The Wolf Of All Streets - Why Meltem Demirors Is So Obsessed With CryptoDickButts

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

Meltem Demirors understands what drives much of the crypto market - community. Meltem has spent years in the industry, leading strategy at CoinShares, a digital asset investment firm. Arguably nobody has a better grasp of both the retail and institutional sides of the market, or is deeper in the weeds of the most obscure projects and communities. We talked about how the rise of metaverses is driving an urgent need to create new infrastructure, why Bitcoin is a cult and why Meltem is so obsessed with CryptoDickButts

I had a long whirlwind conversation with Meltem Demirz, but most of it was actually about dick butts. Dick butts. Do you own a crypto dick butt, Scott? I do not own a crypto dick butt. I think that's a shame. We should fix that. Tune in. Let's go. Let's go.

That's what I meant to say. It was great. No, it's fine. I'm so bad. Cool. We just start going. I like your shirt, by the way, it's fine. I'm so bad. Cool. We just start going. I like your shirt, by the way. That's nice.

Thank you. This was actually a gift from eToro, they said. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They did that whole thing. And now I have to flip my shirts every two or three episodes because I realize that when I do 15 interviews... They're like, why do you only own one shirt, Scott?

Who are you? Bill Gates? No, no. Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. I should just be wearing one black turtleneck. Yeah, I don't believe in that.

Let's not be not cute. I think that you are pretty fashion forward, especially for this industry where you probably would have people who are just wearing the same thing.

Yeah, people look like garbage. But you're notorious for... I look like trash. Well, you've met my wife, so you know that we have no problem. She's the best. But you're like the biggest female flexor we have in this industry, right? Yeah, I like to be drippy. And why is that? Because I think it's important. I think that crypto industry, a lot of

people try to be overly serious. I'm like, we're making magical internet money. And also, I want to be lit. I want to look good I actually think Richard Hart's doing a great job with that he's like using drip as a way to market himself not speaking to the credibility no I actually right it's incredible outside of whatever your opinion may be on what he's building I I didn't really follow him before I follow him now now it's it reminds me of like when I used to follow the fat Jew in the early days and like he just had this funny shit like the dude's literally like twerking with watches on both arms and like. He needs twerking lessons. I will happily give him

twerking lessons and I also realized I own one of the same outfits he does and I can't decide if that means I can never wear that outfit. I think it means that you need to get with Richard Hart and make a twerking, you should do the twerking lessons. And matching. Yeah. This is why you are who you are, Scott. Yeah, I'm a very creative person. I have ideas.

You guys can hire me at CoinShares. So then obviously the next transition is, you told me before can hire me at CoinShares. So then obviously the next transition is, you told me before, your role at CoinShares is somewhat unique, is that you're actually allowed to be that person that gets deep into the craziest. Okay. So what does it mean to be a degenerate in residence? Well, so technically my title is chief strategy officer, but I think one of the biggest challenges is obviously CoinShares, we're a publicly listed investment firm. We operate in four verticals.

So asset management, trading, capital markets infrastructure, social trading, which is more consumer driven, and then we have our investment arm, which I run. But across all of that, one of the biggest challenges is when you have 120 people, publicly listed company, you're focused on profitability, creating shareholder value, and actually operating your business. Crypto is crazy. There's so much happening all the time. There's all of these different niches.

The industry has absolutely exploded. So how do you stay on top of what will be relevant a year, two years, three years, five years from now? You need someone who's out there in these different communities, on the obscure discords, in the telegrams, at these events, at like weird meetups, hanging out with people, getting the tea. So a lot of what I spend my time on because crypto is my life. I don't have friends. I'm a weirdo. Complete lie. All my friends are like in the industry. I've been doing this for seven years. It just sort of consumes you.

So I spend a lot of my time just trying to figure out, here's what's coming next. And then the translation part is figuring out, okay, how do we take this thing that's very out there and very small, and how does it scale and actually fit into a professional investment firm? So it's finding all of the trends, figuring out which ones are relevant for us, and then translating them into a commercializable, scalable product or service. It seems like we've had numerous trends, obviously,

that have sort of had their own little bubbles throughout the history of crypto. How do we know which ones are actually going to last more than six months? Or are all those ones that have quote-unquote popped just the first initial iteration of what's likely going to happen in than six months? Or are all those ones that have quote unquote popped just the first initial iteration of what's likely going to happen in each of those verticals?

Yeah, and I think that's a great question and I think frankly a challenge. As an investor, you never really know if you're any good or not, or if you've gotten lucky, or if you're riding a much larger wave. I think for many investors in crypto who've kind of sprayed capital around,

many of us have been riding a wave, right? And a rising tide lifts all boats. I think for me, the three things I focus on is like, what is it you actually do? Which a lot of times it's very hard when you're talking to a founder to understand what the business actually does. I think crypto, there's sort of a spectrum. There are businesses that are very functional, that have a very specific utility and value proposition. For example, running an exchange, right? It's a very specific function. You know exactly how it works. You know exactly how that business makes money. So there's the very functional, pragmatic businesses on one end of the spectrum. They're easier to value. It's easier to understand how big those businesses could become.

And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have things that are very esoteric. They're very much purpose or vision driven, but it's very unclear how those businesses or how those ideas, projects, make money, can be commercialized, or if there's even scale. DAOs are a great example of that, right? Right. DAOs are an emergent primitive,

but the overall DAO market is $8 to $10 billion, small total addressable market. And I'm not even sure that any of the Dow tooling we're building is actually relevant because Dow's haven't really proven themselves as effective governance structures. So there's this really interesting spectrum. I tend to invest more towards the pragmatic end of the spectrum. But again, we can't ignore what's happening in this crazy sort of visionary end of the spectrum. So it's understanding what the business actually does, understanding how they make money, and understanding how dependent they are on Ponzi-nomics, which let's not sugarcoat it.

Ponzi-nomics are a huge part of what drives value creation in crypto. You talk about that sort of utterly speculative side, esoteric side of it. It's not investable most of the time for a big company. It can be very profitable. Initially, well it can be very profitable, but so is it more like you identify it, track it, and then wait for it to be real enough and then you find a way to get in? Yeah, exactly. And a lot of it's really, so much of this industry is still so relationship driven. And again, it's very important. I'm a participant, a member of DAOs. I'm part of a member of dow's i'm part of a bunch of esoteric weird communities right now i'm really into crypto which are these

nfts no utility no road map it's just a really funny meme and so observing what's happening in that community the types of people who are attracted to these weird esoteric fringe things interacting with those people that's always where the best alpha is. I'm sorry, I literally, I mean, dick butts. Yeah, it's a dick butt. It's hard not to. I'm gonna straight face that one. Okay, let me ask you a question.

No, continue with the dick butts. Do you own a crypto dick butt, Scott? I do not own a crypto dick butt. I think that's a shame, we should fix that. There's goblins out there and people are talking to me and literally, I tweet something and someone has a goblin and it's complete gibberish and I don't know what the hell they're talking about these are things yeah these are things but a crypto dick that's like it's the original internet meme

um they're funny it's a it's a butt with a dick on it right and i say that it sounds ridiculous it sounds preposterous but there's this whole community of people out there that i'm a part of that are really excited about this that are putting time and energy into being a part of this community, there's no profit motive. It's never going to make money. There's zero profit motive. But that's fine. And that's fine. But I do think as you look at the more speculative end of the spectrum, I'm not necessarily in the business of investing in that as coin shares. I do sometimes invest in that as an angel. But it's as those things start to scale and actually become more tangible and find a real market and real demand, integrating that into how we think about operating our business. But I think that that also speaks to the importance

and power of community that so many people don't understand or are missing. If you can build a community around something that's passionate, it doesn't necessarily have to be monetizable now, but that has extreme value. Well, and that's exactly what I was here at Consensus talking about was the combination. So there's the search for meaning, right? Religion is not something that we really identify with strongly anymore as a culture. 40% of the world's population is spiritual but not religious. So there's tremendous crisis of meaning where people are trying to figure out, like, what is my purpose? Where do I belong? We're not as nationalist anymore.

When you meet people, they're not like, I am from this country. I am this religion. Occupation. We used to define ourselves by what our occupation was. Even that has gone out the window because people have multiple occupations. And they don't work for 40 years until they get a pension at the same company. Exactly. So there's this really interesting

sort of crisis of identity. And I think the reason there are 17,000 people who paid over $1,000 to come to this conference and 40,000 people who paid to come to Austin and be a part of this circus is because crypto gives people a sense of purpose. These communities give people a sense of identity. And you see it, right? Bitcoin is a cult. It's a cult of purpose. These communities give people a sense of identity. And you see it,

right? Like Bitcoin is a cult. It's a cult with money. And when I say the word cult, I think a lot of people take that to sort of have negative connotations. But it's a belief system that has a doctrine, like it describes a certain way of life, no seed oils, meat only diet. And obviously that feels very fringe. But I do think there are these communities forming. They started online. They started online with memes. Now we have a bunch of capital, right? So there's wealth being created and now we're spending that wealth to do things in the physical world. It's having an impact on politics, on culture, on art, on technology. So it's becoming this really fascinating sort of trend. And I think crypto is

eating culture in so many different verticals. So I think crypto has created this really interesting concept where we can take communities, we can imbue them with our own native capital, and then we can utilize that capital to actually bend the arc of reality in the non-crypto world in the direction we want it to go, which is incredibly powerful, but also incredibly scary. Yeah. Well, I think the scary part is that there's these endless sort of communities. We saw it, I guess, most prevalently in the NFT bubble, obviously, right? You get the bored apes and then you get the lazy lions and the pudgy penguins, and then it's just like alliterative animals that are completely useless. And everyone,

I am my penguin, I am my turtle, whatever. Yeah, I am my dick butt. Right, you are your dick butt. We are all our dick butts, technically, whether we like it or not. I have many dick butts. But the problem is, I think that a lot of people fool themselves that the community is more important than the price. And they love that thing. They are their penguin. They are their turtle. Until all of a sudden, that thing they paid $1,000 for is worth a buck. And then all of a sudden that community disappears. But a community is all about purpose, right? If the only purpose of your project is money.

Cash grab. Then that's very ephemeral, right? And I think many of these NFT communities, particularly these PFP projects you're talking about, they're very ephemeral in nature in the sense that they spring up. They have one or maybe two week span of relevance, and then they sort of fade away. The projects that have persistence, I think, have strong leadership, right? You need sort of this shamanic sort of central figure who is a figurehead and a catalyst for the community to really move things forward. And there needs to be a purpose that's greater than just, hey, let's make a shitload of money.

And we see this even with really successful layer one, layer two token projects, right? Many of them have been very ephemeral because there's no persistent purpose other than like, hey, let's make money for ourselves, for our VCs and for early holders of our token. I think the things that have had persistence like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and now several other communities,

I think Solana has a super powerful community. I think all of them have been driven by strong purpose and strong leaders, whether those leaders are leaders like Satoshi, who are more mythical in status, or leaders like Vitalik or Rajantoli, who are very visible and very present in those communities. It's funny because then you get that struggle sort of between the ethos of centralization and decentralization

because everybody wants it to be decentralized, but it's not getting there unless you have a passionate leader. But even with DAOs, it's not about decentralizing leadership. All communities require leadership. Governance requires leaders. I think DAOs and the decentralization aspect is around providing more transparency and enabling the effective passing of power from one leader to the next in a transparent sort of community-driven way. I think one of the core mistakes we make in crypto consistently is believing that crypto, tokens, DAOs, whatever, are panacea to these very complex problems that humanity has

had since the dawn of time. We don't fix everything? No, no, no we can't. So I think there are like these complex systemic problems or problems that are just innate to human nature and they're not going to be solved by a token. We could make a shit ton of money selling a token, claiming to solve that problem, but it will have no persistence, persistence right these are like these ephemeral cash grab projects and i'm not a judge jury or executioner i'm just calling it like it is no and there's plenty of people who have gotten disgustingly rich on those more power and even even in the process of believing that it wasn't ephemeral and that it was going to be something of the future but the thing i will say is that's not unique to crypto we see this in tech right like the broader tech not unique to crypto. We see this in tech, right?

Like the broader tech sector has had these bubbles. We see this in infrastructure investing. We're seeing it now with ESG investing, which I think is in many ways, like many ESG funds are just absolutely untethered from any objective reality. So I think it's not unique to crypto. It's just in crypto, capital formation is so much easier.

So in crypto, it's just much easier to monetize these scams effectively, whereas in other parts of the tech industry, it's been harder. But by no means is it unique to this industry alone. It's prevalent everywhere. Let's talk about Nikola. It's an electric car company, never produced a single electric car, had a video of a truck rolling down a hill, publicly listed, regulated, right? So got the check from the regulators, publicly listed company, $29 billion market cap at its peak, now worth nothing. And then you tell me crypto is a scam.

Yeah. Can we get an ETF? Scams are everywhere. I would hope so. So we, as CoinShares, have our asset management business. We operate a variety of ETF-like products. They're ETPs, so it's sort of the umbrella above ETF. We do that in Europe because we can't in the United States. I think, again, the issue here is there are fundamental concerns from the regulator around market oversight, market transparency, and frankly, the sort of incestuous relationship between market makers and trading venues not necessarily helping to alleviate some of those concerns. But again, I think ultimately who loses out is retail users who end up paying exorbitant

fees, you know, management fees as high as 250 basis points, where the average ETF management fee is 50 to 75 basis points. And then the products we do have in the United States retail at a giant premium and then retail gets dumped on while private investors make a lot of money. I mean, GPG is at what, a 32% discount? Correct. Which it should be, right? Because if you presume that product, you're going to hold it for 10 years.

You're looking at 25% of the value creation being eroded and management fees that get paid to Grayscale. Yeah. Not a great deal. Really seems like the United States just hates fun. Well, I think there is a fine balance. I think the issue is the United States has historically been the largest market for capital formation and wealth creation because of strong IP laws and because of open permissive laws when it comes to public markets.

I think what we are seeing across the Western world and the democratic societies that we have in the West, I say democratic, quote unquote, is an increasingly authoritative approach to capital markets and financial freedom. We see financial freedom under attack and financial violence is the most prevalent form of violence in our world today. People talk about the unbanked or the underbanked in Africa or in Latin America. 40% of the American population is underbanked. So

this isn't a problem that exists in other jurisdictions. It's a problem that exists right here because of all of the rules and regulations and policies that have created a system that does not treat people equally, which is the whole reason why I think Bitcoin's so incredibly powerful and is fundamentally threatening to an entire industry, an entire power structure that's been built around financial exclusion as a means for coercion and control

and a way to curtail free speech. Yeah, so it's fun. It's a threat to banks, threat to credit card companies, threat to every payment company, threat to governments. So, yeah, it seems like maybe they'd want to stop this thing. But here's what we've done, Scott. I've been into Bitcoin for the last nine years now. So in the last decade, let's say,

the Bitcoin community has effectively memed a reserve currency into existence. It's 100% true. And that's an oversimplification. It's not. The power of like the internet and memes and this new form of digitally native money that's completely dematerialized to start with. It's incredibly powerful. Like we've already shifted the arc of reality in an incredible way. So if you extend that out 10, 20, 50, 100 years, I think what we can accomplish with that is absolutely fucking incredible. Yeah, Mark Moss said to me, we were in World War III,

and he was like, I've got my Bitcoin, and I've got my memes, and I'm ready to go to war. Yeah. And he was deadpan. Yeah, but I think all future wars will be fought with memes and influence, right? Like money was one of the first sort of tools that we built that allowed us to move value across space and time right language is a tool

that allows us to move stories and beliefs across space and time like this is just an extension of something we've been doing since the dawn of of cognitive processing and like the dawn of cognitive processing and like the dawn of civilization is moving ideas across space and time using memes using money using language and now we have all three combined together into this crazy thing called cryptocurrencies the money part scares the shit out of legacy systems though i mean i don't think they care when it's the information i don't even care if they think the information's fake i think they really care when it's the information. I don't even care if they think the information's fake. I think they really care when it's about that. I mean, what's so funny to me is when we look at how the power of institutions is being challenged, right? Historically, nation states were the most powerful entities in our world.

Then we had corporation states, right? We have Apple, Google, Amazon. They all have multi-trillion dollar economies. These corporations are effectively larger than most G20 economies, which is pretty astounding. And they, like Facebook, Meta, Facebook, whatever we call it now as a platform, 3 billion users, 3 billion active daily users. They influence almost 50% of this planet's population on a daily basis. So already governments are threatened by the power of corporations, right? These corporation states. Then we have metaverses. Fortnite has over 600 million daily

active users. So every day, 600 million people plug into this virtual world and that is becoming part of their reality. If you look at something like Zoom, right? The pandemic accelerated like Zoom becoming a part of our reality. So I think there are all of these different sort of forces that are emerging that are destabilizing to institutions who have historically had control and credibility. And the increased transparency and the increased amount of information that's available online is only accelerating that decline of institutional authority. And so crypto is kind of stepping into this interesting void where people don't believe in their governments. People don't believe in these corporations.

People don't necessarily find community in the places they traditionally have. And so crypto is absorbing all of this energy and it's becoming this massive, unstoppable force. I mean, we've obviously taken the pills. All of the pills. But who the hell wants to live in this Mark Zuckerberg, the Zuckerverse, you know, the Mark Zuckerberg metaverse?

What? You said that we've eroded the trust. I mean, it just looks lame. That's the other thing. It's just kind of lame. I'm like, this looks shitty. I don't know why I can't have arms and legs. It seems like I could still have night and I'm like, this looks shitty. I don't know why I can't have arms and legs.

It seems like I could still have arms. But also, okay, here's what we, people want to have fun. Like so much of the world is so pessimistic. I think what's fun about crypto is like a lot of it's inherently optimistic and it's weird and it's kind of silly. But like I want to have fun. I don't want to be told every day, like how I shouldn't eat me or how me using air conditioning is bad for the environment. Like so much of the narrative right now is so incredibly negative and it's designed to make you feel bad and feel fear. Like, no, I want to feel good. I'm inherently optimistic. I think the future is very exciting.

And the thing is we can make it whatever we want it to be if we meme hard enough. I agree. But do you think once the sort of trust and belief in these legacy systems erodes, as it already has, is that a one-way street? Like, can they earn that back? Or do you think that this is all heading in one direction? I think the one challenge is there is this increasing fragmentation we see, like the splintering of what used to be sort of one objective reality into these multiple subjective realities. We saw that with QAnon, right, as an internet sort of meme-driven movement, how powerful that became, right? And it led to January 6th, which was effectively like a small-scale insurrection. Low-key coup. Well a small scale insurrection. Low-key coup.

Well. Yes, insurrection. But it could completely insane, right? If you would have told me that would be happening, you'd be like, oh, it's insane. But I think we're going to see more things like that where people splinter off and they form these like reality bubbles almost where people are living more and more in these digital worlds. They're surrounding

themselves with like-minded people. Now you add crypto to it. So they're imbued with their own native capital. So they're both pros and cons to it. It's not all like sunshine and unicorns and magical crypto pixie dust. There's also very scary elements of it. But I think this trend is only going to accelerate. At the end of the day, I think a lot of people feel very disenfranchised by whatever the mainstream thing is. And so increasingly, I think people will seek out these smaller bubbles that sort of conform to their own worldview. And so you can do that now. I don't need to live in objective reality anymore. Yeah, and you exist clearly on the front lines of like the most random trends that we have, the things that are really,

but are there any that are just blowing your mind and you're super excited about? And I guess on the flip side, is there anything that you think is so absurd it's just not gonna work and why are we wasting our time here? I think the idea of how work is changing is really interesting, like the no work movement,

which is not a crypto thing, but the no work movement is really interesting like the no work movement, which is not a crypto thing with the no work movements really interesting and we'll see sort of how that evolves and I think Sort of natural extension of that is all these like move to earn play to earn I just got pitched to learn to earn their sex to earn now saw sex sex advice for an article about it Yeah, you're fucking make money. I mean, that's a huge failure for the crypto space because we all know that they're not doing that. And I say that, sorry, I say that to be funny. But you're the real things.

But I think that's sort of a first primitive of what the no work movement might look like. I think a lot of these things are fundamentally unsustainable because there's just all supply and no demand on the other side. So they're purely speculative and obviously not sustainable. But they're really interesting because they're so growing so quickly, very ephemeral.

They grow really quickly and die off just as quickly as we saw with like Axie, for example. Axie is the perfect example, right. But that's not a criticism. I think Axie has a lot of important lessons and takeaways and the successive iterations of these things will hopefully design around some of these failures and become increasingly more adept

at creating more sort of sustainable structures. Or maybe that's not feasible, who knows. But I think there are interesting things that are happening that are not just unique to the crypto space, but sort of piggyback off larger cultural movements like the no work movement and others. Yeah. You talk about Axie. What's so incredible about Axie is that it's like the worst game ever. Right. So I because, okay, it's not the worst ever. I had a Tamagotchi. So I guess I have like a little fat critter that has a watering can with a flower in it on its head, and I paid $10,000 for it.

It's probably worthless now, but it looks... It's probably worth a lot in some current season. But the point being, though, to me, that was a where there's a will, there's a way kind of story that maybe when we actually get some games that are cool enough, this could really, really work. Because Axie, the game kind of sucked. People who are not crypto native literally found a way to buy some Ethereum, send it to a Metamask wallet. We're talking about like grandmas in the Philippines, right? Ronin, you know, open a Ronin wallet, transfer your thing. If you can make money

doing something that's better than your shitty job, you're going to do it. 100%. But the interesting thing is like you don't, it's not just Axie, right? They're like doing Axie, they're doing Stepin, they're doing God knows what else. They're like part of DAOs and they're getting paid to do things for DAOs. Okay, so here's what's so interesting, right? We all talk about this metaverse, which the metaverse is just like an extension of the internet, right? We already have a metaverse.

Yeah, I have an iPhone. It's the internet. But the thing is, and this goes back to the quality of games, it's in order to create any sort of like realistic metaverse, any sort of immersive environment, right, you need a tremendous amount of computation. Probably Intel estimates a thousand X increase over the computation capacity we have today, right, you need a tremendous amount of computation. Probably Intel

estimates a thousand X increase over the computation capacity we have today, right. So where is that going to come from? Like semiconductor production is under a lot of stress and 75% of it happens in a nation-state whose sovereignty is being contested by China. So like F, data centers under attack for ESG. AWS consumes 2% of all electricity in the United States, so where is all that power to power all these data centers that are gonna power the metaverse gonna come from? Where's the hardware gonna come from?

Broadband, right? Mobile connectivity usage every year almost doubles, so where is all the infrastructure investing? Where are the trillions of dollars of infrastructure into new connectivity that's needed? So one of the things that I think is troubling about the metaverse narrative and the crypto narrative is like we want to paint this incredible future

that we're gonna live in, but you can't have bits and bytes without atoms and underlying infrastructure investment into the actual physical hardware that's needed to facilitate all of this. And so I think the place where the crypto narrative sort of broke and it's like, yeah, we can decentralize all the things,

but if all of your data is running through AWS and it's running through ISPs that are owned by mass corporations or nation states, like none of this shit is decentralized because at the physical transport layer and at the physical computation layer, all of that could sort of get cut off overnight. So I think we need to focus also

in the underlying core infrastructure that powers all of these things. And a lot of people just don't ever think about that. Like the Wi-Fi you use doesn't just like float in the air. There's a router that's plugged into the wall that consumes electricity and is consuming connectivity and bandwidth that has to come from somewhere. So who's solving those problems? Because the crypto industry certainly can't solve. I do think we're not opening nuclear power plants. We're hoping to.

We probably are for all I know. Yeah, we're hoping to. So one of my portfolio companies is building data centers together with Oklo, which is building micro scale containerized nuclear reactors. So I literally made like the wildest thing I could say. And you immediately were like, yeah, I'm actually invested in that. And that's why I do what I do. You talked about that. So like name French thing. I'm like, oh yeah, let me name five projects that are working on something like this. But I think it's happening. It's just happening in this pocket outside the crypto space.

One of the really exciting things I'm focused on. So I'm on the governor's commission for the state of New Hampshire, New Hampshire resident, live free or die, baby. One of the big things we're focused on is helping design policy in the state of New Hampshire. All these states are doing crypto policy. It's all focused on capital markets, finance, and taxes. That's not interesting. You know what's interesting? Decentralizing energy infrastructure, adding more broadband, and building more data centers. That's fucking interesting. Creating more jobs, creating training programs to educate people, creating a large labor force. That's what we're hoping to

do in New Hampshire. We don't need more laws about what's security, what's not a security. It's kind of irrelevant. What we need is more infrastructure to actually power this metaverse that we're all talking about and wanting to build. Then why is all the focus on whether things are securities and not securities, and the only thing that we're hearing regulators and legislators talk about? Because crypto right now is run by investors, and that's our primary concern is,

how do I dump my bags? Which is an oversimplification, but it's like, how do these things grow and scale financially? Because we need to pay for things, right? So knowing how to grow and scale the economic side, the financial side of business is important, but I think the underlying infrastructure is also incredibly important.

And I do think we'll see more firms doing this, like Intel's looking at space very closely. Nvidia, Samsung derive a large percentage of their revenue from the crypto space. So they're incentivized. AMD is starting to look at the crypto space. Those are all semiconductor manufacturers. TSMC is already doing production runs

for ASIC manufacturers. We see a lot of firms looking at FPGAs for zero knowledge proofs. So like that market is growing, but we need more people talking about it, investing in it. And again, I think one of the exciting things here is like decentralization breeds resilience. And we talk a lot about decentralization from a financial perspective. We don't talk about it from an infrastructure resilience perspective. We have rolling brownouts, right? We have like when AWS East goes out, the entire East Coast loses access

to the apps that they need. Cloudflare, like hold my beer. Yeah. Every social media platform in the world goes down for six hours together. So like how do we use decentralization as a tool, not just for financialization in new ways, but actually to create resilience in the systems that

like power this digital world that we want to live in. I'm getting very deep into this. No I like it please but so you're talking about doing that in New Hampshire but we live in a country where every single state is basically its own like. Yeah but we can do that anywhere so hopefully we can create a blueprint for how to create a policy that's not just focused on the financial component, is actually focused on the core underlying infrastructure. And then one key provision of that is how do we protect privacy in that process? Yeah. And meanwhile, in New York, it's clownish. Like it's truly clownish. I mean, it's unbelievable. But look, New York has made it very clear. New York was the financial center of the world, and New York legislature has made it very clear,

and the New York AG has made it very clear that they have no interest in continuing to be the financial center of the world. But I don't think they see it that way. Yeah, but you don't maintain your position as the financial capital of the world by being incredibly restrictive, onerous, and also very litigious in terms of how you approach capital markets innovation. But our government

is now litigious about how they approach capital markets. I mean, Coinbase, I always come back to this example, but Coinbase says, hey, we're going to offer a 4% yield product. And the SEC says, we're not going to tell you why, but we're going to sue you if you do. But here's the thing, Scott, we are mobile. So how many people are going to stay you why, but we're going to sue you if you do. But here's the thing, Scott. We are mobile. So how many people are going to stay in the United States? Right, but isn't that, I mean, that's not problematic for crypto, but it's problematic for us as United States citizens trying to operate here. This is why we have to find allies where we can.

And I think, again, there are a lot of states that are making an effort. Senator Lummis and the Wyoming State Legislature have done a great job. I think there are a lot of efforts underway in Texas. There's a lot of miners locating to Kentucky as well. And Kentucky has passed some laws. Ohio, where Warren Davidson is from, is allowing you to pay your taxes in crypto, which seems like a small step, but at least they have an open-mindedness. California, not really sure what's going on there. About anything. You're in California, right really sure what's going on there. About anything. You're in California, right? I'm in Florida.

You're in Florida. Yeah. Have you always been in Florida? I've been all over the place. I grew up in Florida, though. Oh, that makes sense. You have like a Florida vibe. Yeah, but I'm like North Florida.

North Florida is the South and South Florida is the North. Not that I'm by any chance a Southerner, but where I live right now is more like Alabama than Miami. The Floribama line. Have you ever done the thing where they like toss a fish across the state line? I've never tossed one across the state line, but I've hit someone with one. That's apparently a thing. Anyway. No, that really is a thing.

We do all kinds of wild things. It's called the mullet toss, right? Is it called? I went to school in the South, so like that's a thing you went to in texas right yeah i went to rice in houston yeah but rice is very small so we would come to ut here in austin to like get weird so i went to the university of pennsylvania so i would come home to the university of florida to have fun yeah university florida is wild I hear. Yeah, and that's where I grew up, going to football games and everything. I mean, it sounds like we're at a point right now

where that's really an inflection point because we've built all this stuff and to a large degree we need governments to tell us it's okay to use it. But no, we don't. But no, here's my point, though. They can't put all of us in jail, Scott. They can put some of us in jail, though. They can put some of us in jail.

Okay, but here's the thing, right? Politicians are elected. Here's what you have to remember. The people who represent us are elected by us. Doesn't feel that way sometimes. 22% of American adults own Bitcoin. If you treat your constituents like criminals for owning Bitcoin, do you think they are going to keep voting for you? No. So again, I think it's a very short-sighted approach. And

again, I think the challenge we have is people who are in power have been in power for so long and believe they will be in power indefinitely. And I think we need to flip that dynamic on its head. And it's happening, right? It's going to happen just by virtue of time passing and people dying. God, I hope so. I hate to say that. There is an inevitability to it. Our children and younger generations are going to be digitally native. Yeah. Or these cults become powerful enough that they become their own sovereign states. All right. Well, either way, I'm just in it for the dick butts. Yeah. Same.

Thank you so much. Something we can agree on. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day. So good to see you. Thank you. Cool. Let's go.