scientist yeah what do you think an airpod's doing right it's getting closer and closer to an embeddable device and if you didn't have to put headphones in and take them out

it would essentially be the experience of you know when somebody has like a little earpiece in and they're able to hear talking whether it's on television or at a show or whatever that you're able to process information in a different form factor and a different mechanism that's super super powerful but i think the bigger question is not will you do it it's what is the milestone that needs to be hit until you and i say okay i'm ready to do this and then what is the milestone that needs to be hit for the mainstream audience to say okay now this is a consumer you know device just like getting glasses is a medical uh situation okay now we're all going to go get implants right or i'm going to do it to my kid right and do that i think that those are

the ethical dilemmas that i'm struggling with today like you know one of the things that's most intriguing to me recently is genomics and and blockchain right so genomics and blockchain there's a bunch of companies nebula uh one of them and the reason i bring that up yeah there's right this guy church is a savage in the space who is behind that but you know i worry about protected health care information like how do you protect not just my what i did the last time i to a doctor but my genetic information like how do you how do you really protect that well and what you're highlighting right i think is today uh the world really revolves on passwords right so how do i permission myself or others into all kinds of different software and um even physical

locations right it's passwords now yeah i may type a password into my computer i may punch in a you a four digit code to get in a door, uh, to access my money, right? All this, there's pins and passwords. Basically we are moving towards a biometric type situation where, um, the recognition of my face, the recognition of my voice, the recognition of my fingertips, right? Um, or my fingerprints, that stuff is much more secure than the passwords. maybe unless it gets stolen right or ai gets so good yeah it's easy to basically manipulate it and so i think that we're headed towards a world where most likely the most secure information

in order to unlock things is going to be some sort of genetic uh predisposition uh information you know something around those genetics uh there's a lot of work to be done on identifying what that stuff is how it works how do you surface it how do you keep it secure all that kind of stuff but if all of a sudden genetics goes from like a hey you know do a 23 and me and i can tell you where what countries your ancestors come from to uh you can access your money with those that genetic code and that genetic information becomes a lot more important uh and i don't think that people are kind of looking around the corner and realizing how important it can become over time Have you ever participated in sharing your DNA with anyone?

No. See, I won't do it either. I mean, I'm sure it's out there somewhere, but I just won't do it for that reason. It's like the ultimate identifier. Like you can go through a multi-stage, multi-factorial biometric screen, eyes, fingerprint, facial recognition, voice tone, intonation, but the DNA is probably the only way to do it, right? That's the foolproof way. But can you copy someone's DNA?

Well, and for me, so I can't say I had some master plan as to why I didn't do the DNA stuff. I'm just cheap, right? It's like 300 bucks, and I'm not paying 300, but I don't care where my ancestors came from. I'm Italian. I've been Italian my whole life. I was going to say. If I find out anything different, I'm going to be mad. So that was really why I didn't do it at first.

But eventually when I started to hear the stories of, hey, look, is this DNA information being sold to companies? Is it being given and processed in other countries? I mean, look what happened recently where one of those companies that does like Ancestry, I think it may be called Living Tree or something, they turned over their files to the FBI, who then went through it looking for criminals. I don't, regardless of whether you're a criminal or not, I don't think that's why those people shared their DNA with that company. Yeah. Well, and it brings a bigger question, right, is not only what companies get your DNA information, but what information should these companies have on you at all? Right. And it's the genetic data is kind of the most sensitive, probably the most valuable, because it is impossible to replicate for you. Right. And the kind of genetic signature, if you will. but there's other information right that we give very easily right and i continue to just think just your location data right just giving that to services because it makes it more convenient has ramifications that i recently saw uh somebody was tracked down um so i don't remember exactly

how it works but basically uh there's a shadow gps essentially on your cell phone the cell phone company has that information it's kind of like the last tower you ping type thing they sell that data um i believe it's anonymized but they sell that data other companies there's a woman who is suing one of the uh i think it's a cell phone company because somebody bought the data and was able to track her down or use it to locate her supposed to be anonymized supposed to be all stuff all she did was have a cell phone right she's not thinking about can somebody who's a bad actor you I don't remember all the details, but by getting this cell phone, I didn't know that I was going to put myself in physical safety risk. But that's what she did, right?

And it's pretty scary when you start to think of all the data that you generate that we just hand over to other companies because we don't even realize it. Yeah, I don't think that the cell phone companies understood the level of security that they really needed to put in place when they did what they did, which is they have all your financial data. They have all of your demographic information. And then the cell phone is essentially your mobile wallet. At that point, it's such a point vector of attack, like an issue that you have to resolve. You almost have to go through a regression of technology back to analog to protect yourself. Flip phone, pager, smartphone needs to be airlocked or air gapped. and you and i you know you know that's what i kind of do the airplane mode and part of it too

is uh what do you answer your phone if it's a number i don't know no never never never and part of it's robocalling some of it's because i don't want to deal with it never just unless i unless it comes up as someone that i know i never answer the phone yeah same and i don't have a voicemail set up no voicemail right it's just look if you need me you'll figure it out uh the The other thing, too, is as these devices become more and more embeddable or get closer to being embedded, I think a lot about what happens when the digital wallet is embedded in our body, right? Or you've got some sort of embeddable in your brain, and there is that security component of, well, could it get hacked, right? And I remember as a kid, I wish I remembered the movie, but there's a movie and the vice president has a pacemaker. And basically, you know, the plot is somebody gets into the office and they go and they find the box that the pacemaker came out of and they get the serial number.

Somebody hacks the pacemaker and they basically kill the vice president. Right. You know, that that hack has happened, but not with pacemakers. It was with insulin pumps. Really? You should read about that there. They've hacked insulin pumps. And as you can imagine, that can just start jacking up the insulin that's injected.

I don't know what they did, but I know that there was a vulnerability in insulin pumps for hacks. So these are really relevant discussions. Yeah, and it's scary. Super scary, right? You know, and I always go to, like, forget yourself. Like, what if your child, right, or your father or your mother or somebody you love, that happens to them, right? Because to yourself, you're kind of like, look, you know, you have the bias of believing that it won't happen to you, right? But it's what if it happens to somebody that you know, and all of a sudden the insulin just gets jacked up and ends up, you know, killing them?

No, it's crazy. And it's not acceptable. So we have to come up with solutions to this stuff. We have to come up with solutions. For sure. One of the last things I want to talk about is universal health care because you've got this deep background in health care and understand what I would consider more kind of boots on the ground view of how health care in America works today. I will caveat the question with I was listening to Joe Rogan's recent podcast with Bernie Sanders, right? And admittedly, my view of a lot of the rhetoric and kind of the ideas was not super positive, right, from what he did.

But in listening to it, it was very interesting to hear him talk about U.S. healthcare versus Canadian healthcare, the cost, the quality, who pays the cost, et cetera. And it reminded me a lot of the universal healthcare conversation here in the United States. what what's kind of your take on the u.s health care system is things like universal health care possible uh are they net benefit net negative how do we compare to other countries just kind of like how do you think about this like on a more structural um you know kind of platform for u.s health care yeah so i'll start the the kind of discussion that i think health care is a right human right not a privilege i'm also going to say that in the united states we actually do a fantastic job of providing health care to people and i will always defend my position by doing this

if you feel right now you're having some type of medical issue emergency what have you if you call 9-1-1 someone will come and provide you with the basis basic health care they will triage you And potentially transport you to a U.S. emergency department where they're obligated to provide you treatment without proving a source of pay. So right there, you're so far ahead of most countries that don't have a universal health care system. All right. On top of that, the United States really expedites procedures like we're super good at getting things done. If you need an MRI, you can pretty much get an MRI. Whereas if you travel around the world, it becomes less obvious, less available.

Canada, you know, you're going to be in a queue. In Europe, you're in a queue. Procedures, joint replacement, it's not going to happen. You're going to be put in a queue. In the United States, you're going to get access to it. But you're going to need health insurance for that. um so my the my general feeling is health care is a right not a privilege can we do universal health care we've got a really good system in place now it could be made better um we need to

figure out a way to not exclude people with pre-existing conditions that is just a non-star you've got to be able to provide an insurance program for everyone that being said uh the healthy of us have to pay, you know? So I'm not one that is afraid to pay taxes. And I would go so far as to say, put a healthcare tax in place. I'm okay with that. And provide some basic level of healthcare to every US citizen. I don't think that's undoable. I don't think that's undoable. Do you think that the quality of care that is provided today is too expensive? No, it's fraught with too many errors. Okay, so there's a tremendous amount of wasted dollars in health care due to medical errors.

And the number is extraordinary. I don't want to misquote it. It's greater than 20%. It may be 30, 40% of U.S. health care dollars are spent on issues, fraud, mistakes, medical mismanagement. It's just a mess, Pomp. When I started in health care, we were working with paper systems. It moved on to something called a T chart, which was essentially a homunculus man where we pulled a piece of paper that was specific to the disease process in the area of the disease. And now we have electronic medical records, patient portals, integrated healthcare systems, bidirectional interfaces around technology, but it's still a mess because one hospital system can't talk to the next. One private physician who's outside of that healthcare organism can't communicate with it.

So they're still faxing paper around. So there's, I mean, that's what we're dealing with today. So the potential of blockchain technology enhancing this health care system and decreasing fraud, decreasing pharmaceutical issues, decreasing miscommunication of medical errors could be a boom for health care. And find dollars that were already in the system. Use them appropriately. And do you feel like when you say errors, is that like fraudulent stuff where people are basically lying and there's money changing hands, etc.? Or is that more a structural issue where one of the things that Bernie Sanders talked about in the podcast that I did not know is a lot of the drug companies are able to manipulate the prices and rise prices without competition and also without warning, right? So today you can go and you can buy a drug and come back three weeks later.

It's worse than that. It's worse than that. I wish I could sit down with Bernie and really tell him about what PBMs do. So when you go to the pharmacy and you present your insurance card for a certain drug, whether it's brand or generic, if it's a brand name drug, there are tiers, tier one, two, three, four, et cetera. That PBM was supposed to find you the lowest cost for that drug. It's not. it actually does the reverse it gives that particular retail pharmacy the highest price that they can bill the insurance company for for the drug um for example i picked up a prescription

recently for uh for something and the price of it because it was out it was outside of my insurance was three hundred dollars the the pharmacy tech goes hold on a second i think i have a coupon for that and she goes yeah we do uh 30 bucks and i go okay stop you know that's that's amazing i have to get this every month you're telling me you just took a prescription i have to pay 30 300 a month for down to 30 what is this it's a program called good rx um i think that's the name of it good rx it's essentially someone very smart went into the pbm and helps you find the correct lowest price for that particular drug and they print it out as a coupon it's a 90 discount simply because somebody actually looked at the right price the price that didn't it wasn't incentivized in the

wrong way profit over health care profit over integrity profit over morality profit over everything good about health care. No, it's about profit. On top of that, CVS can sell liquor and candy and bullshit. You know, well, the regular doctor or me that was competing against retail pharmacies that had urgent cares inside of them, I don't sell Kit Kats. How can you even do that? Well, it goes to this idea of-

Oh, and they used to sell cigarettes, too. Do they sell Juul? Probably. Should we talk about Juul? Nah. Are you sure? Ken, if you want. So we looked at the Juul investment and we passed.

Jason is two for two on passing on multi-billion dollar companies that are in and around health care and science, both of which ended up having issues. We'll start with the first one, which is Theranos. Maybe tell that story real quick. Yeah, so this is 2011-2012. Blue Cross Blue Shield actually asked me to do diligence on Theranos. Flew out, met with, I think his name is Balaji. It was the COO who was eventually dating Elizabeth, which I didn't know at the time. uh went through the full uh full business i was intrigued with her claims that they could do 2000 laboratory tests from a finger stick you know i've been practicing medicine for a long time and you know this was one of two things uh uh either a miracle invention where she had a box that could do this off a finger stick or they were um they were using mass spectrophotometry

or gas chromatography, there had to be some real science behind it to do this. And I didn't think you could get the results from a finger stick. So I flew out to the West Coast to meet with them, and they wouldn't show me the technology. I mean, it was that simple, Pomp. Again, it's what I said to you before. I have to touch things, see them, interface with them. If you want me to invest in a jacket company, well, get me the jacket. Let's see what this thing looks like. They wouldn't show it to me. And let me tell you, there were some heavy hitters that already invested at that point i mean you had uh just a bunch of them major people on their board etc and elizabeth was a very compelling uh a very compelling and convincing young woman um i went

back we passed on the investment and then the second is uh is jewel and when we looked at that um it was uh almost an immediate these guys are going to get in trouble with regulators you can't sell this to kids yeah i looked at the packaging you know when you're talking about flavored tobacco uh you know it just reminded me of when i was a kid in queens you know i'd go to the corner store and you'd buy like candy cigarettes i mean just the fact of me saying you could buy candy cigarettes it's ridiculous candy cigarettes come on you can't do that and i mean they spanked the the cigarette companies hard yep i mean they're they're crushing them out of business right now with golden leaf etc the penalties are extraordinary uh jewel it will if not has

face the same demise i mean uh it's just and i i don't know it's just not the right thing yeah absolutely well and it brings me to this point of uh holistic health care right where if you really look at um i i do it all the time i i've got a bunch of friends now that are having kids and they're kind of you know i'll say newborn to five maybe some we have six seven year olds right that that i'm close with and you see the photos and their kids are you know they're not grossly obese but they're not skinny right and there's a couple of these photos you look at you're like actually that kid every time i see a picture of him got ice cream in his hand right or he's got you know candy or he's got something on his mouth that's green and blue and red and doesn't look

like natural food right and you kind of start to realize like would we better off simply going to your point of like maybe we don't sell the candy and all this other stuff in the same place where we sell the medicine to then cure the stuff that came from the candy right would we better off teaching people from a very young age that look sugar can absolutely ravage your health over a long period of time right um the things that you put in your body are important and they have you know an impact and and not even just saying like hey don't eat candy but actually explaining this is what is scientifically happening in your body when you eat this right and could we educate people into being healthier um because frankly i never got any of that education right in the

traditional schooling system you you just what's two plus two right how do you write and how do you do this but but never anything that actually you know could have a massive impact on on a national scale if everyone was educated about things we were putting in our bodies Yeah, I think I have the most hope that I ever have around this call for transparency with your generation. You've had access to more information than any person that's ever walked the planet. And I think you all have figured out some legacy problems that my generation and those before didn't understand.

You're marrying differently. You're not getting divorced as frequently. I think you will be a healthier population. I think you're incredibly ambitious and you're incredibly smart and have created amazing businesses. But this is about transparency. And there's some really cool science out there now about adding energy to food and bioavailability. I mean, at another time, I'd love to talk about that. Um, if you charge or reorient molecules, uh, correctly, they become more bioavailable and

our food has been so processed and so denatured that you just don't get the power that it used to give you when you eat it. If you can replace that power, uh, which I think there are technologies that can do that. Now we're kind of back in the quantum science, quantum biology world. Um, things change, you know, the effectiveness of drugs. You can decrease the dosage, increase the bioavailability. You can do that with food. You can do that with a number of things.

So I think it's an amazing time to be alive. You've said that a number of times. I think Bitcoin is real. And I think some of the issues that we're facing right now as a population on this planet are real. And, you know, I hope we take them seriously. the uh before i do the rapid fire many don't know but uh your favorite music group wu-tang clan where uh where the obsession come from uh wu-tang yeah yeah no thanks for finally giving a shout out to wu-tang clan um i'm a i'm a much more nwa over no i love it man no wu-tang

clan so uh coming out of high school in florida we were listening to like miami base so um i got to my freshman year at Methodist my roommate was a soccer player from Edison New Jersey and he literally had like Das FX Onyx and Wu-Tang Clan I'd never heard it before and so um as soon as I heard it was it was over like Method Man Raekwon the Chef Ghostface Killer you know it was just too much man and and that's 25 years crazy 25 years if you get a chance to watch the Showtime there's four episodes of I think it's of Mikes and Men

it really is great it's fantastic it's all about Wu-Tang it's about Wu-Tang Clan and they're just the way they approach music and they're still relevant today I mean I just heard a new Wu-Tang song yesterday with the GZA and some new relevant guys

I mean it's incredible it's crazy it's crazy it's absolutely crazy so yeah Wu-Tang um for the rapid fire most important company in crypto or bitcoin the most important company in crypto and bitcoin i've answered that before it's bitcoin it's bitcoin what's the one regulation you would change or improve if you could man i'd get rid of uh qualified purchaser accredited investor i i absolutely hate it i just think it's wrong i think it's wrong why i mean look i'm doing this stuff today this whole fund business investing and working to help my

friends and uh and people who believe in this thesis to gain access into venture and private equity because their only options were to have a job to become self-employed to make you know to become a business owner or to potentially make enough money to invest and i think those are all okay but they're not the same as the returns that these venture guys are getting and i couldn't get access to to that you know now i can but you you get there by being successful i don't think that's fair i think anyone should have the chance to look across the room and say you know what i think i think lyft is a good investment like i like using it i'd like to own that company and they should be allowed to buy that you know they should be able to buy it on the pre-ipo should have access

to it well well and they can own it in the public market only after the largest returns have already been captured yeah of all the value has been extracted prior to it going into the public market and you're seeing that now especially as companies stay private later stay private yeah you're seeing that now so um it's just not fair yeah it's not fair i change that what's the most controversial thing you'll say in crypto or bitcoin so when people hear it they will disagree with you most controversial thing that i say in crypto that people disagree with me yeah like what's the most controversial thought you have hmm yeah uh i don't know i don't like a bitcoin sv guy no not at all not at all my most controversial thought yeah i don't i don't know

if i have um a real controversial position in bitcoin you know the the thing that happens to us unfortunately is we're kind of like in this micro environment where it's a big world for us like so you know i'm always sorting out everything but it's really small still you know it's really small you know it the most controversial thing for me is probably where i think it's going you know and i i try to tell people this is one of those moments that you should you should go all in on and i think that's what's controversial they just don't see it most important book you've ever read um you know it's probably a this is a great question actually this is a great question um it's probably a culmination of a number of books so when i was a little kid and i don't

even know what the title of these books are pomp but they were books that while you read them you could be on like page 30 and it would give you a choice oh man that choose your own adventure Yeah, it would say like, if you choose A, go to page 50. If you choose B, I loved it. It was like I could change the scope. I could change the path of what was happening. So I used to read those books all the time. And then it's like The Road Less Traveled,

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I think it's like Covey and Peck. And those books really kind of framed my perspective. Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Yeah, I love all that stuff. aliens definitely i uh aliens in the moon yeah well let's like aliens i think are totally there like i mean if we spent more time together you'd understand like my whole feelings about life like the the only reason like one of the things that we haven't been able to do

is make life from rocks but life is rocks right the same parts and components that are in a rock our life we just haven't figured out what drives that life force right but you have things like organelles in your body right now that are bacteria that weren't parts of you like a mitochondria a mitochondria has its own shit like it's its own powerhouse it's got its own kind of dna it's it's a bacteria but it's inside your cells so you've you've brought that in so it can make you live and be the person you are uh so aliens don't look like i think we think they look but they're everywhere so they're here they're here on the planet they're everywhere they're in every every part of the universe you know and when the fourth nation india lands their rover on the moon

on september 7th you know i'll i hope they find life you know i'm so excited for them that that they're doing that um it's coming up it's september 7th you know india that's pretty awesome yeah i think they may be in orbit around the moon right now uh but it's it's amazing i you know do you think it's a thing where there's life on other planets and out in the solar system and we either uh haven't seen it yet uh or we don't have the tools to actually identify it Or do you think it's something where we have the tools and we're looking, but it's probably not in the solar system, it's in a different solar system? Yeah, I think it's beyond our technology at this point. I think we are still struggling with space travel.

I mean, I think this, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought this was ridiculous. The spaceship that's going from India to the moon, it's taking 20 days for them to get there. And I think that's right. But in 1969, when the U.S. landed on the moon with people, it took four days. Allegedly. Four days. I don't understand why we were able to do it so much more rapidly and why we were able to land on the moon with humans with very limited technology

as compared to India launching today and not putting a person on the moon. They're literally going into a low orbit and landing, I think, a rover on the moon. You know, I don't think that our instrumentation is subtle enough to pick up life. Maybe that, like, life in the way you're asking me the question. But I think we found water, and I think bacteria are everywhere. Area 51, you think there's anything there? yeah definitely but i would not storm it i think that is just a mistake like please don't do that i mean i mean the guy who's dressed like a wizard he's amazing but he's gonna get a clam uh gif

yeah don't do that but yeah what do you think's there um i think there's advanced propulsion i mean when you think about uh you served in uh which war iraq iraq uh what what year 2008 2009 right so the first gulf war uh that's when we put stealth technology out that technology was from 1970 we we showed it in gulf one that's when we first showed the technology at 20 something years later stealth technology right stealth bomber stealth fighter what have you um there is absolutely no way we don't have aircraft that can go up down left and right using different types of propulsion systems magnetics etc um so you know that's what's out in those testing grounds those are those are uh advanced warfare technology um uh i don't know if there are aliens there so

well or the thing that i think they're spacecraft that that are there that may have crashed that nobody needs to see yeah i mean look there's also there are human pilots on that yeah and to me the thing that uh is so interesting is everyone is focused on the warfare everyone is focused on the uh aliens and kind of all of these like frankly things that are really cool to think about right uh but what about like um you know i don't know uh crisper technology and genetic editing and things that it's not hey i can fly something over your country right i'm talking about changing the human population at birth in a way that uh could be very drastic and create an inflection point either positive or negative where's that research happening

yeah it it is happening nanotechnology embeddables these like shrink you down to some type of device and embed that it's all here it's all here um you know i think it was meltem that was watching the matrix recently and saying like how forward thinking and powerful that movie is because it really is i would challenge you to watch the matrix again in this series um that stuff is is more real than it's not they nailed it yeah definitely all right coming up on two and a half hours what one question do you have for me i want to ask the real one so no no i'm gonna ask no i'm gonna ask so first i have two questions i have two questions what did you might have we might have to cut off the podcast one what did you get polina for her birthday uh i haven't

given it to her yet so i'll wait till uh till i give it to her all right i'm gonna let you out the hook we're recording this and i haven't gotten polina her gift yet so uh i i actually have no answer no it's just priorities man i like polina is super important i want her to be happy that's important person she appreciates you yeah i want to be invited to the wedding she she's also going to now tell me oh it's so nice of jason to talk about me on the podcast so perfect oh polina she's sharp she's sharp all right you're a lucky guy i appreciate it i'll make sure that she knows that she'll probably listen to this twice now and and cut up the audio and then play it back for me to remind me at times yeah she's uh she's something else man all right great great uh

great podcast um jason wants to ask when i'm getting married that's his big question that's right that's right i just want to go to the wedding i think it'd be fun uh so i i've actually never talked about this on here but i'll say uh i don't believe in big weddings i don't think that that's like a thing doesn't have to be big man i just want to be there i kind of think that when i get married i might just get married with nobody there uh why not i did okay so i just want to be like you perfect i mean i did my wife and i got married in kawaii it was just her and i yeah would you do it again yeah right without anybody no hassle as i'm saying no hassle no pressures yeah there's no anything it's just you're there with the person that it's all it's

between you and them that was nice we had a real ceremony and everything but it was just it was just to us why not i just want to be there man we'll facetime you and we're gonna do it from mars oh my gosh all right listen i appreciate coming and doing this uh i think people will uh will enjoy it so uh thanks so much for everyone to uh to listen to this i know it's a long one but uh hopefully you enjoyed it yeah thanks very much hey everyone pop here if you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple spotify and other podcast charts please do us a favor and rate review and subscribe to review simply go to the Off The Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill

those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off The Chain.