The Pomp Podcast - Michael Dunworth, CEO of Wyre: How Blockchain is Transforming Cross-Border Payments

Episode Date: January 10, 2020

Michael Dunworth is the CEO of Wyre, a company focus on connecting crypto companies to the fiat world. In this conversation, Michael Dunworth and Anthony Pompliano discuss rugby, why nerds go to Silicon Valley, how to build compelling products, and how Wyre is building the essential infrastructure for fiat on and off-ramps. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way. -----If you enjoyed this episode and want to stay updated on everything Bitcoin, blockchain, and crypto. Check out Off The Chain newsletter by visiting offthechain.substack.com and join 35,000+ other investors currently subscribed to my daily investor letter.

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. Michael Dunworth is the co-founder of Wire, a company focused on connecting crypto companies to the fiat world. We had a great conversation in this episode about rugby, why nerds go to Silicon Valley, how to build compelling products, and how Wire is building the essential infrastructure for fiat on and off frames. I really enjoyed this one, so I hope you do as well. Before we get started, though, let's take a look at the advertisers for this episode. First up is eToro. They're a longtime sponsor of Off The Chain podcast. The company's probably the most underrated in all of crypto. They got started in Israel and quickly built a massive business offering stocks, commodities, traditional currencies, and cryptocurrencies to users around the world outside the U.S.

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Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Michael here. He came all the way to New York City on a day where it's about 18 degrees outside. So thanks for coming to do this. Yeah, no worries. Still defrosting, but thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

And as you can hear in his voice, he is not used to the cold. So we're going to get through this. But let's start with time in Australia, right? So born and raised there? Yep. Sydney, Australia. Got it. What's that like? Fantastic. Beaches, not minus eight degrees Celsius. Yeah, it's beautiful. People are chilled very uh easygoing sunny happy yeah yeah and uh growing up um you play sports like what was kind of the the life experience in australia as you grew up yeah you i mean rugby and cricket basically it's all about it uh i sucked at both and i played both i was in the f's for rugby i

went to like a full-on rugby nursery so to speak like that would produce it was renowned for rugby and stuff like that um but i had no contribution to that at all so what is a rugby nursery oh it's like a breeding ground for like top tier talent basically oh really yeah it's like a prep school yeah exactly it's like a it's a school it's you know uh all catholic boys school basically and um you would go there you get shown like how to play rugby really well i mean it's not a rugby school but they're renowned for producing fantastic rugby players so got it and growing up uh so rugby and cricket both are not very big in the united states obviously we have uh you know baseball and uh football and things like that yep um is like every kid's dream to be a professional

rugby player yep exactly so i mean most of the time you grow up sort of like oh i want to you know i think it's changed a little bit now because rugby's sort of got a bit stagnant in like you it's a boring game compared to other games but um uh most people grow up wanting to be a wallaby like that's the you know the australian wallabies is like the term for our national rugby team oh got it so like that is the team if you can get on the national australian rugby team you are like a god in australia basically yeah got it yeah um and and fun fact actually the 5-8 which is a position like let's say quarterback uh the 5-8 for the u.s in the world cup is australian really yeah or he was actually like you know two world cups ago one world cup ago yeah got it my carcass and

and i guess what's interesting about this is uh things like rugby cricket etc uh it takes a lot of time right is what i understand in terms of it's not just like uh hey do you have the skills but like the physicality specifically at rugby is very similar to uh american football without where you yeah where you've got to work out a lot and it's speed it's power it's all this stuff uh and i played american football you know all the way through college i don't understand how these dudes are playing without pads on it's nuts okay so like this is the thing and i feel like a lot of people have analyzed this a bunch but when you're playing with pads i feel like that could actually be more just i'm just gonna throw everything at this person right because they're

got pads on so you're going to be more confident to you know there's going to be less repercussions but if i know that i'm going to break my collarbone like driving it into your you know your hip then i'm going to be more strategic in how i'm going to tackle you or something like that oh so you're making the argument that because there's no pads it actually might be safer i would actually say so yeah wow huh i never thought of it that way neither did i until i watched someone that was like smart and like talking about confessions and stuff and he was like actually we did the research and it's like i mean but like nfl is gnarly like people are you know six eight they run a hundred meter dash and you know 11 flat or something it is mental uh i uh i just imagine

somebody like a sean taylor uh who you probably don't know who that is but he's uh he was basically um he played safety so on defense uh in american football uh he's the farthest guy back which means that anything that happens in front of them basically he can run forward and just level them right and so uh he was notorious for uh pretty much using almost no uh technical form in tactic he just would uh we just called torpedo move right basically some guys running across the middle i'm gonna launch myself as hard as i can into this person and hope that i dislodge the human from the ball you know he was really good at it that was um i don't know if it was jared so jared hayne for he was hayne playing or hayne train or whatever he was an australian uh

you know nf nrl player and that's like rugby it's a different code of rugby so it's rugby league rugby union he came over to play with the 49ers actually oh wow that was like four years ago i think uh maybe five and he was boiling hot like buzz everywhere everyone's like oh my god this dude is gonna tear it up he crushed it in like i think like qualifying or preliminary like the pre-season stuff yeah and i don't actually know what happened in the he i think he was a rugby player who came to play american football yes that's right and he tore it up in the pre-season stuff and then i think you know come like the actual season he just couldn't uh couldn't hold up basically yeah yeah it's physical man dude you guys are crazy yeah um all right so how do you go

from uh rugby nursery to uh rugby yeah to uh you came to san francisco in what 2013 yeah what was the uh the impetus for uh for crossing over that massive ocean to uh come to the tech capital of the world okay so the easiest like the too long didn't read is actors go to hollywood nerds go to san francisco that's kind of the that's probably fair yeah so you know you like you you pack up your bags a one-way trip and all that kind of stuff um yeah i just wanted like i was like well i'm young enough i'm you know the narrative hasn't kicked in yet um and by narrative i mean you know you get the house the family car mortgage blah blah blah and then life's not life's done but sort of the opportunity to take chances is you know dwindling uh exponentially from there so

um i was working in finance and i did a startup in uh in australia uh on the side so it's sort of like you work in you know finance and that was like 7 a.m till 7 p.m and then you know you'd hustle after that after hours or you do like business development in your lunch break and stuff and um ended up selling that to a not like exiting like a you know bazillion dollars but we made money on it um and that was like a oh fuck that's awesome i'm sorry for swearing by the way you're absolutely allowed to swear all right like just get it out there um but you know like once i did that i was like oh my god that's awesome but the problem is like australia is small in california by population so like if you've really got an itch to scratch like i want to build something

and make people's lives better like you may as well start with your you know best foot forward so you got to roll the dice and you go to the place that has the highest probability of success and that's you know at the time san francisco i feel like that will change a lot with distributed teams and you know things like that um but yeah for me that was a no-brainer um got it and so when you get to san francisco you have like a plan or was it just let me get there and i'll figure it out once i get there so i did go with a plan and it was like i i'd had sort of the next idea that i was working on and had like um you know friends that were supporting me uh with this idea and so like you know that was sort of like hey i'll back you into the next idea um but i got

i got there and i realized like after grinding for like the first sort of three or four weeks like i was like the idea is to get rid of the idea and like i'm i'm limiting myself by coming here with pre like i don't know what i'm in for so i better just wipe the slate clean forget about what i thought i knew and start fresh and the first person i met or one of the first first people was the person on the bunk bed above me so bunk beds it was like 20 people this place was like it was an orphanage with wi-fi is the term i would give it basically like literally it was like 25 people in one just hallway it was like a hostel uh i wish or that'd be a friendly term it was a 26 year like some 26 year old that's paying the three thousand dollar a month rent

and he's subletting it out you know 20 people are making 20 grand a month literally those numbers yeah and and you get there and what's the the first person okay so i'll tell you about it so like i'm there coming over like oh cool silicon valley like it's where everything happens get there first person i tried to open the door to the place that i was staying at and the first person like ran out the door bumped i knocked my bag over and he's like oh i'm sorry i'm running to this meeting with andreessen horowitz and i was like whoa cool like i'm here like the only thing i read about is like hacker news and all this sort of stuff and like i was like wow i really am in the circle jerk now this is awesome yeah you know you get there's 20 people

on laptops all building shit and you're like holy shit all right this is cool it was like the show silicon valley like they could not have done a better job in depicting it um yeah the first person i met on the he moved on the top bunk bed above me was uh he's still my co-founder today so really yeah yawning that's amazing and so as um as you're kind of getting settled in and you're realizing hey this culture is pretty real and uh people here just want to build etc yeah what were you doing were you kind of looking for an idea or kind of what were you doing um yeah it's a good question um i came over with like pretense like i said i came over pretense and so i was working on that and it was sort of just eating away that that was not the right way to to do this journey

or like you know to follow up like to to execute on what i'd wanted to do which is try and build something cool i felt like i was doing myself a disservice so um you what was i doing i suppose just working away at it but more just soaking it in and i remember being so like uh really lonely because it was like you know you've one way tick ticketed yourself and like entrepreneur grinding is really fucking hard anyway and it's it's hard if you don't have people around you that are supporting you or invested mentally in what you're doing day to day and um and i remember like you know calling people calling my friends now like i was like you know i feel like i've made maybe a wrong decision and stuff like that and they were just like no just like soak it up and you know

worst case scenario three months goes by you have a bunch of fun you meet a bunch of new people and you've got an experience under your belt best case scenario you come back in 10 years with a really cool story and yeah i feel like it was it was a really hard time at the time yeah yeah and part of this i guess is um it feels like a lot of people go to silicon valley and they have a preconceived notion of what they want to do right like yes i'm gonna do x and i think one of the things I took away when I first got there. Um, and I think a lot of people do is a lot of what makes Silicon Valley so powerful and beautiful is that the people who get it are the people who realize, no, I'm going to run a bunch of experiments and I'm going to let the results

tell me where to go. Right. And that's a very, um, nuanced, but important difference where, uh, this belief that like, I'm going to implement my will on the world, uh, is probably not actually, nearly as accurate as hey i think the world's heading in this direction let me go run a bunch of tests and i'll take that feedback and then i'll kind of evaluate again you know run a bunch of tests rinse and repeat iterate it yeah and that kind of iterative experimenting type approach gets you much closer to the truth it gets you much closer to um you know the the ever elusive product market fit then uh let me go implement my will on the world and like i'm right they're wrong what idiots no i failed because everyone else is stupid they didn't understand yeah that

i think the key thing with that um is generally speaking like to be wrong at shit or to be wrong in general which is what you're sort of saying is someone was saying they're right and everyone else is wrong right um the reality is timing and being right is one of the same like that is the the chemistry for execution right um and a lot of that comes down to humility how good are you at being wrong how fast are you being wrong basically um because you want to be like especially in like obviously digital currencies and bitcoin you want to be wrong really really fucking quickly yeah it paces so fast it is um it's an entire uh kind of community of people who understand that that testing and iteration is really important uh and part of what i think has

um has really been seared into my brain from from living there and working there etc uh was this idea of we've got to be really good at designing the test so understanding what are we testing why are we testing it and how are we going to test it yep and then executing perfectly like one of the best pieces of uh of kind of um or one of the best things i took away from my time at Facebook was this idea of, uh, in order to run, um, successful tests, you need to do two things. You need to measure and you need to execute perfectly, right? And execute perfectly usually gets left out. But what ends up happening is if I run a test and I don't execute it perfectly, when I get the results, if it doesn't work, I'm left wondering, did this not work because

it actually is an invalid test? Like, like we should move on. It's a bad idea. Or did it not work because we didn't execute it perfectly and therefore now we're left and we gotta go run the test again of course and like this is one of the things so you know if like i suppose like just in in the premise of me moving to san francisco right and that is me saying i want to run the test for can i do something really really cool and build something that adds value to millions of people like i don't know i'm still on the journey but like we're figuring it out as we go right But that is me saying I don't want to leave any stone unturned so that if I'm 50 or whatever and the story goes by and I'm like, oh, I could have done that. Bullshit, you could have.

You didn't do it. But now there's no excuse. So if I don't do it, there was no excuse other than I couldn't get it done. But I tried and I know I absolutely tried with every single ounce of energy and opportunity that I could basically. Yep, for sure. And I guess multivariant testing. multivariate testing is just numbskull stuff you can never know what the contributing factor was if you've got 30 different things that you change for sure and so as you're kind of going through

this uh evolution and kind of soaking in silicon valley for all it's uh at the time in 2013 probably all its glory yeah um where do you eventually intersect with bitcoin blockchain crypto like what's the first time you you hear about it and kind of what was your reaction so i was already into it uh before i came over not not into it i was nowhere near into it i thought it was cool uh you know friends of mine um were like going in and bought some bought some together uh and i just like chucked in money at the time and yeah i think it was yeah that was 2012 or 2013 or something um yeah and so more aware of it than i was like i was like cool yeah sweet there's this thing i had no idea what it would do why it's good or anything like that i just had sort of like

yolo kind of thing um but yeah uh i'm trying to think uh yeah basically after that i was like okay cool when we came over here we were just sort of like uh when i came over here um i was sort of just intrigued by it because obviously it was going on a massive bull run right this is 2013 uh we just had silk road got closed i think it was in 2013 and that caused a bit of a you know kerfuffle and then they had i think you guys call it the c-span or whatever the live youtube stream where they were like yes coinbase is an msb but they can still operate and everyone's like bull run basically and then china goes mental and next thing you know it's a 1200 bitcoin but getting into it it was actually from like an actual product my co-founder and i were trying

to build a one-click checkout on the internet so you go shop on 30 websites you check out enter your payment details once and we were like oh fuck why don't we have bitcoin like bitcoin's kind of cool it's novel and like it could you know get some attention that might help drive awareness we did it and then overnight it was just like the top of bitcoin subreddit and they just did not stop supporting us really and we literally like three days later we're like uh fuck like close the doors this is a bitcoin like that's all we give a shit about now yeah and literally that was the start of it and and so it goes back to this idea though of like you were building a bunch of different things and all of a sudden the data was overwhelming hey there's something here

and you guys saying let's go focus there and kind of don't worry about anything else let's go where uh people are pulling us into you got to be data driven like yeah it's it's literally uh i don't know why you would never ever want to quantify your decisions if you have the opportunity to all you're going to do is you're looking for an excuse almost um when the excuse not to have an excuse is being shoved right in front of your face it's data data data like listen to it it will it's there to help you um yeah now it makes sense um and so once you guys start focusing on bitcoin and kind of this one check uh or one click payment you know how do you get from that whoa bitcoin is real and we should focus on it to wire today what's that journey look like uh so very iterative

basically so like the vision was always you know i we've always been the vision is we don't have a vision and that's like a very fair a fair statement to make because at the time it manages expectations so when you hire people if you hire really talented people when you say we're going to be the leading bitcoin checkout company and then we added you know let's say we added five different altcoins that's not going to sit well with someone that's got a league a lot of conviction who's a very talented developer that wants to work on bitcoin being you know as big as it can be and so you lose talent and talent retention becomes tricky when you have a vision so we've always said the space is too early to have a vision so we just iterated so started at the checkout and then we

thought well the next iteration if you're a checkout like a browser extension right um very similar to what lolly is uh lolly's really popular uh if we go the next iteration would be well brands we were saying we would have enough data to see who is shopping where we could go to amazon or go to czar or go to new egg me like integrate it natively it's worth it here's the dollar value that it's going to return to you guys if not the promotional value and uh so the next iteration was native merchant checkout so like a bit pay competitor and then as you build that uh you start realizing that spending only happens when people have made 500x roi in like 12 months so you're like all right cool what's next uh a less seasonal version of it is wallets

so people are still going to buy but in that market like 2014 2015 wallets weren't a sustainable business yet because the you know the ocean wasn't big enough now it is big like it's huge you've got bear market bull market if you are a brokerage service you're worried about the competitive market saturation more than you're worried about oh no it's crypto winter no one's coming outside to buy bitcoin or whatever um and so as you iterate on that uh yeah i don't know if that makes sense by the way no it does um and so i guess really as you're thinking through uh where do we go you guys have done a lot of stuff right so uh one of my favorite stories is this idea of the superhero laundry service uh explain what you guys did there and i think that'll help

illustrate you know your guys openness to just trying a bunch of different things and seeing what sticks yeah um yeah that's a good point so we did basically we had writer's block i suppose it's the equivalent like where you're sort of banging your head against the wall can't can't get past the next milestone so we stopped uh you know my co-founder and i we said what's the most non this thing we can do right now like the complete opposite of what we're doing and what we did was basically started a laundry hero like superhero laundry delivery service so you basically put in an order you say when you want us to pick it up we pick it up 5 a.m in the morning drop it off that night and you pick the super the superhero right so like superman batman superman

batman and spider-man i think it was uh and so our buddy this is so funny our buddy was like oh i shotgun batman and it we were like okay sweet everyone wants batman why the fuck would i want to get up at 4 30 in the morning to dress as batman and then like you know one week later he's like getting real tired of this shit guys and he's sitting there putting his batman outfit on um but yeah we did that and that was awesome because uh it was completely different got a lot of traction because when you show up as batman at 7 a.m and a you know a five-year-old answers the door ready to go to kindergarten that five-year-old is now your shill basically your internal referral loop uh amongst mom and dad to go you know why didn't batman come and pick it up

again and uh yeah it was lots of fun that's awesome and and really it sounds like you guys tried it hey it's got a little bit of traction but uh might not be the most scalable thing in the world to send people in costumes running around san francisco picking up laundry yeah we made we made a decision sort of like it would it would either go the direction of like oh is this going to become like lyft or uber where you open it up and you see different neighborhoods where it's like heroes and villains and you see little like hero and villain icons sort of like which one do you want to pick up your laundry kind of thing um but that would be sort of giving it a nudge and i felt like there's better things in the world to do than another laundry delivery service

which is you know catering to us lazy fortunate people that are being you know focused on convenience and not adding value for sure and so as you were building wire right and understanding that bitcoin itself i think a lot of the um kind of testing and and uh the open-mindedness to try new things it seems like you guys have found a very specific niche in helping people go from fiat currency to uh crypto and uh all of the technical rails and kind of infrastructure is needed but also on the licensing front maybe describe uh what you guys are doing today and then we can go through kind of the work that's gone into uh to get to this point yeah yeah so So basically, you know, fiat to crypto, you know, when you put your card down, you make a payment, you get Bitcoin in your wallet.

That's really hard to do. And there's a reason why it's such a pain in the ass for everyone to go buy crypto. Like, you know, you go sign up at Coinbase or anywhere, most of the time you're going to go blood sample, stroke of your hair, star sign, shirt off your back, selfie, everything. that is all because uh they need to do that because of the risk and compliance association with doing it and so as everyone's going through this ourselves included we realized to build our company we had to actually get all these same licenses and msb and all this all this knowledge that's just like a you know it's a a big uh vacuum of resources time energy and uh capital and so when we did it we were like oh i mean fuck everyone's gonna do this no chance yep we should

productize this this is our journey so you know some people grow up and it's like oh i lived in a country we couldn't send money internationally so i moved and started western union and that's their pain point they solved and bravo and that's fantastic i was very fortunate i didn't have that pain point the pain point i had was i was trying to build a fintech company and i was just getting slaughtered at every angle trying to get it done not trying to side skirt like trying to play ball but it's like you gotta have a lot of money to play ball and so as we did it we you know over the years we'd iterate we're like fuck we've got to just give this to people so that the whole industry can move fast enough because the window of opportunity we have for like digital currencies

to be as impactful as they can be is finite um the big don't eat the small the quick eat the slow and that's wait say that again the big don't eat the small the quick eat the slow that's that's a really good saying i never heard that before the big don't eat the small the quick eat the slow that's right that's one of the things is like we try and well i feel like i beat a beating a dead not a beating a dead horse banging the drum but we always say that at work like i mean not at work because it's not that never feels like work why would i ever call it work but you know like in the office it's like a mentality we we're very sort of like if you ask people that work there um i feel like they'd say that that's definitely one of them so there's a uh there's an instagram

account that you just made me think of it's called nature is metal dude that's so funny yeah yeah of course all right so uh i follow what's your favorite like do you see the shark crocodile one uh i've seen a lot of them uh nature is metal like that is the best description of it so all right so just so people understand there's an instagram account it's at nature is metal and what it basically does is it takes photos or videos from uh just hardcore wildlife so you can get on there next thing you know you see uh a lion eating an alligator or you see um a snake that has the two feet of a rabbit you know uh right before it swallows it i mean just it's really gruesome and it's really it's raw like it's just like you know what it's not national like that's the real

national geographic this is hunt or be hunted this is the food chain this is how you know the world works kind of thing so it is uh it's the type of account that you follow when you want a daily or multi multiple times a day reminder of uh there's this uh saying i see people post all over Instagram. That's a, this life is a hundred percent on you. No one's coming to save you. Right. That's essentially what nature is. And, and the part that I like about, uh, this account is, um, yeah, they've got the, the crazy, uh, I saw a video there the other day where, um, basically a lion was running or a leopard or something. Right. And it caught like an antelope. Yeah. And it's just, you know, again, the, the quick eat, the slow and all this kind of stuff.

But the ones that get me are the ones that are really gruesome where you see the panther after it's eaten the prey and it's just blood everywhere. And you look at it and you're just like, that is the animalistic nature, right? It's just it needed to eat. Had to. And so what did it do? It killed to eat. Exactly. That's what it has to do to survive.

End of story. it's not emotional in anything like that it is fight or flight uh yeah that's yeah and so to me um you know i know it's a little bit of sidetrack but uh it's one of those accounts that uh it's a mentality thing it's really interesting to uh to see so everyone go check out uh at nature is metal um i should get whoever runs that account to come on oh yeah 100 super interesting yeah yeah but but i do think the quote that they said is like everything's on you uh so well i've seen different variations of basically uh this life is a hundred percent your responsibility like no one's coming to save you true it's so true like and you know what's funny like i remember um before like when

i was young i had to write out a thousand lines which is you know you do something you fuck up in school and you got to do it and i remember a thousand dude oh man australia is tough yeah In the US, it's like, hey, write 50 and go take a dessert break. Yeah, right? They caught wind of those 10 pens attached to each other, so they pushed it up from 100 to 1,000. But it said, whatever it is to be is up to me. Whatever it is to be is up to me.

Yeah, this is not a dress rehearsal. This is it. And like it, lump it, hate it, love it, whatever it is, you just got to manage your own expectations and realize that's the case. uh you're gonna fuck up you're gonna drop the ball like like i won't say we but i definitely know myself uh and as a company like we're really good at being really shit at stuff and that's that's a fantastic attribute especially in a fast-moving industry the faster you can be like

oh man i look like shit in the mirror today or not that's how we're judging the company but you know they say a friend tells you you look good your best friend tells you you look like shit yeah if you look like shit um and i feel like we're very good as a team and as individuals on the team uh because everyone is so bright and this industry is full of really brilliant people but if you're not humble enough to iterate on your own opinions you want to be discovering you don't want to be right you want to get the right answer what you know what do you do when you identify that you're bad at something uh usually take too long to make the decision to cut the arm off or whatever it is um you know obviously you want to make that decision as fast as possible but

uh yeah you you just sort of you make a change you identify but do you bring in somebody who's good at it do you try to get better at it what do you do well i mean first you have to identify it right so you can't fix anything until you identify that it is a problem and i think uh identifying a problem as a team it's not about oh just doing someone a favor to say okay well we'll cater to your opinion it's like no no guys we've all got to see this is this a problem can we move forward successfully in the long term short term man maybe you know don't do don't fix something because i'm asking let's understand why it is a problem because then you know you're infinitely going to grow in alignment if that's the case but if you're doing me a favor it's not going to be a long-term

successful opportunity yeah and i think this goes back to part of the silicon valley's uh beauty is people are ruthlessly honest yeah right and in most parts of the world sorry yeah okay explain why do you say i mean i like i actually don't think that i would say it's sort of people are very especially in the entrepreneur world right if you're an entrepreneur um or i'm an entrepreneur i go to you i'm like hey i want to raise capital here's my idea now you rely on deal flow as an investor and you don't want me to be saying you want me to be evangelizing our conversation that we have and so you don't want to say your idea sucks here's why bang bang bang bang bang because so many people are carrying their dreams to you to make them happen with you know capital raising

and personally tell it like shoot it straight that's fine because now i can iterate i just want the right answer but a lot of people are going to be like i can't believe he said that to me like he doesn't like me like how it's like he wants to make an investment and he wants to make like you are doing them a favor shooting them straight but you're risking them bitching about you to their friends and their network and now your deal flow tightens up well the downside could be hey he's an asshole right but but you're not being an asshole shooting it straight this person if you really want to be like the spinach and the teeth thing oh he's being an asshole tell me a spinach no he is trying to save you time your time is the most valuable asset on the entire planet we all

get the exact same amount of it it's who uh realizes that you know it is most valuable you can't like you can't earn time you can save it or you can spend it you cannot earn it so you're never going to get more of it so you can use it wisely i feel like that's a pretty good saying have you ever seen uh the movie with justin timberlake in time trash and i've never even seen it no is that the one where he's got like the things on his arm or whatever so for those that have never seen the movie basically uh every human has a clock or like a countdown clock on their forearm and uh you go to work you get paid in time so literally time is the unit is the currency yep and so let's say you go to work today and you get another 24 hours right we got to come

back to work tomorrow to get 24 more hours yeah uh but if at any point you run out of time you die Now, if you are rich, you end up having infinite amount of time. No, you just have infinite amount of time. So you end up with, let's say, a hundred centuries worth of time or a hundred years or 50 years worth of time or whatever. And then if you are poor, you are usually living with less than 24 hours in the movie. And so quote-unquote poor meaning, hey, you don't have a lot of time. so what ends up happening in the movie is the people who don't have a lot of time they run everywhere right so they're literally sprinting because they don't have a lot of time ah and the

only way to get more time is to go to work so they're literally trading labor for quote time right so there's all these metaphors of real life yeah but the wealthy when that you go to the wealth zones yeah these are people who have a lot of time you can't go in between these wealth zones without certain thresholds of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, like tears. Yes. And so if you have, let's say, more than 20 years of time

that you're allowed into the wealthiest zone. The President's Club, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And nobody runs there. Actually, running is a sign of not having any, quote unquote, money or time. Yes. Because why are you in a rush? Oh, you must not have a lot of time.

Yep. Right? And so the reason why I like the movie is there's a lot of- I really like the premise of this, by the way. Yeah, it's- Sorry, Justin Timberlake. Literally. It's the parallels to life of what are we all actually optimizing for, right?

We say it's money. We say it's all stuff. But at the end of the day, it's time, right? And time ends up being really, really important. And what I think a lot of people don't do is they don't put a monetary value on their time, right? And it's one of the easiest things that I tell young people to do, which is decide how much your time is worth to you, right? How much would you pay to get an hour of time? Is it $5?

Is it a hundred dollars? Is it a thousand dollars? What is that? Yeah. And also what are you willing to get paid in exchange for your time? Right. Yes. And so when you come up with those two numbers, hopefully those two numbers match. Yeah. In some cases they're, they don't match. Yeah. But when you come up with those numbers now, all of a sudden the decisions of what you do with your time become super, super clear. Absolutely. This is, this is mind blowing actually that you're saying this um i won i could not agree more and i think it becomes time is that's the currency i mean that's the the measurement for everyone right but what people get paid in determines what's valuable to them and what they prioritize so if you give me money uh for my time like let's

say i go hey i really want an hour of your time you're like okay cool i want you and like you might say all right i want a thousand bucks and that quantifies out to your your hourly rate or you might say there's actually you can give me more than money you can put uh five hours of your time onto this problem i'm trying to solve and that is more valuable than a thousand bucks um it's fascinating well and the education or information may give you more time later so I'll give you an hour today that's worth X dollars, but it's because that hour of time today is going to save me 50 hours of time later. And so what do we call that when it's capital investment, right? I'll invest an hour with you today because you're going to give me something

that later is going to pay off 50 X what I invested. And when you start thinking of your time that way, as if it's capital, I think people start changing what they do. yeah i remember my old boss uh at work he was like hey you've been doing the same thing for like four hours and i had to do this really like repetitive process uh you know 280 times or something to go through some updates or something this is like years ago and i spent five hours and i hadn't done one of them and it was the case of i'm really lazy so like as a person i'm extremely lazy so i will always be like what's the you know what's the catch here there's got to be an easier away and that was me spending like five hours so that it's automated so i don't have to do it again

and then he was stoked with that because now no one else in the future has to do it either and it's like you know everything especially in investing right for you like oh is it a good investment is it a bad investment well what's your time horizon is bitcoin a good investment long long term uh absolutely is it a good investment today yeah i don't know flip a coin like everything is relative because the value is going to be relative like value is in the eye of the beholder right beauty is in the eye of beholder if i've never eaten a uh i haven't eaten in three weeks and you bring me an old cheeseburger i'm gonna be like oh my god thank you but if i just had dinner and i've had like beautiful i'll be like get that shit out of here and it's sort of

everything is relative so adding value to anything is always going to be relative for sure so one of the things that uh somebody uh i think it was naval recently tweeted he said uh earn with your mind not with your time uh yeah usually i'm too stupid to get his tweets so it takes me like 30 reads but yes i i see yeah right and so the whole idea is just the value you create is much more the intellectual value you provide right and the like manual uh brute force kind of yeah or just your time right yeah so if you spend an hour doing something and i spend two minutes doing something yeah uh and i get paid more than you get paid yeah does that make me lazy does that make me smarter does that make me just understand the rules of the game better yeah right all these

different things but i think that that was a really uh powerful way to to kind of articulate some of these ideas of just like earn with your mind not with your time uh and that changes again behavior because people begin optimizing for something differently what are we all optimizing for right now i mean look we're in a beautiful office 54th floor everyone is everyone is chasing they're chasing something and i had this conversation at this hacker house in uh tribeca yes i think it's trying yeah yeah that's a place you uneducated idiot yes yeah yeah um but i don't know if that's where you were but that's definitely a place in new york okay right all right um but like having this what are we all doing like literally where why are we going to

work well we're going to work to make money why are we making money oh so we can pay the rent why is the rent oh because they want to make money because they've got an investment like it all just and you know it says bitcoin solves this dude like i mean as philosophical as you want to get call it bullshit call it not bullshit the reality is like it does at the end of the day if imagine if let's vaporize money out of the conversation what do humans do day in day out they be themselves what is the your superpower like as pomp right nobody can be you but you that is your superpower that you give to the rest of the world no you are that and your originality is what humans as people at least this is sort of you get kind of philosophical and shit but i mean

dude i'm down the rabbit hole here for six years ten years in bitcoin so give me a break uh but the reality is if money is coming just super easily uh then what do you do and it's sort of like you try and think about people well i look at the people on x factor or you know american idol or whatever you know you get the 70 year old or 60 year old woman that sings and blows everyone's mind why does people like that they like it because one it's original they never saw it coming so that originality sparks a fire in us and the second part is that they asked the story oh what happened oh well you know uh i ended up you know uh falling out with my parents when i was young and then i lived on the street and then i just had to meet make ends meet and i got an

office job and life got in the way life got in the way of that and that could have been picasso columbus or whoever everyone celebrates but that is the problem and life getting in the way is not oh there was just too many people being themselves it's the rent was high the bills got to get paid and so like i feel like it's sort of a great thing when you think about bitcoin solves this i mean bitcoin is the first thing that looks like a opportunity at money vaporizing i mean like look it's hard money it's absolutely but it's sort of going to be to the point where it makes it not a thing anymore. And I guess part of this really comes down to, we are asking people to be experts at multiple things, right? And I've talked about this before, but I want you to earn a living

being everything from a teacher to a fireman, to a finance professional, to an accountant, to you know a marketer whatever your job is yep and then i want you to be a professional investor to protect your wealth right i need you to do that because inflation is going to steal your wealth if you don't yep and so you have to understand asset classes portfolio construction all these different things and if you do not understand those but you still want to protect your wealth then you need to pay somebody to protect your wealth for you right and it's all because systematically you are incentivized to get out of cash right now that is uh a pretty big problem when you add in this layer of uh machines and automation and all this stuff right people

start to worry about uh are they going to lose that income right uh and one of the things that drives me i think uh to to share this with people because it seems so obvious but maybe it's not is that in a world where automation and machines become so prevalent and pervasive, creativity is the one thing that the machines are going to kind of automate last, right? It's the human ingenuity. And if you can optimize for a job or making a living

leveraging creativity and human ingenuity, you got a pretty good shot of surviving the automation wave. You are the last person. i yes a trillion percent agree and this is where it's going because the like if we think about machines right and i'm in like investment groups very intelligent people that dismiss this premise they say it's far too early i'm like look if you look at it properly bitcoin is the carrot and uh you know like that experiment with monkeys right the scientist he's got bananas and there's monkeys 10 monkeys lined up they go i want a banana they grab a banana the banana is thrown into a room

and the door closed behind them the monkey is caged so the monkey wanted a banana but now the monkey's in a cage and it doesn't have its own ability to do whatever it wants whatever so it's caged in now it does not want a banana it wants to be itself again it wants to like just let me out of the cage take the next 20 bananas don't give them to me that is if we look at history we were formerly like before us now which is like intelligent beings or whatever uh it's other than you and i um but basically it was you know cavemen or whatever we didn't have our brains firing as well as they are and basically the next iteration we're in the middle right now between intelligent like you know until cavemen and super intelligence which is computers so if you're a computer right

Imagine AI 30 years from now and you look back at a capitalist America and society, money hungry, ads, ads, ads, buy, buy, buy. What do you think the carrot is or the banana to get us locked in the cage? It's going to be money, right? So that's the banana. So people think we're, you know, de-shackling ourselves from governments. but i mean there's a very very clear path that that could become we're actually handing over the keys from the government uh to ourselves but it's actually not ourselves it's machines controlling our money well and i always go back to this idea of um creativity is mispriced right

and creativity being mispriced is the fact that it's going to actually appreciate in value over time yep people don't yet understand that and so therefore they put a lower price on that creativity uh and so if it's an underpriced asset or mispriced asset yep uh investing there today will pay off pretty well in the future yep um and if you think about where the machines and automation are going to come in actually the people who can leverage creativity and kind of human intelligence and ingenuity the best the automation is only going to further the moat for those who are in the creative business literally the only thing right now like you can train data sets for you know yes or no questions is that a flower yes or no whatever

write me a poem stuff like that you know if you look at how this how this goes if we've got machines that can do everything for us everyone's gonna be like oh i want a day in the life of drake or i want to do this i want to do that i want to be this person everyone starts shaping themselves towards being the same almost and what's left after everyone's sort of been drake for a day and they've been everyone they're like okay what's next originality is it that is the that is the key ingredient that is going to be the most important commodity of the future is originality and right now money squandered like money gets in the way of that so like the singer the artist it was like oh life got in the way and i couldn't share my voice with the world

that voice could be an opinion that voice could be mozart or whatever who else has crushed it in the past but like you do a history test they're not saying hey uh you know what was drake's first album on that no it was who was the first person to write this who was the first person to discover that who went to the moon first they don't remember second third fourth they remember the first and that's because it is original and it is new and our brains that's why humans evolve the way we do is because yeah what's behind the curtain we're always looking for shit and that evolution of asking asking why and that iterative process that's that's literally how we evolve and so like having the mindset that being knowing that first or like managing your

own expectations whether it's in life or running a company or anything like that when you know things are going to change that's okay and it doesn't mean you're right or wrong you can just always like saying we're like you know on our team is always plan for the worst hope for the best end of the day and some people come back like investors they're like well that's a really negative outlook i'm like no that's not a negative outlook that's a very realistic outlook statistically probable like and the odds of us being wrong yeah let's plan for the worst what's the worst case doomsday scenario if we've got a playbook for it then everything else is cream like yeah this goes back to um so there's a very sorry for the rant by the way no no no you're uh

you're dead on there's a very famous um approach that uh nick saban uh the coach at alabama and a few other professional coaches have uh have kind of um solidified or made famous which is uh focus on the process right and do your job and so in football for example there's 11 uh folks on the field yeah and uh on offense right when you have the ball every play is drawn up to be a touchdown right i've never i've never seen a play drawn you mean where they're like the arrows and all the x's and all that stuff it's a touchdown i think you're mad at 95 they score every single time on the chalkboard right and the reason why that doesn't happen in real life is because one of those 11 folks yep doesn't do what they're supposed to do right so the example i always give

is the quarterback's job on you know the player about a run is to take the snap take three steps and hand the ball to the running back right the guy who snaps the ball his job is to snap the ball take two steps you know to his right post his right arm lock in the guy in front of him and then turn and block anybody who comes off the backside yeah then the running back's job is to step to the right run upfield take the ball run through the hole blah blah whatever and every single one of those people has a job now the whole thought process behind do your job is if you're the center the guy snapping the ball yeah don't worry about if the quarterback's handing the ball off or not make sure that you snap the ball you take two steps to the right you post your right

in that at all right yeah it's just do your job and if all 11 people on the field do their job on this play yep we're gonna score a touchdown right that is mind-blowing i didn't realize it was so non like that seems i mean it makes sense sorry go for broke obviously but i mean and that can happen in football obviously because you can get that 60 yards for whatever it is but i feel like uh every play no it's not just the 60 yard touchdowns this is the key piece of where this where this is more strategic ways to be like let's march up the field to start with and then go for broke when we're close to like well so it's not going for broke though right this is the big secret and i think there's a lot of questions to business so the whole idea here is

don't worry about scoring yeah right if you're the center don't worry if we score or not all you need to worry about is something very simple snap the ball take two steps to the right post with your right arm hinge and make sure you get anyone off the backside yes right and if that's all you got to worry about you don't have to worry about what play we've run you don't have to worry about who's in the game you don't have to worry what the score is you don't have to worry if we score or not yep all of that stuff is a distraction yep just do your job on this one play yeah focus right now on your job and do your job yeah by the way if you trust that the other 10 guys on the field each do their job on this play we end up scoring uh well yeah so i i see you i think that's

interesting but if i was a football coach i would say well the whole those 11 people at the time they're all looking at the coach or the manager whoever it is and saying i trust that you are absolutely certain that you have accounted for every permutation of what's what out what they're going to throw at us because that is what's going to cause me to not do my job successfully which is going to unbundle all of it as a house of cards and it's like yeah it's kind of uh inch by inch life is a cinch yard by yard life is hard have you heard that saying no what is that well it means one step at a time like you know inch by inch life is a cinch yard by yard life is hard so like as in one step at a time it'll fall into place so that's sort of like you know if you want to

go for a touchdown yeah like sure you can go for it probably not going to be as successful it's sort of like oh how it takes years to become an overnight success oh my god uber everyone's i could i could have built instagram and sold it for a billion dollars no you couldn't have because you didn't know all the iterations that they went through they started as a bourbon photo app or something like that that iterative process but that was their inches like one step at a time they didn't go like look at the evolution of the internet right people used to knock on neighbors doors and be like hey morning have you picked up the paper imagine if i came to you in 1990 with the internet and i go hey uh upload all pictures of yourself tell me when you got uh in gate

congratulations by the way um tell me about you getting engaged uh where'd you go on holidays i want to see photos and you're going to share these with strangers that you've never met before you'd be like what the fuck though but it crept up to where it is today and we look back and we're a long way from kansas kind of thing but at the time it's just oh just like you know your bedroom is like you've got metallica posters yeah make your own website that's kind of like your digital bedroom and then it's oh tell us what you're thinking and that's your your consciousness stream of twitter or whatever um show me where you are what are you doing and then you look and you're like holy fuck i'm right there with everyone so the world gets really small really

quickly because you feel like you're in your neighbor's house automatically so um but if i said that to you at the start you would not have bought into it it wouldn't create success uh instagram wouldn't be popular if it came out day one of the internet people feel like it's invasive and so to change behavior which is typically what most companies that have a huge breakthrough are trying to do or let's say technology like bitcoin it is iterative but you know it doesn't mean that you should it's zero one hundred is wrong but both things can get there in the end if it's meant to be it's meant to be kind of you know it'll figure a way out it's just do you want it to take six years or do you want it to take 15 or 20 years um and that's sort of like a premise even if i am

like let's say a bitcoin bull and i think bitcoin's gonna you know vacuum in a lot of the value that we see today is it a bad thing to have 40 different alternatives that are trying to throw shit at the wall and iterate and bitcoin can sort of see that and adopt that over time like is that gateway drug mentality the right answer or is it no it is it or get out of the way what do you think um well i think i go back and forth with buddies around this but i think look at the end of the day the downside to gateway drug mentality is i mean the upside is that you know um you get to see and learn and adopt it if you are bitcoin or if you are you know the biggest in the room um but the downside is obviously there's a lot of people that yet can get hurt from that so there's a lot

of scammers and stuff like that which it it feels like oh that person's never going to trust cryptocurrencies again because it's given its bad name they're coming back like every bull run you see your friend you know everyone's got those tweets or those direct messages where they told their friends to buy a bitcoin in 2013 or 2011 or whatever it was and they said no then they don't miss it the second time and so that's the you know the mob comes they're coming either way uh whether we like it whether we don't uh whether you're a government with your poorest person on the planet it is happening you can just choose to take a risk earlier or later and people are usually rewarded for their risk but the funny thing is is the earlier people get into it it

typically is indicative of their principles as well like a lot of the people when satoshi makes bitcoin right um funny thing craig uh right uh who craig right he was uh i think he was actually a lecturer at the university i went to uh in australia which is funny um just kidding no i actually i think he was but i wasn't there then um the when satoshi makes it satoshi has a choice to go holy shit i've just invented irreversible digital money that solves porn gambling and every high-risk industry but is that the best way for the network to evolve in a hard way no it's to go to really brilliant cryptographers and say hey i need your eyes on this what are we missing like let's work let's harden the base and so like if you look at teams like doing token sales and stuff

you go list on binance that's a great payday and i think binance is awesome for like if you're a trader and stuff like that but you know if you've got some sort of thing that you're trying to control it's you're trying to nurture like raising a child that's what a like a distributed network of cells is what raising a child would be and networks are like biology really so you want to nurture it so it grows in the most optimal direction for the core principle that it was founded to be now if i find it to be a scam coin or anything like that i grow it to be a scam coin but if i'm really trying to solve a problem or like hard money that i want to nurture it for the long-term and not take the poison apples which might be you know short short-term self-interest

sorry for the how do you guys think about that at wire right so so like who are the types of customers that you guys are trying to work with um so i mean predominantly it's developers uh you know fintech teams brokerages uh it's people who need the infrastructure it's people that need the infrastructure so a lot of like exchanges wallets things like that um yeah we want to get to as many people as possible because you know we we just want people to realize like just don't bother with doing it all again don't go get the banking relationship like this is a many hands make light work situation if we all work together we band together as one which is we take care of you know everyone bites off a piece of expertise like we're talking about with people and their

personalities like creativity or what are you an expert at that i can extract value from and in return give you value um and those are sort of harmonious relationships but if you look at banks now or neobanks right so you look at a neobank it is a cosmetic layer over the best of stock trading the best of this banking service the best of international transfers they bundle it all together to look like a bank and they present it much better and banks are you know construction of five different products lending saving borrowing whatever um neobanks are like that but they pick the best of each you know if we look at how we can build the future of you know digital assets and digitizing money generally speaking you know bitcoin bites off one of those

pieces uh most likely though everything will rely on it because if you look at a digital world with computers computers have never had a unified clock let's call it as simple as that like we look at the sun the sun goes round and round that is the source of energy that provides us with coordination at scale um a clock is the same thing for machines uh the bitcoin block height sorry so regardless it's not about whether i like bitcoin more than i like ethereum or anything like that bitcoin is the longest running track record so if i'm telling you the sun is wrong and determine the most valuable by the market of course but it's the problem it solves is what value does bitcoin ad oh it's not fast enough the only thing it has to do is not change imagine if the sun fell

out of the sky and we're like oh shit we were wrong actually there's four suns whoops you'd be like huh no the sun is the sun because we know that that thing's been there the longest thing since the beginning it's good turn on tomorrow man what yeah man he's got a good work i think their son um but you know what i mean and it's just being respectful of that that is that's the fact call it how you see it you guys raised money during the depths of the bear market what was that like um i have an exceptionally like i said earlier i was terrible at a lot of things raising money is one of them um but i think like the most interesting takeaway when we raise money was definitely managing expectations so um you know in bull markets and bear markets and stuff like

that you have obviously peaks and troughs uh and when you have such seasonal like financial markets are seasonal especially financial markets in a newly adopted technology so to say oh we're going to grow 20 month over month you just know you are not because you have not quantified every single contributing factor to be able to determine that at all so um managing expectations was the best part about that where i said to our investors i said look we are going to make less money than we did this year unfortunately i mean sorry like that was the premise the focus was on the core way to determine whether or not we have done our job is our kpis on distribution how is our reach going because and it's not like let's just get a bunch of users and monetize later but it's like it truly

is these are networks networks operate on connectivity and distribution and tying things together to create resiliency like that's how a network is survives it's flat but everything's connected and that that's its resiliency and so distribution is like our focus because the tech is there and there's brilliant people that are more focused on it more obsessed with that specific component of it like let let them be masters at it and then that's better for us to have a conversation with them about hey how can we take advantage of that or how can we add value to you guys building this tech and vice versa so like you know whatever that tech is i mean like whether that's uh there's a million and one things it could be but i think it's yeah i think that's

just the way that you've got to play the game and a lot of people i think the default setting in finance generally speaking or anytime there's money involved self-interest self-interest self-interest self-interest what does it look like long term when you are not a company living quarter to quarter and you are sacrificing self-interest for what could be the greater piece of the pie like is it in our best interest as a company to make our company stock worth more or is it in our best interest to buy a significant amount of bitcoin and grow the pie more what is going to be long-term more sustainable what's going to add more value what's going to get there faster i'm not saying i've just bought bags of bags of bitcoin by the way but i mean like

it's it's a thought process i mean that is a very legitimate approach and some some teams that are very successful in the space they actually have that approach um it's a good redundancy if you're betting on the space as if you're a company and you're committing your whole life to this space i mean may as well load up your bags while you're on the plane kind of thing yeah for sure yeah what um what do you think is the biggest challenge in the industry right now identifying what adds value and what doesn't add value explain that nobody focuses on adding value i mean sorry not nobody very few do what adds value so i'll give you like so i have a very big belief that uh if what browser do you use on your computer uh i use a couple but chrome mostly

nice nice um so i was just curious actually but like opera browser how much do you make off Joe you think that's funny over there Joe's laughing somebody came in just asked me some random questions yeah nice you're my social security number laughing because he's spying through your camera because of chrome but like so opera browser right opera browser is three to four or five percent like it's one of the it's I think it's in the top five browsers on like on the planet they have 350 400 million users now that is something that is really interesting to me because that penetration is on a different side of the world so if you have that and every person on a device with a browser that can extract value from this like you know what is adding value is it

me like talking about adding value do we create a product that gives a five percent savings uh to people or borrowing money at 20 interest rates or whatever like whatever's going on in crypto at the moment who should you target well value is in the eye of the beholder if you give someone who's got 30 choices to create a bank account you say oh no no but like try it it's awesome because it's crypto or it's bitcoin it's like whatever dude like the switching costs are not worth it basically i don't give a shit enough because there's not enough value to me to switch now if you go to someone in uh let's say argentina or you know africa hey you're not going to suffer like 15 20 inflation you will break even at the end of the year if you had a hundred dollars this year you

will have a hundred dollars or 99.50 at the end of the end of the year argentina if you bought bitcoin at the top of the bull run 20k and you sold it at the bottom when it's for 3800 or whatever you did uh it was better to have done that than to hold the argentinian peso of course yeah i you're smart i'm not i didn't know that i was like holy the only reason why i know that is because i have people tweeting at me all the time right okay which currencies are failing and yeah and this isn't this isn't venezuela this isn't you know this is it's getting close to home and it will start like oh it's gonna happen in the u.s hyper hyperinflation is gonna happen in the u.s they're already hedging uh they got their interest rate you know manipulations going qe's

raging on and uh i think i remember it was the u.s or uh the ecb recently they started to hint at the idea of like oh we may actually allow inflation to go over the targets but like that's okay because we're planning on it blah blah blah blah blah god almighty i'll tell you what though like if you look at the like there are different tiers right so you know you're in the investment side you look at the individuals that have gotten into crypto earlier and bitcoin and they're you know really enthusiastic and thought leaders and they're rewarded for their enthusiasm and they're rewarded uh longer term with financially when they there was no incentive at the time to buy it um they were there on principle and then you look at banks like say

silvergate bank silvergate bank is a fantastic case study if in my opinion um you know we've like just obviously we're a crypto company and they specialized in saying hey we're not going to dismiss it we're going to focus it we're going to double down and take a look at it because if there is something here then we should be serving it and they're going they're getting rewarded for their investment in time now and the next layer on you talk about like you know oh institutional money's coming in da da da and there's this whole narrative people are just sort of frothing at the mouth over look they'll get here eventually just make sure you are in beforehand basically because after them then the next one is going to be governments and there's obviously already

governments that do hold bitcoin and there's governments that don't and those that hold bitcoin early are going to be rewarded for that investment whether that's a hedge or a desperation um it doesn't matter it will all come full circle and you'll find that damn i wish i could rewind time and there's no time machine unfortunately so yeah i don't know i don't even know what you asked i literally just fire hosed you with trash sorry i love it i love it all right let's do we'll rapid fire before we uh wrap up here uh most important company in crypto other than wire oh fuck how do you go rapid fire on that oh uh most important company uh oh man can we cut this no oh fuck uh

shit uh make it out why uh gateway drug that is not what i expected you to say all right explain what was i supposed to say and that's not a popular answer so i want to hear why i was gonna say blockstream open node or make it out and i felt like make it out right the second because they are upholding a ton of the come try crypto like they're underpinning a lot are people's first interaction with maker dow or with something else well i mean the first interaction is obviously with most of the time with bitcoin but make it out is providing the all the digital money that is getting done by g usd usdc pax and all those guys i mean you would say what are they a competitor to a decentralized stable coin uh yeah i mean what no what they're doing is that's a crowd-sourced

education on ramp what what does maker dao look like 10 years from now and do you think they're still around i would say make it out yes i think they're still around i would say i probably agree with that yeah i'd say they'd still be around i think they would have probably migrated a lot of their uh you know firstly they have a lot of different assets and those different assets would be underpinned by something more secure so something like blockstream liquid for example that's collateralized bitcoin that is like people are going to realize that if it's not the most secure party in town you're going to want to be on the most secure chain and i feel like a lot of teams may end up migrating maybe not i don't know my surprise trend of 2020 calling it now i've been

calling it for a few weeks now defy merges with bitcoin and it ends up all getting built around uh bitcoin yeah i mean at the end of the day uh i don't disagree with that um i don't think i don't know if it's strange i mean like for us it may it may take our best to help it may take a little bit more than 12 months to actually like fulfill the promise but there will be multiple companies that get launched to do this in 2020 yes and i definitely think that that's something that uh we look at a lot just purely from a security standpoint if it's you know if we're looking at the longer term thing what does it what does it mean to be on bitcoin um does that mean oh you got to build everything on it no it just means that the lens of truth is the hardest chain to

bullshit basically and i think like that means you know if if i was doing uh backups uh and i wanted to prove that i had something i could put it on chain a b c d or e i'd just choose whatever the longest one is and the hardest to bullshit so that someone can't wipe over it later and that means that i built that proof on bitcoin it doesn't mean that i had to build all the tech and stuff it just means the keys sit on that and the recovery it's like a backup machine basically I think that's fair. Yeah. What's the one regulation?

Sick rapid fire. What's the one regulation you would change or improve if you could? I think you asked. I would say just either wipe investor accreditations or make it relative to people's proportionate net wealth. Everyone's got enough information on how much people earn, so you may as well figure it out. I'm not going to touch that right now

because people already know my thoughts on accreditation. What are your thoughts on accreditation? It's changing. The SEC recognizes and they're going to add some improvements, But long story short is we should go to an education-based system where people have to take a test rather than use wealth as a signal for intelligence. And my favorite thing is, like, how many dumb rich people do you know? I'm looking at one right now. No, I'm joking.

Just dumb poor person. Yeah. But, no, I think that's, you know, the biggest thing. And I've been quite vocal about it's a violation of the American dream. It is discrimination against people based on wealth. um and i think it's got to change yeah i mean look at the end of the day if people bark loud enough like people that work in the government they're not they're just like i mean sometimes like we've met we have to meet regulators and stuff and they're not they're like oh great how can i make

your life miserable they're like yo i've got a netflix subscription i like spotify too yeah i like to drink beer i want to go home watch tv they're super rational like i mean they're human beings at the end of the day if you can make their life easier with you know it's kind of a do you go one step forward one step backwards to go 10 step forwards or do you just grind against the grain and sometimes it's give and take so aliens believer non-believer or define alien you define it okay well so the little people the gray gray people or whatever you know the little gray people you see stereotype um i would say that they're probably human beings on a like that's an evolved human being like a chimpanzee meeting a human being if we went to a planet that was full of

chimpanzees that would be like an alien coming to us so oh you think that they're way more advanced than we are yeah they're carbon-based same thing they're just evolved like they're the next iteration so chimpanzees so we don't want to land in a plane yeah we don't want to come in contact with them um well i don't know if we do or don't don't but i don't think they're more intelligent and more developed than they have superiority over us right uh yes i would say so but um then maybe superiority is not important it's important to us now but maybe they don't value that like as in we we're threatened by superiority right you just say and maybe that's it's because we use superiority yes we use superiority but why do we do that i mean like you know we impose

our will because we all have our agenda because we have to operate on our self-interest and not what we can do to add value to the collective group so if we're always operating on self-interest it is a kill or be killed it's nature is metal you know that is who is the apex predator and it Sounds like the alien coming down from a spaceship or a little green man or whatever it is, is your apex predator. Crocodile. Saltwater crocodile.

Shout outs to Louis for this one, but saltwater crocodile versus a great white shark. That's the apex battle, I'd say. They haven't evolved since Jurassic. Saltwater crocodile versus great white shark. Who wins? No, who wins? i'm convinced now the saltwater crocodile takes the cake really yeah i went swimming with great

white sharks it was fucked it was amazing you just gotta punch them in the nose right oh mate have you seen these things you are second you are the number two person like in the food chain the moment you see these you will never feel anything more primal instinctively like i am number two food chain like just immediately they swim at 40 knots an hour let's say 40 miles an hour underwater these things are big thick like they're like a submarine um but they're agile they're fast and yeah there's a reason they haven't evolved for you know 350 million years or whatever because what they're doing is working it's doing just fine yeah what what's the most important book you've ever read i'm a terrible reader i can't read really really

like yeah i can't comprehend properly i've i'm really bad at comprehending so i have to anything i read i have to read 20 times like that's less times than reading navals tweets 30 times yeah i'm working on it yeah he's like the yeah the final boss in terms of comprehension all right to wrap up i always let uh the guest ask me one question what you got for me how much do you make after tax joking you should have seen it as a joke you haven't you seen stepbrothers um that's what they think i i want to say what's the most important thing for you that uh what's the one thing you're grateful for for 2019 and what is one thing that you would love to see for yourself as a person for 2020 what's important to 2019 super easy uh as pretty much everyone knows

i got engaged so uh so polina takes the cake on that one um and uh in 2020 uh it's funny we talked about time earlier i have uh i've become much more ruthless with protecting my time um I made a promise to Joe, who's smirking over in the corner, and Polina, that I was going to travel a lot less in 2020. And so I've just been saying no to a lot of things, a lot of these conferences, et cetera. No. And I'll still have to travel a little bit. But I think this year, I should look it up. I think I took more than 140 flights this year.

You're a busy dude. 140 flights. If you start doing the math on that, that's more than one every three days. That's insane. It sounds like you play for a baseball team or something. No, by the way, no discipline is a modern-day superpower. I suck at saying no. That's literally what I'm getting at.

I used to suck. I'm much better at it now. No. No, you're not. That's awesome. All right, man. Listen, I appreciate you doing this. Super excited about what you guys are building.

I think that a lot of people across the industry are starting to realize that the infrastructure is necessary and it's quite difficult to do on their own. So they are coming to you guys. So thanks so much for the work. I appreciate you having me. Thanks, guys. Yeah. All right. We'll do it again soon.

Thanks, Pomp. Hey, everyone. Pomp 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