The Wolf Of All Streets - He Is On A Mission To Provide 1 Billion People With Internet Using Blockchain | Micky Watkins, World Mobile

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

Micky Watkins, the telecom industry veteran, is telling his story of how he is changing the lives of ordinary people in Africa, by providing them with mobile network connectivity that runs on a blockchain. He wants to connect 1 billion people by 2030, if you want to know how - listen to this episode of the Wolf Of All Streets episode with Micky Watkins, CEO of World Mobile. https://twitter.com/MrTelecoms ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►BITGET GET UP TO A $8,000 BONUS IN USDT AND GET MASSIVE DISCOUNTS ON TRADING FEES! 👉 https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bitget    ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets   ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #WorldMobile #Crypto #Blockchain Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:15 Changing lives 8:00 World Mobile 14:27 Mobile network operators’ power 15:55 Technology behind World Mobile 20:40 Business model & progress 24:34 Scaling 27:55 Providing 1 billion people with mobile connection in Africa 30:53 Opportunities in Africa 34:35 Competing in the US market 37:30 Discovering crypto & blockchain 39:00 The balloons 45:10 Wrap up The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

There's an oligopoly that's controlled the telecommunications industry in most of the world since its inception. But it's incredible what happens when you step out of the territory that they control and give people access to phones and to the Internet. I just had an amazing conversation with Mickey Watkins, the CEO, founder of World Mobile. We talked about what happened when they simply brought the basics of this technology into a village in Zanzibar and what that can mean for the rest of the world. This is an inspired conversation that you do not want to miss. Just for anyone who's watching, we recorded 15 minutes of this without recording. So I want to offer some context as to how you and I met and how this conversation started. I was sitting at the Waldorf Astoria in Dubai at the Satoshi Roundtable, met these two nice

gentlemen randomly sitting on the couch, and they told me an incredible story about a fishing village in Zanzibar. I was blown away and I said, I need to hear more. And they said, we're not the guys to tell you this story. Let me call Mickey. So they called you down and instantly we became fast friends and you expanded on this incredible story. So I'd just like you first to share that story with everybody. Okay, awesome. So yeah, this is a really nice story. This was kind of the catalyst to me pushing all the effort to make a mobile grow. So we needed to test out some of the equipment that we'd made. In theory, it worked.

I'd been working in the African continent, the Asian continent for a long time in underserved and unconnected areas. So we kind of knew it would work, but we wanted to see the impact. So in mid 2019, we decided that we'd put these things called air nodes, and I'll explain what an air node is later, in a village. Two air nodes, one either side. So this village was by the sea, houses built on stilts, and very, very remote and took a long time to get to, but close enough for us to be able to support in this initial proof of concept. So we put one air node at the top of the village and one air node at the top of the village

and one anode by the sea in the village. These anodes are on poles. They had solar panels to keep the power there because there's very little infrastructure. They had streetlights because we understood that in the equator it gets dark very early and we thought for $20 on each anode, this is a worthy thing to do.

Underneath they had the CPU, so that's the Wi-Fi unit. Then they were plugged in via fibre. And then underneath that they had second life batteries to support when the sun's gone in so that people could still have the power to charge their devices. So we figured that this was going to make a real difference to the village, but we didn't know how much. And then 2019, everybody knows about it, COVID hit. We weren't able to travel, none of our team,

and we weren't able to get inside and outside of Zanzibar, Tanzania. And then finally, when we could, I sent the team in to take footage. We did it before and we did it after. When they arrived, the team messaged me and they said, we're not in the right place. I said, what do you mean you're not in the right place? They said, we're not in the right place. This is impossible. This village has grown from 130, 150 people to

nearly 300 people. People were actually moving in. I said, tell me more. They said, well, there was one shop when we first arrived and now there's three. There was one pub when we first arrived and now there's two. And commerce is happening underneath these air nodes. So they went off, they went to the fishermen, they started to talk to the fishermen, and the fishermen had new nets, had new everything. And we started to discover that just with WhatsApp, just with connectivity, just with Streetlight,

they were able to reach out almost in real time to traders who otherwise would have had to come along a dusty, dirty road, but they weren't sure if the fishermen smoked the fish or had not smoked the fish. And when you smoke fish, you lose a massive amount of value for that fish. And yeah, they had to completely transform their life. And this is without the blockchain part. This is without the digital ID. This is without anything, you know. So it was a very exciting moment for us. And I think you heard about the power as well at that time too. So from the nine months that this proof of concept run, we would set it up until we could get back there. Because two months, one of the nodes wasn't working.

So we understood why, because it's so clever, really not that clever, but so clever to take the copper wiring from the air nodes and start to light their houses and start to light the shops. And when we got back there, of course, they said, we'll never do that again. We're really sorry. And please, can you put the internet back up on this node?

We value internet just as much as we value the light in our house. So it was really, really, really the catalyst for everything at that moment because I knew that this would happen. I knew that we could connect the unconnected or the underserved but i didn't i didn't think the impact would be so big with just common tools that are out there you know people have phones in these villages they have a sim card in these villages but what they don't have is a connection they may have 2g but 2g you can't make a call like this 3g you can't make a call like this it's uh you can't really send pictures.

It's very slow. All of a sudden, you provide very low-cost internet at high speeds. And yeah, everything changed. So that was, again, the catalyst for what took it to the next level.

It's incredible to hear a story like that in the 21st century, right? I think we all take for granted the things that we have, but simply providing one streetlight or two streetlights on top of these poles, which they then took and basically gave electricity to the entire village, which was not the intended purpose of what you were doing at all, shows a level of human ingenuity, even in people that maybe you would have assumed would not have the savvy or the tech knowledge to make it happen. But the very fact that they had access now allowed them to sell fish around the world to traders that maybe were not particularly going to come. You talked about also that it basically opened commerce after dark, right? I mean, can you talk a bit more about what you saw on that time?

Because in this village before, the minute it got dark it was pitch black everywhere it's on the equator so six o'clock six thirty seven o'clock every single night on time it gets dark right um and then people have small solar if they if they're lucky enough they have small solar home systems um which they're able to generate a little bit of charge but then the choice device for that is is not light the choice device for that is your telephone because it's your entertainment device right so you charge your phone you wait until it runs out, you go in the next morning, the charge comes again, you go to work and you charge your phone, go to work. But what we saw was the seven o'clock at night students, as an example, you know, they weren't

able to study more. Ladies, they weren't able to feel safe walking from one spot to another. Men, they weren't able to trade, they weren't able to to do their things and all of a sudden underneath the air nodes people were sitting and they were selling they were putting out their you know their items and their food and uh we extended bedtime by by i don't know five six seven hours i don't know if that's the right thing to do or not but but for sure it changed everything out there for that village. It's just such an incredible story to me. Really, I found it inspirational. I think it also speaks to the ethos of crypto and blockchain,

which obviously is sort of how your business evolved. Now, you talked about the fact that you put these nodes there to prove concept. What was the concept that you were proving? We haven't really talked about exactly what world mobile actually does so world mobile is a new economic model for the placement of infrastructure where there isn't any so a sharing economy essentially um we understood that we wanted to bring blockchain into play here um namely because from the 3.7 billion people that are unconnected, 3 billion also are unbanked, right? So we saw straight away that there was an opportunity there

to bring digital IDs for actually mass adoption and for people to use digital IDs. And we saw a way that if you can prove and identify who you are, you then have access to all the value-added services beyond connectivity. Connectivity is just the first part, as you know. We're using Zoom now. We use crypto every day. We do many different things as soon as we're online. Online is just the basic part of connectivity. So, yeah, World Mobile, my history is one in telecoms.

I've been in telecoms for over 20 years. The last five, six, seven years, I was very heavily focused on what the mobile network operators should do and what they do. So the way that telecom works, there's an open channel, right? Where the regulator, which is quite correct, needs to be able to access and chase down a terrorist or some other bad guy or woman, not to be sexist. But with that great power came a lot of problems. And those problems stemmed from the fact that WhatsApp, Telegram, all over the top applications had taken the revenue from mobile networks, right? So voice all of a sudden became voice over IP. Voice over IP all of a sudden became free. It's not free, but I'll explain to you why. And then SMS is huge industry

all of a sudden just completely dropped out of the water. So the only thing telcos had left was us. So we were paying for our connectivity. But because of this open channel, there was an opportunity to profile people. There was an opportunity to understand where people go, when people sleep, when people wake up, who their friends' friends' friends are through contact books, which banking people have if people use Bitcoin. It was too much. And before I started World Mobile, my first project into the blockchain was how do I become a mobile network operator that can actually put my hands up and say, hey, I don't profile or take your data. I don't want to be part of that.

I think there's another way to make money rather than doing so. And you can say my word for it. You can just Google. You know, there's a lot of places where our information is getting sold or leaked and it shouldn't be. So that was my first kind of voyage into how do I do this? And then blockchain proved the immutability, transparency, and I could actually say, here's an algorithm, here's a consensus that shows that I can't see anything, right? Your data is your data and that's where it belongs.

If you choose to sell it, I don't recommend that because it's your digital imprint, but if you choose to sell it, you have the choice. If you choose to trade it it you have the choice if you choose to trade it you have the choice and moreover um if there's two data sets that are very similar the one data set that was completely unique becomes not as valuable so i kind of put wanted to put the power back in our hands rather than in the in the operator's hands and to stop this profiling and to stop those things and then i thought where can I do this? Right. Who cares about privacy? Who cares about data?

Who hasn't started their journey online yet? So I called up a few friends and said, where are the least unconnected places? And they said, well, Mick, you've been working at them, right? I said, yeah, but how many people? 100 million people, 300 million people. I said, no, 3 billion people, half the planet. So I couldn't believe it.

I called up another institution the the gsma looked up their their documents and it was true half the world was unconnected so then i thought okay so if i can make this this model where i've been doing most of my life connecting borders and and connecting uh people mostly for financial gain for companies right if i can do this but then put the power back in the people's hands, not just with the privacy, but also let them earn part of the connectivity, I can build a sharing economy. If I can build a sharing economy, I can do things different

than Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have done, as an example. Many others have also tried to connect the unconnected. But alone, you can't do it. And you may be able to do one country. You may alone you can't do it and you may be able to do one country you may be able to do five countries you may be able to do 10 countries in your lifetime but you can't connect three billion people so then i realized that i needed some way so if you buy a piece of infrastructure you need to know you're going to get paid for that infrastructure right how do i prove that how do i prove that um somebody's walked past your node is utilizing

your node isn't gaming your node, isn't gaming your node, you're not gaming it to work? So then we built a proof of service protocol and patented that and then started to implement that into the blockchain. And then we saw many other needs because I'd been in telecom for a long time. The bureaucratic layers all of a sudden could become far easier with smart contracts. And then I figured that, hold on, I can separate a mobile port into multiple permission nodes where I can jail bad actors who mess around, but I can reward

people for actually serving these value-added services, serving the customer with all of the things that we need to be able to run a mobile network operator. So then came AirNodes, first of all. They're the nodes that I talked about. They come in multiple different forms. You've got the balloon over here as well, which is a super AirNode. And we can have just a Wi-Fi router that costs $1,000, $1,500 that is an AirNode. And there's in-between as well, depending on whichever technology we're using. And then came EarthNodes.

And EarthNodes were the, first of all, the connectivity layer is the Airnodes. And I knew that we could bring real world money because people are paying for data. They don't care if there's a bear market or a bull market. And I felt like all of a sudden we were immune to a lot of the problems that non-real world applications had. And then I started to work with the Earthnodes and started to develop that infrastructure. And then I started to work with the Earth nodes and started to develop that infrastructure. And then I realized that because I'm in the industry, I needed to have something called an Ether node, a regulated node that we see in each country. And that would actually have the legal intercept and then servers storing the data that needs to be stored so that we comply. Because if you don't comply, you can say goodbye literally, right?

Telecom is a really hard world and it's run by an oligopoly. And you have to make sure that you do what they say to a certain level. So that's the three different nodes that run in the world mobile chain. I just got to ask you, is that oligopoly as powerful in Africa as it is elsewhere? Because it sounds like... It's powerful. It's so powerful all around the world, it's uncomprehendable, but their power has left half the world offline.

So it's not as powerful as the people, and that's what we're coming... And don't get me wrong, there's many mobile network operators who are very forward thinking, very open to collaboration that don't do the things that I said. But again, how do we know they don't do those things, right? If you look at Spectrum, Spectrum is the 3G, 4G, 5G thing that you use for your telephone, right, the different bands. There's probably more than a trillion dollars of unused Spectrum sitting out there right now where mobile network operators have just bought it just to keep the smaller players out that the barrier to entry is so has been so so high that you just can't you

can't come in and compete in these markets so that's why we're not competing in those markets that's why we're coming in to complement those markets but actually our main main focus is in the unconnected and undisturbed areas and technology has come to such a such a way right now that you're actually able to buy off-the-shelf hardware, flash it, or add something to it, and effectively do what would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for a unit for a couple of K these days. Software is on the next level, and it's the right type. It's the convergence of mindset, time, and technology. And you're able to do that without necessarily electricity,

with solar power, backup batteries, and then connectivity. Is it through satellite that you give people the internet? How do you actually connect them to that? Preferable is through fiber, because satellite doesn't have great throughput. It's really expensive. It's limited to how many locations you can have because of the beam. It's just traveling. The low Earth orbit satellites, for example, they're traveling really fast. And it's not working for more than half the

world right now. So preferably it's fiber. Now the Chinese have done something great. Not only sending a balloon over America, which isn't great by the way, of a sudden, I'm a balloon expert. People are calling me up saying, is that your balloon? I was going to ask you about that later. I mean, at least yours are tethered, right? They won't float away and get shot down by like an F-22, right? You got it. But they've done a really great job in laying down fiber. It's just the fiber doesn't go to the last mile. So we have very innovative ways to be able to send that fiber to the last mile. It could be using TV white space, which is the old analog things that you had on your roof, those funny looking aerials, you know, that are not used in Africa, which is a free spectrum. It could be free space optics, which is really cool stuff.

You know, Google were the pioneers of this with OneWeb and satellites talking to each other via laser beams. But those laser beams can be brought down to ground, and I think it's actually ultraviolet, and they're able to span 20 kilometers at 20 gigabytes a second. So all of a sudden, the last mile is actually reachable. But the problem with the last mile is that if you haven't got something to deliver the connectivity of that last mile, it's very difficult for a mobile network operator to

maintain that infrastructure, to pay for that infrastructure, and to keep that infrastructure secure. That's where it comes in the sharing economy again. If you bring the village and they invest, or somebody remotely invests into this village to provide connectivity, if they're earning from it, it's their livelihood. Who damages, unless you're a bit crazy, who damages your own livelihood? You don't. You maintain it, you look after it, from it, it's their livelihood. Who damages, unless you're a bit crazy, who damages your own livelihood? You don't. You maintain it. You look after it.

You make sure it's up. You make sure it's running, especially if every day you look at your phone and you're seeing dollars come in or the local Tanzanian shillings or whatever it is. So having this sharing economy all of a sudden de-risked a lot for us because CapEx was covered by a party that was interested in getting into the telecoms industry that couldn't before for $10,000, $20,000 as an example. OpEx was covered by the people who own the real estate who said, hey, I'll have that on my roof or I'll have that next to me. I'll put the solar panels on my roof and make sure that's maintained. And if it's broken, I'll call you or send you a message. And all of a sudden you have this magic formula that mobile network operators didn't have, right? And actually, you know, Helium did something very similar to this.

We came out at a similar time, if not slightly before them, but they went in the IoT route, right? And they went on a different kind of incentive model. Whereas we're saying that all the people that are running in should receive a fiat currency because what's important about making an investment um an investment into yourself or investment into infrastructure you want to return that money right so we moved the token totally away from that front layer of connectivity and and said look this is you're going to pay money you're going to earn money the person who's hosting this house is going to earn money and world mobile is going to take a small bit of that money in order to continue our operations and grow.

I can't speak deeply, obviously, to the Helium business model, but my impression there was that they were competing in the first world. Everybody I know who was passionate about Helium was a wealthy person who saw an opportunity to make a bunch of money putting a bobcat on top of their roof, but that wasn't offering what you are, which is service to people who don't have it. It was a cool idea, but are FedEx going to pay you when you drive past them, and are they going to plug in your module for IoT? What they did prove is that people have a real interest in a sharing economy,

or people do have an interest in hosting infrastructure and getting paid for that um i think it was a great idea and it really did take off there a million nodes um but the problem is if you don't bring revenue into the network what carries on to incentivize people to to run those nodes and to put up more notes so world mobile kind of took a different approach than any of the other dy's and said look first of all we understand telecom and second all, let's build a business model that actually brings real revenue into these nodes by being compatible with mobile network operators, by allowing them to onload, offload, and what Rome or neutralized onto our networks. And I think we took our time to do it, but I think we finally have a model now, for example, in Zanzibar, that is probably making more than the entire Helium network combines.

And that's with 250 nodes. That's incredible. So where would you say you are on the spectrum of, you know, from very early beginning, first person getting connected to your entire vision? How many people right now are connecting and using a phone on World Mobile? How many nodes do you have out there? How much coverage do you have as far as sheer mileage? Well, we have around 30,000 customers in Zanzibar, and that's contained. That's quite controlled by us.

We've been fine-tuning the sharing economy. Again, the part where people put down a node and then make money from that node, that's the most key part of this, right? Because's the incentive that that keeps these nodes safe and keeps these nodes running so we've been doing that for around a year and a half two years um we're now in a position where it's copy and paste so now we're moving and it's copy and paste the technology right um every country has different regulation different regulators right but you know the road map of how you can physically go into this place, what you need to put in, what you need to offer them,

and you know that that will then expand and work. And building different types of anodes as well, because one anode for one place may not be the suitable for another anode for another place, right? So where you've got access to unlicensed Spectrums, you try and utilize those as much as you can, because ultimately when you buy Spectrum, who's paying for that? You're offloading it onto your customer, right? So you're increasing their price because you're not buying this and this is not a charity.

So for example, the Village was fiber into wifi and then we had a backhaul that was running from microwave, right? That was really the most inexpensive way to provide connectivity there. But in Kenya, we're playing with something called TV White space and tv white space can go direct to handset in the usa it's worth billions of dollars to to the mobile network operators and that's what they've paid for it in kenya um they and mozambique uh where we're trialing this it's it's uh unlicensed right whether it will remain unlicensed forever is is something that we don't know um but certainly for the next 10 years, 15 years, it will. And then you've got CBRS in the United States,

where we also have presence and we also have some nodes up and we're also working with mobile network operators and MVNOs. And CBRS is awesome, but CBRS won't be awesome once everybody's got CBRS. Then you need to pair that with a license spectrum. So that's what we've been really doing, is testing the model of the sharing economy, bringing in revenue into those nodes, starting to pay the people, starting to

have the customers that they're actually paying, at the same time running with these different nodes and understanding what we can do and what price points we can do and what's the most effective. So now we're actually ready. Now the last three months we've been in Kenya, in Mozambique, in Nigeria, in Tanzania, Mainland, in Zanzibar, and also in the United States, also in the United Kingdom, also in certain countries in Asia, Southeast Asia. So the model is ready to explode. And I think in the next three to nine months, we're going to see something that is, the trajectory can be crazy in terms of adoption. Because who doesn't want to earn money? Who doesn't want to earn extra money for putting something up on their real estate or for maintaining something?

And when you're doubling the national income, as an example, for a Zanzibari, by them holding a node, they don't have to do anything with the node. They have to make sure it doesn't get stolen. They have to make sure that it's up and running. And I assure you, the first thing as soon as it's broken, they don't have to do anything with the node. They have to make sure it doesn't get stolen. They have to make sure that it's up and running. And I assure you, the first thing as soon as it's broken, they're calling us immediately. Please, there's an issue. And, you know, as a mobile network operator, I've got to send trucks out.

I've got to send, I've got to take care of all of that myself. I've got to deal with potential misappropriation of property because people don't value a generator if they can't connect to the tower that the generator is powering. But when it's their own, all of a sudden, just like their car or just like their front porch or just like their job, there's a value to it, right? And that's kind of been the magic. So one on the technical side and two, getting the sharing economy right. So now that it's copy and paste, as you said,

is it just a matter of how many people you can hire and train and how fast you can get them out on the ground? Because I have to imagine that going to all of these remote places in Africa carries with it some unique challenges every single time. And so you'd really have to be very well versed in experience to go do that, which means you're sending one team over here. They have to establish it, then sending them somewhere else. How many teams do you have on the ground and how hard is that to scale? We've got around 60 or 70 people in the continent, African continent right now.

We first started this by, and this is four or five years ago when I knew this was possible. I brought together a regulation team. So I called up the people that I knew and said, look, I've got an idea. Half of them said, this is crazy. You're never going to be able to do it. Half of them said, you know what? Although I'm living in Switzerland and working for an institution, I originate from Zimbabwe. I originate from Kenya.

And my family still don't have connectivity. I want to hear your idea out. And this wasn't just any old people. These were people that were at the end of their careers in these institutions uh regulators for example charles and jerugae um director general of kenya um director general of the east african communities uh he heard the idea he challenged me on a lot of different things and then within two weeks three weeks he called me up and said i'm in pro bono um you know let's go so then we had like one of the one of the world's foremost um pioneers in regulation um who was

backing us up uh and then we brought in other people right we brought in like chris watson who was uh a lawyer um uh who was in telecommunications uh very well regarded you know he's been there since the very beginning and then he was there and then we brought in rene person he was from jp morgan and and uh done many many many deals and then we brought in more people like mike nelly and so that was the formation was making sure that we we could navigate these waters because although i have on such scale i hadn't right so i needed the people that had. So that was the first point. Then the next point was, okay, how do we train up local people to support the sharing economy?

So then we started to train up local engineers. So we brought 15, 20 engineers. We took a team from the UK and from Spain and then sent them to Zanzibar. And we trained up local people so that they could support when there was issues on the ground. And then of course,

there's the training of the people who are hosting this infrastructure, right? They're buying an aerial, they need to put it on the roof, it needs to be certified. And so we have around 70 people, but actually we have around 400, 500 people in Zanzibar that are part of the shared economy right now that are part of World Mobile. Then we have a lot of engineers as in developers that are sitting in the UK, in Spain, and in Portugal, and then a few around the world. We have a presence in Dubai where I met you. We have a lab in San Diego, James Tagg, the inventor of the touchscreen telephone, one of the inventors of the touchscreen telephone, but the one that won, made the first voice over

IP call over a mobile network. And it was hard initially to bring these people in, but as soon as they saw the impact from this village, and as soon as they saw that I wasn't just talking the talk, I could actually walk the walk, they were in. They were in big time. And now World Mobile has around 130, 140 people big. Absolutely incredible.

So you talked about the first experience in the fishing village in zanzibar and how you saw that completely transform this small village at scale what's the biggest vision of how this can transform life for the continent of Africa, for example, or any place that's been disconnected in the past? I mean, beyond giving them phone access or giving them a financial incentive if they set up a node. For the average person who's just on the ground living in these places, what does this look like when you've fully deployed? Africa was so interesting to me, not least because it was the least connected place

on the planet as a continent, but because of the average age of the people. So 18 and a half years old is the average age. They've skipped the generation of PCs. They all have mobile telephones. They have 300 million mobile money wallets

as a leading continent in terms of mobile money. M-Pesa from Safaricom in Kenya is one of the greatest successors of all fintech and adds percents to the GDP every year. So for me, Africa was not somewhere that I looked upon like LiveAid and Bob Geldof. It was somewhere that I thought, OK, this is where the opportunity is to adopt this kind of technology. But don't forget where you live in the United States of America, 30% of the landmass is uncovered and 10% of the population is not connected, right? And then other people have really shitty internet. So, World Mobile has been built to have two major functions. One is the rural problem, right?

The rural problem is where you've got great expanses, people spread out, a lack of infrastructure, and you need to provide connectivity. And there comes this aerostat, right? So this aerostat you can consider as a big aerial, sorry, a big tower. And then underneath, we stick a payload. That payload covers IoT,

and it covers long range very, very well, something that other people haven't really done before. And that's some of our unique IP. But then you've got the Swiss cheese problem, right? We've got holes in the network. So you're going from one place to another, your phone drops out, your Zoom tries to reconnect, your whatever it may be. And in some areas, you know, you'll have that very often.

So what mobile, the sharing economy that we've been fine, and the technology has been built to address both, right? So where can this go? The vision is for a billion people before 2030, way before 2030. I've stood up at the United Nations, the International Telecommunications Union, and pledged and sworn that this is something that I'm going to do. And it's a big challenge, massive. but somebody's got to do it, right? And nobody's doing it. And Google, Facebook, Microsoft, they tried, and they're still trying.

But it doesn't matter how much money you've got. It matters how many people you've got. It matters. We cannot fix the problem, but together we're unstoppable. So this effectively will give everyone access to both a phone and to the internet. Do you see other creative uses like that village where people are going to probably expand on what you've put on the ground? I mean, are you already seeing other villages run with this and turn it into electricity? Or are you going to have to kind of stop them from splitting your copper wires and sending them out to everybody's house?

There's a whole regulation between electricity, right? So you know, we could be providing mini grids and that could be something in the future where we are, where people are also. But right now the focus is connectivity. So if we can get that pipe of connection there, then all of a sudden, boom, you know, the whole world opens. How did you find crypto, right? You didn't find it in a newspaper.

You find it online. How do people, you know, some of these kids that have never been to school 14 years old and all of a sudden they know more than someone that went to university before you know before the internet um how do we take the opportunities into our hands without actually being connected so how big this can be um i saw something on twitter the other day some guy was saying they saw our prices are good luck getting rich node operators and it was like right this is how small-minded people are they don't realize that the internet is just a tool for the further value-added services that people will take. Banking, insurance, education. MediHealth is a massive industry across

the continent of Africa, and Africa's not very connected. Again, banking. Do you go and take a $20 loan from a guy on the corner of the street with a 10% interest recurring every week accumulating? Or do you jump into the DeFi protocol where liquidity pools can offer you 1%, 2%, 3% for a month? People will be very happy with it, right? The opportunity when you have internet just is venomous and it's gets even more. Every day it grows. Yeah, I mean- So this is the impact, man. That, that, that's what it is.

It's, and you can look anywhere today if we didn't have the internet. Right. And you can look anywhere in the world, obviously where the internet has spread to every corner of the United States, first world wherever, and see exactly what's going to happen in Africa. India. It's not, I guess you have the roadmap already. Right.

I mean, they're just behind. It's a renaissance. It's an industrial revolution. I mean, we've seen what access to open information has done all over the world, and they just don't have it. And, you know, you probably had it as a kid in your house. I lived in the countryside, had a really

slow 56-kilobyte internet. Oh, dude, I'm 46 years old. I didn't know what the internet was until I was, like, well into college but yeah okay so um but india is a perfect example you know 15 years ago 20 years ago india was in a different place than it is today right all of a sudden uh bahati air till um a guy called minaj uh one of the foremost great CEOs and good people on this planet, he put 300,000 villages online, right? And when I say online, gave them meaning for the internet, not just banking and whatever.

Gave them the ability to be able to jump into conferences, jump into WebEx, jump into seminars, and all of a sudden, what's the biggest gig economy in the world? Right? In 10 years. It changed everything. Give people very fast internet at an affordable price, and they will take opportunities into their own hands.

So that's why the opportunity with Africa, the continent of Africa, is so exciting. Yeah, the amount of developers and programmers that have come out of India in the last 10 years is a testament to that, right? No, no, right. I mean, it seems like half the crypto projects on the planet are coming out of India at this point. So, and that, to your point, could have never happened in the past without this level of connectivity that they now have. So you're obviously focused on Africa, but you talked about a kind of surprising stat, I think,

is that a lot of people in the rural parts of America and other quote unquote first world countries also lack access. Are those areas that you can go in and compete with the oligopoly that you described before? Do they sort of still have their presence there very strong? Well, the FCC for United States of America, for example, again, I'm not going to name any names, but you can just Google the fines the people or the mobile network operators have received because they're not utilizing their spectrum. They're not utilizing

their spectrum because they don't want to, they can't. Legacy infrastructure, legacy business models, it doesn't work for them,, they'd be doing it. So if you take a typical mobile network operator, you go out, you raise $600, $700 million, you spend $200 million on licensing, you spend $300, $400 million on infrastructure, you then hire a big team, and you start charging people. That's how telecoms works, right? Do a bit of marketing, get your consumers online, deal with the churn, and bring on customers and try and find that loyalty there. It's changed. It's changed. It's changed. There's real estate that people can put these things up, and there's new models being built like us that can allow everyone to be involved in it. So it's not competition. It's actually, they may see it as that, some people, but it's actually complementing because mobile network operators need to fulfill their obligations as well. They need to be able to provide connectivity for the spectrum that they own, and they have to provide 70% and 80%

coverage. They need the help. They may not admit it, and certainly five, 10 years ago, they would not have admitted it, but now they're very open to thinking about, okay, so if you could bring a network that's compatible, that has a good uptime, that works, why wouldn't we offload onto you? Why wouldn't we let our customers act as a neutral host so that they've got connectivity? Nothing worse than paying the mobile network operator for a signal. You drive into a place, you've got no signal, right? The mobile network operator doesn't want that to happen. It's just not feasible with their legacy business models for them to go out and roll out. So it's more of a compliment. And World Mobile, it was born in Africa, it started in Africa, but actually the name is World Mobile. So there's every country in the world, bar a few, Liechtenstein and a few other small countries,

they suffer from this problem of either rural connectivity issues or the Swiss cheese problem. So we've built the model to fit both. I mean, there's even spots in New York City, suburban areas where you drive through and your phone cuts out. It literally happens everywhere. It's everywhere. You don't even think about it because you just accept it, right? But they're getting the pressure from it and they should be providing a service when they're charging you $70 or $50 or $80 a month. You're paying for everything. You should have connectivity everywhere. Absolutely. So I'm interested in hearing how you actually discovered crypto and blockchain.

Was it before all of this or did it become the solution after you started putting these in on the ground? Are you like an old Bitcoiner from 2010 and we didn't even know? Yeah. Yeah. So I was very fascinated with Bitcoin as soon as I saw it, as soon as it had come out in 10 years ago for me. And then I was really interested in how the cryptography worked and I had some great people around me. But then I was really interested in how the cryptography worked and I had some great people around me. But then I was in telecoms and I was trying to find an application for telecoms for a long time and there just wasn't really a suitable application.

But as it evolved and then I thought about the privacy and I thought about the bank and the unbanked and the old adages that people have. I'm like, hold on, this is the real world. This is the one. This is the one that I should bring and drive mass adoption. This is the one that brings money in rather than a Ponzi, which I'm not saying all projects are. There's some incredible technology out there. But you know as well as me that usually it's the rich getting richer on crypto and then the guys

getting shut on the way down, right? Excuse my French french my kids didn't go to a french school but yeah so it took about five years for me to be convinced that this could work and it took the the evolution of ethereum and to see how that was working and i thought okay there's there's a real use case here and there's a real way to bring real world money, trillions of dollars, because telecom is a multi-trillion dollar industry, into crypto. And that was it. I was set. Yeah. I mean, it aligns exactly with what you were already building and working on. So it makes sense that that's how you would adopt it. For anyone who's listening on audio, they can't see that balloon over your shoulder, which we mentioned before the super air node it says 70 kilometers coverage radius yes where'd you come up with the balloon i've just i gotta know and where do you build them how do you deploy these is that like one person owns it and it's coming up from their land or is it a shared uh how does that work

we believe that look to cover the whole of kenya um we take around 80 balloons right that's not bad no and each balloon is around two million dollars if you wanted to cover the whole of kenya with um physical towers and lay fiber to them and power every single one you're talking about spending billions and billions and billions of dollars. Right? For $16 million. For you, you could do it with, yeah. Oh, so, yeah. So you could, 160, 200 million.

160, you said 80, not eight, right? 80 balloons. Yes, got it. Yeah. Then you've got the antennas, right? So the antennas is our own IP. They're long range. They can go farther than any other antenna out there right now.

And then you've got all the different things that sit in those payloads. So, you know, if you take helium, for example, it has to have multiple nodes out there to give that coverage if you go on the map. Well, this can provide coverage for IoT for 130, 140 kilometers, as an example. So the balloon is like a super cool tower that looks cool. It's tethered to the ground. You need permission to fly anything over 300 meters, but we're flying at 300 meters, which is most often considered a kite. You can't, of course, put it inside a flight bar for an airport because

there'll be a disaster there. That's a nice kite. Yeah. So you've got to be quite smart. You have to conform to the regulations, but they're pretty cool. They sit on a base station. The base station has a swivel. The swivel stops the wires from getting all tangled around. You press a button, they go up. You press a button, they come down. You usually have two balloons side by side or potentially a drone to cover for when you need to do maintenance. Maintenance is once every two weeks. If someone shoots it, they're pressurized so it doesn't just fall out of the sky. It has a very gradual drop. It uses helium. I tried asking for hydrogen, but there was a disaster once that

everybody remembers. Yeah, exactly. So we're not quite there with hydrogen yet. But what's really fascinating about these balloons is right now, they're a solution to connect the unconnected, to provide connectivity to the underserved, to bring football stadiums massive connectivity when they need it to have huge throughput. But the same payload that we've developed for 300 meters is actually destined to go up to 20,000 meters. 20,000 meters is really exciting

because the higher up you go, the more you can see. And if you've got high-gain antennas that conform and work with regulation, you can push out somewhere in the region of 350 kilometers radius to 450 kilometer radius from one of these. So we're preparing now for the future. It's just why would we wait to connect to everybody five or six or seven years, which is potentially the time it may take to bring stratospheric stuff out? Google Lunar, for example, that's the stratospheric, right?

But they had big envelopes. I think they were called clovers. And they were traveled by the wind. In the stratosphere, you've got 27 miles per hour approximately the wind. Lightning comes from below, not from above. It's corrosive. Yeah, it's crazy. It's corrosive. And you you send something up you don't get it back down unless you're american you shoot it with a missile and because you think it's chinese um but yeah that that's kind of where we're going

but those those airships are not and not motorized they don't have um engines they don't have a way to stay stationary right now so So we actually do have some relationships and exclusivity partnerships with people that are building airships right now that will take our payload up there. And that's really, it has multiple purposes, but the best purpose it has is connectivity. And you would be able to do the United States of America with six of those. Preston Pyshkoff 1.01 It's incredible. I mean, you said you sat down at the UN and promised them, bold claim that you were going to give these hundreds of millions, if not billions of people connectivity. How long did you tell them it was going to

take? David Morgan I told them, quote, way before 2030. Preston Pyshko Way before. I like that. That gives us a range. David Morgan I think that we can be looking... This is something that we built to have explosive growth. In crypto, it's hard to see past a week. The communities, their expectations are massive. And I love that because it keeps pressure on us. And I like big expectations. This is a big vision. But it's built to have explosive growth. So

I think two two three years away we're talking hundreds of millions if not more customers eventually it's not me eventually it doesn't it doesn't rely on mickey to to coordinate this and roll it out eventually it relies on me to go get the licenses in the countries for me to make sure the back calls and everything is set up there to make me to make sure that the teams that needed to support the sharing economy are there. But it becomes people. We've built tools to allow people just to stick something on their roof to match with somebody who's willing to pay for that, to match with someone who's willing to host that. So yeah, eventually it doesn't rely on Mickey and World Mobile. Eventually it can grow on its own.

I just go online, I buy the infrastructure that I need, I put it in my backyard and I'm up and running. Yep, that's it. And then you can buy it for yourself to fix your own problem, but you can buy it because you want to be part of the telecommunications industry, right? That you couldn't have been part of before for $20,000 or $15,000 or a million and a half, $2 million like the Aerostat, right?

I want to fly one of those over my house, but I don't think they'd let me do it. I think my neighbors would get super pissed if I flew an Air Balloon over my house. I've asked to be strapped to the bottom of one so I can get the real bird's eye view of what's going on down there, but they won't let me

because I'm too valuable for them. Is there anything that I missed that you want to share I didn't ask you about that you're excited about before I let you go? However, thank you very much for having me on. We did become friends in Dubai. I'm looking forward to hanging out with you next time I see you. And if you want me back on any time for further developments, which there will be many. Yes, you're welcome any time. So more importantly, if somebody wanted to actually do this right now, how can they get in touch with you guys?

How can they find out more? Where can they go? Jump into our Telegram. The more technical people who want to understand how to run the testnet and start to prepare for the big traffic that's inbound, jump into our Discord, follow our Twitters, our socials. And I'm regularly on Twitter, regularly on Telegram. So just reach out to me, Mickey at worldmobile.io and I'll put you in touch with the right person. I can't wait to see what you build, man. Really excited about it. Like I said, it was truly inspirational and what I thought was going to be three minutes sitting on the couch talking to a couple dudes

ended up in a few hours of going down this rabbit hole. So you know that I'm genuinely interested and I really just can't wait to see the entire world connected with those balloons flying over everyone's houses. Appreciate you, man. Thank you for your support.