Your Happy Hour - Episode 17: Currency of Life

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

Happy Friday everyone! Tune in to episode 17 and let’s chat about: Currency of Life.In this episode we are joined by Léon Kowalski - a founder and entrepreneur who has walked an interesting road from software engineering and technology, exploring the world of arts in acting, transitioned into serving the international markets of product management and now runs The Cape Crypto Exchange, a cryptocurrency exchange venture based in Cape Town. His vision is to enable financial freedom for all through the power of decentralization.We unpack topics like: finding your purpose, playing the game of life, embracing the philosophical power of building a loving relationship with money, the energy of freedom, bitcoin and decentralization and the magic of being human and speaking your truth.We’ll be here - every Friday - celebrating with you!Connect with us @ friday-feels.co▶ Podcast Chapters01:13 Welcome to Léon Kowalski!02:05 Purpose and the Philosophical Power of Money06:10 Living and Playing the Game of Life07:10 The freedom of energy and expression13:02 My loving relationship with money18:08 Bitcoin and Decentralization29:00 Freedom Maxi: The magic of being human36:50 Navigating your Path: Find your true passion40:16 One year from now… 43:55 Sincerity and speaking your truth46:50 Learn more! Read and Delve within: The Bitcoin Standard49:46 Gems of the Week! 01:00:41 Final thoughts! 01:01:28 Connect with Léon!01:02:26 Next week and Farewell!

Happy Friday beautiful people and hello to you all out there tuning in for your first sip of the weekend. you're tuned into your happy hour with friday feels we're celebrating all you working professionals out there doing your crazy craft embracing the beauty of being human and connecting authentically we are host sergeant nicole we're living and working around the world we're holding space for you and we're keeping it raw and real as we share fresh content with you every week. Follow us on LinkedIn at Friday Feels and Instagram at These Friday Feels for updates throughout the week. In our last episode,

we chatted with Simon Hari on the topic of petrol in the tank. We delved into money as a tool to put to use in the pursuit of your passions and how to get the balancing act as well as the art of making and spending money right so that you can play to your strengths in what you create in this life. And this week we are joined by Leon Kowalski, a founder, a friend, an entrepreneur who has an adventurous and free spirit. He has walked a very interesting

road from starting a business in software engineering and technology at the age of 19 to then later exploring the world of arts and acting, transitioned into serving the international market of product management in Australia and South Africa, and now runs the Cape Crypto Exchange, a cryptocurrency exchange venture based in Cape Town, with the vision of empowering financial

freedom not just for South Africans but the world at large. So mostly to the potential of decentralization we'll explore a little bit more of what that means but firstly a very big welcome to you Leon. Wonderful to have you join us today. Thank you, thanks for having me on the show and great to be here. So tell us a little bit more about what this topic. Thank you. Thanks for having me on the show and great to be here. So tell us a little bit more about what this topic means to you. We spoke about the topic for this week being currency of life. It's our last episode of Money Positivity for this month. And you mentioned that specifically you wanted to chat about the energy of freedom and the philosophical power of money so what does that mean well that's a small question to start off with okay so yeah well the yeah the currency of life and

freedom and money and freedom all these things are very deeply intertwined. And I suppose for me, they're all extensions of philosophy and asking the deep questions of why are we here? And what are we doing here? And how do we spend our time? What are we going to do tomorrow? All of these sorts of big questions. What happens when we go? It's all intertwined with these, I think. And particularly, I guess for me, from a personal point of view, when we all come of age, we kind of have to make a decision whether it's conscious or not that we're going to keep living. When we're children, we just do our thing. Our parents look after us. But once we're out of the nest, we all have to make some sort of decision to say, okay, let's commit to this thing called life let's commit to it let's let's go for it whatever it means to us we're going to keep living we're not

going to pull the eject eject cord and i think if we do that once we'll wait after we do that we have to we have to then determine what is this thing how do we live this how are we going to spend our lives from that that arises these questions around philosophy and purpose. And we start asking, okay, well, what is my purpose? Is there such a thing as a purpose? How can I find purpose in life? And that takes us down good rabbit holes. And it took me down a lot of deep journeys, a lot of interesting spaces. A career I had before software and technology was in the arts, in the film industry specifically, and theater. I think largely because that industry as a whole

deals with these concepts head on. It deals with philosophy. It deals with purpose and all these very interesting nuances of what humanity is and what it means to be a human. And I started there and it provided a lot of nourishment and a lot of insight and a lot of depth and some sort of a purpose, but it never really scratched the itch entirely, just enough for a few years. And I think how I evolved from there and just my journey evolved was looking for more and looking for more purpose. And the more I grew and the more I grew up into an adult and understood more about how the world works and how the systems work around the world, specifically money, and how I sort of stumbled into that was that dealing with politics and economics, these are all actually extensions of philosophy.

And I never understood that when I was younger. You know, I always thought philosophy was its own branch, its own all-encompassing view of life and existence. But what I grew to learn and grew to understand was that economics and politics, they are actually direct manifestations of philosophy of life. You know, politics distills how we as people organize ourselves based on our philosophies as to what life is. You know, these are very broad topics and let's create a bit of a boundary and we say, cool, this is our political leaning. This is how we're going to play together. And we move from there. And then likewise with with economics study of money that's also an extension of philosophy you know very much very much linked to it and i think largely

how i've come to this journey now was from this the philosophy of economics the philosophy of money and and what that actually means you know it, it's actually a very deep subject. When you dig into it, as you probably have obviously recognized over the last few weeks with all your guests, and when we actually open this thing up, when we crack below the surface and we start peeling these onion layers away, we start to see this beautiful, beautiful construct that we've come up with as humans called money. And this is why it's really the currency of life and how this topic sort of resonates because because there is no life

if we consider philosophy to be life and life to be philosophy money is the natural extension of that it's a natural extension of life and if we want to live our game of life if we decide to keep playing this game and not pull the ejection cord, we have to deal with it. We have to deal with these manifestations, which is money, which is life, which is energy. It was that that got me to this point. And here I am, you know, here I am sort of working with and getting to deeper and deeper layers as to what money is and what energy is and how that all intertwines and why we need energy and why we need money. I can dig into that a bit more if you want. Well, I think it's interesting, right? You run a crypto exchange in Cape Town. And so for you, when you think of money as like

the actual currency versus Bitcoin, what got you into that world? I think it's a really interesting time for people exploring. I know decentralization is a big thing for you. When did you first hear of Bitcoin? What drew you into this world? And how did you end up building a company around this? Because I think it's very important to your point of view on money positivity. So I'm very curious. Yeah, it's, it's interesting, because as I, as I started to move away from the arts, and the filmmaking side, particularly, part of the impetus to move away part of the motivation there was, I became very jaded, jaded with that whole world. I cracked through it. When I first moved into it, I always imagined it was very much a space of light and a space

of love and a space of increasing consciousness in the world. And we create, we share stories and humans can resonate with these stories and we watch movies and we watch plays and et cetera. And it uplifts us because we get to connect with other humans and that human experience. And unfortunately, what I started to see was that there was some of that. But when I first got into it, when I was first attached to it, there was a lot of that. And as I started to try and make money in that industry and progress in it a bit, I started to witness something I didn't like, which was a bit more propaganda, and not so much genuine human sharing. It was a bit more, you know,

we want the people to think this way. We want people to feel this way. And it wasn't positive for me. These weren't positive things. And that started to push me away. And so I started to look around and see, okay, what are these, what are these, what's the agenda here? What are the intentions? Why is this not positive? And I went down the journey where, how can this be? How can this be? We've got individual artists, individual filmmakers doing stuff, yet somehow there's a bit of a coordinated effort to spread a certain message, a common message, propaganda, in other words. And I really discovered this concept of centralization versus decentralization and centralization means a central controlled thought at its purest purest sense i would possibly define that it is centrally controlled centrally defined and then pushed out

into the world as opposed to decentralized, which is not starting from a central place of authority, but starting from our own authority, where I have an idea, you, Saj, you, Nicole, you have ideas. We all have ideas of what life is. We've all decided to live this game. We've all had some sort of a philosophy and understanding. And what does that mean for us? It's our own unique experience. And the second we have somebody else telling us about what experience we should have and what conclusion we should draw from that experience, instead of fostering our own natural intuition, our own natural understanding of what this experience is, then we start running into this trouble space,

which I didn't like. I started to feel very uncomfortable with because sure, every movie has a message and every story has a moral perhaps, but it's up to us to sort of derive meaning from that. And if we don't allow ourselves and we don't allow others to derive their own sense of meaning, we run into this awful space where individuality and self-expression and self-freedom get swept under the rug. And for me, you know, human purpose is really, really comes down to all of us. What is our own individual purpose? What's our own individual freedom? We need the freedom to explore that. We need the freedom to figure ourselves out, to learn what our soul means. What's intuition?

You know, what are we doing here? All of these common questions, which we never fully answer, I don't think. It's our whole journey to move from deeper and deeper understandings of ourselves. We need the space to do that. We need to live in a world where that is not only encouraged or not only allowed, but encouraged, I think, or at the very least allowed and respected. And yeah, so in the film industry, I sort of, I saw that dark side where it's like, no, no, no, no.

They're not actually wanting that. They're wanting the opposite. They want to control thought, control growth. And so that pushed me very harshly away from it. And then it was like, okay, if I'm not going to make money and survive through making films, I've got to do something else. And now up until that point, I had been, I'd actually studied software engineering because growing up, I was always fascinated with computers and tearing them apart and building them and all this. So I was very much a computer nerd and a jock at the same

time. And I very much, I very much studied software engineering and had this as a backup. So I fell into that and started traveling, as the bio says, and started moving further around the world and trying to make my living in software and in technology, ultimately. And through that journey and through that journey of discovering how other people live and other means of work besides individual expression, which what filmmaking is i started to i started to understand money and what money is and when you when you sit on you say okay let me make some of this thing called money because i need to buy food i need to put a roof over my head and put some lights on what the hell is money you know we've been told it's this piece of note with pictures of people on it and you know it's got a number in the corner and uh and we can give it to someone and then somebody gives us something in return we so naturally believe this to that this is natural because we've seen it a whole lot but when you really start to crack open it

crack it open it's the it revealed all this beautiful beautiful philosophy like i just like i just mentioned early earlier and so i think at that point, my eyes were a little bit more opened and I started to develop a relationship with money. Before that, I had the same relationship that everyone else has, which is, you know, you've got these millionaires and billionaires and then there's some poor people. And, you know, I'm somewhere in the middle, you know, for those of us that weren't born into royalty. And I think that's been the common middle class experience for the majority of us. And when I started to crack open that, I started to see that, wow, actually, that's not the truth.

That's such a simplistic idea of what money is. It's a negative view, in fact, and it's holding the reins back on ourselves because it's a negative view in fact and it's a very much uh it's holding the reins back on ourselves because it's not allowing us to really have a loving relationship with this thing called money and this thing called money why i say loving relationship is because it directly it directly translates to what life is and the more money we have the more time we have the more money we have, the more time we have, the more freedom we have to explore ourselves. The more we get to explore ourselves, the more we get to love our experience. And the only way to get to that position is to have the time. And the only way to get time is to earn money or get money. And it became highly correlated for me. And then I started to see, wow, okay,

so where is money now? Where is it concentrated? Okay, wow, there are things called governments, there are central banks, there are all these entities in the world which control all this money flow now. And it's like, well, how do I get money? Okay, I've got to go to a bank and get a loan. Okay, how does that all work? Okay, this. Okay, that. And I started to explore this whole concept as to how do I get money? How do I get time to enjoy life? How do I get time to have freedom to explore what purpose is? And how do I get time to live that purpose? And most of us then say, okay, well, we've got to get a nine to five. That's what we stumble into. Okay, get a job. All right, cool.

Let me learn some skills and I will go work somewhere and someone's going to give me some money in exchange for these skills and it's a skill exchange and how do we value how do we determine how much money i can get for my skills it's a value game and and this becomes a negotiation where a company owner a business owner will say all right right, I value this skill. This is what I'm prepared to pay you for it. Do you accept these terms? Yes, I do. Great.

Here is the value, which we call money, and you give me your time in the shape of these skills. And this is our sort of standard system of how we work with each other and how we exchange value and skills for each other's time. So I can go and work five days a week and i get paid some money and then on saturday and sunday i now i've got some money to spend and i can go and enjoy my time on the weekend this is very much how things have been for a long time and so yeah so

you do that for a while and you spend some time working and you realize very quickly that this is there's no exit you realize very quickly i'm making, there's no exit. You realize very quickly I'm making some money, but it's just enough to keep the lights on. It's just enough to keep my Netflix subscription. It's just enough for a bit of food. But it's not enough for me to stop working. How do I stop working so I can get more freedom, so I can get more time for myself?

I need to get time so I can do purpose, so I can live in my philosophy and explore what it means to be human. And then you start to dig deeper. And all of a sudden, I started to see, okay, wow. All right. In order to make real money, I have to be the person who is in control of value. I have to be the one who decides what is valuable in my life. Because then I can get people to give me skills and I can get people to pay me for that value. In other words, I can become a business owner. Because then the more value I provide, I can provide more value to more people. They can pay me for that value.

I make more money. It becomes a trade of value. And working in a nine to five or a direct job with somebody, you don't have much leverage. You just go one to one. You only have your 40 hours a week, 50 hours, 60 hours, whatever. It's still a very small amount of time. And you only have one salary. There's only one person paying you. But if you start running your own business, you now have a million employers, right? Every customer is an employer. Every single customer, when you run a business, they're your employer. They pay you. So it's the same paradigm. It's just inverted.

So I'm now selling a product instead of my direct labor, which was my skills. I'm now selling a product. And I can say, here's my product. And I can sell it to a million people at once and I get paid by a million employers. It's fantastic. And it's an uplifting experience because you're adding value to people and you're saying, I've supplied more value to more people today and they've paid me. Therefore, my net worth is raised. I've been paid more because I've provided more value into the world. And now I've got time. Now I can go and continue to explore my purpose. Yeah, no, that's awesome. Thank you for taking us on that journey. And then since 2012, you've been involved in Bitcoin. So how did you hear about it? And what are your thoughts on it now? Like within the next 10 years, do you feel like it's

going to constantly keep going up? Or do you recommend people buy? I mean, obviously, it's not financial or legal advice. Do you? What are your thoughts? I'm very curious on that side of it. Thank you for taking us to the business owner, but specifically the business that you're in, and the products that you touch. What are your thoughts around that as it relates to money positivity? Specifically with Bitcoin and let me loop in the decentralization idea here. Thanks. I went off on a journey there. Part of the issue of getting this freedom is tax. And we pay taxes and we pay other things and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And all the money

that we make, we don't actually get to keep. They get paid to centralized bodies, centralized bodies who determine what they will do with this money. And they believe they can spend our money better than we can. They believe that they make better decisions than we do. They believe that if you work for 40 hours a week, if your tax rate is 40%, or let's call it 50%, if your tax rate is 50%, then half the time you're working, you're working for another person to decide what to do with your money. It sucks. We're essentially slaves to others for half of our lives, half of our working lives. And that's the centralized model. There is an alternative and it's called decentralization where we fully decide where we're going to spend our money. We decide, I decide 100% of that 40

hours that I've worked. I decide 100% of where I'm going to deploy my capital that I've earned. If it means I want to go sit on a boat and drink vodka every day for the rest of my life, or for as much time as I can, so be it. If it means I want to open up a charity and go give food to the poor, I can do that too. If I want to create businesses, I can do that. And it becomes a very much in line with the philosophy of self-discovery, you get to spend your energy there. And so once I realized that, I came across Bitcoin very quickly. Bitcoin was introduced to me through a friend of mine. And he came across it in 2012 because he used it to purchase goods on the internet.

And it became, it was very much obvious to him that this was a form of currency. You know, you could buy this thing called Bitcoin, you could buy stuff on the internet, and all of a sudden you had stuff from some sort of digital currency. And this is very familiar now, but back in 2012, it was like, it's the same thing as having email back in 95, when people were used to sending mail to each other through the post, and all of a sudden it's like, no, no, you can do it on this computer. We don't need a postman anymore. I was like, what are you talking about? You're a lunatic. There's no such thing. How's it going to get there?

No, it goes through the wires. But I don't understand. What do you mean? How does the paper go through wires? And very much we got used to that as a civilization and we understood it and we embraced technology. And in the early days back in 2012, it was a similar concept. Like, what are you talking about? How do you send money?

You know, where's the credit card? I don't understand. Or how do I send a check? And that's how it very much was then. So it's very much new. But the few of us who understood decentralization and understood that centralization saps our ability to explore life

and have an enlightened life ultimately. We very quickly recognize that Bitcoin actually is this incredible, beautiful tool that will reinforce decentralization, reinforce our self-expression and reinforce humanity. And how does it do that to your question? Well, we get to be our own banks bitcoin specifically here i don't mean other cryptocurrencies there are other things called cryptocurrencies and bitcoin is a cryptocurrency because it uses this technology called cryptography as part of its technology but forgetting all the technical stuff for a second if we just think about what it is Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network where we can exchange value directly with each other. I can hire somebody to come and design an advert for Cape Crypto and I can pay them in Bitcoin.

They can send me the advert and I can use it. Amazing. I didn't have to touch a bank. I didn't have to touch a bank account. I didn't have to tell anybody about it. Nobody knows. I've just had a nice little direct direct transaction with somebody. Same way you could go down to the shop, you could buy some fruits for dinner, and you can pay the shopkeeper in Bitcoin, they can give you apples, you can go to the farmer and do the same thing. It's just a medium of exchange. And why this is so groundbreaking

is because it is 100% peer-to-peer. We do not need a central authority. We do not need a middleman. We do not need somebody licking off their little fee on the way. We don't need somebody, some banker taking 2%. We don't need Visa and MasterCard

taking 3.5%. We don't need our banks creating fractional reserve lending. And there's a whole section there, which I would love to get into. But at its core, it is a means for us to trade to each other and we can be our own bank. Our own bank because money is secure. Before we had Bitcoin, we had gold. Well, we had fiat, but before fiat, we had gold. we had gold. Well, we had fiat, but before fiat, we had gold. And gold, a lot of people will say Bitcoin is like digital gold. And they are right in some ways and wrong in others. And they are right in the sense that it's very close to sound money as possible. And by sound money, I mean that

there is a limited supply to it. In gold, there was almost a limited supply. It's very much limited by how much can be mined. It's very expensive to mine this stuff. And we consider it a very small increase of gold every year. So if you hold gold, you pretty much hold your value. That value of gold will hold its value. It doesn't lose value over time. As opposed to fiat currency, local currencies like US dollars, over time, as opposed to fiat currency, local currencies like US dollars, rands, pounds, all our government issued currencies, government backed currencies, these all lose value over time, they lose value year to year. If you have 100 rands, or $100 this year, next year, you're going to have $95, roughly speaking, right, Roughly speaking, 95. It's probably worse than

that, but just call it 95. And what that means is that if you could buy a grocery bag for $100, and that's got your rice, it's got your fish, your vegetables, your fruits. If you can buy that, that costs you a hundred bucks this year. Next year, you can't buy that. You have to chop something out of your bag. You have to lose a few apples. You haven't done anything. You've got a hundred bucks in the bank, but all of a sudden you can't spend the full. You can't get the same spending power.

And this is what we call inflation. And inflation means that you lose that percentage every year from your energy, from your time. And I think it's always good to think about it in those concepts of energy, philosophy, time, freedom, because that's what's really happening. When people say inflation rate is 5%, it means year on year, if you do not do something, you will lose 5% of your energy. 5% of the energy that you've spent of attempting to swap value, to get value so that we can discover

ourselves that's been stolen from us through inflation it's stolen it's a hidden tax not to mention tax itself and so with bitcoin and why bitcoin why bitcoin is so incredible is it acts as a hedge against that inflationary concept it's a hedge against inflation. If you own Bitcoin, the government cannot inflate that. They cannot print more dollars. They cannot inflate the economy. There's only 21 million Bitcoin. There will only ever be 21 million. That's it. And so you need to get your hands on some of that. And the simple point is that the more we add dollars, the more we add dollars, the more the price keeps going up. The price of Bitcoin is really just the mirror reflection of the printing of dollars.

It's the mirror reflection of inflation. As we print dollars, as we add inflation and inflate our economy of dollars, we see the Bitcoin price going up because there's a fixed amount of Bitcoin. The more dollars you have, the more equivalent price there is because it costs more dollars to get the same amount of Bitcoin because there's more in circulation now. There's more that can be spent. And this is a phenomenon of economics. This is how supply and demand works.

And so the more the governments print the more the price of bitcoin is going up so when you ask is this a sound investment uh sure i'm not a financial advisor but from a personal capacity i am 100 of bitcoin i'm all in in that and to me it is it is so pure and i wish we could get a bit more technical. Maybe we have another chat someday. The simplest version is the more dollars get inflated, the higher the price of Bitcoin. If you do not put your dollars, your hard-earned dollars that are sitting in your savings account,

if you do not put that into Bitcoin, you will lose money year on year. You will lose 5% year on year. You will lose money year on year. You will lose 5% year on year. You will lose money. If you put it into Bitcoin, you will not only hold your money, hold your value, it will increase over time.

In the long run, it might go through cycles up and down, as we've seen, it goes up and down, up and down. But the further adoption we get, the more people that move into Bitcoin and the more assets that get translated into Bitcoin, the more people sell real estate for Bitcoin, gold goes into Bitcoin, et cetera, et cetera.

The more stable that becomes, Bitcoin becomes stable, less volatility. It starts to become a very much a strong safe haven asset. And you will not see as much downturn, you know, as we've seen over time. So, yes, i highly encourage everyone to do their research and to get some skin in the game if you you know be risk averse it's good put your 10 of your portfolio into it don't put the whole thing in until you understand what you're doing definitely i do not trade out coins don't gamble that's. Don't go buy other weird, you know, Trump token and Bitcoin, you know, all these strange coins that are coming up. They're junk.

That's gambling. That's ridiculous. Bitcoin is what we want to talk about. Well, it sounds like this is the right topic for you to come on. Yeah, it's just curious to me, you know, as we've moved through this theme of money positivity over the last couple of weeks, we've gone from, you know, our own discussions around investment and savings and energy exchanges. We've had a chat with Alex about, you know, what does freedom to him look like, which is taking his hard-earned

money and creating creative projects in the world. You know, we've heard from Ruki who loves making money. So for her, it's all about like, how do I use money to make money? And then Simon talking last week about money just being a tool for change for him, like petrol in the tank. So I'm curiously on like, what does that freedom look like for you? Like when you're making money, when you're using money, do you believe in, I mean, you obviously believe in investment in Bitcoin, but yeah, what is that, what are you deploying your money into? And what does that like passion look like for you?

I think for me, it's, I don't think it's an actual specific, a specific use of it an application of it like building a project or doing a film or something like that those are all wonderful ideas which i'd love to explore one day but for me the freedom is particularly with bitcoin and why yes it's an investment but it's more than that it's a it's a stand for freedom it's a stand for freedom. It's a stand against tyranny. And these might sound like dramatic concepts, but it really is a stand against globalization. And globalization is really just a masked word for centralization

on maximum level. It's turning the dial to full is globalization. We are centralizing everything to a central body and they will make all the decisions. That to me is, it's terrifying and it's something we as humanity should very, very, very much strongly guard against. And so when I put money into Bitcoin, that's what I'm doing.

All of us that hold Bitcoin and don't spend it and don't sell it yet, a lot of people will call these people Bitcoin maxis, which means they are very much maximalist on the philosophy of Bitcoin. And I am to a degree, but I'm also more so a freedom maxi, I would describe. And this is a word that sometimes gets thrown around. Bitcoin is excellent, but for me, it's the tool that yields the greatest freedom. So freedom for me, it is that. It is almost peace of mind. It is freedom for others. I want others

to have freedom. I want the world to have freedom because the more we all have our freedoms, it's rational self-interest. We all get to see the beauty of each other from a real core level i don't mean the surface stuff you know i don't mean marxist category stuff i don't mean ideology i mean who are we really are as people let's share that with each other and that's beautiful and that's when we have unique experiences of life where it's where we can have a conversation and you say something i've never thought of or i've never never heard, or, and I feel a new way. I've, you know,

when we, when we hear the same old rehash philosophies, like I felt everything I can, there's no growth there. But when I have a conversation with someone who's so deeply in touch with their souls, or they create a project or they create artwork, or they do a business or anything,

their expression, they're what they put into the world. It's a magical human experience. And I want that. I want those magical experiences. And those can only come when people operate on the level of the soul, when they operate in a true freedom state, when they're in touch with their divinity. And to attain that, we need to defend against globalization because globalization puts people into categories and forces you to think and be a certain way and they present ideas in a certain way and certain ideas are not allowed and there's a lot of censorship and these things

cull the human spirit and so bitcoin for me is a means of guarding against that it's a means of saying all of us together let's's stand together. Once we have enough critical mass in Bitcoin and once enough capital flows into the space and there's enough people who do this thing, it flips. We're still up the hill. We're climbing the hill at this point. We're climbing, climbing. More people are jumping on. They're jumping on the wagon. We're all going up the hill, going up the hill. There's a point where we get to the top and the top and we come down and then it's unstoppable and at that point is when we're all transacting with each other directly on bitcoin most likely bitcoin at this point and uh and it's freedom we don't have central authorities just describe what we can do there's a very evil

concept coming in now called central bank digital currencies. And this is, it's evil. And I use that word in the strongest sense. It is evil. It is evil because it is a means of other people to control our time and energy, which in other words means control our lives, makes us slaves. And a CBDC, a central bank digital currency, is a digital currency which is issued and controlled by a bank, simply put, and by extension, a government. Because the government writes rules for central banks. And these central bank digital currencies are programmable in the sense that they have software behind it. So if you get paid by a central bank digital currency

call it a digital dollar digital dollar you get earned you you get paid a thousand digital dollars this thousand dollars has got software behind it and this software describes where you can spend it where you can't spend it how long you can spend it for. If you do something naughty, they can take it back from you. They can revoke it. So if you're as busy sitting on a talk with a guy and two girls and I'm discussing how bad the tyranny of globalization is, they might not like what I have to say. They might come along and say, okay, we don't like this guy, Leon. He's a bit of a rabble rouser. You know, he's a bit of

rebellious. Let's take some money from him. They can do this. And this is not, what's the term? It's not conspiracy theory at all. This is simply a gender and it's all put out there. You know, we had a look at the French CBDC the other day, what they've been developing. And the French CBDC has the code in it, which is the word for it, I think, is something like reclaim, something to that effect. And so anyone who controls that central bank digital currency, they can then put in the address of wherever that token currently sits. It could be sitting with Usage or unicol or someone you've spent and bought fruit from some just good old good old merchant on the street corner you've gone and spent your digital currency towards and they're using it to pay their bills

if they don't like someone on the chain like me for example they could then go to that central uh sorry to the merchant and say we're taking that money and they take it without asking him without permission they just reclaim it they freeze it and these are terrifying concepts terrifying terrifying we cannot let them happen we cannot let these things happen and one of the stances against that is bitcoin uh bitcoin allows us to trade directly no one can stop it once it's gone it's gone uh it's very powerful and this enforces decentralization keeps us at community levels community so yeah sorry long-winded uh answer there you get me going i'll talk talk rings around this stuff for days it's a bit interesting yeah i'll be googling a lot of

this but it's like the layman's terms they should give a little ted talk on this i don't know if ted will let you say it but you put it on youtube no but it's it's very interesting and it sounds like you've also spent a lot of time internally kind of figuring out what currency means to you right and in different capacities um and so we do have a lot of young listeners and we like to ask people on your happy hour is what advice do you have for those who are trying to navigate their path? I think first is to identify your true passion, not what you think your passion is, not what you think other people want your passion to be, your real passion is and that's a difficult journey because you really have to understand yourself and that comes with that whole thing so you have

to be prepared to go down that path and really go for it it's difficult for some so yeah definitely stick with your passion but then make money through your passion so if you correlate and you highly correlate and understand deeply the concept that freedom and living your passion. So if you correlate and you highly correlate and understand deeply the concept that freedom and living your passion, which is your purpose, if you understand these are all correlated, in order to keep that thing flowing, you need money. So you must highly tie money to your passion. These things should be highly correlated and it should be exciting and it should fill you with endless energy. If you have endless energy where you can work 120 hours a week consistently and you have to force yourself to stop whilst you're living your passion, whilst you're trying

to make money through your passion, then I think you're on the right track. If you have to keep, you know, if you have to force yourself to sit down and do this thing, which you think is your passion, or you have to force yourself, if you have to do this and you're like, I just don't want to think about money. If that's it, I would, I would provide the advice that that is not your true passion. Or if it is, you have not yet understood money and understood how it relates to your existence on earth and what money is. Yeah. So I'd say dig around those. Learn money is life.

Find your true passion. Merge them. And then go. Yeah. Go full steam. Just go. 120 hours a week. Go.

Stop playing guitar. Stop drinking wine. Stop playing guitar. Stop drinking wine. Stop going away. Stop surfing. I'm saying that tongue-in-cheek and away. Go work 100,000% until you're burnt out and then you have to go drink wine and you have to go swim on the beach and play guitar. Once you get to that point, then you know you're in your passion. Then you're living.

And then what happens is you don't need these external things because that stuff is fulfilling. Building your passion and your money together is fulfilling. You don't need anything else. And occasionally you do, but yeah, that becomes your priority. You can't wait Monday. It's like, you know, hello, Friday feels awesome. It's also like, hello, Monday feels. Let me get that Monday in. Yes, it's Monday morning.

Is it 4 a.m.? Can I get up yet? That's the energy. If you can get to that genuine energy, then that's your path to success. I love that. And I think also part of Friday feels, I remember when we started this venture, we were saying we want to extend Friday feels throughout the whole week. That's what everyone should be feeling is that feeling every single day and what you're

doing. So, I mean, that is the beauty of being a working professional and living and celebrating your truth, right? So, I guess like 10 years ago, you didn't really see yourself here in this moment, Leon, but we've kind of walked a little bit of a journey already with you on that. So a year from now, where do you see yourself? I'd certainly like to be deeper down the decentralization path. I'd like to have a few products that are 100% decentralized in the market. I'd like to solve or at least be involved in tackling

some of the more challenging aspects of decentralization, which is identity. How do we prove each other's identity to each other without leveraging a centralized provider? This is almost a gateway to a lot of friction and blockers that have prevented existing enterprises from moving to decentralization, is it always kind of relies on a centralized identity you know show me your passport show me your id you need to prove who i am uh who you are before we will sell you something or give you a loan or this or that or the other and that's been a huge blocker and there's a lot of smart people working on decentralized identities and um in a nutshell a very quick nutshell it's it's fascinating because

it works on blockchain technology and there's some interesting projects which actually work on the bitcoin network and it's interesting you it's very hard to wrap your head around when you first exposed to it but you can present your own digital identity you control it and uh if nicole is a customer of saj, and Saj runs a product and says, I need to know Nicole is actually Nicole, Nicole can present her digital identity. And that digital identity has got cryptographic proofs that certain claims of that identity are true. So if Nicole has a claim in there that says, South African citizen. That has been written by a South African passport verifier, for example. So you could go to someone who verified South African passports.

They attest to it. They say, yes, yes, Nicole does have a South African passport. Let's write that to her digital identity. Now she has that claim. And when you go to Saj, Saj can just see, okay, oh, you have this claim. Yes, it is verified by a source, but she does not need to see the details of that document. She does not need to see South African ID number or any of that. All she needs to know is that this has been verified. The claim is true. There's a whole deep world to that. Fascinating stuff. And we're making great great uh great inroads there and so once that comes up there's going to be a huge influx of decentralization

so a year from now decentralized products may be in the identity space but certainly still in the financial space um i think i love finance i love money and how it all relates to energy it is the energy of life and when we discuss this stuff this stuff, it's talking about life. You know, it's very much present. It's very much present. It's nice. Yeah. Yeah, I love this stuff.

And I mean, we've spoken about this a bit in the past, but, you know, the idea, I guess I've been living a little differently in terms of energy exchanges, home exchanges, and a lot of those kind of things. But yeah, I've also delved a little bit into the idea of identity and how we can actually break away from that and be global citizens and not have to be tied to any of these claims. So maybe a topic for another day and another long discussion on that. But I love that. And I think you were one of the first people who opened my mind to the idea of how inflation devalues us so thank you and thank you for sharing this with everyone today it's really important and so thank you for that professional advice from you what has been

the best professional advice that you've received though along your journey especially as an entrepreneur and having walked such an interesting road i honestly uh i don't know i mean i've only ever read the books and uh i do have some mentors but it's never been on yeah it's funny like things are very much on a on a specific case-by-case basis. But I don't know about advice in a package, in a one-liner, but I think what has been critical for me, what took me to understand to do stuff and actually be somewhat effective, at least able to play the game, whether I win is a different question, but at least to play the game is you have to operate from a position of sincerity, but you also have to know when to taper what you present.

And I'm not going to go run into Absa Bank or JP Morgan Bank raving about globalization and say, no, we must stop this thing. That's a fireside chat. I'm happy to chat about it here. And it's very sincere. And I might still feel it all the time. But depending on the situation, you have to speak to the audience and just taper and just filter the lens that people might be witnessing you through. I think that's very important to us, especially this day and age with expression and social media. We're so used to just saying what we think and it's this whole shock factor and sensationalism. And it almost encourages us to live on that front. But we need

to find the skill of how do I retain my truth, my sincerity and live in that space, live rooted in my space. And at the same time, live rooted in my space and at the same time be able to withstand the winds of the world and not have the tree blow over but present myself in the appropriate way for the situation which doesn't negate myself. It just presents it in the correct way. I think that's been my hardest challenge over time because I do like to speak my mind. And it's hard. It's hard if you're a sincere person. You just want to be honest the whole time. But there are some formats and some spaces where that is not good. It's unhealthy for you, in fact. And so to protect yourself, you need to learn how to filter what you're putting out,

not censor, just filter. So yeah, that's been the most valuable lesson for me i think well i think you operate in a very interesting space where it's still very much growing there's a lot of new ideas and it's also very polarized right so it's probably very um specific to kind of what you choose to follow in your life and it's i think it's good advice i would say because you you kind of chose to speak on on this topic and you you know quite a bit about it it might be interesting if you could share if you have anything to share with our listeners on where is like the best place to get advice on this or really read up and understand how the inner workings of this are to learn more about this? Are you just searching on the internet? Are there certain sites?

And you can feel free to not say either, but just curious. Yeah, it's's good question um i mean there are a lot of places and there are a lot of sites and uh centralized exchanges which will offer some sort of a attempt to offer you a bit of an introductory journey down to understanding this stuff um but i think you know you could you could come across it there is a few books and I was just trying to find the name of this particular book, which is excellent. I forget it for the second. I'll find it in a minute. A particular book which everyone should read.

And that gives you a real grounding. You need the fundamental. That will give you the principles and the fundamentals. Once you have that under your belt, then you're able to correctly filter and correctly discern what's going on in the news what's going on in the world and you probably don't need to go to any site you can you can do it yourself and i would say that is that that's the goal that's the dream we want everyone to be financially literate on their own and it's not complicated it really isn't you can forget the technology stuff, like the actual software stuff.

That is complex, clearly. But the philosophies and the ideas, these are very simple to grasp. Anyone can grasp them. And the deeper we grasp it as individuals, then the less we need to sort of rely on these outside sources. And it kind of just folds in on itself.

The idea is that money is simple and once you have the understanding of what this thing is um that's all you need you don't need to keep learning you just develop your relationship with it so i would say that's the approach it's a bit of a different approach to learning other systems where you're reliant on other people bitcoin you rely on yourself and i love that because i think you know and i'm gonna go back to what i kind of said when we started this theme is that money is not the root of all evil because money is you it's your value it's your energy and it's exactly what you're saying leon it's you can have a relationship with money because it's an extension of you in the world and so i think it's beautiful encouragement that people develop that relationship that loving relationship because

we all tend to have a bit of a hate relationship with it um and a fearful relationship when you don't have the money. That's it. But thank you. And I think that's a really nice gem of the week to kind of kickstart this little section that we do every week of how we fill our cups and how we be amazing working professionals in the world. Saj, do you want to kick us off? Yeah. So I actually followed, Ruki was on a few weeks ago, and she mentioned watching the movie Air, which talks about the story of Nike and how they signed Michael Jordan. And it was just very interesting. I really thought they did a great job with the movie. She highlighted, you know, the importance of partnerships. partnerships. And it was very interesting to kind of see, because I came at a time when Nike wasn't the top player, right? They were actually the underdog. And it has very interesting insights, you know, their department is understaffed, under budgeted, trying to do the most. And

it's, it's always hard, I think, when you're in those points because when you're going through it, you never think like, oh, this is the part that they're gonna show in the movie, right? You're thinking like, shit, everything sucks. And like, I'm getting hammered by my boss. I'm getting hammered by the rest of my group, in terms of I'm trying to push something along. And I think a lot of people feel that way

when you're in the thick of it, you don't realize that it's going to get better. And obviously with work, and it's not like it just magically happened, but what it took while you're going through those motions, I am always very fascinated about that part of the journey is like when you're going through the thick of it, what you choose to do, how many people said no,

and what about if you stopped at one point because you listened and so I think for me that's like a big thing is you know there's like certain quotes where it's just like don't take advice from people who haven't done what you're trying to do and a lot of times a lot of times nobody is trying to do what you're doing because even if the three of us went after the same thing we have different expertise we have different networks we have different philosophies so I just thought it was very very interesting and a lot of times people will say like why don't you listen and I'm like why would I listen like I know the person I have to answer to at the end of the day is me so um you know I thought it was just very interesting to kind of see the tenacity

that it took. And, and it's nice to see, I was thinking like, wow, there's so many ways this could have went wrong. And it took quite a few people before it went right. And anyone who probably wasn't on the team. So I think it's hard sometimes when you're building things and as an entrepreneur, because you don't know if you're on the right path and I'm sure there's many instances maybe at the same company with the same people there's like one instance where he's talking to the CEO and he's trying to convince him to get a higher budget and the CEO of a Nike and he's like well when I've been wrong and he names multiple instances where he's been wrong just thinking like shit those could have been the movies too those could have been the other movies

where you thought that like it was gonna it was gonna happen but it didn't happen and I think it's very much about that where it's like you don't know which which is actually gonna be the time that you're gonna to create your movie. So I thought it was really interesting. I'd actually really recommend people watch it. For the way that the movie was done, also for the messages that were in it. And I felt very captivated. Sometimes you watch things and I'm like scrolling on my phone or doing other things.

But I was like, oh, I'm going to watch this. And it made me kind of put down my phone and see the nuances that were shown. So, yeah, that was something that kind of filled my cup. And I tried to reflect on my own journey after about, you know, what that means and what it's telling me. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, it's in the list.

How about you, Leon? What filled your cup this week? What did you feel you could celebrate as a working professional that kept you going? What energized you? Ah, yes. Perfect. I got a perfect example. Like tax return, end of financial year accounting for Cape Crypto. And Nicole's heard a bit of this before and has a few battle scars herself. And yeah, you know, accounting's never been, you know, funnily enough, you know, as much as I love economics and I love that whole stuff, accounting on its own has never, there's always been a mental block for me always since since school i did terribly in accounting i think i failed it i don't know and uh i never really got it it was always like i don't know it had its own language i didn't understand you know being rash so rational and you know software orientated i'm very much you know i need to know the principle and how did it come and why is it this way? And go down to first principles.

And accounting just didn't seem to have that. It was like, just learn it. This is the way we do it. The end. And I can't, I just don't think that way. I really battled. I can't learn that way. So I was forced to, and this is great, you know, I was forced to actually understand how accounting works on this weekend because i have to submit all this stuff for licensing applications

and i had to in essence clean up that energy i had a very big blockage there of my money energy because accounting is so directly related to it to all of this stuff um but business accounting specifically um i had to clean up that energy. And so I just took the time on Sunday and I just, like you, Saj, I normally put something on to kind of half distract my thoughts. I'm like watching something on Netflix and then I'm reading accounting stuff and I'm kind of trying to figure it out. And I just thought, you know what, what am I doing? Let me focus on this thing. And I asked the question i'd really been wanting to ask for years and i said what the hell is debit and credit how does debit and credit work it makes no sense it's inverted in accounting you know it is inverted and i just couldn't get

past this so i finally just went on this rampage of trying to figure this out and i came across this one guy who had a video and he explained it so brilliantly. And I'm not going to try to distill it because I don't yet own that knowledge, but it tapped something for me. And what it tapped specifically is that these terms are Italian. It's actually debitaire and creditaire. They'reian terms and they were invented in i think 1500 or was it 500 or 1500 year 1500 one of the two and they have total different meanings in italian and they got nothing to do with credit and debit as we understand it today nothing and this was the principle i was looking for and so when i realized that i was like ah i get it and and how they came to be and this was the realization,

is that accounting back then, as they were written, these accounting principles, was written for the perspective of the owner of the business. The owner was given a book of accounts, and the owner would then read it from his or her, their point of view and say, okay, ah, so I owe how much money to the bank? How much assets do I have as the owner? And this whole thing then kind of filtered down and made sense. So I understood the principle and that was a huge breakthrough. It's been bothering me for

over 20 years, 30 years actually. And I just sat there, you know, when you realize something, you're like, fuck, so that's how it works. Okay, I got it. Yes. And then I've now been gradually letting the pieces fall into place. And I feel a lot more confident with the counting. And, you know, when these things happen, energy moves and energy shifts. And you're like, whew, yeah, I got a bit more energy.

I feel better. I'm enthusiastic again about these things. It's no longer a weight on my shoulder. It's now something I'm excited about. Yeah, so that's what happened this week. It was huge. It's cool. That's awesome.

I'm so glad to hear that. I'm sorry that whatever I've explained in the past did not land in the same way, but I think it's wonderful that you went back to the philosophy to understand the economics. Nicole is the most patient person I've ever known. She will never lose her cool. I'm never going to lose you.

And I'm sitting here, we're like 35,000 hours into this, asking me this, asking her the same question. But why, Nicole? And like, thank you for your patience. the italians for the for the accounting oh man what's filling your cup this week nicole oh it's been such an interesting

filling your cup's been a weird word for me this week actually because filling your cup's been a weird word for me this week actually because I've really had a lot of moments of emptying this week you know every week we kind of try fill our cups like we talk about and sometimes you think that's about making sure that you're doing so much and you're so energized and you're jam-packing so much in and you're so hard on yourself if you're not getting progress in terms of the things that you thought you should be prioritizing. And this week, I've just really had to tone it down. And my body's just gone like, hey, just no thinking, no choosing, just be.

And it's been a wonderful, wonderful space. And even when I try I think it's because I've also you know like you mentioned Leon I've switched something and and when you switch into that different vibration and energy you can't go back and as much as I try I go back into that world of you know trying to think too much or choose too much i i am now in this new energy of just being empty and i've discovered that emptiness is not a bad word it's really a space for dreaming and it's a space to make the connections that i was probably missing before because i was trying to fill my cup too much so it's been a really interesting week of kind of filling my cup with uh nothing and and it's

been wonderful so yeah that's awesome you know in uh one of the acting books the meisner technique if i recall correctly the very first chapter i think is called empty your cup and that's exactly it because you can't you know if you pour stuff into a full cup, it overflows. You can't catch it. You can't catch it. And so like the very first thing in that technique at least is emptying the cup. It's so important. Yeah. I agree.

Yeah, it is. And to create change, you have to let go of the history. We talk about that a lot here. You're not your history. Yeah. So it was really a good week. For our audience out there, for our listeners, we've taken you on a really interesting journey

this month, this theme of money positivity. How are you creating financial freedom for yourself? Do you believe in centralized authority? How are you managing money? How are you moving money in the world? What does this decentralized way of living feel like for you and is it up your alley and we'd love to hear from you remember to tag us on hashtag these friday

feels to share your stories and listen to us on all your favorite platforms and to work with us or help us broadcast friday feels from your space and organize your next workation, reach out to us at hello at friday-feels.co. And thank you so much, Leon, for coming on. We really would love to have to explore, I would say, a lot of the topics that you mentioned. I'm definitely going to be Googling them. And maybe you can share really quickly with our audience where they can find you.

Cool. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much. it's so fun to wax lyrical a bit and i i i quickly found the book that i was talking about by the way the book is called the bitcoin standard you can find that anywhere that is the book read that one and you will be good to go you can find me at my company website which is capecrypto.com and it's short for the cape crypto exchange and i'm on linkedin i'm not on much social media it's not not really my speed at the moment but yeah if you want to chat reach out to me on linkedin i suppose i'll spin your yarn thank you you. My pleasure. Thank you so much. That was so fun.

Thank you. Next week, we are starting a new theme. So we wrapped up money positivity, although I feel like we still have a lot to explore in it. So we'll have to get back into it another day. But next month, it's April. And we're going to end the first week of this quarter of this year by thinking about where time has gone.

I guess time has really like drunk some red bull, grown wings and flown away. So some of us may be feeling a little bit burnt out. We're feeling the turn of the season. Life does bring us these moments. So we're going to take a look at how to endure through exhaustion. Is it even something that we should be doing or thinking about? So let's find out. But until next time, that is our mix and we've had so much fun mingling with you and we wish you safe travels into your bed, into the night

and into this awesome weekend. See you next week and keep it real.