The Pomp Podcast - Tory Reiss, Co-Founder of TrustToken: Down Mt. Gox, Through Silk Road, to Justice Reform We Go

Episode Date: May 21, 2019

Tory Reiss is the Co-Founder of TrustToken. In this conversation, Tory and Anthony Pompliano discuss Mt. Gox, Silk Road, the challenges with tokenizing assets, drug decriminalization, criminal justice reform, financial literacy, and the automation of personal finance. ----- Curious about Cryptocurrency but don’t know where to begin? Storm Play is a free and fun way to start earning in exchange for you time. Simply download, register and discover microtasks that meet your interests and be rewarded with Storm Bolts. These Bolts can then be converted and withdrawn into your favorite cryptocurrency, including Storm Token, Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC.).  Earn cryptocurrency rewards by playing new games and trying out cool products! Download the app to start earning crypto here! https://bit.ly/30pSxh9 (Available for iOS and Android). ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Tori Reese is the co-founder of Trust Token. In this conversation, we discussed Mt. Gox, Silk Road, the challenges with tokenizing assets, drug decriminalization, criminal justice reform, financial literacy and the automation of personal finance. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do as well. Are you curious about cryptocurrency and you don't know where to begin? I've got a great way for you to try. You can use Stormplay, a free and fun way to start earning in exchange for your time. That's right. You don't necessarily have to make a financial

investment to begin. You can simply download, register, and then discover these micro tasks that they present you that meet your interest. And then you're rewarded with these Storm Bolts. The Bolts are then converted and can be withdrawn into your favorite cryptocurrency, including the Storm Token, Ethereum, or my favorite, Bitcoin. If you go and download the Storm Play app today,

you can earn cryptocurrency rewards by playing new games and trying out cool new products. It's worth a try, and it's a great way to get started. Remember, go check out Storm Play in the App Store today. 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. Here I am with Tori. Thank you so much for doing this. We've got a lot to cover. Welcome. Thanks, my man. It's good to be here. Absolutely. All right. Background. Who are you? Where do you come from? So I'm one of the co-founders of Trust Token. You're, as you know, one of the investors in said company. Full disclosure. Disclaimer. We invested. Disclaimer. We're based in San Francisco and we tokenize real world assets. We got our start with the U.S. dollar, TrueUSD,

and since then have rolled out a series of other currencies. But for myself, I guess how I got into crypto dates back to 2011 and 2012. Yeah, it was an interesting time. You know, I was in college at the time, Northwestern, And I was I was one of those early customers of Silk Road. And, you know, it was during those sketchy days where you would be sending cashier's checks to, you know, random addresses in China and things like that to load an account at Mt. Gox. And during that period, I also got into the white paper.

And, you know, it was one of those things where I didn't have any money to really invest. But it was like I would trickle invest over kind of the trailing years and kind of went all in in 2013. okay so in 2011 2012 let's talk a little bit about uh i think everyone's heard of mount gox they know hey there's this big issue some people understand some people don't but let's talk about the user experience of like how you could buy bitcoin right you could obviously mine it back then um but buying it is not like hey let me just go sign up for a coinbase account and like hook up my bank and now i own bitcoin it was uh very full of friction and it was uh frankly not easy right and so just like describe like what you would have to do the different steps to actually get bitcoin

yeah no absolutely i mean what's funny is it actually gives it's an exercise in uh what a lot of i guess monetary experiences or financial experiences are like for people in the third world today where things are very uh very manual uh there's a lot of steps involved and a lot of room for human error uh it was literally a process of you know you go find a local bank of a bank of a yeah you go find a local bank branch and you get a cashier's check made out for a fixed amount of money that you're going to be mailing to them then they would give you an address and you you then you would either send a wire or send the cashier's check to just what you know what is effectively an anonymous account right which is the bank of of mount gox at the time um and then

you'd wait you'd have to wait for them to receive your wire it might be two three days or you'd wait for them to receive your cashier's check and then like magic quote unquote like four days later you see your your account balance and you just see that now you have x number of bitcoin in your account that's right yeah it was all bitcoin right and it was just kind of pre-2013 yeah yeah and uh And so then once you get it on Mt. Gox, if you wanted to use it on Silk Road, how did you go from Mt. Gox to Silk Road? Yeah, so that was a process. So Mt. Gox is an exchange, so you could trade spot with the U.S. dollar. But if you actually wanted to get it to Silk Road, then you have to, first off, got to get the Tor browser, figure out how to set that up and protect your privacy, or so you thought.

Then you create your account on Silk Road, and you would have to then, you take your address, you'd go to do a withdrawal. you have to verify your identity with mount gox which that takes another few days then you would send a withdrawal request to mount gox to then send it send the bitcoin to load an account on silk road and then that would kind of give you a guy so basically you tell mount gox hey i want to take my bitcoin off of your platform i want you to send it to this wallet address on a different platform they obviously could figure out that it was silk road but exactly we're just sending it from one digital wallet address to another digital wallet address okay got it and so uh when you signed up for silk road we and i don't think we've talked anybody on the podcast about silk road

specifically um you sign up for like a user account like here's my real name here's my last name here's my username or it was just usernames so it was no no real names um and you you know i mean you can use it there's there's tons of innocuous things on the silk road like i think it's been turned into kind of a big legend today in terms of you know what was going on there in terms of oh there was human trafficking and drugs to be honest like the early days of the silk road that was maybe some dark corner of it but the majority of it was uh you know people could transact i mean there were things like fake ids or weed yeah but then there's also just actually there was like just a lot of e-commerce and a lot of things that might be restricted that they

couldn't get shipped to let's say the uk or the us what were the like non-vice stuff right so take out the drugs take out like all the the fake ids like all that kind of stuff like what were the kind of more traditional e-commerce products there was actually a lot of like memorabilia and there's also a lot of like banned books like weird stuff like that like in certain countries where um they wouldn't be able to buy you know certain media or information like there was actually a lot of that saying like you know free the information yep and you could buy that all on on the silk road so um it's interesting because it's an exercise in anti-censorship and so uh you know whether you were in china or india you know the united states you had access to to all

this material and obviously there's the vice centric stuff but then there's also just this uh more censored information yeah a lot of shared ethos with bitcoin obviously yeah um all right and so uh as you're getting more and more involved with bitcoin through silk road etc uh was there a feeling at the time that like oh bitcoin is going to become this huge thing or was it literally the same thing as you know people today they go and they use their starbucks credits or their amazon it was just the means of exchange and they didn't really kind of have foresight into how big it would become everyone that i interacted with um we we were just using it as kind of medium of exchange it was more just like we liked the idea that it was anonymous or you know felt at the time

more anonymous dollars yeah that's right um it it really because of the user experience like the ux was so bad that it was so hard to imagine it becoming mainstream in any way at that time it was just kind of like wow this is such a pain in the ass like why would anyone want to use this oh but the privacy is great right so so that was like i think the initial hook and that's why it appealed to those markets um but it was really when i started to see some of the early infrastructure popping up like coinbase where you know that was where in 2013 when i when i was doubling down 2013 uh yeah that was when it was um it was you know it was through coinbase and i was like whoa silicon valley is getting into the game and like you know things are changing yeah it's becoming

more real and i think when you see the infrastructure you start to see oh i'm going to be able to take fiat and not have to go get the cashier's check right that's right oh i'm going to be able to actually like get it back without having to try to track somebody down in china yeah exactly so it makes it makes a sense there um and then so you've gone from kind of early days of bitcoin silk road like really you know what what i like to think of as uh some of the initial product market fit of this technology with people who said, look, I want to use it for the anonymity or the pseudonymity. I want to use it because payment processors can't shut it down, like all of that. So today with Trust Token, you guys are now looking at how do we take every stock bond

currency and commodity over time and digitize them, right? Give them similar attributes or properties that Bitcoin shares. Just talk a little bit about kind of why settle on that as a thesis and kind of where you guys have gotten so far? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, the way that I think about it is if you look at sort of the traditional payment infrastructure that banks rely on or, and governments rely on,

there were, you know, early on, there was the idea of correspondent banking, the idea that banks would just have accounts with each other and then they could settle liabilities and credits with each other. And that was kind of how they would quote unquote move money, but there was still a lot of counterparty risk in that

because banks, you know, would fail all the time. There's also a liquidity problem because, you know, if it was a large enough transfer, you know, you'd have a lot of money that you owe out to other banks and things like that. So there's a real liquidity crunch. And so that was solved with the introduction of, you know, deferred net settlement systems. And that's like today, ACH, you know, the automated clearinghouse and in Euro one in Europe and really every country or region is kind of cobbled together their own deferred net settlement clearinghouse. And what they would do is instead of actually doing a transfer for every single transaction, they would settle up at some set time and they would do the net transactions. So like, you know, if you had

sent me money, but then, you know, net at both banks, you know, there were so many businesses and individuals transacting with each other that the actual net amounts that would need to be transferred was a lot smaller. And so that solved a lot of the problems, but not all of them. So then the the kind of the solution that was introduced was you know the central bank and this idea of we're going to now have what's called a real-time gross settlement layer and that's kind of like okay well everyone will just have an account with this central bank and then we can settle in real time uh and we'll actually settle gross amounts and what's wild is if you look at bitcoin at bitcoin is just a global real-time gross settlement layer yep so so we had already

we forget that right everyone always thinks of bitcoin as the asset in which you hold but the network is uh probably one of the largest in the world i mean that's right visa are bigger but it's bigger than venmo it's bigger than apple pay it's bigger than all these other ones um and so there's somebody's using it totally and what's crazy is actually so everyone you just mentioned like venmo and paypal and uh all those guys are actually deferred net settlement so what allows them to be so fast is, you know, the money is not actually moving. The money is held in a single account or they'll just net settle between various accounts they hold in different countries. Same with like transfer wise and things like that. So there's actually a lot of disadvantages from

a deferred net settlement network to Bitcoin's, you know, real time growth settlement. And the idea is, you know, to your point, it's like there are trade offs, but like the reason it's slower and the reason, I mean, that's for security, but it's also because they're doing real time gross settlement like every single transaction can't be duplicated you're removing counterparty risk and it's it's fundamentally a better system it's just there's trade-offs absolutely that makes sense and so you guys started with us dollars right and you created true usd um you know i uh being an investor it's always fun to tell the story of like you start with zero transaction volume right uh and it's now grown into the third largest second largest depending

how you look at it um stable coin in the entire ecosystem talk a little bit about you know why start with the u.s dollar and how you guys went from you know kind of zero to hero if you will um in another trajectory here sure yeah so we uh we now do about three billion dollars in 30 day like trailing 30 day volume so people are really using it and it's really exciting obviously to build a product that people are getting a lot of utility out of uh you know this the uh the The process, like the thinking process was, OK, if Bitcoin is this massive real time growth settlement network, how do we apply that same sort of technology, which is a global real time growth settlement network to traditional currencies? Because that would be really valuable because even today it's still a mess. There's Fedwire, there's chaps, there's you know, there's so many competing real time growth settlement networks that and none of them work well together.

That's why it's so expensive, inefficient and slow to move money in traditional banking system. Mm hmm. So we looked at the U.S. dollar and we're like, well, this is clearly the most well understood financial asset or financial product in the world. Right. So it's like if we tokenize that, you don't have to explain to someone what a U.S. dollar is. And not only that, but we knew it would have all the advantages we built on Ethereum, but it have all the advantages that you that you see displayed in Bitcoin. Yep. And so it was very much a situation where we built it. And, you know, at the time it was, you know, it was five, five of us, six of us, um, you know, this was early, we launched in March of 2018 and we launched on Bittrex. And then, you know, shortly after when we listed on Binance, the world was ready because

Tether had really fumbled the ball. Like they had lost users trust in so many ways that, uh, we got a lot of adoption very quickly and things just started taking off after that. Got it. And so as this thing's grown, you guys have added other assets, right? maybe talk about the other currencies that you've added and then we can get into a big one that you didn't add and why you did that yeah so since then we've we've recently launched australian dollar canadian dollar uh gbp you know british pound uh and we're preparing we are going to be launching

hong kong dollar uh we're working on japanese yen we're working on korean won uh and as well as some south american currencies uh that we haven't publicly announced yet uh and really our our logic there is there's a lot of second order effects and, you know, possibilities when you have all of these fiat currencies running on a single global settlement layer, uh, that you can do some really incredible things, um, for both for individuals, for businesses in terms of how they move money and removing, like truly moving, removing the middleman. What would be an example? Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a great question. So, uh, we have some real world examples. For example, There's businesses in Argentina that are doing commerce, let's say, with other businesses in Europe or in Asia, and they have suppliers that they have to pay and or they have to receive payments for products that they ship out.

And they're taking a haircut of, I mean, it can range, but I'm not exaggerating when I say 10 to 30 percent just to move the money. Oh, I literally tweeted about a week ago. I went and I was in a store and I saw a MoneyGram kiosk. And I went up to the MoneyGram kiosk and I was kind of joking around at first. I was like, oh, this will be a funny tweet. But I started pushing all the buttons and essentially had got right to the checkout page of sending $100 from New York to California. So all within one country, $12.50 fee. Jesus.

Right. On top of the $100. yeah and so that's a intra-country fee of sending u.s dollars from one location to another i can't imagine what it would have been if i said i want to send you you know from new york to argentina or new york to asia or somewhere right like it's pretty incredible how um egregious the fee schedules of these uh these uh companies are yeah and it's because they can afford to charge huge fees it's like you know we need to move money and you know fortunately the the human coordination problem that has led to the inefficiencies and how banks moving move money uh has created this

real arbitrage for private enterprise to step in and say well we can move it more efficiently than banks these guys are you know years behind um but we're gonna you know we're gonna take our cut now what's crazy is if you look at what's possible any transaction on ethereum today cost one cent and it doesn't matter how big it is so i can send you 10 million dollars anywhere in the world and it's going to cost one cent i can also send a hundred dollars and it's going to cost you one cent so i mean that's that's wild yeah and it's and it's on a technology that has really spread globally so there's developers and there's businesses and individuals building on you know on on blockchains or specifically ethereum or bitcoin uh that really they don't

speak the same language they never met each other but it's this incredible human coordination effort where we've all standardized on a couple like core technologies you didn't do the euro why yeah we're we're working on the euro so so we've been we've been chasing the euro for for a while now uh there's a ton of demand for the euro which is ironic given that you know it's zero to negative interest rates right now um but they have some pretty intense uh requirements for what's called an e-money license which is what you need to to move money uh transmit money in europe uh that include performing kyc on every single person that touches your token so i mean you know here in the u.s like we perform it on the first hop like the person making the purchase

but once they go and they have a transaction or they send it to someone that's not really our responsibility there's no way for us to track that i mean we're not surveilling that um the The difference is in Europe, and I think this is going to really kill a lot of innovation there, you have to follow it every single hop. Well, it's not just follow it. You have to KYC and AML every single person who receives it. Yeah, that's right. And it's a massive surveillance effort. It's also a massive burden from a cost perspective on all the payment service providers there.

But ironically, it actually creates a huge black market. That's why there's so much money laundering there. That's also why there's so much kind of cash transactions and sort of under the table transactions is because it it it pays a lot better to be a criminal there than in places where it's really efficient, where you can move money affordably. Most of the latest banking money laundering crimes have occurred in Europe. Right. You know, the big one, I think I forget the exact numbers at this point, but I think it's like two hundred billion dollars laundered through one single branch in Estonia. It's crazy. I mean, it's just that the numbers are so large that it's it's quite overwhelming, actually. Right. All right. So as you guys are doing this, what what comes next once you get outside the currencies, anything there that you're looking at?

Totally. Yeah, we you know, we've made a commitment since very early on. We made we make a few of what we call kind of timeless bets. These are things where regardless of what happens in the space, like this is kind of how we want to operate. One of those was making the commitment to work with regulators and kind of follow the law, protect our users. Thank you. Yeah, right. But that's one commitment. The other has been, you know, we've made a commitment that we're not going to marry ourselves too closely to any one technology and that we're going to kind of let the market and let our users kind of show us where the greatest pains are. And what we've found most recently is to your earlier questions around global payments, we see that is today one of the largest opportunities with the most inefficiency, the most user pain for cash, you know, cash to cash remittances, which makes up still about something like 90 percent of the global remittance market is still all this cash to cash. we're working on uh and exploring solutions there as well as solutions between smes and enterprise

businesses and how they move money so you can think about all these tokenized currencies as literally just tools in our toolbox like they're just products that it's not in and of itself not the solution the solution is now the second layer of intellectual property and technology that we're building to help address these these global payment problems makes sense um speaking of laws Uh, you're from Colorado and Colorado recently, uh, began to decriminalize, um, certain chemical compounds that, uh, I think have been misunderstood or, uh, just not addressed on a national basis. Maybe talk a little bit about what's going on there. Yeah. Uh, I, I'll caveat all this.

You're not an expert necessarily, but you're from Colorado and I know that you at least know what's going on. So we're going to talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. not an expert. Um, the, yeah, I tweeted about this the other day, actually, uh, the, the, this was just passed fresh, uh, legislation in Colorado. Colorado is really kind of taking the, the stance of, they want to be the leaders when it comes to forward, you know, progressive legislation around, uh, drugs and, and, you know, substance. I mean, really it's, it's a

reclassification of, uh, drugs in the United States, which has to happen in my opinion, but, psilocybin which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms was just decriminalized and you know it's funny because i actually talked to my parents about this like right after it happened and they were both like oh yeah yeah we voted for that and i was like what because i mean my parents are you know pretty straight out not the people you would expect they're like yeah let's go uh let's go vote for the magic mushrooms yeah like you know no alcohol they don't do any like no substances in the house growing up they're just nothing right very clean um but the difference is it seems there's been a real shift there where in colorado um you know people are taking a lot of people have

experienced it empirically right so they've they've either taken psychedelics or you know they've had negative experiences let's say with alcohol so they're very jaded around like what culture might tell you is you know the right substances to consume versus what their real world real life experiences have taught them and so i think it's great you know it's it's gonna it has to happen at the state level before anything can happen at a federal level um but there's a lot of progressive thought there and the idea here um many of you know this that are listening but but just in case not uh decriminalizing doesn't mean that it's legal it simply just means that uh they will not enforce the law that is currently on the books right which is a nuance

but it's an important nuance because it actually changes the incentive structure for law enforcement that's exactly right yeah so it's it's basically uh it's instructing local law enforcement to not make it a priority to enforce uh or or pursue charges against individuals especially especially individuals not i mean it's different to talk about criminal organizations or dealers that's that's a whole nother conversation those will still be you know prosecuted for sure um but individuals with you know personal amounts on on them will likely kind of be given a slap of the wrist and let go got it and we've seen this now with uh with marijuana you know cannabis uh i think it's now we're at 22 or 23 states that have decriminalized uh personal possession right and uh

and you know i think it's baltimore i could get this wrong so don't quote me on it but in the city of baltimore um the like attorney general or whoever actually presses charges uh essentially there was no ruling like they just stopped pressing charges on personal possession of marijuana yeah and i if i have it right i think the police officers continue to arrest people And then eventually realize like this is not worth the time because they're just going to get let go later. And again, it's changing the incentive structure or changing the kind of top down direction of where, you know, taxpayers resources should be focused. And I think that you're kind of caveat there of personal possession is very different than like if you are growing and distributing on a large scale, illegal narcotics, you're likely to get in trouble. Yeah. Right. I don't care if it's decriminalized in your region or not. What do you think has to happen for us to go from decriminalization to like actual true legalization?

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we're actually watching the playbook get written with marijuana, with cannabis. You know, I was in, you know, I grew up during the exact era in Colorado where marijuana was at the cusp of being decriminalized and not only made legal for medicinal, but also for recreational purposes. And so it was honestly, as a, as a kid, it was a very confusing environment to be in because, you know, the law was, you know, don't, don't consume marijuana. It's illegal. You're going to go to jail. But in practice, I was exposed to parents and families where they would say to their kids, I don't want you like drinking in our home or drinking and driving or anything like that. Oh, but if you want to go in the basement and smoke, we're going to look the other way. And it was like this very mixed message of like these authority figures, like they were all condoning it and, and versus, you know, what the law actually reflected. And so I think that was actually very formative from my perspective, but I think it's also formative for when you look at the path that it's taken, it's like, first, let's prove the safety and the efficacy in medicinal settings. And I think for a lot of these substances, very much so, including psilocybin and magic mushrooms, there are very real medicinal applications. And I mean, that's being proven out at Johns Hopkins, at NYU, you know, a lot of these very well-established programs through well-controlled, you know, studies that are being put in front of the FDA. and i think if they can first prove the efficacy uh then you can get the foot in the door sort of broader exposure so that people can come to realize that what they were told in the 70s and 80s during the quote-unquote war on drug was act or war on drugs was actually complete

bullshit right and it was very much politically driven well and to me um you know i've had i always consider myself incredibly lucky because where i sit uh on a daily basis i get to meet people who are devoting their lives to go and build just cool stuff, right? And a lot of times it is technology driven, but more and more it is, I'll just put it in kind of the healthcare bucket as well. One of my partners, Jason Williams, built and sold a very large healthcare company. And so we probably see a higher degree of that than most. And I've seen now two or three people pitch us on this idea of micro dosing, like the psychedelic drugs being used to treat, whether it's ptsd or other sorts of you know whether it's diseases however you want to

categorize them um but it is in controlled environments it's done in a kind of prudent and very measured way uh and from everything i can tell it works right and so i always kind of try to understand different sides of the story or the arguments and from law enforcement right if you've kind of been raised or or conditioned to believe the war on drugs story makes sense those people should go to jail. Yeah. Right. Like, okay, that, that's a very, um, kind of straightforward, uh, easy to measure, um, approach. Now, if you look at it from the patient, right, the person who's actually suffering from one of these things, if there's anything out there that can help them, they want it, right. They want access to it. And it's not to abuse it. It is

simply because, Hey, I wake up every day and, and, you know, I have PTSD. And if you can give me something to get rid of it, that's great. Then there's like what I'll call the medicinal approach right or perspective which is they actually struggle with what can have impact and what is the ethical ramifications right like there are certain medical procedures or certain medicines around the world that were applied there's data that suggests that they solve the problem there's also the ethical question of should we provide that right like you know opioids is probably a great example of this we're like yes they do they were effective they do change your pain tolerance but are there side effects that make it maybe we shouldn't you know just

hand them out like candy yeah probably so where's the balance right and and do you think that we'll run into that with some of the psychedelic stuff and cannabis and we've got to kind of find where the boundaries are or are you more in the camp of like you know hey you can die from drinking but you can't die from smoking weed yeah yeah no i i actually think you raise a really good point which is I'm actually not one of those hardcore people that thinks, you know, oh, these substances are just inherently good. There's nothing could go wrong, you know, whether it's LSD or psilocybin or even, you know, ketamine, which was recently approved by the FDA for various treatments.

You know, I actually think and this is I had a really powerful conversation with a cousin of mine who's a pediatrician. And, um, I think, you know, when it comes to relationships with substances, it's like the thing you have to work on first is your relationship with yourself. And I think the issue that we have is, um, a lot of times, like with these issues, they're made kind of black and white, like, oh, is the substance good or bad? Um, and it has nothing to do with that. It actually has to do with, you know, are we perpetuating a culture of education of, you know, personal growth, self care? uh do we have safe spaces to kind of have these conversations you know if you look at europe and like their attitude towards drinking you're able to have an environment where you grow up drinking with your family having wine with dinner and alcoholism is a lot you know is less rampant i mean there's obviously countries they drink a ton in europe i'm not saying they don't drink but the relationship with themselves and with the substance is very different and i think in america

you know we we you know we're a country founded on puritan values and i think one of the puritan values that has kind of been overplayed is one of complete abstinence or complete, you know, celibacy, like in all these examples, it forces you to not deal with the relationship with yourself and kind of self-control, self-knowledge to then you can have a healthy relationship with people, substances, life experiences, et cetera. So I think ironically, like I do think a lot of these substances are a thousand times safer and better for you can have wide ranging benefits versus, let's say, alcohol or, you know cigarettes are a lot of like socially sanctioned substances yep but i think it does

need to be paired with a a societal level conversation around substance abuse for sure that's very real well and it's funny to hear you talk about this because i think we probably share a lot of the same views in terms of um you know a binary world's almost never good right just like like you know i i i get very nervous when people say you know x is good or bad right it's usually well if x is applied in some way right or certain people or you know whatever it is uh so i think the nuance is always really important except with bitcoin maybe right well bitcoin's great so yeah there's really no bad side duh um uh no but i do think that um you know you also similar to myself uh you know i think the uh uh the john mcafee's the mike novogratz there's all these other people

who've come on uh the podcast uh criminal reform right and kind of criminal justice has become this huge issue where uh i think that um the war on drugs really led to uh kind of a desensitization of like we're putting humans in cages right like just so we're clear like that's what jail and prison is right is like we are literally confining somebody there and so um i i usually go to the extreme and i say you know whether you believe in uh kind of the criminal reform and everything like let's just start with the most extreme case right like should we put people in solitary confinement i'm of the belief like that's actually really bad psychologically could be considered torture right and so like if you kind of go to the extreme and you start walking yourself back

you realize that like again there's no binary good or bad right like people do bad things they should be punished when they don't do bad things then they should be okay but it's you know the question becomes what is the punishment right so maybe talk a little bit about kind of criminal reform and and kind of how that relates maybe to some of the um the decriminalization of drugs and and all that yeah yeah criminal justice reform is something that i uh i have a very personal relationship with and uh it's something i i care about pretty deeply um i i actually you know i recommend to you know everyone that i ever you know talked about this subject i mean there's obviously a few great books um but there's a really great documentary on netflix called the

13th the 13th the 13th yeah highly recommended i've never even heard of this before really powerful. And, uh, you know, the, really the, the concepts that are talked about in that movie is how the American prison industrial complex, uh, was, you know, has largely been a result of political motives that date back to, you know, uh, post civil war when we started to have suffrage suffrage and, you know, you could, we were giving, uh, African-Americans and minorities the right to vote, there was another way to kind of have control over these minorities and over these other populations. And so it was very politically driven to create a lot of legislature and as well as a platform, which Nixon coined the war on drugs, is similar to a lot of what we're actually

seeing today, where it's very easy to create a powerful, scary narrative that is a veiled form of racism and and you obviously have to follow through on a lot of the threats right so it's saying like oh man the biggest threat to america is drugs and you know it's a very successful platform and and there was a lot going on during that era um you know i also i highly recommend people read uh the electric uh yeah the electric kool-aid acid tests the electric kool-aid acid test yeah okay that's a book tom wolf incredible journalist might be my second favorite after hunter s thompson we're gonna get to hunter s thompson all right hold on keep going yeah uh but you know you you start to realize that um these there was a lot going on when these

substances were really being discovered and popularized uh in the united states and and abroad that kind of got really really mixed in and ironically i actually think this this could very possibly happen with with crypto where new new technologies let's let's look at these drugs let's say as new technologies kind of get swept up in the zeitgeist of the time and so you know marijuana lsd psilocybin like all these substances were just emerging right in the in the 60s and 70s and so when they got caught up in this and really what was a i i think a very racially driven um you know war on keeping minorities from voting uh you know it was it was almost like we threw the the baby out with the bath water and we kind of came back with this blanket stance of just all

drugs are bad and let's not take the time to understand them and it was a lot of it though was was removing stripping people of their right to vote you know and if you look at the south and also i mean the u.s represents five percent of the world population but we represent 25 percent of the global prison population it's crazy it's staggering it's absolutely nuts and and by the Not to interrupt you here, but one of the things that I don't know what the data is, but anecdotally, the way that prisoners in America are treated, the environments that they're put into, the amount of prisoner-on-prisoner violence, all of these things, the lack of education and training for them to be set up for success when they leave. uh we're really far behind in a lot of these categories it seems like uh so it's not just we put a lot of people in prison the way that they're treated and then the lack of training to set them up for success it's just not a good situation yeah yeah people should check out defy

ventures which is working to address just that problem which is like re-entry and and that that's really what it should be about should be about rehabilitation it should be about education uh instead like we're labeling people as criminals also they're the fact that it's privatized like the majority of the prisons has been privatized they're literally using it as subsidized labor right so they're also charging the government they're getting paid to hold people in prison so again when you talk about alignment incentives it could not be worse alignment of incentives than they're paid to put prisoners away and and beyond that they then get their free labor to to you know whether it's produce license plates or or do you know man tons of manual labor um for

pennies on the dollar oh yeah 12 cents an hour like it's it's completely inhumane and uh i i think you know there there needs to be massive massive changes to to fix this system and a lot of it has to happen through legislation but i actually think a lot of it also has to do with reforming drug laws and like you know a lot of these non-violent criminals who are in jail for you know possessing crack or or you know having multiple drug offenses um you know that they're in on these insane mandatory minimum sentences of you know 10 to 15 years uh and you know i I kind of was forced to face that directly you know around college time myself and when you come to see the system up close you can kind of see all of its scars and all of its you know all the

kind of terrible aspects to it and I think the reason why it's not part of too many mainstream conversations is because most people don't ever get exposed to that system yeah like the minorities that do get exposed are in it and don't have a voice well and part of what I've seen um is you get uh a bifurcation right you get people who uh have never been exposed and therefore they you couldn't expect them to be educated about it right they just never had the opportunity to cross it and if they were they actually may be interested in it and then you get people who have experienced it but as you described earlier they're labeled as criminals and so their voice whether they have one or not is drastically uh softened by oh you're a criminal right and there's

very few people who i think have been able to um be thrust into the experience and the environment of i'm not talking about hey you know you got drunk and you got arrested in college and you went to the local jail cell sobered up and let you go i'm talking about like legitimate prison right when somebody goes through that experience uh it almost feels like the people who make it out on the other side and have a voice to talk about criminal justice reform etc uh they had to do something so spectacular right and and really spectacularly bad to get there in the first place that people will listen not because they went through the experience but because of what they did to actually go right so like you know the jordan belforts of the world etc right

Of like, you know, it's celebritized or made sexy kind of what got them there, right? And if you even look at, you know, like a Mike Milken would be another great example, right? Where, you know, very, very well-known guy, very wealthy guy, you know, gets into kind of a bad situation, right? Ends up going to jail, comes out, has the personal network, has kind of the foundation to stand on and say, hey, look, you know, here's kind of who I am and what I want to do moving forward. that's not the average story right the average story is the exact opposite it feels like well you don't hear the average story yep and and i mean i think there are some people that are doing a lot um cut 50 is a great organization that that's that's working on this i would also suggest people check out an organization called breakout breakout okay what's that breakout's really dope

it's actually so criminal justice reform is a component but they're very much more just social impact driven started by a friend of mine, Michael Farber. Um, they do these, these urban conferences. You can think of like urban gatherings where they really take you deep on a specific city. So, I mean, and cities all around the U S like, you know, Oklahoma city, Chicago, Austin, I mean, you know, you name it Atlanta. Uh, and they gather all sorts of movers and shakers and we're not talking like tech or finance. I mean, it's, it, there are those, those people who show up but it's people who are passionate about these kind of like on the ground issues and they kind of take a microscope or you know to all these problems and they surface them along with all

the beautiful components of like the music the art the culture the food um and i think that's what it takes it takes to your point like not many people have had to actually face it so it's very easy to ignore problems that you've never that you that you don't know exist or that you only you know kind of but only at arm's arm's length all right so hold on before we get into some of the details around this uh tell the story of what happened in college so that everyone kind of understands the perspective that you're coming at this from yeah for sure so it's um it's it's a difficult story to retell it took me a couple years to kind of to own it and and the one thing i'll say here is uh it's obviously incredibly sensitive and so it's important i think for people to hear this

from your perspective right of like um it's uh i have a lot of friends who've been through all kinds of different things right some of it legally related some regulatory related etc and uh the devil's always in the details right so like i just kind of you tell us a story in your own words and then we can get into some of the ramifications etc of you know why you believe the world or see the world in the way that you do yeah yeah absolutely so uh and you know i've i actually have learned i think one positive thing about about this whole experience is like you do learn there are there are two types of people there's the people who uh who want to will give you a chance to kind of tell your side they want to hear the truth and then there's those

who kind of just you know they write you off they'll they don't even want to touch it right and i think it's actually been net like a positive thing it's almost like uh it's a great filter mechanism it's the best filter like like the people who uh i don't even want to say don't care but are open-minded and, and, uh, empathetic and are good listeners or usually the people you want to hang out with anyways. Yeah, no, it's no, it's so true. And, uh, so, you know, the, the scene to set the scene, it was, you know, it's senior year. Uh, I went to Northwestern, which is in Evanston, Illinois, and, uh, there's this student festival every year, uh, that we, that we hold called Dillo day. And it's, you know, we bring in some pretty big acts, you know, they've had

everyone from uh kanye and and like the uh the college lalapalooza exactly a lot of midwest school actually a lot of colleges do this where they'll have like a one a one day like big student festival and uh you know we're we're a bunch of really nerdy kids that work our asses off all year you know round and and burn the candle at both ends and so it's kind of like a release at the very end of the school year and i was living at the time in an off-campus housing with 14 guys in this just big big old house jesus yeah those were the days i i was living in a room the size of a closet you know sharing a bathroom with you know five guys i mean this is this is college guys college college and uh you know you you you asked earlier about bitcoin well you know so we

this was the golden era of the silk road and uh you know everyone in our household had kind of locked down jobs and we wanted to kind of go out with a bang and so we placed a group order you know just i'm not getting anyone's names involved in this just you know we pasted a group order ordered a couple different things you know some weed uh some lsd etc and uh it was for the house's kind of you know house's consumption and uh you know you had to like stock the pantry basically we stocked the pantry we were hosting you know and look this is we own fully like we we explored these things but you know we we were we were um so we we had this right for our house and um the the so the week before we get an inbound kind of text message from one of the friends of people

outside the house saying hey you know there's this kid who reached out to me he was wondering uh if you guys had any extra uh mdma and uh was it like ecstasy right yeah yeah and uh he he was wondering uh if anyone had any extra and so you know i didn't but we sent out a message to kind of the we had a group chat at the time and said hey does anyone have anything extra for this kid and you know one of my friends said oh i got too much for me my girlfriend happy to kind of give him some so we connect or you know we connected them and uh a few days later this is during reading week so everyone's in the library like 24 7 studying uh the kid comes by and the kid is you know picking up uh so the text goes out hey this kid's here and the kid who who is you know

selling a bit of his portion uh was in the library and so he's just like hey can someone run up to my room go grab it off my desk and and give it to him so went went inside got it i was one of the only people home so gave it to him had this whole conversation with him like hey you gotta be safe i'm not even kidding you like we we spoke for like 10 15 minutes because he was this younger asian kid and i wanted to be okay i gave him literally brave new world by aldous huxley another one of my favorite books i'm like hey be safe out there whatever um you know and uh and he you know, he takes off and I don't really think anything of it. Um, a few days later, it's now the day before this festival and we're having a big tailgate at our house. So I'd gone shopping

for groceries. Uh, and I'm, I'm unloading my friend's punch bug with my friend in front of our house. And we're taking like, you know, the, the grocery bags out of the trunk. And I see this SWAT van like parked around the corner of our house. I'm like, dang, they're really like stepping up the police enforcement for dillo day uh and as i say that like i see this stream of police officers carrying riot shields shotguns like the whole nine yards come streaming out towards our house wait they're coming out of like the SWAT van out of the SWAT van like holding the shields like they go and keep in mind this is a janky old house there's no locks on the doors we've never locked it i don't think anyone had a key it's literally college right you could walk in anybody's

home they take a battering ram bust the door down they're they're running in with shotgun shotguns like drawn like screaming and we're like seeing this all go down like holy shit there's people in the in the house like for this tailgate or this is the day before okay so we're so i pull out my phone i text everyone's like don't come back like don't come home don't come home there are police in the house and and then i i wipe my phone i'm just like i don't know what's going on i have no idea why they're here who they're after what's going on and my friend and i are standing there just like watching like you know frozen and one of the guys one of the police officers on the street sees us and he's like what's your names so you know we each say our name and as i say my name

he comes running over tackles me to the ground gets like a boot on my chest and is and is like cuffing me and and they're like you're under arrest you know they take me up on the porch and i'm sitting there in handcuffs and they're like uh they're they're tearing apart the house i mean they've got drug dogs in there they're tearing up the walls like flipping mattress i mean they're going crazy so they proceed to search the whole house um suffice it to say you know they find what you'd expect in the house of 14 senior guys you know there's like some weed some you know bong like a mixture of you know different substances you know stuff that is like more recreational type yeah not not not like nothing in in large quantities but but just you know

you guys don't have bricks of cocaine hiding in the walls and and somebody gets caught in the bathroom flushing it out of the toilet right exactly so none of that but they keep so they keep coming to question me and say like tell us where the drugs are like tell us where the money is and you know i i'm like i don't know what your time i'm not gonna talk i plead the fifth like i want to talk to my lawyer um and long story short you know i'm sitting on the porch handcuffed for two hours while they tear apart the house hands go numb they bring people coming out people are coming out of their houses like neighbors and stuff and everyone's like gawking what is going on and uh you know finally uh they take me inside and all the drugs are on the table again that's

like meager amounts and they're like all right um tell us who's like who belongs like who this belongs to like which room is who so that we know like whose drugs are who otherwise we're going to charge you with everything here yep and i'm like i get it do or die time no i'm like i i'm pleading the fifth like i want to talk to my lawyer like you know that's not like that's not online i'm not going to name names it's not going to help anybody um and they say all right we're going to charge you with everything and so you know in the state of illinois possession even of like a single pill uh you know is is a felony count and so i was charged with five felonies or no sorry it was three felonies and two two misdemeanors but the most severe misdemeanors um and each of those

felony counts held a 15-year mandatory minimum sentence holy shit so i get you know thrown in in the back of a squad car taken to evanston jail and you talk to the cop on the way oh yeah yeah oh yeah because what's that conversation like i mean i could just see they're in this frame of you know that they're just they're enforcing the law right and they're in this frame of like good guy, bad guy role playing, but like, this is their life. Right. And, um, and they just got a bad guy and they got a bad guy and they're doing the right thing. Totally. Totally. And, um, so they take them back to the station, fingerprint me, throw me in the cell, uh, in the cell, you know, take all my, uh, you know, shoestrings and belts and all that. Right. And so I'm sitting in the cell and,

you know, to be honest, I, uh, I started going to the darkest place I've ever been. Um, you know, like I, I had the year before lived in Israel and it had gone there to kind of find myself and started meditating, got really into Eastern psychology and, um, you know, had been at the happiest and most centered I ever been that senior year, you know, had actually for the most part, you know, been, uh, definitely been in the best place, uh, you know, mentally, uh, that I'd ever been. And yet, uh, you know, in that cell, I started the self-talk turned into like, maybe, you know, walking through all the possible outcomes, I'm like being a felon in the United States where I don't have the right to vote. I can't get housing. Like I, you can't get a job.

You do, you are, when you're found in the United States, you're subhuman and it's, it's wrong, but that's just like the facts. And I knew that because I, you know, I had, uh, done the sound so silly, but mock trial for all of high school to the, to the level of like not competing in nationals and things. And so I had a pretty good sense of, you know, how our, our justice system works. And, um, so long story short, I'm sitting there. Uh, I basically at the point where I'm like, Hey, um, it probably would be better to go to sleep and not wake up then deal with, you know, my family, the criminal repercussions jail for 45 years, dah, dah, dah, dah. And I see these, like these dark thoughts come in. And the, the thing that I really credit completely to

meditation and all that time I spent in Israel was this moment of clarity of like, this isn't who i am this isn't my voice and you know i jumped off the cot i was sitting on the cot on the wall in the jail cell i pull the cot down to the floor and again this is like the cheesiest most millennial thing ever but i i drop down i start doing yoga like sun salutations no push-ups i'm dead serious on the floor because i'm trying to get out of my head i know i need to just get into my body and like stop like hyperventilating and so i calm down i'm doing these sun salutations and these guards come running in yeah like i'm not doing it for more than maybe two three minutes and they come dashing in and they're like get get up like what are you doing like put that back on the wall

like they think i'm trying to hurt myself or doing something crazy yeah so they have no idea what you know what the hell is going on they've never seen someone busting out the sunset they're putting their boots on people's chests i used to the yoga but the craziest thing is that that voice goes away right so i'm i'm all of a sudden i'm i'm totally i'm like i'm happy i feel i feel everything's gonna be okay and i say to them hey can i speak to the arresting officer the guy who's kind of leading the investigation so they think i'm about to confess so they go they go get him maybe 30 minutes later he comes walking in and the crazy thing that changed was i saw like all this like toxic fear and like all these negative emotions the fear the loathing like hating our you know

our government hating the officers hating all these people i knew i needed to kind of flip that on its head for me to survive and so it was ultimately i knew the kind of like when he came walking in and i looked at him i saw him for the first literally the first time because even though I talked to this guy for, for hours as he's trying to question me and tear apart the house and everything. But I saw him for what he was, right. And what he is, which is he's, he's a civil servant, which is like one of the hardest jobs you could ever ask for. You see the worst in society. And, you know, a lot of people hold it against you. And I saw like a guy who's just has to hold this frame, you know, who I am as a criminal and who he is as a savior, right. For him to go home

and not, you know, beat his wife, let's say at the, at the end of the day. Right. And, and I, saw that and i i felt an incredible amount of of empathy and so when he came over i just uh you know again colorado hippie here um i say to the guy uh listen this isn't going to mean anything coming from me i imagine because you've probably already written me off as a criminal but i want you to know that whatever happens to me from from here on out where my life goes everything i don't hold you accountable and i want you to know that i appreciate you and i see like i really i admire what you do and you're just you're following the law as it's written and i don't want you to hold anything like i don't i don't want you to hold anything on my behalf and and

i also want you to know that i love you and i said i'm dead serious i say this to the guy in the cell he is and he's this stone face you know like we're still wearing his flak vest bad boys bad boys yeah like scrapped right scrapped like and and you know he just looks at me with this like disgust like this weird confused look and he turns around doesn't say a word walks out but the crazy I felt so light I'm like this is great I'm gonna go to jail I'm gonna get jacked I'm gonna read a ton of books I'm gonna meet really interesting people it's gonna be fun it's like you know I don't have to worry about where my next meal comes from so so I just all of a sudden had these stories of like oh you know I'll get out of jail move to Israel who cares if I'm failing blah blah everything was

fine so fast forward the story I get transferred to Cook County Penitentiary which is somewhere you don't want to be it's one of the worst and most notorious prisons i'm pretty sure that's like one of the most popular places to go for the show locked up it is terrible and i'll tell you you know i was in a cell with something like 60 other men and i was the only white person in the cell which i learned a lot i learned so much and i you know i was there there's no clocks on the walls right there's no windows you have no idea what time it is you're not yet you know guilty quote unquote but you know you're there you're only referred to by a number that they write on your wrist which as a jew had a lot of you know crazy uh triggers for me but they you know they

there's just a hole in the in the floor where everyone's you know you piss and shit in front of everybody else and um you're not no one will talk to you tell you what's going on right you're just you're you're in this room there's not even enough room for everyone to sit so most people either standing or kind of laying on the floor up against the walls and you know you're there for one day two day three it depends what day of the week and you know how things are getting sorted dial on the other side and inside everyone there's there's violence like in terms of people are like fighting each other no i'm there in there everyone's kind of like it's this us versus them feeling so it's very much the sense of like hey we're in this together uh and you know

everyone's like you know what you in for white boy like and there's all these conversations and but it was funny because like as soon as i'd be like oh yeah three three felonies and they're like respect so oh you didn't just get drunk outside the bar and tell a cop that uh you know he was stupid okay all right you're you're legit yeah no but you know you i saw all these people who were just as just another you know this is just another trip right they do this they've been here before oh my god it's just part of their lives right and there's other people who you know there's tons of insane stories around you know false accusations domestic abuse like all this stuff anyways and that's a much longer story but i just it was very humanized i talked with

so many people i mean i'm a i'm a talker like you tell and um you know so and i end up getting out on bail. I'm not considered a flight risk, which again, a big part of that is the color of my skin and you know, where I go to school, all that kind of stuff. Um, but really the important part of this story was bail. You remember? So I had no, I didn't have to pay. So I was out, I was out on bail, but it was $0. So I get out of bail, you know, suffice it to say my parents had written me off there. They're like, Oh man, they're like, you're what are you? Drug addict? You're crazy. Like we're, we don't want to talk to, we're disowning you. Uh, my brother was really there for me. And, and so my friends were, but, um, this, what about the, uh, the 14 guys that you

lived with? What are they doing? They were, it was, it actually really had a weird impact on my relationship with them because on some level, I think there was a lot of, um, there was maybe a lot of guilt cause I didn't name names. They asked, right. And there was plenty. I could have very easily done that. Um, and I took the fall for a lot of people. I mean, I definitely was, you know i'm not free of blame i mean i was i was gonna you know consume substances no question but um but i definitely you know i was honorable in terms of i didn't want to bring anyone else into it um but i think there's a lot of difficult emotions in there and so although they were really grateful and we hugged and had a really wonderful end to you know college together um i

think it put kind of like a wall between us that i was never really able to um break down again because there's a lot of a lot of stuff there and um the you know they all went on to graduate i was meanwhile like facing trial at the school so you know whether or not i was going to get my diploma as well as facing the criminal charges and the school can almost be worse in some cases right depending on what happens in the criminal side of it that's right yeah so four years right and all that debt and all that and i was a week away from my diploma right from walking and uh so i have this war on two fronts i don't want this to draw on too long this has already been a long story, but, uh, the, the, the real kind of, uh, the, the miracle that kind of played out for me

was I, you know, I started, so I got my background check from Microsoft where I started my, my first job after school, it came through the day before I was arrested. So I went and I started work while I was still under trial in Chicago and I'm commuting between Minneapolis where I'd never set foot in my entire life uh in chicago where i'm i'm on you know facing 45 years and and i'm terrified every day that they're gonna work on windows 95 let me go fight 45 years yeah yeah and and i was i thought every single day i'm like today's the day they're gonna fire me they're gonna find out you know like this shit was it was you know in the news and i'm like they're gonna find out it's inevitable so i was just i had the you know fear of god in me of like i'm gonna be

so good at my job that they can't fire me and so that was the attitude i went into work every single day was like i'm just gonna crush this job and on the other front i'm you know my lawyer told me and i got one of the best criminal defense lawyers in chicago but again taking out loans to pay him um and uh i basically he said to me look if this goes to trial it's not a matter of if you go to jail just how long you're there for yep um there's just no question and um so he's like if you don't get a plea bargain and so we went for the first pre-trial hearing and you know the da says hey this is open and closed and by the way i still don't know how why am i arrested what happened why was i the one that was on here and i i didn't know after that first pre-trial what

what had happened i got a guess yeah right i had a guess i had a good guess um but what i later found out and so she she said no no deal right and so no didn't even offer one didn't even offer one right and so we go to the second pre-trial hearing you know that's it's maybe three weeks a month later um and i find out in the meantime through the through the uh deposition and whatnot that uh the an anonymous you know confidential informant told them that i was a large drug dealer who had been selling to them for years and you know was known renowned in the area yada yada like and they so it ends up this this kid this asian kid you know had been arrested a month earlier for you know he had mushrooms and weed and he was he was actually dealing and then to get out of his

sentence he went on this campaign he he was just trying to get any name he could possibly give to the police and then whatever story they wanted to hear yeah to kind of get out of trouble himself it's like the classic classic story yeah and so i didn't even i'd never met this kid in my entire life never you know set eyes on him and he had you know thrown thrown me under the bus right and he got off scott free by the way they dropped all charges against this guy um but he he wrote you know whatever the police officers wanted to hear and so i'm up against it's a he said he said situation and uh you know the evidence is look there were there's drugs and and there's a written testimony and like a recorded transaction i mean like what else do you need right so in the

eyes did they have video no no no video but there were you know he went but he went in with the police like meaning they were they were the ones that gave him the money yeah yeah so um so i basically had come to terms with like this is it like i'm i'm going to jail like it's that's my that's my reality. And, uh, I was trying to put my affairs in order, you know, um, the people that really stuck by me, like my close friends, like trying to, Hey, take, you know, take my stuff, you have this, like whatever. Here's my Bitcoin. Yeah. I'm living out of a friend's parents' house in Minneapolis. Like, cause I didn't want to have a lease that I'd have to break. You know, I, I wasn't, I had to get a car to get to work. I was borrowing a car like, and, um, and you know,

the, I came in for the final pretrial hearing. And, uh, so I flew back to Chicago and this is for the testimony of the police officer. And he comes walking into the courtroom and I haven't seen him since I told him I love him. And he comes, he comes walking in and I jump up out of my seat. You know, I'm in my, my Sunday best, as they say for, for court day. And I, you know, I jump and go walking up to him and I, I just, you know, I, I just put on my hand, I shake his hand. I look him straight in the eyes and say, you know, officer stone. So, so good for you to be here. Um, I hope you've been well, and I really appreciate you, you being here today. Um, and, that's it like you know nothing crazy but i just you know really look at him and and see him as a

person the same way i did before and he goes into the he you know he's sequestered with the da so they can review his testimony whatnot and he's out of the room for five minutes 10 minutes 15 minutes and he comes back out of the sidebar and he comes walking past me and and walks out of the courtroom i'm like oh he's going to take a piss and she calls over my attorney he goes off and five minutes later he comes running out and he's like i don't know what the fuck just happened but they're gonna offer you a plea bargain they're gonna drop all the charges except for one possession charge you plead guilty to that you do your probation you're done you're cleared yep you're completely cleared yes i'm i'm i was i was crying i was like because i literally i was mentally i was in prison i was

like already like in that place in that space i'd been doing my research i was like i was okay with it and um and so that man i mean again i don't know what was said behind behind closed doors but but i i owe my life to him but i think like the bigger story that that i've taken away from it is you know it was a selfless act but it was it was if i if my skin were any other color or if i was raised in any other type of environment right like where it was just there's so many people who are sitting in that seat ready and what they say walks in fuck you pig right that's what they say right yeah or and again i'm sorry i don't want to be stereotypical as well but but the point is like you know not everyone is gonna is going to treat like treat him on a human level

right and well and whether they do or they don't it probably doesn't even matter because he's not walking in there and saying drop the charges that's right he's viewing them as a criminal regardless like that's his frame so for whatever i unknowingly you know shifted his frame and he didn't see me as the person he wanted to put away for 45 years and you know the thing is that i think in this country if you fit that stereotype if you're the type of person that he sees most days committing crimes you're in jail right it's it's just it's done you're there you're gone and i was given a second chance and it had nothing to do with who i was as a person you know it was kind of like where i was born uh and you know who i was born to and the opportunities that that were

afforded to me and uh i it has completely changed my perspective on life uh and i you know i think it's that's what's shaped a lot of my views as well i think it's obvious when you get the exposure to how the system works right and you don't it's almost it's very similar to how i think about crypto right a lot of people in crypto saw the global financial crisis but uh they were just old enough to pay attention just young enough where they actually didn't have their assets at risk um and so they were educated by you know trial by fire type situation but weren't really burnt yeah uh similar situation to you right like you get to go through all the motions you just don't pay the penalty on the back end totally you get the indoctrination and now you know you have

a very specific view of the world yeah yeah and i'll also say like for what it's worth um for people that have been in the you know in prison or have had difficult experiences in their life um you know it it's only a mental barrier that can prevent you from from you know doing your own thing you know like when i quit working and you know taking a salary and and took a plunge as an entrepreneur i was terrified that no one would back me because of like that story was in existence right and and you know there were plenty of vcs who wouldn't even take a meeting right but what we talk go back to what it means to have a filter um the ones who did they sat down and and they led, they, I mean, almost every, it comes up in every job interview when I'm raising money,

whatever, but they'll, the, the, the people who really get it, they're going to ask and they're going to want to hear your story. And, you know, they'll say, you know, tell me, tell me your side and they'll, they'll understand you on a human level. And I think like, um, but the only thing that'll stop you is, is fear, right? So like, if you're too afraid to take that initial plunge, you know, be self-authored in the sense of whether you want to start a business or, or help people, or, you know, um, you know, be in, be in a spotlight or not, uh, you, you really have to, uh, be willing to kind of take that leap of faith and, and you'll find the right people, like they'll be attracted to you. I completely agree. What led you to switch gears here? So you,

you actually spend time, I know, uh, going in and doing kind of a financial literacy training inside of a classrooms. What kind of led you to that and kind of talk a little bit about the work you're doing there yeah well i mean it's ironically it's actually somewhat intertwined with the criminal justice component because it was it was almost born out of necessity personally um there's a uh there's a pretty wild story that i that i was referencing from from college and i know you can tell me whether or not we actually have the time to get into it because it can be a long story but the kind of outcome of that uh experience was i was in a pretty desperate situation personally where I pretty much had to fend for myself. And, you know, I was under maybe $65,000 worth of

student debt at the time, you know, it was just fresh out of school. And, you know, I, I basically had a choice, which was, you know, give up and kind of be broken by the situation or take complete control of my life, my finances, the opportunity that I had and, you know, dig myself out of that hole. Um, and you know, I was kind of at that point hanging on sort of by a string. And so I, I doubled down. I just went super, I went super deep into, um, you know, personal finance, financial literacy, reading every book I could get my hands on talking with people. My roommate was, you know, financial advisor. So I got to take, I got to take all his practice tests while he was training for all of his, you know, series 65 and all of his various,

uh, registrations. And so, um, that was really a transformative period. And then after I was able to help myself and you know get out of debt um which i which i managed to accomplish in you know 12 months and then how do you do that but like what's the secret the secret is you don't have you don't have any fun that costs money you just have a lot of discipline it's literally behavior change right yeah and it's a matter of like taking control of the money that's coming in and every single penny that goes out and be really thoughtful um and and you know i love working with people on this and it's really empowering like to a lot of people this is like a scary concept that you want to keep kind of at arm's distance. Um, but I actually think as soon

as you kind of given the tools you need and the knowledge you need, I've seen people's faces just light up and it changed. Like people literally make massive life changes after these courses because they realize, wow, on the path I'm on right now, things are not going to end well, or the path I'm on, I'm never going to get what I want. What would you say are like the one or two things that people do as you've talked to them that they do that if they just stopped, right? you said like fun right i should not please i do not ever i want you to like unpack that a little bit right because it's not just hey don't live a life of fun oh definitely not it's a certain type of activities that fit in that that i'm assuming that you're talking about yeah i should

clarify i took it to an un almost unhealthy extreme like i was like i said in a very difficult situation and i kind of did what i thought was necessary it was you know means it was like a matter of survival at the time um you know thanks to all those kind of extenuating circumstances is it what i tell people actually in these courses you can have also you can have every type of fun you want but you need to understand the cost and i think it's not just that but it's also making sure that all of the things that are actually important to you like know what your life's priorities are and your goals are make sure you you've automated your finances and so that you're paying yourself and you're taking care of all these things um that actually matter to you that

are going to make a difference in your life and then with what's left over go do whatever the hell you want literally have a great time but the automation is and like removing your decision making from the process is going to be the best decision you can make and ramit seti i think was one of the people that really helped push this forward with you know i will teach you to be rich um which sounds gimmicky but it's an incredible book and um well so here's one of the things that to me is so interesting right um because i think this is uh this is like a well-known financial trick that sounds stupid and because it's so simple nobody does it right which is like pay yourself first right and it's this idea of uh it's kind of like a startup right i always

tell founders i don't care if you raise a million dollars five million or ten million you're gonna spend in 18 months yeah yeah like whatever's there it's gone in 18 months that's very true and so like like trust me yeah you should think about how much you know what are you gonna do in 18 months because you're going to spend the money yeah um and not because they don't want to do that it's just that's just human nature that's just how it happens etc and so very similar to that you're going to spend the money that you have sitting there in a discretionary account right yep most people don't have the discipline to save and so it's almost protecting you from yourself and saying look when money comes in whether through salary investments whatever immediately

almost hide a portion of it from yourself yeah but put make sure that you are thoughtful and disciplined about where it goes and why you're putting it there oh absolutely yeah yeah and i think even the the you know some of the smartest uh you know people that i've met whether it's in silicon valley or you know in any of the places i've lived whether you know it doesn't matter if you're working at facebook or you know you're you're working in an hourly job and and i think the level of financial literacy tends to be the same and you're right it's human nature like the level of discipline um it you know whatever money's deposited in your account is gonna be spent by the time your next paycheck comes and that's kind of that's that's very much human

nature and then talk about how automation fits into that yeah so i mean i think crypto actually has enormous promise in in this regard because uh you know the levels of automation that are available to people today they're actually so they're the best they've ever been there's no question about that however it's still incredibly manual it's pretty difficult and it takes you know it just takes time, like setting up automatic transfers, doing the math ahead of time. It's, it's kludgy. It's, there's not really, there aren't very many elegant solutions. But what's crazy is a lot of that is because the bank's technologies, like your ability to quote unquote, read, write, you know, to let's say your financial accounts, which is moving your own

money around and, and, you know, making if this, then that type decision trees, things like that just as impossible because they create this walled garden where where your money sits uh and it's not like it's not because they want to protect your funds i mean they obviously they they do but it's more just that the uh the mindset they're not technologists right they're financiers and their best interests their incentives are to keep all their money and and you know keep it in their you know in their accounts now in crypto um with it let's say a wallet address you know the technology is actually incredibly simple to automate what money goes where and in what percentages and do that all via smart contract or through very easy interfaces it's really easy to interact with and

so like if you have your money on a blockchain all of a sudden if you start thinking about wallet addresses as accounts or bank accounts you know people who are using true usd today we're their bank account right they're holding it and effectively banking themselves which is again another powerful concept with a lot of ramifications but it also means that you can actually build the perfect bank account with full automation where you're deciding what portion is going, let's say towards, you know, my retirement, what's going towards my short-term goals, my long-term goals, um, you know, towards having fun, what type of investments do I want it going into? Uh, a lot of that can be, it can be made at the point where when every time you get paid,

all of your money goes exactly where it should, and you don't have to make any decisions. And I think like that would be the, that's the ultimate level of, let's say, you know, personal finance is when all those decisions are made ahead of time and then you live your life. You go do what you're great at. It's funny because I had Murad on the podcast and he talked about this idea that not only are most people not great at personal finance,

they are really bad at investing. If you're, use kind of the extreme example, if you're a school teacher and you teach history, the idea that you have to earn a salary and then you need to become educated on the stock market and bonds and currencies and commodities and how to build a portfolio and just all of these things is wild crazy right like it's a lot to expect yeah and it's just an aspect of personal finance they have no exposure to etc and so he's really excited about this idea uh less automation and

more just like bitcoin as a store of value that could potentially steal market share back from other asset classes right so real estate art all stuff uh this may be one of the first times um in his opinion where simply buying an asset and holding it ends up solving all of those investment decision uh problems and can uh help to preserve the value of your wealth yeah and again you can debate whether he's right or not whatever but i think it's a really interesting idea that goes in line with your idea of like automation of just like set it and forget it right and then how do you end up in a place where you want to be yeah yeah and and again you know i think crypto has a place in people's portfolios i know you're on one end of the spectrum you're on the hardcore end and

you know i think i think everyone gets to make the most important investment decision you'll ever make is your asset allocation and it's really an expression of kind of your hypothesis about the way the world's going to play out right and so most people don't actually have a well-informed hypothesis they shouldn't make that decision right there's some well-established guidelines that you can follow um like through let's say a target date fund something like that but what's cool is to your point it's like uh i think another element here is uh the access to investments like you know a lot of the technology that's coming about uh in in crypto today ironically has the most utility outside of the united states and that's what we're finding also for our tokenized

currency is it creates enormous value in places with capital controls, let's say like Korea or Argentina, or in places where you have unstable banking and wild hyperinflation like Venezuela or Argentina. And I know that's been tossed around and bandied to the point where it's somewhat meaningless. But when it comes to actual access to basic financial services, we're providing them still with fiat and I think with Bitcoin. I think it's incredibly promising And I think it's really exciting. Absolutely. Speaking of currencies and assets, I know you've got some unique thoughts around Tether and regulators.

Talk maybe a little bit about why, you know, Tether may be one of the first assets or projects where on a global basis regulators really make an example of them. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that what was recently announced by the New York AG is sort of the, in my mind, the death knell for Tether. You know, we've we've known for the longest time that they were commingling, you know, their corporate funds with the escrowed funds behind Tether. What we didn't know was that there was as large a shortfall. You know, 850 million is non-trivial. But the truth is that I think regulators are actually taking a very clear stance in the space and are starting to put out a lot of clarifications around their positions and what sort of licensing you need, et cetera, et cetera. And I'll tell you that in most cases, when there's this early Wild West type industry where everyone's going crazy, sort of like getting away with everything, regulators take their time, they observe, they come in, but then they bring the smack down and they choose someone that they make an example of. And, you know, in my opinion, based on when, when I went and I read, um, the, the, the memo and by the AG, uh, it's pretty intense.

I mean, there are, I think that they're out for blood and I think that, uh, they're going to make an example of tether just because there is, you know, easily identifiable criminal activity there. And, you know, the thing that scares me is like, I'm not just saying this as a competitor because the thing that I worry about is like, there's a lot of people that stand to, you know lose their hat and it's by far the most liquid stable coin in the world like far more so than ours and there's three billion in circulation like that that's going to have an incredible effect on the ecosystem at large uh but i think you know in general this is this

is how it goes right like the regulators will come in make an example of someone scare the shit out of everybody else and then the big boys who who already let's say i mean most people don't know this but like google facebook these guys all have actually all the licenses you could ever need They already have MTLs in every state. They've got e-money. They've got, you know, MSBs. They're registered everywhere. Right. It was a couple million dollars. Took a year or two. No big deal. Right. They already did it. So I think a lot of the big boys then are going to be able to step in and sort of clean up what's left over and, you know, announce and launch their own solutions. But I just the key here is we need to make sure that we survive this period and with this kind of reshuffling of who's at the table and then come out stronger. makes that makes sense to me uh before i finish up rapid fire what do you think is the most important company in crypto can't say yourself oh yeah definitely not us i would say most wow most important company in crypto i'll say the ethereum foundation why uh i think that they are running a uh what is a quasi like techno religion and it's really easy to fuck up a

religion like we all actually i would say something that get a lot of people to hate me so let's just say there's there's there's many sects of christianity on people there's many sects of christianity and not all of them turned out so well so let's just say like in this case like i'm really hoping for the best what do you think is the most controversial thought you have in crypto like what do you believe that everyone else disagrees with in crypto oh man um i think that virtually every altcoin is going to get this isn't even i guess this isn't controversial virtually every altcoin is going to go to zero i think like you know bitcoin's going to be here to stay this isn't controversial at all not in this not at all i'm trying to think what what

could possibly controversial i think like uh i actually i guess this is controversial to a lot of crypto people and it's given what we're doing but i think uh that there's a real need for regulated projects in the space and i think like ones that play nice with regulators and uh are willing to um you know are willing to take measures to sort of you know open the kimono and and and i think not everything can be a crypto anarchist paradise um but i think there's room for both yep i think it's fair um what would you say is the one regulation you would change or improve if you could uh definitely i i there's a there was a legislation um that that was what's what needs to change is capital formation. So I think, um, when you look at like a lot of the,

the current, uh, securities regulations like reg D reg a plus, uh, you know, reg S, uh, I think those need to be wildly improved. I think it's doing everyone a disservice that only accredited investors can participate in most of these types of, you know, alternative fundraisers. And I think, um, it only hurts, uh, you know, the mom and pop investors that they can't participate. Uh, again, they still need to be educated there still needs to be protections don't get me wrong i think it's a step in the right direction but i think we need to really improve our our securities laws makes sense most important book you've ever read that's really difficult um most important book i would actually have to say the mind illuminated what is that it is one of them i mean it's the

most incredible book i've ever read no it's no it's it's a it's it's like you know how they're in every subject on earth like most people will maybe go to level one level two um and then there's those people who go you know become obsessed and these are people i love but that go to level 10 right or level nine right as close to level 10 as you can get and the in this book it's basically you're being taken on a journey in towards brain science and meditation kind of the intersection of the two to level nine and i think it's only this it's a it's a relatively recent book and i think it's only because there just hasn't been people from the western world with the knowledge and background they have who also have knowledge of the eastern world and translations of like a

lot of this multi you know millennial old knowledge to kind of combine the two and then actually put it into a book in a consumable manner and then they accomplish that and i think it is uh i'm gonna read this tonight it's awesome it's awesome sold yeah all right aliens real not real believer definitely real why no question why i mean it's it's it's fermi's paradox i mean it's like look i think uh i'm gonna ban fermi's paradox as an answer on this podcast here's my answer all right here's my answer um i think it would be the most you know self-centered egocentric human bullshit to say you know we are the only sentient or not even sentient just life forms in the universe now i do think that there's a timing problem i don't i can't say if there's aliens

right now um but like are there aliens you know ever yeah ever or in the future like or in the past you know yes i think no question do you think that there's weirder stuff in space or in the ocean space really i mean i hope so because it's that's that'd be way cooler yeah that's why i think i actually think it's the ocean well you know space like there's definitely life in the ocean we know that for sure there's some crazy shit i mean black holes you know super i mean i think there's just there's some insanely weird shit like if you think about it as just the you know the universe's largest experiment and you know let's say non-anthropomorphized god is just out there fucking shit up um you know if we think that here on our little earth that we've

got weirder shit at the bottom of the ocean i think that's the same mistake we would make in saying like there are an alien i'm gonna make my mission to go find some weird stuff in the ocean bring it back please do all right you could ask me one question to finish up what uh what do you got all right um i want to hear uh if if you could take on you know one quality of a person who you hate you absolutely hate uh but this quality like the quality that you admire the most in them what would that be and who's the person if you'll share that uh it's a whole group of people let's hear it um it is the uh what's the best way to categorize this group are you about to say no it is the it is the people who uh have a false sense of reality in that they believe things that

are just so incredibly unlikely that uh they take as fact um i'm specifically talking about certain groups that most people in crypto i think would just say you guys are just trolling what i've come to find is they're not actually trolling but they do believe that that shit coin is gonna like take over bitcoin right what quality do you admire of theirs so so their ability to completely detach from reality face is uh well it's not even faith right it's because they actually like it's not like a hey i i believe like they in their mind they know right and it's like yeah like they like they have a level of uh confidence um and you know if you look at some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world they have a very similar ability to detach from reality uh

The difference is they are not participants or, like, fans that detach from reality, right? Like, it's one thing to, like, hey, like, if you're a New York Knicks fan, you can detach from reality and think that they're going to win the NBA championship. That's probably not going to happen for a long time, right? But, like, so you can be a fan. It's different when you are the entrepreneur drive. Like, you know, Elon's probably the best example of just, like. Conviction. Yeah, just like I'm going, I believe that X can happen. I'm going to go do it. Right. And what X is, is so detached from reality that everyone else is like, you're nuts. It does take a special type of person to fund that. Right. So, you know, a lot of venture capitalists are in the business doing that.

but the ability to uh detach from reality and also have like the propensity for action to like i'm gonna go build it um i think it's just very very unique uh there are very few people in the world who can do it so true um i mean i'm thinking there's probably less than a thousand yeah you know seven plus billion people totally that can actually detach from reality and then have a propensity for action now i caveat all this with like the crypto people detached from reality have no propensity for action like they're just buying shit and just you know crossing their fingers yeah um but but i do uh i do empathize a little bit in that uh that is a a very unique ability i i would love for you to watch this video all right it's a recent video george hotz

okay hotz hotz he was the original guy to like jailbreak the iphone he's like a really renowned hacker um brilliant dude but he gave a talk at south by and um it's about uh you know i i don't want to give away too much about what it's about but it's about like you know are we the whole idea of like are we in a simulation but i think when you hear this guy talk he's on the level of elon or or you know fill in the blank you know steve jobs etc where he's just thinking on a level that uh most people won't go to or would be afraid to take like take some stances publicly and not only is he taking the stance but he is the person you are describing like he is putting money and time and effort where his mouth is yep towards like what sounds like the craziest thing you've ever

heard but he's only crazy until it happens exactly watch the video the last thing i'm going to let you uh you plug here is uh before we got started you turned me on to hunter s thompson oh yeah and uh we started watching videos uh we watched everything from him shooting at his neighbors on television to uh his daily routine uh maybe just give a quick two minutes on what your fascination there is and why he's uh he's so interesting i mean it's funny it's it's almost like you kind of gave the perfect segue because all these people are kind of on an unabashedly unique, you know, and, and they're there, they, to the outside, to the majority, to the mainstream, they're the total wackos. They're the weirdos, they're the outcasts. Um, and yet they are some

of the most prolific creators, you know, and I think it's really hard. It's, I mean, he, you know, I actually want to take a moment to make a shout out that like he killed himself. Okay. And so and and the reason i want to tell me that part is suicide prevention like no like let's take a serious moment here we're like if you're one of those people where you feel like oh man the whole world is against me everyone is is you know no one everyone's calling me crazy everyone is calling me crazy they're making fun of me they're like you know whether they're trolling you on the internet whatever um you know that that has a very very real impact and i think it is not easy it is not easy to to hold a conviction and to just be different and i think like we need to have a

better dialogue around like it's okay and you're gonna get shit and you're gonna take flack but um you don't let that um take you to that dark wood place don't ever let yourself go to that place there's you can get help and i know sorry this is like a somber moment where it was gonna make it funny but he he you know he's an incredible individual and it makes me so sad that we lost him i i just i loved his writing i loved the person that he was i loved the independent thinker that he was so i highly recommend people read some of his books or some of his short stories amazing guy and and watch the youtube videos and watch you will crack up watch the youtube videos whether it's conan letterman day in the life you could go down a crazy

honduras thompson rabbit hole i guarantee you will uh he also makes an appearance in uh electric colloid acid tests i'm gonna read mine illuminated i'm gonna watch honduras thompson and you guys may never hear from me ever again that's right that's right all right tory i appreciate you uh you taking time to do this uh it's a ton of fun and i'll have to do it again in the future. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Are you curious about cryptocurrency and you don't know where to begin? I've got a great way for you to try. You can use Stormplay, a free and fun way to start earning in exchange for your time. That's right. You don't necessarily have to make a financial investment to begin. You can simply download, register, and then discover these

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